As some of you know, last year I went from having my blog hosted on GoDaddy to using shared hosting services over at HostMonster (and before that, I went from having a Linux box on the floor of my bedroom to GoDaddy). Shared hosting is a fairly cheap way to set up a website, and you can usually get away with it for less than $10/mo. For the most part, I was pretty happy with HostMonster shared hosting, although in these last few months their databases kept falling over, and I had intermittent connection problems. To their credit though, they always answered the phone and fixed everything in a ...

I went through my google analytics this morning for a few minutes. The one thing that surprised me was those of you who somehow get to my site by typing “duanestorey.com” into a google search. If you are part of the 219 people who did that last month, here’s a little tip for you. Up top in your browser is a little white thing we like to call the “Address Bar”. You can simply go up there and type in either “duanestorey.com” or “www.duanestorey.com” into it and press enter, which should immediately take you to my website. You’re more than welcome to use the not-so-standard “Google ...

Since I’m knee deep with reworking this big bitch, I’ve updated some of the content as well. Check out the new About Page, as well as a brand new Projects Page. ...

Lately at work I’ve been doing a few statecharts for things, so I thought I would repost the one I made last year that I did while completely bored last year. There’s a cool program (“cool” being an extremely relative notion in this instance) you can get called graphviz that can create these things fairly quickly. “Happy Times” State Transition Chart I had a cool idea for a contest too I’m gonna blog about and get some participation in. ...

I’m pretty beat, having spent a good portion of the day traveling again. The flight from Montreal to Vancouver, with the strong head winds, was almost six hours long – thankfully it was extremely bearable up in business class, thanks to my hot towel and my tasty meals. Despite all the perks associated with business class (and there are many), I think the main one I enjoyed is that the flight attendants and people you encounter all automatically treat you with respect. If you have a problem, they’ll help you solve it. If you don’t like your seat, they’ll help you move. Worried about your ...

I took a quick break this afternoon from work and decided to hash out a quick WordPress plugin that would push my blog entries into my Twitter feed. The end result is WordTwit, and it’s available for download if anyone wants to try it on their WordPress blog. Drop me a comment or two and let me know what you think. ...

As everyone who hits my blog these days knows, I really like taking photos. My passion for photography started about seven years ago, and is still going strong today. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to afford a really nice camera and a full suite of lenses, and while I sort of understand what’s needed to take “good” photos, my camera really does the majority of the heavy lifting. My friends routinely use my photos in blog posts (which I really appreciate), but every once and a while I do a quick search via Technorati to see who else is using my photos. Tonight, that search led me ...

As you can see, things look a little different around here after tonight. I got tired of looking at my old theme about two days after I put it up, but just didn’t feel like doing anything about it. So tonight while watching Million Dollar Baby, I decided to take a stab and making it a bit different. It’s nothing fancy — all I did is start with the default WordPress theme and add a few things here and there. The main header is a HDR sunrise I did off my patio about a month ago. Gravatars are broken right now, but since Keira and I seem to be the only ones using them, it’s not really any ...

I don’t really have much to say, but I thought I’d write one last entry before my big surgery day. I spent most of the weekend putting in some hours for work, since I had a few meetings last week that took up too much time. Except for the party down at Bryght on Friday night, I didn’t really accomplish too much. Well, that’s not entirely true — today I went into my room and finally sat down to do my taxes.. I think I’m technically a few weeks late, but since I don’t owe any money, I don’t think anybody will kick up a big fuss (in fact, those sneaky bastards owe me $1100). About ...

Even though I spent quite a bit of time working on my last theme, I’ve grown rather tired of it. So, after checking out some themes on the net tonight, I found this one which I rather like. I think I’m going to modify it a bit and put up a new version for people to download. ...

If you accessed my website at all today, you would witnessed one of the slowest websites to ever grace the series of tubes that we call the internet. I spent about two hours on the phone today with web hosting company GoDaddy.com trying to convince them that it was their problem. Unfortunately, even after escalating it multiple times, they still told me it was my fault. So about an hour ago I decided that I had had enough of GoDaddy. I cancelled my hosting, acquired new hosting via HostMonster, and managed to change my DNS and completely set up my blog from scratch in a little under an hour. Unfortunately ...

I was going through some old things tonight, and I came across a few tokens of my past that sort of reminded me how I first got into computers a long time ago. It all started back in Chilliwack, years ago, when my dad got picked up a Commodore 64. That was the first “real” computer that we had access to, and we both got into gaming. Chilliwack was pretty ahead of the curve, and they even opened up their own computer club that my dad and I dropped in on from time to time (oh yeah, we were cool). Not long after, I got my own C64, complete with the “fastload” cartridge, bringing game loading ...