I thought I’m chime in with my thoughts and feelings so far now that it’s been a few days without a PC. First, I’m definitely really happy with my purchase. For the most part everything has just worked, and I haven’t had to mess with very many things so far. Sometimes I lament not having more control over cetain elements (for example, trying to figure out which WiFi connection to use in a public space isn’t exactly obvious — in Windows at least you can see signal strength and public/private all at once. I haven’t figured out how to see all that on the Mac). The windowing manager ...

Sometime in January, I thought I would finally throw some Google Adsense onto a few of my pages and see if I could make any cash at all. I didn’t really have any expectations going into it, which is good because I’m sort of been pleasantly suprirsed. In January, my adsense revenue was around $7, which is almost enough to cover the hosting costs in one month. In Feburary, the adsense revenue was around $22, which puts me squarely into the black for hosting costs. It’ll be interesting to see what March holds, and how long it will take until I get that Google Beer Check. I’ll keep everyone ...

I travel to the United States quite often with work. Maybe not as much as I used to, but for a while there I was down here every month or two, visiting California or other cool places. So, for the most part, I know what to expect in most states. I don’t even really think about it anymore really, I just hop on a plane and change a few of the subtleties when I talk to people (I go out of my way not to so Eh). However, the one that always trips me up is the word “Pop”. Because in the US, most people don’t know what the hell Pop is. So whenever I say it accidentally, I always get that deer ...

I had a really good time in Seattle last night. On my way back from my big walking adventure, I saw a pub called “The Blarney Stone” and basically had to stop by to have one drink out of honour of my home town. While sitting at the pub, I tried my first (and probably last) Strongbow beer. If you haven’t had one, you definitely should at least once.. It sort of tastes like apple juice on steroids. It was here that I ran into Sara and Alec and started my drinking adventure of the evening. I had made dinner plans with a friend around 8pm, so we did a pretty good job of drinking until then.. ...

One of the last conversations I had at Northern Voice was with Michael Klassen, and it was about how Microsoft had completely forgotten about the end-user. Sure, maybe they spent five years working hard to make a new OS that they hoped everyone would like, but the user-experience just isn’t there. Which is really the prime area where Apple excels — they listen to the end user, and make the experience simple and productive. Other companies simply want to focus on the “how” and not the “why”. Having a really elegantly coded application with a crappy user interface is just a waste of ...

I stopped for a quick beer near the water, and they had wireless access here.. So I put a few photos up. ...

This is a short post, but I promised a few people I’d let them know where I’m off to. I’m officially on vacation right now, and I’m going to disappear for a few days to just relax, take some photos, and see where the wind takes me. I’ve never really spent any time in Seattle, so tomorrow I’m going to head down that way in the morning and enjoy some of the Pike St. Market. I’m taking all my camera gear, so hopefully I’ll get some good shots of city life.. I’m staying in a pretty decent hotel downtown tomorrow, and I plan to get as much sleep as humanly possible. After that, my ...

When I started redoing my blog about a month ago, I thought it would be cool to add an area where somebody could SMS me if they wanted. That way, if you were on my blog and you wanted to get a hold of me quickly, you could. For some reason, it really did seem like a good idea at the time. However last night, somebody from Spain decided it would be a good idea to SMS me and let me know that my plugin wasn’t working for him. Unfortunately for me, it was about 4am in the morning, and my cell phone was about 4 inches from my head. So, I woke up wondering what in the hell was going on, only to see ...

As i mentioned in one of my previous posts, tonight I went down to Future Shop and picked up a new MacBook Pro. Before I detail what the buying experience was like, I’m going to talk a bit about me. I do stupid things. Quite often actually. And maybe Forest Gump would say it’s because I actually am stupid, but I think it’s mainly because I’m absent minded from time to time. One good example is the day I went to work with my short not only on backwards, but also on inside out. It didn’t really have any distinguishing features on it, and after three weeks of late nights working on my master’s ...

Most of you that know me have undoubtedly seem me cursing at my computer furiously this past week or punching my laptop from time to time. The reason for this sudden change in behaviour stems from my recent installation of Windows Vista. Somehow, that whole process turned a pretty decent laptop into something completely unusable. So today, while trying to edit some photos at Northern Voice, I realized that I just couldn’t go on using my laptop the way it was. Everything was really slow and most applications crashed from time to time (especially Photoshop). Since I’m about to leave on vacation, ...

I’m sitting in room 1005 at the Forest Sciences Center at UBC, eagerly awaiting the “User Generated Content and Activist Campaigns” session to begin. Prior to this was the keynote address by Anil Dash, which gave some great insights into the importance of blogging, and a few allusions to where blogging may go in the future. One of the most interesting part of this conference, for me at least, is a glimpse into the nature of bloggers. The other night at the social, Lee LeFever gave a presentation about his trip around the world, and one sentence that stands out in my mind from his presentation ...

Last night was the first event of the Northern Voice conference. Everyone met down at Heritage Hall on Main Street for some great food served by some local chefs here in Vancouver. The beer flowed like Vancouver rain, and people seemed to have a really great time hanging out and getting to know each other. Having been to many conferences, it was a pleasant surprise at how smoothly the events went and how social most people were. Here are some sample photos northern voice so far, along with a live shot of Photocamp: ...

Canon has noticeably lagged in releasing new DSLRS, especially on the higher end versions. To their credit, they did a big upgrade to the Digital Rebel line earlier this year with the Rebel XTi. This is a great camera that improves on a few areas that the 20D/30D had, even though it’s considered part of their consumer lineup. Some of the nicest changes in my mind for the XTi are: The ability to view the ISO in the viewfinder. On the 20D, you have to hunt for it Larger LCD screen over the 20D Canon sensor cleaning system I consider the last one very important. I’m very careful when I change ...

One of the great added benefits of having an online presence is that it allows people to find me pretty easily and figure out what I’ve been up to. My parents use it to get a glimpse of the stuff I’m up to living out here in the big city, my friends who have moved away get to see a little picture of home from time to time, and old friends sometimes get a chance to reconnect. Last summer I took a week off and visited New York City for three days, which was really cool. After that, my plan was to load the car with camping gear and head out to Banff and the Rocky Mountains for some rest and relaxation. ...

Tomorrow officially marks the start of the Northern Voice 2007 activities. Northern Voice is a Vancouver based conference where web-bloggers meet up and discuss various technological and social aspects of blogging. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it, and Boris and his company Bryght are the main organizers for it. The main social is tomorrow night, which will be a great chance for everyone to meet each other and break the ice before the main activities begin. Friday is “Moose Camp”, which is an opportunity for conference participants to gather around and form their own agenda based ...

I had an appointment this morning with an eye specialist to go over the last CT scan I had a few weeks ago. Prior to the CT scan, I was told that my double vision would probably be permanent, and the displacement of my eye may not be completely fixable. However, apparently the CT scan shows that the bottom muscle of my eye is depressed into the silastic implant that was put in back in November. So basically, that muscle isn’t moving freely and is contributing to my double vision and cosmetic differences between my two eyes. The good news is that they think they can do something about it. That ...

So, I haven’t really listened to too much of their music, but I’ve been told that it’s unusually cool. Last night I was doing some shopping down at Pacific Center, and while crossing from one side of the mall to the other, I nearly walked into Jack Black. At first I wasn’t really sure it was him, but after doing a double take, I was pretty certain. He had his baby in a stroller and was just walking around checking stuff out. I went home and Googled to see if that was him in town, and sure enough, he has a Vancouver concert tonight. So, if you’re a fan, you might want to check it out. ...

I’m officially going to blog about my frustration with Windows Vista so far. If you were following last week, I decided (stupidly) that I would upgrade my laptop from windows XP to windows Vista. First, the whole upgrade procedure took on the order of four hours, and it wasn’t exact smooth all the time. The progress meters were hopelessly broken, and the pre-check that it does to make sure you can actually install vista properly got it wrong. One thing that bothers me right away is that you can no longer install Vista on the same partition as another OS. I’m not really sure why this is, ...

If you accessed my website at all today, you would witnessed one of the slowest websites to ever grace the series of tubes that we call the internet. I spent about two hours on the phone today with web hosting company GoDaddy.com trying to convince them that it was their problem. Unfortunately, even after escalating it multiple times, they still told me it was my fault. So about an hour ago I decided that I had had enough of GoDaddy. I cancelled my hosting, acquired new hosting via HostMonster, and managed to change my DNS and completely set up my blog from scratch in a little under an hour. Unfortunately ...

Part of our Friday ritual of late seems to be gathering a group of people together after work and heading out for a few drinks at a local watering hole. Unfortunately, it’s getting harder and harder to get a seat at a pub on Fridays, and most of the time we spend 20 minutes walking around before we find anything where we can get it. Smiley O’Neils is a cool pub right near work that I really like, but I think the secret is out on that place, because I can never seem to get a seat there.. Malones (Seymour and Pender) has recently finished renovating, which means they now have a bunch more seats ...