Wayne D's Blog

I finally got to sleep in this morning. The cold I have been suffering through the past week and a half has made my right knee sore and I hadn't been able to catch up on the sleep deficit I have been suffering through. This had made me grumpier than I should be as the people I work with can attest. Two weeks ago it was March break camp at Scanlon Creek. Last Saturday it was the Sportsman's Show with the Explorers. I bought a new winter sleeping bag, a canoe paddle and two cloth wrapped summer sausages. They are dry, they are pungent but they sure taste good. Before I went canoeing last year I tried to find some locally without success. None of the supermarkets around here had it and I couldn't find any at the deli's I checked. I asked the woman I bought it from and she told me the deli guy had a place at Vaughan Mills Shopping Centre so when the two sticks I bought are gone I'll know where to get a refill. I have included a picture below to make your mouth water.

Yesterday I got a haircut for the first time in two years. Well, that's not strictly true, it was my first professional haircut in two years. A little over two years ago I decided to give up the battle with my receding hairline, fore-go a comb over and just get my hair cut really short. One of the wait staff at my Tuesday night trivia hangout was a budding hair dresser and after a few false starts one night she was there, I was there and a pair of hair clippers were there. Jenn decided that cutting my hair in the bar might get someone in trouble so we trooped out back to the attached shed with a bare light bulb. Things were a bit tense when we had trouble finding a socket. With one of her friends recruited to hold a plastic bag, my drinking companions standing by watching, she took clippers in hand and gave me a good buzzing. Digital pictures were taken but they have never surfaced so you'll have to take my word for it.

After that I bought a $20 pair of clippers at Walmart and have been doing it myself since. My wife helps me do the back but I don't get her to help often enough. I ran into the hairdressing server a few weeks ago and decided it was time to have her cut my hair under more normal circumstances. She told me what hours where the salon where she works are open but I neglected to get the number. Tuesday night I stopped by on the way home from the bar to get the phone number. I think she was a bit surprised to see me when I walked in the door Friday just before closing. She hadn't connected me with the name in the appointment book but she quickly regained her composure. My hair was soon washed and I was ushered to her chair. Jenn told me that I was getting two pony tails back there as I sat in her chair showing how wise my decision to seek professional help was.

Haven't seen the trailer for Black Sheep the Movie? Go watch it right now.

Tom Merritt of Buzz Out Loud talks about now being able to buy a TV show. He ends up skirting the edges of legality and he lives in the U.S. where you can buy digital content online, unlike here in Canada.

A patent for linked lists issued last year. Huh? What have the boys in the patent office been smoking?

Friday night was the last night for Northern Lights a CBC radio show hosted by Andrea Ratuski that ran from 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. There were many nights when I fell asleep to the dulcet tones of Andrea Ratuski. With a decidedly classical flavour the mix of music provided by Northern Lights was the perfect blend music and talk to unwind too. I missed the announcement of it's demise back in January when CBC announced their decision to migrate music programming off of Radio One and focus on news and current affairs. In the shuffle Northern Lights was killed off to be replaced with repeats of CBC shows heard earlier in the week including Vinyl Cafe and Tapestry.

Perhaps I'm cynical but it seems more like a cost cutting measure to me. The second hour of Northern Lights has been filled by moving the start of CBC Overnight forward by one hour. CBC Overnight is reruns of shows from other public broadcasters from around the world. Two hours of original programming has been replaced with nothing new. I'll give the offering CBC Radio 2 a chance but I'm not hopeful, it's a contemporary music show and I'm not sure it will be music to go to sleep by. I'll probably end up going back to programming my own go to sleep music with iTunes and my USB powered FM transmitter.

I know I've written about this before but I'm going to do it again. I want to buy a TV show from iTunes but I can't because I live in Canada. If you look on ebay.ca you'll see iTunes U.S. gift cards selling above face value to, I can only assume, video hungry foreigners who would rather pay for their digital content than steal it. Come on you idiots rights holders, work out your issues and start making money because if you don't you are only encouraging people to circumvent the screwed up system you have in place now.

I have another cold. How did I catch this cold? Last weekend the Explorers and Timberwolves had a four day March Break camp at Scanlon Creek. The March weather is too unpredictable to camp out side so we slept inside. The Timberwolves in the dormitories , the Explorers slept on the floor in one of the other buildings. It was quite common to see people pull into the parking lot and get out with their dogs. The dogs enjoyed the chance to run free and it was soon apparent that the owners appreciated for another region. The weather was unseasonably warm resulting in the melting of some of the accumulated snow. As the snow melted nuggets dog poop began to appear. It was necessary to walk very carefully on the paths close to the parking lot to avoid fouling your boots with dog droppings. Yuck. Our conservation areas are not toilets for your dogs. If you aren't going to clean up after them don't take them there.

You are probably wondering what this has to do with catching a cold? Not much, but I do like to rant. when you take a bunch of kids, put them together in a confined space for 4 days it is inevitable that one will be sneezing and spreading their cold germs to everyone in the building.

When I heard that Veronica Mars was going on hiatus for eight weeks, replaced by the search for the next Pussycat Doll, I thought that this was the death knell for the show and it wouldn't be renewed for the next season. Though critically acclaimed and sporting an extremely loyal fan base it has never built the audience numbers that are required to be considered a success. Evidently the series creator thought so too. One of my friends sent me a link to article on Geeks of Doom reporting that Rob Thomas who created Veronica Mars is filming a trailer for the CW Network in which the series skips Veronica through college to when she joins the FBI academy. It may be called Veronica Mars but the strong secondary characters in the show have always played a big part in what attracted me to Veronica Mars. I'm willing to give it a chance, we'll see if the CW Network is in a couple of months.

Yahoo 360 is getting a reprieve, I looked at the default Wordpress blog format that my website hosting company offers and I decided I wanted to tweak the look a bit so it may be a while before I switch over. This is yesterday's lost posting recreated to the best of my recollection. I may lose this one too, my router keeps power cycling because someone jammed the cable leading from the power brick to the router around the edge of the computer desk and it's probably got an intermittent power connection now.

Yesterday on my Saturday chore trip I stopped in at FutureShop to see what CD's they had on sale. While I was there I dropped by the TV department to look at the new big LCD screens they had on display. They had two big HD displays going one with a movie and the other with a Bluray demo disk. I was disappointed with the picture quality, the pictures looked sharp but there was a noticeable amount of noise in the background. There were also noticeable compression artifacts visible around the text on the Bluray demo screen. This was a new 1080p set with a digital connection to the Bluray player. At times the picture looked no better than I get on my video iPod. I did a quick search on the Internet and found that what I was seeing was not unique. High Definition blog has a good article on HDTV artifacts. The sorry state of HD television also discusses how the promise of HDTV isn't always evident in the implementation. If you want to be snowed under with numbers DTV bandwidths explains why these problems occur. The crux if the matter is that all of the digital TV and HD formats use compression. The idea behind compression is that you can reduce the size of a digital file by removing things that people can't see. The MP3 format is an example of comrepssion used on music files, jpg files are also compressed to reduce their size. The problem with compression is that it's more of an art than a science. The amount of compression you can get away without people noticing depends on the content of the image. Unfortunately the pipe for HDTV and high definition DVD's is only so big so sometimes it may be necessary to compress to fit the pipe irrespective of the quality.

Compression means that 7-12 regular definition digital channels can be squeezed in the same space as one regular analog channel. That's why the cable companies are so interested in getting us all to switch over to digital cable.

The upshot is that before you plunk down big bucks for a monster HDTV and HD DVD or Bluray player take a good look at the picture and make sure that your expectations haven't been skewed too much by the hype.

The question now is whether I should explain the Kristin Chenoweth website reference in yesterdays posting. A the time I was writing the blog entry I was listening to Prairie Home Companion and Kristin Chenoweth was singing. I recognized her name from her time on The West Wing but I didn't know she was a singer. It turns out that she it a Tony Award winning stage actress with classical voice training. I would post a picture of her but I've been getting complaints that 4 pictures of women in 57 blog postings is too much. The insinuation was that I did it to increase my traffic. The truth is that the blog posting that offer solutions to Linux problems I encounter are the ones that really drive traffic to my blog.

I think I spoke too soon, my router just reset itself again, I better save this posting before it craps out entirely.