May 7th, 2006
My cousin Andrew is teaching English in Japan and has a blog:
Tales From The Future
Which takes me back to one of our first days in Japan. We were at the train station in Umeda and I had to go to the bathroom. It was quite the experience. I walked in and saw the first stall, a squat toilet. So, I moved on to the next one. Which was a normal toilet, but with some crazy seat. So I sat down and was treated to a very pleasant warming sensation. There is nothing quite like going to the bathroom and getting warmed up along the way. Then I discovered the buttons on the side of the toilet. Man, that was interesting. There was one that released a spray to cover any smells, there was one that provided a faux-flush (no water, just the sound) to cover any unfortunate noises. Then I found the spray button. Courtney got a kick out of the smirk that was on my face when I left the bathroom. This is something you have to experience to understand.
It’s amazing what you can learn away from home.
Posted in Family | 1 Comment »
May 5th, 2006
I’ve added GeoURL tags back to the site. using:
GeoURL Tags at The Aquinas Hub
This is a really simple plugin to add GeoURL tags to your blog. It isn’t supposed to do anything more than that, but it’ll save you having to modify your header file everytime you change theme. This lets visitors to your site find other sites near you in ‘meatspace’.
You can see sites close to me in the real world. I was reminded that Gabrielle is living in Ottawa – I’ll have to get in touch with her. Hmmm, it seems she’s moved back to the Moncton area and hasn’t updated her GeoTags.
I’d like to be able to tag specific posts with GeoLocations of some sort, but I’ll have to investigate this further. I’m not sure that the GeoURL technology is the most appropriate for this.
Update: May 9. I’ve changed from the GeoURL plugin to the Geo plugin At the suggestion of Aquinas. This plugin allows me to tag posts with different locations.
GeoPlugin
The Geo plugin allows you to attach geographic coordinate information to posts. It also lets you specify a default geographic location for your entire WordPress blog.
Posted in Ottawa, Technology | 1 Comment »
May 4th, 2006
Vonage is my current phone company and they make me very happy. If you have broadband to your house you should seriously consider switching to them. We are paying twenty bucks a month for a line, 500 minutes of calling, call display, call answer and any other phone service we might want. They can take your current phone number so you don’t have to go through the hassle of getting a new phone number. If I refer you I get two months free and you get one month free – great for me, maybe not for you since they often have one month free. In any case if you want a referral I’ll email you one.
Vonage have quietly changed their logo from a square-font blocky corporate one with “The Internet Phone Company” tagline:
To a friendly font huggy-V one with no tagline:
The new logo more directly compares with the logo for Skype:
I don’t think it is wise for Vonage to try to compare themselves to Skype. Vonage works well right now, while skype is something for the future.
Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »
May 3rd, 2006
I’m still playing with the Technology of the new site and I’ve tried a plugin that makes Google Sitemaps:
Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress v2 Final This plugin generates a Google Sitemaps compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.
The installation was quite surprisingly easy and seems to do everything it should.I
I also have the WordPress Widgets plugin installed which allows me to easily include bits for flickr and delicious that you see over there. I tried a couple of other themes but went back to this one.
Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »
May 2nd, 2006
My delightful hosting company has started moving sites from Drupal to WordPress. WordPress does blogging and static pages and that is all I need – I’d like some of the missing Drupal features but so far I’m quite liking the default feature set of WordPress. Of course moving site platforms has growing pains and I’m fighting with WordPress a bit.
Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »
April 27th, 2006
Pinhole Day this year is April 30, 2006. Pinhole photography is fun. They talk about it on the Flickr blog and you can also see more pinhole photos at flickr.
Found in Make Magazine.
Posted in pinhole | No Comments »
April 21st, 2006
The Toronto region is trying to get local people to care more about the local headwaters. Part of the work they are doing is naming things after local residents. My Grandfather was Allan Bales – I have his name as my middle name. This picture is just below the Mill pond falls just north of Mill St. in Richmond Hill, ON
Posted in Ontario | No Comments »
January 31st, 2006
They will need lots of people, some of the jobs could be fun.
1 800 342-2006
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
September 17th, 2005
Ingredients:
1 lb. ground beef
1 pkg. Mac & Cheese (PC white cheddar is very good)
2 cups water
1.5 cup Salsa
1.5 cup frozen corn
Method:
Brown meat in large frypan on medium-high heat. Drain.
Add Macaroni, water salsa, and corn. Bring to boil. Reduce heat to medium; cover. Simmer 8 min, stirring twice.
Stir in Cheese Sauce Mix; cook until heated through. Serve immediately.
Adapted from Kraft Kitchens Sloppy Joe Mac.
Posted in Recipe | No Comments »
January 20th, 2005
The New Brunswick Commission on Legislative Democracy has released their Final Report and Summary of the Final Report Go give them a read – they are pretty clear.
They propose mixed-proportional representation, fixed election dates, independently drawn election boundries after census and plenty more.
After you read them fill out their Questionnaire – Final Report and Recommendations, and contact your MLA. For the terminally curious you can see the Pre report questionnaire results that at least some of the proposals are based on. If you are afraid of original sources there are plenty of news stories about this.
I will be commenting on this after I have read and digested it. I wonder if giving lottery tickets to people after the put a ballot in the box would boost voter turnout?
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
