Older blog entries for cmacd (starting at number 41)

Useless info

I have just posted a new static web page on Electronic Tubes.

Perhaps I have gone over the edge

Humor me at this address and tell me if it is usefull to anyone.

The economy must be down

I was driving in to work today, listening to the Local radio and noticed that instead of the normal ads trying to hire ASIC designers, there was instead someone saying that you don't need to put up with depresion and anixety, and their concerned folks were waiting at 1-800-ANIXETY who would be glad to send you a free tape about someone's miracle program.

Esso gives folks gas pains

Long weekend coming, so gas is sudenly up to 78 cents CDN a litre. ($1.85US a US Gallon) it had gone back down to 68 cents 2 weeks ago.

Corel

I notice that Corel CEO Derik Burney now has a BMW in his laneway to go along with his big Ford SUV. I bet he would get back some creativity if he went back to driving his 73 Javelin. Perhaps when the salt gets washed off the roads.

Has anyone noticed that the new Corel Logo looks like a penguin when you hold it upside down?

Good Regulation

Looks like there will be a ban on smoking in Bars and such in the mega city. Perhaps I will be able to attend LUCK meetings again, the discusion was interesting, but the smoke in the bar where the meeting is held was too much for my system.

Regulation that might not work

The new city is going to start requiring that RAVES have a permit, security, and stop admiting folks under 16.

I can understand the concern, but wonder if that will be enough to push them even more underground than they have been, perhaps with unintended results.

I am an old f**t

I have bought myself an old CONAR tube tester. I get nostalgic sometimes for the times when Radio and TV was exciting technology. Back in the 1930's RCA was so much like Microsoft is now it is a fascinating comparison. (Employment of patents and licening to ensure that only RCA approved/compatible equipment was producted). Sure enough the new (made in the 1970's) unit does have settings for some of the old "computer triodes" and it looks like my two "Remington Rand" computer tubes are still good. (even if they probaly won't fit anything that is outside a collection.)

Strange Security advice

Seems that Alcatel makes a DSL modem with a security bug. Someone on the internet can change your settings remotely. Advice in the media is to put it behind a firewall. How does one put a firewall between a DSL line and a DSL modem? Am I missing something? Has a firewall become a magic token that solves all problems? Is this trying to tell me to stick with my old RACAL 28.8 modem?

Transportation

Had my car in for service. Brakes now work for the first time in a year. (they used to stop the car but with great effort, now they take a feather touch). Last shop to fix it must have put in real cheep parts. Shocked when the guy tells me that I had a bad motor mount, Car is now MUCH less noisy. Even let them do an oil change, first time I years I did'nt do it myself.

Tired

Strain at work is getting to me. On Wendsday morning rembered about my Tuesday night swim lesson. Guess its too late to go! I have got to get a job where I can work with/on software or documentation. My curent position is becoming more emotionaly draining, and I don't get satifaction from my work. I don't want to head for burnout. Weekends have been only a time for rest, not for projects in a while now.

BenFrantzDale:

Perhaps one reson for folks only sending the .PNG/.JPG is that bitmaps are much larger than the compiled format, and the PNG or JPG is a portable format, while the source may be an internal format of some sort of rendering program.

Perhaps it is just that the creator never thought of making the raw version avalable, or in fact may have purged the raw format to save disk space.

rupert's Song (Holding Out For An Inode)

That one is good.

E-Clueless

I have been including a form on my various web pages for a service called Mind IT The idea is that a user can fill in their e-mail and get a note when the page changes.

Over the weekend, I get a note that they are "transitioning" to a fee-for-service model, and so they are only going to service sites that have signed up and paid a yearly fee of 800 bucks US.

Now ajh and sad's company charges me something like 175 bucks US a year for both 75 hours a month dial-up access and my web pages, although I think I still get a early customer discount. I am not making any money from my web presence, in fact the two skating - pages help keep commercial traffic off of rec.skate . (I personaly have not been on skates for three years since I sold the skates that were hurting my feet.)

Anyway, I now have to remove the form, and explain WHY I have removed it, as well as warning anyone who is using it that it will croak on April fools day.

Does anyone have or know of a (free) notification service that I can use. Because of the low price I pay to have my pages up, I am not allowed any dynamic stuff on the site itself. It strikes me that the bigest part of the overhead of the service that netmind has is they insist on using their button from their server, presumably to track who is looking at the page. I would prefer to not have any unneeded graphics. I would guess that the service would take about half a day for a scriptwizard to write, with far less resource use than a maillist. (assuming that the sites are spidered once a day at the most.)

Personal

My wife has returned from her mom's furneral.

It is snowing again, another 10 cm. My 45 minute commute extended itself to near 2 hours. I GOTTA find a job in Kanata... I Hate Working Downtown.

There was a picture of a cute little dog that is up for adoption in the print edition of the Signal on the weekend. A five year old Border Collie mix with an unusual white tail. If we did not have our own border collie mix, I would be planning a trip to the pound - I am afraid that our dog would never understand having to share us with another dog.

jdybnis Might is suggest looking on your schools web site, and sending this fool a copy of the policy on Sharing work.

I am sure that your prof would like to know about this, I would sugest having an informal talk about it. The other person would likely get expelled at most schools if they actually submitted some elses work as their own, and you don't want to be seen as contributing to such an offence.

I am not sure what section you are in at UCLA, but I am sure that this section is typical:

Unless specifically authorized by a class instructor, all of the following uses of a computer are violations of the University's guidelines for academic honesty and are punishable as acts of plagiarism:

• copying a computer file that contains another student's assignment and submitting it as your own work
• copying a computer file that contains another student's assignment and using it as a model for your own assignment
• working together on an assignment, sharing computer files and programs involved, and subsequently submitting individual copies of the assignment as your own work
• knowingly allowing another student to copy or use one of your computer files and to submit that file, or a modification, as his or her individual work

I found that at http://www.seas.ucla.edu/userguide/chapter1/1.2.html

life

My mom in law passed away last week, and so my wife is out helping her father. Our poor dog is very confused as to why she only has me to take care of her.

It is amazing how much a sleep debit can start creeping up on you.

Bless alan Cox. According to the Register, he is making some noise Opposing the manufacture of copy-protected Disk Drives.

alan is also the one (by means of a brag in his current sig file) who managed to presuade me to check out Brain Bench. Unfortunatly, I managed to make a very high score in the field that I am very anxious to get out of.

All is not lost in that I did OK in the Tech Writing appitude test, as that is one place that I see I could posibly slip into. (Resume is at home.achilles.net/~cmacd/resume.html for any of you Ottawa/Kanata area high-tech types who would like to have a greybeard around.)

It is the time of the Yule, when surprisingly all the winter celibrations seem to have fallen almost at the same time this year. Hopefully that in itself will help reduce the amount of conflict in the world.

In any case, We have reached the wonderous time of the year when the days will now start to expand, and may you all enjoy the return of the light. I hope everyone here has a moment to pause and enjoy their family.

Skud and dyork welcome to the great white north.

Everyone who wants to see what real weather looks like can also use the webcam on the roof of Rebel.Com

Today is cloudy with light fluries.

I want to live in a world where software does not suck - ESR

That was the slogan on the back of the t-shirt from the 1999 OLS.

That t-shirt was in view in a special report on the CBC last Night.

Unfortunatly I missed the first half of the program, but what I saw was a better than average attempt to explain internet security to non-geeks. The reporters did inteview at least a couple of well known (in)-security experts. As you might expect the term hacker was misused, but at least the term Microsoft was several times associated with insecurity.

Joe Public was told that they need to get patches for their software to keep themselves safe.

Of course, in the interest in sensationalism, the program did use visuals to try and associate folks with embeded jewlery and cracking computers. I tend to associate embeded jewlery with folks under 30, who may or may not have anything to do with computers.

OCLUG

I will not be able to get to the OCLUG meeting tonight Thurs. Dec. 7th, 19:00-21:00 Algonquin Rideau Campus Room A111. The Rideau Campus site is ideal for folks who live downtown and use OC Trans-slo but is hard to get to for those of us who live in the suburbs.

It is too bad because I won't be able to go, because from the announcement it looks like ajh is well on the way to making OCLug a formal organization. Way to Go Andrew!

The Mega-City of Ottawa

A day after Skud anounced she had arrived, the cold weather came. Actually, today was a bit colder than yesterday, but it was still not cold enough for gloves. However it is cold enough to plug the car in overnight.

mbp :The info on the peters projection was interesting, but for some reason, the system at work blocks access to the site you gave. Good Old Google did find a version of the map at diversophy.com

The sample seems to totaly hide most of the northern islands, I wonder if it is an anti-santa conspiracy.

gnuchris :I believe that maddog hall is US born. Perhaps the 'merican linux movment should start now to getting him on a tciket for the next 'lection.

dria :You discovery of your name on kabalarians.com is interesting. even more interesting is that they have both male and female versions of many names. even names like WD-40(male) in fact although your name is only in a female version, is see when looking for other unusual names from advogato that their is both a male and female version of e-smith's. newest Perl expert.

jhermann : Not only do I remember, I just moved the one in the basement on the weekend. Someday I have to find out why the 0xD000 ROM is acting up. Mine is older than the one in the picture, it has a blue (not black) ring around the CRT. Hard to believe it sold for CDN$1200.00 New.

Skud : The Ottawa Citizen also has a site called Ottawa.COM which contains listing or businesses in the area. I belive the listing are paid for, as it is run by the advertising folks.

Anyway, looking for 'Resturants - Other' did turn up the "African Palace",376 Rideau St, Ottawa, (ON) K1N 5Y8, (613) 789-7397, Ethiopian Cuisine. As well as three that list their food as "African"

I don't know, I like Steak and Potatos myself....

dria and graydon : There are many ways to balance ones life. That is why Lee Valley does a booming business in recreating fine tools from the past. Why there are businesses like Antique Electronics Supply or even Berryhill Country Living

If you let your life be consumed by working flat out 23 hours a day, you will grow old and bitter. If you keep some fun in your life you will likely stay healthy into your 80's. My father-in-law is well over 80, was a spitfire pilot in the second world war, left his leg in Malta, and still can crack a joke.

As far as a comment on our culture, I would say that websurfing has at least some self-direction, as opposed to television which for the most part, (say maybe Red Green excepted), is a wasteland.

Free/Open software can be a way to do something that will help the world. So is offering your time to a project that you deem worthy, like creating some recreational facility, or some educational opportunity. One does not have to live like a monk to make a difference.

The power problems could be lessened if folks were to be realistic about using alternatives and diversion of resources. as well of taking advantage of the opportunites that improved communications will allow us to reduce our tendancy to migrate to large cites. The Bagel Effect is a very real trend.

Naturaly while we are devirting potential resources from the landfills, we must find ways to use outdated computers for nobler purposes than sending them to Noranda to extact the copper.

Sunir : Bright lights can hurt your eyes. Hope you have recovered.