Cavalcade of Lights Festival

We have the best luck. In Toronto for the weekend, staying right downtown, and apparently today is the start of the Cavalcade of Lights Festival. It meant a free concert with Steven Page doing some ladies classics (and some other performers I have never heard of) and fireworks. I always love fireworks.

I like it when cities plan to have festivals for us, even before we know we're going there. Highly convenient.

Should be required

For a professionally run website (which this is not one), I think that all 404's that have the referrer as the site's own domain (e.g. a broken link from their own content to their own content) should generate a nightly report of all broken links. Hell, ideally it would generate an email.

It would be great, it would simple, and in theory it would really help things. In practice it would probably be abused and all value from it would be stripped.

Turn back time...

One thing that was bugging me a bit lately was that every hour timemachine would run, and would crunch a bunch of data, the cpu would run for a bit, heat up my laptop and mildly annoy me. Mildly because it's better than having a drive crash and losing data (again), but still it was distracting.

I started to look at the timemachine icon to see how much data it was backing up, and it was always just shy of 50 mb. Every hour, 50 mb... I'm not doing anything locally, so by putting 2 + 2 I figured out that it was firefox's cache that was being backed up.

I found an interesting post about what things Ryan Block doesn't back up. I'm going to start with just the cache directories for now. As things grow, I might add more, but I'm okay with backing up too much rather than not enough at this point.

Something secret about the canal at night

I don't know why, but I find something special and secret about biking along the canal at night. I don't know if it's the feeling of speed, the calmness of the water or how the lights dance. It's just something that I really enjoy doing, even when it's just a couple of degrees above freezing.

It's even better at 1 to 3 am when there is hardly anyone along it but the crazy people on bikes, but that's more of a summer thing.

Goodbye Betty

Today I am saying goodbye to a friend, Betty Nesseth. I'm very sad because I feel Betty had such a large impact on me.

I sat beside Betty on my last co-op. She was looking for someone to run with at lunch and asked me. I replied with "oh no, I can't run" to which she replied without skipping a heartbeat "bullshit! Everyone can run, you just have to learn how". She encouraged me to run and to push myself. She was a great coach and friend.

Betty was never interested in excuses. She would dismiss them with a wave of her hand. She cared about what you did, not what you talked about doing. It was about the goal, about pushing yourself to get there, and once you were there, pushing to get further. You'd make so much progress, when you paused you would wonder how you could have ever gotten there. The answer was simple: "stretch it out", "we love hills! Feel it pull us up!", "feel that wind (blowing in our face), it's just filling our lungs!", and "feel the invisible elastic band around your waist? It's just pulling you home".

I have not spoken to Betty in probably over a year. I'd make excuses, but Betty wouldn't be interested, so I won't.

It's funny - in my last co-op I think that I learned the most, and all of the important stuff had nothing to do with software.

I'll miss you Betty. I still hear your voice in my head when I run and I really don't think that will change any time soon. I feel for your family and I know that where ever you are, you're running free, steady, and in all weather.

Goodbye friend.

Roll back the tech

I read a sci fi story once where a group of people had to enter a space ship that had been gone for like 200 years and needed to interface with the ship remotely. They had emulators running emulators, down like 15 layers. That only works for software (and assuming that you keep all the emulators for years and years).

We're running into that problem now with hardware. Our printer is old as far as printers go and has a parallel (?) printer port. Of our computers, only Laura's has that port, and I'm expecting her computer to fail any time now (6+ year old laptop with a battery that lasts 3 minutes). That's not too bad since printers are so cheap and I can even get a usb to printer for cable for like 20 $.

The difficult part is not printing, but getting data. Yesterday Laura got a floppy disk in the mail. Yes, you read that correct. The ministry of health doesn't trust this new internet thing, and will only transfer data via dead trees, floppy disks, or dial up access. Something about security - and in some ways I understand that, but there are solutions to having a secure network.

The issue is that we don't actually have anything that will read a floppy... the last computer that had that I gave to my brothers and I think it's since been broken. So now I'm going to look for a usb / floppy drive to have on hand because it's going to suck to go buy a computer that must have a floppy...

Software emulation is great, but if you're much more screwed if it's hardware that's out of date.

Aside: it was hilarious to hear Laura rant "who sends a floppy?!? I mean really!". Even funnier when I started to picture her saying it in an Austin Powers voice when he was talking about Random Task throwing a shoe...