Rolemaster at Hrach’s place

Posted by rae in friends
at 12:23 am on Saturday, 31 March 2007

I’m updating a “chatter page” while we play Rolemaster at Hrach’s place.

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Twitter Updates for 2007-03-27

Posted by in Reid
at 11:59 pm on Tuesday, 27 March 2007

Powered by Twitter Tools.

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Vacation posts and Twitter updates

Posted by rae in Reid, family, web site
at 8:54 pm on Tuesday, 27 March 2007

I’ve posted two blog entries I wrote while aboard ship: A Day at Sea, and Mayan Ruins. They don’t have any pictures yet, though. I may add them later or maybe do a separate post about the pictures.

I posted them with the date when I wrote them, which is why they didn’t appear at the top of the page. I have no idea how the RSS feeds will react to them!

I have installed the “twitter-tools” WordPress plugin, which amongst other things posts once a day to my blog with all my twitters. Now you, too, can experience the ephemeral world of twitter by proxy. Or you can just visit my Twitter page ☺.

Update:
Oh, I’ve also installed a “Show unread comments” plugin. I think it uses a cookie to show you commetns you haven’t read yet in the side bar there. When you are reading a post there is a little blocky thingee to the right of each comment to show you its read/unread status. Hope it’s useful for people. Let me know! (Um, by leaving a comment, obviously!)

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Talkshoe

Posted by rae in friends, software, the Net
at 3:29 pm on Saturday, 24 March 2007

talkshoe.com looks like an interesting alternative to Skype for online meetings/chats. If someone else could create an account and let me chat with them to try it out, I would appreciate it.

Thoughts going out today to Peter and Laura and especially Jon.

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I’ve installed the “Audio Player” WordPress plugin

Posted by rae in podcast, web site
at 5:29 pm on Thursday, 22 March 2007

It’s quite snazzy! A couple of my recording play back at double-speed with squeeky chipmunk voices, but most are ok.

Check out the podcast category for several posts with audio in them. My ReidNews podcast for Fri Jan 14 2005 is a good one to try out.

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Mayan Ruins

Posted by rae in family
at 11:00 pm on Wednesday, 14 March 2007

We went to see the Mayan ruins at Chacchoben. Things were going well until Luisa sprained her ankle. Thankfully, it turned out to be a mild sprain, from which she was fully recovered by the next day. The port of Costa Maya is pretty much a complete tourist trap. Even to the point of not being able to hire taxis to drive you away.

To get a taxi at Costa Maya, you must walk about a mile away from the port. The taxis are not allowed to pick anyone up before that. This proved to be an issue for us, since we wanted to but some “Presidente” brandy, and nobody was selling any inside the port area. I ended up walking out and getting a taxi to a nearby grocery store, which also sold liquor. The taxi ride cost all of $1. Unfortunately, they didn’t have that kind of brandy. I waited for a few minutes and flagged down another taxi. He thought he might know a place, which turned out to be only about 100 feet down the street. This time I asked him to wait. That’s the first time I’ve ever asked a taxi to wait for me. Hah! The second place had the brandy, so I bought both bottles of Presidente (all they had) and headed back.

By the time I got back, the rain was coming in. Despite the rain, Ronnie and I managed to swim in the pool. We couldn’t get into the ocean because the shorefront was sharp rocky shoals. I tried to get into the ocean anyway, but it hurt my feet too much. There were beaches to either side of the port, but they were walled off. I think they made you pay to go to those if you wanted to.

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A Day at Sea

Posted by rae in family
at 11:00 pm on Tuesday, 13 March 2007

Luisa had an early breakfast and attended two shopping-in-Mexico orientation sessions. I think only one of them was useful though. The kids and I had breakfast, where we discovered chocolate milk! Ronnie didn’t like it, alas.

Ronnie and I went in one of the four hottubs followed by a refreshing swim in the much cooler, asalt-water pool. It was quite the sensation, as the ship was sailing with a pronounced rocking motion, and so the pool was sloshing fore and aft while we were in it. The pool was very obviously designed with this in mind, since it had an unusually large gap from the water surface to the deck. All in all, it was just like being in a wave pool. Quite fun!

Later, Luisa and I went to listen to Paul(?) Dunn playing guitar and singing Beatles songs. He had stories for every song, and remarked on how the copyright for the songs was reverting to the original authors soon.

Luisa and I went to see the comedy act, but the people around us were pretty loud and it wasn’t very enjoyable for that reason.

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Conflict Notification is In

Posted by rae in development, work
at 1:46 am on Wednesday, 7 March 2007

So today I landed bug 5308, which was the task “Sharing conflict notification UI”.

conflict notification
click for larger version

It is lacking a good graphic for the icon, and it’s not displaying the number of conflicts, but it does okay, I think.

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Snow!

Posted by rae in family
at 10:55 pm on Thursday, 1 March 2007

blizzard-01-pano

Lots of snow today!

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Gas prices since the refinery fire

Posted by rae in family, homeowner
at 5:12 pm on Thursday, 1 March 2007

A fire in a refinery (which one? where?) has apparently dried up all sources of gas for Toronto and we’re being rationed. Or at least, that’s what I hear. We haven’t seen any evidence of rationing. But then we don’t use our car very much. Glad it has a full tank.

Here’s a chart for the last three months’ gas prices, courtesy of TorontoGasPrices.com.

Toronto gas prices

By the way, 1 barrel = 42 US gallons = 159 litres. So that $57.09/barrel cost of crude oil at the end works out to US 35.9¢/litre, which is somewhere over CAN 42¢/litre. Of course, oil has to be processed to get gas, and I’m not sure what percentage of the oil ends up as gas. Anyone out there have specific percentages?

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