Older blog entries for Burgundavia (starting at number 189)

Today is that day of voting

Well, by the end of today, I will learn if I have been elected to municipal office or not. Wish me luck.

A time to vote...

As a Canadian, I watch usually every US election with a sense of dread, especially in the last few years. Today, I am filled with hope. If Obama does nothing else good as president (and I am going to assume we are not going to see a repeat of Dewey/Truman) and he will do many good things, he has already accomplished one thing: got young people out to volunteer and vote.

So please, if you are in the US, go and vote today. Don't let anyone stand in your way, be it registration or other dirty tricks.

Vote Obama.
Californians, vote No on Prop 8 and Yes on Prop 1A
Seattlites, vote Yes on Prop 1

And then I was crazy and decided to become a politician

Seems I have a burst of insanity and decided to enter politics. Specifically, I am running for municipal council in Oak Bay, one of the smaller cities that make up Greater Victoria*.

Why am I running? To promote bicycling, transit, a greener world and similar ideas. As such, I am running under the Green Party banner.

I won't bore the rest of you to tears with campaign stuff, so check out my campaign website at coreyburger.ca.

* Victoria, the city that most assume is one, is in fact 12 different fiefdoms, ranging from 5,000 to 105,000. Oak Bay is one of those. See Greater Victoria on Wikipedia.

Victoria mapping party redux

The OpenStreetMap crew met here in Victoria again tonight. We ended up short a few people, due to that evil thing known as work, so it was only Jason, Tobias and I. After just over two hours of driving and walking, pretty colours were made:

Tobias & Jason's tracks in purple and green, respectively and myself in yellow.

Tobias and Jason ended up walking around Cedar Hill Golf Course and all the little connecting trails to the roads, as well as driving east of Mt. Tolmie while I biked just south of Cedar Hill X Rd and also just south of McKenzie Avenue.

Sadly we just missed the planet dump day, when the default rendering gets redone, so we will have to wait another week to see our work there.

We didn't decide on the next date, due to lack of people attending, so the announcement of the next party will have to wait.

Victoria mapping party

The OpenStreetMap crew met here in Victoria tonight. We had a pretty good turn out. Aside from Sam and myself, who have been meeting for mapping fairly regularly now, we also had Tobias, Jason, Justine and Ryan. Of them, only Jason had any mapping experience and the weather didn't help:

Ironically, the weather report says it will clear tomorrow.

Regardless, we still went out mapping, Sam braving it on foot, Justine, Ryan & I in Ryan's car and Tobias & Jason in Jason's. After just over two hours of driving and walking, pretty colours were made:

Sam's tracks in blue, Tobias & Jason in orange and Justine, Ryan and I in yellow.

Better yet, we agreed on the next mapping party. We are meeting on August 13th at 6pm at Little Thai Place. We will be meeting for dinner, followed by some mapping, rain or shine. For the forgetful, the Victoria mapping party event on Upcoming.

Victoria OpenStreetMap mapping party

The various OSMers in Victoria are holding a mapping party this coming Thursday, the 17th, at 6pm at the Starbucks at 4077 Shelbourne St. (Map of the Starbucks)

The event is open to all. Even if you are only curious about OSM and don't want to map, please show up and ask questions. Those that want to map will spread out all across Gordon Head for the next two or so hours, collecting data as they go, before meeting back at a point of our choice, likely a pub, for a pint or two before heading home for the night.

If you do that Facebook thing, I have created an event. I finally bit the bullet a couple of weeks ago. Much easier to contact my fellow students this way.

29 Mar 2008 (updated 29 Mar 2008 at 04:25 UTC) »
J. Leslie Canty (1925-2008)

Rest in peace beloved grandfather. You will be missed.

Ask (the web) and ye shall receive

Jonathan, I agree that I should have filed the 1st bug. But why work when you can get the lazyweb to do it for you? In this case, Ryan Prior with LP bug 193578.

The 2nd point, about the freezing, I simply didn't have enough foo to determine where (and if) the bug existed. Lazyweb to the rescue again. Although I haven't tested it, Jeff Schroeder has told me it is likely due to a scheduler bug. Explanation, more, and yet more.

4 Mar 2008 (updated 4 Mar 2008 at 00:44 UTC) »
Laptop Stickers for Canada

For those of you that had been patiently waiting, I finally got a huge amount off on Sunday. I still have a few left to do, which I will finish this weekend if school doesn't get me.

Hardy is crap under heavy load

I have been having major issues with Hardy under heavy load. Here is what I am seeing:
1. Page loading and scrolling in Firefox 3 causes Rhythmbox to freeze playback (but not freeze Rhythmbox itself)
2. If free RAM is low and something RAM intensive loads, such as Evince or OpenOffice.org, the entire system will enter swap hell and never leave. Sometimes this will cause compiz to crash. But ironically, this state will not cause Rhythmbox to freeze playback.

This might just be a hardware problem on my laptop, now nearing 3 years old, so I am wondering if anybody else is seeing this. Please tell me about it if you are. I should note I have never seen this specific bug(s) with any prior version of Ubuntu and it is pretty much repeatable, at least on my machine. A possibly related issue was raised by Seb, mentioned under "Other Business" on this Desktop Meeting report.

A bucketful of awesome...

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