Today my new cell phone arrived. I ended up ordering a Samsung X426. The funny thing is that about two hours after I ordered the phone I decided that I didn't actually want it. Luckily their '7 to 10 business days' turned out to be less than two days. It is a nicer phone than the reviews said, but it doesn't have an external display (it is a flip phone). I have my eye on one of the Nokia models - the 3100. It is a little heavier than the one I got, but apparently gets better reception and has much better battery life. If anyone has any comments on my choices, please let me know. I have 30 days/30 minutes to decide.

I just witnessed someone washing their feet in the sink in the bathroom on the third floor of the CS building. I realize that this is a thing that a lot of the Muslim students do before they pray, but doing it in a busy public washroom is kind of gross. In retrospect it didn't distust me so much as surprised me that someone would actually put their feet in the sinks in this building.

I'm also sitting here wondering why I ate so much at Howe Hall for lunch. Well the reason was because I could, but I guess I'm more questioning my judgement at this point as my stomach isn't in the best mood that I have ever seen. Maybe a can of Mountain Dew is the answer.

I can see why it has been getting such rave reviews. That movie was funny in a way that only a cartoon can get away with. But the humour was edgy - almost to the point where I'm not sure how many younger kids would get most of it. That is the appeal I guess... the fact that kids can watch for the fun, emotive characters and adults get to laugh at cleverly disguised crude jokes. I loved it. I didn't doubt that I would - and I would go so far as to say that I enjoyed it more than the original Shrek movie. From what I've heard there will be more Shreks to come although I'm not sure where they might go from here.

If you haven't seen it, go see it in theatres - spoil yourself perhaps - because this is one movie that is seriously worth it.

Which I guess would be just tomorrow at this point, since I actually saw the movie yesterday. I have heard people bad mouthing this movie - and I can only imagine what the 'real critics' think. However, criticism of a movie is person subjective thing. You can argue on certain facts about the quality of this aspect and that aspect, but when it boils down to it, those things might not matter to me. What I am trying to say is that I really liked "The Day After Tomorrow". That being said, I also really liked "The Core". I guess I went into the movie not expecting a documentary - which is what it sounds like some people think movies are supposed to be. I was entertained, I enjoy disaster movies, I like special effects that let me escape the fact that once I step out of that theatre I am still in Halifax and I can't fly. So if you can watch a movie for movie's sake, then I would recommend this one. Otherwise, I don't want to hear about it.

Well... I'm sure that the Internet is going to be flooded by hockey fans everywhere posting the results of tonight's Stanley Cup game seven. I didn't watch the game, nor did I care to, but based on what the radio tells me and judging by the profanity coming out of mike's room a few moments ago I think that Calgary lost. That means that the Tampa Bay Lightning are this year's Stanley Cup Champions. I know that almost every Canadian was hoping for Calgary to bring Lord Stanley's cup north of the 49th again. I guess that will have to wait - for now it gets to go somewhere that I would never have believed that would foster a decent hockey team - Florida. :P

I have been seeing more and more sloppy programming everyday and it is starting to get to me. I guess this is one of those software engineering traits coming out in me. I would like to think that quality control is on the top of people's minds, but at the same time I can see how it might slip through the cracks. Obviously left to their own devices, programmers are most interested in getting the job done and not in learning and doing it properly. Obviously web programming is what I refer to with most of my comments as that is what I am most familiar with. You can be an excellent programmer but that won't necessarily make you a good web developer. And knowing php or asp really well doesn't make you one either. Experience and a little bit of common sense go a long way. You can't just start with experience I realize, but it shouldn't take you very long. This rant could go off in a lot of different directions and I don't think that I really want to do that. I'm liable to offend a few people. I think that at some point in the next couple weeks I will write up an article on how to properly plan and develop small applications for the web. I think that many people will learn a fair bit from it, I'm sure that I will. Until then remember - when you pull something out of a database and you know/desire that there will only be one record, use an if () statement, not a while () loop!

If anyone else is interested, Apple released an update to their Power Mac G5 line today - introducing a dual 2.5 GHz G5 machine that boast serious performance. Performance increases of 78% over a dual 3.2 GHz Xeon machine for example in one of the Adobe Photoshop tests. They have 1.25 GHz front side buses on these new models and the part that some of you will enjoy - they are liquid cooled for an even quieter experience.

Also of more interest to you hold outs - the Airport Express was released that lets you easily set up a wireless base station with a usb print server and wireless music. It includes AirTunes which will allow iTunes users to stream their music to a stereo or powered speakers which can plug right into the base station. The station itself can also act as a repeater or access point for an existing network and supports the full wireless functionality of the Airport Extreme Base station - including WEP, WPA and other settings. And you PC users will be happy to know that it will work with any 802.11g wireless cards/adapters/networks.

All of this comes a couple weeks before the WWDC - which is very unusual for Apple, they usually wait to unveil new products... my hope is that this is just the small peak of the mountain that is to come on June 28.

Just read an article entitled WHAT's going on? from sitepoint. Talks about a new group that is taking a look at web applications and web standards from a technology platform perspective. Essentially, Opera, Mozilla, and Apple (Safari) are getting together and trying to keep Microsoft from absolutely fucking things up for everyone. It is interesting, because for once I feel that I have some insight into a field which is undergoing some serious evaluation. While it is true that my opinion might not mean much to the web standards community now, it very well might in the not so distant future. I'll keep you in the loop for this. Cheers.

Damnit!! I have been on the phone for the past hour and a half trying to get some sort of help with my stupid cellphone and so far nothing. After a successful first week, I thought that it would be fine with my new phone and that I wouldn't return it after all. However after charging it yesterday, I used it twice last evening only to find out that this morning it was dead. So I brought it into work and tried to charge it... but that wasn't working either. The phone wouldn't respond. When I tried to show mike the problem this afternoon, wouldn't you know it... it started charging. So I charged it up and then after work decided to walk down to the Rogers store (again - I was there yesterday) and see if they could take it back.

Nope. Apparently because I used the phone for more than 30 minutes, I was dead to them. In all fairness, I don't blame Kelly, she has been helpful in the past. She told me to try calling Customer Care again. So I did - and I waited my turn and eventually I got to talk to another representative who told me what Kelly told me. I used more than the 30 minutes and so there was nothing that I could do through Rogers. Well... all this time I'm cursing the 30 minutes under my breath and realizing that it is a gimmick because they know that the phone will likely crap out after you have used it for like an hour - or in my case almost 2 hours. So the guy gave me the number for Samsung and sent me on my way.

So I called Samsung not really believing that they would be able to do anything. About that I was right, but I certainly enjoyed the call more. I spoke with Christy and she was really nice and managed to at least deliver bad news in a way that didn't evoke the desire to jam the phone receiver through her eye. She also mentions that of all the carriers in North America, Rogers is the only one with that stupid 30 minute rule. She told me to bring it in and get a technician to check the battery and phone and they might need to repair it... but the phone is only a week old!!! But of course that means I am stuck with this phone which I'm not going to be able to trust, that I bought under misleading pretenses on the Rogers website and that was way more expensive than it is worth. When really I would like either a Nokia 3100 or possibly a Sony Ericsson T616. I even said that if I could trade I'd take the even more expensive T616 if that would make any different.

So all told I'm pretty pissed. Is this how they treat customers of 2+ years? So spread the word... whichever word that you want. I'm going to try and make some calls a little higher up if I can, but I don't know if that will help. Grr.

I just read this little piece from Dave Shea over at mezzoblue. Made me think about the way that I interact with my clients. Others might be interested as well.

At least that is what I keep telling myself. I have spent the past couple nights working pretty much all out on various projects. The last assignment for my class was pretty brutal. Not taxing like Algos, but tedious and generally a bit to much result for an assignment that was supposed to emphasize the process of collaborative design. That being said, you can check out our results - the new gradweb page.

Also of note... Apple release the iTunes Music store in the UK, France and Germany. Which is good, in that it would make it appear that Apple is expanding that service, but I still have no idea when the iTMS will be available in Canada. Hopefully soon.

More and more these days you will find companies that use instant messengers to communicate in their corporate/business environment. What I'm trying to say is that sometimes you want to be able to keep your chat logs and possibly even search through them. Now if you use iChat, you can do that with a tool called Logorrhea. It's free and essentially serves to let you search and browse your iChat logs. (Make sure that you have turned on the logging functionality in the iChat preferences.)

A news article crossed my desk today which interested me. It discusses the recent Bill passed in the states regarding spyware. I'm sure that mike knows all about this since digital privacy is his recent thing. But I think, with only having read this one article, that it is a step in the right direction as far as stupid, annoying and occasionally harmful software invading your privacy. However, on the other hand, I implore everyone to try Opera at least once. It is a really great browser with so many great features that IE users yearn for on a daily basis. The only problem that I have is that the default configuration of the browser has all of these features and extra toolbars visible so that it can be overwhelming. However, if people could only see the clean interface that I have they would grow to love it. I can see that this post is veering madly off topic so that's about it from me.

I had an inspiration on Friday that it would be nice if I were to surprise my parents with a visit this weekend. After all... it is Father's Day (today I guess :)) and I don't get home very often despite only living 1.5 hours away. So I boarded the bus this morning and headed home. After 2.5 hours on the bus and many pages read in my book, I was in New Glasgow. Of course, this is where I would have had problems with not telling anyone - it is a 20 minute drive from New Glasgow to my place. So my brother was in on the plan and was surprisingly faithful in being there when my bus got in. We then went to my brother's soccer game where my parents were. I must say that the reaction was all that I had hoped for.

So now I am at my laptop having finished watching the obligatory movie in the living room with the family. We are avid movie watchers in my family and we have quite an impressive collection that has quite a breadth of scope. And so every weekend, at least two or three movies are watched - this time it was Love Actually which is actually one from my personal collection - and an amazing film for those who haven't seen it.

I also managed to get into the pool as well, despite it not being really all that warm. In fact it was warmer underwater than above. After the customary game of water 'volleyball' we all crawled out to the solace of dry towels. I am hoping that tomorrow is a bit warmer, but I'm not going to hold my breath after checking the weather forecast. And although I didn't get a chance to wrassle some livestock, I am glad that I decided to come down even for one night.

I think we can all agree that relationships between people are never alike. They are kind of like snowflakes that way, each one a result of incalculable experiences and events. Typically there would be some really beautiful snowflakes and I can imagine some really ugly ones too. Generally speaking, people have a good idea what a snowflake is supposed to look like, but in the long run, that doesn't really matter, because snowflakes are just crystalized water.

Mike recently wrote an article where he writes: "Why waste your time, emotions, and affection on someone who you KNOW you will end up leaving eventually?"

However, I think that there is something inherently wrong with thinking that. There were a few points that I disagreed with in his article, but this one sticks out. I also think that this substantiates my snowflake idea. I will agree that staying in a relationship that makes you unhappy is a pretty shitty idea, even if you do believe that you will be together forever. Of course I have been in this situation, so I can attest that it isn't easy to make these calls. I do however believe that there is no harm in having fun in a relationship even if it has a life expectancy of only a week or two. I had friends in high school that I knew that I wouldn't talk to ever again after graduation, but that doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy the times we had and it didn't stop me from making other new friends. We all end up leaving eventually, why not enjoy it while it lasts. As I said, I don't think you should linger in any detrimental situation, so if you are worrying that you are wasting your time with a relationship then by all means dissolving it might be best, but don't burn any bridges. :)

More often than once this past week I had something somewhat interesting to say on here, and the odd thing is that I can't remember any of it. Clearly it wasn't that important. Tonight my brother is staying with me - and we ordered pizzas from Alexandra's. This is my usual choice when it comes to pizza, but tonight the pizza was really watery. The box was actually developing holes because of the moisture on one of the pizzas. Maybe it is the feta cheese, but whatever caused it it was kind of disturbing. That didn't stop us from eating the entire pizza. :)

Nothing particularly exciting happened at work this past week, although Friday afternoon a big shipment of IBM PCs showed up destined for the EDGE lab up on the fourth floor and all of these boxes had nice 20" IBM LCD monitors. So this basically wrote off any work that I would have gotten done on Friday afternoon, so I went out and got the society BBQ underway. The BBQ was quite successful and the Geekbeer that followed it had some excellent live performances.

Tomorrow is the big day and by that I mean the Apple World Wide Developers Conference in San Franscisco. The event actually takes place all of this next week, but the main feature for me (since I am not attending) is the keynote address which takes place tomorrow. This address is given by Steve Jobs and each year they use this event to release new products and showcase their newest and coolest technology.

This year amoung other things - they always have a lot of surprises - Steve will be showcasing Tiger, the next version of OS X. In the past month Apple released the Airport Express and the new line of G5s so there is a lot of speculation as to what cool things will be unveiled tomorrow. I was able to find some screenshots over at ThinkSecret.com and there are other articles there about what is expected - like the new Cinema Displays which will be released in 20", 23" and sexy 30" sizes. I read that they will look different than the current displays - sporting the brushed aluminum look of the Powerbooks and the G5s.

That being said, another big Mac event is the MacWorld Expo which takes place in Boston in July. Typically there are cool things released here too. However, I don't see Jobs on the speaker list so I'm not sure that grand things will come out of it.

I am grabbing text from the Developers Conference and posting it here: wwdc2004.txt This content is taken from MacRumors

Earlier I alluded to a shipment of sexy monitors and PCs that came in. Whenever that happens, there are going to be boxes left behind - these boxes are often piled up outside my office. So Jon and I took the initiative today after "the bosses" left to build a creation out of these boxes. The following pictures should pretty much depict what it is that we created.