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Who Should I Vote For?

The election is next week and I’m still fairly undecided about who to vote for. Recently I’ve been leaning towards the NDP, even though Jack Layton said somethng really, really bone-headed several months ago (thing is, I can’t remember what it was). However, recently displayed ignorance w.r.t. copyright and electronic freedoms are making me sway away from them.

I was pretty anti-Conservative (PC or.. what’s the new acronym? CP? CPC? C3PO?) because of policy comments that tend towards hatred of minorities and the impoverished.

The Liberals. Well, frankly, I’m not all that happy with them either. Paul Martin strikes me as a fiscally sound leader who doesn’t really play politics too well. Certainly the CBC last night was painting him with Jean Cretien’s critique as “Good with policy, but not politics”. Despite that he seems to be the least of all evils.

Then there’s the Green party. But.. well, not really.

I would appreciate any and all comments, especially on disagreeable policy positions of all parties. Unfortunately, I think this election is going to be an exercise in choosing the least worst party. I would especially appreciate if anyone can remember what it was that Jack Layton said all those months ago that really enflamed me. I apologize for the lack of a clear (or really any) description of the issue. :-/

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3rd Big Bike Ride

Luisa and I went out on Wednesday for another ride along our now-usual route. We explored a bit more, and brought along a picnic lunch. Once we found a relatively secluded spot, we met this friendly guy, whom Luisa dubbed “Sparky”.

Sparky wasn’t shy in front of the camera

At first we didn’t approach him because we didn’t want to spook him. HAH! By the end of lunch, Luisa was trying to get Sparky to get off of her so we could get going! We worried briefly about having spoiled him, making him an easy target for future nasty types. However, I don’t think we were Sparky’s first friendly humans.

We started by feeding Sparky a bit of pineapple. He gulped that down in a minute or so. We were happy because he was a really scrawny-looking guy. However, he didn’t really go after the second piece of pineapple until we were leaving much later.

To get a really good idea of what he is llike, take a look at this little 4 MB QuickTime movie of Sparky. He loved to poke his head into our backpacks, between my (thankfully bagged in plastic) comics, and into Luisa’s hair while she was standing up. He seemed to have a fascination with fingers, gently biting them (well, okay, sometimes not quite so gently, for which he would get a tap on the nose).

I really thought he might end up sticking with us all the way home or something. However, he lost interest in use as we mounted our bikes (which he had inspected thoroughly earlier), and stretched out lazily in the sun, eying us as we rode off.

What a hoot.

This is another interesting bit of wildlife we came across. Anyone know what species it is?

Wow, nice colours

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VideoGame Camp

Still looking for somewhere to send the little ones so you can have some peace and quiet this summer? Maybe The VideoGame.Net Experience camp is for you if you want your kids to love you forever!

Along with playing games, the camp is all about *creating* games. How to use tools to create stimulating environments and all that.

The whole thing is run out of several US universities. Rutgers in New Jersey, Hofstra University on Long island, Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan (probably the closest one to us), Saint Joseph’s University in Philly, and a bunch of “Penn State” universities. Hm, so it’s northeastern US-centric I guess. Well, those Californians have lots of fun stuff of their own already, right? Heh.

Via BoingBoing –> Joystiq –> IGN. (whew!)

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Not feeling so great..

I think I’m getting a bit of what Ronnnie had last week. Hopefully hitting the hay early will help get rid of it..

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Recent Work-related Events

[this is an old draft that was hanging around; actually posted Tue Jan 25 2005]

I went to a job interview at Immersion Studios late last week. Turns out that an old ex-Alias guy, Rob Krieger works there. Small world.

Yesterday I went to Alias for a long, full-afternoon job interview. Interesting snippet: Sketchbook’s original code name was “Smack”, and the icon was a needle. Hah.

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Went to Canada’s Wonderland today

Larry from Alias invited everyone who worked on Alias Sketchbook Pro 1.1 to a free day at Canada’s Wonderland today. I have sunburn!

I am a Guilty Dad — Ronnie and Michael were both home sick today with sore throaats, coughs, etc. and I went to Wonderland and still haven’t told them yet. Maybe tomorrow.

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Alias Sketchbook Pro is out for Mac OS X

Yahoo, SketchBook Pro is out!

Alias release SketchBook Pro for Mac OS X today. I spent some time working on this app earlier this year. The app was previously only available for Windows, specifically targetted at Tablet PC users. It’s won all sorts of awards in the year or two it’s been around. But as good as it was on the PC, there was always calls for a Mac version, and here it is.

You can download a free 15-day trial version (the days need not be contiguous), and the price for it is $180 US, which is about $245 Canadian.

Update:
Here are links to some reviews/news items. Not sure how fresh they will remain — some of the URLs are very long and thus likely ephemeral: MacCentral, MacMinute, Mac Animation Pro Creative Mac, Applelinks, Mac Design Pro, USA Today, Yahoo, Creative 3D, Digital Animators, Newsday, AV Video, Hoovers, 3D LuVr, Animation Artist, Prophet.net, Film and Video, Vantage Link, The Street, Digital Producer, Florida Sun-Sentinel, Siggraph News, LA Times, Corporate Media News, Digital Media Designer, Big Charts

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Alias Sketchbook Pro

If you visit the official Alias Sketchbook Pro site you see a brief glimpse of news, which then vanishes into the ether..

I would hope for a more official press relelase or something in the near future.

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Fedora Core 2

Last night I downloaded the ISO DVD image for Fedora Core 2, which was really nice, since it meant I didn’t have to burn like 5 CDs or something. It was nice to use BitTorrent to download the 4 Gig image all in one night (I have no bandwidth cap from 2am-10am).

I burned the image to DVD on my Mac, and then slapped the DVD into the Media Box (which I named “Media” during all installs) and did an install.

It was the first of three I did tonight.

The first install seemed to go swimmingly, but when it was all done and the machine rebooted, it hung after spitting out the text “GRUB”. Now, “grub” is the default boot loader for Fedora Core 2, so I realized that I had a problem, possibly because i was trying to be fancy and include my already-existing old disk as an optional boot.

Now at this point I should mention that I have two hard disks in Media, each of which is 160 Gig. One is Serial ATA (SATA, new-fangled, fast tech), while the other is old-school parallel ATA (PATA). They are from the same manufacturer, and in fact their model numbers only differ by an “S” at the end for the SATA drive. The model #, for the morbidly curious, is “ST3160023A” (and “ST3160023AS” for the SATA, obviously).

I’ve been having problems with the SATA drive because the 2.4 Linux kernel didn’t support my SATA chipset — “Silicon Image 3112″ — which meant performance on my SATA drive was ultra-crappy. I went and got the second drive because of this, in fact. Now, when Fedora Core 2 was announced, it was not only going to have the new, fast, cool and in other ways spiffy 2.6 kernel, but it was also going to have the SiI3112 SATA driver built-in. W00t! So you can imagine that I was really looking forward to the upgrade.

I was surprised to learn that in fact, Fedora Core 2 was released back on May 18th! Ah well, I guess I waited a few extra weeks.

Well, back to the install. So when I couldn’t boot, I thought that maybe the problem was that the BIOS was set to boot off the PATA drive, and not the SATA drive. Well, changing that BIOS setting could really confuse the boot setup for Fedora, so I thought a re-install was in order. Especially since it was so easy to install!

Now, about some shortcomings in the installer… When the installer starts up, it asks to test the disc media from which you are installing. This is a good idea, and is also used in Apple’s recent installers. So I let it check out my DVD and make sure all is good. After about 10 minutes, it spits out my DVD and says “put in the next CD”. Well, I would think that: (a) it should notice that I am using the DVD, and (b) most people will only have the one disc, and (c) it should only spit out the disc when you click on “Test another disc”!

Shortcoming number two has to do with package selection. Following the advice of someone who wrote up their Fedora install (sorry, no link), I selected my packages manually rather than just saying “Everything”. The defaults for the package groups were not all that great. I would say that about half the groups needed no change, but the other half definitely were missing key components. I had to manually add things like postfix, mailman, squirrelmail, mysql, and ruby.

Well, after the second install I got an error that ended with:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.358 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet

Error 15: File not found

Press any key to continue

Now, as it turned out, the key bit there was “root=LABEL=/”, because it was supposed to say something like “root=/some/path LABEL=/”. Well, the long and short of it was that I had to manually edit my grub.conf file to have a fixed “root”, and also have the root defained as “root (hd0,0)” instead of using “hd1″.

Now that I had a successfully booting Fedora Core 2 system, I had to get MythTV installed. The easiest way to do this is to follow the instructions about using atrpms. I did that, but got more errors concerning a conflict between qt and redhat-artwork, of all things. So I have posted about it to the atrpms-users mailing list. I’ll let you know how it works out!

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Pool problems

White Rabbits everyone!

Our sad, saggy pool lining

Snow Pools opened our pool recently, and once the pump was going, our pool liner started to bulge strangely (as pictured above). This means that we either have a leak in the lining, or a leak in the hoses through which water pumps into the pool. If it’s the hoses (most likely) then we will have to dig up the back yard a bit to replace them, alas.

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