Technorati Tags: atimi

Once a day in retrospect was too ambitious: the posts that came out of it were wasteful, they did not contribute anything except for glorified advertisements for products mainly, I felt. My main goal was to improve my writing, but I wanted to do so as long as I could come up with “some” original thought at least, and not just re-hashing some news I came by from other blogs.

Hopefully my post for next week will be more fruitful in this regard! It is easier to develop this habit by making it easier for me to do, then hopefully increase the frequency when I have kept my writing discipline up.

Technorati Tags: blogging

It’s not that I don’t go to the computer to write, it’s figuring out what to write. Writing original articles is hard, collecting various tidbits of information out there and commenting on it is a bit easier. Let’s see, it’s Dec 28th now: I didn’t write for the 23rd, 24th, 25th, 26th, 27th and of course the 28th, for a total of six days. I could chalk it up to the holidays, with it being Eid-ul Adha, Christmas, Boxing Day and all, but I won’t. I’ll try to submit six postings dated on this date, to catch up.

Well, what do you know, one post down, five more to go!

Technorati Tags: blog writing

• Aerogarden: Grow your own herb garden with just light, water, and some nutrient tablets (NO soil needed!). A con is that your electricity bill will increase (but of course that is expected, with the lights on the device needing to be on).
• BookGem: Hold that book open and prop it up with this gadget. Perfect for people that like to read when they eat (myself included!)
• Electrilite flashlight / radio / cell phone charger: Does not need batteries with its hand crank, and the bulbs are LED too (thus uses less power). It can charge your cell phone, and you can listen to the radio on it. Its small size is perfect compared to the other larger all-in-one emergency light/radio devices.
• Rite in the Rain Notebooks: Considering Vancouver is wet all winter generally, this could prove useful. What is great is that they also offer waterproof paper, my cat has gone missing recently and it will be great to print out the “lost” posters on waterproof stock to post outdoors on lamp posts, and the like.

Technorati Tags: cool tools, riteintherain, electrilite, aerogarden, bookgem

From the New York Times:

Armed with nothing more than a crow bar and a car jack, it took the culprits just three minutes to break into the Sao Paulo Museum of Art before dawn Thursday and steal Picasso’s ”Portrait of Suzanne Bloch,” and Portinari’s ”O Lavrador de Cafe.”

Not much of a barrier to entry:

Jumping over a glass partition, they climbed an open concrete staircase leading up to the entrance of the two-story modernist building, which hovers over a large plaza on stilts of steel.

Technorati Tags: art heist

Why not publish them? It’s because I edit them too much. You see, if something is published, it is out there FOREVER (Internet Archive, Google Cache). So I tend to scrutinize my words incessantly. Well, from now on I’m just going to write at least one post EVERY day. It will take some discipline, but I’ve made the decision that it’s one way to improve my writing, and I love writing (besides software development of course).

Recently, I’ve rediscovered something about myself. I’m a builder. I love to create things — either software, or sentences. Besides writing software, what I wanted to be ever since I was young was to be a writer. Of course, I wanted to be both, if possible! And of course it’s possible. I’ve been a voracious consumer of books, and a daily reader of countless blogs, too much passive activity. So I’m taking action now not to be passive, but active. Hey, I only did two edits or so to this post. I think that’s progress.

A colleague came over to me and explained that a rep from Gillette came the day before and, like Santa, gave everyone in the office a box of two Gillette Fusion razors each. I was working from home that day, thus I missed out on the fun. Apparently the rep said that he went to our website and saw all the pictures of unshaven programmers on it, and decided to give us these gifts. Right – nice ruse.

This was one upgrade that I didn’t need. I usually shave infrequently (usually twice a week), and one razor blade will usually last me a month – and oh, I have about 10 blades left from the Costco 16 pack I bought some time ago. Most of the time we have to deal with clients over the phone, so not being close shaven is ok. I held out using the Gillette Sensor and not upgrading to a Mach 3 – until I got one as a gift. Besides – Sensor blades cost the same as Mach 3 ones, so it didn’t make a difference if I upgraded.

The total cost of the package – 2 razors and 4 blades – would have cost (2 x $13.99 + 1 x $17.99)= $45.97 Canadian, without taxes. Pretty generous gift. But it doesn’t make economic sense to upgrade – a 4 pack of Fusion razors costs $17.99 Canadian, versus a 4 pack of Mach 3s at $11.49 each. Thats a 57% increase in expenditure for razors if I chose to go the Fusion route! Nice try, Gillette.

Maybe I should just keep a sharpened machete handy, and shave like Crocodile Dundee…

[another reason to be wary of Gillette, with the most silliest anti-shoplifting campaign ever… no wonder new version Gillette blades cannot be picked up off the shelves here in Canada and can only be bought near or behind the counter)

I was nearby and I couldn’t help overhear the rest of their conversation. The wife was talking to the clerk: apparently her husband had trouble seeing the small text on webpages and wanted to get a bigger monitor so he could see the text. The clerk had Firefox running on a demo computer and she proceeded to show the problem her husband was having, basically he couldn’t see the text clearly because it was too small. I figured, this clerk would surely know his stuff, and tell the couple that you can increase the default text size in the browser through the options, or just “ctrl+mousewheel-up” to increase the font size.

But no – the clerk proceeded to test webpages on a 19″ monitor so the husband could “test” whether the 19″ monitor was better for his eyes. Of course the text was “larger” (a 19″ LCD has the same number of pixels as a 17″, but the pixels are larger of course). I had a dilemma – should I step in and save this couple about four hundred plus dollars and show them how to increase the default text size (and interfere with the clerk’s sale) – or let them be. I chose the latter – I figured it was not my place to interfere with someone�s bread and butter (maybe he was on commission, who knows).

Well – two weeks ago I was in a similar situation, but this time there was no sale involved.

Someone had come in and was asking about sharing an external drive between Mac and Windows systems. It just so happened that I was having the same problem – my NTFS formatted external hard drive could only be read (but not written) by my Mac system. The answer was to re-format the drive to FAT32, that filesystem can be read and written by both Windows and Mac OS.

I stepped in when the clerk had totally no clue how to help that man with his problem. I told the guy that all he had to do was re-format the drive to FAT32 to fix his problem. Of course, as soon as I helped the guy, the clerk conveniently added, “oh yeah, I forgot about that”, which may or may not have been true.

I didn’t have time to add however – that you will have to format the drive on Mac OS to have it all under one partition (choose “MS-DOS Partition” in Disk Utility); under Windows you are restricted to 32-GB FAT32 partitions.

Well – I guess I found my litmus test on whether to interfere or not.

The police cars have the lettering “Burnaby Police” on the front doors, and are baby-blue in colour. We have a municipality here in BC that is called Burnaby, but I’ve never seen any municipality’s police cars in that colour before. So far, since I have lived here – this is the third time I’ve seen filming nearby. The first was “Taken”, a sci-fi mini-series I believe (I didn’t watch it). The second was a quick film (only a couple of days) that I did not know the name of – probably a local film, and the third is this new film. Before I moved here, a scene from the X-Files was shot here, which I think was the episode “Patient X” (Season 5) where a throng of people were moving across the top of Ruskin Dam (they kept the name of the location in the script). The Ruskin Dam is sure a magnet for filming I guess.

side note: The film “Lake Placid” was filmed on the top side of the dam, Hayward Lake.