I was out at Waves Coffee until around 2:10am last night, which was an interesting experience unto itself. The first question I have is for all you ladies — how come the majority of you are dating dipshits? Pretty much every girl that walked in last night had some idiot guy attached to her. This one in particular reminded me of the typical drug dealer back home — you know, with the fancy phone, crooked hat, tons of jewelry, and an attitude that just wouldn’t quit. The guy had his girlfriend running errands in the coffeeshop for him while he sat and tried to degrade her verbally. Even after ...

WordPress 2.5.1 came out today. WordPress 2.5 was actually a bit buggy (IMO), so I’m happy to incorporate this new release. I was for some reason still running a 2.6 beta version, and now I’m officially back on the stable line. If you’re a WordPress user, you might want to download it and install it — apparently it has a few rather important security releases. ...

After originally being denied access to see the specialist, St. Paul’s contacted me the other day and said they could fit me in this morning. So I went down to the hospital and went over my last test results and had a chance to talk to the doctor. The good news is that my test came back c. diff negative, and although that’s not a fail safe test, it’s at least partially good news. Based on my symptoms and my tests, the specialist is fairly certain that I’ve developed either irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) or lactose intolerance, both of which can temporarily arise after fighting a gastro-intestinal ...

I accidentally stumbled onto my own feed in Google reader today and noticed some photos I actually didn’t take. For whatever reasons, it seems like feed burner is not filtering the content based on my user account at Flickr, but instead is including public photos tagged “feedburner”, something it never used to do. I checked my settings, and it’s definitely setup to only include photos from my stream, so the problem seems to be on their end. I tried finding a contact email on their site, but all they do is push you to the support forums (I hate this practice by companies nowadays — support ...

I found a bunch more videos from the Junos. After the Gala on the Saturday night, a few of us headed to some after party. Here’s a shot from the Jam Room upstairs in the VIP room. ...

Here comes another rant: As most of you know, back in November I was in the hospital with pneumonia. While there, I picked up a hospital acquired infection known as c. diff. It’s unfortunately rather common these days mainly due to the lack of cleanliness in hospitals (and also due to the abuse of broad-spectrum anti-biotics in hospitals). But without a doubt, it’s a serious infection, and is responsible for many deaths. The superbug the media focuses on is MRSA, but in terms of fatalities, c. diff kills about twice as many people. Just last month it claimed the life of a mother who went to ...

Ever since I upgraded to Leopard a few months ago, I’ve been plagued with disk space issues on my Macbook Pro. Normally, when shooting photographs, you use your hard drive as permanent storage and your compact flash cards as temporary storage. I had so little space on my hard drive during the Junos though that I was forced to reverse the two, and was literally using extra CF cards to make up the hard drive difference. Today I sat down to see if I could figure out where it all went. The key application I used was Disk Inventory X, a great little tool that graphically displays where all your space ...

This was on Thursday night. Good times. ...

Yes, today I briefly debated getting out of my bed at around nine, but decided sleeping in until noon was a better idea. I’ve had this recurring dream for the last few years that always feels so real. In it, someone (usually my friend Jeff) tells me about some university exam that I’m late for. Of course, everyone is completely prepared for the exam except for me. So I get to the exam and struggle for a good portion of my dream trying to come up with answers I don’t have. For whatever reason, that one always seems real to me. When I wake up, I sometimes almost want to make a call to the ...

I’ve been taking it fairly easy this week, spending a lot of time at home (when not at work) resting up. I’ve been on anti-biotics for a few days now, and while my bronchitis is subsiding, my stomach has been bothering me. Not sure if that’s related to the infection I acquired last fall, or if it’s just the anti-biotics upsetting my stomach — I guess I’ll know for sure when I stop taking them. There are a few things going on this weekend, but to be honest, I think I’m going to bail on everything and just rest. I think I might go get groceries tomorrow morning and then spend the rest ...

For those of you who actually come to my site from time to time, you’ll have undoubtedly noticed my little counter in the right corner of the sidebar. What that tracks is how long my website has been active in the corner of my living room. If you’re on a paid hosting account, fire me off an email whenever your server goes down so I can keep track against how mine’s doing. So far I’m at 17 days straight without any downtime. If you check out Media Temple’s status blog, you can see that they’ve had 50 minutes of outage during the last three days. Based on their own blog entries, they ...

Last week both Rebecca and I got contacted by General Motors asking if we wanted to take part in GM’s Catch The Vibe event. It’s basically a huge multi-day adventure race, where we would have, as teams of four, gotten to test drive the new 2009 Vibe, live-blog using new Blackberry’s, and drive all over the city looking for clues and what-not. Included with the festivities was a free night at the Opus Hotel in Yaletown. Unfortunately both her and I have day-jobs, and we just couldn’t manage the time during the day. It looks like a really fun event, and it would have been cool to take part ...

Today marked the launch of Strutta, a local company that has been working hard to create a unique gaming experience. I had the opportunity to check out their product about six weeks ago and play with an early alpha. I think these guys have some great things in store for them, so make sure you head on over and check them out. So on behalf of everyone here at duanestorey.com (yah I know, it’s only me), I want to congratulate Maura, Danny, Alexa, Jordan, Lyal, and the rest of the Strutta team, on their accomplishments. Best of luck guys. ...

Tomorrow marks the first event for the Vancouver Fashion Week, 2008 Spring Edition. I had a media pass last year and spent a few evenings taking photos. If I remember correctly, the only downside to the event (in my opinion) was that I thought most of the models lacked enthusiasm. I also remember wishing I had brought a flash to the opening event, so if anyone is going, I’d recommend bringing one. While I love photography, it’s fairly dull sitting at the end of a runway for an hour taking the same shot over and over again, and I really appreciated the models that mixed it up a bit or added ...

A few days ago I started getting a soreness in my throat and lungs that has since progressed into what I figured was bronchitis. I hit the medical clinic in Yaletown tonight and got a full check-up, and sure enough, it’s what I thought it was. They’ve prescribed Zithromax, which should hopefully have me feeling a lot better in a day or two. After filling my prescription on Pacific, I decided to check out a new coffee shop that opened up there. The coffee shop is Waves Coffee, and it’s a quaint little spot right on the West Side of Yaletown. It reminded me a lot of the coffee shops I used ...

I was just lying on my bed, opening some mail from the last few months that I haven’t gotten around to opening. I thought since I have an appointment for taxes coming up that I should get all my receipts and everything in order. In one envelope, I find this letter, apparently involving some parking violation I had around Christmas: THIS IS TO COMMAND YOU IN HER MAJESTY’S NAME TO APPEAR BEFORE A JUSTICE ON APRIL 14, 2008 In case you’re not following the date, that was yesterday, and I obviously didn’t show. The next part is the worrisome piece of information: FAILURE TO ANSWER A SUMMONS ...

One of the strange things I find about getting older is the fact that I no longer enjoy the same things I used to. Board games are a good example — I just plain don’t like them these days. I don’t mind sitting around a camp fire and playing asshole for eight hours, but I can’t be bothered with something like monopoly. Another strange change is that I don’t really enjoy drinking or bars that much these days. I had a fairly crazy university life, and somehow (despite being in a dormitory filled with nerds and scholarship recipients) ended up on a floor full of people that liked to party ...

For those that are interested, I finally found an account downtown that I think is willing to do my taxes. I’ve typically always done them myself, except for one year when I had a bunch of stock and moving expenses I wasn’t sure how to deal with. I have income from multiple sources this year (thanks to photography and the odd web job), which should mean (in theory) that I’m eligible to write off some of my photography and computer expenses. Unfortunately, I’m not the most organized person in the world, and I somehow have to track down all my tax stuff from last year, along with everything ...

I received an email a while ago from an editor at Wikipedia, asking me if I would mind if they using one of my juno photos on a page. The only catch is that they wanted me to change the license of the photo to allow for commercial use and derivative works. I’m a big fan of Wikipedia — I use it all the time. So I really wanted to help those guys out and let them use my photo. Since I paid for the entire Juno trip myself, I have a hard time actively letting other people make money from my work. As a compromise, I offered to grant Wikipedia a non-revokable license for use of that photo on their ...

I have, over the course of my career, given a pile of interviews. One of the trends I’ve seen a lot in recent years is people who feel the need to lie or exaggerate on their resumes. There’s nothing wrong with wording your experience in such a way to promote you a bit better, just so long as you don’t lie or stretch the truth to the point where it’s unbelievable. In fact, when I started in the realm of software development, I had basically zero real world experience in the area, and that was often looked as a complete detriment to me (even though I had been coding since I was about 15 ...