Sarah emptied out her camera and her pictures from the recent CS Halloween party are available from her website.

Well, it turns out that the groundhog saw his shadow and the Americans have to suffer four more years of bad leadership. I think that is how that goes anyway. I didn't see the final distribution map, but it looks like the country was divided up pretty much as it was during the civil war - with the backwards south voting Bush (my apologies to the civilized in the south) and the north siding with the rest of the world to get Kerry in the oval office. But apparently there are more right-wing hicks in the states than previously estimated. That is all I am going to mention on the election because my political knowledge is pretty small.

If you have been a reader long enough, you might have an idea of how I feel about designing for the web. Well, Marc Comeau at AboutAWebmaster.com published an article called Seven things you can't say on the web which really drives home how he (and I) feels about proper web design.

This article doesn't do justice to the feeling that I felt after seeing the report on CBS4 News from Boston, but it does tell you what happened. I just can't imagine...

Of course... considering that when I was growing up, this time of year had one of the highest concentrations of birthdays among my relatives with my aunt and both grandparents on my mother's side having a birthday within 5 days. It always felt wrong at the same time celebrating birthdays at the same time that the rest of the country is mourning the senselessness of war. Now that I am older, I have managed to meet a few more friends with birthdays in this first part of November — Happy Belated mike from Friday and Happy Birthday to Jon in about 25 minutes. :)

I went home on the weekend to celebrate the birthdays in my extended family and somehow we managed to accommodate 19 people for supper and 17 people sleeping overnight. It was quite chaotic as I'm sure you can imagine. It is interesting when you reach the point in your life when these family gatherings, although fun, become a real juggling act. When you are 7 everything just seems so exciting and you get to stay up later and eat junk and see your cousins and have a good time. Bottom line — remember to bring headphones. :)

Tonight's episode of CSI just showed a TV on which Aquateen was playing. Crazy.

I woke up this morning to what I maintain is the first snowfall of the season. Sarah says that it was flurrying on Wednesday, but I didn't see it and it clearly didn't accumulate. But today there is definitely a layer of white on the ground. I think that November 13 is a tad later than the first snowfall last year. I don't know if that is a good or bad thing, but I just hope we don't get a dangerously cold January this winter. And although I am somewhat excited about the snow, I know that come next month and especially in Jan and Feb I'll be cursing it. :)

If anyone is looking for a good movie to go and see, I recommend The Incredibles - another great Pixar masterpiece. I just got back through the snow and the slush, but it was worth it to see this movie. The characters were well animated and some of the effects are getting pretty impressive. Hair, water, fire, dust - all elements and effects that have been traditionally hard to render are in this film with few problems. I knew nothing about the story going in expect the odd preview I had seen, but that didn't matter - like all the Pixar movies, this was wholly entertaining in its own right.

The power has been flickering for the past hour or so. If I go offline tonight — it likely went out. Thank god for the UPS — although it does have screaming fits, it does last through these tiny interruptions. I also want to mention that the reason behind this power trouble I would imagine has to do with the awful wet slush that we received today. I am far less pleased about this now than I was this morning when I first noticed it was snowing. This isn't fun snow it is messy snow and that just sucks for everyone.

I neglected to mention that I received a pedicure on Tuesday. I must say that it was quite relaxing. I got to sit back and soak my feet while reading a lovely article on OSLV VPN solutions. Sarah got a manicure at the same time — we were down at Remedy Day Spa. Last Christmas Sarah had bought a gift certificate for a Gentleman's Pedicure and I just used it now. I'd hate to say that I was too lazy to get a pedicure, but I guess that is all I have in my defense.

I will say that if you haven't thought about treating yourself to a pedicure at least once, you should.

I'm not sure how many of you took the opportunity tonight to see the Christmas Parade of Lights, but it was certainly a fun time and for anyone near Dalhousie, conveniently located. :) In fact, even the weather cooperated this year - no raining on our parade :P and it wasn't -15 out there this year. The one thing I recall from watching the parade last year was how absolutely cold I was the whole time despite wearing my thick warm winter coat. This year it stayed on the happy side of zero and the new Tim Hortons and Subway in the IWK really did a fine business providing refreshments both warm and cold. I had made a point to bring my camera, but suffered from a Card Error at the last moment and so I had to settle with just watching it in person. :) It was dark and I wasn't sure how well it would photograph anyway.

I'm not sure if everyone else is as excited about this as I am, but a while ago I heard that the iTunes Music Store would be opening in Canada this month. This news followed after Apple opened new stores in 9 additional European countries. I've been patently waiting so far this month occasionally checking Apple.ca for announcements just in case my news feeds don't get it. However, recently I have read that the date for release is November 26, 2004 which is next Friday. Although this info is unconfirmed, there are estimates that the cost will be $0.99 CDN per song ($9.99 for most albums).

I guess time will tell, but I am excited. :D

The newest version of SubEthaEdit adds a few new features that are worth checking out. If you have ever wanted to work on a file with someone else simultaneously, then this is definitely something that you want to check out. If you are simply looking for a great programming editor for the Mac that really follows the Apple human interface guidelines, this is also what you need. I have been using it for a while now and it only gets more useful. It has very powerful and flexible regular expression support and this new version allows you to add or remove text from multiple lines simultaneously. The new version 2.1 also supports the ability to copy from the editor as XHTML which can then be pasted in a web log for example to show code snippets including the syntax highlighting. This example shows one of the functions I wrote for one of the questions on my networking assignment - yes it is PHP.

    static function randomNode() {
        // Chooses a random node from those
        // added with Node::addNode()
        $dnode = mt_rand(1, Node::$nodecount);
        reset(Node::$nodelist);
        while (--$dnode) {
            next(Node::$nodelist); 
        }
        return current(Node::$nodelist);
    }

I just wanted to mention that the Snowball, which took place last night, was a stunning success. Every success has its difficulties and last night was no different. Due to some initial communication issues with the Westin Hotel we were forced to go to tables of 10 instead of tables of 8. However, thanks to Mike and Pat we managed to get people seated properly. Attendance was excellent with almost 200 people sitting down to eat. The food was excellent, Mike did an awesome job as MC and the evening ran like a well oiled machine.

That. And I'm glad it is over.

I don't know if any of you dabble with Flash at all, but I just finished debugging a fiendish issue that really could have been avoided with the addition of one comment to one of the Flash help pages.

MovieClips that are attached to the stage at depths outside the range of 0 to 1048575 cannot be removed using removeMovieClip(). You will first need to swapDepths() to put the clip in that range if you want to remove it.

By chance I had changed my depths to negative values when I was experimenting early on but left them there because it didn't make any difference at the time. Well. Now I know better and I thought I'd share with others.

That's right we are taking our show on the road. This Friday (tomorrow) we are going to be hosting the Computer Science Society Night in the Grawood. The event starts at 9pm and ends at 1am which is a tad later than we are used to starting. So it is like a Geekbeer, only 4 hours shorter. The exciting part of it for me is that I don't have to do the sound gear setup and tear down - or the sound operation in between. There will be Open Mic with our very own Krafty performing for us. Depending on the open mic turnout we will likely be capping off the night with some karaoke. Just a note that the kitchen closes at 9pm so if you want a bite to eat, swing by early. I hope to see you there.

PS. Some of the proceeds from the $2 cover charge will go to Stepping Stone. For more info on the whole event, check the wiki.

I just did an assignment that isn't due until next Monday. That's right - December 6. This means that I did an assignment more than a week in advance. I'm pretty sure that this is the first time that I have done this. Certainly this term, possibly ever. It is quite a feeling to have something completed ahead of time.

If Apple plans to release the iTunes music store in Canada in November they have less than 12 hours. At least in this time zone. Since they are headquartered in California I guess they have just shy of 16 hours. *crossed fingers*