New Wedding Photography Section

Published on
It’s probably because it’s been so nice these last few days at home, but I’m actually finding myself itching to shoot another wedding this summer. To that end, I’ve started assembling a wedding photography section. It needs a lot of work, but at least I have something for now until I can spend a bit more time on it. ...

Snow Snow Snow

Published on
I gotta say — I’m fairly amazed that it’s still snowing on the west coast. I woke up to a white coating on the local mountains and houses here. I actually spent a few years living in Ottawa, and one of the reasons I came back was because the weather was so much warmer out here. But this is without a doubt one of the craziest winters I can remember. Cultus Lake provincial park is only a few weeks away from opening, so it’s pretty incredible that we’re still plagued by this cold snap. I sure hope we’re privileged enough to have an extra warm summer as payback for this dismal winter. Anyone ...

Chalkwork Snook Adoption Fund Drive

Published on
Dave Shea is trying to help a fellow designer raise a bit of money for their adoption fund. To that end, he’s donating the proceeds of the sales of his Chalkwork icons to the Snook adoption fund for the next few weeks. If you’re looking for icons, now’s a great time to grab a set and help out a good cause at the same time. ...

Chichen Itza

Published on
...

Greetings From Mexico

Published on
Heading to the beach in a sec, but wanted to do a quick entry. So far I’m having lots of fun down here. This is easily the nicest resort I’ve ever been at, and the food has been pretty stellar. I was a tad hungover yesterday, more so because of the heat and lack of water than the beer, so I took it easy. Today is a pool day at one of our sister resorts, Coba. So I’m just going to read and relax. Tomorrow we’re heading to Chichen Itza, which is one of the seven wonders of the world. So I’m definitely looking forward to that. I haven’t pulled out my SLR yet, and have been using my little ...

Nexus Pass

Published on
About a week ago I went through the formal interview process for my Nexus Border pass. Other than when my friend Dan has been working at YVR, I can’t really remember many times I’ve crossed the border where I didn’t feel the border guard was excessively rude. Maybe it’s because I always cross the border alone, or maybe there’s something weird flagged on my account, but I always seem to get the nth degree. The interview process was fairly straightforward, until of course they asked if I wanted the card for business or pleasure. I said that while it was primarily for pleasure, I would ...

Quick Update

Published on
On Thursday I’m getting on a plane and heading out to Hamilton for a few days prior to heading down to the Mayan Riviera. I have a lot of things to get off my plate before then, and am hoping to even hit the mall at some point to do a bit of shopping. My laptop has been down in Vancouver getting fixed, and hopefully I’ll be getting it back tonight (that’s a whole blog post in itself). I have to say that not having a laptop around has been a total pain in the rear end. Tomorrow I plan to work from a coffee shop again, as I find it’s a really nice atmosphere (and the scenery is a bit better ...

Viper Cache Nearly Done

Published on
I spent some time working on Viper Cache last night. It’s going to get a new name at some point, but it’s close to being done. I’m going to test it on this site for a while and see if I can iron out any bugs. ...

Help Laura Get On Ellen

Published on
Ellen Degeneres recently signed up on Twitter and somehow managed to get 100,000 twitter followers in a relatively short amount of time. She’s fairly new to Twitter, and a few people think she might need a bit of help. [easyvideo video=”http://www.youtube.com/v/UqvU6HE8aOI&hl=en&fs=1″] Laura Roeder is hoping that Ellen will bring her onto the show to try to learn a few things about using Twitter. I’ve exchanged a few emails with Laura with regards to WordPress and WordCamp over the past few months, and think it’s a pretty cool attempt by her to get on national TV. So ...

WordTwit Test Post

Published on
I’m updating WordTwit right now to be able to show responses to Tweets in a blog post. A use case for this would be someone asking a question on Twitter related to a particular blog post, and wanting to incorporate Twitter feedback to that question into a post. Hopefully in a few minutes you’ll start to see some tweets show up here. [wordtwit status=”1317970082″] ...

Why HOV Lanes Suck

Published on
Having driven over the Port Mann bridge probably close to a thousand times in my life, I’m pretty much an expert on how traffic works in that area. Years ago, in an effort to relieve some congestion for westbound traffic heading into Vancouver, the city created a dedicate HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lane that goes pretty much from the Port Mann bridge all the way to the Hastings exit downtown. Unfortunately though, one of the characteristics of that lane is that it’s rarely used to capacity. There’s nothing more frustrating than sitting in grid-locked traffic and seeing a completely empty ...

Hastings Racetrack Forced To Close During Olympics

Published on
I just heard this on the news, and it’s the kind of thing that makes my blood boil. The Hastings Racetrack is being forced to close for a month during the Olympics due to security concerns by VANOC. Lots of employees will be out of work, and some may even lose their jobs. Given the Olympics are supposed to help the economy, it’s rather ironic that VANOC is forcing some people out of work. Shouldn’t the rights of the individual business owners be respected, regardless of what VANOC wants? ...

Heroes, 24, Lost

Published on
Now that I have cable again, I’ve been watching a bit more TV. Except for last night’s Heroes and 24, I’ve been keeping up with all three shows. Of them all, Lost is the only one that’s really keeping me interested. I think the whole concept of 24 has just gone on too long now. I thought season two was pretty awesome, mainly because it focused on character development. Now it’s more of an action flick. They had a good opportunity with that cute FBI agent, but they really haven’t used her to her full potential yet. I’m not sure why, but I find Heroes pretty boring these days. I guess ...

Jay Leno Offers His Own Stimulus Package

Published on
Apparently Jay Leno is going to be hosting a free comedy show for some of the jobless. Pretty nice gesture. ...

Playing Around With Web Servers

Published on
Obviously I’ve been spending a bit of time tweaking Apache such that it is well optimized for working in a VPS environment. Truthfully though, Apache is a major resource hog. To be honest, I really can’t comprehend what it’s doing with all that memory it seems to hoard. One of the other major downsides to Apache is that it forks additional processes to handle server load, and processes are rather heavy (at least when compared to user threads). Since I haven’t touched any C++ in about two months, I thought I’d try my hand at writing a quick web server to see if I can better understand ...

New Digs

Published on
As you can see, I changed my theme around a bit tonight. I actually had something different going a few days ago, but decided to abandon it and go a slightly different route. I’m still tweaking the colors a bit and going through my old content and cleaning it up, but most of the functionality is here now. If you hit anything that’s broken, please let me know. ...

Rimu Hosting Update

Published on
So I’ve had my website on Rimu for over a week now, and so far things are going quite well. I’ve actually had a few support requests in with them, mostly trivial items, and they’ve answered everything in about 30 minutes, which is great. The one thing I’ve found out is that their base plan (which only included 160 MB of memory) just isn’t powerful enough to run more than a small WordPress site. I spent a bunch of time reducing the memory requirements of Apache and MySQL, but my efforts just weren’t successful. Every once and a while an application would crash with a kernel out of memory ...

The Strangest Thing

Published on
I’ve been in Chilliwack close to two months now. It’s obviously a completely different lifestyle out here, one that I’m quite enjoying. I wake up every morning to an apartment that’s filled with light, and I go to sleep each night without the sound of loud sirens or drunken idiots screaming outside. But without a doubt there’s one aspect of living out here that still seems unnatural — seeing children outside. Living in the downtown core of Vancouver you don’t really see a lot of kids. Sure, you see the odd infant, or on the weekend, a few kids going to the aquarium or what-not. But ...

Happy Birthday Mom

Published on
Today is my mom’s 55th birthday, although she doesn’t look a day past 30! Last night we gathered over at her place for some prime rib and to sit around and have a few drinks. When I gave my mom a hug at the end of the night she told me it’s been about 10 years since I’ve been able to make it to her birthday, something that hadn’t even crossed my mind until she had said it. But definitely one of the nice things about being back home is that attending family events like birthdays will be a whole lot easier for me. So have a great day today mom, and enjoy your birthday! ...

The Day That Media Temple Stood Still

Published on
About two years ago I decided I would test out Media Temple’s grid service package, mainly because it was highly recommended by WordPress users, and seemed to perform quite well. In fact, for the first few weeks I was a Grid Service user, I thought things ran actually pretty smoothly. Unfortunately though, over the next few months, things would degrade rather rapidly. My site was plagued by ever increasing latency, and would often go down for 4- 6 hours at a time due to MySQL outages or random, seemingly unannounced maintenance periods. It got so bad at one point that I actually came to the ...