Archive for January, 2009

Transit Strike Over?

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

Ottawa’s 52-day-so-far transit strike is apparently over. Both sides have agreed to binding arbitration with no conditions, something they should have done a long time ago. I wrestle with whether I think unions are a good idea in some cases or not. Generally I don’t like them, but I have seen cases where they have […]

Starbucks Barista

Monday, January 19th, 2009

No, not the folks making coffee (or pushing buttons as Chuck would say) at Starbucks, but the espresso machine by that name. The Barista is a fairly simple low end or mid range (depending on your perspective, I guess) espresso machine and mine just stopped pumping. It whirred and vibrated like it normally did, but […]

Digital Copy: A Reasonable Compromise

Sunday, January 18th, 2009

Two comments on the current state of DVD, Blu-Ray, and this transition period. First, during the lengthy transition from DVD to Blu-Ray, stores are stuck having to stock two copies of every movie. This is going to last for years, and was the reason I originally predicted HD-DVD would win, since you can have one […]

Bus Strike Update

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

The 39 day old bus strike in Ottawa is still going strong. The two sides are negotiating now, which is progress, but there are still a couple of key issues that they just can’t find common ground on. A major one is scheduling, and today’s Ottawa Citizen has a pretty good overview of exactly what […]

Retype Your Email Address

Friday, January 16th, 2009

A lot of web forms ask for your email address. And most of these ask you to re-type it, to verify that you typed it in right. Am I the only person that just selects all in the first one, copies, and pastes it into the second one?

WordPress 2.7

Friday, January 16th, 2009

That was painless… I upgraded WordPress to 2.7 and nothing broke.

Battery Problem Resolution

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

I mentioned a couple of days ago my battery problem with my MacBook Pro. The menu bar battery icon, when clicked, said “No batteries available”. This story has a happy ending. I took the machine in to Carbon Computing where it spent 2 nights waiting to be diagnosed. What do computers do when you try […]

Domain Clutter

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

For years I’ve been accumulating domains. It’s just natural when you get an idea for a website or development project to start thinking up domain names. Registering a domain name is the individual developer equivalent of the corporate new project T-shirt design. And for years, I used Yahoo Domains to register domains. Their service was […]

MacBook Pro: No Batteries Available

Friday, January 9th, 2009

I have nothing but trouble with Mac laptop batteries. First there was the original PowerBook with it’s defective battery, replaced by Apple under warranty. Then my wife’s MacBook Pro battery ran out of ability to hold a charge after just 15 months – far below it’s expected life, but of course, out of warranty. And […]

Pages and DoubleClick?

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

I downloaded a trial of iWork ’09 from Apple today to check out some of the new stuff. I run a utility called Little Snitch that tells me when apps I’m running make network connections, so I watched Pages’s interaction with the outside world the first time I ran it. When you enable the free […]