Random Musings and Nicknacks

I don’t believe it, but it seems there is a story in our family that hasn’t been told yet!

A couple of months ago, Ling and Tim decided they wanted to make pizza from scratch. Make their own dough, toppings, everything (okay, they bought the pepperoni, but you know what I mean).

So Tim set out on the internet to find a dough recipe, and he and Ling decided to work on it together. Everything made sense to them, except for one thing…

I came into the room to overhear them talking between each other … “we don’t have any yeast. Do we really need yeast? We probably don’t”
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For such a big city, and such a big industry, I am constantly surprised by how small the IT industry in Vancouver really is. I think we owe it to the mobility of the workers.

I started a new contract yesterday, and discovered that there are people there from three of the places I have previously worked.
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At the beginning of this week, C4 Consulting officially launched version 2 of its website!.

This one is in a short beta, to work out any issues with compatibility, especially around different browsers.

If anyone sees a problem, feel free to use the site feedback link and let us know.

I had a thought over the weekend — I realized that after we had bought the NAS (extra disk storage) that we didn’t really seem to be using it, and this was a bad thing – we shouldn’t be just wasting this technology.

So I logged in to take a look, and discovered we were using 45% of the 1 terabyte of space on it! It sure was being used, and I had to think about it.

Tim has about 40GB of video data on it, he couldn’t be making the movies he does right now otherwise – he’d be out of space.

My entire iTunes Library is on there – every time I listen to music, sync podcasts to my iPod, or watch a movie, we’re using it.

Both Macs do nightly backups onto it; we can recover data all the way back into 2008.

Oh, and of course this entire website is running on it.

So it turns out we do use it, and use it heavily. It is just that it does its job so quietly that we don’t even notice!

And I think that’s really the way technology should be — unobtrusive, invisible, and incredibly useful.

I just found this video from another site I read, showing some of the most amazing bike tricks I have ever seen…

This is a must watch … you wont believe what you see.

Picking my bike up from the shop the other day, I ran into a situation that I have never been in before — my credit card was rejected!

This had me concerned. I knew how much was on it, and there was plenty of room left to the limit. The only options I could think of where that they had flagged a large charge from a bike store as too suspicious (which seemed unlikely, since I was present in the store, and they called in to try to get authorization) or the extra room on my card had disappeared.

The latter option could be a significant problem, since we were talking thousands of dollars…
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When I go out for my lunchtime walk, their is often a little black dog in the park that amazes me by the quality of his training. Every lunch they go out into the park, the owner throws a ball or a frisbee, and they spend the lunch hour exercising.

There is a lot of traffic in this neighbourhood, but there appears to be no need to put the dog on a leash – even when they cross the street he heels perfectly [1]. Additionally, when the owner is in a restaurant the dog sits patiently outside waiting, motionless.

Walking by, for the first time I saw what might be a chink in this dog’s training.
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This actually caused me to laugh…