I’m exhausted - it’s funny how having a 2 month-old in the house can do that to you. But I’m really happy to have accomplished a few things over the weekend. Last weekend we managed to move two desks and related computer gadgetry into the master bedroom so that the office could officially become Milo’s room. The reshuffle in our bedroom worked out well, but rearranging Milo’s room had to wait until this weekend.

We also rearranged Josh’s room this weekend, making it much more appropriate for a boy of his age. All of the toys that had previously lived in the living room have been relocated to appropriate places in his bedroom, and there is a large open space on his floor for him to play. This morning when he woke up, he ran to the living room, and promptly said, “Mommy, where are the toys?” Before she could respond, he said “Oh, Joshua’s bedroom!” and ran back to his room. I think we’re going to like having our living room back, at least until Milo’s stuff overruns it.

I did my first electrical installation in a long time yesterday - I installed a new (to us) dryer to replace the faltering one we’ve been using for the past 2 years. The old dryer just doesn’t want to tumble, and it’s so old that it’s probably not worth repairing. We acquired a much newer model for free from freecycle.org, so I went about installing it over the weekend. Our breaker panel isn’t labeled, so I had to make an educated guess as to the right one - I got it on the second try. It also turned out that we did not have a 220V socket, but instead a cable coming out of the wall that is wired directly into the dryer.

I had some fun getting the very tightly-fitting ducting apart without damaging it, then unhooking and re-hooking up the very stiff wires in the 220V cable. 20 minutes and a couple nicks and scratches later, it was all hooked up and working properly. I’m such a handyman…

Anyhow, we received an unfriendly notice this morning that we must pay $900 in outstanding taxes today, or risk it going to collections. That’ll put a damper on your week! Oh well, when Revenue Canada calls, it can always be worse, right?

Tomorrow morning my first post at The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog will go live. This is really exciting as it’s my second Weblogs Inc. blog, but even more because I’ll be working on it with Marc Orchant, whom I’ve posted about here numerous times before. Marc is a true professional, and an incredibly bright, witty and wise guy. (I mean that in the nice way!) I’m truly honoured to get this amazing opportunity to work with him.

This story is amazing. Some guy was looking at satellite photography with the amazing Google Earth program. He saw some patterns that he figured must be man-made, and decided to ask some archaeologists about them. It turns out that they are Roman ruins that had not yet been discovered!

Last year was a blast; it was great to be in a room with the same people that influenced me to get into “this blogging thing” in the first place. And it looks like Northern Voice is going to happen again this February! I’ll be there for sure again this year.

I just need to mention here that last night my hockey team won 7-1, and I got 2 goals and an assist! I’ve never gotten more than one goal in a game, so I’m pretty excited about it. Here’s our team’s main statistics page. And this page shows our team’s scoring leaders.

Right now I’m tied for 1st on our team for goals (with one of our best players), and tied for 2nd on the team in points. Yes, this is only because this was our first game of the season. I know it won’t last, but it’s fun for now!

Sometimes I wish I had a slightly more unique name. Not that I have anything against my name, but as it turns out, there is another Jason Clarke online that comes up consistently if you do a Google search for the name (it seems to vary back and forth as to which of us comes up first, although right now its him), who is a staunch supporter of G.W. Bush. It worries me that some people might find him, and believe that I support George Bush. I don’t want to be perceived as being delusional.

I’m sure George Bush is a perfectly nice individual, with all sorts of value to society. He is, however, a shitty president. The article that the other Jason points to written by Ben Stein makes the argument that the hurricane is not Bush’s fault. Well no shit. If it were possible for an individual to cause a hurricane, this world would be in seriously worse shape. This is a typical underhanded political strategy; argue against a position that doesn’t actually exist, from a position of obvious strength. I challenge Ben or Jason to write an article that instead of arguing the hurricane isn’t Bush’s fault, argues that Bush actually reacted adequately to the event. Oh, and provide facts. Even someone that only watches The Daily Show for their news is able to understand that Bush and his cronies did not take this seriously for almost a week, until it became clear that their inaction was having a huge negative impact on the president’s approval rating.

I, for one, agree with Stein that Bush is not a racist. It’s not race that he uses to determine a person’s worth: it’s money. So while I don’t think he’s a racist, he is most definitely prejudiced against poor people. And in New Orleans, it’s basically one and the same. Most of the people there are poor, and most of them are black. Either way, they got screwed by the US government.

Oh, and just to confuse things a bit more, other Jason Clarke, I know you follow the goings on at Weblogs Inc. Given that, why don’t you give Jason Calcanis’ post about leadership a read - he explains how Bush has failed far better than I could.

Darren Barefoot put words to something I’ve been thinking for a long time, and much more eloquently than I could have done. The only good thing about link list posts that I come across in my news reader is that I know I can safely ignore them, and I won’t be missing a thing. As Darren puts it, if you can’t be bothered to write something significant about the link you’re showing me, I can be sure that it’s of no interest to me anyway. So don’t bother.

The funny thing is that from what I understand, these list posts can be very popular, particularly if they are themed in some way. So obviously Darren and I are in the minority on this one. And since there’s no point putting out a plea for everyone to stop creating link lists, I’ll simply state that I’m not reading them. That’s all!

If this isn’t enough to get you excited about NHL hockey in Vancouver this season, nothing will.

Of course, I intend not to attend any games this year, in protest of the stupidity that brought about the worst labour stoppage in pro sports of all time. I’ll still be watching the games on TV though.

And tonight is my hockey team’s first (and probably only) practice of the year - the first time seeing everyone together in anticipation of a new season! Division 14, here we come. I can’t wait!

Scoble, you gotta read this.

When I innocently asked a friend to download a song for me from a music store that happens to use Microsoft’s “Plays for Sure” DRM, I inadvertently caused him hours of anguish, and lost him his library of music he purchased with real money. Needless to say, he’s no fan of Plays For Sure anymore (won’t touch it with a ten foot pole now), and has decided that Apple’s iTunes DRM, while not perfect, is the best available on the market these days. In fact, he’s very seriously considering converting from his Tablet PC to a Mac, very much like what Michael Hyatt recently did.

I’m no Microsoft hater, but you gotta admit there are problems here. Chris is a student, as well as a professional developer and a hardcore geek. When he’s tempted to move to a Mac from his Toshiba m200 Tablet PC (the pinnacle of Microsoft mobile computing), it’s clear that Windows has become boring, and still just causes its users too many problems.

And while Plays For Sure is a nice idea, it sure isn’t a guarantee.

This is something really small, but for me it’s a blemish on an otherwise almost perfect browser (after installing all my extensions). For whatever reason, when I minimize a maximized Firefox window to my taskbar, then later click a link in another application that needs to open a browser window which causes Firefox to restore, it restores to its “windowed” size, rather than restoring to its last state which was maximized. This little quirk just drives me crazy, and I can’t seem to find any reference to it, or any fix for it. At this point, I’m starting to wonder if it’s a behaviour brought on by one of my many extensions, or if it is default Firefox behaviour, as I suspect.

Has anyone run into this? Were you able to fix it?

Man, working for Download Squad has its benefits. I’m currently chatting with some co-bloggers on Download Squad using Google Talk. Google Talk is the instant messenger that Google’s been working on, that uses your Gmail ID. If you’d like to ping me, I’m clarkeja at gmail dot com. Check here for the latest.

[Update] For those that haven’t gone back to the Download Squad article, the Google Talk client is available for download.

Last night I wrote a post for Download Squad about AutoHotkey. I just had to repost it here:

The other night as I was trying to fall asleep, I made a mental note to search for a utility that I would like to have that I figured probably didn’t yet exist, or at least not in a way that would be useful to me. I wanted to be able to remap hotkey assignments in a way that is contextually valid depending on the application I’m in. In other words, I’d like to be able to create consistent hotkeys regardless of the program I’m in, so that pressing a given keystroke always performs a similar action.

In my case, I have been using an email client for awhile (NEOPro) that has some pretty well thought out and easy to use hotkeys, like pressing space marks a message as read, shift-space marks it unread, the backspace key will file the message, etc. I wanted to be able to have the same keystrokes perform the same actions in Outlook.

It turns out that the application I was looking for already exists, and even better, it’s free! And the kicker is that it’s far more powerful than just remapping keys, though it does that job extremely well. It’s called AutoHotkey. Now I must warn you that this is a bit of a geeky tool in that there is no GUI for setting up hotkeys; you have to learn AutoHotkey’s scripting language. Thankfully, it’s quite simple, and doing a few quick searches for example code will almost always help you find what you’re looking for. I have to say, I’m in love with this program.