Cows and Chickens

I’ve been tidy­ing up some things around the condo, mostly in the IT realm. I’m try­ing to reduce the num­ber of devices, cables, con­fig­ur­a­tions, and gen­eral annoy­ing­ness in my daily exist­ence. So far, this is what is new: AppleTV + 1.5TB USB Drive And this is what I’ve elim­in­ated: MediaPC Run­ning Myth­Buntu (a con­stant source of aggravation) […]

Roomba and I have been get­ting along pretty well over the last few months. It has been clean­ing my floor reg­u­larly, and doing a good job at it. It gets dust bun­nies from places that I never did with the vacuum, and it usu­ally makes it home to its char­ging base. I recently rebuilt its bat­tery pack… the batteries […]

A few weeks ago my mac­book stopped talk­ing to my Link­sys SD2008 gig­abit switch. No link at all. Other devices were still work­ing fine, so I tried dif­fer­ent cables, dif­fer­ent ports, etc, in what I thought was a sat­is­fact­ory dia­gnostic effort. I booked a Genius Bar appoint­ment, took in my Mac, and embar­rass­ingly it worked fine when con­nec­ted to […]

This is a great pro­ject, and says good things about people: http://www.tweenbots.com/

I’m cur­rently on VIA Train 78 from Lon­don to Toronto after a nice week­end vis­it­ing my par­ents. I wanted to give props to VIA Rail for being an excel­lent, com­fort­able way to get around Ontario. VIA Rail seems to go out of their way to hire excel­lent, friendly staff. The ser­vice people on my cur­rent train are […]

I don’t usu­ally review res­taur­ants here, but I’ve had quite a few great meals at Free Times cafe recently and thought I would give them some props on my blog. I just had din­ner there, the shishta­wook plat­ter, fol­lowed by a very nice piece of apple crumble. And a great glass of freshly made lem­on­ade. Excel­lent food, cheap prices, and […]

I got the oppor­tun­ity to trade a bottle of nice bour­bon for an under-utilized Roomba Dis­cov­ery. A friend of mine recently moved to a new house which wasn’t friendly to the little robotic floor cleaner, and he offered it to me ages ago. I finally decided to take him up on the offer. The robot is the white Roomba Discovery, […]

My friend Jonathan and I are start­ing up a new Java Users Group in Toronto. Our aims are con­sist­ency, rel­ev­ancy, and social­iz­a­tion. The other Toronto JUG rarely meets and tends to have advertorial con­tent in their meet­ings. Our JUG meets on the third Thursday of each month, and fea­tures short present­a­tions, show-and-tell, rob­ocode battles, and a social session […]

The doc­u­ment­a­tion video for Blinken­lights Ste­reo­scope in Toronto has been released! You can grab the video here: Blinken­lights Ste­reo­scope Doc­u­ment­ary Enjoy — and please don’t hot­link this, I don’t have unlim­ited bandwidth.

I’ve put up two small You­tube Videos demon­strat­ing the awe­some­ness of the Blinken­lights Ste­reo­scope install­a­tion. Check it out, and try to attend in per­son. It is quite the sight!