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 MP3s ...
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 those ...
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 that ...
Given that I've been with my current company for the last four years, I haven't really had to think about salaries for quite some time. That being said, I'm actually curious how Vancouver is doing in terms of salaries in the high-tech department. I know it's fairly easy to acquire a +100k job in the Bay Area, and in New York you can easily approach 200k in some fields (Math+Programming in the stock market for example). By talking to various people over the last few months, I gather there's a pretty big spread amongst most companies in this city.
I've thrown together a few quick and dirty poll ...
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 over ...
It's here, Northern Voice 2008. Tonight is the big social down at the Tiki Lounge in East Vancouver. I'll be heading down with Rebecca, John, and Keira for some drinks and a full roast-pig. I still haven't figured out what I'm going to say at PhotoCamp, but I'll spend some time thinking about it during the day and see what I can come up with.
Photo by Gary on Flickr
Every camera in my house is currently dead, so I'm frantically bouncing between doing laundry and charging equipment. I went to the mall to pick out some new clothes tonight, but turns out I'm just way too picky. I've decided that ...
So a friend of mine pinged me online the other day and told me he had been laid off from a local company. I didn't ask too many details because I was a bit busy at the time, but since then a larger picture has emerged.
Apparently the local company decided to pack up and head south of the border. And while a lot of permanent employees were laid off, they also slaughtered the co-op students as well. As someone who used to be involved in the co-op program, I can tell you that this is a pretty low blow. These students have precisely four months to earn enough money to get them through another full ...
Toshiba just withdrew their support, which basically means it's completely empty over in the HD-DVD camp right now. Remind me never to be an early adopter again.
So, stay tuned for the HD-DVD burning party at a campground near Chilliwack. ...
Yes, I think it's true. HD-DVD, my friends, is dead, or at least in the last of its death throes. Being an early adopter, I went out a few months ago and picked up a HD-DVD player, thinking that at the bare minimum both formats would exist for a year or more. It turns out my timing was rather poor.
A few of the major studios moved from HD-DVD to BluRay last month, and the move was so dramatic that the HD-DVD guys cancelled their talks at the CES show in Vegas (which actually probably did the most harm to their effort). Reuter's is reporting that HD-DVD is basically dead, and a leak from WalMart ...
I've decided to head back home for the weekend. I haven't been back to Chilliwack since Christmas time, so I figure I'm long overdue. A whole whack of conferences start soon, and I'm going to by fairly swamped up until mid April. So, I'm going to grab a book and curl up on the couch back home this weekend to relax a bit.
Also, for those of you that have been patiently waiting for more information about what was previously called "Startup Weekend Vancouver" or "Beer Camp" -- the wait is nearly over. Stand by for the unveiling of the website along with more information. ...
DemoCamp Vancouver is officially starting right now. Rebecca Bollwitt, aka miss604, will be doing live coverage of the event.
You can check it out by clicking here. ...
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/This_is_why_the_world_hates_Microsoft';
So tonight (after a bit of wine) I decided to blow my hotmail account away completely and never look back. Unfortunately, as soon as I tried the circus music started playing and the adventure truly began.
Step 1, tell hotmail to go fuck itself. This involves telling hotmail to close down my account. While fucking itself.
Oh no! Danger Wil Robinson! Cannot close down your account. Apparently there's some Microsoft mail thing associated with my account, and I have to close that down first. Not a prob. I'll gladly fuck over ...
Image from PBase.com
That, my friends, is Canon's biggest lens, the Canon EF 1200mm f/5.6L. For obvious reasons, they only make a handful of these every year. The cost? Approximately $10,000 $100,000 if I remember correctly. ...
This guy just did a huge Apple comparison with the new Air notebook computer, both with and without the solid state add-on drive. The verdict? The Air in general is slower than both the Macbook Pro and the Macbook, and the battery life is only average.
Photo by John Biehler
The writer was optimistic that the solid state drive would be a good investment. Unfortunately though, it provided rather lackluster performance, and hardly increased battery life at all. I've had my own Macbook Pro for a long time, and most of my friends have Macbook's. I'm purposefully holding off the Air because it looks ...
I love Digg. I surf it at least a couple times a day, usually when I'm bored, sitting a work waiting for something to compile. I would say that without a doubt the majority of my "cool" news actually comes from Digg.
Lately I've begun submitting the odd story on my own to Digg. No matter how many times I try to submit something though, I always seem to get stuck on the same old problem -- what category does the story fit in? The main problem I think is that Digg categories are more mainstream news oriented and less about the things I actually am interested in (even though I think most ...
I love Digg. I surf it at least a couple times a day, usually when I'm bored, sitting a work waiting for something to compile. I would say that without a doubt the majority of my "cool" news actually comes from Digg.
Lately I've begun submitting the odd story on my own to Digg. No matter how many times I try to submit something though, I always seem to get stuck on the same old problem -- what category does the story fit in? The main problem I think is that Digg categories are more mainstream news oriented and less about the things I actually am interested in (even though I think most ...