Not much new to report. Work is going fairly well, and I’ve met most of our Ontario company now. Derek and I hit “downtown” Kanata and hit a few local establishments tonight, which was actually a lot of fun. I have two more days here, and then I get on a plane and head to Toronto for Matt’s concert. I’m actually getting pretty excited about the whole ordeal. I talked with Tony briefly tonight and he’s in the same hotel as me, which is cool. The next time I probably blog will be in Toronto, a few hours before the pre-show meet-up. ...

I finally got a hold of my doctor back in Vancouver today to try to figure out what’s wrong with me and what I can do about it. It turns out that I have a fairly serious infection caused by a bacteria called “clostridium difficile.” C. Difficile sometimes lives in the intestines and is normally kept in check by a range of good bacteria that also live there. Unfortunately, as a result of the antibiotic treament I had in the hospital (which was clindamycin I believe), a large portion of the good bacteria have died off, leaving a pile of bad stuff to proliferate: Clostridium Difficile Infection ...

The plane ride was fairly uneventful. I haven’t flown West Jet for a while, but thankfully everyone on board still had a great sense of humour, and the flight was nice and smooth. I was pretty happy to see that new Harry Potter on the in flight entertainment, since I haven’t had time to see it and I had really wanted to. On West Jet, you have to pay if you want to watch a movie, but I figure I can kill a paperback in about 4 hours or so, so paying $5 to watch a movie isn’t that bad a deal. The rest of the time I spent messing around with my new iPod, and I have to say, that thing is really ...

Last night I met up with John and Rebecca to watch the hockey game down at Fogg ‘n Suds. I’m not super familiar with the Canucks line anymore, so being around super hockey Canucks people is a bit intimidating. That being said, I did manage watch some of the game and to lose myself for a time in the high-ball fishbowls that they were serving there. John and me, hanging out at John and Rebecca’s house – not sure why we put hats on I’m smack in the middle of packing for my trip, trying to figure out what to bring and what not to bring. As the first leg of the trip is work-related, I ...

This should be my last Apple post for a while, but I thought this was newsworthy. Photo from here A friend sent me an email this morning which basically talks about Vancouver being chosen for a new Apple store. After years of speculation and anticipation, there is finally confirmation that that an Apple store will occupy a space inside the Pacific Centre Mall in downtown Vancouver (BC). The three-block indoor mall has been undergoing a long-term and extensive renovation that included demolition, construction and the juggling and moving of several retailers, along with the addition of new stores. ...

A few weeks ago I went down to the Bell Mobility store and asked how much longer I was shackled to their service. Unfortunately, it’s on the order of two more years, which means I really can’t get a iPhone and switch to Rogers (although, I’m still not sure that’s a great option either). So tonight, while talking to Jason, he was telling me about his recent iPod Touch purchase. It’s basically the same as the iPhone, except it doesn’t have a camera or obviously a phone. But the user-interface is roughly the same, and it has Wi-Fi, so you can surf the web wherever you are. The first ...

Warning — you’re probably gonna hear far too much information in this post, but I need to vent a bit. Ever since being discharged from the hospital, I’ve had some pretty bad digestive problems. It started with just your run of the mill diarrhea, but has slowly gotten worse over the last month. Lately I’ve been waking up a bit crampy, and have to hit the bathroom fairly often during the day right now. I spent the other evening searching on the internet, and finally pinned it down to antibiotic associated diarrhea, due mainly to the IV and oral antibiotics I had while fighting pneumonia: Antibiotic-associated ...

Well, tonight I completed the update procedure, which went off with out a hitch. I’m currently back to 10.4.8, and so far so good. I’m not sure if I’ll upgrade to 10.4.10, or wait for Leopard to come out next week and grab that. We’ll see. I also spent a bit of time talking to the Lacie drive support guys today. They basically said the drive was hooped and to take it back to Future Shop. So tonight, I went down, returned the Lacie drive, but instead of getting the same one, grabbed an LG drive (which said it didn’t support Mac). I figured it was more money, and I had all the system software ...

One of the pieces of technology I’ve always thought was pretty cool was the new Lightscribe CD burners out there on the market. Prior to Lightscribe technology, the best a home user could really do was to be an ink-jet printer, print out a CD label, and then mess with putting it on in the right place. Some companies tried to make blank CDs with actual, printable surfaces, but those didn’t really work. But somewhere, after a few beers, some genius came up with the great idea of simply etching the label on the CD using the laser built into the CD burner. And thus, Lightscribe was created. A ...

Some guy on eBay bought that broken lens off me a few weeks ago. They paid promptly and everything seemed fine, so I boxed up the lens in the original box and shipped it to California. I got an email today saying that they guy went and picked it up from the post office, only to find the box empty. So, somewhere along the way, somebody decided to help themselves. Of course, since the lens was broken, I didn’t add any extra insurance to it. That being said, I think there’s at least $100 included by default. But now I have the hassle of trying to sort all this out and will probably have to refund ...

This is my mac. He’s pretty fun, kind of shinny, not too heavy, and he can nearly last a whole DVD without dying. But when he sleeps, he sometimes doesn’t wake up. When I iPhoto him too hard, sometimes he rebels and he goes to sleep instead. When I photoshop, sometimes he chugs away doing something else, almost like “don’t worry, I’ll get to that eventually.” I put more ram in Mac, hoping to make him happier, but he’s still sad. When he crashes, he does it slowly to rub it in, slowly fading the screen from top to bottom until he’s gone. He used to do this once a month, but ...

Slight change of plans. I was originally going to go to Toronto on the 26th, but I’m going to go to Ottawa the week before for work. So, I’ll be bouncing into Toronto on the 26th, but instead of coming from Vancouver, I’ll be coming in on a flight from Ottawa. That will put me into Toronto several hours earlier, which should take a bit of pressure off with having to get downtown from the airport. I’ll be staying out in Kanata in a really great hotel called The Brookstreet Hotel, which just happens to be owned by Terry Matthews (whose company recently merged with ours). Apparently Terry ...

Today I made the long trek to work, but instead of having my head down with my iPod firmly attached, I decided (mainly because my iPod was dead) to keep my head up and look around. Being a single guy, my gaze routinely fell on cute girls and, to my complete disappointment, nearly all of them had a cigarette firmly attached between their fingers. Photo by Liz Kasameyer on Flickr Now for some reason, I always thought Vancouver was a fairly healthy city. When I moved away in 2000, I don’t think a single person I knew smoked. And now, coming back, everywhere I look there are people who are puffing ...

I had a meeting with my plastic surgeon today to talk about the last surgery I had. It’s been a little over five months now, so in terms of results, everything should be stable. In my opinion, the position of my eye, while better, is still not perfect. In addition, I still have double vision in the top-left version of my visual field. My plastic surgeon did a few simple tests on me, mainly involving looking at my eye and tracking its movement using a finger. At least to my surgeon, the results are acceptable and do not warrant another surgery. For now, I have a few referrals to some eye doctors ...

One of the main advantages of digital photography over film photography, at least in my mind, is the ability to view the histogram shortly after taking the shot. While viewing the image on the LCD is obviously an advantage as well, it’s difficult to tell if the shot actually turned out based on a small image on a 2-3″ LCD. An example histogram from Luminous Landscape A histogram shows you how many pixels in the image (shown on the vertical axis) are at each intensity level (0-255 typically, shown on the horizontal axis). If the histogram is bunched to the left, that typically means the image ...

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, the other day I had a chance to photography my first wedding. All in all, it was a pretty rewarding experience. The day started at around 11am for me and Hesty. We suited up, did some last minute charging of equipment, and then got in touch with the groom. Normally the photographer heads over to the where the bride is getting ready for some photos, but Kim’s aunt wanted to do those ones, so I was relieved of that duty. We met Mike and the groomsmen down at the Holiday Inn in Langley to get ready. In true Chilliwack style, Mike, instead of hopping in the ...

Last night I had the chance to photograph the wedding of two of my old friends. It was a great experience, and I’m fairly satisfied with how the photos turned out, considering how dark it was both outside and inside the reception area. I’ll do a full write-up on everything I learned about shooting a wedding, but right now I have a turkey to eat. I shot over 1000 shots at the wedding, and I’ve slowly been sorting them. I put about 150 or so of them on Flickr if anyone is interested. There are still more I have to process and put together, but there’s enough that it’s fairly good representation ...

I’m in a hotel in Langley, and I’ve started to sort the photos from tonight. Having been to the location and having spent some time with old friends, I’m feeling a lot better about tomorrow. Danika, the flower girl I’m really glad I got a chance to try out a bunch of photos in a real setting, because I made a few mistakes that I likely won’t make tomorrow. I’m gonna keep this short, because I still have lots to do. Next blog entry will probably be Sunday after everything is over. ...

I nearly went into work today, but still felt a bit under the weather this morning and decided to rest a bit more. So tomorrow, I’m going to head into work and see if I can pull off a full day. I tried to go to the clinic tonight for a check-up, but there was over a two hour wait, so I’m going to try again in the morning on my way to work. Also, this weekend I’ll be attending Mike and Kim’s wedding as the primary photographer, which is both exciting and a bit stressful. It’s not hard to grab a camera and take a bunch of photos, but it is hard to be prepared, both technically and mentally, ...

About six months ago I released the Crossroads wordpress plugin. I haven’t really kept up to date with the usage statistics for it, but today I stumbled upon them. There are currently 370 authenticated users, generating around 20,000 API calls a day to Flickr. Not bad. ...