The Time Has Come

The moment you’ve all been waiting for… I’ve got a second blog! What does that mean to all of you loyal readers? Just that my random, infrequently updated blog will now be slightly less random and updated even less frequently.

One of the problems I’ve been having since I’ve started posting was the two very different types of readers that I want to reach:

1. My parents
2. ummmmm…. who am I kidding, no one else reads this

Seriously though I’ve been wanting to both keep in touch with friends and family as well as rant about tech things. Now knowing full well that my tech friends don’t care what I do on the weekends, and that my family would probably stop reading if I started writing about the woes of permission grants as it pertains to cross schema triggers in an Oracle 10g database. You here that right there, that was the simultaneous click of all my family members leaving this site to look at the latest sleepy puppy video on YouTube.

So if you are one of the 3 people that might be interested in the tech talk side of things, the new site is here, enjoy.

The times they are a-changing

So, it seems I may be shifting into a new, more technical position at work. I’ve been looking forward to this kind of move for a long time. Not that I don’t like my current position, but I really relish the challenges of difficult technical problems and now I’ll get to focus on them more. I will be sharing the system architecture/technical planning etc. role with a good friend that’s been doing it for a few months.

To set the mood for this move, Jeremy Miller has written a great article that describes my feelings really well. For those that wonder what my focus will be for the next while, it should provide a good read.

Best Flowchart Ever

Thanks to XKCD for providing me the means to slowly transition my blog from purely humourous rantings for the masses, to slightly humourous postings for nerds.

Hail to the Revo

Deciding to make the most out of the foul weather, a group of us went stumping (backroading/offroading) last weekend.  I’ve been a little wary of doing any really aggressive offroading since getting new tires for the truck since I’ve downsized from 31″ to 29″ tires, but they stood out as the best tires I’ve ever used in the snow.

Driving my Dakota with no weight in the backend, in snow deep enough to be dragging my drivetrain through the packed surface layer, I was getting as much traction as my friend in a landcruiser with liftkit and 33″ BFGs.  For anyone considering new offroad tires, I emphatically recommend the Dueler Revo

Special thanks for an fantastic stumping day out to all the lads hopping in my box to get turned around in the snow.  Mad props to McLin on his first foray into the world of stumping.

Two Words…

Groin Attack

Bachelor Life

I will take this opportunity, dear reader, to bring you up to date on things that have changed in bachelor life since I last enjoyed this style of living.

Our favourite cartoon satire, the Simpsons, has been replaced by a short-lived comedy combining the hedy implications of genetic engineering and the frivolity and angst of high-school called Clone High. I recommend it to anyone with a similarly odd sense of humour so that you can join in when I trade in my Homerisms for Mr. Butlertron references.

Video games seem to have reverted to their infancy while the horsepower to run them has gone through the roof. I spent a good amount of time this weekend playing “Mike Tyson’s Punch Out” on hardware that, at the time of the game’s release, would have been available only to the pentagon and taken up a warehouse of its own nearly the size of that housing alien spacecraft.

Curling Rocks!

… are very heavy. Ha ha, little curling humour there. For those of you that aren’t into curling puns, too bad.

So my curling league kicked off last night and I have to say it was everything I expected. Just as fun as darts, and with almost as much exercise!

Due entirely to our magnificent skill and training (read: luck) we managed to squeak a win in our initial game by a score of 9-1.

Lessons learned from a first day of curling:

1) Teflon on ice is very slippery

2) Novice league shots fall into 2 categories: flying through the house or “Get Sweeping”

3) Teflon on ice is VERY slippery

4) It doesn’t matter where the skip points his broom, the stone goes where the stone wants to go

3) Teflon on ice is VERY, VERY slippery

Monaco – Breeding ground of Ferraris and Clown Fish

Amanda and I spent a really cool day exploring Monaco today. Funny little place, I’ve been to few cities let alone countries where the whole place can be explored in a single day. Beyond the standard walking around and café visits, we went to the Aquarium, where they have a very successful coral and clown fish breeding program, and the Casino, which is apparently very good at spawning Ferraris (there must have been at least a dozen within 2 blocks of the casino, and this is the off season!)
The most visible thing about the people of Monaco: they have WAY too much money. The yacht show was on when we were there and the average price was well into the millions of dollars. Moorage in Monaco is millions of dollars for a berth. This got me to thinking, how does a country so obviously flushed with cash protect itself from greedy neighbours and pirates? Back in the day the mountains surrounding the principality and the high cliffs around the port would be a natural defense. Now in the days of the Apache helicopter and tomahawk cruise missile, what do they do? The answer was provided in a park, and ties nicely into a previous post about the defense of Switzerland with amazing little knives. Apparently the Monagesques have taken the defensive stylings of those wily Swiss a step further and introduced the Monagesque Army Cow!!!

Did you miss us Moustiques?

Here we are back in Nice, and so are the mosquitoes. We think we’ve determined where they come from; the room next to Amanda’s is a “storage” room. I think it used to be the shared bathroom for the floor before bathrooms were installed in the suites (very apparent from Amanda’s place that the bathroom was an add on). Anyways, the old lady that seems to be caretaker for the place came and asked Amanda for help last night because she was emptying water that was dripping from the ceiling in that room into the toilet and there are no lights in there and everything is coated in a fine layer of slime. Glorious.
On the up side, the weather has been a lot nicer since we’ve gotten back to Nice. If I were to do the Italy trip, I think I’d spend a lot more time in the Tuscan hilltop towns (Montalcino, Montalpulciano, San Gemignano etc.) and only go to Como if the weather report was 100% excellent. The scenery was outstanding there, but as soon as the weather got socked in, you couldn’t see any of the scenery anymore. And being a mountain town, the weather socks in a lot more than in Tuscany, where the one storm we saw, and it was a doozy, lasted all of 10 minutes.
So now I’m sitting here in a launderette in Nice, watching my mostly thrice soiled clothes (hand-washing in hotel sinks doesn’t really count as getting things clean in my books) spin round and round and thinking about what a change it’s gonna be to head back to Victoria next week

• No mosquitoes


• Lots more rain


• No cheap, great wine


• Free, good beer


• No reading in the sun on the beach


• Good internet access and telephone


• No Amanda….

Northern Italy is a Gorgeous Mess

I thought about naming this post “Death by Semi-Truck on Tiny Alpine Road”, but wasn’t sure it had the same ring. Amanda and I have decided last minute to visit lake Como, home of such famous people as Alessandro Volta (until his not so recent death) and George Clooney. After a very painful drive through the backroads of Chianti.which are supposed to be very romantic, but are a pain in the ass if you’re trying to get somewhere and haven’t pre-planned somewhere to stay, we breezed the rest of the way across Italy and are nuzzled tightly up against the Swiss boarder. I feel much safer knowing their amazingly versatile knives are at hand in a pinch.
The scenery here is amazing, I see why Mr.’s Volta and Clooney like living here. Gorgeous Alps plunging dramatically into beautiful lakes. Unfortunately, when Amanda and I arrived last night in the sunshine we said “no need to take pictures of the beautiful scenery right now, we have two more days here”. It’s been raining the whole time since. To get back to the title of the post, since it’s raining and we have a car, we decided to nip over to Switzerland for lunch. An interesting idea, but lacked in the execution. The alpine roads from Italy into Switzerland are 1 lane (not each way, in total), are riddled with traffic including huge trucks and wind up and down mountainsides. Twice we hade to stop, back up and basically maneuver traffic around so that a semi truck or bus could make it around a tiny walled hairpin turn. Next time I’ll stick to the Autostrade.