You know, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. I really have no idea where I’m going to end up career wise, but one of the things I’ve thought about in the last few years is becoming a real-estate agent. Sure, it’s not something I’d probably enjoy, but I think I could handle the truck loads of money. It’s not something I’ll probably ever do (as I have my own plans), but there’s something to be said for a job outside of the technology sector where you can set your own hours and fill your bank account up with rich people’s cash. I mean, let’s be honest – how hard is it ...

I’ve been toying with this rather amazing idea for the last few years. I’m going to toss this out there, because I’m rather fond of it. The Vancouver technology scene is rather impressive. Almost every week there’s a really awesome event taking place that brings together some great minds. I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned from my peers in the last few years. Given that we all take time out to get together and discuss technology, I always thought it would be fun to all go somewhere all together. Sort of like a less formal SxSW, but with more of an unconference component. So here’s ...

Also, if you still want to be eligible to win a Nintendo Wii, head on over and fill out the survey. I haven’t been very quiet about my recent reservations about Google. I really don’t think they really have any amazing products any more, and are heading in a downward spiral. People used to brag about Google’s flat corporate structure as a huge bonus, and at first it seemed really appealing. But after recently visiting the company’s main location in MountainView, and talking to a few people, I’m more of the opinion that it’s hurt them more than it’s helped them. In fact, I think part ...

I feel like writing a blog entry right now about as much as I feel like putting a spinning drill-bit into my temple. But I really wanted to jot down some of my thoughts from today before I passed out. There’s a group of seven of us down in Mountain View right now. The purpose of this trip is to try and hash out a complete peer-to-peer communications protocol based on open-standards. When it’s complete, it will essentially be an open source framework that will allow functionality similar to Skype, including encryption between nodes, even in an adhoc configuration. This trip marks the first ...

My mom used to always say that somethings in life seem to happen for a reason. Surprisingly, she’s been right most of my life, and the strangest things sometimes happen to me that end up pushing me down a path that turns out to be a good one. While camping this weekend, my Samsung A880 phone went into a spiral of death, and started complaining about not being able to find service. I figured that I maybe forgot to pay my bill or something stupid, and called up Bell Mobility yesterday. After spending two days on the phone with them, they are all of the opinion that my phone has just gone the way ...

Jay from Giant Ant Media just emailed me a few awesome YouTube videos they did with regards to Roger’s customer service. I thought I’d share them with everyone, because they’re a riot. Given the content of my last post, I think these are particularly relevant. Now, I’ve been a Bell Mobility customer for a long time, and I can honestly say that they’re not very good either. I suspect the grass is always greener, but I’m fairly certain most wireless users in Canada would agree that we need some new blood in the market to help keep the current breed of wireless providers honest and competitive. ...

if (is_single()) { ? } ?I missed the boat on the first round of Canadian iPhone action last year mainly because I was (quite stupidly) locked into a crazy Bell Mobility contract. The current consensus of the rumour mill is that Apple is gearing up to announce the 3G version of the iPhone on June 9th, which would hopefully put that model into Canadian stores sometime in the near future. I have been patiently awaiting it’s arrival so I can call up Bell and tell them where they can shove my phone and my crappy contract. The only problem is that Roger’s has been completely silent on what type ...

I read an article this morning that made mention of QR codes, and to be honest, I had never heard of them before. After doing some research, it appears that QR codes are essentially two-dimensional bar-codes that are fairly popular in Japan. A user with a camera phone can simply point their phone at a QR code and, assuming it is QR code aware, will decode the symbol. QR codes can be used to encode URLs, phone numbers, text information, and SMS messages. So you can have an advertisement and simply put your URL as a QR code. A user passing by could simply hold their camera in front of the code, ...

I’ve been using Google Reader as my main RSS reader for some time. For the most part, I’m pretty happy with it. They’ve recently added the ability to share items, which makes it far more interesting. The one thing I’d love to see though is the ability to add local comments on those shared items, comments that only my friends could see. So many times I’ve read items in my friends’ shared feeds and really wanted to say something, or get clarification. Going to the real site and posting a comment sort of implies a certain level of knowledge on my part (especially if it’s a technical ...

Yesterday I read a really interesting article about the end of Windows as we know it. I can’t say that I disagree with that assessment at all. As many of you know, Windows Vista was basically my sole reason for moving to a Mac last year. I had installed it on my Toshiba notebook computer and it was the slowest piece of a garbage I had ever used — none of the drivers worked properly, and it crashed for no reason. The worse part was their “upgrade wizard” said my machine would be fine. Here’s a little video I took while installing it (looks like it’s up to 50,000 views on YouTube): The ...

Ok, I’m going to go into rant mode. Why is everyone so enamored with Google these days? I read yesterday about their recent Google App Engine, and didn’t really see anything that particularly turned my crank. I’ve been bouncing around the web today reading what people are saying, and for the most part, everyone is down in the People’s Temple drinking the Kool-Aid. I don’t think the App Engine is a bad idea, I just don’t really get why you’d even consider it, especially considering AWS is around and has a much more flexible offering. First, I’m going to start by saying that 99% ...

I went out tonight and bought a new digital camera, the Canon SD 870 IS. I did some basic research before hand and that was one of about three cameras I considered buying for this upcoming weekend. What sold me on it was that a guy at work recently picked it up and heaped a pile of praise on it. Also, it’s the only camera in it’s class that had image stabilization *and* a useful wideangle end (something most cameras lack of this size). This is, unfortunately, probably the 8th digital camera I’ve purchased in about as many years. Several of them had untimely deaths, and one was even the victim ...

I finally got around to finishing off a little project of mine at home. As everyone knows, I take a pile of photos. So many in fact that I have a hard time finding places to store them all. In the old days I would just make a DVD every few weeks and be done with it, but now that my digital camera is 10.2 MP, I can easily fill up a DVDs worth of photos in a few hours. Of course, I don’t need to keep all of these, and routinely I don’t. But for the ones I do want to keep it’s getting hard to manage them all. About six months ago I picked up a 320 GB external drive to use for backups and started ...

No real surprise here, but this article talks about the seemingly inevitable death of the newspaper. I don’t think I’ve picked one up in ages, and for the most part get most of my news from various news agencies on the web and from RSS feeds for peers. Some people argue that user-generated content is bound to be less reliable, but as most of you know, many of the huge news organizations are incredibly biased. Which is better, I’m not sure, but I’d rather trust my peers than some dolled up girl on TV reading off a teleprompter. ...

That’s it really. I no longer carry cash for the most part. My paycheck arrives in my bank account electronically. When I pay for things, I use my credit card, debit card, or paypal. My bills are paid via online banking, and except for a birthday card once a year, rarely use snail mail. I probably receive 5 pieces of mail a month, but receive around 100 emails a day, and currently have 13,050 messages in my gmail inbox. The fastest way to get a hold of me (even beating out phone calls) is actually via email these days. I ripped most of my CDs to my computer last year, and primarily listen to ...

I was walking around my apartment this evening, and came to the realization that I have a ton of computer equipment. So much in fact that some of it is piled is various corners of my place. Here’s a small list of what I have sitting around: 1) iMac Core2-Duo 2.0 GHz Desktop 2) Macbook Pro Core2-Duo 1.8 GHz Laptop 3) Intel based 1.6 GHz mini-server running debian linux 4) Quad Core 2.4 GHz Centos-based mini-server with 1 TB raid 5 storage (I use this for storing photos and other things I don’t want to lose) 5) External 350 GB USB 2.0 drive, used for time machine backups 6) Apple TV 7) External ...

This morning I went to use my internet and was redirected to a page that indicated I had exceeded my bandwidth for the month. Granted, with my recent purchase of Apple TV, I have been using more bandwidth. But as far as I’m concerned it’s not anything crazy (the odd TV show), and it’s strange to me that I hit my limit. I upgraded to the next plan up which is a small SoHo package for now. The part that concerns me is that my upstream bandwidth was larger than my downstream, which makes no sense at all based on the things I do with my computer. My NAT is locked down, so it’s basically impossible ...

Last night I went over to John Biehler’s house to sit around, drink diet pepsi max, and to watch a movie. We ended up renting Michael Clayton, which is a really good movie if you are looking for something to watch. John gave me a pretty exhaustive tour of the Apple TV (which they recently updated to version 2.0 of the firmware), and I have to say, had London Drugs still been open when I left his place, I would have rushed over to pick one up on my way home last night. No matter. After bouncing between Best Buy, Future Shop, and London Drugs today I am now the proud owner of an Apple TV. For ...

I guess this makes complete sense, given what I know about physics. Blue lasers were actually extremely difficult to make, and they didn’t emerge until nearly a decade after red-lasers hit the market. Since the wavelength of light is inversely proportional to the energy of the photons, making blue light (which has a low wavelength) takes a lot of energy. In fact, most of the original blue lasers wouldn’t last very long because they basically burned themselves out. Also, as Hesty pointed out, the computation requirements for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are far greater than MPEG2. Slashdot is reporting ...

This morning I had the pleasure of swinging by MacStation in Yaletown on my way to work and picking up a brand new MacPro computer for work. I could sit here and quote technical specs until the cows came home, but I’ll just say that this sucker completely rocks. It basically has two of everything: Two CPUs, each of which has four 2.8 GHz cores A dual-head video card capable of doing 1080p video on each port Two network cards, so in theory you could put one on a private network and one on a public one I’ve spent the last year sort of bouncing between multiple machines. In fact, looking back ...