Dangling Conversations

Posted 04 Oct, 2006 at 10:15 by brent in /Chatter | Permanent link

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

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Posted 28 Sep, 2006 at 08:37 by brent in /Technical | Permanent link

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.

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Posted 27 Aug, 2006 at 10:37 by brent in /FoodDrink | Permanent link

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 :)

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Posted 23 Jun, 2006 at 20:53 by brent in /System | Permanent link

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.

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Posted 30 May, 2006 at 00:10 by brent in /Social | Permanent link

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.

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Posted 29 May, 2006 at 12:35 by brent in /MovingPictures | Permanent link

This is wicked!

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Posted 16 Apr, 2006 at 19:53 by brent in /System | Permanent link

There's possibly a virus/worm/etc living on someone's machine that is successfully authenticating to the mail server and sending spam. Please check your PC for any such malicious software...

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Posted 05 Apr, 2006 at 01:27 by brent in /System | Permanent link

Letting everyone know that apparently sending mail to (only) hotmail.com is failing.

Possible candidate reasons are:

• hotmail.com requires reverse DNS now to work
• the servers/ip addresses are blacklisted
• the isp is blacklisted

I've sent mail to the NOC at MS inquiring further.

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Posted 08 Mar, 2006 at 10:20 by brent in /World | Permanent link

This is f'ed up. Why is an established organization for security trying to build a center for faith-based and community initiatives? WTF are they going to do? Hold a church BBQ and frisk everyone? Have a bake off at a mosque and have a dunk your most hated homeland security member? I'm glad I got out when I did, they are some f'ed up: Homeland Security and Neighbourly Love.

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Posted 27 Feb, 2006 at 12:20 by brent in /Science | Permanent link

This is so cool, I almost went outside and simulated one using yellow dots in snow. 3D in air image generation

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Posted 21 Feb, 2006 at 14:49 by brent in /MovingPictures | Permanent link

Sneakers--one of the movies no one watches because of the title. It took some friends who had seen it to show us the movie.

I really enjoyed it. It was a fun caper movie. A full description including cast is here at Amazon

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Posted 21 Feb, 2006 at 14:44 by brent in /Games | Permanent link

Random question popped into my head after popping out the inside of the cap from my diet Pepsi (tm, r, or whatever). I was wondering what sort of promotions occur in other countries regarding the Olympics (and I didn't feel like logging in to www.pepsi.ca to see if I won getting my picture taken with Wayne so I thought I'd write about it instead).

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Posted 20 Feb, 2006 at 13:05 by brent in /System | Permanent link

OK, I've registered the domain and linked it up. Matt is fixing up some pathing stuff to support both the original (www.goldenempires.com/dc) and www.danglingconversations.com.

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Posted 15 Feb, 2006 at 13:07 by brent in /Games | Permanent link

This was so much fun to do I thought I'd share it with you all. Do the following with Lord Vader with the object "Porn Star". Sith Sense.

Enjoy!

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Posted 15 Feb, 2006 at 11:24 by brent in /World | Permanent link

If you haven't read it, there's a wonderful set of comments coming out of the US government about the tech industry complying with China's rules and regulations about information. Such as that here: 'Nauseating collaboration with a regime of repression'. I find this fascinating that the US government wants compliance by say Google and other search companies to hand over there records and yet they consider China oppressive?

First question: Is this hypocritical of the US Government? Second question: How are these rules different from say house building code regulations? Aren't the rules and regs involved designed to help protect the people?

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Posted 31 Jan, 2006 at 18:51 by brent in /MovingPictures | Permanent link

Picked up the DVD on the weekend. It fulfilled the basic criteria of making me laugh, but it also had me cringing on numerous occasions. Quick synopsis is a bit of history, analysis, and numerous tellings of this particular joke by numerous people in comedy, usually told more for people in comedy than for the public.

And for the record, Bob Saget is a dirty, dirty man. I never realized until now. See what watching America's Funniest Home Videos does to you if you watch it too long?

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Posted 31 Jan, 2006 at 15:24 by brent in /System | Permanent link

The system is back up. Telus didn't have the line connected last night--looks like it might have been caused by something the previous owners did (possibly digital phone). Anyway, it's up and running and seems to be working fine. I haven't done any speed tests yet however. I'll do that some other time. I've spent enough of the afternoon at home working on the energy evaluation of the house and working with Telus to get things working again.

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Posted 29 Jan, 2006 at 12:08 by brent in /Science | Permanent link

CBC has the article describing what happened. Here's the video it was referring to.

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Posted 26 Jan, 2006 at 13:36 by brent in /System | Permanent link

Well, as expected there are issues with both Telus and Interbaun with doing the move on the weekend. It has been moved to Monday for now. Interbaun indicates Telus has not done an "assignment" for the move and Telus won't tell me anything becuase they aren't my ISP (if they had some f*ing service, I'd consider it) but according to them everything is set.

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Posted 02 Jan, 2006 at 13:43 by brent in /System | Permanent link

Letting everyone know there will be some downtime for the servers on the 28th and 29th. Hopefully the duration will be short but it depends on two companies (phone and isp) being unusually efficient on a weekend.

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