Archive for February, 2008

Car accidents, messing with metermaids and snow

Friday, February 15th, 2008

I wont get into details in this post about a nasty car accident today (trying to get the pictures off my phone…), but I will make a post about it soon enough. 

On a positive side, let’s talk about fun ways to mess around with metermaids!  Back in Ottawa, there is a LOT of snow.  Plows are fairly active, but it is not uncommon to find 5-6 feet of snow on the side of the road with a car under it.   Generally, if there is room, they send a towtruck to drag the car from under the snow.  Before they tow, they usually ticket the car.  This is where the fun starts.

 Required tools:

  • snow shovels
  • car door
  • snow bank on the side of a street

Essentially, you will be building a snowman, just a lot bigger, and shaped like a car.  Our first step is to place the door in the snowbank; you really want to get this at least 1 foot deep in the snow.  After the door has been placed, you want to shape it properly to give a “natural” look. 

Once you are done the door, you can easily start working on the rest of the car.  What you are working on is a simulated car under this snow.  Always assume a foot of “grace”, so it will be a bit bigger, and way more believable.  If you are successful in pulling this off, add some random car parts to give it a more real “feel”.  Also, spray as much water as you can to really harden up the snow.  Getting a 2inch think layer of ice will ensure guarenteed laughter.

That’s about it!  Sit by and keep and eye on the “car”.  Make sure to have a camera ready to capture the fun!  I will post pictures tomorrow, too late tonight to get anything clear.

Rogers Unlimited, but Limited, but really can be Unlimited

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

As re-posted by elReg, Rogers Canada has an Unlimited plan, that is, not exactly so unlimited.

Assuming you are using their mobile browser, on their mobile devices, you should not be charged for your browsing.  Use a third party phone?  5 cents a kilobyte.  Yes folks, welcome to 90’s.  Even using a third party browser will ding you heavily.

I am used to talking other European providers and their “unlimited plans” (capped at 200MB) and really ranting about them, but Rogers Canada?  You would think Canada’s sole GSM based monopoly provider would be friendly and nice. 

Well, this post is a rant and a way to get by their greedy ways. 

Seeing that I may have a slight influence and this will get a LOT of attention, I will just say what you need to know.  If you are crazy enough to pull it off, awesome, but I will *not* help ANYONE with any extra data (cheap pun intended)!

Rogers mobile phones use a builtin browser and that uses a specific APN.  That APN has “free” internet.  Take that APN, use it to connect with another program (or computer data card), and you now have “unlimited” and they’ll think you’re using their browser. 

If you know what I am saying, you are already on your way.  If you do not, sorry, wrong camp guys.  I put “free” and “unlimited” in quotes, only Rogers knows best how to fix/screw their customers.

Disclosure:  I work with mobile phones, I used to be a customer of Rogers (5 years with them and another 4 years when they bought their only competitor).

Evolutionary games…evolve or go extinct!

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

Back in high school and college, I hosted these role playing-type evolutionary games.  Essentially, the game is started by the leader (usually me) giving a topic, a few details about the surroundings and a few rules/limits.  This game was played offline on paper and it lasted 7 days per round, usually with a quick meet-up mid way through.

Before I give an example of a round of this game, I must warn: It is a very geeky game and it can become very addictive. 

Example of my last round played, that I can remember… You are brought from the year 2000 and placed in 50,000 BC.  You have no tools with you and your task is to generate electricity.  You do not have to power anything fancy; you just need to create electricity with some amperage (no static electricity).  You have plenty of firewood, stone, unrefined steel, natural earth magnets, and copper ore. 

There is not much else to it: find a creative way to get the task done.  There are many ways of getting the job done and you do not always need to use all the items that were given to you.  You cannot make up items, but natural resources should be assumed to be available (in this scenario).  Discussions with other players are frowned upon, but confirmation with the leader is generally ‘okay’ to make sure you are on the right track.The above scenario was simple and involved creating a stove, forge, developing advanced foundries and finally refining the ore.   From there, you would create some form of simple generator and you would have an output in AC.  Normally, most rounds are not laid out this easy and the results can be much more “random” and unpredictable.    I have never attempted to put this game online or attempt it in a digital format. 

If I get enough requests (say, 10+?), I will create a separate page and post rounds there.  So, people coming in to geek out, do not have to catch a random and useless article!

Please welcome a new server to this world…

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008

I’m proud to announce I brought up a new server.   As always, this is a remote, geeky, for the hell of it type of server.  It is self sufficient, requiring no external help “per se”.   The server is powered by a bank of golf cart batteries, 6 of them to be exact, in series and parallel, giving me 12 volts.  From there, we have a 480 Watt inverter.  Quick tests/math guesses give me 25-32 hours of power without any external sources.  To recharge the batteries, I have a 500 Watt turbine connected directly to the batteries.  The turbine has a built-in overcharge unit to keep from killing the batteries.  The server runs idly at around 58 Watts and 190 Watts at full load.  I had to use an external video card because the onboard card added an extra 12 Watts (vs 2 Watts for an older ATI card).  The CPU was declocked 12% and that saved another 2-14 Watts (depending on load).  For internet access, I am currently using an RJ45 cable running over the side of an apartment building to a cable modem running with a 20 meg connection and no blocked ports!  I am building 2 cantenna’s as we speak, so it will be upgraded to a 108MB wireless connection tomorrow or the day after.  So, it will be an almost 100% self reliant server!  The cost of the turbine was totally not worth the electricity savings; but the geek factor makes it all so special!

What do I plan to do with this server?  I have no idea.  I put in 1TB of storage on a RAID 10, 4×500GB drives, SATA2.  There is about 2GB of ram and it is running Windows 2003 Server as its host and VMWare server running another Windows 2003 Server and Debian J  I will most likely use it as a form of storage and offload my web traffic on it when my other servers are overloaded. 

Nothing like hosting your own backup solution, just need to upgrade my encryption algorithm:  3DES (encrypt/decrypt/encrypt, 1 KEY).

Broken toes and bad parking jobs

Monday, February 11th, 2008

Broken toes simply suck.  You can break them, the doctors can tell you they’re broken, but there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.  Another rant for tonight?  Parking.  How many times have you come to a perfect spot that is just slightly screwed up?  I have a reserved spot, however, someone found a way to take up too much damn room and take up my space.  Yesterday, at the mall, I found a great spot.  Near the main entrance of a store, loads of room, no complaints.  After I was done what I came there to do, a lady hit me.  Really.  She opened her door and slammed against the car, leaving a nice and shiny new scratch.  Her response?  Sorry.  And she walked away.  Luckily, it is a rental and I was forced to pay that damn “accidental coverage”.  I left a nice note in the window saying these exact words: “Thank you very much for slamming into my door and leaving a big scratch.  Please be careful.” 

Edit: I know this is completely random.  I was debating between talking about Playboy models over the years or something really geeky about power generation and server placement.

Visiting my real estate agent, seeing my old home and definitely not missing the snow.

Sunday, February 10th, 2008

After being out of the country for a while for work, coming back home brought a lot of memories.  Since I had to fly to the area on a business trip, I decided to take a bit of extra time to visit old friends and get some R&R.  I drove to my old house to see if anything had changed and say hello to my real estate agent, who had actually bought my house and lived in it since.  Getting back to the area, I realise just exactly how much I did not miss shoveling snow.  Since moving to Seattle, I have never had to shovel snow.  In fact, I do not even believe the city of Seattle has the equipment to shovel snow.  I am pretty confident they just wait for it to melt away.  I like being descriptive in text, but the amount of snow is just inconceivable, so I am posting a picture (I took a lot…). 

10 feet of snow you say?

This snapshot was taken from my old street.  A lot of kids, not too much traffic, but nice and quiet.  I could not get my house sold when I left town, but my real estate agent offered to buy it from me.  I found it a bit odd, but I could care less:  I got it sold!  Well, sort of.  My agent is still renting it from me, but it will eventually be sold!

Back to the snow:  It sucks.  You wake up to a generally fresh 1ft coat of snow in your drive way, spend an hour shoveling it, and spend another hour shoveling the snow that is plowed into your driveway from the road.  Usually you do this twice a day, as, if you want to park your car in your own drive way at the end of the day, another plow happily filled your driveway while you were out.

I would really love to invent a type of energy efficient “snow box”, shaped like a green house, that would slowly melt the snow and make it “disappear”.  I do not think it needs to really take in a lot of snow, but if it could dispose 1 to 2 sq ft of snow per day, you would be a very happy camper.  Throw in R/O and you’ll have a great supply of water.  No yellow snow please.

 

Computer Engineering, Human Sexuality and Knitting

Friday, February 8th, 2008

Starting with last nights post: “ooops”.  I wrote that from a night of heavy drinking (really awesome!) and that post originated from getting an email from my webhits logger.  I keep a syn capture running *just in case* I get a DOS attack.  Seeing I do not get a lot of hits, I had a low threshold.  Last night, I got an email telling me my throughput was increased by 600%.  Drinking and blogging is not a good idea and thus my stupid post.  I wont remove it, but I had to mention that :)

Today I had to present at Concordia University in the heart of Montreal.  I was early, as always, and I had time to kill.  I explored the building and noticed a LOAD of sex posters, from STD studies, to kama sutra group sessions, to sex advice, to forms of new birth control, and more if I kept looking.  This was all around the computer studies department, which was very amusing to me.  This is Quebec, this is Montreal, so I should have expected this and not been as surprised.  What caught me off guard was the knitting club being advertised too.

So there you have it, come to Concordia, learn computer engineering, find a partner and knit! 

Knitting Poster

Random articles and increased web hits for unknown reasons

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

I like to keep check of my blog and hits. I write fairly randomly and try to impress anyone but myself. In any given day, I get about 80 or so human website hits (ed note: I am not interested in advertising…yet anyway!). Honestly, it is creepy how many people read, or care, about my daily life. Lately, I have been posting about random daily events and shying away from actual productive articles (including my famous alcohol reviews/mix section and geeky hacking tip of the day/week). I would have expected 50-70 honest hits doing the creepy reading my life thing, but 300+ on my prostitute and montreal posting REALY caught me offguard. Receiving a job offer by email is also unexpected, fun, but disappointing to turn away. Sorry, but i love my job as a software dev in test/hack/destruction :) Either way, this post is about getting huge hits and me posting ‘quality’ posts. I will be moving to a new domain soon (it’s up and running and i’ll be keeping this one just as active or linked) and i may accept random comments soon too! Thank you viewers/stalkers, i feel special. Tonight there will be no special update. My day was fairly boring with a presentation at noon and a lot of walking in the great (cough) city of montreal. The reason i started this post was being notified of a surge in hits!

And finally, my night right now: I am drinking a long island ice tea and some fruity vodka drink in a bar called ‘Club Pinokkio – best of the 90s’. Maybe if anything exciting happens, i will blog tomorrow :) Good night my loyal readers and/or stalkers.

Keeping warm in a cold Montreal

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

Here’s a bonus blog posting today. 

I was bored and decided to walk around Montreal and see what the city had to offer on a Wednesday night.  I am near McGuill University, so I should be bound to find local student bars.  Having an almost non-existent drinking age should also aid in finding young people.  However, my search was fruitless.  Almost every bar was either a strip club or an empty bar. 

It is a very cold night in Montreal, so maybe that is why people are staying home and not coming out.  However, keeping warm in Montreal should not be hard.  There are so many prostitutes wanting to go home with you it is eerily creepy and very disturbing.  Walking into a dance club and sitting down for a drink, I was asked straight out: “do you want to go back home and screw?”.  Telling her no was another story, I simply said I did not even know her name and it would never work out.  I was not paying attention to her talking/story after I said that.  About 5 minutes later, she moved onto another john in the bar.  On my way back to the hotel, I was followed by yet another “lonely” girl asking why I was walking home alone.  This was an easy turn down, I said I did not have money and she was welcome to watch a movie with me (ed note: I did not have any movies).  She dissapeered just as quickly.  And finally, when I pushed the hotel’s elevator button, there was yet ANOTHER prostitute sitting in the hotel’s lobby.  How do I know she was a hooker?   She asked if my “wife” was already in bed.   I said yes and went to my room. 

No, there was no wife in my room.  There is no wife anywhere.

From winter hell, to random education, to winter hell, to a suite

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

My morning started in a winter drive with around 5 feet of visibility.  A decent speed of 40km/h was attained.  Unfortunately, I did have to dodge the oddball idiot travelling way too fast.  Luckily, they had a soft landing in the ditch.  The drive that should have lasted 2 hours took well over 4 hours.  After arriving at my destination, I was still quite early.  Seeing that I was at a University I have never been before (or the city), I decided to spend my extra time exploring.  This University (Queens) has a beautiful and old fashioned campus.  The first building I decided to explore was a converted church to auditorium.  It was amazing what they had inside.  The best part was a teacher giving lessons on how to play an organ.  I have always enjoyed listening and even watching someone play the organ.  What happened next came as a complete surprise:  I was asked if I would have liked to try!  There was no cost, no one in line and I had to put on little booties.  I told the teacher (I assume?) that I had no experience what so ever.  She said that was okay and I would have a free 10 minute lesson with only my feet.  I’m a slow learner, so I only got time to practice with my right foot.  It was *awesome*.   After that excitement was over (not really, I’m still excited 12 hours later), I explored the rest of the buildings, the library, the residence, everything I could possibly have time to walk.   I did some PR and managed to get more people to attend my presentation outside of the small expected audience (definitely a plus!).

After a great 3 hour presentation, it was time to go.  The snow storm got WORSE.  Visibility was reduced, the roads were covered in snow, and the transport truck drivers drove like wild idiots.  I watched a truck jackknife less than 100ft in front of me, I watched an SUV go sideways into the barrier and I followed a car that thought it would be safer to use two lanes, the shoulder, the other shoulder, back to the middle… It was not a fun drive.  Total driving time: 6 hours, expected time: 3 hours.  Chance of survival: 20%.

All is not all that bad.  Once I had arrived at my hotel, I was put in a luxury suite because they sold mine.  I am sitting here blogging on the 28th floor of a Sheraton, enjoying a great view of the city of Montreal.  Time to explore the street level and see what is going on in this busy city J