It’s been a bad week, but laughter helps lift some of the clouds. Here are two videos on YouTube that gave me a good chuckle. The first is Chuck Norris reading some of the funniest (but cleanest) Chuck Norris one-liners.
This next one has a slight language warning, but it’s even funnier – it’s a David Blaine magic spoof, and the guy playing David Blaine is PERFECT because he eyeballs the camera just right.
I find myself in a hard place at the moment. Ashley and I came back from vacation a few days ago and were told that a dear friend has been diagnosed with cancer. She had cancer in her eye a bit over a year ago (melanoma) but was told that they got it all and we were all thrilled that she was in the clear. She gave birth to a baby girl about two months ago, and she was embarking on a new part of her life. Yesterday we were told the cancer is even worse than they thought – the prognosis isn’t looking very good. Here’s the description in her own words:
“I’ve been told that I have numerous lumps in the occipital bone in my right eye cavity with one tumor pressing on my brain. I also found out that the cancer has spread to my spine and pelvis/hips. In additional, the cancer has also been located in my lungs, liver and another tumor has been discovered in my pelvic region. Right now, the doctors are doing radiation on my spine and lumbar region in hopes that I can get back on my feet, return home under palliative care and then research as to whether or not the cancer can be treated with Chemotherapy now that it’s spread to other organs. As for the original site of the malignant melanoma, which grew on my eye lid and conjunctiva in the corner of the eye…that’s not such a big deal anymore. Phew, no more worrying about whether or not I’m be a one eye’d pirate!”
As you can tell, she has a lively personality and a great sense of humour. In some ways I think she’s dealing with this better than everyone else around her is. I’ve never had anyone I’ve been close to die – I’m finding it very hard to deal with this. It’s hard to concentrate, it’s hard to get any work done, it’s hard to put what I’m feeling into words. I feel some solace that there are Christians all over North America praying for her and her family right now – I’m fortunate to know brothers and sisters in Christ from many places and I’ve emailed everyone I can think of to pray. If that’s also you, please pray. I believe in miracles and I believe in the power of prayer…but that doesn’t make the sorrow I feel hurt any less.
I’m so incredibly tired of being sick. A little over a week after I get over having the flu, wham, I’m knocked to the floor with a particularly nasty cold. Last week it started with a very sore throat (it felt like someone was pouring acid down my throat), that blossomed into a head cold with all the associated head-stuffed-up problems, then it moved down into my chest and now I’m coughing up a lung and all sorts of nasty-coloured globs of mucus on an hourly basis. Gross. I went on antibiotics as of two days ago, and I’m hoping it will start to clear up before I leave for a short vacation on Friday – there’s nothing worse than flying with a head cold. The pressure changes
What makes this particularly frustrating for me is that I delayed a few days on my HTC Touch video review, and then for the past week I’ve been unable to complete it because who wants to listen to coughing and sniffing on a video? Bah! I want to be healthy again, which is what I normally am – to be sick twice in a matter of weeks is unheard of. Stupid body of mine – heal thyself!
As much as I like Vista, what I don’t like is waiting for developers to catch up and make their applications Vista-compatible. I still can’t get ACDSee 9.0 to work on Vista, and Adobe Lightroom is crashing regularly on me when I try to edit my RAW photos (which is bizarre because it worked fine for more than a month on the same hardware, minus a video card). I filled out an Adobe tech support request and Vista isn’t even an option on their list of operating systems. Vista came out at the end of January, making it six months now since release. I have all of my hardware working, but I’m still fighting with all sorts of software issues. There’s no solution other than to grit my teeth and bear it, but I’ve gotta’ say, my jaw is getting sore. When will the pain end? When will computing feel “normal” again like it did with XP? Come on software developers, catch up…
A couple of weeks ago, on June 3rd, the church I attend (RockPointe) had a fund-raising event for AIDS and extreme poverty prevention as part of a “Compassion in Action” push we’re doing as a congregation. They did it in an interesting way: they got together some of the most exotic and unique cars in western Canada, charged $100 a ticket, and put on a first-class event with food, entertainment, and an awesome assortment of jaw-dropping cars. Then then asked the nice (mostly) rich people who attended to reach deep and donate what was within their means. The final tally isn’t quite in, but at last count this event raised $115,000 – is that amazing or what? Calgary is such a financially blessed city, and it’s nice to see some of those people giving to a good cause. I attended the event and was the official event photographer. Here are a few pictures of some mighty lovely cars…
You can check out the full gallery over on my photo site, and you can even order prints if you like an image you see.
I emailed YouTube last week asking them why my 13 minute HTC Touch unboxing video was rejected for being too long when my account was categorized as a director account. I also asked why one of my videos was processed and live in about 20 minutes while the other took over two hours. Here was their response:
“Thanks for your emails. We’re no longer offering the option to upload videos longer than 10 minutes, regardless of your account type. If you see a video on YouTube that’s longer than 10 minutes, it’s probably owned by one of our content partners. There are also some users who can upload longer videos because they were given this permission before the feature was removed. Also, occasionally, depending on site traffic, changes to video and account information on our site can take a few hours to update and synchronize. We’re constantly working to make that happen a lot faster and appreciate your patience.”
So basically, we have a site that was built completely on end-user content now turning away users that want to upload videos longer than 10 minutes. I’ve had a YouTube account for a couple of years, and I thought I had requested “Director” status, but it seems either I hadn’t or it was never granted – and now I can’t get it. It’s bad enough the the quality is complete crap on YouTube, but it has such a large user base posting videos there gives you good exposure. Ideally my videos will be under ten minutes, but if I get on a roll and a video happens to go over 10 minutes, it’s idiotic that I’ll then have to break it up into two pieces. I’ve been testing DailyMotion and the video quality looks quite good compared to YouTube – they encode at 640 x 480 I think. So do I go for quality or put up with the length limitations of YouTube and the lower quality? Decisions, decisions.
There’s nothing quite like a good teacher, so this video struck me as very, very true.
I try to keep my office tidy, and with the U-shaped Ikea desk I have, all the cables running from PC to wall are exposed making it all too easy for things to look messy. Baseboard cable clips were a good solution I found to allow me to group power, networking, USB, and other types of cables together. The problem is that the Belkin clips I purchased aren’t strong enough – they seem designed for only a couple of thin, light cables. Over the past year since I installed them they’ve all fallen off, looking like this:
(baseboard dust – gross!)
Essentially being a problem of adhesive strength versus the stress the cables place on the clip, as each one fell off I re-attached it to the wall with Krazy Glue. That worked for a few weeks, but all of them fell off again – this time leaving the adhesive pad on the wall. What I’m looking for is some sort of cable clip that’s much stronger: I’m thinking something that screws into the drywall, something that will hold the cables in place and not fall off. Has anyone heard of such a thing? All my Google searches have been in vain…
This is how I felt from Sunday afternoon to Monday night:
(photographer bgaras2001, photo taken from this Smugmug contest)
Today I’m finally feeling better, but on Sunday I was puking my guts out and I felt like dying. It’s one thing to have a cold or a headache, it’s quite another to have a fever and have your whole body throwing a coups d’état. As I was aching I couldn’t help but think about what it would be like to be undergoing chemotherapy, suffering from cancer, or any other ailment that made you feel absolutely horrible, all of the time. God willing, I’ll never have to go through anything like that – but suffering, even for a brief period of time, gives you some small insight into the life that others who suffer on a regular basis go through.
I’m at about 80% normalcy today, so I’m hoping so get that HTC Touch video review finished and queue up two articles I wrote for Zune Thoughts. So much work to do!
Last night (June 5th) around 7 pm, a fierce rain came pouring down from the clouds, and within an hour the sky was alight with flashes from lightning. The thunder was booming, and I working on editing some photos from a recent exotic car event I photographed on Sunday. We had a brief power outage, and I expected my three UPS units in my office to do their jobs. When the power outage was over less than one second after it started, only one of my computers was left standing. Hrmph. What went wrong? They say there’s nothing like an emergency to test how ready you really are, and this certainly proved that I wasn’t ready for a power outage from a technology standpoint. I sat on the floor and started to examine which power cables went where. Much to my surprise I had accidentally connected two PCs to the same UPS, and it couldn’t handle the load. While this was going on, another two outages happened. I re-wired things so that two of my UPS’ only had one PC and one monitor connected to it, and my main workstation UPS (a brand new APC XS 1300 with a slick LCD display telling me current load levels and power draw) had the guts to take two PCs and two 24″ LCD displays.
I turned on the other two PCs and sat back with a satisfied grin thinking “Ok, bring it on, I’m ready now!”. I didn’t have to wait long, because the next outage hit a few minutes later. This time only one of my PCs blinked off, but I was expecting none of them to shut down. I took at look at the UPS it was connected to and it turns out that I bought a wussy one that could only handle 200 watts of draw – and I bet I was pulling just over that, around 250 or 275 watts. I turned off that PC and resumed work on my main workstation. Four more power outages happened, but all of my back-room gear (cable modem, WiFi router, switches, etc.) were all holding up because they were split up among two more UPS units. I have six UPS units in my home.
The thunder continued to boom, over and over, and the lightning strikes blazed in the sky. I started to notice the odour of smoke, but I didn’t think anything of it (idiot that I am). Ashley told me that there was a house on fire down the street from us, and I couldn’t believe it! I looked out my walk-out basement window and sure enough, amidst the sheets of falling rain there was thick black smoke rising from a house just a few homes down from us. When you see something like that, it’s a strange sensation. I thought “Ok, fire in the rain, this can’t last long, we’re not in any danger.” (Well, actually, I think my first thought was “HOLY CRAP, WHAT THE HELL?!?”). I grabbed my Canon SD800 digital camera, put on a jacket, and went outside with Ashley. There were already police and fire trucks on the street (why didn’t they turn on their sirens so we’d know there was something happening?) so that was a relief that help was already there. That meant though, of course, that the lightning strike that started the fire occurred at least 20 minutes prior. It’s a bit scary to think that there was a blazing fire a few hundred feet from my home and I had no clue.
Since the fire was on the back side of the house, we walked to our back yard to get a better vantage point. Boy did we ever!
Our neighbour two houses over, only two houses away from the fire, was out on her balcony and she told us that the three people living in the house were ok, they got out safe, and they were across the street in another house. Once I heard that, I felt free to take pictures of the fire – I felt that if someone was hurt or killed in the fire, me snapping pictures would be insulting (even if the people in question never heard about it). Some might argue that the loss of personal property is also an injury of a sort, but property damage pales in comparison to the loss of a human life.
There are a few more pictures of the fire in this photo gallery. We watched the fire fighters spraying the fire from the ground with a single hose for a while, and it only seemed to be getting worse. I don’t know much about fire fighting, but what they were doing didn’t seem to be doing much good. At that point it might have been more about containment than actually trying to put it out. What’s amazing of course is that it was still pouring rain, and the fire was blazing. Our neighbours (Ken and Adrian) on the opposite side (away from the fire) came out and we were discussing the situation with them. When he heard about the fire Ken wisely moved his work truck – which is full of compressed gas – down a block, just in case. I didn’t think we needed to worry about evacuating yet, because it would take a strong wind and a cessation of the rain to make things more dangerous. I noticed that someone had parked a car on our driveway, so I pulled my other car out onto the driveway just in case we needed to drive out of there. Here are a couple more pictures of the fire fighters:
Did I mention the insane flooding? Below is a picture of the green space behind our house – and no, it doesn’t normally come with a lake. There are storm drains there act as a pressure release for water being drained in other parts of the area, so it comes slamming up fast and in 30 minutes it was full. Our house is thankfully about 20 feet above this, so there’s little fear of flooding.
This morning I went out to see what the house looked like, and thankfully it didn’t look like it spread or did enough damage to collapse the roof in. I can’t imagine what the house looks like on the inside though, I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire inside was destroyed by fire. I know nothing about building repair, so would damage like this be repaired with a new roof? Or would they rip the house down to the foundation and build a new house? Calgary is undergoing a massive boom right now – house prices have doubled from what they were five years ago – so I hope the family in question can get the help they need and fast.
Oh and remember the flooded green space above? Here’s what it’s supposed to look like (photo taken this morning at 6:30 am):
How did my fair city fare elsewhere? Well…not so good. The amount of water caused all manner of problems (note that I didn’t take any of these pictures below):
See that yellow truck under the bridge? It’s free floating – I bet the water was 20 feet deep. Now, to be fair, this was no Katrina-level disaster. On the other hand, Calgary is remarkably unable to deal with water problems because we have so many low-land points and little to no drainage – so even a moderate water problem causes problems. Kind of like when five snowflakes fall in Seattle. 😉 We can deal with six feet of snow easier than 12 inches of water.
Last night Ashley and I had some good discussions about what we’d do if our house caught on fire. Given that all of our photos, music, and data is backed up off-site (via Carbonite) we decided we’d grab our dog, my laptop, and a few important documents and that’s it. Everything else can be replaced. Although now that I think about it, I don’t have an inventory of our DVD collection, and those aren’t ripped to a digital format, so replacing all of them might be difficult. A flaw in my plan! Emergencies like this sure do make you think though…
Be sure to check out the full photo gallery for all my pictures of the fire and collected images of flooding around Calgary – I’ll be adding to it as I find more images of what our city went through last night.
UPDATE: I thought it would be worth pointing out that I no longer use Carbonite because, frankly, they suck. Here’s an article why (short version: they don’t back up all your files). I was quite happy with Mozy for a while, then they jacked my rates by 1390% and I left them in a hurry. I’m currently using Crashplan and their pricing and service level is great.