On May 5th, Flickr is having a big world-wide event were everyone is being asked to record a day of their life in photos. I think this is a pretty cool idea, and it should make for some really interesting browsing when it’s all over. Unfortunately for me, May 5th will probably involve mostly sleeping and chewing pain killers, but I’m definitely going to try and participate if I can. ...
When I left for Chilliwack on the weekend, I accidentally left my phone sitting on my bed back in Vancouver. Considering I was only going for a day, I didn’t real think that much of it, and checked my messages from Chilliwack on Saturday night. When I got back to Vancouver yesterday evening, my phone was dead, so I simply plugged it into the wall and went to sleep.
Unfortunately, upon checking my messages today, I realized that I had missed a call yesterday from my plastic surgeon saying that they couldn’t perform surgery on Thursday, and that they wanted to bring me in and do it today. By ...
Friday afternoon I had yet another enlightening visit down at St. Paul’s hospital. I actually went in rather grumpy and upset with the whole process, but about five minutes into it was greated by a really cute, friendly medical student. So, my spirits rose pretty quickly to the point where I was making light of the whole situation. It was actually rather funny, because the first little bit of dialog went like this:
Cute student: “so why are you here today?”
Me: “I have no idea”
Cute student: “what do you mean you have no idea? You came in.”
Me: “My doctor’s office called me and ...
Last night we had a mini drinking event at work where we said goodbye to Chris and Hanh. After consuming a few beers, we sat down and started to watch a bit of the hockey game. After the second period, Hesty and I ventured down Robson street on our way home and met up with John and Rebecca for a drink at a local restaurant.
This morning I woke up around 11am (and man, was it nice to sleep in), had a quick shower and hopped into the car headed for Chilliwack. It seems like it’s been a really long time since I’ve been back home.
My dad and I went halfers on some homemade wine a while ago, and ...
Tonight I found myself down in the gastown area, having a few beers with old pal Boris Mann down at the Bryght offices. He was nice enough to invite me to some of the Thursday night BBQ lovin at his offices, and introduced me to the ever-sought-after “Save On Meat” store around the corner from the offices.
Photo by Roland TanglaoAfterwards, I stuck around and hung out for the Drupal monthly Vancouver meetup and learned both about Drupal 6.0 and some of the Install Profile work that the guys at Bryght have contributed back. I’m in the process of setting up a new website with a different ...
I’ve been messing around a bit more with photoshop in the evenings, and one day soon I’ll read the huge 1000 page book I have on it as well. Here’s something I was messing with a bit last night. It’s a shot from my patio looking easy towards Yaletown. The bridge is the Granville Street Bridge.
The whole image involved work on about 5 different layers in photoshop. The rain was a bit trickier than I imagined, and it’s not entirely convincing, but it’s a good start. ...
If you were reading the news yesterday, you probably heard of the allegations that Canadians overseas have aided in the torture of Afghan prisoners by handing them over to local authorities and then not following up on their treatment. To quote a few paragraphs from the Globe and Mail:
Critics demanded the resignation of Defense Minister Gordon O’Connor yesterday over new allegations that Afghan prisoners, detained by Canadian soldiers and handed over to local authorities, had been tortured.
[…]
Professor Michael Byers of the University of British Columbia, a specialist in international relations, ...
As most of you know, I have been waiting anxiously to have my surgery performed down at St. Paul’s. About two weeks ago, I had a meeting at the hospital with my surgeon (where I sat and waited for three hours just to sign a few forms) where we discussed the surgery date (which was supposed to be this week), and a few of the details. I called last Thursday to try and nail down an exact date, but they said they wouldn’t be able to give me one.
So today, I called down to the doctor’s office to find out what was going on. I was told that for some reason, nobody even submitted my name into the ...
I’ve been experimenting with high dynamic range (HDR) images for a few months now, and so far I really love the effect that you can get with photos. At least in my eyes, HDR images generally seem to look a bit more natural than a typical shot that doesn’t have a large dynamic range. Unfortunately, this whole field is more of an art than a science currently, so getting the perfect HDR shot is a bit of trial and error (and in a lot of cases, the end result isn’t always appealing).
My tool of choice right now is undoubtedly Photomatix, and I use it almost exclusively when generating HDR shots. ...
I’ve had a few requests lately from people asking if I could send them a copy of my master’s thesis. So in the interest of saving time, I’m throwing it up here in case anyone wants to download it and read themselves to sleep.
My research was primarily in the area of high definition video compression, specifically on a new codec called H.264 that is used in the new HD DVD formats such as Blue-Ray and HD-DVD. I proposed a novel scheme to combine concurrently broadcoast MPEG-2 standard definition (SD) streams with H.264 spatial difference information to create a HD broadcast stream at a ...
As of this moment, I am officially “on call” for my next surgery at St. Paul’s hospital. I was hoping that I would have gotten the call on Sunday night for a Monday morning surgery (I just want it over with), but unfortunately I still haven’t had the call yet. I won’t be able to eat for twelve hours prior, so I’m pretty much guaranteed to get at least that much notice. It would be nice if they could give more notice than that, but apparently the hospitals are rather busy, and it’s difficult to book them in advance.
Photo by jekemp on Flickr (click photo to view) My dad has a ...
A few months ago, I wrote a flickr plugin for wordpress that integrated with a few different image galleries including Lightbox and Greybox. As last count, 126 different blogs were using the crossroads plugin to show their flickr images in their posts.
While updating my blog theme last night, I realized one of the current problems I have with most of the themes I downloaded. Typically, a theme will present the full content of a few blog entries on the main page. A few of the “cooler” themes I’ve seen only show one post on the main page, which is sort of a neat idea if you don’t write very ...
Even though I spent quite a bit of time working on my last theme, I’ve grown rather tired of it. So, after checking out some themes on the net tonight, I found this one which I rather like. I think I’m going to modify it a bit and put up a new version for people to download. ...
On Friday night a bunch of us from work took Jari and Seppo out for one last night on the town in Vancouver. Since we basically accomplished everything we set out to do this week, we started drinking at around 4pm Friday afternoon at work. From there, we made our way to the Yaletown Brew Pub for dinner and some more drinks. I wasn’t really sure what these guys would like to see (apparently at the end of the night it turns out they kind of wanted to see a strip club, affectionately called “The Titty Bar” in Finnish), so I sort of did a mini pub crawl with them. After YBC, we decided to hit ...
Last night I decided to go down to the little store downstairs and get myself something to drink. As I was leaving my apartment, I realized that for some weird reason I couldn’t lock my door from the outside. Locking it from the inside is difficult, but not impossible. But I can’t for the life of me manage to lock it from the outside.
So basically, I’m stuck at home until I can figure out a way to get it fixed. The obvious answer is to call a locksmith and get him/her to come fix it. But it’s Sunday, which probably means it’s going to be a major pain in the ass to sort out. I’ve been ...
Tonight I had the unusual desire to spend some time working on my blog. The last theme that was up was 100% written by me entirely from scratch. And while I really liked it when it went up, I’ve grown a bit tired of it. So for now, I’m using the Balance theme from the internet. It has a lot of cool Ajax features, and even supports Gravatars in the blog comments. If you don’t have a gravatar, I suggest you head on over and get one.
So instead of reinventing the wheel with my own theme, I think my current plan is to spend some time extending this one with some of the cool features I’ve been ...
Most people who know me nowadays would probably be a bit surprised to learn that I used to be a big literature buff, particularly with old english poetry. I guess it all started back around grade 10. I had done pretty well in school, and had been recommended to take advanced placement calculus and physics. Because of that, and of my high marks in english I guess, I was put on a list that recommended I be enrolled in a new AP Literature class at our school. So for kicks, I said “why not”?
And to be honest, looking back, it’s probably the class I enjoyed the most. I studied some of the greats ...
The first news of the day is that yesterday after work I picked up a new set of glasses. I still haven’t finalized all the insurance papers that will let me get a refund on the first pair, but at least I’m no longer without a pair of glasses. The ladies at the eyeglass center were nice enough to remind me to remove them whenever I decided to step out, have a few drinks and then fall down.
Unfortunately, in the process of falling the first time, I seemed to have gotten the world’s largest splinter. To make it worse, it entered at the tip of my finger, and proceeded to go down the length of ...
Did a quick HDR off my patio before bed. And before I drop off, here’s one more bit of info — my dad and step-mom are getting on a plane at 7am to spend a week near Cancun relaxing. They usually spend most vacations every year in the RV camping somewhere, and this is the first trip that they’ve taken to a far-away place (except of course when they came to visit me out in Ottawa). So, I hope they have a really awesome time down there.
Also, Jari and Seppo should be stepping off a plane any time soon to spend the week up here in Vancouver. These are the two Finnish guys I got loaded with ...