ReidNews > 2004

icmef

Posted by rae in web site
at 2:28 pm on Thursday, 28 October 2004

I put together a bunch of RSS feeds from several people’s blogs, sorted the entries by time and put them up on an icmef.

I’m still playing around with the format, and learning stuff like the <cloud> tag, which should make for less polling. Shouldn’t be hard to set up an XML-RPC server to handle cloud..

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Renovations: walls done

Posted by rae in family
at 9:26 am on Thursday, 28 October 2004

Well, the wall and ceiling renovations are all done.

click on the pictures for a larger version

Now we just need to paint and get the floor done. Someone is coming on Monday to start the floor work. Hopefully it will all be all done by the end of the week, and we’ll have our new bedroom to enjoy. Then we’ll just have to go find the new loveseat.

[Update: fixed the picture links. Thanks David!]

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Battlestar Galactica is back

Posted by rae in entertainment
at 11:20 am on Tuesday, 26 October 2004

There’s a new Battlestar Galactica series, based on the miniseries from last year. I downloaded episodes 1 and 2 last night, which is kind of strange, since the series isn’t supposed to premiere until January of next year. Huh.

I also grabbbed the pilot episode of a new Canadian series, ReGenesis, which is airing on The Movie Network.

Galactica cannot be seen in Canada, as far as I know. It is running on the Sci Fi channel.

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Renovations

Posted by rae in family
at 10:49 am on Tuesday, 26 October 2004

For the past week or so, we’ve been renovating our master bedroom. Well, more specifically, we’ve hired contractors to renovate our bedroom.

before the renovations began
(click for larger pictures)

The plan was to remove the closet that separates our bedroom from the “walk-in closet” area, thereby making for a large bedroom with an ensuite bathroom. We’ve been using 3D Home Architect “Home Design Deluxe 6″ (HDD 6) app to plan out the space. Hm, apparently, they’ve renamed the new version to “Envisioneer“. Bad move, I think. “3D Home Architect” is a fairly recognizable brand.

Ya, ya, ya, it’s a Windows app, so sue me. Unfortunately, I only have a version of UpFRONT for the Mac that requires an FPU. That makes it crawl, even on my 2GHz G5. If I could find a version that used SANE (i.e. software floating-point), it would fly. :-/

So here are some renderings from HDD of what we hope to accomplish. Click on pictures for a larger image.

Our dream

You can see lots of pictures if you look in these places:

You can also see how we got the house ready for all the dust you get when you sand drywall. Today is supposed to be the worst day for that. They’ve closed the door in the bedroom, and we’ve closed all the doors upstairs and stuffed rags in the bottom of the door. In the pictures you can see how Luisa found enough plastic of various kinds to seal off the living and dining rooms, as well as creating a baffle to walk through to get to the kitchen (and thus access the dining and living rooms). It’s like living in the Andromeda Strain!

After the drywall guys are done we get to bring in the floor experts. First the people who replace/fix the floor int he bedroom, and then the stripping/sanding people. Luisa wanted to coat the floors herself because she wants to use water-based stuff, and most professionals will only use the thicker stuff (lacquer?). Fortunately, when we talked to the “floor guy”, he said he would be happy to use water-based stuff, so I think Luisa is happy to let him do it.

So I’m sitting here huddled in the basement with the furnace off (don’t want drywall dust in the vents!), listening to the banging and scraping going on two flights above me. Hey, time to run iTunes!

[Update: Luisa wrote about the renovations too. And I didn't even notice before I posted. Silly me.]

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Collaborative Drawing

Posted by rae in the Net
at 10:32 am on Monday, 25 October 2004

Peter just showed me “Imagination Cubed“, an interesting site where multiple people can draw and chat at the same time. It is a bit similar to Saturday’s iSketch.net.

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iSketch

Posted by rae in the Net
at 1:32 am on Saturday, 23 October 2004

Ronnie showed me iSketch, a multi-user online version of Pictionary, basically. Very cool.

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Walking home

Posted by rae in family
at 3:47 pm on Wednesday, 13 October 2004

i took the Mazda in to the shop to get the brakes looked at and the oil checked. I had to walk home, so I brought along my camera and took some pictures along the way.

A plane in the sky along my walk..

(Update: picture above shrunk to a smaller size; you can see full size by clicking on the pic though. Thanks Jeff!)

There are a *lot* of pictures, and I left them big-ish (1024 pixels wide instead of the usual 480), so don’t click on “More..” unless you have time to wait for all the pictures to load.. (more…)

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Podcasting, and Eeek

Posted by rae in podcast, the Net
at 12:28 pm on Wednesday, 13 October 2004

There seems to be a new Killer App out there, and it’s called PodCasting. The idea is a branch off of RSS feeds for blogs — like those I use in my Journal News aggregation page. A link to an mp3 is added to the RSS information, and there are apps (iPodder – free, iPodderX – shareware) that will monitor the feeds and grab new mp3’s as they become available.

This is not too different from what I already do with some more commercial mp3 broadcasts. Every week I download the latest Quirks & Quarks as well as This Week in Science. I am hoping this new influx of available mp3’s may include some science-related information/discussion. I’ve always thought we could do a show with two or more people talking about stuff.

Eeek! It turns out that Jerry Doyle is a hard-line right-wing conservative!

Btw, in case you hadn’t heard, Howard Stern is moving to satellite radio, where he can’t be censored by the FCC.

Cool.

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Distant Relatives

Posted by rae in family
at 1:06 pm on Tuesday, 12 October 2004

At the end of September, I was fortunate enough to meet up with some relatives from Wales. Two of my father’s first cousins, as it turned out! I had never met them before, as my grandfather (Edgar Ellis) left Wales for Canada when he was around 20 and never went back (he died fairly young in a canoeing accident).

My cousin, Bob Ellis. Click for more pictures.

The only contact information my cousins had when they visited Canada (they were on a tour) was my Aunt Barb’s name. When they got to Toronto (after visiting Calgary, Vancouver, and spending a couple of days at Banff), they looked up Barb’s name in the phone book and gave her a call. Unfortunately, it was right at the end of their trip, and we only got to spend about an hour with them all before they were heading off to the airport! Ah well. At least now we all have up-to-date contact information!

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Scott in the Derby

Posted by rae in friends
at 11:22 am on Thursday, 7 October 2004

Last weekend we went to Caledonia to see Scott compete in a smash-up derby (is there a more politically correct name for them?).

Scott’s car (before)..

.. and after!

It was quite a hoot watching all the cars literally smash each other to bits. All the cars lined up on either side of the arena, 7 to a side, with their rear ends facing outwards. At the signal, all the cars would back out at high speed and ram into each other. In general, I think it’s both safer and wiser to back up into a car rather than ramming it head-on, since a head-on collision can damage a car’s engine. Hm, unless you have a car with the engine in the back, like a VW Beetle or something.

Scott zooming around..

There are lots of rules for safety reasons. The main one is that you are not allowed to smash into a car on the driver’s side, for hopefully obvious reasons. Sometimes it can happen by accident, such as when a car races towards another car’s front, and then a third car smashes the rear right, twirling the car around so that the driver’s door is facing you. In almost all cases, the approaching car will hit the brakes and forgo the smash. Sometimes the timing just makes it impossible, and there were a few whistles blown on cars that did hit the drivers’ doors, albeit not very hard.

The back of Scott’s car, hand-painted by Karin, I believe

Ronnie and Michael had a most excellent time at the Caledonia Fair itself. There were a couple of jugglers near the front entrance who had a very good act, and it didn’t hurt that we bought an X-Box game while we were there..

Here are a few more pics of Scott’s car (before the derby)…

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icmef

Renovations: walls done

Battlestar Galactica is back

Renovations

Collaborative Drawing

iSketch

Walking home

Podcasting, and Eeek

Distant Relatives

Scott in the Derby