Wayne D's Blog

The only problem with being an emusic.com member is that I have to manually add the music I buy each month to my iTunes library. I store my iTunes music library on my Linux computer because then I can play it on my Linux box, my Windows machine accesses it via Samba. I have never managed to get my Linux machine to connect to my Windows XP Home machine otherwise I would have done it the other way around and maybe I could have used the Consolidate Library function on the Advanced menu in iTunes. As far as I can tell iTunes is the only music player that doesn't let you update you music library by scanning a directory. iTunes Library Updater is a Windows program that implements this missing functionality. It removes items from the library that no longer exist in the directories you specify, will let you specify multiple directories to scan and will recursively scan the directories. To bad Apple didn't build this functionality into iTunes.

I know you are probably wondering when I am going to write about my six day canoe trip in Temagami. I got back late Wednesday afternoon, Thursday night was the Argos game and I think that I have pretty much recovered. My sunburn has faded and my knees are back to normal. Well, you are going to have to wait a bit longer. I'm not going to write up the trip until I get my pictures back from Black's. I wasn't sure about taking my digital camera out in the canoe so instead I took an old point and shoot camera. I paid the extra six dollars for each film to get the high resolution digital scanning and am curious to see how they come out. After shooting one film I realized that the camera was set to 100 ASA when it was really a 400 ASA film. I don't expect the two stops of overexposure to make any difference since the camera has a fixed aperture and shutter speed anyways.

Today was website day. I spent most of the afternoon updating a couple of the websites that I administer. I found a neat javascript tabifier that I implemented on the Argonotes photo gallery page. I also updated the Meet the Band pages to reflect the changed membership in the various sections since last year. I also uploaded the pictures from Thursday's game to both the Argonote's website and the Argonote's Facebook group. The St. Paul's website also got it's monthly freshening up. Tomorrow its off to Guelph to drop my younger two sons off for a week at Camp Edgewood.

It was a busy week this week, Argos home opener and the long weekend. Sunday night we went to Richmond Green to see the fireworks, I tried taking some pictures with my digital camera and was convinced yet again that if I want to shoot in low light I really need to get a tripod. It just seems like so much work to drag the thing around. I took some pictures after the Argonauts game Thursday night including the illuminated CN Tower and the balls floating on the pool outside Roy Thompson Hall. They remind me of the old TV show The Prisoner.

Canada.com has finally decided that I live in Canada, the only problem is that Global TV has taken all of the shows I might want to watch off of their website. I originally ended up there when I wanted to check out The Jane Show after I caught a bit of one episode but it's no longer there. All they have on the site other than news shows is Deal or No Deal, The Best Years and 1 vs 100. Sigh.

I'm heading off for a six day canoe trip near Temagami in a few days. I have to buy a knapsack in preparation for the trip. The big question I have now is which sleeping bag to take. Last summer in Killarney I used a lightweight backpacker sleeping bag and it was fine. I used the same sleeping bag two weeks ago near Parry Sound and suffered from cold feet the first night when the temperature dropped below 10. The second night was fine when it was a little warmer but after sitting out at Richmond Green last night in a sweater and jacket wishing that I had brought my gloves I'm questioning whether it might not be prudent to invest in something a little heavier. The other problem with the lightweight bag is that it's not very wide and is quite tight around my shoulder when it's zipped up all the way. That's good for keeping the heat in but not so good when you want to roll over.

A few weeks ago we got a number of Blackberry's at work. I've been carrying one of them around and have become addicted to the Crackberry. While hanging around at the park last night waiting for the fireworks I browsed the web and updated my Facebook status. The kids were off playing on the bouncy castles and I would have been in the beer garden if it hadn't been so darned cold. Though I understand intellectually that global warming is bad my resolve becomes weaker when shivering on a July 1st night or shovelling a couple of feet of snow in January.

It's hard to blog on a holiday weekend, the time off makes me so mellow that I find it hard to get righteously indignant about any topic enough to make an entertaining blog posting.

Click on a picture to see my Flickr photostream.

This one is for my sister in law.

This one is my favourites.

Remember the prisoner?

We are now the proud owners of a Wii. Right now two of the kids are behind me playing Wii tennis. I stopped at EB Games at Vaughan Mills to buy a second Wii remote on the way home after getting the game and found that even though they didn't have any remotes they did have Wii's. Isn't that always the way, things are scarce until you find one. I ended up buying a game that came bundled with a remote, I figured the $15 extra it cost was probably worth it.

I heard an accident the other day. I was driving up to a stop light and heard a thunk sound, I looked into my rear view mirror and saw two women getting out of their SUV's. I don't know how they managed to collide since the line of traffic they were in was almost stopped. I would hazard a guess that a cell phone was involved. The next day I saw a guy pull right up behind a car stopped at a light with it's four way flashers on. Evidently he didn't realise that we were all bailing out of that lane for a good reason and that a broken down car was perhaps why the traffic was moving too slowly. Again I suspect some type of external distraction was involved.

Almost time for my emusic.com account to reset. I haven't decided what to download next month. This month it was Monique Marvez's Built for Comfort, she is one funny lady. My other selections were Gomez's How We Operate and Loreena McKennitt's Elemental. I don't remember why I chose either of them but I'm sure Gomez was a good choice, the jury is still out on Elemental.

Centos 5 has released a plus kernel that has Firewire support, and it works. Yeah!