Blue Sparks

While perusing my friend Darryl’s site I happened to come across some old poems I had written, as well as an old article that accompanies the poem. I will link them, because they are easy enough to find: Memoria. In actuality, this is one of my newer poems. I wrote many in highschool as a “depressed” teenager, some of which are located on this very website, and still more are in an old red book which sits on my shelf.

Most of my old poems are composed on the idea of a crush, and I’m sure it shines through so even the most unliterary could see the meanings. Anyway, despite the fact I am married and these poems were composed in response to not having feelings returned by *gasp* another woman, I still believe they are two of my best.

Those of you who know me best will most likely know who every one of these poems (those below and linked) were composed for.

The day I got in my car accident I was planning on picking Jackie up a new computer. On my way home I did just that: I stopped at future shop and picked her up a brand new Apple iMac. This is a continuation of the slow creep of Apple Computers into our life since the addition of an iPod a few months ago.

I must say that OSX is much different than I am used to. I do enjoy the ease of application installation ( drag from DMG archive to Applications folder ), and wonder why Microsoft couldn’t have done things like this. Despite the differences, I managed to get everything set up correctly. Not that it was really that hard anyway.

Jackie loves her new computer, and the addition of a remote control makes her estatic. She can watch movies while working on her flowers and cakes and doesn’t even need to fiddle with the computer. The only complaint she had was due to the fact she couldn’t play all the windows games we had (Sims, Sims2, CSI). I tried a couple different solutions: Crossover and Parallels Desktop. Neither really performed up to the level I would have liked. Parallels was better than crossover, but the real problem was I couldn’t find a good way to mount ISO/MDF images. Unfortunately, Daemon Tools wouldn’t work. The other issue was speed; despite the fact Intel Core 2 Duo processors support virtualization instructions it just wasn’t fast enough. Enter Apple Bootcamp.

Bootcamp allowed me to create a partition for windows, and formatted it. Then it burned a driver disk for all the iMac hardware. Finally, I rebooted the computer with the windows install disk and went through the normal windows installation. I was quite impressed at the ease of it all! After the installation was done, it was just a matter of installing the games. Now Jackie just reboots to play her games.

Since Jackie has her own computer now, and can play her games on it as well, I decided it was time to finally ditch MS Windows. I attempted this once before with a dual boot setup, but we kept rebooting back into windows so Jackie could play games. This time was different though! So I downloaded the Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) disk image, burned it, stuck it in the CD ROM, and carefully picked (then carefully rechecked several times) the windows partition and blew it away. The rest is history, really. I’m now running on a pure linux system with dual monitors. My music, mail (thanks to thunderbird), and documents transferred over smoothly because of data HD. Automatix took care of all the tough downloads and left me with a very functional system. I even compiled the Cedega CVS and installed Steam for CSS and DoD.

Everything is Good ™.

This labour day weekend was a busy one, but I think life is definitely starting to settle down now. The summer is “officially” over as of this weekend, so I think the weekends full of activities are on the downswing. Between the wedding being over and the onslaught of the fall season, I should be able to get back to school work for a while. At least until the honeymoon starts (Sept 22nd… we’re counting down).

On Saturday Matthew, Alan and I went to the FanExpo 2006, which is a comic/gaming/scifi/nerd convention located in Toronto. Personally, the only thing I go for is the role playing section. It’s usually the largest selection of RPG books you can find in one place. This year, however, was seriously disappointing. I was hoping to find a large selection of used 1st/2nd edition D&D books, but there was almost nothing. For the most part we couldn’t even find any 3/3.5e D&D. What we really noticed was the anime/manga section had really taken over the entire place. We did manage to get in a game run by the TRPA (Toronto Roleplaying Association). It was called “For Peace and Beer”, and was one of the worst games I ever played. It killed the afternoon and we gave the DM a nice headache, so I won’t complain about it any more. On the whole, I give the entire expo a failing grade. It seems to have lost focus.

The first pictures of the wedding have filtered in from my In-Laws: Clicky

We should have “offical” photographer photos soon, I hope. In the meantime, I’m trying to get copies of the photos in that gallery to put on my site.

[Update Aug 30th]Changed link to my personal gallery[/Update]
[Update Sep 5th ]Updated link again[/Update]

For those of you who know me, I’m a fan of physics. While I may not be a physicist, I read all the articles I can find on the topic. Be it subatomic particles, or astrophysicis, quantum mechanics or string theory, I read them all. It’s all so very interesting. If I had a chance to learn the advanced maths and theories necessary (and then be employed in the industry… my friend Peter’s brother is a physicist and couldn’t get work due to lack of grants) I would go for it in a minute. Actually, I figured I might do an undergrad degree in physics after I finish my CS degreee… just to fill my time.

Anyway… on to the meat. It seems there is some neat “proof” for the existence of dark matter. Sounds like a pretty awesome discovery. Take a look at this picture:

Dark Matter

Basically, what’s happened here… is the two bright spots are galaxies which have passed through each other. The red is the hot gas which is left behind from the collision. If there was no dark matter, you would expect the gas to be pulled towards the strongest forces of gravity in the area, the galaxies. That’s where the dark matter comes in. The blue highlights are where the gas is actually being pulled. Very interesting, don’t you think??

For a better explanation, check out this page.

One word: Awesome.

‘Twas an all day drink-a-thon. Well, not quite all day… they wouldn’t let us drink on the golf course until 11:30.

9:30 – 11:45, 9 Holes of golf
There were six of us, so we split off into two threesomes (kinky). Left my brother Aaron and friend Matthew with my dad (and to his helpful criticisms, haha). My other brother Sean and I went with my other friend Peter. We all sucked at golf, but we proved that even though we’ve been playing for years we play just as horrible as newbies. After the round, it was into the clubhouse for a quick drink and we out.

12:00 – 2:00, Lunch and Beer
We headed back to my parents place for a BBQ and Beer. It was good times. Not much else to add, it was your normal BBQ, other than it started to rain.

2:00 – 9:00, Plan B… and Beer
Since it was pouring, the fishing trip for the afternoon was cancelled. We loaded the cooler with beer, and just headed back to my place. We pulled out the poker set and played for a good couple hours. I did surprisingly well considering I’m not a poker player. I ended up third, mostly because I got bored and started making outrageous bets without anything to back it up. Aaron won in the end, but he was knocked out twice and bought back in… so I don’t really think it’s that good a win

After poker we played some video games, watched a movie (Don’t ever watch Final Cut with Robin Williams), and got pizza. Peter had to jet early since he had to catch a bus back up to hogtown. He dropped us off some cash for the bar though, to make sure I had a good time.

9:00 – Unknown,Teh Bar
This is where it all starts to get hazy because the drink-a-thon started to catch up to me. Mostly because I wasn’t allowed to pace it out. Being forced to have a beer in your hand all the time will do that, I guess.

Anway, we went to a bar called Seductions. Or, rather… a gentlemen’s club. Our venues were a little restricted, considering it’s Brantford, there was only one choice really, unless we headed up to Cambridge. Thankfully my hollow threats of going home if someone announced it was my bachelor party held, and I somehow got away without a beating from the “dancers”. Not much else to say really… we drank, we saw naked ladies, and then we drank more. Then, at some point later in the evening we got home. I think Matthew was the DD… that responsible bastard!

Summary
On the whole… pretty damn good. Lots of fun was had by all. Luckily, I ended up with no hangover yesterday. I didn’t catch the break from my aching muscles, though. They screamed at me all day for abusing them while golfing.

With one week to go, the stress for the wedding is building. Jackie agreed to make one gumpaste (basically sugar) flower for every guest to go with their placecard. She also said she would make three dozen for the wedding cake. Each flower costs about $5 to buy, so she has saved her parents quite a bit of money. [Roughly 150 flowers x $5 = $750]

We’ve had about six months to put these flowers together, but Jackie’s a slacker, just like me (I’m so proud !:). We’ve been working like crazy to get them done. The cake flowers needed to be done by today, and we did get them done… last night! All of the roses are done for the wedding, and the lillies should be close to done. We still have a few more days for them though, so I’m not worried (yet).

Jackie also took 150 little boxes up to the decorator today because she’s making rum balls for the wedding favours. I had to fold every single one of them. It was slow going at first, but by the end I was quite adept. I could fold about two per minute. I don’t think I’m going to be giving up my day job any time soon though.

On a side note, Jackie learned to do the flowers from the place which is doing the cake and favours. She’s getting very good at it. Thank you Klara Johnson!

The picture gallery has been integrated to fit in with bBlog. For the most part it was just some css/templating fixes. On the whole it makes the entire package look a lot better.

It was a little tough getting everything working correctly though. I had to move the images to their own folder, but keep the exifs, resized images, and thumbnails outside of that folder. The problem was that iTunes (curse that sack of shit) was synchronizing the thumbs and resized images to the iPod.

Moving the pictures wasn’t a big deal. It just took a little patience while the hamster in my old toshiba laptop ran on his wheel and moved stuff around in the subversion repository. The real PITA was when I found out after I generated 10,000 resized images the gallery was doing it all again manually on the webserver. Nice. The paths ended up being different so the mangled names didn’t match, and therefore it thought there were no thumbs.

• svn delete –force *
• walk though every gallery folder while it generates thumbs
• svn add *
• get bitched at by webserver admin
• svn commit
• … wait

Joy!

I’ve added the audioscrobbler/last.fm recent tracks played list to the sidebar of the page. I’ve written a bBlog plugin to do so, and have also made it available for download.

The other day, Darryl mentioned to us about last.fm and how it recommended good music. I have vehemently argued before against the current music distribution system (radio) because of such fiascos as Payola and other nasty shit. The radio gods just don’t know what I want to listen to, and I’m tired of them trying to push crap on me.

So, I signed up. Well, actually… I signed up a couple months ago without realizing what I was signing up for. The configuration I downloaded for foobar2000 said audioscrobbler was recommended. Therefore I downloaded, installed, and signed up for it. It freaked me out a little when I logged onto the page and noticed my listening habits were being tracked, but it soon came back to me what had gone down.

Anyway, I’ve already got a nice hit from their recommendations. I had Ben Folds recommended and, it just so happens I already have the CD but hadn’t ripped it to my computer. Not bad eh? I guess we’ll see how the rest of the recommendations go.