Simon Carr’s Homepage @ www.simoncarr.com

My thoughts;
1) Oh god.. don’t step there, no no no no no, ok you made it.
2) repeat thought 1 for 6 minutes.

The 2009 Experiment: Reuserism

I have a New Year’s resolution for 2009; I am going to try to buy as few new physical item during 2009 as possible. If I can pull it off, I will buy nearly nothing that is new.

• I won’t create more physical waste through purchases of goods.
• I’ll save some money.
• I’ll add some additional value to an item that’s already made and is most likely perfectly usable.

Reuserism rather than consumerism. So as an avid Reuser, I will keep the Reuser economy alive and kicking during this carefully crafted “economic downturn”.

[ ... READ ON ... ]

Made my day!

Technorati Tags: c64, classicgaming, commodore

Just in case you need some opinions as to how to vote on the 18th of October, or how NOT to vote, as the case may be…

http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/501215

The death-toll is somewhere around 12 people, with another 7 under review, and the Federal Agriculture Minister, Gerry Ritz is cracking jokes about it. Well, to be fair, he’s apologized now that he’s been outed.

So he’s a Federal Minister, and he’s funning up the passing of 12 of his fellow citizens, under the watch of a department that he is the head of.. hilarious, really.

On one hand we have this sincere statement from Mr. Ritz;

“Let me state on behalf of the government that our thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends of those that are affected [...] And of course, I’d like to reiterate that our highest priority continues to be making sure that Canadian families’ food supply is safe.”

And then to contrast, we have this statement made in a conference call:

“This is like a death by a thousand cuts. Or should I say cold cuts.”

And when told about a new death in Prince Edward Island, Ritz said:

“Please tell me it’s (Liberal MP) Wayne Easter.”

Please, let’s give the funnyman and his comedy crew what they deserve on October the 18th. Remember, that kind of crap starts at the top.

The disdain he shows towards us is not a one-off accident, he just did it in public without thinking anyone would notice.

Edit: It’s seemingly 17(!!) deaths, not 12.

Technorati Tags: canada, elections, listeria, listeriosis, neocons

This… just… this.

Edit: After reading this written by Joss Whedon, I am putting up frickin’ banners all over my site.

Mark your calendars!

ACT ONE (Wheee!) will go up Tuesday July 15th.

ACT TWO (OMG!) will go up Thursday July 17th.

ACT THREE (Denouement!) will go up Saturday July 19th.

Edit2: Did you think I was bluffing? Banners everywhere!!!

I’m under no illusions that spam doesn’t work. I mean if it didn’t work anymore I wouldn’t get upwards of 200 messages a day like this… but, I mean, come on! Look at this crap!

So to get past character recognition, that’s what they’re doing. Spam messages have been barely legible for years now, but this is a wonderful new low.

My real question is this; who sees this and thinks “ooh! Interesting! I better click on this here link to find out more!”

Who is it? Who are you people that eventually buy based on this first offering? Come forward so that I know to avoid you like the plague!!!

I’ve been having what I thought was “trouble” with my GMail account. I have been recieving mail for one GMail account that I didn’t think was mine, and it was being forwarded into my legitimate GMail account. So I posted to a support group asking if there was something going on… As it turns out a typo had unlocked added functionality!

Another user pointed me at this blog posting which offers pointers at some very useful features.

From the posting;

Append a plus (”+”) sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was hikingfan@gmail.com, you could send mail to hikingfan+friends@gmail.com or hikingfan+mailinglists@gmail.com.

Insert one or several dots (”.”) anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn’t recognize periods as characters in addresses — we just ignore them. For example, you could tell people your address was hikingfan@gmail.com, hiking.fan@gmail.com or hi.kin.g.fan@gmail.com. (We understand that there has been some confusion about this in the past, but to settle it once and for all, you can indeed receive mail at all the variations with dots.)

So how does this relate to GTD? What I can do now is funnel to-do items, thoughts, and notes, into my GMail account and automatically have them routed based on the e-mail address itself.

So let’s say I had a shopping item, I’d send an e-mail to myaddress+shopping@gmail.com with the item, and in GMail I would create a filter to route it from the INBOX into one of my Labels. The Label, in this case @shopping, is available via my Blackberry or via my web browser. When I have completed that task, I can “archive” the mail and it disappears into my GMail abyss.

Using this method I can even make notes to myself just by replying to my own e-mail. GMail will sort it as a message “thread”.

This whole set up does take a bit of fiddling, but for me the payoff is ideally having everything covered at all times, without losing any items (at least without losing any important items).

Y HELO THAR!

I am posting this from an Ubuntu Desktop box I duct-taped together a couple of days ago. I am a long time Linux dweeb, but I gave it up as a desktop solution years ago after becoming hooked on Mac OS X.

While I’ve been advocating that everyone I know switch to Mac OS X, I have secretly been courting Ubuntu Desktop 7.10. The verdict so far is good, maybe great… for me. I am loving it. Ubuntu has an amazing level of polish and is over all very usable after you install. The install itself isn’t particulary challenging, which is also good news. Some of the visual FX features are very pretty (and some are cool, but totally dumb).

Adding applications is as easy as clicking on Applications -> Add/Remove… and selecting what you want to install. Most of the officially supported apps (under Ubuntu) will then be added to the Applications menu. There is a bit of a gotcha in that you sometimes need to know what you’re looking for before you install it. Like for example installing a DVD Player is non-trivial in my opinion, because of some of the restrictions on how DVD software works (the encoding and decoding of DVDs).

The traditional method for installing 3rd party software on your PC is that you either pop in a disk that you have, or you download it from the Internet after searching via your web browser. The Add/Remove utility takes care of pretty much that entire process. You have access to, without exaggeration, hundreds of Open Source applications. An additional cool feature is that the apps are rated, so you can avoid the technically dodgy ones.

There have been problems though. I’ve had to wipe out my xorg.conf a couple of times now to get it to re-generate after something munged my settings and left my display totally unusable. To do this I had to log in blind so that the Wireless connection would activate, and ssh in (and luckily I had SSHd running) because my screen isn’t usable from the command line at all. I’ve also found that adding a second monitor is difficult enough for me that I’ve actually backed off and am sticking to just the one. This is a big deal beacuse I’m a dual-monitor junkie.

The above sounds like total gibberish to 99% of the people on this planet, and that’s exactly why I can’t reccomend Ubuntu to my friends and family yet as a replacement for systems like Windows (or a much cheaper alternative to Mac OS X). This would have been a total show stopper for almost everyone I know save for my fellow sysadmins and propeller-heads.

Overall though, if you’re feeling brave, and you want to try something new, Ubuntu 7.10 could win you over. It won’t replace my Powerbook yet, but I’m perfectly happy using it as my Desktop until I can afford that iMac I want (h0h0).

Arr! Dukes Cycle and Suspect Video have both fallen victim to the massive fire that broke out in Toronto’s Queen West district.

I was a huge fan of both Dukes Cycle and Suspect Video and it’s a real shame to see them both go.

With Dukes I had finally found a decent and reputable bike shop to frequent, and it’s where I picked up my BadBoy.

Suspect had an amazing collection of rare and weird vids. Back in my rental days I was a frequent visitor. Some of the stuff in the Suspect library are most likely now lost forever (including tapes me and my Jerk friends added “supplimental material” to.. h0h0).

Torontoist: Massive Fire Guts Queen West Block

Technorati Tags: Toronto