Not sure how keen I am on the name, but I’m always a little excited when they announce a new James Bond film. For some reason it’s one of the few film things that instantly makes me feel like a 16 year old boy. I like the new Daniel Craig interpretation of James Bond quite a bit and I’m interested to see what his second take will be like. The new film is titled Quantum of Solace.
Author Archives: Gabriel
First MESSENGER pics available
Was poking around the web this morning and noticed that NASA has some photos from the MESSENGER probe online now. Enjoy!
Bin Laden, Ambassador of Peace?
Apparently Omar Bin Laden, Osama’s son, wants to bridge the gap between Islam and the West, it’s a strange story. Gives you a bit of a strange insight into the Bin Laden clan.
Radio Timeshifting on CBC.ca
Just thought I’d post a note about timeshifting for CBC Radio 1. I wanted to listen to tonight’s episode of Dispatches but for reasons beyond my control I wasn’t near a radio at 7:29 EST. The good news is that Dispatches is a carried nationally, so all you have to do is dig up a western audio stream (such as Calgary) at the appropriate time and bingo, you have radio timeshifting! Nothing very complicated, but for those of you who listen to the radio a lot or, like me, miss a lot of radio programmes this is pretty nifty. Of course in many cases you can just download an MP3 or Real Audio version of the show these days and the penetration of these formats are growing.
The only downside to the streaming option is that you have to use Windows Media, but I’ve heard some rumblings that this may be changing in the not too distant future…
Test the Nation and Pop Culture
I just took the Test the Nation quiz over on the CBC website in a move of solidarity with my fellows who have to be in the office tending the deluge of incoming web traffic tonight. (Though in retrospect all I managed to do was generate additional traffic!) In any case it turns out the theme is pop culture and I managed to score a 53/60. Admittedly I just guessed randomly on several of them and on a few others I picked whatever I thought was the most likely answer (there’s one question with Lost and 24 as possible answers and I’ve never seen either show), but I was surprised that I scored that well. I guess pop “culture” permeates further than I think.
iTunes U
Over the past several months I’ve become a bit more of an iTunes guy, I actually use it to surf for music online and I bought my first iTunes albums over the recent holiday season. So I came across iTunes U the other day (i.e.: I opened my eyes and noticed the link) and it’s kind of cool. Basically it contains free podcasts of university lectures from a number of leading American universities such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, MIT and I just noticed that Queen’s is there as well. Obviously it’s no substitute for actually being in the classes but there are a number of good entry level lectures on topics that I would have loved to study in school but just never got around to or didn’t take because they conflicted with something else. Looks like the series of tubes is finally getting connected to something more than porn and warez.
You do need iTunes to play though.
Firebug
As you can tell I’ve been in the process of migrating to a new site design and toolset over the past few days. I’m trying to avoid too much custom code but I did make a slight modification to the plugin that renders the quotes feed on the rightmost column. In the process of troubleshooting the problem I discovered the Firebug plugin for Firefox. It’s most a most excellent debugger for walking through the code when there are issues (as well as flagging that there is a problem in the first place). In addition it can provide some useful profiling information regarding how your page loads, etc. In any event it was very helpful getting the page to render valid XHTML and JavaScript.
The Upside-Down-Ternet
Ha! I just stumbled across the Upside-Down-Ternet in a post to the sage-members list. I love it when sick minds and technology meet to screw with the masses!
FSF Associate Member 6293
Partly as a response to some of the slippery slope behavior I see taking place with some major GNU/Linux vendors regarding patents and licensing I decided to get off my figurative lazy ass (as opposed to getting off my actual lazy ass) and join the Free Software Foundation today. I would encourage anybody who feels strongly about technology and free software, or who has benefited from the GNU Project to consider contributing.
Quay 2.0 (or is it 3.0?)
Gentle reader,
In the spirit of all the web 2.0 foolishness which I am routinely forced to choke down, I hereby inaugurate The Quay 2.0. Buh-bye Quay 1.0!
So the current iteration of the site is 13 days shy of its 5th birthday, that’s something like 120 in Web 1.0 years so it’s probably time for the experiment to come to an end. Strictly speaking this is the third iteration of content for this site, there was a previous static site with a bunch self gratification therein. In any event, I’m calling a close to the original, archiving the data and deleting the DocumentRoot.
The primary goal, other than a bit of closet cleaning and an attempt to better represent what I’m up to these days, is that hopefully a new toy will motivate me to blog a bit more than I have been in the past couple of years. At some point in the not too distant future I’m going to make an attempt to explain some of the factors that led to this decision. Thanks for your patience.
NB: In the unlikely event that there is something you are looking for it is my intention to be able to dig out most of the old data an republish it, just ask. Also, you will find that The Community has been untouched, simply dissociated from my blog as over the years it has taken on a life of its own and is now self-feeding.