September 10th, 2006
Cassie’s Daycare/Junior Kindergarten is going to uniforms soon. It seems odd to me that four year olds will be wearing uniforms. We just found out this week, and it is supposed to start in a couple of weeks time.
Yesterday we spend a bunch of time scouring stores for navy bottoms and white tops. It is an interesting challenge finding preschool sized uniform type clothes. With reccomendation from the school we found lots of good stuff at Children’s place, a good amount of stuff I found at Giant Tiger, but early research sent us to Gymboree to find some stuff – nope – it’s all gone – try the website.
Sandra tried the Gymboree website and found some great stuff, sadly she was able to get stuff into her shopping cart, but was not able to actually buy anything using Safari. Sandra fought with it for about 20 minutes. I suggested Firefox, which allowed her to get further, but again stopped her before checkout. She fought with the site for another 10 minutes and eventually got it to take her money.
Searching for School uniform wear online takes you to lots of sites that want your school ID so they can sell you exactly the right stuff, but it is hard to find places to sell you navy bottoms and white tops.
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September 4th, 2006
Haddock Entertainment – who I know and love because of the DaVinci series is starting a new one called: Intelligence. Intelligence is a new show including Matt Frewer – Famous as “Max Headroom” but also brilliant in “Taken“, and “Doctor Doctor“. DaVinci was so good I’ll definately be watching this new one.
Posted in Canada, Television | No Comments »
September 4th, 2006
I’m using Boot Camp 1.1 at work – I’m supposed to use my MacBook in WinXP most of the time I’m in the office. I’m a Mac Expert, and I need to be able to support Mac OS 7 all the way to 10.4, on the Windows side we support XP. Since XP is where I’m weaker, I have to use it at work.
Thankfully, my boss is frugal and when he saw that our companies standard Windows Laptop would cost us about twice as much as the MacBook I got the choice was clear – Cameron gets a MacBook. Admittedly the Windows Laptop would have had a bigger screen, a docking station, and an external monitor, but I’m very happy with the MacBook.
I’ve used Boot Camp 1.0.1, 1.0.2 and 1.1 like most people I couldn’t tell the difference between .01, and .02, but 1.1 was a lot better – in the MacBook I have an abbreviated keyboard – no windows delete key – just a Mac Delete/Windows ? key. That made hitting control-alt-delete (to log into the network) problemmatic. Windows has an alternate keystroke for getting the task manager up (force quit) – Ctrl-Shift-Esc, but without a real extended keyboard I could not hit control-alt-delete to log in until Boot Camp 1.1. It is now fn-ctrl-alt-delete. Right now Boot camp just works – choose on boot what OS to use (hold down option key to pick – similar to multi-booting lots of Linux/Win machines) and it happily is OS X, or Win XP. At work I have an IT department to make sure the firewall, and Anti-virus software is working.
The problem I’m still having with Boot camp is that sometimes when I re-boot it comes up with the wrong time – usually off by 4 hours – I’m guessing it has something to do with OSX and XP storing the Time zone differently so the computer gets confused. I haven’t cared enough to really detail when this problem happens. On the windows side I have a boot script that double checks that the time is right if I’m at the office, In OSX “use network time” usually fixes me up.
Posted in Coming Apocalypse, Mac, Technology | No Comments »
August 25th, 2006
My laptop from work is a MacBook with an iSight on board – that means that I can video chat with people. All of my ’60′s dreams of the picture phone have come true, except for the nightmare of having nobody to video chat with. I’ve got Skype, iChat, and Yahoo Messenger that should all video chat, IM accounts on MSN, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and Skype. But hardly anybody to play with. Woe is me.
Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »
August 25th, 2006
You may never believe it.
I’ve been going to the Gym almost every workday for more than a month. I’ve been taking Cassie to daycare for just after 7, and then I have about an hour for workout and shower before I have to head off to work. Weights 3 days a week, and cardio 2. I guess everything Mike and Mark taught me didn’t go to waste – I’ve remembered a fair bit of the proper technique.
Cardio kicks my ass. I’m enjoying the recumbant bike, but I know I should be using the cross trainer. I tried the cross trainer one day and had to give up after 5 minutes, then I tried to finish up on the bike, but had to quit after just 6 more minutes – ARGH. I’ve tried the other way around – 20 mins on the bike and then I can do 7 on the X-trainer.
I complained a bit today at work that I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere – I’m staying at the same weight on the machines – althought cardio is a bit better. My boss said that one of his trainers told him – “it took you quite a long time to get chubby….”
Foolishly I didn’t do a lot of measurement baselines before I started so I’m a bit blurry about how I’m doing. Current goals are all about getting to the gym consistently and I’m very happy so far.
Posted in Coming Apocalypse, Ottawa | No Comments »
August 25th, 2006
One of the cool things about my new job is that I get to play with all the new toys. I haven’t been this cutting edge in 12 years. We got an Apple Mac Pro (like was just announced/released at WWDC 2006 a couple of weeks ago) in to set up as a server in a client’s office. It is a beautiful machine – everything they say about how easy it is to add Drives and RAM is true. I had to open it up and geek out to the technology beauty.
We’ll be setting up the software and doing the training for that office in a couple of weeks time. I’m learning a lot, and I have great people to work with.
Posted in Mac, Technology | No Comments »
August 21st, 2006
Another set of fun fireworks here in Ottawa, this time from the fireworks competition over in Gatineau. My new camera continues to rock.
Sandra is actually starting to think I’ve got too many pictures of Fireworks – it seems they all start to look the same after a while. Fortunately the Balloon Festival is next weekend so I’ll have pictures of hot air baloons to post. Sadly there will also be more Fireworks….
Posted in Ottawa | No Comments »
August 21st, 2006
I’ve probably taken too much Philosophy of Science, or read too much Heinlein; but I have quite a soft spot in my heart for Occam’s Razor.
Today I was sad to see John Gruber write:
The principle of Occam’s Razor holds that the simplest explanation is the most likely to be true.
My understanding of Occam’s Razor is: “Given two explanations with equal predictive power, USE the simpler.”
The Wikipedia article John Links to seems to agree with me:
…when multiple competing theories have equal predictive powers, the principle recommends selecting those that introduce the fewest assumptions and postulate the fewest hypothetical entities.
Occam’s razor doesn’t say anything about the “Truth” of theories. It just tells you which theory to prefer.
Example: in Physics we often use Newtonian Mechanics – it is simple, and makes very good predictions under many circumstances. However, most Physicists understand Einsteinian Mechanics to be more “True”, and under some circumstances they have much better predictive powers – in those circumstances we should choose to use Einsteinian Mechanics.
Now, I’m really focussing here on the simplicity part. However when I read the quote from Wikipedia they say that I should focus on the fewest assumptions, and fewest hypothetical entities, and doesn’t say anything about simplicity. Now on the Fewest assumptions Einsteinian Mechanics wins – you don’t have to assume velocities not near the speed of light so maybe I’m way off base and Occam’s razor wants me to use them all the time and it is lazyness that makes Newtonian Mechanics so popular with Physicists, and not Occam. Next some other person will say: “No Cameron, you are the crazy one here.”
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May 30th, 2006
My presentation for Mugoo was not smiled upon by the demo gods – lots of problems, but I rolled with it, and my audience seemed happy with the information.
Some comments/ followups for my presentation.
For Neil Herber: On the bottom of your “Write post” page you will see this:
WordPress bookmarklet
Right click on the following link and choose “Add to favorites” to create a posting shortcut.
Press It – bales.ca
(don’t bother pressing it – I’ve disabled it)
Another blogging product I’m told has good anti-spam features: Movable Type.
Tool that I’ve used and enjoyed for more fully featured CMS sites (Content management system) Drupal. Drupal does lots more than blogging so it is much more complex than WordPress that focusses on blogging and allows some static pages. People I know have not had good experience with Drupal’s anti-spam features. Your mileage will vary.
More to come.
Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »
May 29th, 2006
Mugoo the best club anywhere is pationtly watching me ake a post.
– LeRoy from Mugoo (not Cameron)
Posted in Technology | 3 Comments »
