Jeff’s 40th

Posted by rae in friends
at 10:11 am on Wednesday, 31 March 2004

Birthday time! Jeff (K, not R) turned 40 on March 23rd celebrated by hosting a dinner for one and all on Saturday the 27th!


Gail, Megan and Jeff

I’m not sure, but I suspect that the girls outnumbered the guys by a fair margin.


Michelle, Ruth, Luisa and Kristen surround little Jamie

Not that I’m complaining, mind you!


A smooch from Ruth

Michael was a bit disappointed that he couldn’t come, and asked why we didn’t bring home any leftover food. We had to explain that you don’t bring food home from and all-you-can-eat buffet! :-)

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Cory’s signing

Posted by rae in friends
at 2:31 am on Monday, 29 March 2004


Cory signs books at Bakka
On Saturday I went downtown to attend Cory’s book-signing event at Bakka. He was (mostly) signing his two new books, A Place So Foreign and Eastern Standard Tribe. I don’t get down to Bakka hardly at all anymore. `in the day, I would go to Bakka once or twice a week, browsing books and usually buying a paperback or two. But then the combination of changing to a job in Richmond Hill instead of downtown and Bakka moving from Queen & Spadina to Yonge & Wellesley put the kibosh on my visits.


John Rose acts as Cory’s press photographer
Those Fridays on Queen Street west were pretty nice. Along with Bakka, there was the Snail across the street, supplying my comics fix for the week. The staff at Bakka and the Snail often cross-pollenated, and everony knew everyone else. Just look at Cory’s acknowledgments in Foreign, where he mentions several people who have worked at either store.

Many of those people showed up to the signing, which was great. I haven’t seen them all for ages [well, except for Michelle, Makr and Jeff :-)]. Tara’s 3-month-old baby was awfully cute, and John is getting more and more gray in his beard! (And here I thought he was an Ageless One). The only person missing for me was Tanya (who wil be appearing at Bakka on April 17th).

*yawn, it’s late (I got lots of good stuff working for Alias) and time for bed. I’ll post about the bday celebrations for Jeff K’s 40th later. You can peek at the pics now if you like.

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Famous Friends

Posted by rae in friends
at 12:51 am on Friday, 19 March 2004

As I get older, my friends make more and more of an impact on the world. Even so, it’s a bit of a shock when someone you know is on the cover of Now Magazine here in Toronto. Now to be perfectly honest, I don’t really know Cory all that well. If I saw him, I would say hi and talk to him for a while, but (for instance) we’ve never visited each other’s place or anything.

John, on the other hand I know really well. And I get to see him many nights on TV. He’s a “science guy” on the Discovery channel’s daily science show (formerly “@discovery.ca”, now “Daily Planet”. Next year …?). Also on the same show is Ivan, whom I got to know over a few good games of D&D.

Friends abound in the literary field. I used to know Tanya really well (well, well enough to get my name used in one of her books, even if it was just a quick victim of evil), but haven’t seen her for years and years. Tanya, Cory and Michelle are all part of the Bakka gang. I expect to hear something about Tara (on the right in that pic) one day. I really liked her comics! Hopefully I’ll see her when I go to Cory’s upcoming signing. Michelle’s sister, Kelly is a Hollywood actress. Someone else I’ve missed seeing for years and years.

Another luminary is Yann Martel. Okay, so I haven’t seen Yann since High School. I still think the odds are .. well, about 50/50 that he would recognize me. :-) However, since I was definitely not part of the jock culture that gave him a bit of a hard time, I’d like to think that he would stop for a chat if we met somewhere.

Ruth doesn’t really know it, but she *is* famous. Really. And don’t tell Debbie, but she is, too. If you are a scrabble fan, you must have heard of poslfit, a.k.a. John Chew. I don’t think Andrew realizes how much we envy him working at Apple in the Cocoa team. That’s easily fame-by-association.

Craig controls our every move as an Editor in Chief at MapArt, while David tries to be an honest journalist (he insists it’s not an oxymoron). I also have to admit that I know (*gasp*) a politician.

*whew. Okay, I think I have all the name-dropping out of my system for the next 20 years.. The only point I might try to make out of all this before I give up and go to bed is that the older I get, the smaller the world becomes in terms of who I know. I am always finding people who know my friends by completely other routes. I can see how society evolved into a “not what you know but who you know” kind of deal. It’s a raw deal, a deal I don’t agree with, but I can see where it comes from nonetheless.

Ya, I must be getting tired, I am pontificating.

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Unreal Tournament 2004

Posted by rae in entertainment
at 10:01 am on Thursday, 18 March 2004

Yesterday was somewhat Unreal Tournament 2004 day at our house. On Tuesday Unreal Tournament 2004 (ut2k4) was released in the US, and Luisa took the boys to Electronic Boutique to pick up 3 copies. When she got there she was told that (a) the game wouldn’t get to Canadian stores until the next day, Wednesday, and (b) the game had two editions: DVD with headset and 6-CD with no headset.

Well, initially of course we wanted to get 3 copies of the DVD version, but then we realized that Michael’s PC doesn’t have a DVD-ROM drive! Egad. Also, our friend Iain (who doesn’t post to his own blog!) asked us to reserve a copy for him too, so we reserved 1 CD and 3 DVD versions of ut2k4.

Come Wednesday (yesterday), Luisa returns to the store and discovers that they only have 2 of the 3 DVD versions we ordered. I quickly call Iain and ask if he wanted to wait for 2 more days for the DVD version or just get the CD version. He opted not to wait. Heh. So Luisa came home with 4 copies of ut2k4. The kids started installing right away and started having prooblems with the headsets etc. (I told Michael to go ahead and use my headset since I was at work!) They ended up sorting them out — Ronnie doesn’t like the headsets so now Michael and I have the 2 DVD headsets and also Michael managed to get voice chat working with an internet game, even though we couldn’t get it working in a LAN game.

When I get home, Iain and I immediately make a copy of my DVD using Toast 6 on the G5 to see if I can spare Iain some pain installing at home. We use the copy to install on my PC and it works! Yay, so Iain doesn’t have to feed his 6 CDs to his PC at home. It doesn’t work as a play disc though, which is fine since Iain can use his real CD for that.

Small side note: ut2k4 has optimizations for 64-bit CPUs.

So Iain and Michael and I played a bit (I was doing some enTrac work, burning a DVD image at the same time) and never managed to get voice working properly. In fact so far, only Michael has gotten it working in an internet game (more than one? I’m not sure). Perhaps it is a server setting? I had thought I might have to open a port on the firewall, but Michael got it working so it cant be that.. right?

As an interesting side note, ut2k4 comes with copies of two Alias products: Maya PE (personal edition), and SketchBook Pro (trial edition). Cool!

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Online journals

Posted by rae in Reid
at 9:55 am on Wednesday, 17 March 2004

Today in her Blatherings, Debbie asked:

How long have you been posting?
Why did you start your journal?
Are you basically happy with it?
So let’s see what my answers are..

How long have you been posting?
Since shortly after we got our first cablemodem I guess. That was around April 1997. So it’s been seven years now. Yow.

Why did you start your journal?
Partly because I’m an extrovert exhibitionist (thanks Hon!) and partly because I saw the web as a way to keep in touch with people. I figured it was easier explaining things once in one place rather than repeating them over and over. Plus, it is kind of nice to see someone you haven’t seen for quite a while and yet they are up-to-date on your life and have things they want to ask about it.

Are you basically happy with it?
Hah! Of course not. The content is fine, but it’s still too hard to create it, especially the pictures. On the one side, there’s the software itself. I’ve moved around, using several different packages and am currently settled on Moveable Type because it’s the least sucky of the available software. However, I do not like its license and it has some basic design problems. Hell, all of the available software suffers from basic design problems. This is why I’ve been motivated to write my own.

Ya, in my copious spare time. Hah!

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Burning at both ends..

Posted by rae in Reid
at 5:40 pm on Monday, 15 March 2004

Augh, I’m starting to feel a litle stressed. For those of you who don’t know, I’m working two jobs at the moment. During the day I’m at Alias, while at night I work at home on stuff for enTrac (where Mark works). it’s starting to get a bit stressful as deadlines start to coincide. Never a good thing.

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Art & Logic

Posted by rae in development
at 9:37 am on Friday, 12 March 2004

Ran across this page today. Looks like an interesting place to work. It’s a colection of programmers and other tech staff that are geographically distributed across the US and Canada. Interesting.

Kevin at work sent me a link to this link that looks like a real news page. It wasn’t until I accessed the tech section that I was sure the site was a parody. Oh, and be forewarned — accessing the site root will take over your whole screen with personal ads in a flash animation.

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You are a winner!

Posted by rae in Reid
at 8:59 am on Thursday, 11 March 2004

When I filled up with gas at Esso this morning using my SpeedPass thingee, the pump made this strange musical sound and announced on the front that I was a “free winner” or some such, and that I had to go in to the counter to claim my winnings. My receipt had a skill-testing question on the bottom, too:

(30 X 3) - 80 + 5 ______

I dutifully took it to the counter, had to sign my name and now I a m the proud owner of.. 50 “points”. Ooooh, ahhhh.

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Recent Tech Tok postings

Posted by rae in web site
at 9:44 am on Wednesday, 10 March 2004

Been busy posting on Tech Tok recently. Recent posts include:

Toronto LAN Party
iTunes-LAME Encoder
AllOfMP3.. won’t be around long
Installing Mandrake 10
MorphOS — what the hell is it?
Running slashcode
Halo Mods
Apple Store for T.O.
Sony’s “Video iPod”
convert IP address to geographic location

So check it out!

4 Comments

tnir.org was Blackholed by rt.njabl.org

Posted by rae in web site
at 11:23 am on Tuesday, 9 March 2004

And somewhat rightly so. No, I was not running a completely open relay. I just made a mistake in my configuration. In my “trusted SMTP servers” list I had entries of the form:

192.168.1.0/8
209.167.153.0/8
Now, I am not completely clear on the ‘/’ notation. I know it means a bitmask w.r.t. the IP address, but I wasn’t sure which way the mask was applied. In fact, I thought (as experienced admins will already know) that the bits “filled in” from the right, and that they indicated “wildcard” bits, that could be anything. So in my config file, the “/8″s meant (to me) that the last 8 bits (the “0″ in the IP address part) could be anything. However, what it really meant was that the *first* 8 bits were required and the rest could be anything. So this:
    192.168.1.0/8
means any machine with an IP address starting with “192″ could use me as a relay.

In fact I was open to anyone with an IP address that started with 216, 209, 204, 24, 66, and 207. Now as it turns out, the IP address of the relay tester (rt.njabl.org) was 209.208.0.15. Yep, that meant I let it relay.

Well, now I’ve fixed it by changing all the /8’s to /24s and used the web page to ask to be retested. And now I know what the /NN notation means.. in the context of postfix config files, anyway.

3 Comments