« July 2003 | Main | September 2003 »
No, not the other one. Yesterday Kerry and I went to Moncton, New Brunswick to hang out with some friends from Newfoundland at the Magic Mountain water park. We had a really nice day even though it wasn't as hot as we would have wanted. Thanks Chris, Crystal, Greg and Pam.
Last weekend I did a fun gig: lighting for the taping of the final episode of CBC's Rock Camp, airing next April. The downside was an unfortunate meeting of my car with a production van.
It was in this tiny cafe with a tiny stage and a really low ceiling, so there were some challenges. The crew was great, however, and I had lots of fun. I had to learn the Zero88 Fat Frog console, since the console I usually use wasn't available. That's ok, because I like learning new things. I could tell you who won, but I'd have to kill you. Actually, I was never approached to sign an NDA or anything, so I guess technically I can say whatever I want, but that would sure be un-nice of me (not to mention unpopular and possibly career-limiting).
On to the car blues part. At the end of the setup day, Friday, I went out to my car to grab a fast-food dinner before coming back for some more programming. To my surprise, my front bumper had been bashed in while I was parked during the day. Fortunately, there was a note with contact information. It turned out to be one of the production vehicles, so I'm hoping there won't be too much hassle in getting it fixed. So, I spend part of this Monday and Tuesday getting estimates and dealing with related details. I guess it isn't that surprising, but the repair bill is going to top $1000, even though the damage looks pretty minor at first. I have some pictures that I'll post later, perhaps.
Tom Young wrote this today on the Syn Aud Con mailing list:
The Zen of mixing monitors is to try to please the user while not doing
things that one has learned (and therefore intuitively knows) will be
counterproductive. At the same time, you must give them the benefit of the
doubt and at least listen to what they are "hearing". Often times, logic
flies out the window.
It's been a long while since I've truly laughed out loud.
Also, a cool programming site.
Kerry I and dropped by the grocery store yesterday to get some ingredients from dinner. While we were there I noticed 3 l baskets of peaches on sale for $3. Seemed like a good price so I bought a basket. Downside: now I have to east a basket of peaches before they go bad.
Mom is visiting tomorrow on her way back to Qatar. Hopefully she liked peaches. Reminds me, I should try to clean up the mess around here...
It seems the movie industry is partly blaming this summer's poor revenues on text messenging. Well, boo-hoo. I'm really sorry that they can't assure themselves of a big opening weekend gross by just buying a truckload of ads. Technology that enables people to communicate quicker and easier is a good thing, and it allows market forces to act more freely, hopefully rewarding the few who actually make interesting, well-crafted films, and slamming the mills that churn out mindless drivel that passes for entertainment too often these days.
I just read a recent interview with Richard Stallman (via Slashdot), and halfway through there is a gem: the most succinct description I've seen yet of the Trusted Computing initiate by Microsoft et al.
The name "Trusted Computing" (I think they've changed it since) is a deceptive half-truth. The idea of this change in computer hardware is that application developers will be able to trust your computer to obey them instead of obeying you. To describe it more honestly, we call it "Treacherous Computing".
This year YC Newfoundland is expecting it's best music lineup and largest attendance ever. One of the two headlining worship leaders is Charlie Hall who is this week's featured worship leader at worshiptogether.com. Note that if you haven't visited the worship together site before, the featured worship leader link above may not work. You'll need to select your country first, and then click worship leaders from the blue horizontal navigation bar at the top of the homepage.
I've been trying to cover the various highlights of July in reverse order, which means my working weekend at the New Glasgow Jubilee should be next, but I'm going to skip that (I'll write about it soon, honest, Tommy) and go right to our last day in California.
After doing the job interview thing, and the school hunting thing, we had a day left to do the we're-in-California-let's-have-some-fun thing. I didn't know this before, but Kerry is really into thrill rides. What a lady! Sci-fi, Risk, computers, and roller coasters, too? So, with the freedom to spend the day shopping in LA, in Hollywood, at the beach or just about anything else, we both preferred to visit Six Flags: Magic Mountain. Of all the roller coasters we rode, the new X coaster was certainly a world apart. Like no other roller coaster I've ever been on, it was certainly worth the two hour lineup.
The park as a whole was a great park with lots of great coasters. Neither of us have been on many coaster before, so we didn't have much to compare with, but we tremendously enjoyed ourselves. We went on stand-up coasters, the first looping coaster in the world, the largest looping coaster in the world, suspended coasters and floorless suspended coasters (just a seat attached to the track above you). Of the normal, modern steel coasters, we both probably like Goliath the best. A very tall, fast coaster without any loops, but that first drop is an amazing rush.
A tip to other visitors: if you don't live around southern CA and you're visiting on a limited time budget, get the fast lane passes. Your park admission allows you to ride any coaster as many times as you want all day, but if you're there at a busy time (like we were - on a Saturday) you'll spend most of the day in lines. The fast lane passes are tickets you buy at the park entrance that allow you to get into a much shorter line for selected rides. You buy passes in blocks of four and each pass is good for one entrance into the express line on any eligible ride. It's best to buy the fast lane passes at the park entrance. There is a booth inside the park where you can get express passes, but it's busy. Besides, they only sell a limited number of passes per day, so you want to get them early.
But on to the X. The website probably gives a better idea than I'll be able to in words. If you can imagine an ordinary roller coaster, then replace each row of seats with a large horizontal axle. Imagine that the seats are attached to this axle behind the seat back, and the seats are outside of the train car itself. Two on each side. So each row of the train is two seats on one side, the car itself in the middle, and then two more seats on the other side. You sit in the seat very similarly to SCREAM, the floorless coaster. You're secured by shoulder bars and a safety belt, and your legs hand over empty space after the train is out of the station. Now here's the fun part: the big axle that the seats are mounted on, it can rotate! So as you're sitting in the roller coaster, even if the coaster is standing still, you can be tilted back so that you're looking at the sky, or rotated forward until you're facing the ground as if you're lying on your stomach. It can actually rotate the full 360 degrees.
So, to the punch line. It was 10:30 PM. We had just done what we thought would be our last ride of the day, when another person on the ride we were just getting off was telling Kerry about X. He said it was the best ride in the park, and more than worth the wait. The park closes at midnight, but they will ride everybody in line before 11:00. So we hurried across the park to X, waiting in line until 1:00, and caught the second last run of the day.
It was so intense, that both Kerry and I only remember the first 10 seconds of the ride - the initial drop. I described the seats above, but I didn't mention that the seats face backward. As you leave the station, you tilt back on your back, and you climb the main slope looking up at the sky, with your head pointing up the hill and your legs more or less parallel to the track. Even if you study the track design or talk to other riders and know what's coming, nothing prepares you for the moment that you reach the top and first experience the drop. As the car starts to head over the edge, the chairs rotate forward. This alleviates your fear the you will head down the main slope head-first on your back. You think perhaps that instead you'll go feet-first, with your face towards the track. You are quickly disabused of that notion when the chair continues to rotate until your body is horizontal, face down to the ground 200 feet below you.
Here's where it gets interesting. The track is not a steep slope like other coasters. It is completely vertical. There is no steel track beneath you to impede your view. The track curves back underneath the main slope that you just came up, so you are hanging suspending over nothing but ashpalt parking lot and it's rushing up at you - real fast. If you picture the track as a telephone pole at this point, your head is closest to the pole and your legs are pointing away from the track. To be in this position in a normal coaster, you would have to do a headstand in the car on the way up the main slope.
Suddenly, just before you reach the ground, the track curves back under the main slope, are now you're in a standing position, with the track above you. After that, there are various twists and turns complete with more seat rotations, but I couldn't tell you anything about it. All I remember is that one incredible drop at the beginning. Wow.
I just made my first firebird quick search bookmark. Firebird comes with several built in, and lots of people have written about this mozilla feature before. I think it's been in mozilla for years. Still it feels like a nice, tiny accomplishment, since I came up with one I think will be really useful to me.
Here it is: to search imdb from the firebird or mozilla address bar, simply create a bookmark to http://imdb.com/find?q=%s, name it whatever you like, and then use the bookmark manager to set the keyword to imdb, or whatever you like. Then typing "imdb shanghai knights" in the address bar will bring you right to the imdb page for the movie.
On Thursday I rented Shanghai Knights and yesterday Kerry and I went to see SWAT at Park Lane cinemas. Both were moderately enjoyable action movies. After seeing the SWAT trailer several times this spring, I still didn't know what the movie was about, but we had seen so many billboards advertising it while we were in California that we couldn't resist our curiousity to see it. Kerry thought the acting was a little stiff, but I didn't notice it to be too bad. Although I always wonder how cars seem to be able to keep pace with jets on a takeoff roll...
Kerry and I have had a wonderful evening. Phil and Doretta Zinck invited us over for dinner. We had a great meal of lasagna and then spent the evening chatting about church, life, jobs, relationships, and everything. We really enjoyed it. Thanks, guys.
If you are still using Internet Explorer or Outlook Express (or both) then take a look at these three articles:
I vaguely recall wanting to make a pay phone call while I was at home in Newfoundland. On my credit card bill this month, there is a charge for a payphone in St. John's for $1.15! Moral: never use a credit card when a quarter will do!
Now that I've finally spent some time in my new apartment, after my weeks of travel and work are over, I've spent a little too much time on the net, evident in my blog entries lately. I had intended to blog about the various events during the travels in July, but now I've got more recent family events that have gone un-blogged.
Mom and Dad are finally spending some time in their house, since uncle Geoff and family are taking a vacation. Since my parents have been home from Qatar they've been living out of a suitcase at my sister's, my uncles and Jim Anstey's houses. Mom leaves to go back to Qatar for fall semester in only a week, it's hard to believe the time has already come.
Dad has been looking into flights for us children to visit them in Qatar this Christmas. It appears that a specific choice of flights leaves nearly a 24-hour flight change in London, which is more than enough time to get out of the airport and at least see a little of the city. I would also like to plan a longer stopover on the return flight. The specific arrangement between College of the North Atlantic, Air Qatar and Air Canada covers flights the allow stopovers in London, Paris or Frankfurt at no extra charge, but it would be really keen to see Rome. I know AQ and AC fly there, so the question is just how much extra would it cost to route through Italy instead of France or the UK.
Dad also has laser surgery on one of his eyes. There was a complication that required an additional laser treatment, and he will have cloudy vision for up to a month before he knows whether or not further corrections are required. I hope it works out ok, because I know it will be great for him not to depend on his glasses so much.
Kerry's grandparents are in Ontario visiting their children. Sadly, Kerry's grandfather strongly dislikes airplanes, and he's been sick for most of the visit as well. I'm not sure if the two are connected, but I hope they can make the most of the trip and enjoy the time with their kids.
My apartment still isn't totally unpacked. A rearrangment of the furniture may be necessary to fit everything in neatly, and I'm procrastinating on that chore. I have a few other things that need doing while I'm in a lull with paying work, not the least of which is thesis writing. Speaking of which, I should go do some of that writing...
Another slashdot article today caught my eye. It tipped me to the Wired magazine article about new breakthroughs in synthetic diamonds. Two US companies are hoping to break into the gem market in order to recoup their R&D and lower their production costs so that they can eventually make diamond semiconductors for the electronics industry. Of course, the other side of this story is that cheap synthetic diamonds have the potential to upset the diamond monopoly run by the DeBeer's cartel.
Diamond-based computer chips are far from a sure thing, but there is a plausible argument that diamond's superior thermal conductivity will allow it an edge over silicon as we approach the limit of semiconductor size and performance. If we can't build the chips smaller and faster, maybe we can run them hotter and faster. On the other hand, this doesn't seem to offer the potential for order-of-magnitude improvements.
As for the collapse of the diamond market, the question is will people still want diamonds if the price falls by 50% or even more? Or will the DeBeers marketing machine convince people that flawless synthetic diamonds aren't as sentimental as ones dug up from the ground?
In the slashdot discussion of the article I learned about another gemstone that I hadn't heard of before: crystalized silicon carbide, or Moissanite. Named after the man who discovered it originally in meteor remains, it is clear and hard like diamond, but it has a higher index of refraction, so it sparkles even more than a diamond when cut and polished in the common round brilliant cut. An interesting thought to file away for some later time, but I think that for most young couples the real factor is this: the cost of the engagment gift symbolizes the sincerity of the commitment.
That is what I feel is the truly sad state of our cultural expectations for love and marriage, but who am I to argue with a whole culture? Besides, I will want to give my fiancée an engagment present that is not only beautiful and durable, but also valuable.
Today's slashdot article on identity theft reminded me about the importance of staying informed about my finances. I try to be consciencous about this anyway, but I'm going to make sure that I order those credit reports that I found out about a few days ago.
Oh, and sites like anybirthday.com that aggregate publicly available data and make it easily available are a little scary. Not that I would suggest such sites should not exist - it is public information, after all - but it's a reminder that a lot of information about me is easily obtainable. I guess it's my responsibility to stay aware of what happens with my information.
Of course, I freely give out lots of personally identifiable information on my own website.
Silly me, Thunderbird uses the same mbox format as the mutt and pine files I've got saved for the last 8 years. So all I have to do some day is concatenate the archive files for each date range for each saved mail folder, and then I'll have all of my saved mail accessible in one place! Should be easy to consolidate all the big emails with attachments that I have in various mozilla profiles, too. That's a job for another day, though.
I also tried out some RSS feed readers that Asa mentioned yesterday. I've never used aggregators before, and I guess I was sort of hoping for something that would combine feeds into one list of recent entries. Perhaps this exists and I'm just missing it?
From what I can tell each reader simply gives you a list of feeds that you have to manually select to see if there are new articles. It doesn't seem much more convenient than a good set of bookmark tab groups, like I've been using for the last few months. In any case, RSS Reader Panel seems to be the simplest and most useful of the list Asa gave. We'll see if I actually find it useful.
I found Jamie's Thunderbird review via Asa's blog which motivated me to finally install Thunderbird 0.1 that's been sitting on my hard drive for a few weeks now. Looks good so far...
A few things are still missing for me. The reason I've waited so long to switch from mutt is that I can run mutt on my university shell account and access all my mail as well as my saved mail folders via putty and ssh from just about any computer, anywhere. As a result, I have a few big emails in my old mozilla mail profile, but I also have years and years of email in the old plain text mailbox format that I would like to import. I'm sure there's some way to get around it, and one of these weeks or months I'll sit down with google and scour the web for the tools and info I need. However, Thunderbird would be really compelling for me if it offered easy import of mail from my old plain text mail folders as well as from my mozilla profile.
Then I'd just have to set up some kind of remote desktop access so I could access the mail on my home PC remotely....
Incidentally, I wonder what ever happened to the idea of virtual folders in mozilla mail? Or am I misremembering?
So, does anybody out there know of a friendly, competent and economical camera repair shop in Halifax?
A few years ago, my parents gave me a Canon ELPH as a birthday gift. It was a complete surprise, and I have loved it ever since. It takes great pictures (as far APS goes), is well built and especially great for travelling.
Last month, I was in California for a job interview. On the way home, I unfortunately packed my camera face up in the front pocket of my carry on, which the desk attendant in LA strongly urged me to check. I don't like checking bags, but I thought we weren't on a particularly tight itinerary, and baggage claims in Halifax is usually pretty convenient. So I checked my bag.
The camera has a soft case, and it can be accidentally turned on so that the lens extends out of the camera body, while in the case. This happened somewhere between our rental car in LA and picking up the bag in Toronto. Then, the bag must have been either dropped, or packed beneath some heavier bags, because the zoom lens was forced out of alignment. It's now jammed, and the camera can't turn on or off.
Air Canada explicity disclaims any liability for electronic items packed in checked bags, including cameras, so I expect my only recourse is a (costly) repair. Just in case there was some way the problem could be fixed from the inside, I took the camera apart tonight. It was a very interesting exercise. I'm not to only one who's disassembled an ELPH, although I went farther than that guy did. I didn't desolder the LCD to get at the viewfinder optics. Rather, I removed the 4 screws that hold down the circuit board on the back of the fil compartment so that I could see the back of the lens. I tried to force the lens back into place, both pushing from the inside and pulling from the outside, but it won't budge.
Just in case anybody else out there wants to take apart their ELPH, here are some of my notes.
I have what I think is the original ELPH, so other models may be slightly or entirely different, especially the newer Z3 series.
By the way, I looked for service info, and the only thing I could find on the net is a L.L. Service Guide from Micro Tools. $44.95 USD is as expensive as the repair fee I hoped to avoid, so I forged ahead with only my wits to guide me.
Be sure to keep track of all the screws and small parts. Once all eight screws are out, the shell should come apart. It's a tight fit, so it may take a while for it to come apart, but it doesn't need to be forced or twisted. I think either half should be able to come off, but I found it easier to take the front (lens side) off first.
At this point you should be able to see the film compartment and the inside of the lens. The motor that powers the lens is at the bottom of the camera. The cylinder next to where the battery would be is the capacitor for the flash. Be aware that this capacitor can probably store voltages that may be lethal, and it may not be discharged just because the battery is removed. It seems to be fairly well protected from accidental shorting, but if you don't know what you're doing, stay away. Better safe than sorry, and don't say I didn't tell you.
I didn't disassemble the camera any farther than this. I did take off the black tape covering most of the front, the yellow tape on the side and a few more screws, but they weren't needed to get at the film compartment. I could see more screws inside the flash compartment, and under the folding PCB board that wraps around the camera body. I'm guessing that the plastic frame of the camera innards splits into several subassemblies, but at the very least some careful disconnection of the circuit boards is required. At this point I decided it's more worthwhile for me to take the camera to a repair shop and get an estimate. If it's more than $80 or $100, I think I'd rather put the money towards a new digital camera.
Ah, the drawbacks to being financially challenged...
you should read the article entitled Let's Put SCO Behind Bars. Basically the SCO Group, which bought the IP and name of the former Santa Cruz Operation, is now suing IBM because they claim IBM leaked proprietary SCO technology into the Linux 2.4 kernel. Most tech people around the world regard this as complete and utter bunk. Consider that before this quarter, the SCO Group had never reported a profit, and now their stock has inflated on this lawsuit. Several websites will list SEC filings of recent insider stock trades by SCOX execs, which seems to indicate that they're getting their money while the getting's good. A word to the wise...
Came across this article on Open Proxy abuse through some article on slashdot. I found it interesting, and it might be interesting to system admins or other computer geek types out there...
freecreditreports.com has had some ads on tv lately that have inspired me to look into credit reports -- something I've been meaning to do, but never seem to get around to. A quick look at the site indicates that you can get a free credit report online, but it seems to me that the site is angling to get you to "join" so that you'll buy their montly credit watch service. I don't think I need that, in addition to the fact that it looks like the site is US-based. So, a quick trip to the source of all knowledge and I'm on my way.
It turns out that there are two main credit reporting agencies in Canada: Equifax and Trans Union. They both have lots of info online, but I hit the Equifax credit rating FAQ first. Lots of good info. Both companies will sell you a copy of your report online for about $15 CAD, but you can get your report by mail for free. They also point out that they will correct any errors in your report, at no charge.
I finally watched Erin Brockovich tonight. Julia Roberts plays a rough-around-the-edges character, so we'll look past the coarse language. Kerry saw it when it was playing in theatres, and she liked it enough to watch it again. Having seen it, I think I'd watch it again, too. At a few points I was a little nervous that it might get over-dramatic, but it ended up being enjoyable without being too over-the-top emotionally.
Kerry and I also watched Ballistic again last night. It was so memorable that we didn't realize until we started watching it, that we had watched it only a few months ago. Oh, well. It was pretty forgettable the second time, too. Not really bad, but really not that good either.
Monday past saw one of the bigger concert acts of the year at the Metro Centre. Def Leppard played to a small but appreciative crowd in support of their X tour. I was on the IATSE call for the load in and out. I felt fortunate to be on the audio crew and I worked with Ted from Sound Image to set up the FOH PA. The rig was JBL Vertec, and lots of it. 10 4889s per side with 8 4880 subs, and 6 more 4889s for side fill. There were 4 4880 ground subs a side and 10 smaller center fill speakers. Way more than enough for the lower bowl of the Metro Centre.
It was the first time that I've worked with Vertec, and I have to say that the system rigs and flies exceptionally well. It was even easier than v-DOSC, which had been the easiest I had worked with until now. I can see why they are popular on tours. The system sounded very good, although I didn't hear enough of it to be able to form a strong opinion of Vertec's sound vs other rigs that I'm more familiar with.
The monitor console was Midas Heritage, but FOH was the real treat: a Digico D5. Again, a first hand-on for me. I only had a few minutes to look over the shoulder of Ted and the Def Leppard FOH tech while they were testing and tuning the rig, but it was definitely cool. I kind of prefer the way that the Innovason boards have all of the channels laid out more like an analog board, but the D5 seems to have a lot more configurability with the touch screens. Hope to be able to see one again soon.
I wasn't on the show call but I managed to get in to see most of the show. The lighting was very well done. I don't remember the name of the tech, but he was a fairly young Japanese fellow. He was using an Avolites console. I guess that was because the rig was a hybrid between a modern moving light show and a classic rock-n-roll massive PAR can rig. There were 17 sections of pre-rig truss with 2 bars of 6 each, as well as a handful of additional bars and about 16 racks of ACLs. The front truss was an arch of pre-rig (without PARs) , with 10 Mac600s, some lekos, and 4 blinders with color scrollers. The mid truss was a similar arch but with PARs (10 bars of 6) and ACLs. There were 5 Mac2000s hung off the upstage edge with pipe. The upstage truss was a semi-circle arching upstage, and it had 4 sections of pre-rig spansetted off the upstage edge. Each section of pre-rig was really 3 sticks spanset together, so the effect was 4 squares, each with 6 bars of 6. There were 5 pipes each with a pair of Mac2000s below the 4 PAR grids. On the floor there were another 9 Mac2000s and 6 Mac 600s upstage. All of this was provided by Bandit Lites.
I'm pretty sure that the color wheels in the moving heads were modified to contain only yellow, blue, red and green. This allowed the LD to do a really neat effect where all the lights did a fast color scroll, with each fixture slightly offset in the scroll, and the color was mostly white, but with random flashes of blue, red, green and yellow, matching the colors in the conventional lights.
I learned a couple of things from that show, and one was that you can use green effectively in a rock and roll show. The opening look was a green random strobe with all the moving lights in a crowd blind position. The other notable element was the kibuki drop. They had a really nice shimmery kibuki that rigged off the mid truss hiding most of the lighting rig and the drum riser. Just when the house lights went down the curtain was dropped during the green strobe effect. You wouldn't even know it happened if you weren't looking for it. When the lights came up the stage was just there.
I guess I've said about enough for now, or at least about as much as I can remember. Don't know when the next gig will be (Sum 41 plays at the Metro Centre in early September) but I'll soon post a report on my gig at the New Glasgow Jubilee last weekend.
This afternoon Kerry and I visited the Halifax SPCA on our way to Kent to get some shelves. They have many nice animals, but they're especially overstocked on kittens. If you're in the area, visit them in Burnside Industrial Park.
Cool to see the chain of events as the mozilla community, scattered across the world, moves forward together. A guy in California codes a new idea, and some guy in another country takes it and adds something really nifty. This is happening all the time since Mozilla is built around Javascript and CSS, so any decently competent web designer can actually poke around inside mozilla, make changes, and contribute back to the project.
In another case, a group in Poland take some mozilla images and make posters to promote Mozilla around their town during a computer conference. Somebody else took those images, and set up an online shop selling Mozilla items with any proceeds going to support Mozilla projects. As soon as I pay off a few more debts, I might have to get me some new clothes...
I've been incommunicado with many people for a while now, and I know that a few of them occasionally check this blog, so here's a quick update.
Everything is going well for the moment. Last weekend I was ABI's lighting tech for the New Glasgow Riverfront Jubilee. That was a lot of fun, with a few interesting stories thrown in. More on that later. On Monday I did the union call for the Def Leppard show at the Metro Centre. That was also fun. Tuesday I slept in and Wednesday I started setting up power for the Busker's festival running from now until next weekend.
I'll make a few posts over the next few days to have a record of some of the events of the past month, including my trip with Kerry to Newfoundland, my job interview in California, and the recent gigs. Stay tuned...