Earl Grey, hot.

I decided a couple of months ago to start to purge all the tea in our "coffee" cupboard. We had a lot of tea because people would give it to Laura to drink, but she wouldn't drink it often. A cupboard full of fancy teas and most of the time she wanted red rose.

So I started to drink Earl Grey (hot), mostly because of Jean-Luc. At first I wasn't impressed - tasted too "flowery". Second cup was "okay". Third was "not bad", followed by the fourth "pretty good". Pretty soon the box was empty and I was bemoaning the lack of my new favourite tea. *sigh* My plan to get rid of the tea by drinking it has backfired because now I've added that tea to the grocery list.

But I really do enjoy a cup o Earl Gray, hot.

Hate on for DRM

Up to now I've tried to stick to my guns about DRM. If something had DRM, I'd either return it or not buy it in the first place. I've not been perfect - I've bought things like DVD's and bluerays which are at least region locked. I never bought anything from itunes when they had drm, but I've purchased a metric crapload since.

I'd like to get some non-dead-tree magazine subscriptions (Analog and Asimov), but they are all drm'ed when you buy from amazon, sony, barnes and noble. At this point my only option is to buy higher priced individual issues from fictionwise which is owned by b&n - which could mean that it gets killed off in favour their own competing store. I even emailed the publisher and they told me they "do not have any plans for DRM free subscriptions in the future". *sigh*

Why do I hate drm so much? To me it removes who owns the purchased item. At any time the company can decide not to support the device or (if it calls home) servers that the drm uses. You're locked into the devices which the company decides you can use.

Don't get me wrong, I've got no problem paying for content or using docs that are clearly linked to me like they generate at the pragmatic bookshelf. I know when I download a pdf from them, I can view it on my computer, my iphone, or any device I get in the future.

I know that I can strip off the drm. I could just ignore the law. That's not the point. I don't like being a "good customer" and being treated like a criminal. I'll do the only thing that I can do - vote with my wallet and go somewhere else while letting them know why I won't be a customer of theirs.

First run

Today I went for my first run at lunch in a long, long time. Not that I've been running much at home either, so it's not super easy to get back into the swing of things. Perhaps if I had not decided to go up the stairs behind the Centre Block my chest and head wouldn't have felt like they were going to explode. But I discovered that my old route around there is less accessible since they put up all kinds of security fencing. Now I just have to remember to bring my phone so that I can get an accurate timing (because I'm too lazy to do splits with my watch). My current time was slow and off because being just a couple of blocks away from Wellington means that it's a lot longer before my run "starts" and it is sort of weird when it "ends".

Even with a pounding headache for the rest of the day I felt great. I had forgotten how good the high is.

Speed biking

Today I took a longer bike route home. I started to time myself when I got to the canal and from the Laurier bridge down to hogs back and up the Rideau river to home it was 18.27 km. Average pace on the path was just shy of 24 km/h. At least I know that I'm not breaking the 30 km/h limit on the paths, but I'm slower than I thought I went. My fastest km was 28.6 km/h.

Today I started feeling like my energy tank was at 1/8, and I went as fast as I could, only slowing down north of Bank St. When I finished, I felt like I wasn't at zero energy, but maybe 1/16. I was tried. Some days I feel like I just need to burn off whatever energy I have left and empty myself out. It feels good to do that.

It's weird because I thought that I "boot it" sometimes. In the news today a professional biker did an average speed of 52 km/h over 31 km. Ya, I'm slow. That's what it feels like when I'm going on the path and I see someone on the road. They are usually faster than me, and once I timed a guy and he looked like he was moving at double my pace. Apparently that is possible.

I guess if I want to go faster I should probably fix up the old road bike I have and maybe oil the chains on all the bikes. Installing the clipless peddles would help too.

Advice for your wedding day and beyond...

Shortly before we got married a friend messaged us some "wedding day advice". I really liked it and I just wanted to capture it here rather than it being lost in the bowels of facebook.

I'm no expert on any one thing, but I am good at learning enough to get by... This is some advice that I have given everyone I know who has gotten married since I was enlightened by it.

You will find that on your wedding day, time goes 5x faster. You will be running from place to place for pictures, wedding, speeches (I hear there will be few.. good..hehe), visiting each table, and then cutting the cake - and suddenly the night is over and you 2 would not have spent more than 30 minutes together total. Seriously - your wedding day will be a blur.

My advice, which has been 3 years in the works is - take some quiet time together at some point during the reception and just look at each other. You don't have to speak, just look. Take a mental picture of how good the other looks, because chances are - you will be looking better that day than you ever have, and may ever look again.

Make a mental note of how happy you are at that moment. Your wedding day will be the best day of your life (until kids start popping out - which may be a while) - you will likely be as happy as you ever have been.

Once you have taken that time together and have committed everything to memory - carry on with the evening.

You will find over the rest of your lives together that marriage is not always "great" - there are arguments, disagreements - whatever. It's up & down over what should be the rest of your lives.

When you have a down time - remember what you had previously committed to memory. Jim - remember how beautiful Laura looked, and how you felt the first time you saw her in her wedding dress, and when you said "I do" and when SHE said "I do". Laura - same deal, substituting the dress for a tux/suit/whatever.

So many people forget about the good times when things get rough and would rather take the easy route out. Your wedding day will have been the best day EVER, so remember it and you will have a long & happy life together.

You guys are perfect together - don't forget that.

Kevin

ps/ future "best moments" include when Laura says "I'm pregnant", followed by the first ultrasound... and it goes up from there. ;)

Get'er done

One of the things that I've been really bad about with this blog is that I have not had it backed up by myself. It's got about 8 years (and counting) of my life and random thoughts documented here. It's not something that I want to walk away from.

I wrote before about exporting the blog but that's not something that I can run all the time. In the mindset of "get'er done" and something working but less than ideal is infinitely better than something not done at all, I decided to just pull down all the archives in html format. If I really needed to the future, I could parse out the files.

It's simple to do using wget with the mirroring functionality. Unfortunately mac's no longer ship with wget. After wasting too much time on how to do it with curl, I just installed wget myself using some instructions I found. The only difference is that rather than using the 3 year old version, I installed the latest.

After that it was a quick script that pulls down all the files, and I'm done.
#!/bin/sh
# mirrors archive section of blog
cd ~/Documents/blog-backup/
wget -m -l 1 http://www.beernut.ca/jim/archives/

Timemachine kicked in, and now I have a copy of my blog on at least 3 computers. Not ideal, but a good first step.

Offline webpages for the iphone

My wife asked me for an easier way to access data on her phone without going through a couple of clicks to get there. The first way that popped into my head was to make a webpage that she could do the whole "Add to home screen". However this is something that she needs to access, even if there is only a shitty wireless connection. After a little digging I found that you can have a base64 "data url" which can contain the whole page. There's even a website called iWebSaver that someone built that can do a couple of the steps for you.

I didn't want to put this page up public, so I just used the tools on my mac to base64 the page that I wrote:
openssl enc -base64 -in my-page.html | tr -d "\n" && echo ""
I used the tr to strip out the newline characters and the last echo was to just make it easier to copy and paste from terminal.

So I emailed the base64 text, but prepended with "data:text/html;base64," (no quotes). For example, you wanted to have a web page with "hello world" you might do something like this:
echo "hello world" | openssl enc -base64 | tr -d "\n" && echo ""
That will give you aGVsbG8gd29ybGQK to which you'd put into the url bar of safari
data:text/html;base64,aGVsbG8gd29ybGQK
(I understand for "hello world" you probably should have the content type of "text/plain" rather than "text/html", but I don't want to confuse anything too much.)

The only issue that I ran into was that the page didn't look very nice on the iphone. Doing a bit more digging I found a meta tag that I could drop in that fixed everything:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,user-scalable=no" />

No childhood pictures for you

Looking at a lot of the pictures that end up getting uploaded to facebook and other sites, it seems that a lot of the pictures are all taken from cell phone cameras. I like the idea of using whatever camera that you have with you, but so many of the pictures are going to blurry photos with crappy colour. Because people always have something that will take photos with them, they don't take a camera. I love the old family shots that my dad took with his SLR. They look great and it's a great feeling to see them. The shakily held, poor colour, soft focused crap that a lot of the cameras turn out won't create that feeling.

Don't get me wrong, I'm guilty as the next person. I forgot my slr and used my phone at my nephews birthday once. Even with the "wow, your phone did that?" quality the pictures still look like crap. Kids today will have their life documented from before they were born, but I fear the sharpest, clearest picture will be the ultrasound.