cat /dev/brain

Noah and I ran the Ancaster Old Mill Race yesterday. He ran the 1km kids race, where they don’t time the kids, but everyone gets a medal and ice cream. He got very competitive, while having a short walk after sprinting up a hill, someone passed him, and he quickly sprinted to catch up. See…

This article at the Globe and Mail reports on rumors of an AppleBerry… the result of mating a BlackBerry with an iPod. I know this is a case of ‘I told you so’ but I mentioned this idea to friends about six months ago. Have Apple’s designers create the design, use BlackBerry’s internals/keyboard/wireless, add in…

If you follow Canadian politics at all you’ll know about Joe Volpe, who has recently given back the donations given by several canadian children. Suspiciously, these children all gave the maximum allowed ($5400) and all where children of executives of a drug company called Apotex. A few jokers put up a parody site called “Youth…

Yesterday I ran as part of a relay team in the Sulphur Springs Trail race put on by the Burlington Runner’s club. The relay team ran a total of 100 miles (160km), or 8 laps of a 20km loop. I completed one of those loops with a time of 2:03:01. I had hoped to finish…

I’ve been playing with Google Web Toolkit for the past few days, what an incredible piece of software! Anyone who’s done any web development knows how many pieces of technology are involved in making a reasonably attractive web site. This toolkit takes the whole thing to the next level. Rather than worrying about HTML, CSS,…

I’ve had about enough of comment spam. Aside from handling 50-100 spam at work, another 5-10 on my personal account, now I also have to deal with an onslaught of comment spam in my blog. Setting up filters wasn’t enough, there was still too much getting through. Not like I get a lot of hits…

My first open source project has graduated from the incubation stage to full project status today! Read all about it here. The project exists primarily to support the code for an article I wrote a while back, integrating CruiseControl with WebLogic’s compilers.

Caught this in a startup log on one of my HPUX systems: Starting ISEE hpservices mad daemon. ………………………….. OK Should I be worried?

Yes you too can have fun at work. Recipe for fun is: Ingredients 1 beatup old car, the more beatup the better. 2 scruffy guys with hoodies 7 police cruisers loaded with policemen 2 undercover police cars with appropriately dressed policemen. The more they look like the scruffy guys the better. 1 building with a…

No, not us. Amy & Kevin however are having triplets. A quote from their site, quoting Mark Twain: “Twins amount to a permanent riot; and there ain’t any real difference between triplets and an insurrection.” Our thoughts and prayers are with them.

The past election’s campaign caused my children to ask why the red and blue signs were all over our neighbourhood. We explained that we were voting for the next government, and the blue sign on our lawn meant we were supporting the Conservatives. After the Conservatives won a minority government on Monday, we told them…

There is always an official way, a prescribed way, or a “proper” way to get something done. But when the resources simply aren’t available to do something the proper way, improvisation is the key, and usually poorer countries are far better at it than the wealthier nations. Have a look at these pictures. Noone in…

I don’t travel too much, but this site (flightcomm) is pretty cool. Most airline sites only tell you whether a flight is delayed or not. This site shows you a map of exactly where the plane is at any given moment, including height and airspeed, all based on FAA radar. Very cool stuff.

I took Mikaela (age 3) for walk a few nights ago, and she noted that the moon, of which only half was visible, was “broken”. She wondered when it would be fixed again? And last night she recited a Franklin book to me, almost word-for-word. I guess Mikaela didn’t inherit my sieve-like memory!

I have another blog out there, over at BEA’s dev2dev site. This blog will be for all WebLogic and Java posts. I haven’t posted too many of those here, but hope to have a few more over there. I’ve run into two seperate forms of writer’s block lately. The first came after I received BEA’s…

I’ve always been a big airplane fan. Like most kids I dreamed of joining the Air Force (American of course, I wanted to fly A-10’s), but my rather limited eyesite made the dream stay just that. But I can still tell you what kind of fighter jet just flew by based on its silhouette. One…

This guy took the time to read the Windows End User License Agreement (that annoying window with all the legalese that pops up when you install any Microsoft product) and found that using any Java code can cause death. I guess all Microsoft products are so stable that they can be used in applications like…

I spend an inordinate amount of time using Firefox, both at work and at home. (No it’s not wasted time, most of my work involves online information.) My biggest beef with Firefox 1.5 was the incredibly slow and CPU-consuming performance when hitting a page that included Flash objects. Then I found Flashblock. It blocks all…