I started watching TVO's program The Agenda last night. They were live from Waterloo, with a special feature on the local innovation economy.
It takes a special talent to turn something as exciting as the high-tech-driven innovation economy into 60 minutes of dreadfully boring television.
Actually, I only made it twenty minutes in, before I had to change the channel. The whole thing was turning into a University of Waterloo infomercial.
We were cleaning out my mother-in-law’s basement on the weekend. It has flooded every spring as long as I have been around, so make that 19 years at least.
It was recently flooded about three feet deep, then the furnace conked out and everything froze solid.
When we arrived on Saturday morning, it was a hell of a mess. Crap everywhere.
We started digging in, and the smell was getting to me. I put on a mask, to hopefully avoid any toxic mould, or other hazardous material that might be floating around. My brother-in-law decided not to wear a mask. His wife yelled to him, “Martin! Wear a mask! You don’t want to get cancer from that stuff.”
Martin yelled back, “Cancer? This stuff EATS cancer!”
Who said the Conservatives don't care about the poor?
Here they are with a groundbreaking idea - shoot a few excess Canada geese, and feed the poor!
Geese, understandably, are against the idea.
Well, we knew that the Conservatives would say anything to get elected. No lie is too farfetched for them. We knew that they have no ethics, whatsoever.
Now, it appears they're into criminal territory, with an attempt to hack into the Liberal party's website.
What's next, fellas? You can't get much lower, can you?
I'm wading my way through a list of the Top 100 Blogs for Developers, and I'm feeling a bit left out.
I see an obvious lack of content here, compared to the blogs written by other software developers.
So, to make up:
Twitter. Twitter. Twitter. Facebook. Agile. Twitter. Ruby. Python. Kindle. Twitter.
Total waste of time, all of them, but at least now I fit in.
Seeing all that nice bright sunshine today has me thinking. We need a patio. With a bar. Wouldn't a couple of Coronas go down really nice on a beautiful spring day?
We'd need one computer per four developers. Every fifteen minutes you switch seats. So you code for fifteen minutes, and drink for 45.
The day would fly by. It would hardly seem like working. Who's with me?
Late Friday afternoon, outside the doors of St. Mary's hospital ER.
Nurse (to bewildered looking patient standing in the driveway): Excuse me! Are you my patient, from bed 9?
Patient: Uh, maybe.
Nurse: Were you just going to leave, without telling anyone?
Patient: Uh, maybe.
Nurse: Do you still have an IV in your arm?
Patient (looking at arm): Uh, oh! Yes.
Ok, hands up if you're not at all surprised by this.
Audio files, photos and transcripts leaked to the website http://Wikileaks.org has exposed the Ontario Progressive Conservative Campus Association (OPCCA) as hosting workshops dedicated to teaching Campus Conservatives how to take over student governments and defeat perceived enemies including the Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) and the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS).
They're obviously taking their lead from the guys who published the 200 page "How to obstruct parliament" manual.
We were running into a strange exception when unit testing, with NUnit 2.4.8.
We have some drag and drop action in a treeview, and at the point where we set the AllowDrop property, we caught this:
Turns out, drag and drop must be set up in a single-threaded apartment, and NUnit runs its tests in a multithreaded apartment.
The quickest way to fix this is to add the /nothread option to the nunit-console.exe command line.
Sunday night I was sparing on a competitive team. They had me skipping, which turned out be a challenge. Most ends, the easiest shot I had was a 10 foot angle runback. Against three or four.
We staggered through to the sixth end, when we finally gave up. I think the score was 9-3, or something like that. We’re trying to beat it off the ice as fast as possible, when the drawmaster yells, “Wait! There could be three teams tied in the standings going into the playoffs. We need to measure a draw to the button as the tiebreaker.”
I’m thinking, “Awesome. This isn’t even my team, and now I have to draw the button to seed them in the playoffs.” To make it worse, I had thrown three draws the entire game, and only made one of them.
So I grabbed the lucky number 7 rock (not really lucky, but I had a fair idea of draw weight with that one) and headed up the sheet. Let ‘er rip, and watch the sweepers get on it around the far hog line. I got right up behind them and yelled at them right to the top of the button.
Not bad – 10.5 inches from the pin, in the white paint.
The other skip steps up and parks it 9.75 inches from the pin.
On the other sheet, the bugger covered the pin.
So, not only did I get ass raped in the game, I couldn’t even seed these guys a little higher.
Ok, I promised this a few days ago, but I've been busy.
My mother-in-law was diagnosed with colon cancer last May. Had surgery, moved to an apartment near family in this area. Started going downhill last month, and was admitted to hospital around the third week of February. It was evident that she wouldn't be going back home, but there was a meeting planned for the Friday afternoon to decide where she'd go. I know she didn't want to spend whatever time she had left in a hospital, and an hour before the meeting she passed away. It was not unexpected, just maybe a little faster than expected.
Visitation on Monday, funeral on Tuesday, back to near-normal routine on Wednesday, except for some out of town family members who were still staying with us for the rest of the week.
On Saturday my parents came to town to watch my daughter curl. It was her first real bonspiel, and she was very proud of having the chance to curl with so many family members watching. On the way home from the curling club, my father had a heart attack. Mom grabbed the wheel of the car, whipped it into a parking lot and leaned on the horn. Several bystanders jumped in to help, including a CPR instructor.
Your chances of surviving a cardiac arrest outside a hospital are 5%. Yup, five. Count Dad in the lucky five. He's recovering slowly in hospital, but everything looks pretty good right now.
So, go out and learn CPR. And eat lots of fibre and vegetables.
Typical story. Lonely child. Grows up morose. Nobody to love. Failure at school. Failure at work. Nothing to live for. Jumps off a famous wonder of the world. And fucks that up too.
Kevin Martin’s triple in the Alberta playdowns was pretty good, but I think this is better.
It's been really quiet here lately.
Let's just say, this sucks.
And so does this. However, I did get to see the product in action, albeit a little closer than I really wanted to.
More later...
This is kind of cool.
Our network was a little flaky, for lack of a better word, today. Windows Live Messenger was refusing to connect me, so I clicked the Troubleshoot option.
Then it ran through some tests to help me figure out what was wrong.
In the end, it didn't help, but it tried. Turns out our network was buggered…
With my five-year-old...
Her: I was helping a kid at school with the computer, and she just kept clicking everywhere! I told her not to click unless the pointer changed, but she just kept clicking and clicking!
Me: Some people learn better when you tell them or show them something, and some people learn better when they do it by themself.
Her: Well, she's having a HARD TIME LEARNING!
With my five-year-old...
Her: Knock, knock.
Me: Who's there?
Her: Orange.
Her: Knock, knock.
Me: Who's there?
Her: Orange.
Her: Knock, knock.
Me: Who's there?
Her: Orange.
Her: Knock, knock.
Me: Who's there?
Her: Orange.
Her: Knock, knock.
Me: Who's there?
Her: Orange.
Her: Knock, knock.
Me: Who's there?
Her: Am I ever glad I didn't say 'orange'.
I'm not sure if it's available in Ontario, but if you find yourself travelling, this is a good one.
I was given a bottle of the 21 year old for my *cough* 40th *cough* birthday. It's wonderful. Very smooth, buttery, caramel. Mmmmm...
