After the plane that was to take us from Montreal to Vancouver was delayed in arriving in Montreal it delayed us boarding the plane. Once we were boarded, they announced that the Cara employees in Montreal had walked off the job that afternoon and the managers were scrambling to get the meals ready for the flight. That delayed us about 20-25 minutes — which in turn meant our ground crew had disappeared to another flight. So all told I think our plane left an hour later than expected. Needless to say, there was much worry about connecting flights. I wasn't that concerned — figuring that we were carrying at least half of the flight to Victoria from Montreal. Fortunately the same lack of eastern wind that slowed down the arrival of the Montreal bound plane helped us arrive only 25 minutes behind schedule. Just enough time to sit in the gate area for Victoria as they announced pre-boarding. The last leg was pretty uneventful.

Now I'm sitting in my room — fully aware that it is after 5 AM at home and thinking that I should hit the sack. :) After all, breakfast is only available until 9:00.

I'm sitting in the Chisel Lab at UVic right now and poaching some unprotected wireless. Of course, this is a research building, so odds are my packets are being harvested for nefarious uses. In any case, I'm able to get online and get my internet fix. The campus is quite beautiful — as you can see I found some of the bunnies. However I am going on a tour of the campus at 14:30 (18:30 ADT). The people I've met so far are great — I no longer have any apprehension about coming here for my Masters. Even the air smells sweeter, but that might have something to do with the huge amounts of flowers on campus.

So all told I am well. Breakfast was good once I figured out what the system was. I'm not sure how many people are staying on my floor, but I've only seen one other person since I checked in. The room is nice, and hopefully by tonight I'll have my Internet setup so I can upload some photos of it.

• Finger Print Scanners track truancy — They say that this is for a college — clearly this isn't Dal where they don't care what you do as long as they get paid.

• Forget-me-not panties — This one seems a little suspect to me. Otherwise an interesting concept. Let's all get together and violate the privacy of those we love the most.

The more I read the news the more amazed I become of the human condition. We really know how to fuck things up don't we?

• Oxytocin for everyone — Trust me.

• dot xxx — I actually think this is a good idea and have often wondered why it didn't happen a long time ago.

I realize that I haven't seen all that UVic and Victoria have to offer, but I feel as though I belong in this university, working with these people. I have been made so welcome and finally see a group of people working on ideas that all excite me. It is quite an experience and although I am looking forward to going home after this trip, I am also looking forward to coming back here in the fall.

Today I took the opportunity to see the athletic facility which is beautiful and I went downtown as well with Irwin, another visiting student. And when I went to supper tonight at Felicita's (which is the campus pub/bar) I met up with someone from the Chisel Lab who was there with friends and ended up hanging out for a couple of hours. Tomorrow Jenny is going to show me a bit more of the city — and I'm going to keep my eyes open for a place to live. Then I'm off to the airport for a red eye flight back to Halifax. Whee.

A couple of days ago, mike posted about a puzzle game that he found, and asked people to let him know about any other puzzle games they found. Well Wooden Puzzle isn't exactly the same, but it is challenging. I think I might make a Flash version because we all know that I'm not a huge Java fan.

Due to a lot of not sleeping and not having the Internet, I didn't get a chance to say that I returned safe and sound from my trip out to Victoria. There is something about flying through the night that really distorts your sense of time. But all is well and I have had a chance to rest and relax — hopefully shaking any jet lag I might have experienced.

I did manage to get a chance to drive around Victoria looking at various apartment buildings, writing down phone numbers and addresses and all that. Many thanks to Jenny for being my tour guide while I was out there. I definitely feel optimistic about this whole move.

That highly anticipated event that all Mac fans (users or otherwise) look forward to as a herald for new and exciting things in the world of Apple Computers. The keynote address kicks off at 10:00 PDT which is 14:00 ADT. At that point live coverage will be available at Mac Rumors Live. I won't be providing live coverage on my site like I did last year, but I may comment on things that happen in a relatively immediate and spontaneous way. I will likely archive the textual proceeding at the end of it all, again like I did for WWDC 2004

Well I guess it is official — I am now an alumnus of Dalhousie University. Sure I got my Alumni Pin two weeks ago at convocation, but as of yesterday, my home directory on torch now resides in /users/alumni/. Nothing is more clear an indication than that.

However, you may have noticed that for a while yesterday, that my website was returning an Internal Server Error (500). This it turns out was a repercussion of my account migration to its new home in the alumni filesystem. However, I know the right people to talk to get something like that resolved and I hope that it wasn't too much of an inconvenience.

I was going to post about the Mac World Wide Developers Conference keynote yesterday, but to be frank I was a little disappointed. Steve just talked about his new love-in with Intel and that was it. The reports I read about it were pretty weak, so I will reserve total judgement until I see a video feed of the event.

For those interested, my grad photo proofs are available online for comments.

This is really the first summer that I have been at home for any length of time. The past few summers have either been spent working in Halifax or in school — again in Halifax. However, as I have finished up with my work in Halifax and I don't start school at UVic until September, I get to spend a couple of lovely months at home.

For those who haven't been for a visit, my family has a pool — one they installed after I left for university. So while I have enjoyed it from time to time on visits, I never really had to take care of the pool maintenance that many casual swimmers take for granted. I had seen my brothers and my father work at it, but I basically watched from the sidelines. This summer I got to learn — really fast — how to filter, drain, vacuum and scrub the pool. And having been the only one home during the day for the later half of this week, I took on the task of getting the pool clean enough to swim in. And now it is. In fact today was around 30°C here and while the water was only 22°C it was certainly a welcome refuge from the heat.

Definitely a fine movie for anyone who is a fan of the action genre and/or either Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. Despite a little technical trouble with the theatre we were in, the movie was amazing. All I'm going to say is that I found the performances of both leads to be amazing.

One that pisses me off a lot is when people ask me for assistance with HTML and then when I make a comment about the fact that something should be done a certain way to be standard compliant I get: "Well it [still] works this way."

Goddamn it — that isn't the point! I have some tolerance for people who grew up like I did with HTML 1, 2, 3, 4 and are simply not evolving properly. But when someone is new in the web field and they are simply not willing to learn things the proper way — that is the problem. And clearly there are still people out there providing antiquated references and instruction. Stop it, stop it now!

With Pzizz from Brainwave Enterprises.

I've tested their napping software and it is pretty good. They now have a sleep module which lets you "turn off" at the end of the day for a good night's sleep. I haven't tried it yet, but if you ever have trouble falling asleep at night, then this might be the software for you. Audio can be exported to MP3 for use on portable devices as well.

Yes, I have had more grueling weeks in my days, but last week was certainly crazy with a different twist. One that didn't have me sitting at the computer endlessly or even writing anything down at all. It did involve throwing things out, moving things around and putting things together. It was week of non stop cleaning of our house in order to prepare for a largish family get together at our place this weekend. And clean is what happened. Everything went perfectly, except unfortunately the weather. Not that it was terrible, it just wasn't pool weather.

One of the major changes worth mentioning was the fact that we entirely overhauled our rec. room. This is the room where all of our family computers have lived. The predominant piece of furniture in this room was a large wooden table that was over seven feet long and three and a half feet wide and home to probably over ten computers of various shapes and sizes over the course of 15 years it was here. Of course, an important fact to note is that it is — and always has been — far too high to use a computer at comfortably. Armed with my more recent knowledge of ergonomics — not to mention a touch of RSI to make things fun, I declared to my family, that it was no longer suitable to have this beast of a table — which is otherwise a fine sturdy table — in our rec. room.

So while we were madly cleaning, we also managed to take this table out onto our screened in deck where it is much more appreciated. A bit more shuffling and a trip to Staples has landed us with a much more suitable computing environment. We added three new — and relatively inexpensive — desks to replace that table and with the addition of my desk which fortunately matches the colour of at least two of the new desk, we have quite the setup. We even managed to organize the tangled mess that was our router which despite having all eight ports in use, only really needed four of those — with the helpful addition of my switch.

So this is the story of why I haven't been able to do much this past week. But now I have finished my latest book I was reading and I think I can get started on some other projects as well. Oh yes — and bask by the pool. :)

The opening paragraph in an article by the Register says it all:

You make the world's best browser. It's smaller and faster than Internet Explorer, and a lot more secure, and every year you think up new ideas that make browsing easier. Then a rival appears that steals your ideas and yet only manages to produce a slower, clunkier and feature limited version of your browser - and the press reacts as if it's just discovered the internet for the first time. What do you do?

It's nice to have a pool. :)

More company coming which means mowing the lawn in less than optimal conditions — ie. too hot. Not only that — despite the fact I was wearing mosquito netting around my head the black flies were able to get through and feast on my face. I of course thought I was safe and kept mowing. They got me all right — as I noticed when I went in for some water. I guess you have to take the good with the bad. :P

I saw this comic and I thought of... well myself and pretty much everyone I know.