Well, most people go through this world with only one mom, but i’ve been fortunate enough to have two in my life.

My mom, at Cultus Lake last summer

My step-mom, Cathy, also at Cultus Lake last summer

Once I get cleaned up here I’ll be placing a few phone calls. But until then, Happy Mother’s Day, moms.

It’s 5:30am, and I’m still up. Which is why I found this rather amusing:

Apple announced the official iPhone developer program a while ago. Unfortunately at the time they also indicated it would only be open to people in the United States at first. I decided to just sign up for it at the time anyways, assuming they would open up to Canada at some point as well.

Turns out they did. I got my official email last night saying I was accepted, so today I went and paid my $99 and can now develop iPhone applications (if I want to). So, maybe I’ll mess around with XCode on my vacation for an afternoon and see if I can make anything cool.

So, this is a fairly basic question. Lately, some people have been installing little rick roll blockers, thinking that it somehow protects them from being rick rolled simply because the video no longer plays. My take on that is that it’s basically a form of cheating, and that if you clicked the link, you were rick rolled.

But let’s see what my knowledgeable readers have to say. Chime in below:

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The Amazon EC2 service is a rather revolutionary cloud computing system that came out in late 2006. It provides a fairly flexible infrastructure that allows you to launch application servers on demand. Traditionally new web companies are forced to pay for rather expensive co-location facilities for their servers, with little or not thought given to scalability (which isn’t always a bad thing, considering most companies never reach a point where they need scalability). That being said, for a company that either requires scalability, or is looking for new ways to reduce costs, Amazon EC2 might be a good fit.

Unfortunately, since every EC2 instance is essentially a virtualized computer, all data in an instance is lost should the instance suddenly terminate. There are several ways around this, such as storing instances and data over on Amazon’s S3 service, but unfortunately none of them are entirely straightforward (especially if you’re looking for MySQL or database persistence).

I recently discovered that one of our servers at work that is being kept in a local co-location facility was responsible for a fairly high level of traffic last month. Due to some crazy pricing schemes in the co-location facility, we were fairly heavily charged. I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation based on the bandwidth and usage patterns and quickly realized that Amazon EC2 would be about 8% of the cost that we were dinged.

I skimmed a few tutorials on the web and had a fully functional EC2 instance up in about 15 minutes. Assigning one of their new Elastic IP addresses was fairly trivial too. There are a few hiccups yet to work out due to the nature of the stuff I need to run on the box, but all in all it’s been a fairly painless process. So while Amazon EC2 is still in beta and shouldn’t really (IMO) be used for anything mission critical, in cases like the one I’m playing with it may be an extremely viable (and cost saving) option for some businesses.

I went out for a few beers tonight with Boris and Dave down in Yaletown, a pseudo celebration for Cinco De Mayo. One of the topics that came up casually over a few margaritas was the fast approaching onslaught of Vancouver technology events.

Shira and Maura and Launch Party Vancouver 2

Kicking it off in approximately two weeks is the fourth iteration of Launch Party Vancouver down at the Republic on Granville street. It’s always a great event, and most of the local technology companies (and freelancers) are usually in attendance. I was sort of the unofficial photographer for Launch Party III, and will definitely bring my camera around for some shots of LPV IV (although, I may focus more on socializing at this event).

Sorry, I’m bad with names. But there’s Lori Pike, Monica Hamburg and Rebecca Bollwitt above

So, while I’ve been taking it easy and not attending too many local events recently, I’m definitely excited to hang out with the ‘ol crew again down at LPV 4. I’ll post more information as it gets a bit closer.

PS - Happy 25th birthday to Shira Lazar - may your liver bring you happiness for many more years to come

I realized I removed most of my contact information a while ago. I actually briefly had my phone number available on my Facebook page, and acquired two stalkers in the process last year, so I basically removed everything but my email. Thankfully that’s passed, and I’m less timid now. So, if you’re looking to get a hold of me, here are a few ways:

• You can try email on my contact page
• Check out my facebook page
• My recently resurrected MySpace page (warning, may disappear without notice)
• My Twitter page
• My Jaiku Page

As most of you know, I turned 31 on April 7th a few weeks ago. At roughly the same time (and coincidentally, on the same day), somewhere over in Victoria, Lloyd Budd was welcoming his son into the world.

Lloyd Budd is a hardcore WordPress user, and an all-around nice guy. I meant to post something about this a while ago, but just got swamped (with WordPress stuff). That aside, I want to congratulate Lloyd and his wife on their new addition to the family. Given that he shares the same birthday as me, I’d recommend stocking up on beer now.