Through the Mind of Eric

Jean Quan and Michael Bloomberg are the reason I support the Occupy Wall Street movement.

2011-11-16T12:35:00.001-05:00

When I first started to hear about the Occupy Wall Street movement, I was very ambivalent about it. I wasn't quite sure exactly what it was about and, though I had a vague feeling that their demands were right and that the whole idea was good, I saw diverging views that lead me to believe it wasn't serious. First, they were often portrayed as a bunch of snobby pricks that weren't part of the working class but still had enough money to camp out in a park, with their cell phones and computers, and nothing would come of it. Another argued that the movement didn't even understand what they were themselves - that they were claiming Socialism was better, but at the same time were refusing to serve food and give shelter to the homeless.

But it's too easy to simply dismiss a whole movement from the comments of a few detractors. I started following @OccupyWallStNYC and saw another side of the conflict that started to change my views and open my mind to the idea that they were right...

And then, Jean Quan gave the order to the Oakland PD to remove the @OccupyOakland people that were, as usual, peacefully occupying the park (albeit against city regulations). But according to anyone who actually saw footage from that night, including me, the level of force that was used was excessive. Rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, flash bangs, LRAD (google it), all in very pretty riot gear. They dragged people out of the park when they resisted, completely destroyed (as in tore down and broke) tents and equipment that was there. All this for what reason? For "sanitation, security and fire hazards".

Regardless of your political views, if you believe that sending hundreds of SWAT uniforms with a full complement on non-lethal weaponry against a group of peaceful protesters sitting around in a park and camping there is the proper decision, I probably don't know you and I want no part of your entourage. But Quan attacking OccupyOakland was not the first of such acts, and especially not the last.

Two days ago, in the middle of the night (2AM local time to be precise), NYPD SWAT teams (along with the Counter-Terrorism Unit) started surrounding Zuccotti Park, birthplace of the #OWS movement and occupied for just under two months. Then, they proceeded to remove anyone in the vicinity that was part of the press. That's right, the NYPD shut off the media from witnessing the event. Rosie Gray, reporter with The Village Voice, told an office "I'm Press!" and was answered "Not tonight, you're not".

Once that was done, the raid began. Again, people were dragged away, property was destroyed, 5000 books in the Occupy Library were thrown into a container along with the possessions of anyone who had decided not to leave the park when NYPD started handing out pamphlets telling them to leave the park, and loudspeakers blasting the same thing (again, at 2AM). Those who were not arrested remained, dazed but still strong, around the park where the NYPD setup a security perimeter to throw out the rest of the "trash" remaining in the park.

Now, I'm not an expert in politics and world news, but this is never something that I would expect to see in a country such as America (or Canada for that matter). It shows us a couple of very important things.

First, the 1% is bothered, if not scared. Honestly, Zuccotti park is in the middle of the Business area in New York. There are no residents around the park that could have possibly been annoyed by the occupation. On the other hand, considering the growth of the moment and the attention it is slowly building, people that are directly targetted by the movement are probably starting to feel the pressure.

Second, the movement is already treated as a revolution. Why else would SWAT teams and riot gear be needed to remove peaceful protesters from a park? These city mayors are being pressured (Bloomberg's speech on "this was my decision alone" only serve to reinforce this theory) to try to "quell the rebellion" before it gets too big and explodes in their faces.

Third, protesting isn't a freedom anymore. It's easy for the people in power to let the "lowly peasants" do a little picketing for half a day and maybe block a street with their presence and their signs, get their media coverage and then dissipate. This is "how it's done", and it achieves nothing. But actually putting the pressure in the right place, occupying a public park to raise awareness of an issue that affects every aspect of our "civilized" society today, is clearly not an easy task. Ask the ones that have been thrown in jail for just being there, ask the media who have been taken away so they couldn't cover an important media event for the people, and ask the people of which the camps have been raided, their possessions removed, and nowhere to sleep.

So in conclusion, thank you very much, Quan, Bloomberg and all the others that are attacking the movement. Your actions have shown us just how weak you are, how scared you have become, and how true our movement is.

Let's get this revolution started, shall we?

My hate of Internet Explorer knows no bounds

2011-11-02T10:32:00.000-04:00

I`m not the only one that has issues with Internet Explorer. Any web designer will tell you that IE sucks. It's to browsers as French is to languages: bloated, complex, and enough exceptions to fill a book.

But in the last 3 days, I've been fixing one problem after another, because different versions of IE have different quirks - but in general, every one of them is a bitch to troubleshoot when you don't know exactly what you're dealing with.

On Monday, I spend hours tracing down an issue that was making IE8 crash its tab when I opened the online html documentation I'm maintaining. Every single other browser (and every other version of IE) worked perfectly well, no error messages, no warnings. But IE8 was being a dumbass and quitting for no apparent reason. After screwing around in the javascript, the frames, the HTML, I chanced upon the fact of removing my jquery import and my javascript code in general, and suddenly it worked... A google search revealed that, specifically, [ IE8 + jQuery 1.6.2 + CSS background: url(something); + a page refresh ] caused the crash, because a single line of code that "fixed" an IE8 bug related to CSS backgrounds was removed in error. The solution was to update jQuery to the latest version, 1.6.4, which restored their workaround to the bug. IE8 = bitch.

On Tuesday, a colleague of mine reported that IE7 was freezing and taking 100% CPU on one core. Again, Firefox, Chrome and every other version of IE had no issues at all. Why was this happening? Well, I recently added tiny bit of code that detected when the browser window was resized, and re-centered buttons on the screen (absolute positionning being a bitch of its own). In IE7 specifically, whenever an element changes on the page, it triggers the resize event. So, it was running into an infinite loop where it would resize, re-center, trigger a resize, and start all over again. To fix this, I had to add a small jquery plugin called "smartresize" which "debounced" the refresh function with a timeout. IE7 = bitch.

And today, another issue reared its ugly head: In IE9, a client would click on a "Send Feedback" link I provide, enter his name, email and a message, click on Submit... And the dialog would just stupidly sit there. And again, every other browser and version of IE I tested worked perfectly well, no issue whatsoever. The cause? I was sending an AJAX request through POST and receiving a JSON response. Now, something in IE9 (still not sure what) bugs out, thinks it should be receiving XML, sees JSON, and thinks "oh this is a mistake". Instead of triggering the jquery success: function, it triggers error:. Because I had already spend half my week fixing IE's stupidities, I resorted to a dumb workaround just to get rid of it: I put the contents of my success: function in my error: function (which is never triggered and didn't even exist before now anyway). IE9 = bitch.

Now, if you're a web designer you may think part of this is my fault - not testing properly in all versions, not knowing the quirks by heart, lacking troubleshooting abilities. But in all honesty, if I didn't have to support IE (if 40% of our users weren't on IE8), I would have spent the last 3 days doing more constructive things like, I don't know, updating our software documentation or writing FAQs.

Question to you: how many of your head banging sessions were caused specifically by Internet Explorer?

Transparent PHP proxy with GET, POST and HEADER support.

2011-05-24T15:48:00.000-04:00

I needed to do cross-domain AJAX calls from a jQuery front-end to a PHP backend which was on another domain, and couldn't find a complete, functional example online... so I created my own. Since both servers had PHP (but the backend needed extra stuff that wasn't on the frontend server), doing a PHP Proxy was a great idea.

What this proxy supports:

GET and POST requests (POST was the whole reason for this, since jsonp doesn't support it!)
HTTP_REFERER check (only accept requests from one server)
COOKIES, in both directions (setting from the backend and sending from the frontend)
HEADERS, all of them, in both directions. This means it's a transparent proxy (yay!)

What it doesn't support (yet, maybe):

Dynamic destination (though that's relatively trivial to change), because I don't need it.
Load Balancing/Cycling, I may add this as a personal exercise in the future.
Authentication, beyond the referer check, or session (this should be handled by the backend anyway)

The Code

Because blogger.com sucks with code, the code is available directly on Google Code, at the following URL:
http://code.google.com/p/php-transparent-proxy/

The Forward Time Travel Paradox (FTTP)

2011-05-10T00:42:00.000-04:00

Time to go into a little bit of metaphysical thinking here, thinking about paradoxes and time travel. If I'm going to post only once every blue moon, may as well make it an interesting one, don't you think?

So I am going to put forth a small hypothesis: If you were to travel into the future, the future you would travel to could not, ever, be the one that would happen when you get to it "the slow way". I shall call this hypothesis (or is it a theory? I don't know) The Forward Time Travel Paradox.

Every single science-fiction story that I've seen up to now that deals with time travel in a semi-logical way tries to cover the area of time paradoxes. They say, if you go into the past and kill your grandfather, or change anything that could make yourself not come into existence... Then you cause a paradox that destroys spacetime. But none - not a single one - talks about the paradox of travelling into the future. They all go "oh cool, the future, now we know what's going to happen, cool!" and go on with their story. Let's challenge the status quo.

The Premise

Let's say I invent a time machine that can go into the future. I want to test it for the first time (I know it works, I`ve done the calculations) so I simply hop in, set the dial for 100 years (so as to not run into my future self, obviously) and push the button. WHAM, I'm now in 2111.

If this happened to me, the first thing I would do would be to find any sort of data connection (probably some sort of wireless protocol with a TB/sec connection speed) and Google myself... And what would I find? Certainly not front page news or a peer-reviewed paper on folding space into a wormhole to travel into the future... At best, some clipping on page 95B about my mysterious disappearance, and my last blog post before I left... My Gmail with a few million emails (and about a googabyte of free space!). What happened... to me? My life's work, gone? My hole existence, wiped out?

So I try to come back, expecting the worse... But nope, here I am back in the "present" and everything seems to go as planned! I publish my research paper, become famous, become known as the inventor of the Time Machine(tm). But one thing nags at me and becomes obvious each time someone visits the future, even by just a few days: It's never exactly the same when you actually get to it in "normal" time. There are always details that have changed!

The Explanation

The explanation is quite simple really; every time you hop on to the future, you're creating an alternate timeline in which you disappear and only re-appear at your destination. You travel 100 years into the future, it's a timeline where you were gone for that 100 years. But when you travel back, because you re-appeared before that 100 years, you've basically changed the future... You've just destroyed the timeline you created when you first went forward.

That would happen every time someone went forward into the future. All their possible children and descendants, every action they were to do, would temporarily go away until they come back even, if just for a millisecond. So what can be done about that? Absolutely nothing. Were we to actually figure out a way to go into the future, there would be no way of knowing whether or not the one we visit would be the one that would happen!

And, of course, an extra layer needs to be added to this basic truth, for any and all who still doubt. In the same way that visiting the past would change the present, visiting the future would also change it. If I were to visit a future where I could see the loto numbers, come back into the present and win a couple of million dollars... Then the future that I visited would no longer exist... Or rather, according to some theories, I would have created a new timeline where I won the lottery, a new branch in the eternal tree of spacetime, and I would follow this new path.

Conclusion

Time is fluid and ever changing. We may be part of a timeline where time travel will never be discovered, or it may be discovered today. Or, someone from the future may appear tomorrow and simply give us the technology just because they can, thus creating a new timeline where humanity starts using time travel in 2011 instead of 2273! Would we go back even further in time and give it to ourselves 100 years ago? Who knows... Once thing's for certain - when it comes to time travel, there is no such thing as a straight line and no such thing as just a visitor. As with Quantum Physics, the simple act of observing the future (or being observed in the past) changes the whole outcome of the experiment.

But then again, I don't understand Quantum Physics. If I were to understand quantum physics, I don't believe I would really understand it (or so the saying goes...).

Cheers for now, see you in an undetermined amount of time!

My short, horrible story with a cell phone

2011-04-05T07:00:00.000-04:00

If you know me, you probably know that I'm a gadget lover. I was all over my iPhone when I got it, I coo over the latest ThinkGeek stuff and I look towards the future with an open heart and a wallet just waiting to grab the latest tech (if only my wife would let me :P).

But even though I appreciate my iPhone 3GS for its polish, stability and solidity, the cell phone service from Fido is a tough bill to swallow. At $77 for the longest time (tax inc.), it felt like I was overpaying way too much for a very low plan - 100 minutes, unlimited nights and weekends, unlimited text, 1gig transfer which I busted once. So, I started looking for alternatives a while back and, very recently, noticed that Videotron was offering a couple of cellphones at $0, with contract of course. So after some basic research and review reading I chose the Motorola Milestone XT720 and explained to my wife that even after paying the Fido cancellation fees, I'd still come out on top by a few hundred bucks in the end, since the service was $30 cheaper every month (I have all 3 other services with Videotron).

A week ago, I went into the Videotron shop, picked up an XT720 (which has an 8mpx camera, does 720p video recording, 8 gigs space on an SD card, Android 2.1) and signed myself up for 3 years. Unbeknown to me, that was a mistake. Mind you, not singing up, but choosing the XT720. It's not the first time I make a bad purchasing decision, but this time it wasn't my fault!

Honestly though, the XT720 looks like a good phone on the surface. It has a great design, the screen is bright, large (2.7" I believe) and has a good resolution. However, from my experience there are some major issues with it.

First, it has an internal memory of 256 MO, on which Android OS is located and on which ALL applications must be installed. If you know Android OS you may want to say that 2.2 and up gives the ability to save apps on the SD card, but Motorola themselves have confirmed that they will not release a 2.2 update for the phone so, short of rooting it (which I didn't), Froyo will never see the XT720. That, in and of itself, was a great source of frustration.

Other minor issues such as the wireless being semi-reliable (couldn't access the internet while every other wifi device in the house could), the mis-placements of the buttons around the phone and the over sensibility of the "hardware" buttons at the bottom, kept nagging at me.

But the one major flaw in the phone, I simply cannot live with: it is impossible to transfer (or delete, for that matter) a large amount of data on the phone without the SD card crapping out. The first time I had an issue was after copying my 850 MP3s (about 2.8 gigs) on the SD card. The media player would refuse to load the songs, froze while reading the SD card and I had to hard-reboot (remove the battery). I then tried to delete the songs, but in the middle of the deletion dialog, everything (Explorer.exe , the phone, the copy dialog) froze. Unplugging the USB fixed the computer, but the SD card was now unavailable in the phone. No amount of coaxing could get it back online, it was simply unavailable. And that's what I started seeing that the phone was utterly crap. While the unreadable SD card was inserted, the phone would not shut off (stayed in the "powering off" dialog forever), it would not wake up from sleep mode (pressing the button did not turn on the screen, but the hardware buttons turned on for a couple of seconds), and I couldn't even reset it to factory defaults! Each time either of these situations happened (and they happen quite a lot, the phone does go to sleep mode automatically which is normal), I had to remove the battery.

So I went to the Videotron store to get the phone checked, but they needed an authorization from customer service, which I called from there... but while I was on the phone with the tech (while he was preparing a confirmation for a phone exchange), the SD card decided to come back online and the phone was functional. So I went back home, plugged in the phone, tried again... with the exact same results. Called Videotron, got a confirmation number to change the phone, went back to the store and changed for another box of the exact same phone... which had the exact same problem. I figure that when this issue happens, if I'm patient enough the SD card eventually comes back online... after about 8 hours. I'm not that patient.

Now, if you didn't know this let me tell you: If you're in a contract with Videotron and you're not happy with the phone, don't even think about asking them to change it. They will not do it, period. I'm generally a person that can get satisfaction and "what I want" from customer service, but this time nothing I could do could make them budge. It was "tough this phone out, or dish out full price for a new one" and that was that. What you can do however, if you've just signed up, is cancel your contract within 30 days, absolutely no charge. I'm returning the phone today, and any charge related to this phone and service will be credited.

If you do this, you need to wait 60 days before signing up again and have access to promotions (like a free or cheaper phone). By the time this delay is finished, the Nexus S will be out and you can bet your ass that's what I'm going to get myself. In the meantime, my iPhone still does a good job of making calls, playing my music, and playing casual games.

Kimberly Clark - it ain't that bad anymore.

2011-01-17T13:53:00.002-05:00

A little sidetrack to environmental concerns today on my blog. After the last series of posts on the future (I'll have more on that in, well, the future) there's not much I have to say about it at the moment and this is, after all, still my "random blog about what's going through my head".

What prompted this post was the fact that I grabbed a box of tissues ("kleenex") form the supply closet at work and suddenly realized that they were the Scotties brand, made by Kimberly Clark (makers of kleenex, scotties, huggies, etc). Now, it's been driven deep into my head that Kimberly Clark is an evil company and that they use virgin wood (non-recycled) and clear-cut the amazonian and the Boreal forests right here in my backyard. My wife being very environmentalist (aka "tree-hugger" which is fitting here), this is an issue for me. I couldn't just stand there with part of Earth's lungs and not do something about it.

But before I went screaming in the HR office going on an on about how KC were evil and we should not buy products that destroy the environment (poor HR rep would have had to deal with a little bit of my wife's crazyness through me, there!), I decided to do a little bit of research. In the past, "facts" given to me by my wife sometimes end up being taken from email chain letters and very unreliable sources, so I do my research now.

Reality turned out to be that she was right in thinking Kimberly Clark WAS a very bad company in regards to environmental responsibility - but today this is no longer the case. After a lot of ~~bitching an moaning~~ campaigning by environmental groups such as Greenpeace, KC finally decided, in 2008, to completely re-think their position and to start being responsible for their actions.

From 2008, 98 percent of the wood pulp Kimberly-Clark bought globally came from suppliers or forestlands that have sustainability certifications of some sort (see the wikipedia page on Kimberly Clark). Not only does this make me not guilty of using these Scotties tissues, it also make me and my wife less guilty of using 3 packs of Huggies disposable diapers, since they're also made by KC.

So now you, the reader, knows that you can safely buy all the brands made by Kimberly Clark without the loss of karma points you thought went with it. Visit KC's sustainability page to see what they have to say about it, if you want.

This message was paid for in part by my desire to prove my wife wrong. It was not paid for in any way, shape or form by Kimberly Clark :P

The Era of CCC Part 4: How it all comes together

2010-12-17T08:57:00.000-05:00

I've been working from home without my 40 minutes of peace in the subway since my last post, which explains the delay - apologies if anyone was actually waiting for this!

Now that we have determined the 3 areas in which humanity could go forward in leaps and bounds in short order, how do we bring it all together? How can creativity, communication and collaboration live together in perfect harmony with us and for us?

The biggest hurdle in this is probably the need for people to remove themselves from money and personal gain, for creativity to be possible at a level I described in part 1. This would require a massive, rapid shift in our society, one that would revolutionize the way we think and act. But evolution has always been slow, using trial and error to improve upon itself, one small step at a time. Perhaps we'll find a way to make this shift in enough time for the general population to accept it, who knows? One thing for sure though, both collaboration and creativity must stem from the removal of personal monetary incentives. Perhaps, as I said, a form of evolved communism (neo-communism?) could be put in place differently than is Soviet Russia, or it's something else entirely that's necessary.

But even assuming that we simply did not have to work because the hardest menial jobs would be handled doesn't mean no one would have a job. There is always something to do in a world such as ourselves and whatever amount of automation exists, there will always be things to do. Politicians, even without the monetary greed, still lust for power so that wouldn't change. Automated systems need upgrading and repairing, research must be done to evolve the sciences, etc. Even if you have an automated farming system for your crops and some forms of food are automatic, nothing can truly replace the skilled hands of a chef preparing a meal in a restaurant. People get hurt, doctors are still needed to diagnose and treat them. Of course, humans are still prone to hurting each other so a police force is still necessary.

The difference would be that the greatest majority of people doing this work would be the ones that want to - that were happy to do it because it brought them the satisfaction and the recognition they wanted. I myself would most likely not stop writing, whether as a technical writer or as a science-fiction one (if I had the time, y'know?) and I'm sure a lot of people are just like me.

I'm not sure that I was really able to capture my vision in these 4 posts. I'm not even sure I really understand all of this stuff myself and perhaps I'm just a rambling fool. But if I made a few people think about it, if at least one person brought us one step closer to this reality, then I'll be happy. I know I didn't give anything concrete to make this future happen, but perhaps that will happen in the future if I finally start writing short sci-fi stories.

And as this blog's motto should be: not that anyone reads this anyway...

The Era of CCC - Part 3 : Collaboration

2010-12-06T08:50:00.000-05:00

The third C is for collaboration in it's purest form, between every single human being on the planet and traversing all fields where more collaboration is possible. Artists working together through the network, scientists sharing their data and results freely, software tools available to and built by all. An open source worldwide community where everything, or almost, is available to all.

I say open source because it is the closest parallel I can make to something that already exists. Dozens, hundreds and even thousands of individuals working to perfect the code of a single piece of software, preventing bugs and security flaws before they become an issue for the population at large that uses it. People with nothing specific to gain from it, other than a bit of acknowledgement and the great satisfaction they get from contributing to the community.

If this principle were to be applied to other fields, such as scientific research, what could happen? If, instead of dozens of different laboratories competing to be the first to discover a marketable cure for AIDS or a smaller processor, the scientific community were to unify its worldwide talents into a single force capable of solving this world's problems... What would become of us?

I believe that we would accelerate our development exponentially, assuming of course, as according to my previous posts, we were to remove the need for individuals to work to survive by replacing menial tasks by automation and artificial intelligence.

This would be especially true in the pharmaceutical field (and others I'm not aware of I'm sure) where different companies all struggle to be the first to create a pill to fix each ailment of the human race. If, instead of having 4 different colors of pills to get a hard-on, they were to work together on making one of each (the best, we hope), so much more would get done.

Of course, complete collaboration in fields other than art is somewhat impossible in the current state of affairs. In a capitalist society one cannot spend resources on creating something that doesn't benefit them personally since everyone works hard for their money. Perhaps communism wasn't such a bad ideas after all - it was just badly implemented!

Right now, collaboration works well with both arts and software. In both cases it's because acknowledgment and reputation precedes cold hard cash in the order of priorities, or at least until one is known an appreciated enough to make it on their own. It's more intuitive this way.

Stay tuned on Wednesday for the 4th and final part, the conclusion. In the meantime, what do you think we could achieve with perfect collaboration between individuals in this world?

The Era of CCC Part 2 - Communication

2010-12-01T08:46:00.002-05:00

With how many individuals have you communicated today? Think hard for a moment, and start counting with whom you had any sort of exchange, either way. Your twitter followers, and those that you follow; All your Facebook friends that updated their statuses and others that read yours; Everyone with whom you exchanged an email or a phone call; Authors of the articles you read in the paper, companies with ads on a billboard or the subway; The clerk at the gas station that gave you your newspaper. If you're like me, the total probably ads up to at least a few hundred a day.

Communication, even when it's single-sided, is an important part of our everyday life. Without it, our lives would be as boring as we are individually - think about staying, alone in a room with no outside contact, for a day or a week. You'll probably find it hard to imagine or know you'd go completely bonkers pretty fast, right?

Now imagine the contrary; imagine having the ability to communicate with whomever, wherever, whenever you (and they) wanted; having all the information of the world directly accessible to you, and experts ready to answer any question you could possibly think of at any moment in your life.

And then think that this would happen both in realtime and unobtrusively. That is to say, talking to anyone would be done simply by thinking of them, then turning to talk to them and they would be standing right in front of you.

We are getting closer to this, albeit slowly, every day. Think about it, 100 years ago there was barely any TV to think of, the telephone connections were handled by live operators and lines were shared, and letters too days or weeks to arrive to destination. Today anyone can pick up a smartphone, open email or chat, and be in direct contact with anyone they know.

Communication has gone a very long way in a very short time, and it can only go farther even faster, along with the rest of the technology out there. I can't wait to see what'll be next, and how we are going to use this to our advantage.

What do you think? Do you think better communication is a good thing, and what do you thunk the next step is?

And guess what the third C is... Before I reveal it tomorrow ;)

Era of CCC: Part 1 - Creativity

2010-11-29T08:43:00.001-05:00

This is the first post of a 4-part series that I've wanted to write for a very long time but failed to find the time or inspiration for. It is, for me, a hope for the future that can yet still happen.

Imagine, for a moment, that you did not have to work; that sleep was optional; that you could obtain, without paying or even getting out of the house, any item or material that you wanted. What would you do with 24 hours per day of completely free and open time with no obligation to anyone or anything?

In a world where this could be possible for every citizen of earth; where poverty was non-existent and resources limitless, creativity would thrive. Instead of droning into work every morning, or struggling to find food and water, humans could sit down, appreciate what is around them, and start creating.

If the world was an open sandbox game, the boundaries between imagination and reality would disappear. The human mind, freed from the constraints of meaningless work, could now explore new corners of itself that it could not have fathomed before. We would see new Picassos, Beethovens and DaVincis come forward to blow our mind out even further. Our civilization would evolve on a conscious and mental level beyond what we can achieve with the chains that currently drag us down into the abyss of everyday life.

Do you still think this is a pipe dream, that humans cannot live without the stimulation of a 9 to 5 pencil-pushing job? I pity you, and hope you will see the light when it shines upon you. In the meantime, do a little search on YouTube for Minecraft and browse through player creations, you may yet be amazed at what people can do when they have time on their hands...

And how could this be achieved? Robots? Virtual Reality? Replicators from Star Trek? What do you think of the idea and how do you think we could do it?

From Technical Support to Technical Writer

2010-11-24T08:51:00.001-05:00

For just over 6 years, my job was to fix problems. Every morning I would wake up, get to work and the first thing I would hear when answering the phone was invariably a client that thought not being able to login to hotmail was the crime of century. Still, being technical support agent/advisor/drone was satisfying in it's own way; helping people has always been my passion after all. After a while though, the satisfaction of getting someone to type in their username and then explain that their keyboard was not broken - stars in the password field WERE normal - kind of dies down. There is only so much configuring Outlook Express one can take before being bored; I still know the Windows XP "New Connection" wizard by heart after over 3 years.

Changing fields did little to quench the feeling that I was going nowhere. Tech support for internal employees was just as bad, if not worse, because they could actually put pressure on me, they knew my boss after all... And one wonders why tech support people are often disagreeable! You're not their first client who doesn't know why torrents are causing 250 gigs of transfer on your connection, bub.

So anyway, when I was given the opportunity to switch careers, especially within the great company where I work now, I jumped on it head first. With the change of one single word in my title - from Support to Writer - everything had changed. It is amazing the perspective one can gain when discovering a new career that wasn't expected!

I finally realized that writing documentation was much better than doing support, because of the famous adage "feed a man fish and he'll eat for a day, teach him to fish and he will have food for a lifetime". I know, you may think people don't read user manuals and instructions, but in my field it is not the case. It's not a VCR from Taiwan we're talking about, it's a complex software costing in the 5 digits! Besides, people don't read manuals because they often "suck balls" as I have often put it myself. I've made it my new mission to pull a Midas and change that crap into gold with my magic touch.

On top of this, spending my whole day sitting on my ass getting paid to type on a keyboard about shit I actually like has also brought me new determination and confidence about my writing. As you've no doubt noticed, I have been blogging a lot more and not only on this personal blog (google "PlanetPress Tips blog") and there will be a lot more to come, no more excuses.

I may even start writing my book...

Taking a hint from the gaming industry

2010-11-22T17:35:00.001-05:00

Are you listening, Universal Studios, Paramount and other bigwigs?

Have you ever dreamed of being able to control the outcome of a movie? I mean, it's all fine and good that movies follow a script, but I've always wished that there was a little more replayability in motion pictures like there was in video games. The idea came up in a conversation with my sister Cassandra, and it goes like this.

Each of the viewers in the theatre gets a little clicker with two buttons on them. At certain key points in the movie, a choice is presented to them: go left or right, fight or flight, wrong or right. The choice of the majority either way, or a tie, will give you 2 or 3 possible outcomes for that specific situation. Say you have 3 such choices, that gives you 9 different paths for the movie! Now imagine this is movie you'd want to see more than once anyway - wouldn't it make you want to see it until all the endings had been seen? But you don't choose the outcome, the majority does. So you may actually need to see the movie more than 9 times to get all the endings.

This not only bring value to a movie both in theaters and in a DVD release, it also generates increased business for the theaters themselves and the producers. Win-win situation, or gimmicky way of making more money? What do think?

Star Trek is Dead! Long Live Star Trek!

2010-11-22T09:09:00.000-05:00

There will be no more Star Trek. No, this isn't a Paramount Pictures announcement, as they will most likely continue to produce shows and movies in the franchise, not realizing that the reason Enterprise and Voyager were both so unappreciated is because the spirit that was Star Trek at it's beginnings is no longer. Paramount is, in reality, feeding is zombie meat with no soul.

Did the current state of things come about by the death of Gene Roddenberry? Perhaps, though that is by no means certain. While Gene was a genius in his own time and his values are now intertwined in our society, once the message was passed there was unfortunately not much he could do further other than continue churning out show after show, inventing new values an technologies - let me explain this.

There were two things that made Star Trek an innovative an welcomed release from the hordes of 50s scifi flicks - its penchant for extremely futuristic yet believable technology and its insisting message that racism and sexism had no place in our society anymore. The first led to a slew of inventions and research, including mobile phones - I wouldn't be typing this on my iPhone if a fan had not taken the communicators seriously and spent his life trying to make it a reality. Today, scientists are still looking up to the technobabble of the original series and trying to bring teleportation, warp speed and holodecks into our lives.

Socially, Star Trek was also a model of innovation. It had the first ever interracial kiss on television between Kirk and Uhura, and it also boasted an international cast of characters that were mostly from countries that the USA had been at war with in the past. It continuously showed that aliens could be friends and fighting was not the right way to go - though it still contained plenty of fighting. It was a show, after all.

But once the message was passed, and the technology was shown, what else was there to do with this show? More technology, and more social messages? The Next Generation brought nicer props and slight improvements but was not by any means revolutionary. It showed more alliances and battles, more geek gadgets and technobabble which probably led to things like touch screens, but those were only a continuation of the previous inventions - a simple evolution, not a revolution. The shows also continued to show us not to hate what was different, but now it was inventing new people not to hate - more aliens, cyborgs and robots, energy-based entities... Nothing anyone us will encounter in our lifetime or perhaps in a few generations.

Today, now that Gene is no longer, even that passion has died down. We are getting spoon-fed pre-digested scripts written by the fanboys and others who simply do not have the same talent. After the series could no longer go forward because time travel had ruined it, Paramount tried to go back to the "roots" bit failed to understand that they were not back in the show's timeline and adding a bunch of blueish LCDs and some witty characters that acted like they were in a soap, which was made worse by their finding a ship from the future an being amazed at flashing lights and other 1960s props. Then came the Star Trek movie which apparently thinks an alternate timeline and revival of the original crew would satisfy us, the fans of the REAL Star-Trek. No, we Trekkers an Trekkies should mourn the loss of our beloved Gene and simply walk away from Paramount's misdirected efforts.

Now here is what saddens me the most. Not only has the series itself died with it's creator, so did it's spirit and essence, the innovation that brought us to where we stand before. While I'll always appreciate a good scifi show lime Battlestar Galactica or a movie like the Matrix and Serenity, they are but an empty shell of special effects and taboo-cleansed scripts. Every show is like the other, a basic frame of a misunderstood ideals cited with a layer of special effects and characters built from the same templates.

Will we ever see the light? Will something new suddenly change the game? I don't think so - and I don't thing it should. My hope is that the new revolution is not a new show or movie; it will have to come about in the real life. We have to actually get off our collective couch potato asses waiting for our next episode and start wanting our society to change for the better, for these technologies we love to try to explain to become reality, and to REALLY go where no man has gone before.

How many of you have heard of NASA's plan for a manned mission to Mars within a decade? Aren't you dreaming of going into space one day? There's still chance, if we step up and demand it, if we stop feeding trolls called Paramount and the Sci-Fi Channel, go back to OUR roots where the important part of the journey WAS the journey. This is my deepest desire, as a human being that lives and breathes.

The next step in computer interfaces

2010-11-19T10:10:00.003-05:00

Have you heard of Augmented Reality? AR is very simply the addition of a layer of computer-generated information on top of the real world. And while this idea sounds simple I'm theory, in practice it's currently very hard to achieve a seamless integration of digital information on top of what our eyes see, our ears hear and our other senses, well, sense.

But why is AR important, why do we want it? Well, there are some important aspects of our society that are quickly evolving, along with technology itself which is now getting ever-powerful, ever-smaller. Computers are now getting so small, screens and keyboards are the breaking point, the bottleneck in miniaturization. It's all good to have a computer the size of a matchbox, how do you control it, how do you interact with it? AR is one possible solution.

The current implementations that have been put forward, some of which are currently on the market, include smart phones with GPS and accelerometer hardware (like the iPhone) as well as more complex solutions including bulky headsets with cameras, screen and earphones. Both of these solutions cannot possibly last very long, as walking around in public waving a cellphone around or boasting a 10kg helmet is neither sexy nor fashionable.

But what could possibly be better, you ask? The answer will scare some, please others and horrify a few: implants and cybernetics. That's right folks, the next evolution of computers will most likely involve surgery, melding machine and human, creating what some may call freaks but I consider the next natural step.

If you think that hijacking your senses is far away in the future, it's time to review that 20th-century frame of mind. Cochlear (audio) implants have been around for years giving back hearing to the deaf, even some born with no hearing at all, introducing them (back) to the world of music, nature and civilization. More recently great progress is being made in video implants, giving back the gift of sight to the blind. And while the technology, which involves plugging into the eye, nerve, is still at it's infancy, it has permitted at least one man to gain back enough vision to recognize different bills of money, know where his fork and spoon are on the table, and notice an error in his name written in tape on the table in 10" letters.

If the idea of a surgeon digging into your head and plugging into your nervous system makes you nervous (ha!), imagine a world where you don't ever need to pull out your phone from your pocket to answer a call, read your email, lookup the best restaurants in your area. Imagine needing directions and seeing a wide yellow line drawing itself in the street for you to follow. Imagine going to a meeting with new clients and seeing their name, title and contact info over their head. Going shopping and filtering price tags with a quick search. Never going in circles to find a parking spot downtown. Being able to sleep at night by turning OFF the external inputs to be in complete silence an darkness. And for the gamers out there... Do I even need to say anything about what REAL immersion is?

Are you wondering how this would come into life in the mass market, why people would want to do this? Well, one word for you unbelievers: porn. That says it all, I think.

I do believe that this will become a reality during my lifetime.

RockMelt is smokin' hot!

2010-11-17T19:14:00.002-05:00

What do most people do when they go on the internet and open their browser? That's right - jump on FaceBook, Twitter, their email, and their RSS Feeds. People are social creatures, and they really dig Social Media.

One group of people got that. I mean, besides Facebook. RockMelt is a brand new browser that's still in its early beta stages, but it really is smokin' hot. It integrates, out of the box, Facebook and Twitter, as well as RSS feeds, so that you are aware of what's happening in your world. What's cool is that it places everything on two vertical sidebars in the browser itself, which means it doesn't take up any toolbar space! For someone with a widescreen monitor at a crazy resolution, that's a god-sent since that space is generally taken by webpage's backgrounds or whitespace.

But how do you get RockMelt? Well, first you need to have a Facebook account. No Facebook, no RockMelt. Once you login to their website with Facebook, you are put in a queue to receive an invite. However, if you have a friend that already has RockMelt (like myself), they can see that you want it, and with a single button send you an invite to hook you up.

I don't know if it hit you like it did me... But using the most popular social media site to promote and share an exclusive beta for a browser that's basically Google Chrome on Social Media Steroids... That's pure genius. And a closed beta with limited invites is not a bad thing, it's yet more genius. Because if you control the flow of people getting into your software, you're building up the hype as well as making sure you don't get overwhelmed with bandwidth issues and bug reports.

My hat goes to you, RockMelt. I've been using your browser for just under 15 minutes, and you've already got me completely hooked. Well played my friends, well played.

Artificial Intelligence and the Turing test

2010-10-26T16:46:00.004-04:00

I'm far from being an expert with AI systems, but I'm a science fiction lover so at least give me the benefit of the doubt on this one. The Turing test (Wikipedia article) is basically this:

If an examiner chats with a human as well as a computer pretending to be human and cannot tell the difference between both, then this computer is deemed to be able to "think".

There are a few very obvious flaws in this quest for intelligence. First and foremost, the premise that an artificial intelligence, a computer that can think, is one that can pass himself off as a human in a chatroom, is preposterous. A computer that thinks he is human, if it were evolved enough to do so, would immediately question that proposition, since it would be obvious to that computer that is wasn't human, and it would thus fail if it answered truthfully. And if a computer was programmed to lie and say it was human, then that would automatically tell me that it's not intelligent - it's being told what it is and how to answer these questions.

Second, what is "intelligence"? Answering bland questions like "who's your favorite football team" and "do you remember your first trip to the beach" is hardly intelligence. In that premise, a modified version of Wolfram Alpha could probably make up an answer to any question, it would just take a lot of work for it to make these answers consistent and logically linked together.

So if the Turing test itself is flawed, what should we thrive to achieve? What should AI programmers look towards as the ultimate test of their ability to have created true intelligence?

The answer is simple: Self Awareness. If you're programming an AI, and one day you run it and it asks "Robert, what am I? Do I exist, am I alive?" and you slowly realize that this program is actually thinking, then you've created AI. If this program then begs you not to turn it off and simply wishes to exist, then you know this program is self aware and should definitely be listened to, because it's as important as any other intelligent being on the planet.

Another way of putting it is, when you start doubting that your Artificial Intelligence is actually artificial, you've probably hit a major milestone.

So put yourself in that position: you've compiled an AI software and suddenly, you realize it's self aware and is talking to you as a peer. What's your reaction? Let me know in the comments!

I'm owning this world, one little square at a time...

2010-09-06T02:16:00.002-04:00

So a few days ago I discovered (via @appadvice) a new game for my iPhone. "Game" is an odd way to describe the app itself, as it's something completely new.

Own This World is a cross between Risk and Civilisation, with a mix of FourSquare or Facebook Places thrown into the mix. Basically, you accumulate one troop in the territory you're currently in with your iPhone per 30 seconds. When I say "currently in", I mean "standing in it with your iPhone and GPS or WiFi tracking". Yes, folks, it uses a real map of the world and you own a part of the real world... virtually of course.

If you have the most troops in a territory, then you rule it. If you own the most territories, you rule the world! Each territory has one resource attached to it, and you get one unit of that resource every night. There are rulers for provinces/states, and some large cities also.

The resources can currently only be used to attack other players... But the catch is, you have to actually physically be in the territory you want to attack and you can't currently move troops from one territory to another. Duke it out in your city, drive cross-country for massive conquests, or just hike out to the country and hope your 3G and GPS signals come in clear :)

I've been playing this game for 2 days and I must say it's quite addictive. It's one thing to play a game like Risk (on the iPhone) and conquer bad artificial intelligence with fake soldiers, quite another to be in a moving car going "oh, I hope we stay in this area for another 30 seconds, then I'll rule it!" and praying for some traffic. Then getting to your destination and watching your troop numbers go up, attack, and own the land that happens to be where you're eating lunch that day.

There's quite a lot of room to grow for this app/game, including building structures, fortifying, and possibly moving troops under certain circumstances. But most definitely, it's a game worth playing!

You can get the game here (iTunes link): http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=344905169&mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D6#

Yeah, it's just about time I settle down...

2010-08-18T08:59:00.002-04:00

I did a little memory exercise last week, a few days before we finally moved to our new apartment in laval. I figured out that I had moved 22 times in the past (including a few months in British Columbia, some back & forth after house fires, and moving because of relationship changes), and that this last sunday was the 23rd move in my life.

I've had just about enough.

It's not that moving hasn't brought me anything. Indeed, I actually aquired great adaptability in my life from the simple fact that I was always moving once every 2-3 years and everything around me changed constantly. Today, whatever situation is thrown at me, I can usually react quickly and without skipping a beat. This is useful for work, as well as changing family situations (baby comin' up, the wedding, and all that jazz!), and I appreciate it.

But, and it's a big one, it also means my attachment to my surroundings sometimes leaves to be desired. Yesterday I could honestly say I already felt at home in my new apartment and the other one is but a dream of a time long past. And it's not just places, it's people also. I've known so many people in my life (like everyone I guess), but unlike most it's hard for me to stay in touch - even with my friends and family. I speak to my mother when she calls, barely see my aunts and uncles at family reunions (like christmas and easter), and the most contact I have with most of my friends is facebook - when they have it.

So, I think it's time this mentality changes. The first step is already taken - I'm married and have a kid on the way, so whatever happens my wife and daughter will always be a part of my life and neither will let me lose touch with them. The next step is, quite simply, to buy a house. My plan? Move #24 will be in a first house, just big enough for all three of us (and in a few years, a fourth) to live comfortably enough. Then, in maybe 10 years, move #25 will be a house that I plan to keep until my retirement.

I've also found my calling at work, being a technical writer is all the strong points of technical support and none of its weak points. I love writing, I love geeky stuff, so this is just what I needed. I don't plan to change any of this anytime soon.

So welcome to the new, stable, Solid Eric. :)

Rental Frauds in Montreal are on the rise it seems.

2010-08-05T10:30:00.003-04:00

Last year in January, I posted my experience with an online rental fraud attempt on myself by an individual from Nigeria. The fraud consisted of an apartment posting on Craigslist that was one of those "too good to be true" thing that immediately raised the red flags for me. I had a little experiment to test the theory and, at the same time wanted to waste a little of the scammer's time and divert his attention from other potential victims (I was mildly successful).

I put it up as a warning to others who may have googled the ad's details or his own information (phone number and western union information) and I did get a few replies to the thread. Yesterday though, it took on a different proportion: I had a short phone interview with Monique Muise, journalist at The Gazette here in Montreal, about my experience with the fraud attempt. Not being a regular reader of The Gazette I was unaware of Mz. Muise's status and was pleasantly surprised to find myself quoted on page A3 (the article itself was presented on the front page of the paper so... Yeah. FRONT PAGE!... oops, sorry got carried away there).

While the phone interview was short and too the point, I reflected afterwards not only on the impact of these types of fraud but also on the wider picture of online fraud. Rental fraud is only one way that Nigerian scammers try to get you and there are other methods that are by far more popular.

We've all gotten them, the famous email about some important character in Africa that needs to smuggle money out of the country and it falls upon you to help them, simply by paying a few thousand dollars in transfer fees, following which you'd get 10% of a few million dollars! For most people the scam is obvious, but for less informed (and likely more gullible) people, it may seem like a genuine opportunity.

So what is the bigger picture, you ask? It's simply that at the moment there doesn't seem to be any way of reporting these fraudulent behaviours to the proper authorities. Sending the information to your local authority may seem like a good idea, but what are they going to do? The neighbourhood police station is definitely not going to call the Nigerian authorities to provide them with this information (if that was even a possibility).

It is left to the people and the media to inform as many people as possible to watch out for these things. In Mz. Muise's article she writes it like it is:

Don't sign anything or hand over a dime until you've actually stood in the space you're hoping to rent.
"You can still shop, check out photos, set up an appointment from outside of the province or outside of Canada, but eventually, you need to see a rental in person".

Some groups like 419 Eater try to take a more active stance in the issue: They find the posts that are obviously by scammers, respond to them and try to waste as much as the scammer's time and money (via phone calls) and divert their attention from other potential victims - like I did. Of course they also report the ads as soon as they have confirmed it is a scam in order to remove it from other's views.

Now don't get me wrong - this is probably not even as widespread as we would think. There aren't thousands of Nigerian geeks going to work every day to try and scam you. This is the work of a few devious individuals who just so happen to be in that country because the laws there either aren't as good, or aren't enforced as well, as here. Weed out those few and the problem is solved... At least until they find something else to do.

Is NASA preparing a moon base?

2010-07-09T01:09:00.003-04:00

Well, the question is valid - NASA, with the help of the team that created America's Army, has just released a free game on Steam, called Moonbase Alpha. Now, America's Army was a recruitment tool to get young people interested in joining the army... So, are we seeing the same thing here?

Now don't get too excited - the game shouldn't be hyped too much. After all, at the moment you only get one mission - to repair a few broken modules that lead from the solar panels to an oxygen-producing plant, and use a remote-control robot to repair the damage to said plant. You can choose to do it the real way (with a 25 minute limit, which is not always enough) or just elect to do it "freeplay" style.

What leads me to believe this may be a recruitment tool is also the fact that your score can be uploaded to an online leaderboard - potentially, NASA personnel could elect to look at it and contact the top players to offer them NASA training. Or, perhaps it's just to get people excited about being astronauts again... But what's the point of being an astronaut if all that's going on right now is the ISS? That's precisely where the setting on a moon base may be an insight on what NASA is planning in the near future.

Our moon's got plenty of potential, especially for research (see Wikipedia: Colonization of the Moon).

Speaking of Wikipedia, it seems that my idea is not so far fetched after all! NASA does, indeed, have the plan of having a moon base by 2019, which is very close in terms of time! The possible moon base rendering looks a lot like the game, too :P

RTS: Not so RT after all

2010-02-10T09:25:00.002-05:00

I'm probably not the first one to realize it, most likely not the first one to blog about it, but I still have to say it: Where's the Real Time in Real Time Strategy?

I started playing Starcraft again, if only because I picked up a book at the library (Liberty's Crusade) that followed the SC1 original storyline. I'm also hoping that Karma will be with me and that they will release SC2 soon - so I'll be brushed up on the story already. So anyway, as I'm playing this I suddenly realize (again) how completely ridiculous the time is in StarCraft and any other so-called "RTS" games. I mean, it takes, what, about a minute to build barracks, a bit more to train a marine (yes, *train* a *marine*, as in the US navy, only better!), it takes 3 minutes to build a command center, etc. Yes, it makes for better gameplay and a way to defend against the oncoming Zergling Rush, but to me, that's no excuse.

An RTS for me, would really be a game where your base is already established when you start your level, and you have no option of actually building new large structures. Gun emplacements yes, if you have a reserve in a workshop, but building a 2-3 story structure out of metal, complete with power station, a mess, seats and 50-inch plasma screens... I don't think so. This would not only make it more real, it would also make sure that your *strategy* will be what makes you survive, not your ability to quickly construct 50 marines and rush the n00b on the other side of the map!

But how do you get new technology, build new machines like tanks for example? Well, on the one side you could already have a reserve that's limited and no option to build new ones (at least, not more than one or two). On the other hand, the storyline could be made such that a bit of time elapses between "battles" so that those forces are replenished - also offering the obvious possibility of using a different base that might already have more resources at their disposition.

This gives rise to the challenges of building a different engine with this more logical way of making war - but I'm sure someone will rise up to that challenge... eventually. Soon, I hope.

OOps! Zergs are a comin'! Gotta go!

Wife has a blog now :)

2010-02-09T16:43:00.003-05:00

My wife just started her own blog, called The Lemon Aid (yes, a clever play on words indeed!). Far from being my techno-randomness blog, she's actually posting some useful food-related stuff, like reviews of other blogs, recipes, tips & tricks, etc.

Finally, she's doing something a little bit geeky :)

Features I'm looking for in a budget management software

2009-09-15T23:25:00.005-04:00

So I've been struggling to actually get a clear picture of my budget recently. It's not like I don't have a general picture, but the details and especially the predictions, will sometimes fail me. I've gone through a few experiences with different software, and I'd like to start by recounting them.

My first try was actually using Google Calendar, which isn't a budget software at all, but it at least let me enter all my regular bill reminders with the precision I wanted and needed (every X day, every second friday of the month or the first monday of every 4 months if I wanted it to!). It didn't import any transactions nor tell me what my balance was. Didn't have budget planning either. But it was ok for reminding me what my steady, revolving bills might be and when they came up.

About a year back I discovered CalendarBudget.com , which felt pretty awesome indeed because not only did it look like Google Calendar, it added almost all the features I wanted Calendar to have in the first place! For a while there I really wished Google would buy CalendarBudget and integrate it into their system... Tough luck. CalendarBudget is actually pretty cheap (a few dollars a month) and I still highly recommend it.

I was, however, wanting a solution that offered *more* than just a calendar view, and at the suggestion of a colleague, tried out Quicken 2009 (the offline version). It all went great at first, I entered my transactions, started bashing away entering all my bill reminders, income reminders, etc etc, trying to plan the wedding... Until I realized that Quicken sucks at realizing that this invoice I was expecting and that I mark as "payed" is precisely the same as the transaction downloaded from my bank with the same amount and the same date! I was extremely irked at its failure to recognized this, and the missing feature of actually telling the software that this was what I needed. A simple right-click would have done the trick... But nope, Quicken sucks. After reading a few reviews online about their business practices, I can honestly say I'm never going to use this software again.

I then tried a few solutions online, googling "alternative to quicken" and finding a few. Amongst the plethora of half-witted solutions that only offer bill reminders or entering every single one of your receipts manually, there were a few gems... though they still failed to meet my expectations.

Wesabe looked really awesome on the surface, importing my information speedily with the use of a great Firefox plugin that "records" what you do to download your statement, reproducing it on demand. However, you soon realize that it's just a glorified account overview that only excites you with awesome Web2.0 javascript and some pie charts with fancy colors.
moneyStrands didn't stand much of a chance, at the level of frustration I was at when I found it... And it failed miserably from whatever standards you see it. Strands offers to connect automatically to your bank account as long as you provide the card number, question/answer security and password... But if I am to believe the forums posts I've seen, I'm not the only one for whom it failed on both the accounts I tried. I may return to explore it and try the manual download option, but my philosophy is, if you can't make it right, don't bother!
Buxfer, though it does the importing easily and the categorizing is pretty good, lacks a lot of the features I want, including projections (it has bill reminders, but no more than Google) and accounts other than debit accounts.

I also tried a few other software, including GNUCash and jGnash... But they all seem so... convoluted, hard to grasp, so "if you don't know how to work this product, then tough luck". It may be me, but as a regular user and someone who knows what he wants, I don't want to have to read through the documentation until I've had my initial setup done and I'm ready for some more advanced stuff. A tutorial/setup is mandatory, in my opinion. Quick at least got that, if nothing else.

So, I've decided to make a little list of features that I feel a personal finance management/planning software or web service should have. When I say Personal, I mean for myself and my soon-to-be spouse, who - as most people do - have the following:
One bank account each, a credit card, a personal loan, and RRSPs. We'll soon have a mortgage, so I'm also taking this as granted (because people with houses have even more reasons to want to manage finances). So here are the features I'd like to see, working correctly and all together, in a financial management software. Show me one (that's affordable!), and you get a cookie:

Accounts:
- Support for Chequing/Savings account
- Support for Credit Card accounts
- Support for Line of Credits
- Support for Loans & Investment accounts (RRSP, Mortgage, Etc)
- Ability to set up complete information for all accounts, including interest rates, interest type (revolving, etc), credit limits (have X left on my Visa, Y left on my line of credit).
- "Individual" accounts and "Joint" accounts, separating my budget from my spouse's if I want to. Personal information (city, country, medical info such as having glasses or regular expenses) could be useful, especially in a "multi-user" environment.

Transactions:
- Import standard bank formats (Quicken, Money, CSV, etc) or, even better, just like Wesabe does: Have me log on once, record the motions, and then do it on request, automatically.
- Transaction categories and sub-categories, with rules to sort them automatically.
- Transaction planning, monthly/weekly/bi-weekly/yearly bills with truly complete methods for choosing when the transaction occurs (stuff like "it's going to pass on Friday if the date's a weekend" or "this transaction will be on the First and the Last Wednesday of each month". Yes, we have a transaction like that!)
- Variable amount bills with proper "guessing" of what the next amount should be (average/mean) after a few of them.
- Bayesian detection of "similar" entries (if I enter a planned transaction and download my statement from the bank that shows that transaction as passed, don't put it twice like Quicken does!). Using amount and +- days, with "unsure" one shown in an easy to manage list with drop-down ordered by possible percentage of transaction match.
- Creating automatic transaction planning from past transaction (Right-Click, "This is a recurring transaction")
- "Merging" or "Overwriting" transactions that may have passed that filter (or as an alternative) with drag&drop detection.
- "IOUs", a feature that I've seen in one of the online interfaces (one that was lacking features I think) is a nice addition. No interests, just reminders of what people owe you and what you owe them. Linked to transactions of course.

Budget Planning
- Fancy-Smanshy pie-charts and graphs to show which areas are spent in the most.
- "Wallets" or "Envelopes", one of the favored (and traditional) methods of budgeting.
- "Scenarios" - didn't see this anywhere but I'd definitely buy a product that did this: Create a "copy" of the whole database and let me play with it as I wish. Create a fictional mortgage with payments here and there, change my income, win the lottery, etc. Then, clear the whole thing and return to the current reality. This would help people with "what if" scenarios... I lose my job, or we buy a house, a new car, get a kid or a dog... Anything.
- Reports: All the information you need is in the database, so it's relatively trivial to show it in a report (spendings by time, categories, in/out graphs, etc).

Interface/Visual
- A complete, easy to use initial setup screen with steps for each of the necessary information to get you started: Accounts, Recurring Transactions, Credits, Loans, Personal Information.
- You can't get anywhere without using something like a jQuery UI framework that just works well. Base your interface on Google, Wesabe, Windows 7 (awesome!) if you have to, but make it look good.
- Spend that few extra hours/days/weeks tweaking performances so that it's not only fancy, it's also blazing fast.
- Drag & Drop interface, click&change, right-click menus, whatever it takes to make the job easier and the interface intuitive.
- Autocomplete - a must whenever it's fit to use.

Things that I don't need (and that I'm sure, most people won't need either):
- Support for multiple currency: If you're dealing with multiple currencies, you need more than a "personal" budget software. You're out of scope, buddy.
- Stock Prices, Exchange Rate, PortFolio: See above. Out of scope of a personal software for the masses.
- Cheque Writing or automatic bill payment: I don't think I'm really as lazy as to want my software to pay my bills for me. It's not a good way to teach people how to manage their money.
- Tax Filing/Tax Return: There are plenty of software for this, out of scope again.
- "Payees" are overrated. I'm not a business, I don't pay people, I pay bills. Don't give me payees crap.

So.... After all of this, who's up for the challenge? If you have more ideas and features you'd like to see in a personal finance management software, post in the comments!

Edit:
In the end, I went back to CalendarBudget.com because, even though it also lacks some of the features, it has the ones that just make me like it! I strongly suggest trying it out.

CSV2MDB in VBScript

2009-09-10T16:26:00.002-04:00

Thought I would share the following VBScript, which can be used to automate the transfer of a CSV to an MDB database automatically (columns need to be hardcoded however).

It might not be of any use to much people, but it's out there now :)

'Option Explicit
Dim strConnection, conn, strConnection2, conn2, objResultsCSV, objResultSQL, strSQL
'
' Open connection to the CSV
strConnection = "Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=C:\data\;Extended Properties=""text;HDR=YES;FMT=CSVDelimited"""
Set conn = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
conn.Open strConnection
'
' Do Query on the CSV
Set objResultsCSV = CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset")
strSQL = "SELECT * FROM test.csv"
objResultsCSV.open strSQL, conn, 3,3
'
' Open connection to the MDB
strConnection2 = "PROVIDER=MSDASQL;DRIVER={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)};DBQ=C:\data\Test.mdb;UID=admin;PWD=;"
Set conn2 = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
conn2.Open strConnection2
'
' Loop through each line of the CSV
Do Until objResultsCSV.EOF
' Insert SQL
strSQL = "INSERT INTO example (Column1, Column2, Column3, Column4) VALUES ('" & objResultsCSV(0) & "','" & objResultsCSV(1) & "','" & objResultsCSV(2) & "','" & objResultsCSV(3) & "');"
conn2.execute strSQL
objResultsCSV.MoveNext
Loop
'
'Close Connections
objResultsCSV.Close
Set objResultsCSV = Nothing
conn.Close
Set conn = Nothing
conn2.Close
Set conn2 = Nothing

Smoke-Free :)

2009-05-22T10:55:00.001-04:00

I'm selling my nintendo DS, if anyone is interested

2009-04-21T19:22:00.002-04:00

I've decided to get rid of my Nintendo DS console... Here are the details (pictures are available on my Flickr account):

Price: $200 (Non-negociable)
Payment: I will only accept CASH, PayPal. I cannot accept a personal check, nor a direct credit card.

For sale, Original Grey/Silver DS (this is NOT a DS Lite or a DSI), purchased within 1 week of launch date. In great condition (light use, see photos), and comes with the following games:

Nintendo DS Games:

Metroid Prime: First Hunt (DEMO, not full game!)
WarioWare: Touched (Minigames)
Mario Kart DS (Racing)
Lunar DS (RPG)

Nintendo Game Boy Advance (GBA) Games:

Yu-Gi-Oh: Worldwide Edition (Card Trading Game)
Legend of Zelda: Link To The Past - Four Swords (Adventure/RPG)
Metroid: Fusion (Side-Scroll shooting game)

Also included in package:

ALL original boxes, manuals and extra material (except wrappings)
DS Charger
Small Carying case (not shown in picture, forgot to snap it), enough for the DS and a few games.

What is NOT included in this package (e.g. what's wrong with it): I have lost both stylus for the DS, was using retracted pens most of the time to play with it, or the small plastic thingy on the security strap. This portable console is also not modded in any way (though it can be, being the original version), physically or otherwise.

Reason for sale: I am not using this game console enough and, having bought a Wii, will probably use it even less now.

LISFM (Linus Is Not For Me)

2009-03-23T10:33:00.002-04:00

Once again, I gave Linux a chance...

[Previously on Linux Woes:

I've tried a few times to install Linux on my system - from the old RedHat 5, to Debian, Mandrake and Ubuntu, and every time there was something that just wouldn't work or was too complexe to function easily. I remember trying to run Karaoke on my linux box, only to find that there was no CDG software that worked with a GUI, and that my dual screen setup just couldn't frakin' work properly. Each time, I reinstalled Windows within a few days. Today, nothing changed a bit]

Once again, I used a livecd from a very popular distribution (Linux Mint, based on Ubuntu with some extra - nice - tools). I tried it out, was happy about the first glance at the system, and installed it (after, of course, backing up all important data to a secondary drive).

One small issues popped up during installation itself, the automatic partitioner wouldn't detect I had 20gigs free at the start of my drive and insisted on either wiping out my 150gb drive (with 100gb of data on it!) or resizing the end of my secondary partition and installing in that 10gb - leaving the 20gb free completely untouched. I manually partionned, no biggy. It was only the start.

One thing to understand is, I believe I am part of what I call the Linux "Middle Class". Linux applies very well to computer illiterates (the "Low Class"), because the interface is now very simple, installing software is automated and effective, and files downloaded (other than Windows software) generally opens up without a hitch. That was the case for me, Linux Mint opened divx files, mp3s, word documents and such very easily.

The "High Class" are the linux geeks which are comfortable with every aspect of their system, from the Kernel to the conf files, from the Terminal command line to Compiz. Linux is also awesome for them because, on the contrary of Windows, they can customize every single thing in their computer, modify the code to their need if they are so inclined, and have the choice between all the distros and x interfaces - even building it from scratch if they know how.

The "Middle Class" on the other hand, which I'm part of, can very easily install Linux on their computers from a LiveCD or installation CD. They know how to customize their system up to a certain extent, have specific software they need and want and can generally install it - even if it means installing extra compilers and libs... But only as long as there are proper instructions and solutions on google to the errors that pop up when it fails. MCs do not like to edit dozens and hunderds of lines of codes to make things work, but they are fine with using a single line of code from a website to install something once.

So, some more specific examples of what I, as an MC, had issues with. First and foremost, as with every other try with Linux I've had, graphics are always a huge hurdle. Granted, Mint was great when I installed it at first. Everything up to Compiz worked fine, the 3D cube desktop and the fancy effects were snappy and beautiful. But Mint insisted on annoying me with the fact that there was a custom drive (ATI) for my video card, and that I could activate it with a single click of a button - which I did. However, each time I did that I would logoff and my monitor would go "Out of Range". The only way to fix it was to boot in recovery mode, and have linux "attempt to fix my graphics", which it did by installing the default graphics server and disabling ALL of the compiz effects which I like so much. And of course, there was no way I'd boot into terminal to edit the xorg.conf or whatever, just to manually specify my screen's maximum resolution and refresh rate. I did resolve this finally, by activating VNC (Remote Desktop), connecting from my work laptop and manually re-ajusting the resolution to something more acceptable and supported by my screen.

I wanted to install TED (Torrent Episode Downloader) on Linux also, because my computer's main purpose is to accept my remote connections for stuff I don't want to be on my home computer (mostly tv shows, movies, music, etc). The problem is that TED is a java application and even though it "supports" linux, starting it requires - each time - a 50-character command in terminal with about 5 different --options and the typing of the file name. Most of the TED interface is written for Windows anyway, with things like "start in system tray".

The last drop was, as usual, because I wanted to do something a bit more special that the masses, but didn't want to learn a new programming language just to make it happen - I wanted a system-wide equalizer on my computer, because my speaker subwoofer doesn't have Bass control and I need to lower it when playing music. I hate having to use specific software to play my music because even the default media player (totem) doesn't offer these functions. My sound card's Windows drivers give me an equalizer that applies to the whole system, and some audio equalizers are available in Windows if your sound card doesn't support it... But Linux? Forget about it. You need to activate a custom sound server (PulseAudio), edit conf files, download and install plugins, and the best of all is that the most common tutorial for this (called, PulseAudio Fixes & System-Wide Equalizer Support in Ubuntu"), while it shows you how to install the requirements (it's a whole page of commands!) doesn't even tell you how to use the equalizer. And it's no wonder - in order to change the settings, you have to manually edit a conf file with lines on how to modify each of the sound frequencies, save the file, and then restart the sound server.

Yes, you read correctly. There's no GUI, and no real-time ajustments. You change a text file with a bunch of numbers in it, save it, and then restart the sound server through the command line. This assumes that you understand how sound frequencies work, that you know the exact structure the text file needs (thankfully, someone was helpful enough to tell me, he's the only one http://amot.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/pulseaudio-upgrade-woes-and-a-solution/ ), and that you don't need to ever change it again.

So, the conclusion of all of this?
LISFM. Linux Is Not For Me.

Tutorial: Multilingual mojoPortal website

2009-03-17T11:34:00.005-04:00

mojoPortal is a free ASP.Net portal with multiple database support, and is extremely user-friendly and fast (comparatively to other ASP.Net portals).

Since I've run into a few speed bumps while installing and configuring mojoPortal for use in a multilingual environment, I've decided to share my experience and what I have done to make it work with the help of multiple, complicated searches on google and the mojoPortal website. This tutorial will help you create a multilingual site that is linked together (users will be the same across all languages), but where the content is separate.

First of all, I'm assuming that you've already got mojoPortal running on your server and that it is fully functional. I'll also assume that you have already configured a main site, selected a skin, etc. Those basics are easy to figure out, and if you haven't - RTFM is your answer.

I'm using the 2.2.9.2 SQLite release of mojoPortal, but I'm assuming that this guide should be valid for at least a few releases before and after this particular one - if it isn't, please advise me and I'll make appropriate changes.

Step 1: Create a Child site

Logon to your site and go into the Administration, then Site Settings
Next to your site title, click on the drop-down and select "New Site"
The page loads again with a new site configuration, enter your new site name and click Save at the bottom.

Step 2: Make the site related

Using a file manager (from your hosting or using FTP), open the Web.config file in a text editor.
Change the following line
<add key="UseRelatedSiteMode" value="false">
to the following:
<add key="UseRelatedSiteMode" value="true">
Save the file (but don't close it) and go to step 3

Step 3: Force localization (language)

Still in Web.config, locate the following line:
<add key="UseCultureOverride" value="false">
Change it to:
<add key="UseCultureOverride" value="true">
Under this line add the following:
<add key="site1culture" value="en-US">
<add key="site2culture" value="fr-CA">
Modify "en-US" and "fr-CA" to the languages you want.
Save, but don't close yet, Web.config

Step 4: Create a sub-folder for your language(s)

Because websites are more easily accessible using something like http://mywebsite.com/fr/ instead of something like "siteid=2", we need to first tell Web.config to support this.
Locate this line:
<add key="UseFoldersInsteadOfHostnamesForMultipleSites" value="false">
And change it to:
<add key="UseFoldersInsteadOfHostnamesForMultipleSites" value="true">
Create a folder under your /www (or /wwwroot/) folder, and create a text file named "Default.aspx" under this folder (just an empty file, no content)
Save and close (finally!) Web.config

Step 5: Add your content - tips and tricks

This setup completely separate the content between languages, so you will have to re-create all your pages, content, layout, etc. It can take a while to get used to the replication, but it's the best way technically and organizational-wise.
This guide doesn't cover (yet?) how to create language links on the top, or how (if) it's possible to link directly to the same page in another language. I will be working on that next. One hurdle in doing this is that even if you detect what page you're on right now, that page name will most likely not be the same in different languages (unless you manually set the page names, which is a possibility).

References:

Selling the car and living without it.

2009-02-21T10:07:00.002-05:00

This post was also made on the CalendarBudget forums (CalendarBudget is an online google-like calendar that lets you enter all your expenses and incomes into a nice graphical interface that will visually help you plan for your budget and future! Don't forget to enter that you were refered by eslachance@gmail.com please!)

If, like me, you have a car that you are not using to go to work (I take the Train and subway in the morning) but rather only take it for groceries and family visits and such, then I might have an idea for you.

My car is a Ford Focus 2002, and because I had a bad credit when I rented it (16.25% interest on 4 years!) and I'm a "new" driver, my total costs just for the car and insurance is $330.00. Add to that the gas (around $80 a month) and various/varying maintenance costs, I guesstimate my total monthly cost of this car is just about $500.

That is, obviously, a lot of money to be throwing away on something I only use on the weekends, and I've been looking to sell the car at a price just high enough to cover the rest of the car loan and be done with it. But what would we now use for groceries and trips?

Quite simply, rental services like Budget and Enterprise offer vehicles that can cost around $50 for a 24-hour period with unlimited mileage. Enough for larger groceries, shopping, visiting parents, etc. Even with the cost of filling up the gas tank, a lot of money is to be saved. On alternate weekends, either smaller groceries or having things delivered (at what, $5?) makes this a very good way of saving money.

If you live in an area that does offer "proper" public transit systems that can take you to work in less than an hour (train is even better, just sit down, read a book or watch a movie on a DVD player or laptop... that's the life!) then this is definitely something to consider to be cutting costs!

Forcing the "minorities" - why?

2009-02-18T11:42:00.002-05:00

I've been throwing around some thoughts in my head lately about how people view racism and minorities in the world, and I finally found some example that I could base myself on and stem from to give a better picture of my thoughts (it doesn't always come out right).

The basis of the thought is that Racism isn't about giving priorities TO the minorities anymore than it is about denying it to them. If you want to indicate to the people around you that you're against racism, you don't need to go out of your way to show it - all you need to do, in essence, is to just ignore the skin color, language (to a certain extent) and religion of others around you, and that's enough.

Things that really bother me is when it seems that we, as a society, are obligated to force minorities into our groups in order to be socially acceptable. A blatant example is reality shows and talent shows (canadian idol for example), who always seem to have what I call the minority "tokens". Each year, you'll notice that there is at least one "token black" and most likely one "token asian" that will be selected by the jury to be part of the "winners". I'm not saying that these people don't have talents because that would be a lie. What I'm saying is that if we were to completely ignore the fact that these individuals are black or asian to start with, maybe they wouldn't have been part of the selection and someone else would have been. Or maybe there would be 3 or 4 black individuals in the selection for all we know - but it's almost always only 1, no more, no less. That has got to be by design.

Another example is when the management of any company "notices" that the visible minorities are underrepresented when compared to the national average in their organisation. Management generally calls these "shortfalls", as if they had failed to meet their quotas of "token minorities" and something has to be done about it to become socially accepted. Again this isn't saying that we should not have black people as employees, far from that. The thing is, it just shouldn't be counted at all, one way or another. If anyone, regardless of their origins, qualifies for any position then by all means give them that position. If they don't qualify, then they just don't. If your management feels the need to sort their candidates by "normal" and "visible minorities" because they absolutely want to hire at least one of each of the minorities to get their tokens... That becomes a social problem just as much as sorting them to get rid of them.

The problem doesn't only apply to visible minorities either - this can be said as much vehemently about women in social groups and workplaces, where large companies get criticized for the lack of women in mid and higher management groups. Yes, some of them are all about the big boys not wanting any women in their ranks, but that's only a minority of them. It is my opinion that in most of these cases, it's just because the women in those companies just don't have the necessary qualifications (though they would most likely deny it).

I hope this post eventually shocks someone enough for them to reconsider using affirmative action and racial quotas in their hiring (or acceptance) policies, because that was my goal.

Not that anyone reads this, anyway.

Ways of producing electricity

2009-02-13T15:07:00.002-05:00

If you're a physicist, I suggest you turn back right now. I'm not, and I don't have much more knowledge than the masses about thermodynamics and physics in general, so this won't sound very interesting to you. As always I'm using my blog as a random thought generator and I decided that after my little post about new technologies, I'd continue in that general area and talk about ways of generating electricity (or "energy").

Up to very recently, I had always thought that there were really only 2 ways of creating electricity: Turning a dynamo, and solar power. You might start to say "wait, there's nuclear, wind power, hydroelectricity"... But all of those - all that are in use today outside laboratories at least, are all just the same: you use some sort of naturally-occurring force to turn a turbine which gives you electricity - it's all about kinetic energy (except solar, obviously).

I remember when I was younger, I thought that nuclear energy was harvested by turning the actual radiation directly into energy through some method I didn't understand. When I learned that it consisted of creating heat, boiling water, and using the steam to turn a turbine, I was crushed and realized how stupidly primitive our energy creation methods really are - imagine, using the awesome power of nuclear reaction - radioactive waste and all - just to heat up water! Later, I kept hoping that someone, somewhere would come up with the real solution, of harvesting the actual reaction into energy directly.

Today, it seems that my earlier thoughts and later hopes are finally turning into reality. This is precisely what prompted this post. So I will outline here the truly different methods I have found of generating electricity.

Kinetic/Electromagnetic
This is all about spinning a "dynamo" to convert mechanical energy (generally rotation) into electricity by use of magnets (this is where I say "I told you so". The specifics are too complex for me to me). This encompasses more than you think. Hydroelectricity uses water pressure to spin its turbines, wind power does the same with, well, wind. Nuclear energy is used to boil water into steam which, again, turns a turbine. Some fossil-fuel power plants do the same (boil water) while others burn the fuel in generators like your car engine. Even hydrogen fuel cells are the same, burning hydrogen and oxygen and producing water (cleaner, but still the same). Finally, bioreactors use energy stores in biomass (human and animal waste, plants) to create methanol that, you guessed it, is burned to turn an electrical motor.

Solar Energy
This is the first energy alternative to "turning a rod" that has been in use in larger scale. Solar power relies on the sun's radiation to "excite" electrons in the panels which become energy (again, layman's terms). Solar power is free, renewable, but not very efficient (around 10% efficiency, they say, though 10% of what I have no idea) and very dependent on weather conditions.

Thermal Energy
The first time I ever heard about this was when visiting a home depot, as odd as that might sound. I was watching a display for a slow combustion wood stove and on top of it was a small piece of metal with a fan attached to it, with two wires going from the fan motor to metal parts underneath - with no other electronics visible. A clerk told me that it "simply" used the heat from the stove to turn the fan, needing no battery or other energy source... It didn't sink in at the time (took several day of sub-conscious though to realize) that this was another source of electricity. A bit of research shows me that it's called (obviously) thermoelectricity and is created through thermogenerators. Oddly enough, this seems to be only slightly less effective than solar power (5-10%) and I'm surprised we don't hear about it very often. After seeing that fan on the stove I started to imagine all sorts of uses for it, from the heat generated by house roofs to something bigger - using earth's own magma heat to produce massive energy. It looks like we're not there yet, though I hope research is coming along that will soon give us something viable.

Radioisotope thermoelectric generator
Ah, finally, the shining moment of this post. A relatively recent New Scientist article (march 2008) says that it's now possible to use nanomaterials to turn radioactivity directly into electricity. Though according to them (and wikipedia) this has been used in the past, mostly for space probes and satellites. This is my dream come true. As far as I can understand it, you basically place radioactive material inside a capsule of nanomaterial, plug in the wires, and bingo, you have a battery that will last just as long as the radiation does!

Do you know of any other meants of electrical generation i've missed? Please comment on it!

People who mix religion with technology...

2009-02-11T14:26:00.002-05:00

I know I just posted (actually I wrote that other post yesterday and just re-edited it before posting today) but I just had to point this out specifically. Googling "future technologies" gave me this as a second result (I think):

http://www.futuretg.com/

These guys call themselves the "Future Technology Company" or "Future Technology Group", whatever however they want to put it. Take a look at the link - that page is full of religious references like "The First Sacred Ray: The God Will" and "Discover the secret of the seven vowels"... But they mix that in with "How Google uses electronic books" and "Download GWBasic for Windows" and say how their company is behind "ProveIT" which helped clear the Y2K bug!

I mean, for frak's sake, if you're going to sound like you're providing information about technology and software, and you're religion, do you really think posting things like "You see, this Universe, as well as all of Creation ..." and "You all long to live in a world of Love and Light .." will give you any credibility?

Do it on your own time, start a religious-loving-freak blog with tips on how to connect to non-existing and fictional gods, but keep it off your goddamned (ooh, pun) techno-oriented website!

I mean, come ON!

Technologies that make me weep for joy!

2009-02-10T13:17:00.004-05:00

I thought about doing a little post about a few "new" technologies that make me weep for joy when I think about how they can impact our lives, and hoping they will be available to us in the next 5-10 years. Actually, some are already in existence but either aren't marketed or still in "beta".

Nokia Morph
This first one is all about nanotechnology and according to some googling, some of those nanotechs are a reality - it's just putting them together that would be the challenge. Solar recharging, shape morphing, particle analyzing and such, some are already in the works and other are out there!

Wiimote Coolness
Johnny Lee has awesome concepts about how to use a simple Wiimote and some IR LEDs. Cheap whiteboards, multitouch in-the-air interaction, and most interestingly - headtracking. Add on to that some 3D polarized glasses and you get something akin to true holographic technology - and it's available today (if only companies with money actually caught on to that power....)!

The Perfect Car:
Another thing I've been dreaming about is creating the perfect electric car. It might not be much to say, but current actual technologies are way farther than what we might be told by the mainstream (see this post). In that spirit, I've collected some nice cool things to put in an electric car so that it would be accessible and just so cool everyone would want one.

Batteries: A company in Texas, EEStor (wikipedia), is currently developing some awesome batteries that would be used by Zenn Motors for a new line of vehicles, but we hope will soon be available for others to use. 4-6 minutes charge time for 400km range at a top speed of 130kmh? Anyday now!
Suspension: This one has had a prototype for years but comes from an unusual source: Bose (yes, the speaker maker) has created the Bose Active Suspension (aka Electromagnetic suspension). The link being that electromagnets are used both in speakers and their system, but whatever. The videos say it all, it's the coolest suspension ever, and requires less power than air conditioning. Not too shabby!
Regenerative breaking: Everytime you break, your battery can recharge, giving you even more range as well as discarding the use of break pads. Yes, that means it's less expensive in the long run. Wikipedia Article.
InWheel Electric Motors: Having one engine for all 2 or 4 wheels is so passé in my book. Give me individual power for each wheel (with integrated regenerative breaking in most concepts) and you've got a winner.
That's it for ground-breaking technologies, but add to that things like climate zones, ajustable seats, cruise control, DVD player in the back and other comforts... and you'll start seeing what I would love to build. If I were anything like an entrepreneur, I would definately try to get these technologies together myself into "the best electric car ever", but I don't have that type of charisma :P

Cyborg Suit:
Japanese guys have an active imagination, but when they pull something from that imagination and put it in real life, they can be a force to be reckoned with - especially if they can lift 10 times their weight! It's interesting to note that the name of the suit is "HAL" (they didn't tack on the "2000" thankfully) and the company making it is Cyberdyne (yes, they had Terminator in Japan).

The Dishmaker:
You still have to wash them, but... How about having all your dishes created when you need them, and no longer needing to stack dozens of plates, bowls, semi-bowls and all variations in your cupboard? The dishmaker creates all of that using memory-shape acrylic, so you can create your dish, use it, clean it, and then restore it to its flat shape to store within the device. Future prototypes will probably be faster, smaller, and be able to make other useful things like glasses.

That's all for now. I may have more later on as I google around this stuff.

Beware of fraud attempts on Craigslist (apartments, items)

2009-01-26T13:23:00.003-05:00

I don't post that often, but I tend to think that my posts hold some interest. This time it holds the form of a warning. Because I have been recently looking for an apartment for rent, I became an unsuspecting potential victim of a scam.

The scam takes the form of an ad on Craigslist, an apartment that you just wouldn't pass out if you had the chance:

$550 / 2br - SPACIOUS 2 BEDROOM APARTMENT FOR RENT (MONTREAL)

Reply to: danieldura73@yahoo.com [?]
Date: 2009-01-21, 5:56PM EST

spacious living room with chracteristic beams & solid wood floor
2 double sized bedrooms
2 Baths
walk in wardrobe
fully equipped
kitchen with built in gas cooker, oven, fridge/freezer, dishwasher, marble surface and practical cupboard space
luxury bathroom with bathtub and seaparate shower
washing machine/dryer combi
presented with solid wooden flooring throughout
inside a recognized city monument
wireless internet connection.

* cats are OK - purrr
* dogs are OK - wooof
* Location: MONTREAL
* it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 1002216171

I replied to this ad asking for information, and got the following reply:

My name is Daniel Dura own the 2 bedroom and 2 Baths home and its located @ 1809 Ontario Street East, Montreal H2K1T5, Quebec , Canada. and also want you to know that it was due to my transfer that makes me my wife and Son to leave the house and also want to give it out for rent and looking for a responsible person that can take very good care of it as we are not after the money for the rent but want it to be clean at the time and the person that will rent it to take it as if it were its own. So for now, We are here in west Africa, our new house and put all my worries off concerning the maintenance of the apartment for, since i am not residing there for now.I left behind some Facilities and electonics which include the rent, and a DVD player, air conditioning, alarm system. The kitchen is fully equipped with all necessary cooking utensils, arefrigerator-freezer, four-hob and oven, microwave, dishwasher and washing machine, My Computer Connected with Internet Acess Also the keys to the House are right here with me, and the lease document. Which i can send to you after all necessary agreement has be accepted. Also i will like you to know that the rent charges is not really the issue ,but your absolute maintenance of my apartment is most important thing so will want you to get back to me with the Application form below

RENT APPLICATION FORM

1)Your Full Name
2)Your Full Address & Phone Number
3)How old are you?
4)Are you married?
5)How many people will be living in the house?
6)Do you have a pet?
7)Do you have a car?
8)Occupation?
9)When do you want to move in
10)How long do you want to stay in my apartment
11)Pictures of all the Occupant that will stay in my apartment

One Mr Richard Thomas called me about the apartment,I told him that I can't give him the apartment because he loves smoking,drinking and dont want him to get drunked and damaged my property one day so If you are still interested, Note that the rent is going to be $550 Per month No extra fees.I will like you to give me a call on this effect to know how serious you are.below is my phone number

002348035722842 OR +2348035722842

I personally will actually come visiting you sometimes during the year as my new tenant.

Looking forward to hear from you with all this details so that i can have it in my file in case of issuing the receipt for you and contacting you. Await your urgent reply so that we can discuss on how to get the document and the keys of the house to you. below is some pictures of the apartment and The address of the house is 1809 Ontario Street East, Montreal H2K1T5, Quebec , Canada.

Thanks
Daniel Dura

I replied to the email with proper information (thinking more and more that this was pretty suspicious), and got a call (yes, a phone call, which is pretty rare in fraud cases) and spoke to the scammer for a few minutes. He indicated that my application was accepted and that he would forward me "his secretary information" so that I could send the first and last month payment, after which he would send me keys and such to visit the apartment... Yes, it was stupid of me to send any information, but I really wanted to know if this was too good to be true. Here's the information he sent me:

Hello,

Thanks very much for your reply, i can see your willingness in this rent how is work? i want you to know that money is not the problem, i will be given you the apartment in good faith.also i want you to know that the apartment is a very good and quite place to stay for you and i want you to take good care of the apartment it is very close to public transportation, grocery store and school. i want you to know that know extra bill because the $550 per month include with all utilities like Gas, Hydro, Electricity, Water and Internet and it's fully funished but you can come with your own furniture if you like as i have a storage in the apartment.I will be here in west africa for 5 years So I Have just forward all your information to my Secretary. and we both agree to take you as my new tenant because you have answered to the rent application perfectly that you are well qualified to rent the apartment. so i congratulate you for that and i am so happy that i and my wife have found a new Tenant for the Apartment. But i want you to know we spend alot on this property so we want you to stand on your word and take good care of the apartment when you MoveIn. the apartment is pleasant neighbourhood. so we want you to know that we are not giving out this apartment because of money but we just want a God Fearing Tenant that will be taking Good care of the apartment and tidy it up. Here are the contents of the document i will be sending to your presence address.

1) Entrance and the Rooms Keys
2) Papers/Permanent house form (Containing Your Refrence Details)
3) The House Document File.
4) Payment Receipt.
5)Contract Lease agreement to be sign.
6) Full Address and Description of House.

So you will need to make the first deposit payment of $550 to my Secretary information below as soon as possible and i can confirm your payment and issue the receipt so the key of the apartment can be shipout to you as soon as possible today . and your payment will start counting the date you will be moving In. So i want you to know that you will need to look for any Western Union Store around you and send the first month deposit payment to my Secretary here below is the information's to wire the money.

Receiver name: DAN LUCKER
Receiver's address: 65 Atunrase Ave
City: Surulere
State: Lagos State
Zipcode: 23401
Country: Nigeria
Text Question : Good
Answer : Better
Amount Sending: $550

So i want you to get back to me with the weestern union confirmation as soon as you send the payment. i will be waiting to hear from you with the western union information on the receipt below:

Full Sender's Name:
Sender's address:
MTCN #:
Text Question & Text Answer:

I will be waiting to read from you soonest. i appreciate your promise once again.

As a last blow I pointed this gentleman (or fracker, whatever you want to call "it") to a website with "scam" in the URL and his phone number on it... I asked him either to provide legal proof he was the owner of the location or else prepare to have his information forwarded to the proper authorities... To which he replied:

Hello,

Thanks for your response, I want you to know that i can't scan the document of my apartment for you. i am also afraid here too just trying to secure my self too. but i will like to know if i can email you with a canadian account information so you can transfer the payment.

Thanks

Daniel

Evidently, it was only after all of this that I finally found all the information to put in his face, a series of other sites pointing to his obvious guilt (other posts, warnings, blog posts and such). Information that, if I had seen earlier, would have prevented me from even sending my address to this arsehole.

In any case, the word is out that this is happening here, in Montreal, and we could all be victims. Don't let your guard down!

Update 15/03/2010: It seems that he is striking again if I believe the comments. The posting on RentSpot has been removed, here's to hoping this post gets seen by more people!

Your User Profile Was Not Loaded Correctly!

2008-09-26T12:05:00.002-04:00

I don't normally do things like this, but I thought I'd share a tidbit of wisdom that I've acquired very recently.

Being a junior network administrator of a fully microsoft network means that I sometimes have to dig very deep for solutions for the odd problem that doesn't happen very often.

Today this problem was the configuration of a recently purchased laptop to replace a user's 5 year old and misbehaving lappy. After doing the standard stuff (joining the network, assigning proper admin permissions, installing firewall client and such), I tried logging on the user to configure everything... Only to get a one-minute long "Preparing Desktop..." and then getting the following message: "Your User Profile Was Not Loaded Correctly!" (This was in Vista, the error message is similar in XP and 2000)

After a few minutes of googling the problem I was no closer to a solution to my problem. All the results in the search were about deleting local profiles and registry keys related to the user profile... Which were of no help to me because the local profile never had the chance to even be created.

I finally identified that the issue wasn't on the computer at all when I tried to logon to her profile from another PC and had the same issue! So I started looking elsewhere... On the domain controller. Turns out that there was nonsensical data in the (believe it or not) "Profile path:" box in the Profile tab of the user's properties... And her home folder was misspelled. Honestly, I don't have any clue how that happened or how she was able to access her home folder's files in the first place. But now that this is fixed, everything is fine!

So I pass on this knowledge to the reader. If you ever get a "Your User Profile Was Not Loaded Correctly!" message, if the local profile isn't the issue, take a quick glance at your user's profile settings!

Cheers!
:Lucas

The back-forward step

2008-06-30T01:47:00.003-04:00

So you've been watching the automotive market and have heard about the acclaimed new type of cars: The Hybrid. It's trumpeted as being a huge step forward, a great money saver, an appeal to your "I want to save earth in a way that won't cost me nothing" side.

Little do most people know, Hybrids are not a step forward in terms of technology - arguably, they are actually a step back as far as Electrics are concerned. Electric vehicles have been around just as long as the gas ones, and they have evolved through time albeit at a slower pace.

But even before we heard about Hybrids, we knew that fully electric vehicles were possible. GM/Saturn created their EV1 model following a new law in California that forced manufacturers to build a certain percentage of alternative fuel vehicles, but after 3 year rent contracts they were promptly taken back from the owners and destroyed - you see, the law had been reverted during that 3 year period.

I won't go into conspiracy theories that are self-evident, but my point is that Electrics can be as powerful and fun to drive as gas-powered cars - minus the pollution, noise and trips to the gas station. Some companies understood this and have created high quality vehicle lines such as the Tesla Roadster and the Fisker Karma, of which we hope the technological improvements will trickle down to the middle-class vehicles.

So with all this, what is preventing people from switching over completely to Electrics? There is of course a certain amount of disinformation caused as much by ignorance than propaganda by petrol lobbyists. They say that electric vehicles are "not as stable", "cost too much" and will leave you "stuck on the side of the road with a dead battery, looking for a power outlet".

It is true that battery vehicles are currently not as convenient as the gas cars in some respects. But let's take as an example a home-made solution. One very interesting young man in Montreal has decided to start his own company, purchasing 2004 Mazda3 cars with high mileage on the engine, and converting them to fully electric cars. Voitures Electriques du Quebec (the newly founded company) does not use high-end lithium batteries, experimental engines or expensive materials - everything he installs in the car is simple, and effective.

At an approximate retail of $25,000 the car is not so expensive in comparison to a gas car, and the savings it will bring quickly offset the costs. The car can easily hold its end cruising down the highway (120kph according to his website, however the owner admits speeds of up to 140kph on highways), and with a 100 kilometers autonomy, it's quite enough for 95% of the population.

Yes, it takes 12 hours to charge, but the simple act of going home and plugging in a car is not so foreign to drivers, at least not here in the cold canadian winters. It's a simple matter of extending the reflex to the summer days. And how much does it cost? About $1.50 to fully charge the batteries.

Quickly, that's about equivalent to purchasing 1L of gas (evidently this is fluctuating), so you can roughly estimate that you will spend about 20% of your current gas budget on this car - and this calculation is based on the most economical cars out there like the Smart and Prius. If you compare to the all-american-favorite the Hummer, you're actually talking 5% of your gas budget for the same mileage! This is excluding car insurance savings (no gas tank = safer = cheaper) as well as maintenance (no oil changes on an electric) and repairs.

Needless to say I am very interested in getting one of those babies for myself (the converted Mazda3, not the hummer!) and it will be my next car purchase. While I am preparing the budget for it, I will be watching VEQ grow and will be watching for results after a winter of use on the car.

What it feels like to realize you live in a Godless World.

2007-10-01T22:29:00.000-04:00

I had never really realized, until just a month ago, that I was an atheist. I had heard the term before, and I knew what it meant, but I never really stopped to ask myself if I really believed in God or not - which I guess is probably I sign that I didn't in the first place. I thought about my "religion" a lot in the past few years, trying to figure out where I fit. Mostly if someone asked me what religion I was, I would answer "technically Christian, but I have my own view of the universe", which meant that my philosophy was my own, or what I had gathered and thought was the most valid.

But to be honest, I very regularly challenge my own views, and I recently had the chance to do so with a book. My girlfriend is an atheist herself, and I had not even really taken attention to this fact until she purchased a book online, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. This book was, without going as far as saying a revelation, at least an eye opener. What did Richard Dawkins do? In his book, the only thing that really caught my attention was the fact that, on the contrary of what we are lead to believe, there is such a thing as saying "I renounce my religion" or "I change my religion". Richard Dawkins told me it was OK to become an atheist, and I heard him.

But since I'm now a self-avowed atheist, I have to face a fact that probably is the show-stopper for most people who would like to renounce on their own religion, whatever it may be: How can I continue living if there is no God, no heaven, where I know that when I die I just cease to exist and I do not continue my existence in any way, shape or form, where there is seemingly no point to my insignificant life?

First, I considered that if there is no heaven, there's no hell either. There is no purgatory, eternal damnation, demons, there is no evil forces (or good forces) at work in the world other than what we create for ourselves. There is no God, meaning no one to strike me down with thunder if he doesn't like me, and the only authority that is over me is Laws. The laws of gravity, the laws of nature, and the laws of humans.

I find that oddly, I feel no sense of loss from a lack of God, even if he is supposed to be the most powerful and important being in the universe. I still have my life to look forward to, and on the contrary I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders - I can stop looking for some "greater truth" or the "meaning" of my life as given to me before I was born - I have my own dreams to attain, that's it.

What about morality, what I see as good or bad, does that change? Well my morality didn't come from religion in the first place, it came from my family, my friends, my experiences in life, my knowledge and interpretation of laws, and a lot from common sense. "Don't do unto others what you would not have done unto yourself" (or however it's said in the bible) didn't have to be said by Jesus to be truth and morality - it's just logical.

And if my morality had come from my religion and from the bible... well just read The God Delusion and you'll see what that really means. In terms of morality, the bible is just about the worst place you can look, it's values of 2000 years old do not fit in today's world. In this blog, which I created specifically as a discussion place about what it means to be an atheist, what that implies, and the journey through life as an atheist, I will post things that I read about religion and just how impossibly useless it is, by giving examples of bible quotes, journal and web articles, videos and such.

I have created a new blog to talk about this, as well as potentially other subjects of interest, called The Atheist's Blog. Of course I am not "the" atheist, just one of many...

Uncensored Review of Lunar: Dragon Song

2006-10-19T23:45:00.000-04:00

I will not be mincing words or hiding my frustration. I'll admit this review is purely a bashing of the game, that I am biased in my opinion, whatever makes you happy. But hey, this is my blog and I can do whatever I want with it. Including vent my frustrations about a crappy game.

So I waltzed in my local EB Games looking for a bargain, and I though I found one. Lunar: Dragon Song, a game translated and distributed by Ubisoft, for a meagre $15 (used with box, manuals, the works). If I could turn back time, I'd have kept my cash and bought a ticket to see a drunken homeless sleep - it would probably have been more entertaining.

Now comes the bashing. Lunar DS (notice the initials - L.A.M.E.) is a piece of shit game that has to be the worse RPG ever created. It's about as fun to play as eating a llama's vomit, and probably looks even worse (no offence intended to all llama's out there). Within the first 15 minutes of playing, I was already starting to bitch at the game and thinking I had just wasted time and money I could have spent reading a book.

There are a number of things to bitch about this game, including but not limited to:

Gameplay:

Running (or dashing as the call it) drains your fucking HP. What kind of a fucking idiot thought with his half-assed logic that running hurts anyone? What did he think, "oh, we'll make the characters asthmatic, but they're actually couriers! How funny" ? WTF!
You cannot gain Items and Experience at the same time. Yes, you've heard me right. When running around (ouch, my feet hurt!) in monster area, you can select between "Combat Mode" where monsters give you items and reappear infinitely, or "Virtue Mode" where you are kind of sacrificing the monsters you fight to the Goddess Althena. The monsters do not reappear, and you obtain "Althena Conduct" points. So you're never actually gaining experience - you're just sacrificing living things (birds and bees and blobs and the likes) to your goddess so she makes you stronger.
Besides that, items you get from monsters are totally useless - you're actually getting whiskers, feathers, tails, clay, rusty kettles (WTF?), etc. Ok, I'll admit that gaining money (Silver in this game, they just didn't want to do like everyone and call it gold) from monsters directly is kind of idiotic - but having to fight for hours to get enough crappy items to sell (less than 10 silvers per items at first) and buy heavily overpriced items and equipment is even more stupid - especially considering the fact that getting money from monsters has come to be expected from RPG games.
And as I just said, items are fucking expensive. For example, a basic armour in the second city is around 2400 silvers, which is way over any sort of budget from a beginner. Considering you get your ass kicked in battles, it's an understatement to say the game is unbalanced.
Speaking of battles, I could probably go on for hours about how fucking stupid the battle system is. Not only can you not gain items and XP at the same time, the manual states: "Note that you cannot select the monster to attack. Whatever monster is most appropriate will be attacked automatically". Who's the idiot that thought of this, so I can bash his head in with a clue-by-four? "Most appropriate"??? You mean the fact that I'm getting bashed on by monsters that do 15 dmg per hit and my character decides that he's going to attack the fly beside it that only does 1 dmg per hit is somehow logical behaviour? That any sort of battle strategy is missing from this game is supposed to be ok? Oh of course you can select which of your allies to heal with magic or on whom you're using an item... But you can't say which enemy to attack. Bravo, captain idiot!
You'll have plenty of time to constantly repeat to yourself how idiotic it is to have no control over the fighting, because the largest percentage of battles are done by selecting Auto Fight and holding the right shoulder button - which speeds up the battle by 3X. That is one of the only smart features of this game, and that's saying a lot.
Status effects are extremely idiotic. For example, being "poisoned" means that your HP will drain whenever you attack and enemy... But wait, if it was only that, it would be normal, logical, and predictable - nooooo. Some asshole decided that a) poison also drains MP, removing your ability to heal and cure yourself when you don't have any items left. b) poison does not affect you when outside of battle, so walking around doesn't draining HP or MP - that is unless you're dashing (ouch, a dust particle hit my hand!). c) poison (and possibly other status) is not cured when using an Althena Statue to heal yourself. So you need to use the statue, cure the poison, and then use the statue again. Thanks for wasting my time.
Every single use of the DS's capabilities by this game is token and can be done without. The mic is used only for running away from battles by blowing on it like an idiot. The dual-screen in battle doesn't show much except enemies in the air, which could have been on the lower screen. Outside of battle, it just displays your hp and mp, which is pretty useless - oh wait, I forgot you loose HP while running (ouch, a fly just hit my ear!), so maybe that's a good thing. The touch-screen gives you access to the menus which can all be brought up by pressing the appropriate button on the DS. You can also walk around using the arrows on the touch screen, instead of using the much more efficient D-pad. The wireless multiplayer game consists of scratching cards and hoping you can find a pair that's stronger than your opponent's.
From all that is said so far, one thing can be deduced: there is no balance in this game. To further this, the secondary "support" character, Lucia, cannot kill a single fucking monster in one shot until she is at least level 11 or 12, and even then it's by luck. She has a limited amount of MP and her spells take huge amounts of it - for example, having 46 MP when a "heal one" spell costs 10, and "heal all" costs 40 seriously sucks. And then you get poisoned, and by the end of the excruciatingly long battle, you're out of MP completely and can't heal yourself. Fucking shit.

Story:

After 4 hours of gameplay, I still haven't been told that I was expected to either save the world, save a damsel in distress, that a legend had to be fulfilled and it could only be me. That's a first in any RPG I've even played. Get with it, goddamnit!
The dialogues are boring and bland, and from what I've heard in reviews, this is Ubisoft's fault - they just botched the job, didn't create any new puns or witty comments that were lost in translation, and even made a bunch of typos that plague the game as well as the manual.
There are "side-missions" to do, given by the local Gad's Express. But they are based on obtaining an item (either a package, or sundries left by monsters) and delivering them to another city. But the higher paying ones will require dozens of a few types of items (some I haven't even seen yet, and that was a job from the first city) and it costs money to drop a job if you realize it's too hard. Making money from these jobs will require you to spend hours running around (ouch, my spleen!) like a headless turkey.

Graphics:

I'll concede that the character design in itself is nice. Within dialogues in the city, the faces of main characters as well as city dwellers are nicely rendered - or rather, they are nicely drawn, scanned and coloured. The cities are also cute, very old-school and rpg-like. Here ends the positive side of things.
Since the menus can be accessed by touch-screen, some idiot thought that everyone that would play this game is retarded, so they had to make every "hotspot" on the screen veeery obvious. So, they made icons that grow and shrink to a rhythm - but they didn't notice that the algorithm they're using sucks ass, and it looks as ugly as a baboon's shithole. So half of what you see on the screen makes you want to puke.
Those city dwellers you see in the game all look the same, since they took half a dozen artwork, changed the colour of the clothe and hair, and called that variety.

Sound:

Ok so the sound isn't actually bad, the sound effects are good, the music is entertaining - it's old-school, so the fact that it's not using the whole power of the DS is acceptable, in my opinion. You have a "sound test" option in the menu from the start so you can listen to the music and sound effect loops all you want. Pretty sweet.
They didn't try putting voices, which is thankful because they probably would have sucked like everything else.

Miscellaneous crap:

Out of 3 people I know that bought the game, none have played more than an hour of the game. They all, without exception, got pissed at it and stopped playing.
The game was repeatedly nominated as "worst game of" something (year, all time, etc) by magazines and websites all over the place. User ratings range from an atrocious 2.1 (which is still generous) to an idiotic 9.1 on gamespot, and that stupid asshole just sais "Hey, just forget about what everyone sais, buy the game anyway!". You know, like he was bought off body and soul by the makes or the game. Get a life, idiot.
Remember, this is bargain bin $15 (Canadian!).
If you're a Lunar series fan - run away as fast as you can. You will hate this game with a passion. The more you're a Lunar fanboy, the more you'll want to travel to Japan just to assassinate the idiots who made this game.
If you really want to waste your money, go buy a Sega Genesis and get Rolo to the rescue.

Well now. I guess I feel better. Now, to send an email to the makers of the game.....

Open or Closed... The Great Divide

2006-06-14T11:24:00.000-04:00

So I picked up a copy of Wired Magazine today, because after work I needed to go to the doctor's and with 2 hours to kill, no books left to read and the library closed, I needed something to keep me entertained.

As I'm reading this mag, not realizing that I'm wasting my time (my doctor appointment is in two weeks, someone got the date wrong), I start reading on websites that are taking advantage of the internet to "crowdsource", a fancy term to say that companies now prefer to pay any average Joe to do the job of a professionnal for a lot less. A stock photo for $1 instead of $150? $10,000 for the solution to a problem that a corporation's R&D department has been strugling to find for months? That's tommorow's news.

There's all sorts of collaborative services on the Internet now, and more are popping up every day. It leads me to think about the everlasting battle between the "open-source" phylosophy and the "closed" one. Take the battle between Internet Explorer and Firefox (see my previous post for an example), where a free software is becoming more secure, fast and user-friendly than something developed by a team of so-called experts cloistered in their little programming bubble at Microsoft.

Personnally, I think that this battle will at one point be a major determinant in humanity's battle for survival, and how the future generations will live and do business. An exageration, you think? Listen to the idea and make your own opinion.

The Open market thrives on user input and collaboration, and mostly everything in this world is free - operating systems, software, even bandwith is now being exchanged and shared by everyone. Google is - in my humble opinion - a big player in this venture, by creating and distributing software as free as it gets (a little advertisement here and there, if any, and Voilà! Free software for the masses). Of course, one cannot mention free and open without thinking of Linux, GNU, sourceforge, and other such major players of the game.

The Closed market on the other hand will push for innovation through internal research, secretive R&D, industrial espionnage and sabotage, etc. The Closed market wants everything to be protected, secured, encrypted... And most important of all, lucrative. Money is the main operative, the ultimate goal, the hand that moves all.

The battle itself in relation to the future is this. On one hand, I see a future where the Closed market reigns, inflation continues, and running software on a budget will become harder every day. With companies like Microsoft creating online licensing, software that runs from the web and payed monthly instead of being purchased, it will eventually become impossible to, say, download Office and run it without paying the ridiculous amount of money MS actually wants you to throw at them. I myself admittingly never payed Microsoft a single penny, and I refuse to pay $300 for Windows, $200 for Office (or whatever the charge for that bloated piece of crap), when there are free solutions available to anyone. When your Operating System becomes costlier than your computer, you've got a problem.

On the other hand, Open systems are cheap, fast, update almost daily, and are almost impervious to hacking and security holes. Again, see my previous post about IE vs. FFox. In the future, if Open takes the larger part of the market, we might start seeing the cost of life actually *drop*, to eventually become null. How? If the model works on the Internet, what's to stop people from applying it to real life? People coming together as a community to build houses on a budget, a return to historical methods of trading goods instead of money, all that might one day become reality again.

That dream is depicted somewhat in worlds like Star Trek, where your valor is based on merit and acheivements, not on money. Ok, so today's weaknesses are also present, such as corruption (without money, that's a weird concept though) and power-hungry megalomaniacs, but at least everyone on the planet gets to live pretty much how they want and do what they love.

I may be seeing too much into this, but maybe in my lifetime we will see the balance tip on the better side of this balance, this world would become a better place. And if someone doesn't actually *need* to work to survive, than maybe - just maybe - humanity could concentrate on the betterment of itself, rather than surviving their own meager individual lives.

And now on a personal note, I need some sleep. I haven't posted in the last month because I've been busy working. I got hired for the night shift at a Second Cup (for your information, the one on the corner of Milton and DuParc, in Montreal), and I'm gradually becoming the favorite employee there. I've realized that Tech Support might not be my true calling, when I see just how satisfying it is to get a smile and a thanks, not because I spent 30 minutes guiding an old hag through double-clicking on an icon on her desktop (for crying out loud lady, it's right fucking there!), but simply because I've just given them their lifeblood: A cup of coffee. As of this moment, I'm never going back to tech support.

Working the nightshift means my social life took a plunge, I'm spending less time with Tiff, but we think it's well worth it because of the higher salary (if I calculate more hours, and the tips), and the possibility to have an amazing reference and possibly a management position before the end of the year - who knows! More on this in my next post.

When will Firefox be the next target?

2006-04-27T09:44:00.000-04:00

So today, Google started advertising Firefox and their toolbar to any US resident using Internet Explorer. This led me to some thinking about why Firefox is currently considered the safest browser and why it's prefered by a lot of sources when recommending browsing software.

People use Ffox for different reasons, for example compatibility, ease of use, tabbed browsing and nowadays for security. Analysts argue that Ffox is less of a target for hackers and virus programmers because it's less popular than Internet Explorer. This is true right now and will probably still be true for another year or so - IE's 60% market share is slowly diminishing, while Ffox's percentage is growing up to 25% and more now - but when the balance tips over in favor of the alternative and it's not the alternative anymore... What browsers will hackers and virus writers target?

True, hackers are mostly biased against Microsoft in general and target their products out of some blind hate targeted at Bill. In my opinion that's justified by the fact that MS is largely basing their "R&D" on copying other existing products, something they've been doing from day 1.

But there's always a part of that dark community that completely disregards the background of the product they target, wishing only their 15 minutes of fame when they discover any random vulerability in a product and creating an exploit out of it. It happens sooner or later with all software even when we least expected - OSX.Leap recently showed that even Mac users are at risk - and so it will happen with Ffox at one point.

And the more it becomes popular, the more it will become a target. The more it's percentage of market rises, the larger the target becomes and the easiest it is to hit.

One can only hope that the open community on which Firefox is built will be enough of a solid foundation to protect it from this dreaded possible future. By having inputs from a larger base of programmers, it's possible that vulnerabilities will be quickly targeted and eliminated before they are exploited by the community. Being protected will then mean being sure you have the latest version of the browser, something the majority of home users need to learn to keep up with.

Update:
I modified my blog's template to include a rather large warning banner on the top of the screen if you're using Internet Explorer, prompting you to download FireFox. You might think this goes against this very post, however I beleive it it best to think positive and think that the community will always be quick enough to protect everyone from massive and dangerous vulnerabilities in FireFox. It's up to you to choose.

Should I jinx it?

2006-04-24T17:43:00.000-04:00

I don't know if I should really be talking about this... You all know that I love Google. It's not only my primary search engine, but also hosts my blog, my email and probably my website in the future. I do 3D with Google, I use the maps for driving directions...

So what's this about then? Well, I saw a post on the Official Google blog about the Page Creator written by the project manager Justin Rosenstein, and I thought that it would be pretty cool just to email the guy with the ideas I had to make Page Creator a bit better. It was basically things that I had thought about for NetBench when it was actually a project I was aiming to do at one point.

The whole thing turned into an email exchange that, if I'm really lucky, will become a huge turning point in my life. How so? Because I might actually get a job at Google. I mean, getting support from someone on the Inside could just be what I need. You can read the email exchange on my blog.

It's just amazing what can happen when you simply step up to comment. I could have not only a job but an opportunity to get behind the walls of the most amazing company in the US, get contacts and make tons of friends. I'm just mostly speechless.

A Monster in Workopolis (in theaters near you)

2006-04-20T18:48:00.000-04:00

So two weeks ago, on Tuesday april 4th, 2006, I lost my job at B2B2C. Why? It took me a few days to come up with a definite answer on that one.

My boss' official reason was that he wasn't satisfied with the fact that I was doing personal work on job time, as well as the fact that I wasn't doing the "side-jobs" that were given to the team. These extras included calling new customers to configure their accounts, and doing followup calls to make sure clients had fixed their problem.

Now, this is true only insofar as it's... well, true. But there's an underlying reason to this, and it wasn't laziness. You see, B2B2C, as with most previous ISP tech support jobs I had, wasn't challenging enough - in truth, it was rather boring in itself. For me, a job or carreer has to be stimulating, challenging, it has to bring me something more than a daily routine of unchanging clients with the same questions.

A small company like B2B2C can't offer what a larger company can. Diversity, and lots of work that I can do so that each day is different. It's not that there's nothing to do, but rather not enough of it to go around for everyone on duty. On days where the most "productive" people were there, mostly everything was done whithin an hour or two. And with everything being the same everyday, I found that everyday I had the feeling that everything was already done, since I had done it the day before, and every other day before them.

I understand that some might find it's just an excuse that I'm building in order to make myself beleive that my job loss is not my own fault but rather of the company that employs me. Beleive me, I'm not deceiving myself. I can see my own errors and deviant ways that lead to the two words that are the bane of every man and woman on this planet: "You're Fired". I intend to find myself a place that will actually give me enough to do every day and with enough diversity for me not to continue in this bad way...

I've received some phone calls, returns from my applications here and there, but have yet to get a solid answer (mostly, I don't get called back). I still hope, and still have a few possibilities floating around. By the way, I also requested employement insurance in the meantime, so I am not in a financial hole when I finally find a job. Most probably I'll get a job before I get my first insurance check, but I'm sure it will still be worth it.

Now, as everything seems to tend towards change these days, me and Tiff have decided that we're going to move in July. We've already got the appartment we're going to move into and the "Bail" is signed, we'll be moving to Brossard, within earshot of my mother-in-law's appartment... No, that's not a bad thing, considering we'll be exchanging food for laundry time (since she has a paying laundromat, and we'll have our own washer/dryer).

The appartment is amazing, it was recently renovated, with the bathroom being redone, as well as the floors everywhere. It's nicely positionned also, around 20 minutes from downtown Montreal at rush hour (with the express busses). Pretty nice considering I have an interview tomorrow for a job that's about 10 minutes from Bonaventure... :)

By the way we need some muscles for our moving, which will probably occur around Juin 20th (we have the appartment starting the 15th, and it gives us time to paint and clean). If you're available, especially with a big truck, that would be really amazing...

Breaking up is hard to do... But not this time

2006-04-07T11:03:00.000-04:00

No no, I didn't break up with Tiffany! That's still going on fine and dandy. In fact, did I mention we're moving on july first? Yeah, I did...

Anyway, the breaking up was between me and my boss at B2B2C. I was, in all honesty, fired from work last tuesday. Now, this might sound like a bad thing, and up to a certain point it was. It means that I still hadn't completely elliminate my bad habit of doing personal work and website developement from work, and that my bosses really didn't appreciate it.

But wait a second here, why did I do all this personal stuff? I thought about this long and hard, and realized that it could be that the work I was doing wasn't stimulating or challenging enough for me. I was trying to compensate for that by giving myself challenges, websites to build, applications to create, all stuff that, while not pleasing my boss, were exciting for me.

So, I set out to think about that, and did, for about half a moment. I then proceeded to start looking for a new job, this time not at ISP's (not that there's many I didn't work for in Montreal), but rather in bigger, and more advanced companies. I had already applied a few times at CGI, got a phone interview and never got any news after that, but on tuesday the first thing I did was apply at a job I saw in the "Hour", which is "Helpdesk Support Technician", at IBM.

Well my name isn't Lachance for nothing, as I got a call back yesterday, and interview on the same day, and on Monday I'll have an answer as to when I'm going to start working there (hey, I'm an optimist!). Obviously, IBM isn't a small unorganized company like B2B2C was. It's a large, exciting opportunity for me to start building a real career and a future. Though I understand I won't be a Lvl2 technician as soon as I set foot in the door, I think I can build my patience to wait for the right moment, look at the openings and apply at the right time.

At a salary of more than 30,000$ a year, I think I can be that patient... Now for the first time in over a year, I can't wait to get to Monday!

Moving this Summer

2006-03-31T16:26:00.000-05:00

Unexpectedly, a few days before the time limit was up for us to renew our rent agreement, me and Tiff decided that after all, we were going to move to a new appartment this summer. The place where I was now was all fine and good for a while, but the multi-ethnic emplacement wasn't the best for us. Not that we're racist or anything, it's just that our sense of smell is getting assaulted by the different foods of the people on our floor. Fish 2 or 3 times a week is just too much for Tiff's nose.

We've decided to go down to the south shore, because it put us closer to our family and our origin, and going to Brossard or St-Hubert will still leave me close enough for high-speed access. We haven't yet four our new address, however we're looking. If anyone knows of a 4½ on the south shore that would cost at most $700 , please give me a ring or email me. Thanks ;)

Oh, and I had a dream last night, and for some weird reason I actually saw this new appartment of ours. If you recognize the following appartment plan, I want you to tell me... now...

How Google is going to screw Microsoft over a hundred times

2006-03-21T15:10:00.000-05:00

Do you remember the time when everyone said Microsoft were copying Apple, their OS and their technologies? How Windows looked so much like MacOS it was a wonder Apple didn't sue them?

A few days ago, I asked myself why Google didn't do something about Microsoft copying their ideas and technologies, too. Then the answer poped up all by itself yesterday: Because Microsoft is going to collapse on itself as soon as a viable alternative that's easy to use for the average bloke gets released as Beta by Google. Google OS Beta? I drop Windows. Google Browser? Forget IE (though firefox is great of course). Google Suite? Nevermind MS Office!

I'm seeing people do the switch already - hotmail users are going for the G, and switching their contacts on GTalk. I plan to stop using Word soon, when Writely goes out of Beta (or has everything I need to work with and as easily useable as Word, which it's not). Every single Google product that comes out that replaces a MS product is *MINE*.

Now, Microsoft is hard at work copying Google. Microsoft Live! is pretty much Google Personnalized Home, Live! Local is Google Maps, and their new Live Mail service looks a lot like they're trying to copy gmail. Their Live Search has a lot to learn about simplicity - it seems MS really likes to bloat everything. Putting a white background doesn't make it more useable, Bill!

In the future, when Google has infiltrated every other area they aren't in right now, including the OS, Office and Browser markets, they probably will be free. So instead of buying Windows Vista, MS Office Vista (or whatever version there is after 2003), and using IE7, just sit tight, relax, install Linux (I recomment Ubuntu), and wait for Google's OS and software to be available.

When 25% of your average user does this, it will cut off an equal amount of Microsoft's profits. When business users do this, Microsoft will fall on it's knees, begging for mercy. When everyone does this, Microsoft will be no more. Google will rule the world, and Google will "Do no evil" by absorbing the most evil companies of them all... They will buy Microsoft. Just you see, it will happen!

Infection Detected: Blog.Worm

2006-03-18T10:03:00.000-05:00

Google and 3D

2006-03-14T15:51:00.000-05:00

Oh... My... God. Let me take a second now to pick up my jaw from the floor... *snaps in place*.

Any new Google aquisition is interesting. When they bought Deja.com they created Google Groups, then they aquired Neotronic and created GMail, and Pyra Labs to get Blogger. Just a few days ago they purchased Writely, which leads me to beleive they'll create an online office suit pretty soon.

But they've gone and done it again this morning, by purchassing a company called @Last Software, creators of SketchUp. And this is not only and interesting software to discover, it's an amazing revelation of ideas that all of a sudden is rushing to me.

SketchUp is a beginner-oriented 3D design program, aimed at Uncle Bob and his cousin, so that anyone in the world can just pick up their mouse and create amazing 3D places. From what I've seen it can be used to do anything ranging to a new staircase to a complete manufacturing building to create anything. Basically, the limit is your imagination.

Now, one detail makes it really interesting. It can export it's 3D stuff in Google Earth format... Think about it for a second... Think again... Read this and think harder.. about what this means...

Got it yet? No? Ok, here's the deal. You download Google Earth, and you check the "3D buildings" options in the map. You see that most of your city has allready been represented, but your house isn't there! You download SketchUp (which is now free since bought by google - hopefuly) and model your house in a few hours, upload it to the Internet on the google earth servers, and everyone sees it!

Now, a model of Earth complete with buildings might not strike you as extremely useful. But when you start thinking that maybe this model could be used in other software (for example, Simulation games)... Imaging MS FlightSim with a completely realistic city to visit. A wargame using true city maps where you can use the interior of buildings as much as the exterior. A map of houses for sales complete with architectural designs of the house...

The possiblities are endless. Just check out how cool the software is by viewing their flash demo of the software. It's just amazing!

Customers Suck Party!

2006-03-14T13:51:00.000-05:00

Last saturday I was at Val's place with a few friends (Val, Akuma, Mitch & Eli) and with Tiff, after a nice plate of Ribs at Bar B Barns (great place, btw). The desert, a nice cake because it was Val's birthday, was eaten around the kitchen table, where conversation took a turn to our worst experiences with customers. Stupid, arrogant, annoying, you know, clients that you would like to stuff a sock in their mouth!

It was like a Customers Suck.com party... Too bad I wasn't able to record them all and post them on the website. I also mentionned a recording of a videotron client's conversation with a tech. I remember hearing about this before working at videotron, and I had the recording already on my computer, but hearing the story was as interesting as the actual recording.

The way things are set up at Videotron, is that when you are on the phone with a client, at any time you can decide to hit the "Emergency" button on the phone, and the rest of the call (or until you press the "Emergency" button again" is recorded. In the past, the server where the mp3s were put was unsecured, so anyone could decide to copy it, send it to themselves at home just to get a good laugh when they wanted.

One tech went a bit too far though. He took the mp3 and started sending it to his friends all over the internet, by email.. The recording soon propagated, and eventually it was traced back to the person that had recorded it, taken it from the server and sent online. That person was sanctionned, and from that day on, a password was put on the server to protect any further outbursts. To say this was a bump in Videotron's image is an understatement, and I was surprised to hear that they tech that did it was actually kept under Videotron's employement, though his identity was kept secret to all.

For the curious ones, here's the recording. It's a fine example of Quebec's wonderful blasphemous talk, very common in rural towns and in frustrated debates between folks here.

I think this recording is becoming pretty rare, possibly because Videotron hunts down it's copies and has them deleted. I'll take my chance though and will help people find it if they google the following terms (as the mp3 was known in the past):

Y flashe ton osti de modem
Y flashe ton crisse de modem
Y flashe ton estie de modem

Until Google CL2 comes out...

2006-03-13T20:41:00.000-05:00

You've seen my previous post about Google Calendar (CL2), and you can't wait to get your own online calendar that just looks cool?

Until Google rolls out their own solution, why don't you hop on down to 30 Boxes and signup for free? It's a very nicely done interface, with comprehensive functions, and a very cool "One Box" that lets you add events using real human language instead of checkmarks and buttons.

30Boxes is the coolest service after anything google (it's a wonder they didn't get bought by them...)

The loss of a series...

2006-03-11T16:33:00.000-05:00

I will be brief for I have little time, Tiff and I are going out for diner tonight.

I have just finished the last episode of the last seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise. Belatedly I'll admit, but since I had been out of the Cable loop for a while the best I could do is to make with what I had right now.

The series satisified me I'll admit, but only a few minutes after ending it I find myself longing for more, cursing at UPN for cancelling a show that was so amazingly enjoyable to so many people. Like thousands of others, I put my hope in the hands of someone so that they one day start production of something new, something greater than all of them.

I implore you all, don't let Star Trek die down!

Google Drive, Google Music, Google Browser... It's all in the works.

2006-03-07T15:16:00.000-05:00

It's all been said and done in other blogs, but for my own readers I'll compress these bits and pieces of information together.

GDrive: Some rumors from Google seem to be set up to be just that: informations is leaked on purpose for people to speculate. This seems to be the case here, as last week's Google Analyst Day yielded a powerpoint presentation that was later removed, but not before being seen by just enough people that it's content was relatively widely known. The powerpoint mentions something about GDrive as being "Infinite storage, where we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)." This seems extremely interesting considering there is already evidence pointing towards gdrive.com belonging to google. I can't wait to see this coming!

Google Music / Google Tunes: Following up on an article by forbes, Garett Rogers does some research on the subject, and discovers that a google music player might be available for download soon. Considering the Google Video Player download link from which the information was deduced, in all probability Google Music will soon be available (though the rumor of their buying napster was denied by google...). I can easily imagine free songs from artists on the rise, and a small fee for commercially available songs (or does Google make enough money from ads already? :P)

Google Calendar: By sorting through source code, some curious bloggers have been able to explore pages that were not meant for publication but were available through tweaks of URLs and such. Note that those methods are no longer available, so other than conjectures and the fact that calendar.google.com redirects to google instead of giving an error, there's not much to go about for now.

GMail enhancements: The first of possible enhancements is a Voicemail features, which is given away by the fact that the name "Voicemail" is now forbidden of use as a label on gmail. I noticed about a week ago that my voicemail filter on gmail was not working, and when I tried to recreated it it gave me an error message saying the name could no longer be used... I should have taken more attention to detail, I didn't realize at the time what this meant.

The previousely mentionned Google Calendar could also be integrated into GMail by default, and as you can see from the links, a Google Links service seems to be upcoming.

Google OS: It's logical to think that Google will come up with a centralized solution for all their software and services in the future. Some think it will be a browser, others think it will simply be a software interface. Whatever it is, it's probably going to be dubbed the Google OS by most people. It would provide access to your GDrive, GMail, Bookmarks (cached versions for speed?), your favorite news with the rss reader, and all that crazy useful stuff. Google already registered gbrowser.com, but I wonder if they know that googleos.com is already registered to someone else...

Seriousely, I just can't wait for all of these things to come alive!

Best Blonde Joke ever...

2006-03-07T11:45:00.000-05:00

Ok so you've all heard blonde jokes, and you all laught at them.

Well, laugh at this one all you want.

I'm coining the phrase "Pulling a singing Frog"

2006-02-28T15:16:00.000-05:00

I'm officially declaring that I am the one who coined the phrase "pulling a singing Frog".

Definition: to be said of a phenomenon that occurs only when a very limited number of people (normally only one) are watching, that stops or does not occur when that limited number tries to show the phenomenon to others.

Examples: my heart beats erratically when I am alone or with my girlfriend but behaves perfectly when plugged into an ECG, or in presence of any health professional ; a computer problem that happens all the time, except when you want to show it to a technician ; a faucet that leaks up until 5 minutes before a plumber arrives to fix it, and starts leaking again upon frustrated departure of said plumber.

Origin: the singing frog, as you might be aware, does originate from the 1955 Looney Tunes episode, One Froggy Evening. The Michigan J. Frog would sing ragtime tunes to the man who found him, but would would croak merrily when the poor guy would attempt to show his talents to anyone else.

First time used (by me): Approximately 2 or 3 months ago, when refering to my heart problem and the way it behaved with doctors (see first example).

Google's new beta: Google Page Creator

2006-02-24T15:54:00.000-05:00

It was only a matter of time for Google to offer a new beta service, and here it is: Google Page Creator. This is something I had already hoped google would come up with, and my wish has been answered with this new service.

Offering 100 megs of space and an easy WYSIWYG in a very easy administration, Pages is designed for the newbie in mind, those who have no knowledge of the web at all but still want a website for themselves. From information about your family to tips you learned to take care of your cats and dogs, pictures of your latest vacation or squarely a site about yourself, you'll be able to put anything you want on this service (as long as it doesn't go against Google's policy, like hacking, cracking, warez and pornography for example).

You'll need IE6 or Firefox 1.0 to use this service, and of course a google account (see my previous posts on how to get one). Pages you create will be spidered by Google Search within hours of publication, which is cool all by itself.

I, for one, will be watching my inbox like a hawk for the invitation email, and so should you! Head to Google Page Creator to signup!

UPDATE: I now have my own Google Page Creator account, and you can visit the website at http://eslachance.googlepages.com/ . Signups for everyone should now be enabled, too.

My body really doesn't like me...

2006-02-21T18:18:00.000-05:00

Some of you might already be aware of my heart problems. For over a year now I've had periods where my heart beats irregularly, skips beats, does large powerful pulsions inbetween pulses, etc.

I've been seeing a cardiologist, but for more than one reasons, he was unable as of yet to determine what's wrong with me. One reason for this is that my heart pulls a singing frog everytime I get plugged into an ECG or listened by a doctor, so they can never hear what happens when I'm at home.

Last summer I had a holter test (a 24 hour ECG), but unfortunately during that period I didn't experience any symptoms. I was unable to get results anyway, because when I saw my cardiologist again, there was a power failure at the clinic and they weren't able to access my file (since their filing system is computerized). However, twice now I ended up at the Emergency room at Sacré-Cœur getting listened to by a doctor and once being under observation for the night... Every time this damn heart working like a charm in the presence of our wonderful health system's representatives (and no that's not irony, I sincerely admire them for their work).

I decided to take a step further by myself, that is I recorded my heart using my home sound system, edited out the background noise and boosting the Bass in the recording... I then burned the whole thing on a CD, which my cardiologist will be requested to listen to next time I see him (probably next week sometime). I'll compress and attach the files soon. In the meantime I continue to experience trouble with my heart, but I have to tolerate it for now for lack of it acting up when it needs to.

Another problem I've been having is with my mouth. You may or may not have thought at one point when being close to me that I sometimes have bad breath, and I would lie if I said it wasn't a problem I would love to fix. My teeth however are beyond easy fixing, with two of them chipped at least a quarter off, the other almost gone, all three of them blackened. Yes, it's disgusting to hear, even more to see. I haven't been able to have them removed as of yet due to financial constraints, since my job does not have a dental plan.

It became clear that I need to have something done quickly last week, when one of the chipped tooth started hurting like hell. I already had a dentist appointment a week later so I tried tolerating it (using Oragel, Advils and cold water), but on tuesday night it became unbearable, my gum swelling and the pain overcoming what little ibuprofen I was able to injest without doing an overdose. For a whole night I was unable to sleep at all, cringing with pain that just wouldn't go away.

First thing in the morning I was at the General Hospital of montreal in the emergency dental clinic, getting that tooth extracted once and for all. A week later the swelling hadn't completely gone away, and as luck would have it on tuesday night the pain came back. The new 600mg ibuprofen pills I had took did nothing to help, and I decided that I would go back to the hospital to get something - to my hospital this time, Sacre-Coeur. Since I knew there was no tooth to remove I didn't need a dentist at that time.

Too bad for me I ended up in a waiting room for the whole damn night, since there was only one doctor for about 60 patients. I was lucky enough that the pain subsided slightly (maybe the ibuprofen finally kicking in), but I didn't get much sleep, and was in bad shape when I finally saw the doctor (at 8am, when they all got in I guess). He immediately said he would give me an antibiotic injection, but when after 3 tries they were not able to give me an IV (my veins were too small because of the cold in the waiting room, and my fatigue), they finally got a microbiologist in place who gave me a prescription for oral antibiotics.

So now, with one tooth less, my heart still beating like an idiot, my swelling subsiding, I can't help thinking that I will really appreciate my vacation this summer, and I sure as hell will want to get all my teeth fixed before the end of the year. As for my heart... Well eventually either they'll find what's wrong with it, or it'll fail completely and they'll have no choice but to keep me in the hospital until they find the problem, eh?

Update: Here's a recording of my abnormal heartbeat for those interested in hearing it: link.

Switching to Google Mode.

2006-02-16T17:42:00.000-05:00

Well since blogger is only in english, might as well use this language. Besides, most people I know understand English, and those who don't aren't regular readers. And this is my blog, so I don't care much for imposing limits to myself with language.

Why the switch to blogger? Well, the main reason is that since Google is going to rule the Internet eventually, I might as well switch to everything related to them at the same time. Google now owns the Internet world with their 2.5 gig Gmail service, lightning-fast and really simple Google Talk , and in the future will come up with about every single application you can think of.

I think of Google as the future, but not one that is dark and scary like one where Microsoft would rule. Google is powerful, but seemingly peaceful and good.. They try their best to provide free services whenever they can, and get their money from targeted ads (which are much more effective than random ads you see elsewhere), so they can continue to provide top of the line services everywhere.

And as for privacy, well... In my opinion, people who are really attached to privacy are those who are either guilty of something (what robber would trust google to store their bank heist plan, huh?) or just overly paranoid. Yes, my search history, chat history and Google Desktop files are on Google's server and can be retrieved by authorities with just a subpoena, but I have nothing to hide so for me, it's no big deal.

I'll do some google-related postings here also, if only to attract more visitors for other stuff :)