I clearly do not spend enough time outside on cloudless nights in early October at 3am. There are some seriously sexy constellations to be seen. Unfortunately it has been far too long since the days when I would lay outside in my backyard and seek out the stars, my astronomy book in hand. It glowed in the dark. So when I was confronted by Orion on my walk home from Shirreff Hall I was filled with a feeling of deep memories and the compelling desire to just lay down and fall asleep on the grass starring up into the sexy night sky. Other than Orion, the only constellation that I really recognized was Cygnus the Swan. On my way up campus much earlier, I noticed the big dipper which is my old friend because in the warmer times of the year, the big dipper is plainly visible during the reasonable times that people should be awake. Not the case for Orion, which is also easy to see, you have to wait until early morning. Needless to say I will be looking up my constellations as soon as I get my Internet back.

On that front I have some news as well. First thing is that Dalhousie and St. Marys both announced earlier today that school would be cancelled until Monday. This is great news to all of those intrepid first year students who are likely passed out from the effects of alcohol right now. Some of them are at home, some went home before they even heard the announcement about the closure. That being said, work should not be put off at the thought of a free week. There was something in the past like this, but we were out for much longer, and that was the strike. Four weeks we were out there, which gave birth to amoung other things, this website. And given the opportunity I would be making the most of this time off to get some changes made to some website or other. The no power thing kind of squeezed the juice out of that plan though. However, there is hope. First of all... South Street seems to have power now, while it didn't around 9pm. Rumour has it that they have been turning on bits and bits of the grid on and testing the transformers - which has resulted in a tree catching fire. Fortunately the fire department was waiting right there. And most of the buildings on campus seem to have some sort of power flowing in them despite all of the residences being powerless. And as I walked by I saw a sign that said that faculty could get in to get their belongings. This intrigued me so I tried my card, and voila, the door opened. So early tomorrow I am going in there to get my sunglasses. I mean, tech support is like faculty. So basically this whole week off thing wouldn't be so bad if I had power, which the CS building seem to be getting from somewhere - generator possibly.

Got a fair bit more reading done today and I'm happy about that. Spent most of the night playing a board game with Sarah and I was able to score my meals at Howe Hall... that is my life and I hope that yours is getting back to normal. Cheers

Halifax that is. At least the part that I have seen. But I will commend the power company for doing such a fine job, at Glengary we had power yesterday afternoon at around 5pm. I, however, wasn't there to realize that fact until about 9pm. I was out having a great hot meal at Marc's place. It was quite a relief to see the lights on in the building as I walked up and even more of a relief to take a hot shower and fire up my computer. The funny thing is that despite all of my sleeping over the past few days, I am very tired here at work today. That is another thing that I may not have mentioned, Dal staff was called back to work yesterday and so I was here yesterday working. Of course, I wasn't really expecting to be working - although I am glad that I was - so it was a very weird day. Needless to say, the building is empty except for those die hard grad students and a few others that I'm moderately convinced live here.

In my trip down to Barrington Street last night I saw some of the damage in that area. It was pretty bad on some streets. However, I can see that considerable progress has been made towards getting some of it restored and that is a good thing. I guess that barring some weird issue, my life is more or less back to normal. I do have to clean all the spoiled food from my fridge and get some new food, but other than that, I'm back in action. Cheers.

In all of the commotion showing various people the photos that Chris took on my camera, I forgot to post them here. There are some pretty good pictures in there that really show the damage from the day after the hurricane. Also, we are keeping a gallery of pages with photos on the computer science website. Luckily most people have their power back on and the city is returning to some degree of normallacy. Of course, saying that, my aunt doesn't have power yet and it is now almost a full week since it went out.

I updated my OS on my laptop today - to OSX 10.2.8 and all was going well. It asked me to restart - as one would expect after installing a system upgrade. When it started up again, I noticed that something was different, the Dock was normal. A long time ago, I installed software called TransparentDock that allowed me to tweak certain settings of my Dock - various colours and opacity. This allowed me to have it looking the way that I wanted. And through all the OS upgrades I have done since then, this was fine. But not this time. So I tried to run TransparentDock again and I clicked to apply my settings and voila - my Dock was gone! Well I did a bit of searching online and determined that the best course of action was to reinstall the upgrade. So I did that and now I have my Dock back. I guess I'll have to live with the way it looks for now. :)

This is more or less a warning for those people who were/are in a similar situation. Apparently there are a number of people who had similar troubles. Sneaky, sneaky sir.

Well. My iPod is "broken", in so much as it doesn't seem to want to read from the disk. This is obviously a problem for a device that is essentially a hard drive on steriods. The music isn't an issue, I have it all on my laptop, but it is the fact that this thing cost hundreds of dollars and now it doesn't work. I was hoping to get a few years out of it. So I am going to call the AppleCare people in the morning and see if they can take it. Or maybe how to fix it. I'm pretty sure that I can get them to fix it because I won't be buying from Apple again if they don't. :) And you can be sure that they will be getting dicussed here.

So I will definitely let you know how that goes - the tales of my sick iPod. Cheers.

I'll admit that the last person you will find following politics is myself. I know that Canada has a Prime Minister and I think that I know what his name is, but not much more. However, I do listen to the radio in the morning and apparently the fine folks down in California think that the esteemed Mr. Schwarzenegger is their best choice of governor. I realize that he is a movie star and that has a certain appeal, and that for all I know he is a fine politician, but can you imagine losing to the Kindergarden Cop? heh. I guess they have done worse... I mean... dubya.

If you are a frequent user of the Ctrl Key - specifically the Left one, then you know that it just isn't in the right place. Or possibly you are in the school whereby you accidentally hit the CapsLock key whenever you type an 'A'. In either case, I have found some resources that enable you to remap your modifier keys.

On MacOSX: uControl - Also has some nice other features such as virtual scroll wheel, good for laptop users like myself.

On Windows: Mucking about in the Registry is one way to do this, there may be utilities, but you can simply add this to the Registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ Keyboard Layout\Scancode Map set to a binary value: (make sure to backup this branch of the registry first, I haven't tested this.) 00000000 00000000 03000000 3A001D00 1D003A00 00000000

On Linux: A couple ways I have found are to add this line to your X server config file: Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:swapcaps" apparently it is in there but commented out in the default. There is another way that will let you do it in the console is: echo 'keycode 58 = Control' | loadkeys

Now (X)Emacs will be so much easier to use.

For men. Apparently research is being done - and finalized on a horomone based birth control method for men that would last for 3 months. Essentially it would render your sperm immotile and have no long-term side effects. It would be administered by injection - every 3 months or so. I'm not sure what the numbers are on its effectiveness at preventing pregnancy but it certainly poses an interesting alternative/suppliment to existing methods.

I for one would be willing to get said shots if the effectiveness was high enough. I mean at this point women are already using horomone altering methods as birth control - ie. the pill, and if I can do my part in that arena, why not? Obviously this doesn't protect against STI's but I know that in most guys minds, pregnancy is the most troubling issue. It is certainly interesting. I'll try to find out more information.

Word is we are getting a bit of a storm in Halifax again today. It's not a part of a hurricane or tropical storm, just a nasty low pressure system that has shifted our way. It is expected that this will cause gusts of wind up to 90+ km/h - not Juan speeds, but more than we usually see. It is predicted that this will cause some power loss to the currently weakened grid. People are advised to get their batteries and candles ready.

Well... that really sucks eh? I just thought that I'd post this because I know that up until about a month ago, I never listened to the news or anything and never heard about this kind of stuff. So I wanted to give my news deprived readers a chance to prepare themselves. I'm sure there may be more to say about this after the storm, when I likely won't have power. Bleh.

Wow, what a weekend. I realize that it isn't over yet, but I spent the last two days in PEI and it certainly feels like it was the weekend. The reason that I was there is for the APICS conference. APICS stands for the Atlantic Provinces Council on the Sciences. (I'm not sure where the 'I' comes from - maybe in provinces.)

APICS or no, what this weekend boiled down to was the programming competition. This year Dalhousie sent three teams. My team consisted of Jesse Rusak, Chris Bebbington and myself. We were well prepared, having been practicing for weeks and when we got there we were ready for a good competition. Unfortunately, that isn't entirely what we got. I will say that I had an amazing time. I had fun, and I got to hang out with 11 other amazing people. (There were 3 teams and 3 coaches). However, during the competition there were some issues with test data which we definitely felt slighted by. Two of the questions had errors in them and we feel it affected our times. That only really matters because we came third. Out of 24 teams. But we were only beaten by 16 minutes (by the way that these competitions are timed - which is kind of hard to explain.) And this wouldn't really matter except that now we have no idea if we are going to be going to Rochester in three weeks for the regional competition. They always take at least two teams, in the past few years they have taken more because of participation in this division. I guess we won't know for a week or so.

But not considering the issues surrounding that, as I mentioned, I had a great time. This weekend was basically akin to travelling with a sports team, only much more geeky and no one (not even our coaches) is allowed to watch us perform. However, the atmosphere was the same and that isn't something that I have ever really had the pleasure of experiencing before. And obviously this whole thing wouldn't have been possible without the generous backing of the Dean of Computer Science, Dr. Nick Cercone and the hardwork and long hours put in by our coaches, Tony Cox, Vlado Keselj and Marc Comeau. Thank you.

In case you got curious as to what I am counting down to on the left side of the website, let me fill you in. Unix systems keep track of dates using a timestamp which is the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970. This poses some issues with running out of numbers in 2038, but that is not what I am talking about. I am talking about the date and time for which the Unix timestamp is 1234567890. That date isn't for a while as you can see by the countdown, but those who are curious might like to know that it is February 13, 2009 at 19:31:30. And even more interesting is the fact that that date happens to be a Friday - Friday the 13th. Good times will be had by all. FYI

I just learned this morning that my programming competition team will be going to Rochester to compete in the regional contest. We were told that there was a good chance that we would be, but now I guess it has been confirmed. So now begins the labourious process of training to a point where we can beat MIT and Harvard - and SMU. :)

Well - I didn't even know that it had been shipped, but my TV arrived today right to my office. Luckily I have the packing slip, because it strikes me that it might be a fun time trying to get this thing out of the building. Not because of its size and weight (I have Chris to help with that) but because I will be trying to get a large piece of equipment out of a building that has a lot of electronics in it.

In case I forgot to mention it when I made the order, the TV is a Prima 24" Flat screen TV. I ordered it on Oct 9 from FutureShop.ca.

Well... the release of Apple's new Panther Operating System is today. I know that they are releasing it at 8pm - but I'm not sure what time zone that might be in. I actually ordered this software online a couple of days ago. I realize now that because of the educational discount I saved $80. It still came to about $100, but it shouldn't be bad for what it offers. You can check that out at the OSX Website.

In other laptop-related news I tried to install KDE on it and I'm not sure but I think it had an issue with the downloads. I was using FinkCommander which is essentially a port of the debian apt-get system (which isn't as good as Gentoo's Portage system.) I will work on it a bit more and see what I can come up with. Mac's are sexy.

On more or less a whim I went out and bought a suit today. I just got back in fact. I needed a new one because my old one was getting a tad small. The pants haven't fit me for a while and well... that isn't much of a suit is it. So I went to Moores and got a nice black suit that actually does fit me. They also fixed me up with a nice pair of dress shoes. They pulled out some size 13 shoes for me to wear while trying on the suit and they were quite comfortable. I can't even get regular sneakers in size 13 that are big enough. And that was pretty much my excitement for today. :)

One hour tonight. It is that time of the year when we lose our daylight savings time. We get to live 1:00 to 1:59 twice! This is just a reminder to everyone and a way to help myself remember too.

I went to brunch today at Howe Hall... no big news there, I do that every week. However, as I was walking back to Glengary I was followed by someone. This also isn't a big deal. Just some random person headed in the same direction I was. I got down almost to the corner of LeMarchant and University Ave, when I heard, "Excuse me, can I take a picture of your head?" I turn around and there is this woman standing there and she was getting a camera out of her bag. "I don't normally take pictures of the faux paranormal, but that is really cool." She indicated that she need something to stand on so we went around to the front of the library where she stood on one of the big rocks and quickly snapped a picture of my head. She said thank you and then proceeded to run into the Student Union building. Now the SUB isn't far from the Library, but clearly it must have been in her best interest to run there. Weird.

To clear the story up a bit, for those of you who haven't seen me since Friday morning - I have a bat shaved into the back of my head this time. I'll post a photo at some point once it grows in better. And yes I have had a lot of people comment on my head shavings, but I think this is the only time that a stranger has asked for a photo.

We had another exciting practice last night and again it was only us solving questions. There is something about really tricky questions and no competition that sucks the fun out of this whole process. We haven't nailed down exactly when we will be leaving, but it will likely be on Friday, November 7 and returning either on Sunday or Monday depending on what events we are required to attend. :)

The Panther has arrived. Packaged in it's sexy black and silver box, the next line of Apple OS X has finally arrived. It is certainly sexy though. I wasn't sure that a simple upgrade would be worth it for $100, but now that I have installed it, I see that it definitely is.

On an Apple related note, I have sent my sick iPod off to AppleCare so that they can work their magic. I have no idea how long it will take, but it means that I don't have to buy a new one then I'm up with that.

For those of you who will likely install Panther at some point, I just wanted to give a rundown of what you get on the discs. Panther ships with 4 CDs. Disc 1 is the main install disc. At some point you must be able to customize the install because when it asked for Disc 2 it said "You have specified options which are on another disc, please insert disc 2." Disc 2 just contains a boatload of languages that you will likely not need, like Finnish and Norwegian. It installs about 12 languages at least on the default and I know for a fact that those language files take up a fair bit of space. There are programs for removing the extra languages that are listed in my MacWorld magazine - I will post those when I get home.

The third disc isn't required during the install. A lot of people won't need it at all. It contains Additional fonts for languages like Arabic, Cherokee and a few I didn't even recognize. Skipped that. It contains drivers for some sort of Epson printer - shipped that too. Interestingly it had software for reading a Common Access Card, which I guess is some sort DND thing. Don't need that. The only interesting software on it was the Panther version of X11. If you are a traditional Mac user, you likely won't care about this, but people with Unix/Linux backgrounds will be interested in the upgraded X Server from Apple. It now supports full screen and is supposedly faster than before. I will know more once I get a chance to test it. And the forth disc - the Developer Tools is where you find XCode and other goodies that allow you to turn your Mac into a sexy development house. Good luck and enjoy Panther.