Since I’m a geeky guy, I tend to love everything Google. I was naturally excited when Canada got Google Street View last month, and have already used it several times to find out ahead of time what to look for ahead of time when heading out to see a new building for the first time.
Street View of Playa del Carmen - 5th Ave at 10th St
And I’m sure that any reader of this blog knows that one of my favorite places in the world is Playa del Carmen on the Mexican Riveria. So naturally I was excited to hear that the cars that snap the Street View pictures were seen in the Playa region at the same time as there were photographing Canada.
Well the wait is now over, I can virtual wander the streets of Playa now whenever I like! Google Street View for Playa del Carmen (and the rest of Mexico) has now gone live!
There is a couple of disappointments… they must not have made arrangements with the city to travel down the normally pedestrian only Quinta Avenida (5th Avenue), which is the cities main tourist walk and likely would have been the highest viewed street in Playa if it was available. Additionally, it would be nice if they could get the Street View tricycle to drive along the beaches to give us that view too. But considering Playa did not even have street maps within Google Maps a few months ago, this is a major update. Now if they can just get a sattelite view that doesn’t have clouds over downtown Playa….
I’m off to bed, but I shall be exploring Playa tomorrow!
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]]>Well I’ve been unable to blog for some time now. ?Work and school suddenly got too busy, and so some things had to suffer. ?But now I have time agin, the reason why we’ll leave for another post.
Halloween upon us, and John Chow posted a challenge to beat his score at a Halloween themed online slots game. ?So while I sat here eating my dinner, I clicked away and beat his score as evidenced below. Sure, it’s barely a win, but I’ll keep clicking and I’ll update the screenshot if I do significantly better.
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- Image by miss604 via Flickr
I keep meaning to spend what little free time I have between work and school to work on fixing the problems on this blog, but I keep getting distracted. The fixes need to be done, as they are what keep me from blogging (every time I have a couple of minutes free, I work on the fixes instead of a new post). But I’m distracted yet again this weekend, paying attention to WordCamp Whistler ’09, which is was organized by my favourite Vancouver bloggers. Karin and I would have really liked to go, but the budget does not allow it. Too bad Dad doesn’t own a room up there anymore.
Because I’m distracted yet again, I’ll make an exception and blog this quick post.
In order to keep up with what is going on, I’ve made a Yahoo Pipe with as many sources as I can find, and I’m constantly adding more. You can get the RSS feed or you can go to the pipe’s page. Included on the pipe page is the list of sites I’m pullling from so far, please leave a comment or Twitter me if you have additional suggestions.
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- Image by The Gordons via Flickr
Just a quick post to say that I’ll be returning to regular posting by the new year, and hopefully even before then as I should have some time over the holidays. There’s a number of things broken here, as when they’ve happened I’ve just had time to fix Karin‘s blog; but I should have time between Christmas and the New Year to clean my own blog up, so please be patient.
I hope everyone is having a great holiday season (I’ll say Christmas, I’m not scared of being politically incorrect, but if you celebrate something else this time of year I hope it’s going great too!) and that you are all safe in this snowy weather. Drop back real soon!
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite]]>Two years ago Rebecca from Miss604.com participated in a fundraiser for charity called Blogathon. I had recently discovered her blog at that time and read each post of the posts she made every 1/2 hour for 24 hours straight. The next year several more blogs that I followed participated, and so now it is a bit of a tradition.
This year the web-wide organization did not materialize, but Rebecca herself has organized Blogathon for the Vancouver area. Having a dismal readership myself, there was no point in participating as a blogger (the whole point is to raise some funds for a charity rather than to pollute the web with drivel no one is reading); but hopefully the few people out there who do read me might be so kind as to swing by some of the participating blogs. You might discover a new favorite read or two, find some great content, and hopefully be inspired to donate to one of the worthy causes choosen by the bloggers. My goal is to have enough readers by this time next year to participate myself.
Rebecca has a list of the blogs here, but by far the easiest way to follow them all is to use the Blogathon 2008 combined feed Duane Storey has just created. I have been following Duane and Raul‘s blog this evening, as they started their 24 hour shifts at 10pm, and will catch up with all the bloggers with my morning coffee. There are numerous blogs that do not begin their 24 hours until tomorrow, so if you feel like it you can stay up the entire time along with the authors.
]]>I’m a little confused as to what constitutes news. The CBC has just published this report that states that a Swedish newspaper has said that unrestricted free agent Mats Sudin has accepted the Vancouver Canucks offer to play for them next season.
For a reporter, the next step when writing a story is supposed to be to confirm it through other sources. The piece states that when they checked with Sudin’s representatives, they denied it. The rest of the article is then just fill on Sudin’s career and the massive offer made by the Canucks to entice him to join the team.
Basically this seems very much like just another rumour. So what is the headline? The CBC choose “Sundin accepts offer to join Canucks: report”. I guess they feel that the last word is supposed to indicate that this is all just second hand rumours that are being denied by those involved; but to me it seems like they are attempting to make it sound pretty definite in that headline when in fact this is a non-news story that probably should not have been written.
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite]]>Karin and I have never managed to attend any of the many tech events held in the Vancouver region. Most are held downtown or at UBC, and we are at the opposite side of this sprawling metro region. This makes a mid-week event especially difficult, considering my alarm goes off at 5:30am for the workday. I do love the three day weekends that working 10 hours shifts gives me; but it certainly makes weeday events tough. Weekend events are rare, and until now have always managed to conflict with something else we need to do.
We therefore were excited when WordCamp Fraser Valley was announced, as it was a short drive to Langley to attend. The entrance fee of “free” was also something attractive. We signed up looking forward to learning more about WordPress and finally getting to see and perhaps meet some of the bloggers we regularly follow.
Leading up to the actual day, I was unsure if we’d be able to go as Karin’s recent dental work has resulted in pain that builds up throughout the day and usually has her heavily medicating by the evening. She was determined to go, though, even if she wasn’t able to socialize and network due to the pain. So I left work a few hours early and we drove to the Cascade Casino.
I will not try and summarize every detail as Rebecca Bollwitt; otherwise known as Miss604, live blogged the entire event save for her own presentation. You can find a link to her excellent notes below.
The evening started with introductions by Gary Jones from BlueFur web hosting. Gary was the primary organizer and his company was a major sponsor. He introduced Raul Pacheco, otherwise known as Hummingbird604. Raul is a prolific blogger who only recently made the switch to WordPress, but once he did he dived in quickly. Raul spoke about transitioning to WordPress from other platforms and starting a new WordPress blog.
Gary had received a last minute cancellation, and therefore had to unexpectedly speak next. Despite not having time to prepare, he gave an excellent presentation on business blogging, explaining why almost any business can benefit from blogging. Many of his points apply equally well to personal blogs and I will therefore implement them.
After a short networking break, Kulpreet Singh spoke about security in WordPress. His was the most technical talk, but contain a lot of useful and important information and I hope the less technical people in the audience were able to take away a few good points. Being a geek myself, I have already secured our blogs using a lot of the methods Kulpreet covered, but I did learn a few new ones that I will use. Kulpreet was also the one speaker whom I did not already have in my Google Reader, which I have rectified as he is a knowledgeable source.
Up next was the infamous Rebecca Bollwitt, often better known by her moniker Miss604. Her’s is one of the first blogs I followed, likely because I myself often cannot grab the “Flash” nickname on many sites and have to go with Flash604. Rebecca spoke about customizing sidebars in WordPress based on what page is being viewed. She did a good job of making it sound simple, which it is but I’m sure many a non-technical person has been too scared to try. Hopefully she encouraged a few people to expand their boundaries. During the Q&A portion of her presentation Rebecca demonstrated Twitter, as it had repeatedly been mentioned throughout the evening.
Evil entered the room next when John Chow took the podium. I was unsure what to expect, as John is extremely knowledgeable but often comes across on his blog as approaching such commitments casually. John spoke about bringing traffic to your blog, and it was very organized and informative. John covered quite a few good tips, many which I have already read on his blog but some which he shared only with us and asked that we not reveal them as they will not work well if they become widely known. His blog has so much information that it was nice to know which he considered the most important.
In addition to the knowledge gained and the chance to meet other users of WordPress, part of the reason I attended was to kickstart me with regards to this blog. I have had several personal items recently clear up, and so this conference was perfectly timed. I do hope that we can attend more soon.
My thanks also go out to the presenters that do live in Vancouver; you had to do the trek that we have so far avoided.
There is no way you can absorb everything at such a conference, and so since I didn’t get to network as much as was hoped, I have been searching for the presenters and my fellow participants online and reading their summaries. Below are as many links as I could find to other participants’ blogs and Flickr photos. Please leave a comment if you know of more and I will update.
- Raul Pacheco Summary Flickr
- Rebecca Bollwitt Live Blog Flickr
- John Bollwitt Summary Flickr
- John Chow Summary
- Gary Jones Summary
- Kulpreet Singh Summary Presentation Slides
- Tyler Ingram Summary Flickr
]]>Michael Kwan is running a contest on his blog, with the prize being a bag full of swag he picked up at two recent conferences. He decided to add a creativity component this time, and came up with a challenge to photoshop John Chow.
Luckily, he isn’t judging this based on skill; but rather on making him laugh. To this end I put together something during my lunch hour at work that is pretty much a hack job, but will do as my entry.
For those of you not familiar with John Chow, he is a local blogger who decided to moniterize his blog as an experiment and is now one of the experts in the “Make Money Online” realm. Last month his blog earned $40,125.99.
Click on the picture to see a larger copy.
]]>I have been pretty silent as of late as Karin‘s dad was quite ill. Peter had prostate cancer for a number of years, and it was expected that it would eventually enter his bones. He had bone scans every 6 months in order to detect when this occurred, and was warned that once it did he should be prepared for severe pain. Once the cancer was in his bones, the prognosis was for no more than a year left.
Despite his ill health and onsetting dementia, my father-in-law still made his annual trip to California and Arizona for a month at the beginning of this year. Upon his return it was obvious that his health had worsened, and his next scheduled scan confirmed that the cancer had progressed into his bones.
Even with his pain and rapidly declining health, he still showed his strength through his determination to be at family events. Many of us did not expect to see him at his granddaughter Angela’s wedding, as he could barely sit up for more than an hour each day during the preceding week; but he showed his resolve by attending both the church ceremony in the afternoon and then a large portion of the evening reception. This took a lot out of him, however, and he did not leave home again.
My mother-in-law Gertrude was faced with the fact that she would not be able to keep him at home much longer, even with several visits a day from palliative care nurses, but Father’s Day was approaching and she hoped to have one last day with the family. Again he showed his resolve and sat in his easy chair in the living room all afternoon as his children and grandchildren gathered, but again it took much out of him and he did not leave his bed again. We did not even see him during a several hour visit the next day, during which we visited the hospices in Langely and Mission, met with one of the palliative nurses, and made our decision to move him to the Christine Morrison Hospice in Mission.
He was transferred the next day, and just in time. The facility is lovely, and it allowed Gertrude to stay with her husband 24 hours a day while he received pain management and care from nurses around the clock. The facility even took great care to make sure that Gertude was cared for also, with meals available to her at any time, shower facilities for her, and even professional massages to help with stress. Within a couple of days, the nurses told her that she should make sure that the family all knew that they should come say one last goodbye.
Peter Nickel passed away at 5:07 pm on Sunday, June 22nd. It was a grey, lousy day all morning and afternoon, but once his suffering stopped the clouds parted and the sun shined down. We all gathered at the hospice to say our goodbyes, and then we spent the past week planning and holding the funeral. We laid him to rest on Thursday. While it was a sad time for the family, we all were relieved to know that his pain had now ended.
Instead of documenting the events that were occurring, I was busy offering my support to others in the family. I will miss Peter and value the time I did have to get to know him, but of course my loss is nothing compared to his wife and children. If you want to know more of the events that occurred, both Karin and Waltrude blogged during Peter’s struggle. I would only ask that you not fill their blogs with comments offering your condolenses as they have ended their tears and are moving onward.
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Image via Wikipedia
I have been pretty well offline for the past few days as I attempted some computer upgrades.
That doesn’t sound like I’m much of a geek, but let me explain. First, I’m not counting my time at work; I am online on at least two computers at once while working, but I’m working. Right now I’m writing the first half of this post on my work notebook during lunch. Even if our network goes down at work and I am not online, I support computers for a living and that is geeky in itself. But I have to consider the work time different than the home online time; otherwise I probably would not go near a computer when I got home.
The upgrade was supposedly a simple memory upgrade. Karin and I built identical computers 6 months ago when it became impossible to continue on our old dinosaurs. I ensured our motherboards were capable of running 8GB of memory each, but for budget reasons we put 2 gigs each in at the time to see if it was enough. The computers run well, and we’ve had none of the problems everyone complains about with regards to Vista or a 64 bit operating system, but when I had multiple photos open in editing software while also keeping track of my favourite blogs, I could notice the slow down. This is to be expected when photo editing; it is a memory hogging task.
So last Monday we headed into Langley both to make a stop at the dentist to pick up pills for Karin, and to also stopped an NCIX to purchase extra RAM. If you have a dual-channel capable board, information in the memory can be accessed quicker if you have two sticks in the same coloured slots on your motherboard. Basically, this allows the system to access both at once, which lets your memory keep up with the speed of today’s CPUs. We had put 2 sticks of 1GB each into each computer, and so my plan was to put all 4 sticks into one computer to give it 4GB, and then buy a package of 2 sticks of 2GB each for the other computer. The best available for budget minded people such as ourselves was some OCZ Platinum XTC for $75. This meant we each got to double our RAM for $38 a computer, a deal in my eyes.
But then the struggles began. I put the 4 x 1GB sticks into Karin’s computer, and then I Monday night I could not get my computer to boot with both sticks of the new RAM. I had to finally leave it so that I could get enough sleep for work the next day. Karin’s appeared to work fine, but then she messaged me Tuesday morning from my home computer to say hers was frozen. I had to have her pull the two extra sticks out so she could get it to reboot.
Karin’s solution was simple, I just had to bump up the RAM voltage in the BIOS because the RAM runs at a higher voltage the the board provides by default. But for mine there was no such luck. I flashed my BIOS to the latest version, and then began changing the voltage and many other settings. Each setting has a range within which it could safely be set without voiding any warranties, but to try every combination took quite some time as I would have to insert just one stick, boot to the BIOS, change settings, shut down, insert the second stick, reboot and test.
After a couple of nights of this and some advice and research on the OCZ support forums, the possiblities were all tried and it seemed I might actually have defective RAM. I ran Memtest86+ and confirmed that one stick is bad; and then kicked myself for not testing it sooner.
So this entire week has been one of working on my computer hardware, which is geeky; but wasting time when I should have tested for defects sooner, which is not so geeky.
We’re now off to Langley to exchange the RAM, and hopefully I will be up and running tonight.
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