Dangling Conversations

Updated Xmas Stories

Updated Xmas stories.

4 Things

Four Jobs

Dishwasher (Golden Griddle)
Dickie Dee
Test Lead at Xbox Live
Senior Programmer at BioWare

Four Movies

Incredibles
Shrek
Gattaca
Shawshank Redemption

Four Places

Waterloo
Ottawa
Seattle
Edmonton

Four TV Shows

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
The Colbert Report
Mythbusters
Mantracker

Four Vacations

Florida
Algonquin Park
Hawaii
Banff

Four Websites

Sluggy Freelance (http://www.sluggy.com)
Penny Arcade (http://www.penny-arcade.com)
Order of the Stick (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/ootslatest.html)
Megatokyo (http://www.megatokyo.com)

Four foods

Deviled eggs
Pecan Pie
Dark Chocolate
Bacon

Four Places

Visiting Friends
Australia
Italy
New Zealand

Four bloggers (might be a stretch...)

Sky
Lisa
Justyna
Nikita

4 Things

A little something...

Four jobs I�ve had in my life
youth counsellor
farm hand
business process re-engineer
product manager

Four movies I can watch over and over
White Christmas
Shrek
Sound Of Music
The Fifth Element

Four places I have lived
Orangeville, Ontario, Canada
New York, New York, USA
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Waterloo, Ontaio, Canada

Four TV shows I love to watch
(this is very hard for someone without a TV)
CSI
Firefly/Babylon 5/ST:TNG (and various other extinct sci-fi shows)
Discovery Channel
Music Videos (MTV, MuchMusic, VH1)

Four places I have been on vacation
Mardi Gras, New Orleans
Signal Hill, Newfoundland
Highlands Backpacking Trail, Algonquin
Cat's Pyjama's B&B, Lion's Head

Four websites I visit daily
Questionable Content
Jay Is Games
CNN
Travian

Four of my favorite foods
Pad Thai
BBQ T-bone steak and a baked potato with butter and sour cream
Pie (and other pastries)
Fruit (almost any kind)

Four places I would rather be right now
camping
someplace new/on an adventure
playing ultimate
anyplace with friends

Four bloggers I am tagging
Matt
Kael
Brent
Wendy

If you've been tagged, the only rules are you must answer the same questions, and you must tag 4 new bloggers.

Windows Vista: The Burning Questions

I've been having a hell of a time finding a good utility that was:

Free
Burns ISOs to CDs/DVDs
Isn't limited by ISO size

I already had Nero, but it doesn't work yet on a clean install of Windows Vista. (I'm running RC1 build 5728).

So I wrote my own utility. You can download it or get more information at : ISOBurn

Source is there as well if you want to play with it.

What I'm grooving on, 09/2006 edition

So consider this a resolution to put up at least one post a month in this space. Here's some stuff I've been listening to a lot recently.

Le Vent du Nord consists of four veterans of the traditional Quebecois folk-music scene. There's a fairly strong similarity with the maritime-celtic sound that became a Big Deal back ten years ago. I'm about 98.8% sure that these guys would be awesome in concert.
Every now and then I rediscover music in my collection that I haven't thought about for a while, and the most recent rediscovery is the Concrete Blonde back-catalogue. Fine stuff.
Kael's recently got me listening to the Killers' first album. (Or not so recently, I suppose, but the sampler he gave me back in June got lost in the shuffle.) The first four songs, for my money, are pretty much perfect; after that, I begin to get bored. I've only heard a remix of a song from the second album, so I don't know if they've shaken things up or not for the new release.
Listening to them both earlier tonight, I realised that the Decemberists' The Sporting Life has some strong musical commonalities with Adam Ant's Goody Two Shoes. The former song's been my introduction to the band, so I'm left with the question: are the Decemberists new-new-romantics?
The Impact is the Michigan State University student radio station, and it's pretty great. I find myself in range of their transmitters for almost an hour of my typical Long Drives, and I make a point of tuning in. One of the many songs I've discovered through them is Fred Jones part 2 by Ben Folds, which is possibly the saddest song I've heard all year. (It's also notable for featuring Special Guest Star: John McRae on harmony vocals. You might well think that the lead singer of Cake's voice is not particularly well-suited for blending with the voices of other humans, but he and Ben make it work quite well.)

Oh yeah

Today, in addition to being the birthday of one of the authors (hi Brent!), is the second bloggiversary of Dangling Conversations. Given that the front page still has posts from freakin' April on it, it's fair to say that the initial excitement has died down substantially.

Memory: still like a whatchamacallit.

Had it not been for a stray comment in Neil Gaiman's blog, I might never have realised that Susanna Clark, author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, also wrote one of my favourite stories in the Sandman: Book of Dreams anthology. I haven't picked up the volume since shortly after the Great Flood in my apartment over six years ago, and while I remember the story (Stopp't-Clock Yard) vividly, I had nothing to hang the author's name on in my mind at the time.

(Looking in the book now, it turns out that I still sort of follow the authors of my other two favourite stories; I've been reading Steven Brust for quite some time, and John M. Ford is one of the posters on Making Light.)

Calgary

Lisa & I are in Banff for our 5th Anniversary. It is incredibly beautiful. We enjoyed the hot springs last night and wandered around town.

The real reason I'm posting however is on our way to Banff we went through Calgary and had lunch at James Joyce's Irish Pub downtown. The food we had there was amazing. Lisa had strawberries and brie on small pieces of toast (mmm mmm good). I had a lamb burger with pistachio nuts, bacon, blue cheese, and really good home cut fries. It was fantastic. Service was really good and the ambience was phenomenal. It's in a historic building and there was even a tour outside talking about the origins of the building. Anyway, could write more, but it is our anniversary :)

Math + A Capella

If you're a mathie, you'll like this.

If you're a music lover, you might like this.

If you belong to the intersection of those two sets, you'll likely howl at this.

[P.S. this is one of those cases where I wish I could double categorize a post.]

Block thing walking

Via Good Math, Bad Math: want a screen-saver that leans how to walk? My fellow OS X users should check out breveCreatures, developed in an A-Life simulation package called breve.

It's an evolutionary simulation: twenty-five critters made out of between two and many blocks (I've never seen one with more than eleven parts) are dropped onto a featureless plane, and each one in turn tries to walk (or, well, perambulate). Success is defined as maximum distance from the starting point; the more successful critters breed to populate the next generation, the less succcessful die out. Pretty standard genetic-algorithms type stuff.

The soon-to-be-released game Spore that Blue wrote about a while ago plays around with evolutionary ideas, but (from what I've read) does so in a particularly unscientific way. It's got player-designed organisms and a "march of progress" from simple aquatic creatures to planetary civilizations; those are great for a strategy game, but pretty much entirely against the spirit of the modern understanding of evolution. breveCreatures functions nicely as a demonstration of those same principles.

Is your home wired enough?

Your laundry machines beg to differ.

(From wired.com)

Airplane Boarding Algorithms

Ever wonder what the most efficient algorithm is for arranging passengers boarding an airplane? You're not alone! This paper is a mathematical analysis of the topic of airplane boarding algorithms. Well, two of them.

Nice Bed

I try not to talk about $WORK[0] on here anymore, and this sort of qualifies, but in an interesting way.

And I love the 2001 reference.

[x-posted to my LJ.]

The final frontier

It's been a day of picking up keys: I'm moving offices (this weekend) and moving house (over the next few weeks), and I've been given access to both of my new spaces today.

I've therefore spent an inordinate portion of my waking hours today wandering around in empty rooms, sometimes clutching a tape-measure, and envisioning things. The actual process of moving will be kind of arduous, but right now the sense of possibility is making me happy.

Let there be no more doubt about where I stand on the Judging/Perceiving axis: P all the way, baby.

(I'll post a link to photos once I've uploaded them. I'm using the cheapest damn digital camera money can buy --- it's like the Polaroid 600 of digital cameras --- so don't expect much.)

My Day Isn't Over Yet

Well, the server is back up. It appears the primary machine has suffered either a motherboard or power supply failure. Thankfully I do have backup hardware, just took a bit to copy stuff over and reconfigure it for the other machine.

I'm still tweaking some config stuff, but everything ought to be a go at this point.

This has been a culmination of a day where a vast amount of unlikely events have occurred in the span of just 12 hours.

Can't Stop The Serenity

So, Serenity is making another big screen appearance, this time for charity. Toronto is one of 47 screens around the world that will be re-showing the movie on the big screen thanks to its loyal following of fans, known as Browncoats.

Saturday June 24th in Toronto for those who are interested.

Read the article here Or the website here

Leaving on a jet plane

Strangely this will be the first time I've been on a trans-atlantic flight all by myself. There's something about the fact that I'm going to spend all night travelling and arrive tomorrow morning at what feels like 4AM and need to negotiate customs all by myself, and then figure out how to get to my hotel, and probably discover that they won't let me check in until after lunch (which is going to feel like breakfast), and then I'm going to have to find something to do for several hours while massively sleep deprived, that kinda freaks me out. Hopefully the hotel lobby will have big comfy chairs and not mind me passing out in one of them...

I guess I'm better off than my roommate. She won't be arriving until 3am. It will be interesting to see whether or not I actually get my room because it's her name on the reservation (they've assured us repeated that this will not be a problem...but then these are the same people who told her to "Call back tomorrow mornign at 9am, so&so will be here for sure then" only to discover that 'tomorrow' was a national holiday...so we'll see). Worst case I've got the address of a hostel around the corner.

I'm probably worrying about this way too much. Time to go get on the plane, once I'm in the air and can no longer actually do anything about the situation I'll stop worrying :)

Life for sale

Ever heard of Gen-Pets?

Neither had I until I found a link to their site.

A little disturbing at first and I kept following links on the site looking for the page that would say "ha ha... this is all a joke".

I couldn't find it. If you can, let me know.

Ventrilo is set up

I've set up a server. You can connect through either of www.oneoddsock.com or www.goldenempires.com. Ping me if you are interested in the password. It is the public version.

A Real Moving Still Picture

This is wicked!