I did quick 2 week visit to Canada.
I spent some time with our son and daughter-in-law, visited many dear friends and places in the city and nature, worked for couple of days in the office and met new colleagues and even met current my boss for the first time in 3D. I must say, he is taller than in Zoom :-D
I also visited our ex-cat with her new human servants and as expected, Lucy duly ignored me. Oh, well - cats.
Many people recently (including myself) had experiences difficulties with Web access on the iPhone. Quite often the following error message pops up:
Usually repeating the web page access helps. Sometimes you have to try third time or wait few minutes.
This has nothing to do with signal strenght - as you can see, there are 4 bars and 3G is on. I saw it happen on Edge as well. Reseting the phone sometimes helps, but it is hard to say whether because of the reset or time delay ..
I have got a letter from Online Rights Canada. I believe that what is about to hapen, may have pretty deep implications down the stream. Minimum thing I can do is try to help spreading the word.
Here is the message:
Dear Online Rights Canada Supporter,
We understand that the government will imminently introduce legislation to amend the Copyright Act - and it intends to push it through quickly. We at Online Rights Canada wanted to let you know what was ahead in the next few weeks, and what you can do to protect Canada from a new DMCA.
I do not blog on political issues, but this one is kind of different.
Couple of weeks ago I received a letter from my ISP provider (Rogers Cable), stating that days of unlimited downloads are over. More or less. Rogers capped the monthly transfer depending on your subscription plan, which in my case means maximum 95 GB / month for sum of upload and download.
They started to monitor the traffic in December and will start charging for the transfer exceeding the cap in June.
Last week I attended one day event organized by Microsoft named Heroes Happens Here. It is series of introduction targeting new products: Windows Server 2008 (not out yet) SQL Server 2008 (not out yet) and Visual Studio 2008 (out and well).
I do not do much Microsoft development these days - my world is currently rather unevenly divided between Java (about 70 %), Web-ish technologies (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, some Ruby) and OS-X (Objective C) which I am trying to squeeze in and get finally started. But Microsoft is such important platform that one must pay attention what is going on.
Guess what are three most useful tools without which no proper Ottawa household can exist ? Snow shovel, snow pusher and car window ice scratcher. If the number was 4, the next would be snowblower. Up to yesterday, our family was in safe position being equipped with several shovels, four or five scratchers and one pusher.
Then disaster stroke: my son broke the pusher while moving away few cube meters of snow we removed from the roof. In case you do not understand - removing snow from roof is another favorite winter leisure time activity in Ottawa: almost everybody is doing it. Not that it would be so much fun, but because of the dreadful consequences - avoid it and you may end up like this guy.
and similar plague (for some reason they were pretty active last few days):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un_PjRXV5l8
I wish I could pull similar stunt - but I am not really a good actor and my accent would make it hard to believe. But it is hilarious anyway (video is a recording of phone call and contains text transcription ...). Enjoy.
Thanks to Peter M. for the link. I would link his blog or home page, if he had one :-).
The wild ride is over and the city gets back to normal. I wish we had won the Cup, but - Ducks were playing pretty good and found what worked on our team. Thanks, Alfie and the Sens - for all the great moments. You were fantastic. There will be another season in few months and another chance to bring the cup home.
On the positive side - it is good to have 2-3 more free evenings a week, now - when there is again nothing on the TV :-). Time to start catching up with neglected podcasts, blogs and feeds.
This week was full with attending the demos and workshops. On Tuesday, I spent half day on the Microsoft Unify Tour 2007. I planned to be there full day but an important business meeting made me change the plan. Fortunately, the sessions should be available recorded on the Web, so I will be able to check them later. The topic was bang-on - considering that we are in final phase of large project, using distributed network of SQL Server 2005 installations with replication and location was same as usual.