If things go sideways here, it’s because I’m switching this blog’s server. Please be patient, it should all be back to normal within a few hours.

[Update] As it turns out, there was a pretty fundamental part of the site that has been broken for awhile now. (I wondered why I wasn’t getting any comments!) Anyhow, I’ve reverted to a very old theme with some out of date info in it, and some missing functionality. It’s only a temporary situation though.

The only problem with this video is that the hockey player is actually taking an interest in baseball. Otherwise, it’s hysterical:

Thanks to my buddy Brad for the link.

Tags: hockey, goalie, baseball, shortstop, Canadian, comedy, funny

I know, I know… I’m all about the embedded music clips these days. I’ll get over it and start posting more tech-related content again. But for the moment, take a look at (and listen to) this guy, Reggie Watts.

Tags: Reggie Watts, beatbox, beatboxing, vocals, music, looping

You simply haven’t lived until you’ve seen William Shatner’s spoken word “interpretation” of the classic Elton John song Rocketman.

Wow. Just. Wow.

[via WWdN]

Tags: Shatner, William Shatner, Rocketman, Elton John, spoken word, Wil Wheaton

So the last time I restored this site on the new server, everything was working fine except for a specific post, which happened to be the most popular post on this site. Try as I might, I was unable to get the post to work, so I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to the latest version of WordPress and this new swanky theme, and I’m feeling pretty good about it. And (I believe) everything is again working fine.

Sorry if you left any comments here over the last week; unfortunately restoring the backup destroyed them.

Please let me know if you see anything broken on the site. And, welcome - again!

Tags: website, blog, server, WordPress

We returned home from an overnight visit at a family friend’s place for New Years to discover that our furnace was not working. Once I figured out that the pilot light was going strong, and the furnace made a click sound when the thermostat was moved above or below the current temperature, I decided that something must really be wrong and called the company that had serviced our furnace a few months ago.

From my description, they figure it must be a bad gas valve (which is electromagnetically controlled - thus the clicks I heard). The estimate to fix it is $300 - of course that’s without actually looking at it, so we’ll have to see how that goes. Being that it was the first of January yesterday, there would be an additional $100 fee for a call that day. Considering we live near Vancouver, BC, and the climate here is typically mild, we decided to rough it for a night.

Last night was somewhat chilly, but manageable, and the furnace guy will be coming to work on it tonight at 5pm. So we’ll see how that goes.

Tags: furnace, New Years, Vancouver

There’s not much to say here, other than to suggest you watch the embedded video:

Jack Black’s new tongue-in-cheek public service announcement asking users not to be pirates (video embedded below):

Via Jordan

BTW, there are other funny Tenacious D clips available as well.

Tags: Jack Black, piracy, pirates, PSA, public service announcement, Tenacious D

We recently moved, and as always happens when you move, much of our mail has been going to our old address. We picked a stack of it up tonight, and as Francesca was going through it, she pointed out that we had received a notice from the North Delta Health Unit pointing out that chicken pox vaccination time was coming around for our oldest son.

That’s not all that notable, but the fact that at the bottom of the postcard there was a large section that stated “Listen to a podcast with Dr. Monika Naus on Chickenpox at: www.bccdc.org” sure was. As Fran said, it’s not that long ago that they started using email and pointing people to their website. Now they’re using podcasts? Cool!

Tags: podcast, podcasts, health unit, public health, chickenpox, chicken pox, mail

These are so cool - ice trays that make Lego bricks. Obviously they don’t actually work, since the backs of them won’t be properly shaped, but they’re still darn cool!

Tags: Lego, Lego bricks, ice, Lego ice

By far my favourite way to read RSS feeds is using FeedDemon on my laptop. While there tons to love in FeedDemon, there are a few things that I wish were a little different, and rather than submit them to the NewsGator newsgroup where they might get lost under the deluge of feature requests, I thought I’d outline my feedback right here on my blog. NewsGator has shown that they’re on top of what’s being said about their products in the blogosphere!

So here are the things I’ve noticed that I think could use a little work:

Bug: The Unread Folder View sometimes does not show all feeds with unread items in them. I think this happens when FeedDemon updates its feeds; the total unread number for the folder containing the feeds updates, but the feeds that went from no unread items to greater than one unread item don’t automatically show up. Quickly choosing the (all) Folder View then back to the Unread Folder View displays the missing feeds.

Usability issue: Another issue I’ve found is when a feed update occurs while I’m reading a feed in “river of news” mode, (i.e. click on the feed’s title and all unread posts are showing), if new posts show up for the feed I’m viewing, it’s not made immediately clear to me that I’m not seeing everything available for that feed. Obviously clicking the feed title again will show the new stuff that just showed up, but the problem is that if I don’t notice an update has occurred, I will blindly press the hotkey to mark everything in my feed as read, thinking that I’ve actually read everything in the feed when I haven’t. So then I’ve just marked posts as read that I actually haven’t even yet seen. I’m not sure what the solution to this is - I hate dialog boxes, but maybe that’s the way to go - if you happen to be reading a feed in “river of news” mode and that feed is updated, maybe a dialog box needs to notify you that you’re not seeing everything for that feed. Actually, a better alternative might be to ensure that pressing the “mark feed as read” hotkey only marks items read that have actually been displayed on the screen. I’m sure this is the more difficult solution, but it’s definitely the most user-friendly approach.

Feature request: Hotkey support. For better or worse, I’ve come to know and love the hotkeys used by Gmail and (gasp!) Bloglines… and for that matter, Google Reader. It drives me crazy that I need to hold down modifier keys to do almost anything in FeedDemon. I want to be able to move from feed to feed with the “J” and “K” buttons, instead of “Ctrl-Space” or some other multi-key combination. Ideally, the focus would remain on the reading pane even when using the hotkeys, so that for example I could press “J” to move to the next feed, and use the space bar to page down as I read, then hit “J” to move to the next item. (Like how it works in Gmail, etc.)

Feature request: As a future enhancement I’d love it to see Nick take a page out of Bloglines’ book and implement the ability to scroll between posts in the “river of news” view. I prefer reading one document top-to-bottom like this, but it drives me crazy that I can’t easily skip a long article that I’m not interested in - I have to scroll down, down, down. I should be able to jump to the next article with one keystroke. Like “J”! Even better, it would be great if I had the option of marking each post that I put the focus on as read as I arrive at it (or leave it), similar to how the new Google Reader does it.

Nick and the rest of the NewsGator team, please take my feedback as it was intended - I’m hoping to add value to the product and help steer it in a direction that will benefit all users (as well as myself). And for anyone else that has read this far and doesn’t understand how great FeedDemon is, and why you really should pony up and pay for a great news agreggator, take my word for it - FeedDemon is awesome, and combined with NewsGator’s synchronization engine is simply unbeatable. And Nick Bradbury’s blog (he’s the creator of FeedDemon) is my favourite developer-written blog. He writes for the rest of us, while still managing to discuss the challenges he faces as a coder, while striking that hard to find balance between topic-specific posts, and regular life / family stories.

Tags: FeedDemon, Feed Demon, Nick Bradbury, NewsGator, Bloglines, Google Reader, Desktop Aggregator, RSS, RSS Aggregator, News Aggregator, Feeds, Feed, Feed Aggregator

My brother-in-law Scott has started a blog focused on his adventures in the wine industry up in the Okanagan. He’s gone through all of his winemaking courses, and is now a winemaker’s assistant. Right now he’s bottling after pulling some nasty hours during the crush. If you’re at all interested in wine and the art and science of wine making, check out Scott’s blog.

As a side note, I’ve never personally been much of a fan of wine, but Scott’s managed to help me find a few varieties that I quite like. Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc… good stuff. Speaking of Pinot Blanc, we had a bunch of it while setting up Scott’s blog, and let me tell you, working on a Mac (which I never do) and drinking wine does not make me at my most productive. But it sure was fun!

Tags: wine, winemaking, Okanagan, Penticton, winery, wine tasting