Wayne D's Blog

www.flickr.com w_d's May 5 photoset

Flickr is going to publish a book of pictures taken by their members on May 5th. For those who don't know Flickr is a social networking website that facilitates picture sharing. The trouble is that each member can only submit one picture. Now i need help deciding which picture to submit. Click on the upside down eye and pick out your favourite then click here to communicate your favourite if you aren't a Flickr or Yahoo 360 member. Flickr members can leave comments on the Flickr site and Yahoo 360 members can leave comments here. I wanted to create a poll but Yahoo 360 doesn't allow 24 choices in their polls. I know it's kludgy but it's the best I could come up with using the available tools.

Wow, long gap between entries. Well it seems long to me. Spent the weekend in the woods with the Explorers. Now my jacket smells of wood smoke. We managed to get stuck with a big pile of wood with a slightly red centre that was very hard and burned very poorly until it got really hot.

I have really got to start writing my ideas down, I had something brilliant to write for this post but it has fled my overactive mind. I do know it was a gripe about something. I am getting quite curmudgeonly in my old age. I'm about ready to heave my car radio out the window. It has refused to work with my iPod to cassette adaptor. The same adaptor works fine in my wife's car but in my car it trys to change direction every 30 seconds or so. Very irritating. I was reduced to listening to the radio this evening and it was beastly. I couldn't find anything I wanted to listen to and ended up pushing the scan button and listening to 15 seconds of every station on the FM dial multiple times. By the end of the trip I had decided that I was going to crawl under the dash and figure out a way to get the iPod line output into my radio or else. Why would anyone listen to the radio when they can program there own station with their iPod?

My upgrade to Centos 5 was mostly successful except that I haven't managed to get Firewire working yet and my printing is totally screwed. I had installed a number of wonky fonts before the upgrade and now whenever I print I get mostly blank pages. I guess I should dig into it and figure it out. They upstream provider did recommend a fresh install, now I know why. The good news is that it the webcam driver I couldn't get working in Centos 4 does work in Centos 5. Three steps forward, one step back.

I feel less guilty about not blogging so now I can go to bed.

A warm breeze is blowing through the window as I sit here enjoying the first nice day of this year. My hands are stained with oil from the boy's bicycles. We dug them out, tuned them up and off they went riding today. The cushion for the porch swing is installed, the chairs are down from the garage loft along with the patio umbrella and we ate outside on the deck for the first time this year. Its been a long winter but I'm pretty sure we have seen the last of the snow for the year. When I retire I'm moving someplace without winter, not tropical necessarily, just someplace where I don't have to shovel snow.

I mentioned my infatuation with National Geographic's video podcasts and how I had subscribed through the website. I guess I'm used to instant response because I was worried when I didn't receive an immediate confirmation of my subscription. I worried all for nought, National G confirmed my subscription on the 13th which was about 2 weeks after I went to their website.

In the past I have opined on how social networking was a fad and didn't hold much interest for me. One of the younger women in my office talked me into joining Facebook even though I didn't think it would be any good for an old guy like me. Late last week one of the RHHS class of '80 alumni looked me up on Facebook and sent me an email. It was nice to hear from her and I realised that I have lost touch with all of my high school and university friends. Today I joined the alumni group for my high school and came across a message about my old music teacher Bud Hill. He was quite a character and a great teacher. He was a fan of whole wheat bread before it was fashionable to eat fibre and can take partial credit for me preferring whole wheat bread. Sites like Facebook make it easier to stay in touch with the people you know and remain connected. I originally thought Facebook was only for kids and I was wrong.

I picked up my new glasses today. I decided a needed new glasses because the ones I was wearing were a pair of safety glasses that ATS bought me a 4 or 5 years ago. They were OK but I think my head must be getting fat because they felt like they were squeezing my temples and they were pretty big and clunky. After I had my eye test I went to Lenscrafters and was overwhelmed with the selection. The sales staff left me to flounder on my own, maybe I should have called them over to help but after looking around the store for 10 or 15 minutes I expected them to check in with me. I'm getting crotchety on my old age and have a fairly short attention span, descended into despair and went home. I went cruising on the Internet and found a new company called Great Glasses who offer a 3 for 1 deal. I didn't want 3 pairs so they gave me a discounted price on 1 pair. They got just the right balance of leaving me alone to look and helping guide me in my selection. Mumtaz was very patient with me and put the pair I liked in a box and took my number when I told her I wanted to show them to my wife to get her opinion. The problem with picking out glasses is that when I take off my glasses to try on a new pair my vision isn't really good enough to see what I look like in the mirror. That was Saturday. Just as my wife and I were getting ready to go look at them my sister called up and wanted to come by for a visit. Monday night we were tied up so we didn't make it in that day. Tuesday Mumtaz called and left a message asking if I was still interested. Wednesday night we made it in and even though Mumtaz wasn't there we were treated very well by the staff who were working. When I picked up my glasses they gave me five gift packs of a lens cleaner along with a bottle of cleaning solution to give to my friends. If you need new glasses you should check out Great Glasses. If you do be sure to mention my name, if I refer ten people I get a free pair of glasses. Please note that even I didn't get a referral bonus I'd still recommend them.

Don't you hate it when companies change things and try to convince you the new thing is better than the old? Rogers used to have perfectly serviceable online billing and payment system. Recently they sent me an email trumpeting all the great new features of their online billing system including: the ability to see the last 18 months of your bills, view your current account balance, real time payment processing and simplified navigation. The feature they took away was the ability to schedule payments. That was the feature I liked best and used every month! It was especially useful because Rogers bills in advance, the bill you receive this month isn't due for a month. Sigh. I guess they wanted to get more late payment fees out of their customers because since they improved the system I consistently forget to pay my bill in time.

I really liked Heroes. What is the point of a network pulling a high rated show from their schedule for an extended period of time? Are they hoping that I'll find something else to watch instead of their show? I they hoping to upset the people who watch the show that they fill the time with when the main show comes back and pushes the show they were watching into a new time slot? Sigh.

I updated to Centos 5 at work today. Well actually I started the update and went home before it was finished. Stay tuned to find out how long it is before I get my system back to normal.

Tuesday night is again blog night. I arose at 5 a.m. Sunday morning to attend the CBC's Easter Sunrise Pascha Celebration. It's amazing how fast you can get downtown at 5:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning. The concert was great, the demographic skewed a little older than last year when the concert was Gospel focused. I sat between two older couples who were CBC Radio 2 listeners and expressed their displeasure with the changes that radio 2 has undergone recently. In an attempt to attract more younger listeners CBC the amount of classical music has been reduced, only time will tell if they are successful. the CBC blog has some comments about the evening changes. My question would be, why try to attract a demographics that is courted by most of the commercial stations in town? More concert pictures are available on my Flickr photostream

Enough CBC bashing for now, time for some audience bashing. Bash #1: If you don't know how to shoot with available light, leave your camera at home. There was one old guy who stood in the centre aisle with an SLR with a monster flash for 5 minutes or so blasting away. The people who couldn't see the concert because your were standing in their way were annoyed. The mirror clunk is annoying enough but there was enough natural light in the CBC atrium to shoot. Turn off you flash and see how much better your pictures look. Bash #2: If your digital camera makes a fake SLR noise when you take a picture figure out how to turn it off or leave it at home, I'm trying to listen to a concert and your camera noises take me out of the moment. I have a question for you brass players out there. One of the trumpet players looks like she split her lip at the concert, she was trying to stem the bleeding with a tissue but was ultimately unsuccessful. In my years with the Argonotes I've never seen this happen but I don't pay much attention to the brass.

What the heck is going on at IMDB? They reworked things and completely screwed it up. For example the entry for Trading Places the 1983 movie with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd doesn't mention either Eddie Murphy or Jamie Lee Curtis on the cast list shown on the movie's page. I don't know how they ordered the cast list, there seems to be no apparent order. Maybe it's time for someone to launch a new IMDB like IMDB used to be, sane and helpful.

I'm so excited, I've got my first non-work related Facebook friend. Granted she is my niece but she added me first so I don't feel like a pity friend. I'm not going to post my Facebook id here because I only want people on my Facebook who actually know me, I'm not a friend whore. If you are on Facebook and want me to be your friend look me up. I'm not going to grovel and beg you to add me, I don't want pity friends.

Google is so cool sometimes. I managed to rank 23rd for the phrase "up skirting pictures", it came from the phrase ... He ends up skirting the edges of legality and he lives in the U.S. where you ... and my references to the word pictures in my posts. Now I think I understand where my hits are coming from, annoyed webizens looking for naughty snaps.