April 22, 2009
If you like Carcassonne or Settlers of Catan, you can play them online (with people or bots) at games.asobrain.com. To avoid copyright infringement Settlers is called “Xplorers” and Carcassonne is called “Toulouse”. It is free, i frequently find myself playing a quick game over lunch.
Try it out, let me know what you think… and yes the interface could be brought into this century, but i guess you get what you paid for.
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March 31, 2009
the challenge: Here
the theme: The Cola of Choice
the subject: Alyana (aka. Aly, aka Gator)… and cola of course.
the photo: (Click to en-biggen)
Aly takes the Cola Challenge
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January 26, 2009
The challenge has been issued, and I accept.
The photo shoot challenge for January is “The world from above”, and while I may have taken the premise a bit too literally, my plan is to win by being the only entry. 
I am well aware of that these pictures aren’t that very good… even for me, but again, my plan is to win by being the only entry.
With out further ado, here are the pix, click the image to embiggen it.
Up now dad
Kyran also likes the Big kid slide.
looking down on the hotwheels fun
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January 16, 2009
This past Saturday there was a small break in the cold temperatures, frigid winds, and now seemingly constant snow. I wasn’t going pass up the opportunity. So i got the boy dressed in close to a million layers (probably more than was necessary) and headed out of doors. We squeezed around the cars in the garage until the sled could be safely retrieved from its high perch. Then started on our way to the playground and attached toboggan hill.
If I'm not riding in it, I have to be pulling it.
Kyran, wait for dad
In typical Kyran fashion, as soon as he was out of the sled, he had to be pulling it… and not helping pull it, he had to do it all by himself.
Soon we arrived at the toboggan hill, we trudged through the deep snow, i put Ky in the sled and pulled him a little ways up the hill, gave him a little push and I ran beside him down the hill… that is when i learned something… our sled is not so good for unpacked snow. During the decent, snow buried the front of the sled effectively stopping it, well physics dictate that a body in motion tends to stay in motion. The sled had stopped but Kyran was still moving… face first into the snow. So i was bracing my self for crying, whining, possibly screaming as i ran to grab him. As i picked him up he just had a look of “what was that?”; there was no crying or anything as i brushed the snow off his face and hat. So i put him back in the sled and went back up the hill… this time to an area of snow that had been packed down by other adventurous children. I pointed him down the hill, and away he went, I couldn’t tell what his reaction was since i cant run backwards down a hill in front of a speeding sled (let along take a picture of the event), but there was no complaining when i pulled him back up the hill and let him go again. We repeated this a few more times until the lure of the playground got to strong for the little one.
The playground is typical slides, swings, pseudo steering wheels, stairs, ladders, bridges, we tried them all.
Kyran loves the slide
Weeeeeee!
Kyran also likes the Big kid slide.
Yeah! Swings.
Eventually it was time to go home for lunch, so slowly I walked with Ky as he pulled the sled.
Time to go home.
Once you are at home what is there to do but play with Hotwheels
looking down on the hotwheels fun
The Pretzel
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January 14, 2009
I used to use a wordpress theme called DarkPad, i have taken this theme and essentially made the inverse (and called it LightPad) plus some other tweeks.
Tell me what you think… I am always open to suggestions.
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January 12, 2009
Well with the new year changes to this (seemingly static) blog have come. While it may not look like anything has changed, believe me it has.
At the beginning of this month Dreamhost had a promo code for 90% off a two year hosting package, so rather than pay $214US for 2 years, i paid $21.40… that is the kind of deal i can’t pass up, especially since i have been looking for a host for a while but had been to cheap/lazy to do anything about it. As an added bonus, with the DNS tools build in, i no longer need my paid DynDNS account.
So after getting the DNS pointed correctly (who knew if you typed ‘.org’ instead of ‘.com’ it wouldn’t work?) i had the unenviable task of migrating this blog from my home server to Dreamhost. During the migration i upgraded from Wordpress 2.0 to 2.7, i thought there might be some issues since it is a large version jump. All in all it went smoothly, i did the one-click WP install, imported my DB, crossed my fingers, and…. BAM it worked.
I did not migrate Kyran’s blog since neither Jori nor I have the energy to update it regularly… it was a good idea poorly executed. Also lost in the migration is the photo gallery, I used to run Gallery 2 on the home server, it worked well, but again… not overly useful if it isnt used. If you are interested in seeing pics of me and the family, i may post a few here, and we (irregularly) post some up on facebook. (some of my older posts refer to images from the gallery… obviously those images are missing… and i dont care)
The offical link to this blog is: http://matt.b8s.ca
The official domain home page is www.b8s.ca (check it out… it is lame.)
Why did i migrate from a Home Server to a Hosted solution, there were 2 main reasons.
1. MS VirtualPC (yes i know they have VirtualServer) was not as reliable as i hoped, it seems like every time the power went off the virtual machine wouldn’t boot… i believe it corrupted the virtual C drive… thankfully the server components and data were on a different virtual drive.)
2. Security, While i am careful with my firewall settings, i dont have the time needed to keep my XAMPP stack fully up to date, in fact, i dont think i have updated it at all since it went live.
And one last note about dreamHost, so far i have been impressed with the flexability and ease of use, but they have this annoying habit of sending passwords in emails… its 2009 lets find a way to do better.
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November 22, 2008
By now you have probably seen the outdoor christmas lights that are solar powered (offer you a savings on your power bill)
Lets find out how long it takes for the lights to pay for themselves.
I have some 3 year old LED lights that i use for decorating the house.
Using a Kill-a-watt meter the 150 light strand uses 4 watts of power.
This is which is 27milliWatts per light.
A new standard 100 LED light strand is $17 from canadiantire.
A solar powered strand of 50 LED lights is $25 from canadiantire, so 100 lights would cost ($25 * 2)=$50. These solar powered lights will stay on for up to 6 hours per day.
The cost difference is ($50-$17)=$33. So we need to save $33 off our power bill to break even.
Now lets calculate how many hours we need to operate the regular strand to reach the break even point.
I pay $0.07 per kwh from the power company.
27mW * 100 = 2700mW = 0.0027kW = killowatts used per strand.
$33 = ($0.07/kwh)*(0.0027kw * hours)
($33/$0.07kwh) = (0.0027kw * hours)
471kwh = (0.0027kw * hours)
471kwh/0.0027kw = hours
174603h = hours
So to be cost effective we need to use the solar lights for more than 174,603 hours which is 7275 days (or 20 years) of constant use. But lets not forget that the solar powered lights only operate for 6 hours per day.
174603h/6hours per day = 29,100 days at 6 hours per day
29100/365 = 80 years at 6 hours per day, (everyday of the year).
Now if you used your christmas lights for 3 months a year (any more than that is just silly) you get:
80/0.25 = 320 years (at 3 months a year (for 6 hours a day)).
To summarize, you would need to use a strand of lights for 320 christmas seasons for it to become cost effective to buy a solar powered strand of lights.
But wait, there’s more.
A typical LED has a life of 50,000 hours, but by the math above we would require 174,603 hours to reach the break even point. So it is not even remotely likely that the LEDs would last the time required to get to the 320 seasons to break even (… i am not even going to get into the life of the solar panel).
So save your money… dont buy solar powered christmas lights.
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September 30, 2008
Recently I had just sat down for supper when the phone rings, the conversation went like this:
Me: “Hello”
Caller: “Hi, this is Kim calling on behalf of [Member of Parliament Candidate], can we count on your vote in the upcoming election?”
Me: “I haven’t decided yet”
Caller: “OK, bye”… click.
Now is it just me, or would that not have been the perfect opportunity to sway an undecided voter?
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June 12, 2008
It is a sad day in the nation… all Canadians should bow their heads in sorrow as our digital rights are near death.
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January 12, 2008
I have been trying out a program called MovieCollector. It keeps track of all of the movies you own and displays them in a nice format. To add movies, you can enter either the title or the UPC, making it easy to update. You can use it to keep track of the movies you have loaned out to others, but I have yet to use that feature. Additionally, you can export the movie list and details to an html format for what ever you may want to do.
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