My dad is coming out to hang out at my place tonight. We’re probably just going to sit around, watch movies, and maybe have a few beers. I don’t get many opportunities to head home and visit my family these days, so it’s definitely nice when they find the time to come into the city and see me. ...

I’m just heading out the door to take my car in to get looked at. There’s nothing wrong mechanically with it, but Mazda called me out of the blue last week and asked me to swing by so they can look at my stereo. Apparently they might have put in the wrong one when I had it replaced about a month ago (which is strange, because it works and fits fine). I suspect there’s some recall they aren’t telling me about. But anyways, they are going to replace the CD player I imagine, and they also offered to detail my car for me in exchange for the hassle. It’s supposed to be a nice sunny day out ...

About six weeks ago, the CD player in my 2006 Mazda 3 Sport crapped out. Given that it’s a new car, and that I purchased the stupid extended warranty (thanks to my lack of a backbone and the high pressure sales guy they put on me), I went in and asked them to replace it for free, which they did. Ordering the new CD player took around four weeks, but eventually I ended up with a new CD player that seemed to work fine. Last week I got a call from Mazda asking me to come by so they can take a look at the unit they put in. I told them I wasn’t having any problems with it, but they said they just ...

One of the areas of my website that I lost with the last theme change was my photography section. To be honest, it wasn’t that complete before, but since photography is such a big part of my life, I miss having it around. Tonight I sat in front of the TV and put together a new one. I extended some recent code I had written for SmugMug to pull in my photos from there. I’m going to slowly add some of my photos that I think might interest organizations looking for Vancouver photos, or various photography from some of the concerts I’ve attended. So, feel free to head on over and check out the ...

Yes people, it’s that time again. BarCamp Vancouver is only a few hours from kicking off down at WorkSpace in GasTown. For those of you not familiar with it, BarCamp is an unconference where people get together and determine the topics at the conference the day of the event. Everyone who attends is potentially a speaker, so it’s a great forum for learning new things and being expose to new ideas. Rebecca Bollwitt and I are organizing a session of WordCamp tomorrow down in Granville Island, which should be a lot of fun. I currently have a desk full of WordPress swag to give out tomorrow (courtesy ...

This isn’t really a huge surprise to me, but apparently BlueRay sales aren’t doing very well at all. In fact, sales of BlueRay went down last month compared to the month before. There are probably a lot of reasons why other people aren’t buying them, namely the high price of current BlueRay players. But in terms of me, I’m not buying one simply because I’m still pissed off from the whole HD-DVD/BlueRay battle. On my shelf at home is a now useless HD-DVD player, which I purchased thinking HD-DVD would be around a little while longer. Since the industry basically screwed consumers with ...

One of my major criticisms of Google over the last few years has been the state of most of their products. While many of them are initially innovative and useful, they usually fall by the way side and seemingly get abandoned. The “beta” moniker seems to be ever-present on most of their services, leading one to almost believe that there is no such thing as a finish product within the walls of Google. I just read this article where someone took the time to figure out just how many of Google’s products are in beta. The verdict? Nearly half of them, including the four year old gmail product ...

Just got back from my appointment this morning. Some lady spent 20 minutes giving me impromtu eye tests, and measuring my face and eye positions. There’s one tool they use to measure eye displacement which is actually slightly painful because they force it to sit on the edge of your eye socket and press it there. Unfortunately, my left orbital bone is slightly out of place so it’s hard to get an accurate measurement using that device. Anyways, once I finally talked to the surgeon, he basically indicated that another surgery at this stage is probably too risky. He said even though the end result ...

On Wednesday, I’ll get to meet Dr. Peter Dolman, who is one of the best ocuplastics surgeons in the country. I’ve been on the wait list for about three months now, and I really have no idea what to expect to be honest. I went to the extra trouble to try and make sure my CT and MRI scans were there waiting for him, but I suspect that somehow they will have been lost come Wednesday, and we’ll have nothing to talk about. Truth is, I really don’t know what the end result will be. Tonight I told some friends that it’s really a lose-lose at this point, which is true from my perspective. Option ...

To be honest, I haven’t really spent much money on my home theatre setup in about seven years or so. But for a while there, I was into fairly decent home audio equipment. That’s not to say I don’t do the odd update from time to time, because I do: last year I purchased a HD-DVD player, and more recently an Apple TV, the former of which was a rather poor investment (although it performs quite well as a basic upsampling DVD player). My current home setup consists of the following. In terms of speakers, I’ve never been big on home theatre, and have always tried to have my system focus more ...

They just had their first boy. Congratulations! ...

Right now, in Las Vegas, is the huge Blog World Expo. Most of the Vancouver tech-scene is down there, including Rebecca, & Arieanna and Ianiv. Last night I decided to head down this morning and join them until Monday morning, since it looked like they were having such a great time. I actually found a pretty decent flight special late last night, and I booked it for this morning. Unfortunately, when 5am rolled around and I had to get up for the airport this morning, I didn’t really feel all that well. Plus, doing six hours worth of plane travel seemed less fun than it did the night before. ...

On Tuesday night I had the privilege of attending a private party at the Molson brewery put on by Molson. Molson decided to have a little get together with some of the local social media individuals and bloggers, and while pounding back a few beers. The event was called Brew 2.0, and it took place down on Burrard Street at the big brewery. I’ve actually never been inside a brewery before, and it was a really cool experience. It’s amazing how many beers Canadians are consuming every minute, something you get a sense of as the machines pump out cans of Rickard’s Red and Molson Canadian. I ...

I haven’t written on here in a few days now. That’s a long stretch for me. Truth is, I’m just kind of busy and a bit bagged. I haven’t been sleeping all that well lately, and feel like I’m a walking zombie. I was feeling pretty nauseous all yesterday, and didn’t really eat that much. I hardly slept at all last night and woke up feeling like I was going to throw-up, so I decided to work from home today and try to save what’s left of my body here. I decided a few weeks ago that I’m taking this weekend off. I don’t know what I’m going to end up doing, but I’m really hoping it ...

I ended up doing a bunch of work on Saturday night, and just hung out close to home. A quick twitter by me saying I was going to have a few casual drinks at my place led to Dave showing up for a few beers. After that, we went down to the Six Acres to meet up with Trevor, and then ultimately over to Matt’s house for a few quick drinks. When I got home that night, I realized just how tired I was. I passed out on the couch around 4am, and quite literally woke up sometime around 5pm last night. I got up here and there to answer my phone and check email, but I just couldn’t force my body to wake ...

I do tons of flying compared to most people. The last few years haven’t been as busy as normal, but for a while there I was getting on a plane on average of about once a month to go somewhere with work. I chronicled some of my trips over the last few years here. One of the things I’ve always sort of snickered about on planes is the need to still blatantly point out that smoking is not allowed on a plane. I always thought it was fairly self-evident that one shouldn’t light anything while sitting on top of several thousand pounds of kerosene, but apparently I was wrong. It turns out some idiot ...

I read this article a few minutes ago about a certain company in Silicon Valley that is sending a few people’s DNA into space. It’s called Operation Immortality, and it’s meant to preserve the DNA of the best and the brightest (and seriously, please turn the sound off on your website — there’s nothing worse than navigating the web and having something chirp in your ear randomly when you hit a page). Who have they chosen to represent mankind? Well here’s the short list so far: Kevin Rose, creator of the social-bookmarking website Digg Robert Scoble, one of the world’s most popular ...

I woke up to an email inviting me to a big Molson event down at the Burrard Street Brewery next week. It’s an event geared towards some of Vancouver’s web 2.0 saavy people and bloggers that involves sampling various beers as well as a special blogger brew that they have cooking up just for us. It actually sounds like a ton of fun. Given that I can demolish a few beers without much effort, I think I’ll definitely swing by and check it out. A few other of the night’s attractions will be: Kerry Scarsbrook & Gord Rickards, creator of Rickard’s Red, will be in attendance. Molson Brewery ...

Time comes, time goes. Yesterday was June, and today’s September. No fierce battles, only casualties. Last night I picked up a nice steak and threw it on the BBQ. Half way through cooking I ran out of propane. First time in two years that’s happened. I guess change is floating in the air these days, little wisps of something else to do, somewhere else to be. The leaves will fall soon, and then the rain, and then the snow. Turn a few more weathered pages in the book and it’ll be June again. Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s cold in here – grab the axe and help chop down another few years for ...

I read the headline for an article today that said a gene has been identified that increases someone’s chance to living to 100 years old by 300%. Without even reading the article or having any idea of the content, I already knew that the gene would somehow be involved with insulin signaling. It turns out, I was 100% correct – you can read about it. I spend every Sunday night reading the latest and greatest in medical research. And while 99% of medical research is redundant and not worth reading, the other 1% is rather fascinating, especially when you have enough pieces to put the larger puzzle ...