Archive - 2006

Just wanting to send out my e-Wishes to each of you to have a Merry Christmas!

The Ontario government is praising the performance of their new HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes in Toronto (article). I hope that they are going well, it seems like a pretty good idea... the article referenced above even indicates that they'll expand the number of them, not only in Toronto, but in Ottawa as well. The only HOV lane in Ottawa that I can think of is on one of the bridges to Hull... if you've got 2 or more in your car you can take the HOV/bus lane there.

Meg and I went out and purchased our first wee little Christmas tree this weekend. So the house is looking a little bit festive. That's certainly one of the things I've missed since living on my own, my mom's house was always decorated in early December.

As you can see, the tree is certainly wee. We decided that due to a small set of decorations, and us not spending christmas at our place this year, that we'd only go small. But it's all rigged up with lights and decorations that I've received throughout my life. The coolest thing is that it's still alive... as you can see it's potted (and a wee bit crooked, I may have to correct that soon ;) so when we're done with it this season it'll go upstairs on the deck for awhile before being replanted somewhere.

I hope you and yours have a splendid time this holiday season!

Well, as a member of our (what is now small) board of directors for my favourite ultimate association, it's fallen to me to help move our web team through the upgrade process for our drupal installation. Currently it's running at 4.5.2 and I'd like to get it up to 4.7, and depending on the time 5.0 is released, maybe to there. It's not going to be an easy thing though, as the previous version has been tied into our league management system (Leaguerunner) and so there is some customization - which I'm not sure I'm the best to do - that will have to be involved.

Well, Kev and I are back at it, training for our long distance running endeavours... Okay, so Kev's are probably more endeavours, mine are certainly more in the struggle category.

We're not necessarily training for the marathon this year, in fact, I'll only be running the half come Ottawa Race Weekend. But we'll be training as if it's the marathon I guess. My goal is to try to get to the point where I don't need to take breaks, and run the half straight through. Oh, and to see if I can lose some of this extra weight I've been carrying around for the last 10 years.

I've got a new roomie, Meg moved into my house this past weekend. I'm sure there will be some little bumps as we both adjust to living with each other, but I'm really happy she's here. It's very nice to have someone to go home to. :)

Arrgh, I'm furious after reading this Toronto Star article on the new legislation being tabled by the Conservatives for the environment.

A goal by 2050 (44 years from now) of reducing emissions to be 45 to 65% less than todays. Wow... a whole 1% or so a year. You think we could do better.

No regulation of industrial polluters for another 4 years. Gotta love the consultation phase.

Intensity targets, what a farce. These don't put a cap on emissions but instead limit energy used per unit of production. How is that going to clean things up?

Wow, I got quite a treat today courtesy of my girlfriend's roommate Adam Martin. Adam, you see, won a contest on the radio last week while I was in Minneapolis. This contest allowed him to bring along a guest to be one of 6 people to watch a radio interview with the lead singer of the Tragically Hip, Gord Downie. With the bands next release, World Container, targeted for tomorrow we were treated to new CDs, autographs, a photo with Gord and a chance to watch and ask questions during the interview.

So, in my recent travels I was thinking about ways to make passwords more secure. I'm always afraid that some Internet cafe I'm in has some sort of keylogging software/device installed or something and that my passwords are going to be scammed. As my girlfriend Meg pointed out, you can do some obfuscation of your own by clicking around and entering the password and other characters in on different lines/input areas... but I think there could be another fairly easy way as well.

Cryptography uses one-time codes or one-time pads to provide people with what are disposable encryption keys essentially.

Seems I wasn't actually hacked while away. I must have got a new IP address and there must have been a problem with my dynamic dns update script. Oh well, should be fixed now. Sorry.