Let me vote for you... it's okay, we're lawmakers

When a friend pointed me to a video of lawmakers voting in Texas, it was just one more thing that makes me glad that I live in Canada. Wow.

Journey Leap?

After watching the first episode of Journeyman, Laura pointed out something: the idea of it seems very close to Quantum Leap. In that light, I think that the intro to Journeyman should be changed to have a narrative that goes like this:

Theorizing that one could go about their lives, Dan Vasser stepped into the world and vanished .... He woke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were his own and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is google, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a search engine that everyone and Dan can see and hear in 2007. And so Dan finds himself journeying from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next journey will be the journey home.

Bank branches are <i>so</i> last century

While getting ready for the closing day of our new house, I've been dealing with bankers and a lawyer. Mixed reviews for both.

This rant is directed at scotiabank. Don't get me wrong, the staff that I have dealt with have always been nice and helpful within the rules of the bank. The rules / policies are what I have a problem with. And this may be a issue with all of the major banks, I don't know.

The issue: if I open a savings plan at one branch, I should be able to handle any services with that account at any other branch. I shouldn't have to drive 45 minutes each way because I had set up the account at a convenient place for where I lived 5 years ago. I want to be able to go to a place that convenient for me now.

It's not like it's a paper record or anything. If you can see it on the computer screen in front of you, and I can do other services at that bank, I should be able to do all my services transparently.

So, for something that took me about 5 minutes to do at PC financial, it took me about 3 hours to do at scotia. And only because I was being a PITA customer saying things like "I'm sorry, that's not possible", "That doesn't make sense", "Why do I have to come back? Can't we do this now. It's just one form!" (it wasn't for scotia)... you get the idea.

Scotia: please modernize your processes and policies, not just your tools.

Ontario election - talk about what you're going to do

One thing that I really don't like about this upcoming election are the attack ad's from the PC party. The liberal party ad's are "we are going to do ...". The PC party ad's are "they other guy didn't do ... last time when he said he would. The liberal leader also kicks puppies."

Those ad's don't help me understand what you're going to do if I elect you. All they do is make me mad at you for bringing more negativity into my life. Having your whole campaign of "we're not the other guys" is a really crappy campaign. That sounds to me that you have no plan past getting elected.

I laugh when I picture that: the PC's winning by a landslide and the next morning looking at each other and saying "now what?" while shrugging their shoulders.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed... Wii!!!

Something I've been talking about with Andrew for a while is how awesome it would be for them to release a Star Wars game for the Wii. Well, it looks like they are going to, Spring 2008. ;-) That alone made me really happy (I'm drinking a beer to celebrate right now). Then I checked out the official site and watched the trailer. I almost peed myself. Wow. That game looks gorgeous. Now, I understand that it won't look that good on the Wii, but it might on the PS3. If the PS3 wasn't like 600 $, and if Laura wouldn't kill me for buying one, I might just have bought one for that one game.

I'm off to watch that trailer again...

Filter gmail without clogging your inbox

I was going to write a post about regretting signing up for the maven mailing lists when I noticed a sponsor link in gmail: Gmail eats your Bacn. The more that I use gmail the less patience I have for other mail clients. OutLook, I'm talking to you!

Automount a drive in a mac

Wow. I fully expected it to be a bit difficult to get used to some things in a mac, but I figured that to do anything it would be easier. Perhaps not.

I store my music on a NAS drive so I don't have to fill up my macbook with a whole bunch of mp3's, and I have iTunes to manage it. For some reason when I sleep my computer it doesn't try to reconnect any drives I mount. Well, it's a mac so there must be a check box somewhere I can say "try and reconnect" like was on windows, what 95?. There are a couple of different posts with how you can create a script or install / buy and application to do this. Woah, I have to do what to reconnect to a shared drive? That's just nuts.

I might understand that if we're talking about linux, but this is a mac where everything is supposed to be automagical and wonderful. What happened? Where is this basic feature? Hopefully someone will be able to tell me.

Since my music is all managed on iTunes and iTunes couldn't see that since the last time it tried to start up, my whole library is got that little picture of the exclamation mark (!) so it won't try and play those songs. Unless there is another way that I don't know of (very likely), I'll have to go through and click on all the songs so that iTunes can "see" them again. Grrrrr.....

I'm enjoying my macbook for the most part, but I'm not apple fanboy. Time for another coffee.

Frick, that's annoying...

Since moving to using a mac for my home computer there have been some joys and some pains. Some things that I just have to get used to I guess because it's "the mac way", others just rub me the wrong way.

For instance, if I am using a piece of software that has a window's and mac version, I expect that they will work the same way. I understand that this is a really difficult thing to do. The "feature" that set off this rant / post is the fact that when I "open in new tab" for firefox, a lot of links open in a new window and open in a new tab. When I look at the code for the links, the end of the onClick event has a "return false". That normally works. Not so in FF on a mac.

*sigh* I'll look for the bug report later.

Update: I've been thinking about this a bit more. I guess it's a difference between what fires the onclick event from browser to browser. In my mac, if I right click on do "open in a new tab", it just opens in a new tab. If I command-click, it fires the onclick event and opens in a new tab. If anyone knows what bug that would correspond to, let me know.

Showing the apartment? I don't care

Now that we are moving soon, minto is showing our apartment to prospective new tenants. The first time, we totally cleaned, made sure that things were nice and sparkly. The second time, we cleaned up to lesser extent, not as sparkly.

What did we do when we found a notice they put really early this morning / late last night? Not much. Just hid the dishwasher we're not supposed to have. It just comes down to the fact that my GAF factor is low when I feel like I'm being asked to do someone a favour with short notice.

Calm. Peaceful. Happy.

This summer has been crazy busy. Laura finished school and all that went along with that, we got married, did the honeymoon thing, went to other people's weddings, bought a house, I did a "there and back again" thing with my job, went to see Phantom of the Opera (3rd row center! Felt the blast of heat from the pyrotechnics!), bought a new computer, bought a new bike, packing for a move, went camping, went camping some more...

A lot went on. It's been a really busy summer and it looks like things are going to calm down... just in time for Christmas. *shrug*

For all that's gone on, all the crazy stuff that's happened and is still to happen, I feel very relaxed and happy right now. The only thing that's nagging at me is that because this summer has been so nuts, I feel that I've neglected my friends. There isn't really any excuse for it, it just sort of sucks. Time management is something that I still need much work on. :-/

Getters and setters: a rant of anti-patterns

It's been at least a couple of days since my last rant, so I figure that it's time again to show a couple of things that I consider to be anti-patterns. First off, let me tell you that I get annoyed by getter and setter methods that are not just an mutator for the class. I understand that rules are made to be broken, but they should only be broken in special cases: not as the "default".

"Helpful" getter methods:
public List getFoo() {
if (this.foo == null) {
foo = new ArrayList();
}
return foo;
}
I do not think that a "getter" should change the internal state of an object. A null list isn't the same thing as an empty list. If you want to initialize it, do that in the declaration or in the constructor, not in the getter method. If for whatever reason it's not valid to have the member be null, init it and then guard against it being set to null in the setter. If you're lazy like me and you use something like Commons Lang for your equals and hashcode impl, then if you call the getter on an object, it will no longer be equal.


I had it all planned to write at least one more "issue", but I can't think of it right now. One thing at a time. ;-)