Archives for the 'Uncategorized' Category
Jared Diamond is speaking tonight
October 27th at TCU Place. Wendy and I are going to it and I am quite excited about it. She got tickets to the reception and the talk for some reason but I may drag along a copy of his books and him sign them.
Campaign Promises Thus Far
This list is the campaign promises the four federal parties have made. The end result is with a struggling economy, a lot of these promises won’t see the light of day.
iPod Touch
Yesterday I finally broke down and bought an iPod Touch. I am not sure if I will keep it. The nerve damage in my hands make it almost impossible to use.
That being said, the Wordpress app I am using works amazingly.
New from Google
First of all there is Google Chrome and also a new version of Picassa. Both are worth downloading.
4-0
The Saskatchewan Roughriders are 4-0 with a comeback victory over Montreal. Not only that but it is the second win in a row by our third string QB. Apparently Eric Tillman knows a little bit about evaluating quarterbacks and hiring head coaches. His trade of Kerry Joseph doesn’t look so bad now. Speaking of Kerry Joseph, how is he doing in Toronto?
What Would Republican Jesus Do?
This comes via Scott. While I had to laugh, this was posted as a response to this interview with Mark Driscoll and others in Relevant Magazine. I thought I had just missed it but not a lot of people linked to it according to Technorati so I thought I would link to it here. I generally don’t care that much about what Mark says but after reading his comments, it almost sounds like he has William Shatner disease, that is he is becoming a parody of himself.
Home at last
After a long false start yesterday, Oliver is finally home today after 22 days in the NICU at Royal University Hospital. We picked him up at 3:30 today and we had several requests to take him by the Centre. After I was diverted to deal with a flood we had (someone soiled their clothes and decided to flush them down the drain). Wendy and Mark took him home. Mark who has been so excited for so long, finally got to hold him for the first time, the dogs checked him out, and he is now hiccupping on the couch beside me.
Contextless Thoughts
- Oliver is still in the NICU at RUH. He is doing fine but is still too small to take home. The nurses are trying to fix him up with the little girl in the crib next door but there isn’t a lot of chemistry there.
- Mark is irritated by the rule that he can’t see Oliver whenever he wants. There was a poster up for the RUH Foundation and he muttered, “I won’t be giving any money to them!”
- Lee is moving out soon (It was a couple of years ago he was going to move in for a couple of months). He has a nice renovated apartment in Lakeview which he doesn’t know if he is going to keep because he wants to be closer to work. Either way it looks like there is a move in my future. Mark is torn as he hates the idea of his uncle moving out but he really wants Lee’s large bedroom in the basement. He has floated the idea of moving out with Lee but that hasn’t gotten much traction.
- A friend of mine drives a Ford Explorer but spent less then $400 on gas last year. He walks the ten blocks to work every day even when it is -40 degrees out. He only drives when he has to be somewhere after work that he can’t walk to. Considering that the average American spends almost $4000.00 a year in gas, that’s a considerable saving.
Mark is Eight
Mark turns eight today and he woke up to some fun birthday gifts. As I mentioned before, I got him a skimboard and the DVD of Surf’s Up. He wants to surf but in Saskatchewan you are somewhat limited with your surfing options. After proving to me he can read an analog clock, we got him his first digital watch. He can’t wait until it is dark and he can try out the indigo night light. We also got him some Cobra 2 way radios for use at the lake. Other gifts include the Transformers game for PS2, a Tech Deck, and a art kit (he recently told Wendy that “art’s my thing”). We generally get him a book for his birthday but after getting a dozen Hardy Boy and Danny Orlis books at the recent Symphony Orchestra book sale, he has a lot to read.
Lee gave him a three person tent and a sleeping bag. Lee loved sleeping outside as a kid and thought Mark may want to do that at the lake. Of course it is all fun and games until a skunk decides to wander in during the night.
Later today we are heading to go-kart track downtown for some racing action. Last year Mark was an inch too short and was devastated he couldn’t race so this year is good to go. Of course he has been trash talking none stop about his racing skills so we will see how he feels when he is nudged into the tires.
It’s been a good year for Mark. His grades are excellent, he loves karate, and Maggi actually listens to him. The next year should be even more enjoyable, well until he breaks his leg skimboarding.
Back from Calgary
I am back from Calgary. I was traveling with another manager from the Centre. As we were in a meeting last night he got a call from his kid who was being rushed to the hospital. After waiting for more information, we packed up, checked out and left Calgary at 10:30 p.m. and started to drive home. It wasn’t my favorite drive ever (my record isn’t on the record) and we rolled into Saskatoon around 4:00 a.m. I drove most of the trip and I discovered Amp Energy drink. I was in a convenience store in Drumheller looking at what drink to get and I actually thought, “If it is good enough for Dale Earnhardt Jr., it is good enough for me.” Amp Energy gave me a boost was a lot better tasting than Red Bull. While driving through the night isn’t that much fun, it was nice to get home 18 hours earlier than expected.
The conference was a good one. I took some classes on disaster relief and I know more about the Incident Command System than I ever thought possible. Hopefully I will never have to put into practice what I have learned but if I do, I should be a bit more prepared. I also managed to get downtown and connect with Karen/OneHouse and also Dave King who returned my coffee mug Wendy gave him when he was in Saskatoon.
Mark is quite sick this afternoon and I am exhausted. The plan is to watch the Canadiens lose to the Philadelphia Flyers and then call it an early night.
Don’t let the facts get in the way of your sign
Apparently all of the historically aware protestors were off at another event.
Charter for Compassion
This comes from Karen Armstrong at the 2008 TED. via OneHouse
Edward Norton and the Highline
A new look around here
If you are reading this on my site (rather than via a feed reader), you will notice a new look and feel around here. I was looking at a bunch of Wordpress themes and while I liked some of them, many themes seemed to get in the way of the content or are used by Wordpress.com and therefore as common as the Blogger templates.
In addition to playing around with the design, I added some features under the sites hood. While playing with WordPress I found a dynamic sitemap generator plugin. While Blogger automatically pings Google Blog Search and you can submit your RSS feed to Google Sitemaps (Wendy does that with The Cooking Blog and it makes a pretty big difference in how Google sees new content), I went out and installed a free Google Sitemap generator that works as a PHP script. It found all 8230 posts and the other 100 pages that make up jordoncooper.com and created sitemaps for Google, MSN, and Yahoo! search. If your server can run PHP, you can download it here.
Twitter’s Server Woes
As I have written earlier, I really enjoy Twitter. Reading some of the political writers post 140 character posts on the campaigns is amazing and a lot of fun. Recently Twitter has had some server issues that has made Twitter a bit unreliable and all over the web one has been reading how awful this was. Maybe because I have been online and dorking around with web services for a long time but a couple hours of downtime isn’t that big of a deal AND isn’t that uncommon.
- Blogger had some problems with reliability and uptime even after Google bought them.
- Metafilter used to limit the ability of new people to sign up and actually charged at one time.
- Flickr had some technical scaling issues before Yahoo! bought them.
- Typepad had had some rough days as well.
- I remember when GeoCities was still kind of cool, it went down for a week once.
- Microsoft lost MSN Messenger at least once that I can remember and I remember Hotmail going down because someone forgot to renew a domain name.
It’s the web. Downtime happens to the best of them.
Our Cabin Weblog- Recently listened to music
- David Gray – Be Mine October 19, 2008
- David Gray – December October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Knowhere October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Real Love October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Last Boat To America October 19, 2008
- Recently additions to my library
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
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