Yearly Archives: 2008

Life

House Upgrade 2008 Part IV: a roof over our heads

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The deck construction is almost finished. Almost… a slippery word, that can often mean “never”. Since the last posting on this topic, here is what has been completed:

  • roof framing assembly (structural steel trusses) constructed
  • aluminum framing and acrylite / polycarbonate roofing panels installed
  • electrical roughed in
  • exposed steel clad in cedar
  • deck stairs constructed
  • second “quick connect” natural gas fitting installed

It looks pretty good, actually, and is “done enough” that the things remaining feel rather minor. The roof has turned out really nicely: Solariumsplus did the work, and I’m really pleased with what Pete, Curtis and Randy put together for us. Some pictures…

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Life, Rants

Power outages: Lower mainland BC = third world?

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We just had another power outage exceeding an hour in duration here at our house. That makes about six this year here after perhaps one per year of that duration during the seven previous years. You could argue, I guess, that I live in a suburb, and so perhaps the occasional power outage is to be expected. However, at my workplace in the heart of the corporate district in Burnaby, with BCIT on one side of the road and Telus/IBM/etc on the other, there have been three multi-hour outages this year as well. I know it is an exaggeration bordering on the insensitive, but I’m beginning to feel like BC Hydro has degraded lower mainland British Columbia into a third world power district.

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Geek Miscellany, Rants

Why I haven’t “realized the mobile Internet”- and why I think Rich Miner is on the wrong track

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Mobile phones and “smart” phones have a ton of features: things like taking pictures, browsing the Internet, and playing games. Studies have shown, however, that only somewhere between 10 and 50% of the users of these feature rich devices know how to do more than make phone calls with them. Rich Miner of Google mentioned recently that the reason for this is mainly “bad UIs”. I think, however, that Rich is probably on the wrong track, at least for some users. Maybe even the majority of them.

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Rants

200 pound Actor, Joseph Petcka, claims self defense in killing of 8 pound cat…

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I am continuously amazed by the human capacity for cruelty and stupidity. Here we have a man, a former professional baseball player and sometime-actor by the name of Joseph Petcka, who claims he brutalized and killed his (presumably ex) girlfriend’s cat because “he attacked me”.

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Games, Rants

The failure of the PC Game industry…

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Game developers for the personal computer are becoming scarce. More and more developers are changing their focus to develop console games- games for the XBox 360, PS3, Wii, and so on. Many of the games that make it to the PC are low-quality “ports” of games that were first release months or years earlier on the console.

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Life

Coffee time elbow…

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My elbow, or more accurately the area just on the forearm outward side of the elbow, has been sore lately. If I pick something up it twinges, or if I hold the arm straight and make a fist it hurts.

It has been painful, but not debilitating- like a lot of things that happen with my joints since I turned thirty, I more or less just have been living with it. After some poking around on the internet, I found some references to tennis elbow and concluded that this was the most likely culprit. I decided to give it a couple of weeks and, if treating it like tennis elbow with cold packs and compression improved it, to assume I was on the right track.

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Geek Miscellany

Mythbusters paintball gun Mona Lisa

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Adam and Jamie of Mythbusters fame are cool guys. I enjoy their program and find it oddly educational, in a sort of geeky-destructive way. But I have to admit that the following video of a demonstration they did at an Nvidia graphics card conference really impressed the heck out of me. The first part of the video shows their interpretation of computer graphics using a single CPU, and the second part is their version of a massively parallel GPU rendering.

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Gear

Single cup coffee brewers…

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I like coffee. I’m not a connoisseur: I prefer something like a basic arabica blend- more or less what Tim Hortons or McDonald’s serves. I may not define good coffee as something pooped out of a civet’s butt, but a good cup of coffee (based on my definition of “good”) is a crucial part of every day. I drink perhaps three or four 12+ ounce cups per day in total: more than I should, but less than some.

Irene can’t drink coffee any more, so brewing an entire pot each morning is not efficient. And a regular brewer isn’t very effective at producing a couple of cups- the magic that takes place when the hot water passes through the ground beans loses effectiveness. And instant coffee is barely a substitute: yes, I drink it, and it serves the minimal purpose of something calling itself “coffee” I.E.: jumpstarts my brain, but I can’t really say I enjoy it very much.

As a result of these factors, I’ve been exploring various single cup brewing systems. The “to go cup” brewers you can buy for $15 suffer from more or less the same problem as trying to run two cups through a brewer designed for a pot: the water and the coffee don’t intermingle quite the way they are supposed to. That leaves fancy gizmos like the Tassimo and Keurig single cup brewers.

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