Blue Sparks

Only one more day with Rogers, and then I move on to a nice little company in Waterloo. Too bad the new job hit me with surprise paperwork today. Of course, it’s the sort that you need to fill it out or you don’t get paid. I guess I should actually take care of it…

Southern Ontario Voting

Well, I’m amazed that almost all of Ontario, Southern Ontario in particular, has voted in the Conservative party. For as long as I can remember paying attention to politics Ontario has been a Liberal party stronghold. Something has changed this time, and whether for good or bad…. we’ll see down the road.

If you look at the picture on the right, you’ll see that it is dominated by conservative voted ridings. Up north we get into some NDP (orange), and Liberal (red) ridings, but the blue is overwhelming. If you go to the interactive map ( clicking on the image should get you there ) you can zoom in and see that Toronto is still a Liberal stronghold, but that seems like all of it.

I’m always a political swing vote. I refuse to give my vote to one party from now until eternity. I will give my vote to the party whom I believe will best suit us for the next four years. I’m not really sure if Stephen Harper is our man this time around, but he was a better choice than Stephane Dion… And sadly Jack Layton won’t hold a majority in my life time. I’ve stated my opinion elsewhere that I believe Jack Layton is a good leader. On the other hand, I am not certain that the NDP are a good solution for the country at the moment.

Lastly… there’s the “Green” party. While I’m all for helping the environment, I’m not dazzled by that being their strongest issue. I would rather have a party that was strong on all fronts, and didn’t base their platform on ONE significant issue. It’s sort of like the “Bloc” being a party just for Quebec. But, that’s just my personal opinion (And, we’ll conveniently ignore the fact that the current economy was the one ‘big issue’ for most this election.)

I guess we’ll see how things turn out in the months ahead, won’t we?

Well, I’ve officially taken a new job. My (almost) six years at Rogers will be done on October 17th. It’s on to a new adventure!

I just wanted to mention some of the Firefox extension which I use to make life so much easier while developing for the web. These are tools that I make use of every day, and want to make sure that everyone knows about!

First and foremost, there is FireBug. I am so glad that Mozilla threw this in with Firefox version 2. I would have had no idea about it, at least not until someone else sang it’s praises, otherwise. This is the single most used tool that makes my job that much easier! Javascript debugging, Ajax callbacks, examining HTML, benchmarking network bottlenecks…. the list goes on! My only gripe thus far is that in Firefox version 3 there are certain HTML elements, such as buttons, which I can’t right click on and use the ‘Inspect Element’ tool. On the whole, it’s wonderful!

Next come the Firebug plugins… FirePHP is the first. This allows me to send debugging information in a HTTP header, and then view the result in the FireBug console. While I could just dump exceptions and errors straight to the screen this little gem allows me to show the same screen the user would experience in such a situation, but at the same time see detailed debugging information! It is great for use on my local development system, as well as our testing server!

After FirePHP, there is FireCookie! While, this extension isn’t as used as the above two it is still a wonderful addition to my toolset. With it I am able to see any changes to cookies in the FireBug console. Very useful while testing Ajax scripts which may or may not make changes.

Lastly… this isn’t a development tool, but interesting nonetheless. FireGPG is a tool which will encrypt/decrypt GPG blocks right in your browser window! Not highly useful, but it works and you can run into the odd encrypted block out there. It’s not a key store though, so you have to have GPG already installed and point FireGPG to it.

Hope someone finds these useful as well!

Right, new pictures are up of our trip. Right now I’ve only got our pictures, but we should get some from the rest of the family to add later as well!

Bear Lake 2008

So we arrived home from Bear Lake on Saturday, and the trip was very good! I won’t bore you with the details, but the weather wasn’t bad; it was mostly sunny with a little rain. The fishing was also pretty good. Jackie’s dad took us up into a back lake which we had to portage the canoe into, but I lost count of the number of Bass I caught up there at around 10, and that is not where the fish stopped either. We also went to Science North] one day. I was most impressed by the IMAX video we saw on the Great Lakes, which focused on the Lake Sturgeon and the attempts to restock its dwindling population.

*** WARNING, FISH STORY BELOW ***

On the topic of Big Fish I should not that while I was bass fishing with Jackie’s Dad, I happened to land a muskie (muskellunge). Let’s just say that was an experience and a half!!! I was fishing with a buzz bait on the top, hoping to get some largemouths to strike, but what I happened to get was much mroe than I bargained for. A large fish, which I first assumed was a Pike, rolled out of the water and slammed the lure. I knew it was a big fish, but estimated only about 15-20lbs from what I saw of it originally.

I’ll skip the 15 minutes of battle with the fish, and just note that I was using 8lb test line with no steel leader. This fish could have escaped me with a wrong move! By the time I got the fish up the boat Jackie’s dad informs me that we have a muskie, not a pike, and that it’s almost four feet long ( about 35 - 40lbs of fish ). I threw him the tape that I keep in my tackle box, but it only measures 36 inches. We estimated the fish was about 45-48 inches long though.

Now that we have the fish, we need to figure out what to do with it. We only have a small bass net, no cradle, and our boat is only a 12 foot aluminum. Any attempt to grab this fish is probably going to end up with us in the water, or even worse it thrashing around in our little boat! We eventually decided to beach the fish, and try to release it there. It was easy enough to get it into the shallows and on the rocks, but that’s when it got really mad. I tried to pull the hook with some pliers, but had no luck. Eventually it rolled itself up in my line and it didn’t stand a chance vs 35+ lbs of fish and no water for buoyancy.

I left the lure and pushed the fish back into the water, where it sat in the shallows for a few minutes gathering its strength again. Soon enough it skulked back into the weeds to continue on its merry life. All in all the whole episode probably took us 20 minutes or so, but it’s an experience of a lifetime I have to tell you!

To top it all off, this was the only night I *didn’t* bring my camera fishing with us. That means there is no picture, just the word of myself and my father-in-law. I caught enough fish up there during the week I don’t need to exaggerate, but I know how some people feel about fish stories!!!

I updated the Gallery a week or two ago. It’s added some photos since the last dump I did, which was probably back in November or December after we got back from Sean’s wedding.

We finished our kitchen renovations (finally)… at least for the most part. There are little things to do still, like putting the caulking along the wall and touching up paint where we messed it up, but overall it’s finished. There are some photos up in the gallery. Some are before pictures, and the others are with us at about 75% done.

On the topic of renovation, I was helping Sean put new floor in his condo with my father on Saturday. Overall things went pretty smoothly, except that my legs are absolutely killing me from being hunched over all day. There was preexisting laminate in his place, but he wanted to cover two rooms in the same colour so I picked up the old floor. That’s a project for another month though.

To top off the muscle pain, I went fishing yesterday morning in the Grand River. I always fish off the banks, and they’re not exactly easy to traverse down by mom and dad’s place. On the plus side I managed to land quite a few smallmouth bass down there! I went angling the weekend before with Jackie’s dad, Uncle Ron, and their friend Roger down in Lake Erie for bass season opening and I caught less (and was in the water much much earlier).

Fishing has actually been quite productive so far this year. Up at the SC Johnson cottages I landed a lot of bass, even though I was fishing for pike - bass weren’t in season yet. At the ponds in Mt Pleasant the same thing, bass and more bass when attempting to lure in some trout - again, bass still not open. Although the Saturday that bass season opened I only managed to get one out of the ponds.

And next week we’re up to the cottage on Bear Lake again. I’m hoping my luck holds out in the fishing area since that is where I will be spending most of my time!

If you want to set up your own site to build pictures of Pi, I have put the PiPic script up for download. It is available under the GNU GPL.

PiPic

As some of you already know I host a page on my site here which will show you 4 million digits of Pi. You may ask why, and I really couldn’t tell you. It’s just something I thought was neat, and so I did it. The calling of a true blooded nerd I guess…

Well, I took it one step further this week. I’ve heard of pages which will show you pictures of Pi before by mapping digits on to images, but they didn’t do so on demand. So I’ve taken it upon myself to help everyone out. Now you can view Pi at any resolution you would like, from 1×1 to 2048×2048. It could go larger as well, although my current script is limited in size because I have (wait for it) 4 million digits of Pi stored here (and what’s 2048×2048?).

So, if you’re nerdy enough you can check it out too:

Pi 300x300

I try to keep my praise for my brother at a minimum, for obvious reasons. It’s not that I don’t appreciate where he is now, I’m actually quite proud of him. Really it’s that I don’t want to feel like I’m pushing him on anyone, or trying to make myself look better by having a brother who plays Rugby for Canada. For the most part I let Aaron speak for himself, he’s used to it now after all of the interviews. I tend to make my tributes in different ways, such as starting a wikipedia page for him, the Brantford Harlequins, and other Rugby Union pages.

This time it’s different, I can’t help but make note of how happy I am to see him playing in the Rugby Union World Cup. Canada may have dropped their first two games so far, but we, as a family, don’t care. Aaron has made his dream come true, he’s playing in the biggest sporting event there is for the sport of his choice. There has been ups and downs, just like any journey, but he has reached the goal.

I guess you can’t help but feel proud when you get quotes like the following from Rugby Canada News] (even though the try was called back… it’s still a good quote):

“At 68 minutes Aaron Carpenter entered the game at number eight and immediately began to demonstrate the meaning of the term impact sub.

As sooner as Carpenter arrived on the field, he picked up from the base of a scrum and tore 45-metres down the pitch. When he went to ground, Canada recycled the ball and spread it wide right where incoming fullback Mike Pyke took the ball and went over the line.”

My wife was telling me a story last night about her sister, who teaches a grade eight public school class. She has two students who love Rugby, and can’t wait to get into high school where they can begin to play on a team. She asked the two of them if they knew who Aaron was and, of course, was greeted with glowing eyes and a thorough description. Now that she had their attention she mentioned that Aaron was her brother-in-law and was rewarded with two gaping jaws.

This story made me realize how important Aaron really is. Not just to his family, but the entire community. We have a generation of young players who are looking up to him and watching his every move. I can’t even imagine the responsibility or the weight that must carry on a person, but I do believe that he does all of us, including the community, proud.

Aaron, keep up the good work!