Inner Noise

Container-managed transactions with JBoss/MySQL

2008-12-23T18:00:00.001-04:00

Now that I find myself out of a job, I’ve got lots of time to get caught up on all of the technologies and stuff that I really should know.

I know how to build applications using Java/JavaEE. I know how to develop EJBs (particularly session beans and MDBs). I know how to use JSP and servlets. I know how to use JMS. I know how to use RMI. Most of this stuff is pretty automatic after having worked with these technologies over the past few years. Throw in some helper technologies, such as XDoclet (no more manual updating of deployment descriptors for me, thanks!), and things become even easier. While I can’t rattle off different parts of the J2EE 1.4 specifications, I like to think that I’m competent in my ability to use the technologies.

At least, that’s what I like to tell myself.

I had a bit of a disastrous interview last week. I got asked all kinds of questions about how different parts of J2EE work and, while I was able to come up with good answers for most of it, there were certain questions that I totally botched.

One topic that I really hosed was container-managed transactions (CMT). This is something that I should know something about, but in reality I never actually used them in the applications that were being built at my last job. We pretty much just assigned the “Required” transaction attribute to every EJB method and, as far as I was concerned, everything else just sort of worked. For the CWMP RPC method test system I built, transactions weren’t important at all, so I never really bothered researching about how they worked.

Using that botched interview to try to actually learn something, I set about experimenting with CMT. JBoss is the application server with which I am the most familiar, and MySQL is a free RDBMS that I am also familiar with, so I installed these two products for my testing.

Once everything was set up, I set about creating a simple EJB with a few public methods that my RMI-based test client would call. One method would successfully make changes to the database. A second method would make failed changes to the database. A third method would call the first two methods, allowing me to test multi-level transactions.

Based on what I had read about using transactions (and my own previously limited experience), it should be just a matter of setting up the XDoclet @ejb.transaction attribute on the appropriate methods and the container will take care of the rest.

Here’s an example of my “successful” method:

 /*  
  * @ejb.interface-method  
  * @ejb.transaction  
  *   type="Required"  
  */  
 public boolean updateMovie(MovieDTO movie) {  
   boolean success = false;  
   Connection conn = null;  
   
   try {  
     conn = _ds.getConnection();  
     PreparedStatement stmt =  
       conn.prepareStatement("UPDATE movie SET title = ?, year = ? WHERE id = ?");  
     stmt.setString(1, movie.getTitle());  
     stmt.setInt(2, movie.getYear());  
     stmt.setInt(3, movie.getId());  
     success = stmt.execute();  
   } catch (SQLException e) {  
     e.printStackTrace();  
     throw new EJBException(e.getMessage());  
   } finally {  
     closeConnection(conn);  
   }  
   
   return success;  
 }

It’s a simple method that takes the contents of a DTO and updates the appropriate record in the database. Nothing fancy.

Here’s the code for the method that always fails:

 /*  
  * @ejb.interface-method  
  * @ejb.transaction  
  *   type="Required"  
  */  
 public boolean updateBroken(MovieDTO movie) {  
   boolean success = false;  
   Connection conn = null;  
   
   try {  
     conn = _ds.getConnection();  
     PreparedStatement stmt = conn.prepareStatement("UPDATE movies SET title = ?, year = ? WHERE id = ?");  
     stmt.setString(1, movie.getTitle());  
     stmt.setInt(2, movie.getYear());  
     stmt.setInt(3, movie.getId());  
     success = stmt.execute();  
   } catch (SQLException e) {  
     e.printStackTrace();  
     throw new EJBException(e.getMessage());  
   } finally {  
     closeConnection(conn);  
   }  
   
   return success;  
 }

The difference here is that the query will fail because the “movies” table does not exist (it’s called ‘movie’).

When I installed the app and ran my test client, both methods behaved as they should. When I called the working method, the update occurred. When I called the non-working method, the update did not occur.

Then I added the following method:

 /**  
 * @ejb.interface-method  
 * @ejb.transaction  
 *   type="Required"  
 */  
 public void doStuff() {  
   ArrayList movieList = getMovies();  
   
   for (MovieDTO movie : movieList)  
     System.out.println(movie.getId() + ": " + movie.getTitle() + " (" + movie.getYear() + ")");  
   
   MovieDTO movieChange = movieList.get(0);  
   movieChange.setYear(movieChange.getYear() + 1);  
   updateMovie(movieChange);  
   
   movieList = getMovies();  
   
   for (MovieDTO movie : movieList)  
     System.out.println(movie.getId() + ": " + movie.getTitle() + " (" + movie.getYear() + ")");  
   
   updateBroken(movieChange);  
 }

Again, pretty simple. It does the following:

Get the list of all movies and output them to the console
Change the year for one of the movies and update it via the “successful” method
Get the list of movies again and output them to the console (the idea to show that the update actually occurred)
Try updating the movie record again via the “unsuccessful” method

What should happen here is that the record in question will be updated to reflect the new year value (confirmed by the new fetch and display) and then that update should be completely undone because the second update will fail. That means that if I check the database after running the test method the original year value should be there.

This was not what happened. Every time I ran the doStuff() method, the year value continued to increment, despite the fact that the second update always failed. I was very confused.

And so began my 2 day odyssey to figure out what the heck was wrong.

I asked some former colleagues about our use of transactions with Oracle and MS SQL server. They claimed that everything was working as expected.

I read up on how to specify transactions in the deployment descriptors and verified that XDoclet was doing the right thing.

I started searching the web to see if anyone else was having problems getting transactions to work with MySQL and JBoss. It turned out that lots of people had problems getting them to work, and while people were eventually successful, I couldn’t see what they were doing to get it to work.

At one point, I stumbled across something that talked about needing to use XA drivers in order to get the transactions to work. While this should certainly do the trick, it seems to me that the XA stuff is really meant for establishing transactions across different types of systems (say the EJB container and some remote OSS or billing system). Still, I decided to try using the MySQL XA driver. I tried and tried to get things working properly, but the problem remained. Whenever I ran that test method, the year value was incremented.

At one point I really mucked with the XA driver configuration and things stopped working altogether. At that point, I figured I needed to move into a different direction. This was confirmed when I asked a colleague about XA drivers and he mentioned that the product never used them.

Ok, back to the web and more endless digging.

After a few more hours, I just happened to stumble across this article, which talks about how to get CMT working with Hibernate in a JBoss environment. The key section is “Configuring MySQL”.

I didn’t really pay much attention to the table definitions (which may have actually saved me a lot of time, since I may have come across similar definitions before). Instead, I saw this little gem:

As you can see, we are creating tables of the InnoDB type. That’s important. MySQL’s default type is MyISAM. MyISAM is an improved replacement for ISAM, but it’s a non-transactional storage engine and it follows a different paradigm for data integrity, which MySQL calls “atomicoperations.” Again, it’s non-transactional, meaning that it does not support transactions. Obviously, we need a transactional table type, and in MySQL that means InnoDB.

Well, well, well.

When I created the tables initially, I didn’t specify any sort of engine, thus they defaulted to MyISAM. Since this engine does not support transactions, there was no way for the container to undo the first successful update.

Giddy with excitement, I fired up the excellent MySQL Query Browser tool and modified the table definition for the ‘movie’ table to use the InnoDB engine instead of MyISAM. I then ran my test client against the doStuff() EJB method and…

Success! The console output showed the list of movie data, the data with the updated value, and the failure exception. When I queried the database afterward for the current values, the original values were all still in place. The transaction had been completely rolled back. Hurray!

So that’s it. In order to get container-managed transactions to work with a MySQL database, the tables must be configured to use the InnoDB engine. A full table definition script would look something like this:


CREATE TABLE movie (
    id         int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
    title      varchar(255) default NULL,
    year       int(4) default NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY (id)
) TYPE=InnoDB;

I hope that this information helps someone avoid all of the headaches I experienced in trying to find out what turned out to be a very simple solution.

Uh, what the hell just happened?

2008-12-02T17:20:00.001-04:00

December 1st, 2008. An ordinary day, I suppose. “Official” start to the holiday season, at which time I “allow” Andrea to start playing Christmas music and start my annual argument about when the decorations will be put up, the tree purchased and set up, and so forth. Apart from that, a normal day, with our normal routines.

I checked my Blackberry and noticed a handful of e-mail messages from E-Trade, sent around 12:30am. Each message said that my corporate stock options were scheduled to expire on March 1st, 2009. Given that my first set of options weren’t due to expire until some time in 2013 or 2014, I found that a little odd.

As I rounded up Olivia and wrangled her into the car to head to school, I continued thinking about the e-mail. March 1st was certainly an odd date – doubly odd that all of my option allotments were going to expire at the same time. Must have just been some sort of clerical error.

By the time I got to the office, the significance of March 1st finally dawned on me – it was exactly 3 months from today. At that moment, I recalled something in our employee guide that mentioned that employees had 3 months after the termination of employment to exercise any vested stock options. Uh-oh.

As I made my way to my office, everyone was sort of milling about and gabbing. There was certainly a bit of nervousness in the air.

“Anyone get any e-mail from E-Trade recently?” I inquired.

“No, why.”

“I just got a bunch of messages saying that all of my option grants are about to expire.”

“Dude, shut the hell up. People are nervous enough as it is.”

Allow me to step back into time for a moment. Back in October it was suggested/implied that layoffs might be coming before year-end. Near the end of last week, we got an e-mail mentioning that a senior VP was dropping into the office on Monday (December 1st) and that lunch would be provided.

So I’m sitting at my desk, dig out my laptop and set about getting started for the day. The e-mails continue to worry me, especially since I was the only one to get them. However, I had just received a glowing yearly review and a raise, and I was working on a project a little more closely aligned with head office.

My boss arrived and I went to see him.

“So, is there something that I should know?”

“Uh, no, why?”

“Well, I just got these e-mails from E-Trade about my options expiring on March 1st, which is 3 months from today.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything. I don’t even know why is here. Just continue doing what you’d normally be doing.”

Word finally starts circulating that the VP has arrived, but still no one knows what’s going on. Apparently my boss is in to see him.

Some time later, a colleague pokes his head into my office to tell me that our boss was just let go. Well, I guess we know why the VP was here and my boss had no idea what was going on.

A few minutes later, the e-mail prophecy comes true as I get called in to see the VP. The usual customary “you’ve done great work, bad economy, blah blah blah” stuff. I’m handed a couple of boxes so that I can take stuff of immediate importance, but told that I’ll have to make an appointment to come in and get everything else.

Even though I pretty much figured this was coming, it was still a bit of a surprise. I headed back to my desk, packed up a few essentials, and quietly headed out the door and to home.

And, for the first time in 15 years, I’m unemployed.

During the rest of the morning and afternoon, I was in communication with my now former colleagues, who kept me up to date on the carnage. In total, 6 people were let go.

Happy holidays indeed.

Sightseeing in Stockholm

2008-11-30T17:13:00.000-04:00

This has been in my queue for a couple of months now and I’m just now finally getting around to finishing it up and posting. The article refers to a trip I took to Stockholm for the Broadband Forum during the week of September 8, 2008.
--------------------------------
I was in Stockholm for the week attending a broadband specifications conference. The conference was scheduled to start Monday afternoon and run through until Thursday afternoon. Scandinavia was at the top of my list of places I really wanted to get to, so I was really looking forward to attending.

I scheduled my flights to arrive in Stockholm Sunday afternoon and depart Friday morning. Ideally, I should have scheduled my flights to either arrive the day before or to leave a day later so that I could do some touring, but I sort of dropped the ball on that one. However, with a late afternoon arrival and things not starting until Monday afternoon, there was some opportunity to catch some of the sights. I also knew that I’d at least get to the downtown area and see some nice architecture and experience some fine local cuisine most evenings, so I wasn’t too worried about having so little time.

The flight got into Stockholm pretty much on time, but by the time I got through customs, got my bag, and got to the hotel, it was a little after 7pm and I still hadn’t even checked in yet or figured out what was around. I ran into an acquaintance in the lobby and given the lateness and my level of fatigue, I decided to eat at the hotel and try to make it an early night. No big deal, I still had Monday morning to catch a couple of things.

The alarm went off at a reasonable hour Monday morning and I went about getting ready to head out. I was going to need some cash and a 7-day metro pass, so that was to be the first order of business. I was staying at the Quality Hotel Globen, which is part of the much larger Globen City complex that includes an arena and a shopping mall. The mall was only a couple hundred metres from the hotel, so that was to be my first stop.

The mall was just opening when I arrived. There were lots of people, but it wasn’t particularly busy. I wandered around the mall, looking for a bank machine and having a look at what the stores were offering, especially since I needed to pick up some sort of souvenir for Olivia.

I eventually found a bank machine, but I still needed the metro pass. I got to a set of escalators and headed down, which took me to the bottom floor of the mall. There were only a few stores on this level and so there was not a lot of traffic. I walked a couple dozen metres past another bank machine and stopped to look around for a moment.

To my right was an ICA store (which I believe is a grocery chain). To my left was what appeared to be some sort of lotto booth. I looked at the lotto booth store for a moment, trying to determine if there was some sort of sign that said I could buy a metro pass there.

I heard what sounded like a semi-hollow aluminium can hitting the floor and I turned around to see the can roll past my feet. The can started belching out thick orange smoke.

I was watching the can, wondering why in the world it was there, when a very loud noise started up. It was coming from back where the escalators were, so I spun around to see what was going on. There was a corner wall blocking my view, so I started walking towards the sound. After a few steps, I was able to see past the wall and found the source of the noise.

Two men wearing very fluorescent lime green jackets with blue stripes were standing in front of a door. One was wielding a very large gas-powered circular saw, like you would use for cutting concrete or rebar or some other tough metal, and trying to cut into the door.

“That’s odd,” I thought to myself. “I suppose maybe they’re doing some sort of maintenance work.”

The smoking can re-entered my thoughts and again I wondered about the relevance. It was smoking quite a lot at this point and the lotto booth was completely filled.

I continued looking at the two men. The one not operating the saw was looking around and turned in my direction. That’s when I noticed the reflective ski goggles.

The man made eye contact with me and waved me away. I was about 10 metres away and there were a lot of sparks flying, so I figured he just wanted to make sure I didn’t get too close.

Having had enough of that, I decided it was time to head out. There was a door leading outside a few metres away, so I headed towards it. A man with a panicked look on his face was kicking the smoke can out of lotto store and talking on his cell phone.

It occured to me just then that these guys weren’t trying to cut opening just any door. It was the door to the room containing the bank machine I had just passed.

That’s when it finally all came together.

These guys were robbing the bank machine.

My first thought at this point was, “Well, I really don’t need to be here, so I need an exit RIGHT NOW.” I very quickly walked to the (what appeared to be) automatic door. Nothing happened. I tried pushing the door open. Nothing. I tried pulling the door open. Still nothing.

Ok, great. A couple of guys are robbing a bank and I can’t get out of the mall. “Ok, ok, no problem. They’re busy with the door and probably don’t want things to get any more complicated than they already are,” I told myself. That’s when I had the brilliant idea.

“I know. The escalator is just over there, so I’ll very quickly walk along the wall past the would-be robbers and make my way up the escalator.” I started walking back towards the escalator.

I got around the corner again and stopped to see what the two where up to. One was still busy with the door. The other was nervously glancing around in the area of the escalator, his arm raised up into the air.

That’s when I noticed the gun.

I really don’t know anything about guns, rifles, pistols, and the like. I do know the difference between a revolver and something like a Glock/9mm/etc. This particular gun was black and looked like the latter.

“Oh, this is just fucking great,” I murmured to myself. “I can’t go out the automated doors because they won’t open. I can’t go up the escalator because these guys are armed. The mall is filling up with orange smoke. What the fuck am I supposed to do now?”

I turned back towards the door that I couldn’t open and saw the man still on the phone. This time, however, he was frantically slapping a black pad next to the door. He slapped a couple more times and the door that I couldn’t open finally opened. So it was an automatic door after all. Seeing my opportunity, I ran out.

Once outside, I took a few seconds to catch my breath and figure out what to do next. I turned right and started walking down the sidewalk. All I really knew at that point was that I wanted to be as far from the situation as possible.

I walked a couple hundred metres and came across a set of stairs to the right that went up to the plaza between the hotel and the mall. I had initially climbed a set of stairs right outside of the hotel and walked across the plaza to get to the mall. Wanting to get back to the hotel as soon as I could, I decided to climb up the stairs.

Once I got to the top, I could hear sirens. I figured that it must be the police, so I decided that instead of heading straight to the hotel, I’d hang around the plaza to see how long it took them to arrive and to see what happened once they got there. There was a steady stream of people exiting the mall, that orange smoke trailing behind them. It was really starting to fill up the entire building.

I wanted to see what was going on, but also be out of the way. Off to the left was a park bench. I decided to have a seat there and watch the event unfold.

Not 30 seconds later, a “side” door to the mall opened and two men dressed in fluorescent green jackets stepped out. I glanced at them and then quickly looked down along the plaza. Further away, I saw a few more people dressed in similar jackets. At first I just figured that the coats must be pretty popular. I glanced back to the two men. One of them looked right at me and that’s when I noticed the ski goggles and the big black bags they were carrying.

“Oh my god, you have GOT to be fucking kidding me!” I said aloud (not that they could hear me). “Why can’t I get away from you two?!”

Although it looked like they were looking right at me, they were really quite occupied with what they were doing and paid no attention to me. They very quickly opened a door to a stairwell and disappeared. Over the next few seconds, I could hear some banging, like something large and metallic was being dropped (something like a crowbar). A few seconds after that, two men wearing regular street clothes emerged. They very calmly walked over to their waiting motorcycles (well, one was a motorcycle and the other a scooter), donned their helmets, placed the black bags over the fuel tanks, and drove down along the plaza and out of sight.

A few minutes passed and I was still sitting on the bench in disbelief of everything that just happened. The police finally showed up and I walked over to the wall along the plaza to see what was going on. While I was standing there, someone next to me asked what was going on. I mentioned that a couple of guys were trying to rob a bank machine in the mall and that they came up onto the plaza and drove away on motorcycles.

My initial plan was just watching the police for a few minutes and then walking away, not wanting to get involved at all. However, after talking to the person next to me and watching the police begin interviewing people, I figured that I should probably head down the stairs and mention that I saw the guys originally show up and start cutting into the door and that I saw them leave.

It looked like there were plenty of witnesses, so I doubted that I’d be able to offer something that someone else hadn’t already provided, but I figured I’d wait anyway. As it turns out, it looked like it was a good thing that I told my story. There were plenty of people who witnessed the actions in the mall and lots of people saw a couple of guys riding away on motorcycles, but, as near as I could tell, I was the only person who actually saw both parts. I have no idea if my ability to link the two events together will have any effect on things, but at least I felt like I had contributed in a meaningful way.

After the interview, I headed back to the hotel and tried to clear my head. At this point, the morning was shot and it was time to get ready for the first working group session. So much for getting any sightseeing done.

The police called me about an hour after the initial interview. They wanted me to show them the doors that they had come out of and the stairwell I had mentioned, and where they went on the bikes. After that, I never heard from them again.

I spent a few hours trying to find news articles about the incident on the internet. It was quite a while before I found anything and, of course, just about everything was in Swedish. Interestingly enough, Google Translate doesn’t really do a good job translating Swedish to English. Despite that, I was able to discern some information about the incident. One thing I found particularly interesting was the report that the thieves had escaped in a car. That certainly wasn’t what I saw. I suppose they could have ridden the bikes just a few hundred metres to a car and then driven off. *shrug*

And that was my first full day in Stockholm.

HD Update

2008-11-29T17:11:00.000-04:00

Quite a long time ago I spent some time talking about the not-so-good HD signal provided by Eastlink. Some days were good, some days were bad. Some channels were consistently good, some were consistently bad. I had called into Eastlink to inquire about the signal issues and they had mentioned at that time that my location had known issues, and that they were eventually going to solve the problems. I don’t really watch a lot of TV so, for some reason, I seemed to be ok with that.

Fast forward a whole big pile of time…

It has literally been months since I last had the HD TV on for actual viewing of HD television. If the TV is on at all these days, it’s because I’m playing a video game (I love Rock Band and Olivia loves Mario Kart) or, very rarely, I’m watching a movie.

Olivia fell asleep in our bed tonight (she had a very busy day). I wanted to see a bit of the hockey game, so I figured this was as good a time as any to turn on the big TV. I noticed all kinds of new HD channels. I haven’t really had any time to check them out, but it looks like there may be a couple of cool science/nature channels (Equator, Oasis, etc). I suspect it’s some sort of free-view happening and will be ending shortly.

The other thing I noticed, especially once I flipped over to CBC to watch the game, was that the signal quality was very good. CBC tends to be good, but their hockey broadcasts always seem to suffer from blocking problems on Eastlink. That really was not the case at all tonight. Yes, there was some very minor problems, but, for the most part, the signal quality was bordering on excellent.

I don’t know if I just caught everything on a good night or if Eastlink is finally starting to get its act together, but I look forward to testing out the signal quality again over the next few days, just to see.

Not that I’m likely to actually watch it or anything. Someone remind me why I’m paying for this? :)

iPod Chronicles - Part 8: Nike+ Accelerometer Calibration

2008-04-19T21:40:00.001-03:00

I never bothered calibrating the accelerometer when I first got it. In the manual, it suggested calibrating the unit, but it also said that the default settings were likely fine for most users. I had measured out a variety of distances from my house in half-mile increments, so I figured I'd compare the default calibration with my already known distances and see how they compare. If the accelerometer wasn't too far off, I wouldn't bother.

For the first few weeks, the calibration seemed to mostly match my measurements, with the accelerometer being short about .1 miles after 3-5 miles (ie, I had to run 5.1-5.2 miles in order for the accelerometer to register 5 miles.

In the first week of February, I finally had to get a new pair of shoes - the cushioning in my old shoes was totally shot and my knees were suffering. I bought the same shoes, only in the newer version. Again, I cut a small slit in the underside of the tongue and inserted the transmitter, making sure to place it under where the laces cross, just as I had with my old shoes (I still hadn't figured out the thing was an accelerometer yet).

From the very first run (3 miles, if I remember correctly), the accelerometer seemed a little more off than before. Noticeably. It wasn't until I put in about 7 miles and hit the 7.5 mile mark that I finally decided that I needed to do a calibration.

The calibration process was very simple. A basic calibration can be done with a run or a walk of some distance no less than .25 miles (400 metres). A more accurate calibration is achieved by doing the distance as a walk and as a run. Wanting to be as accurate as possible, I decided to do both.

I measured out .5 miles (I should have done 1 mile, which would likely give a more accurate calibration, but the walk would have taken a while and I was pressed for time) and ran it out. I set it up again and walked the distance back to my original starting point. Good thing I did - it turns out that the calibration was off by about .07 miles PER MILE. That's not a whole lot at a short distance, but when you run 10 miles, it's going to matter.

I've done plenty of runs since the calibration, and the accelerometer seems to pretty much match my measured distances bang on. I read somewhere (website, manual? I forget now) that frequent calibration is encouraged. Now that I see how easy it is for the calibration to be off, I'll likely perform one every month.

iPod Chronicles - Part 7: Nike+ Data and Website

2008-04-18T09:39:00.001-03:00

The Nike+ website itself is nice enough, with an interesting Flash-based interface, but it is a bit limiting. It does a lot of basic stuff, such as graphing each run, keeping track of distances on a per run, week, and month basis, and comparing a particular distance with the best similar distance in the history, but there's a lot more I think I'd like to be able to see.

At a minimum, I'd like to be able to easily see a total history summation, like the iPod interface shows - total miles, total hours, total calories, etc. It would also be nice to be able to select and graph multiple runs at the same time, rather than just one particular run against a "best" run.

I have just recently discovered that people have figured out the API the Flash app uses to access the run data, so I may start to experiment with it in the near future. The data is XML-based, so I could use the API to grab the data, import it into my own database, and then do whatever I want with it. A simple set of web pages that offers a bit more functionality (such as the items listed above) would be interesting to experiment with.

iPod Chronicles - Part 6: Nike+ Running Kit

2008-04-17T12:54:00.001-03:00

As I said before, one of the reasons why I got the Nano was because of the Nike+ running kit. A few friends have the kit and raved about how well it works. I'd always run without music in the past, but the idea of being able to determine my pace, distance, and time without having to figure it all out in my head from the time on a regular watch was appealing. I also liked the idea of having a running history (which I tried to keep via an Excel spreadsheet in the past) and being able to graph my runs.

The kit consists of two pieces - an accelerometer/transmitter, which inserted or otherwise attached to one of the shoes, and a sensor that plugs into the sync port of the Nano itself.

Of course, I don't have a pair of Nike shoes with the pocket under the insole for the transmitter, so I needed to come up with some other way to attach it to my shoe.

When I was first fiddling with the accelerometer, I didn't realize that that's what it was. One side of it squishes in a little bit, so I figured the thing worked on pressure, kind of like a pedometer. I was always a little suspect of that, though, since how would it be able to determine distance? In any case, in order to make sure the thing would work, I thought I had to make sure that the squishy part was in contact with my foot somehow.

The accelerometer is pretty small, but I decided to try sticking it under the laces of my shoe, on top of the tongue. With the laces over top, I figured that that would engage the action. After some initial walking around the house, the sensor picked up the transmitter and every thing seemed to be fine. Time for a test run...

It turns out that simply sticking the transmitter under the laces isn't such a good idea. I didn't even get half a mile into my test run before the thing went flying out of my shoe, tumbling down the street ahead of me. I was going to need to find a better way.

I starting thinking that maybe I needed to sew a little bag or something ot tuck under the laces. I'm pretty certain that that would have worked, but while I was lamenting the issue with some friends, one of them mentioned reading that some people cut a little slit in the tongue and put the transmitter in there. My shoes were nearing their end of life, so I figured I'd give it a try.

I cut a small slit on the underside of the tongue, off to the side, and slid the transmitter in. Again, thinking it worked by pressure, I made sure that the laces were crossing over the top of the transmitter. I walked around for a bit and the thing was still registering, so I went for another test run. Success!

At first, I didn't like running while the music was playing. I have a small (512mb) iRiver MP3 player that I was going to use for running (as well as travel), but I just couldn't deal with the music in the background. Each song had a different tempo, which I subconsciously tried to match, making running difficult. When I started with the iPod, it was just the same as before - the changing tempos kept throwing my running off. I really liked the stats aspect, though, so I kept at it. I figured that if I couldn't deal with the music, I might get away with listening to podcasts.

Music with lyrics really threw me off, but instrumental songs seemed to cause me fewer problems. I started experimenting with different instrumental stuff, eventually settling on Jesse Cook. I ran almost exclusively to Jesse Cook songs for several weeks.

Eventually, I got used to the idea of having music in the background. I've even managed to deal with lyrical songs as well. Sometimes a song will come on and it starts to mess me up if I start to actually listen to it (which happens if it's a song that I think I might be able to easily learn on the guitar). When that happens now, I just skip to the next song. And now the iPod has become a very valuable part of my running program.

iPod Chronicles - Part 5: iPod Docking Station

2008-04-15T13:50:00.001-03:00

I used to have a pretty decent stereo in my living room, but I've had a couple of amp/receivers fail that I haven't replaced. With the completion of the home theatre, all of the working equipment was moved downstairs, leaving a void in the living room. This wasn't such a big deal because we don't really listen to music all that often upstairs. If we really want to listen to something, there's an under-the-counter radio/CD player in the kitchen or we could turn on the TV to one of the digital music channels.

Despite all of that, one of the reasons for getting an iPod was that we could get a speaker docking station and set it up in the living room, giving us access to a larger library.

I wasn't in any particular hurry to get the dock, but Andrea really wanted one, so, as I always do, I started doing some basic research.

I didn't want anything ridiculously expensive (somewhere around the $150 range would be fine), too hideous, and something that projected decent sound. without actually hooking the iPod into a real stereo I knew that the quality would never be spectacular, but if I was worried about that I wouldn't be using any compressed audio files in the first place.

I did some rudimentary searching online to see what was available from my local stores and then did some basic research into several models that interested me. With that knowledge, I then headed into Future Shop for some sound demos.

Buying stuff at Future Shop is always hit-or-miss, unfortunately. You really do need to know exactly what it is you want, since the staff tend to be non-helpful. Add in the fact that it's sometimes very hard to demo anything and you've got a recipe for frustration. Still, I usually know what I want, which is why I keep going there.

Once I got to the store, I headed to where the docking stations were. As luck would have it, most of them had a power connection, making it easy to give each unit a test. I reached into my pocket, pulled out my iPod, plugged it into the first dock, and ...

A sales droid ran over. "Can I help you?"

"Not really," I replied. "I'm just testing."

With that, the guy starts trying to move me to particular units. I brush him off.

I give the first station a whirl and I'm immediately unimpressed. I move to the next unit and start it up.

Now there are two sales droids. I'm not sure why this always happens, but whenever I'm trying to demo something, I'm immediately surrounded by people who think they know more than I do.

I continue to try units and the sales droids continue to try to interact with me.

"Well, what did you think of that one?"

"Don't like it. Too tinny." I try to be curt, with the hopes that they'll get the message. They don't.

"Yeah, that one's not very good. You should try this one instead." Grrr.

Despite all of the annoyances of the sales droids, I manage to narrow my selection down to two particular units: the Altec Lansing M602 and the Mirage OmniVibe.

I've got a set of Altec Lansing speakers for my desktop and I think the sound they produce is quite nice. The M602 had a similar sound quality (although not as nice without a dedicated subwoofer), configurable bass and treble settings, a remote, and the price was decent ($150).

The OmniVibe had fantastic sound (as you would expect from any Mirage kit). It also comes with a remote, but does not have bass and treble settings. The price was also pretty steep (I believe it was about double).

The decision came down to two things. First was the price. $150 was reasonable and $300 was not. The Mirage had much better sound, but I didn't feel the cost was justified. Second, the OmniVibe has a top-mounted speaker set-up, which would be better if installed in a semi-central location. The M602 has the speakers front-mounted, like a ghettoblaster. Since I was likely to set the unit up on top of the entertainment unit, I figured the front mounts would be a better choice.

So I walked out the with M602.

I eagerly set the unit up when I got home and I must say that I was pretty amazed at how the system manages to fill the living room with sound. Andrea was also impressed with the sound.

Deep down, I know the OmniVibe would have been a better selection, from a sound perspective, but given our listening habits, the M602 has been perfectly adequate.

iPod Chronicles - Part 4: Cover Art

2008-04-14T13:00:00.001-03:00

Hello, my name is Mike Digdon, and I'm addicted to cover art.

There, I said it. Now I can take the next step towards recovery, although I'm not all that certain I want to recover, since cover art is fun!

Let's take a few steps back, to give this some context.

One of the nifty things about the Nano is that it has a covert art mode, just like the iPhone/iPod Touch. I don't particularly use the cover art mode to choose an album to play all that often, but it is nice to flip through the collection every once in a while.

The big thing for me is that I absolutely can't stand seeing that yucky grey default cover picture that the iPod uses when there's no cover art for a particular album/song, so I absolutely insist that every song loaded onto my iPod have the cover art from the album that I ripped it from.

When you rip a CD into iTunes, iTunes has an option to go fetch the album art for you. I find that this only works some of the time. There are typically two reasons why it doesn't seem to work all that well for me.

The first is that iTunes seems to sometimes grab the wrong cover art for a particular album. Unfortunately, it grabs the first entry it finds and that's what you're stuck with. This is something that Window Media Player has in it's favour - if it detects multiple entries for a particular album, you are presented with the list of possibilities and then you can select the one that is appropriate for you.

The second is that I seem to have a bunch of albums that aren't available on iTunes. If an album isn't available, there's no cover art for it. Bummer.

All is not lost, however, since iTunes has a mechanism to load cover art images from disk. The only question was "where would I get the images?"

Of course, I knew that Windows Media Player keeps track of cover art images, so I figured that if I could find out where they were stored on my computer, I could just use WMP to find all of the missing images. So, I went through the effort of trying to find those images.

After much searching the internet, I discovered that the images are kept in the album folder in a file called Folder.jpg. Of course, these are hidden files, so I first had to modify the folder view options in order to be able to see them.

Somewhere along the line, it occured to me that going to Amazon, looking up the album, and saving the cover art image to a local file would be a lot easier. It also wasn't too much later that I discovered that I can simply paste a cover art image into iTunes, rather than loading one from disk.

I still use iTunes to find the cover art first. If the correct image cannot be found, I then go to Amazon and get the correct image.

One day, I happened to look at the Nano while it was playing a song and noticed the evil default cover art image. I was a little confused about that, since I knew that I had installed the correct cover art image. And thus another little idiosyncrasy with iTunes was revealed.

When you have iTunes download cover art or your opt to add it in yourself via the "Get Info" option, the image is only attached to whatever songs you currently have selected. Ultimately, this makes perfect sense, but what confused me is that I would click on the first song and use iTunes to fetch the image, which would eventually be revealed. However, sometimes only portions of the album art would be revealed. By clicking on the other songs in the album, additional portions would be revealed. I have no idea why iTunes does this, but it led me to believe that the album art was attached to all songs in the album. Apparently not.

Once I had figured out that I need to select all songs in the album first, everything has been fine, and I'm able to collect my cover art with ruthless efficiency.

iPod Chronicles - Part 3: Using the iPod

2008-04-13T21:36:00.001-03:00

Once I got some songs copied over to the iPod, it was time to demo the unit and see if I had thrown away my money or not.

The interface on the iPod itself is pretty intuitive, as you would expect from a finely-honed Apple device these days. The screen is sharp, the colours are nice, the font is readable.

I really like the click-wheel, although I must say that sometimes it misbehaves a little bit on me. Sometimes I'll scroll through to a particular item, yet when I remove my finger, the selection changes to either the item before or the item after.

I'd heard some horror stories about Cover Flow not working all that well on the Nano, but I have to say that it seems to work pretty well for me. There are times when you scroll through the albums really fast and the Nano hasn't had a chance to load in the cover art in time - maybe that's what they were referring to. I haven't seen Cover Flow on an iPhone, so I have no previous reference for correct behaviour.

Of course, the most important aspect of the Nano is the sound quality. I'm no audiophile (if I was, would I be using MP3s in the first place?), but the sound quality on the Nano seems pretty good to me. Definitely better than the iRiver. Earbuds/headphones make a lot of difference, so it could just be that the earbuds that come with the Nano are better than the ones that came with the iRiver. In any case, I'm very happy with the audio quality.

One thing that the iPod can do is normalize the volume from the various tracks. Depending on how you have iTunes set up (or how your MP3s were originally created), the volume levels from all of the tracks may be different. With the flick of a virtual switch, the Nano will supposedly adjust the volume levels from track to track to keep them consistent. I've tried this briefly, but I have to say that I wasn't all that thrilled with the results. I'll definitely do some additional testing, but I have a feeling that I'll get better results by configuring iTunes to do the normalization at rip time.

A totally useless feature that I like anyway - when you select a source category (music, podcasts, movies, etc), the Nano will start up a slideshow using the various cover art that you've supplied (or opening frame to a movie or whatever).

I showed nervousness about iTunes in the previous posting, but now I see why it wants to be the keeper of all things. iTunes takes all of that song data and uploads it to the iPod, allowing you to see all of that information, as well as search for songs based on title, artist, album, and composer. I tend to just do album searches, but it's still nice to have the option.

Video playback was not really much of a factor in my choosing the Nano - the idea of watching a movie on a 2-inch screen wasn't appealing in the least. However, since it had the functionality, I figured I've at least test it out.

You can't just put any video onto the Nano - it first needs to be in the correct format. iTunes supposedly will convert a video automatically when you import it, but so far I haven't been able to get that to work. Unable to get a video onto the Nano, I did some googling to see what I could do. It turns out that there are all kinds of video convertors for the Nano.

I found a free one called Videora, installed it, and gave it a whirl. I didn't want to wait around all day for the conversion to finish, so I selected the Robot Chicken Star Wars double-episode for the test source. I used all of the default settings in Videora and let 'er rip.

It took a while, but eventually it finished. I loaded up iTunes and the newly-converted video appeared in the video library (which is how I knew the auto import stuff wasn't working, because it never showed up on the library). I synced up the Nano and there it was in the Movies menu. Not expecting much, I started up the video.

I was amazed.

Yes, it's still a rinky-dink 2-inch screen, but I was amazed at how watchable the video really was. I don't think I could watch a lot of stuff on it, but I could probably sit through a movie on a flight.

Of course, the converted videos only look good on the Nano screen. If you use iTunes to view the video, the quality is quite awful.

Unfortunately, the iPod seems a little unstable at times. For the first little while, I never had any problems with it at all. I think I had to "reboot" the thing only once. However, once I got the Nike+ kit (see parts 6, 7 and 8), I found that I had to "reboot" at least a couple of times a week.

Sometimes the iPod seems a little slow, too, like the CPU has been maxed out or something. I'll turn it on and try to use the click-wheel, but the scrolling is delayed. I'm not sure why this happens, but it's only sometimes.

Hopefully future versions of the firmware will address some of these issues.

iPod Chronicles - Part 2: iTunes

2008-04-13T21:30:00.002-03:00

One of the things that sort of bothered me about getting an iPod is that I knew I would have to use iTunes to manage my files. Although I had to use proprietary apps to get songs onto a media player in the past, they tended to merely be conduits and let me do pretty much whatever I wanted. I'd heard lots of horror stories about iTunes over the years, but lots of friends with iPods told me that the latest iterations of the app are pretty decent. So I bought the iPod, with some mild trepidation about signing my life away to an Apple application.

Having said all that, iTunes is a decent piece of software, but it can be pretty infuriating at the same time.

When I first started it up, it asked me where my music files were kept so that it could import them into the iTunes library. That was cool, since I was going to have to do that anyway.

What's not so cool was that as soon as I plugged the iPod into the USB port, iTunes immediately tried to copy my entire music library onto the iPod. On the surface, that's probably not all that bad, but automatically trying to copy about 15 gigs of music over to the iPod without once asking if I really wanted to do that is probably bad form.

There are some things about iTunes that I find a little aggravating.

The first is that it grabs the very first cover art image that Apple offers up (based on the CDDB listing for an album). I wish there was a way to be able to search for the correct image (as it turns out, I found a better way - see part 4).

Second, iTunes seems to be limited in the length of a filename, resulting in filenames (which are made up of track number, artist, and song title) being chopped off. It doesn't affect the MP3 track info within iTunes, but it's annoying.

Third, the idea that a compilation album is somehow different from regular albums. If an album is tagged as being a compilation, it gets put into the "Compilations" sub-folder. Again, this doesn't really affect anything, but why??

Of course, there's lot about iTunes that I really like.

I really like how iTunes will automatically ask to import and convert a CD as soon as you put one into the CD drive. What's even nicer is that it asks first if that's what you really want to do. It's too bad this behaviour isn't a little more consistent throughout the interface.

I'm completely impressed at the speed at which iTunes will rip a CD. In the past, I've always used a program called CDEX, which I've always found to be excellent, although a little on the slow side. It wouldn't be unusual for a CD to take about 20 minutes to rip. iTunes, however, can rip a CD in 4-6 minutes.

I love the whole podcast system. I love being able to subscribe to a podcast and have iTunes automatically check for, download, and sync new programs. I also like how it detects that you haven't listened to a particular podcast in a while and stops downloading new episodes until you start listening again.

Finally, there's also lots of stuff that I haven't really messed with yet, such as playlists. On-the-go playlists are interesting, although I find using the iPod itself to generate the playlist is a little time-consuming. I typically just find a genre or band that interests me and turn on shuffling.

All in all, iTunes is an interesting app and I hope it only improves going forward.

iPod Chronicles - Part 1: Selecting the iPod

2008-04-05T22:33:00.002-03:00

I've always had a portable music player of some sort since about Christmas of 1983 when I got my first Walkman. I've gone through times when I was a heavy user and times when I hardly ever used it at all, but I've always had one available.

When I started training for the marathon back in 2005, I started thinking that it might be nice to have listen to music while I was running. Everything I have is on CD now and I don't think I actually have a functional tape deck, so I figured that I'd take the plunge and get myself an MP3 player.

iPods were all the rage at the time, but they were prohibitively expensive, so they were off the list right away. There were all kinds of other models available at the time, but I didn't really know a whole lot about them.

Long story short, I opted for an 512mb iRiver 700 series, mostly because a couple of friends had iRivers and were reasonably happy with them. It was interesting because you could very easily drag-and-drop MP3s to and from the player, even though you had to use the iRiver manager program. The sound quality was lacking, but it was good enough. And it came with an armband.

I never really used it for running because I found it difficult to listen to music and run at the same time, but I did use it a lot for all of the air travel that I was doing at the time.

As you can well imagine, 512mb doesn't really hold a whole lot of music. It wasn't much of a chore to copy music back and forth from the player, but it did mean that I had to think about what I might want to listen to on a flight.

* fast forward to mid-2007 *

I was doing a LOT of travelling at this point and figured that I could use a player with a little more room on it, so I started some research.

Basically, I was looking for something with around 16gb that had decent audio quality. Lots of players now can do video as well, but I didn't really care about that. The idea of watching a movie or whatever on a 2-inch screen didn't really appeal to me. I also needed to be able to find some sort of strap or armband for it, since I was hoping to try using it for running (again, even though that didn't work in the past).

iPods had some down in price considerably since I last looked at players, but they were still at a premium compared to other units. I researched some other players, but the only other one that made any sort of impression was the SanDisk Sansa e200, which has all of the same functionality as an iPod, but is considerably cheaper.

I hummed and hawed for quite a while, trying to decide what to do. During this time, I decided that I wanted a player that did not use some sort of hard drive for storage. An hdd-based player probably doesn't have any skipping problems, but I didn't want to have to deal with that in a high-impact environment (such that running would provide). That eliminated all of the video iPods, leaving only the Nano and Shuffle. The shuffle doesn't have enough storage, so it was off the list. That left the Nano and Sansa.

Also during this time, a couple of friends who have iPods also started talking about the Nike+ kit they were using for their running. This obviously intrigued me and definitely had me leaning towards the Nano.

It was around this time that Apple was going crazy with the new iPhone. I have no interest in the iPhone whatsoever, but what is important is that shortly after the introduction of the iPhone, Apple announced that some new iPods were coming, including a new Nano. The new Nano looked very interesting to me, but without being able to actually see the thing, I still couldn't make up my mind. The smaller size was appealing, as was the better display. Sure, it was supposed to be able to play video, but I didn't care about that.

Eventually the new iPods were available for purchase and I headed over to Future Shop to take a look. There they had the new Classic, Nano, and Shuffle. Not only that, but they actually had power (a rarity), allowing me to play with the menu.

I immediately grabbed the Nano and the first thing that I really liked about it was the size and shape. It fit in my hand perfectly. I worked through the menu and I was pleasantly surprised with the interface and how good everything looked. I played with the cover flow stuff (there were a handful of albums on it) and was surprised by the performance of it (I had previously read that the cover flow stuff was pretty sluggish).

All in all, I was pretty happy with what I saw.

I continued to do some research into the Nike+ kit, and the more people told me, the more I liked it. The scales were finally tipped in favour of the Nano and I decided that that's what I would have.

Andrea and I had discussed getting a new MP3 player and we decided that it would be a Christmas gift for me, so I was going to have quite a wait. I tend to be pretty patient about that kind of stuff, so it wasn't going to be that big of a deal.

However, something about having it now totally resonated with me. I had been saving up some money anyway, so I went out and bought it, telling Andrea that it would be an early Christmas present and that she was not to get me anything substantial (to which she abided!). I also bought the official Apple Nano armband at the same time (which turned out to be perfect, since it has two "settings" - one for the plain Nano and one for the Nano and Nike+ sensor).

I ripped open the (minimal) packaging, hooked it up to my laptop, copied over some songs (sort of - iTunes started copying over my entire MP3 collection), and had a listen.

I've been happy ever since.

iPod Chronicles

2008-04-05T22:27:00.002-03:00

I bought an iPod Nano back in October 2007 (well, whenever the 3G Nanos came out) and I am absolutely delighted with it. Sure, there have been a few hiccups, but overall it's been a fabulous device for me.

From the time I got it, I've been making notes about my various experiences with it, both good and bad. I've always intended to post those thoughts and experiences here, but as you can see, I'm pretty lazy and I'm only just getting to finally formalizing those notes.

Over the next couple of days, I will be posting an 8-part series on my experiences with the iPod, including iTunes and the Nike+ running kit.

I hope you find the information interesting.

Nike+ test

2008-01-24T10:01:00.000-04:00

This is just a test post to see if people can access my Nike+ running profile. This is subject to disappear at any time.

Another year, another post

2008-01-01T20:37:00.000-04:00

Merry New Year!

No, wait, that's not it.

Ho-hum New Year!

No, no. Uh... gee...

Oh, wait, I've got it!

Happy New Year!!

Or something like that.

Ok, so it's a new year, which means that it's time to come up with some new year's resolutions. As I've said in the past, I tend to think that resolutions are mostly silly because it is usually only a matter of (a short) time before those resolutions are broken/forgotten/ignored. I'm not particularly interested in self-improvement, but I do have a small set of goals for the year.

Number 1: More guitar practice. As I suspected, getting the Godin really encouraged me to play more. Of course, it also highlighted the fact that, despite hacking away at it for seven years, I still can't play the damned thing. I'm going to try to find a way to get in at least 1 hour of practice in a day. This is one that Andrea probably won't be too happy about, but I'll try to find some way to do this without impacting her time too much. :)

Number 2: Another marathon. I ran the Bluenose marathon back in 2005 (as I talked about lots here) and I've been trying desperately to run another one, but something always gets in the way. In 2006, I was sick for about 4 months, making training impossible. In 2007, I was sick for almost 6 months and ended up off the continent for race weekend. I'll be starting up my training tomorrow (Jan 2nd) and hopefully I'll stay healthy this time through. If not, I'll try for one of the summer or fall marathons. My knees aren't too happy these days, so this may be my last kick at the can.

Number 3: Finish the damned DVD inventory system. I've been working on this thing off and on (mostly off) for the last 4(?) years now. I've been using this as a tool for learning/using new technologies. The problem is that it is taking so long that technologies change before I finish. It started out just going to be some sort of Perl-based app. Then it was going to be JSP. Then I decided to use Struts for the GUI. Then Struts 2 came out. I'm hoping a Struts 2 book becomes available soon, since it's been hard to find the documentation I'm looking for online. At this rate, even Duke Nukem Forever will be released before I finish.

Number 4: This one is a bit of a stretch goal - more writing. In particular, more blog updates. I come up with things I want to write about all the time, but writing is a slow process for me. I'm also still wrestling with the scope of this blog. My life isn't interesting enough to be any sort of diary. I like technology and various "toys", so I'd like to focus on those topics whenever I can. Certainly, I'm hoping to do better than one post every 4 or 5 months. :)

See? That's a pretty short list, and there's nothing too outrageous there. Let's see how I do.

Lunar eclipse - a family affair

2007-10-24T09:05:00.000-03:00

Things have been rather vacuous here, so I thought I'd regale a story I posted to the RASC Halifax mailing list way back on March 3rd just after the total lunar eclipse

--------

I haven't done any observing for many months, for a whole variety of reasons (some good, some not so good), so I was particularly excited about the lunar eclipse tonight. I watched the moon rise over the past few days and it turns out that when it was to hit totality, it would be just above the trees right off my front porch.

My daughter, who is only 22 months old, is completely fascinated by the moon. For several months now, whenever she sees the moon, she goes completely bananas. "Moon, daddy, moon! Oooooooo!" She stares up and points at it and oohs and ahhs. A budding astronomer, to be sure. My plan is executing perfectly *cackle*.

I really wanted her to see the eclipse, so I hoped and hoped for the past couple of days that the weather would hold out, and I believe that we were suitably rewarded.

As soon as it got dark, I grabbed my binoculars, camera, and tripod and got set up because I wanted to try to get some umbral pictures. Overall, the views were magnificent and I got a couple of really nice pictures of totality (unfortunately, I had the multi-focus setting wrong, so my umbral pictures are pretty fuzzy). But that certainly was NOT the highlight of the evening for me.

While I was waiting for totality, my wife comes out, with my daughter all bundled up, and we watch the eclipse together. My daughter was absolutely amazed at the moon. She definitely noticed that something was different about it, although we really couldn't explain it all that well. We watched and watched and I took zillions of pictures. It was wonderful.

Eventually I packed things up and we headed back home. We were facing west, so she immediately saw the big, bright "sparkly" shining over our house.
"Daddy, spark-y!"

"That's right, hon. That's VENUS. Can you say Venus?"

"Nee-us"

"That's right, sweetie!" She giggled.

All in all, an incredible evening and an amazing event. Oh yeah, the eclipse was pretty neat, too.

Tourist - with a capital T

2007-05-25T03:27:00.000-03:00

I've been in Beijing for a DSLForum conference all week. I've done a bit of sightseeing when I've had the chance, but the conference kept me pretty busy during the week. The only time I really got to see anything was when a group of us would go out for supper after the day's meetings were finished.

The conference ended on Thursday and with my flight not leaving until late Friday afternoon, I found myself with some time to kill. There were several things that I absolutely wanted to do while I was here - see the Great Wall and Tiananmen Square. Anything else I managed to squeeze in would simply be a bonus.

I managed to see the Great Wall earlier in the week, leaving me only with Tiananmen Square. That certainly wasn't going to take all morning, so I needed something else to do to fill the time.

All week, my colleagues have been going to various places and buying the "famous" Chinese knock-off watches. I've been to China (Shanghai) twice before and was used to being accosted by the street vendors peddling the watches. I had absolutely no interest in them - 1) I already have plenty of watches and 2) these watches are known for becoming non-functional shortly after purchase. As such, I blew the whole thing off day after day.

Every day, someone would show up and say, "hey, I bought a Rolex last night" or "check out the Tag I just got!" The whole thing started to become rather intriguing and, unfortunately, I caught the bug and decided that I, too, needed to do the ultimate in tacky tourist behaviour and buy myself a knock-off. Everyone in my group was managing to get the watches for $25 or less, so if I figured that if the thing manages to survive a couple of weeks, I'd certainly get $25 of entertainment value out of showing the thing off to my friends.

With the extra time to kill, I decided to go to the YaShow Market (Yaxiu is the correct pinyin spelling). Most of the watches I had seen were bought there so I figured I'd jump on the bandwagon.

It was absolutely insane.

The "vendors" had every model of every luxury watch brand you can think of. They have huge catalogs listing them all. If you don't see the one you want, you simply ask for it and they either pull out a case with more watches in it or go out back somewhere to produce the desired piece. What is the most amazing thing is that, quality of the movements aside, these watches look identical to the real thing. In many cases, the differences are so subtle that you'd never really know the difference.

Once you've selected the watch (or watches - they try to sell you as many as they absolutely can), you begin the negotiation process. I knew what people had paid for several watches that interested me, so I went into the process knowing exactly the maximum that I would pay.

I started looking at some Breitlings, which I really liked the look of. I picked out a Rolex for Andrea and a TAG Heuer for a friend (who had asked me to get something interesting if it wasn't too expensive). The vendor came up with an opening bid of about 2500CNY.

Now, since I was really only willing to pay a maximum of 500CNY for three watches, I was a little concerned that I wasn't going to be able to get them down that far. Thinking that maybe the Rolex and Breitling were going to be a little too expensive, I replaced with a second TAG and a Bvlgari. Indeed, the price came down, but I don't know if it was because the watches were "cheaper" or because the vendor was trying to "entice" me.

And so the really hard bargaining began. They offered about 2100CNY, which I countered with 400CNY. They completely laughed at me, which I totally expected. Still, I stuck to my guns.

"400. That's all I'm going to pay."

"For one watch, yeah?"

"No, for all three. 400. That's it."

They came back with some other completely insulting number - something like 1800. I laughed.

"Ok, ok. 450."

"Why only 50? Come on, that for one watch. 450 for each."

"Absolutely not. 450 for all three."

There were a few more exchanges, but they really wouldn't come down past about 1500. It was time for some hard ball.

"500 is the absolute best offer I can give you. 500 for all three watches."

No budging.

"Look, my friend bought this exact watch here yesterday for 150. If I were to buy 3 of them, that would be 450, so you're actually getting an extra 50."

"No way! No way! Can't sell to you."

"500 for all three. That's my final offer."

Nothing.

"500. Last chance."

It was clear they weren't going to accept that. So I did what you always do in this situation. I started walking away.

I got about 10 feet away and, without looking back, called out, "500, going once!".

I walked a few more feet. "500, going twice!"

"Ok! Ok! 500!"

And so I got my three watches for 500CNY. Knocking them down to 20% of the original offer certainly seems like a good deal, but I know that I still got taken to the cleaners. :) If I had pushed, I probably could have gotten the whole lot for 400. However, I knew that I was willing to spend 500CNY and that's what I did, so I don't feel too bad about the whole thing.

When I got back to the hotel, I did some research into the Breitlings. It turns out that the ones I was looking at were about the same price as the TAGs that I ended up with (for the real deal, of course), so I probably could have gotten the one that I had originally wanted. I do take some solace in the face that the Rolex and Breitling I picked had the link straps and a colleague had regaled some stories about having problems with the strap on his watch a couple of days previous. The watches I ended up with have rubber and leather straps, so that's at least one less thing to go wrong with them. :)

So, I ended up buying about "$7500" worth of watches for about $70. Like I said before, if I can get a few weeks of entertainment out of them, it'll be worth the money.

EA 84 A7 52 30 CC 92 A6 6D FD B8 1D F5 D5 6D 06 FTW!

2007-05-09T13:10:00.000-03:00

As a self-professed geek, I spend lots of time on geek websites. In particular, I try to read slashdot every day. Sure, it's a haven for fanboyz and zealots, but reading through the comments can be kind of funny some times.

Anyway, today they had a posting about an article from "Freedom to Tinker" about owning your own 128-bit integer. The idea is that they will generate a 128-bit number for you and use it to encrypt a copyrighted haiku that they deliver to you. By doing this, apparently the number then falls under the DMCA. As such, if some organization (say MPAA or RIAA) tries to use the number, which could be used to decrypt the haiku without my permission, I can release the hounds.

So, here's my number - EA 84 A7 52 30 CC 92 A6 6D FD B8 1D F5 D5 6D 06.

Some people have waaaaaay too much time on their hands. And I just love it!

- Mike

Best damn birthday party ever!

2007-04-21T16:38:00.000-03:00

Olivia officially turned two years old back on the 18th. We had a smallish party for her then with a cake and some presents. But that was nothing compared to what we had in store for her today...

Back in February, we went to PEI for their 3rd annual Jack Frost Children's Festival (I'd provide a link, but all of the links that turn up in Google are broken). One of the highlights of that trip was the hours and hours we spent playing in a variety of bouncy castles. Olivia absolutely loved them, especially when I climbed in with her (having someone my size jumping around causes all of the kids to go flying, which they all love).

The bouncy castles made quite an impression and Andrea was determined to get one for Olivia's second birthday party. She did some searching and came up with Glow Parties (also known as Glow Promotions). They rent out those black signs with the bright pink, red, green, etc lettering. They also have a big list of various bouncy castles that they rent out.

The pirate ship looks absolutely amazing, but it's really big (waaaaaaaay too impractical for the yard) and cost something like $475 for 3 hours. Although we love Olivia to death, that's a tad much for a kid's birthday party. Instead, we settled on the blue castle. The picture doesn't really do this thing any justice.

So, for $150 they come out, set the thing up, leave us all kinds of instructions and safety tips, and head out. Two hours later, they come back, pack everything up, and leave.

The weather has been really crummy for the past few weeks, so we were pretty worried about the whole thing. We were able to cancel out on the bouncy castle on the day of the event, should it be raining, so we weren't worried about that. What we did fret about, however, was what we would do with a house full of kids should the weather be bad.

Olivia knew that we were getting this thing for her and she was pretty excited over the last few days. When the truck finally arrived this morning to set things up (just shortly after 10! Yay!), she started squealing with excitement. "My party's here! My party's here!!" It was all we could do to keep her out of their hair while they set stuff up. When it was finally set up, her and I went in and she squealed endlessly. Money well-spent, I would say.

This all happened rather early. The party was scheduled from 11am to 1pm, but the castle was set up by 10:15. We gave Olivia a bit of time to herself in it (it was for her, after all), and then started calling people to come over early, if they wanted.

Without a doubt, the kids absolutely LOVED the bouncy castle. And when they grew tired of that (which they eventually did, however briefly), we've got a huge fort/picnic table/swing set thing in the front yard as well that kept everyone occupied.

There were hotdogs, chips, veggie trays (mostly for the adults), presents, cake, loot bags, and hats. Everything that a rockin' party needs. And everyone absolutely loved it. Olivia was having so much fun that she didn't want to open her presents - she wanted cake instead. Can you imagine that?? Of course, it was a totally cool Dora the Explorer cake (pink and green, just as she requested), but still... weirdo.

As always, all good things must come to an end. Eventually the Glow people showed up to take back the bouncy castle. That was not a particularly happy moment for most of the kids, who had found their way back in. There wasn't too much fuss, though, which is surprising given how tired the kids surely were.

At that point, people began packing up to go home. By about 2pm, Olivia was absolutely beat. The last stragglers headed out and we took a VERY tired little girl up to bed. No fighting this time. We laid her down in bed and she immediately rolled over and went to sleep. We never heard a peep out of her until just before 5!

All in all, an incredible success! It simply was not possible for the party to have been any more perfect. Perfect weather, good friends, good food, great entertainment, presents... what more do you need?? Of course, the big joke now is, "well, how are we going to top that next year?"

- Mike

Greetings, Facebook people

2007-04-20T11:02:00.000-03:00

Since I've added the URL for my blog to my Facebook page, I figured I'd better add a recent post welcoming anyone who might wander this way.

Not a whole lot to see here, mostly because I'm lazy. I've got tons of things that I should write about, but I seem to lack the motivation necessary to get it done. Oh well...

The gift that keeps on rockin'!

2006-12-29T13:39:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned waaaaaaay back in my New Year's post, I wanted to spend a lot more time with my (acoustic) guitar so that I could justify the purchase of an electric guitar. I've wanted an electric guitar for years, so I was particularly motivated to practice.

Although my skills have definitely improved over the year, they still aren't anywhere near what I want them to be. However, I felt that I was definitely making progress, which warranted the purchase. An additional nudge is that most of the songs I listen to are rock-based, which would be easier to practice on an electric.

So, after having saved up my pennies for most of the year, I headed to my local Musicstop and purchased the following gear:

Godin Freeway Classic - black, with a maple neck and fingerboard
Line 6 PODxt Live
Roland CUBE-30

I was originally just looking for the PODxt, but all they had in stock was the Live. I hummed and hawed about it and decided that it would be nice to be able to just use my feet to switch between tones, so I opted for the Live. That, and I just didn't want to wait. :)

I bought the CUBE-30 mostly because my friend has one, which I've used on several occasions, and because that's the amp the sales assistant gave me while I was demoing guitars. I wasn't all that hung up about the amp because I knew that I was going to be using the POD for its amp models and would likely be using headphones most of the time (which is indeed the case).

Selecting the guitar was a very long process. I went in thinking maybe a Yamaha or a Fender Strat (depending on pricing), but I ultimately knew that I would purchase the guitar in my price range that felt and sounded the best to me.

I went into the store and after looking at the wall of guitars for a few minutes, the sales assistant came over.

"Can I help you?"

"Yeah, I'm looking to buy an electric guitar."

"Ok, is there anything in particular you're looking for?"

"Not really. My plan is to pick up every guitar on this wall and try it out. Whichever one speaks to me will be the one I leave with."

The sales guy nodded his head, invited me to select a pick, brought over the CUBE-30 amp, and left me to my work.

It took me about 2.5 hours of playing to make my choice. After about 1.5 hours, I had the selections narrowed down to a Fender Strat and the Godin. I really liked the idea of owning a Strat and the feel of the neck and the sound were certainly what I was looking for. However, the jumbo frets really annoyed the hell out of me.

The Godin had a great feel and I've had lots of experience with their products (my acoustic is a Seagull), so I was leaning heavily towards the Godin. Then the sales assistant said, "Just so you know, the Godin and the Strat are the same price, but the Godin also comes with a gig bag." He showed me the bag, and although it's not a hard-shelled case like I got with the Seagull, I really liked it. SOLD!

As I said, I had been saving up all year for the new equipment. However, in the interest of cutting down on our Christmas spending, I told Andrea that she could give me all of this stuff for Christmas. In fact, the PODxt Live ended up being a little more expensive, so basically Andrea bought me the amp for Christmas.

I rushed home with my new gear and wailed away for the afternoon. Andrea was none too impressed that I was playing with my Christmas present before Christmas, resulting in punishment that consisted of buying and decorating our tree more than 2 weeks before Christmas. Oh well, it was worth it.

Anyway, Christmas has finally come and now that I'm allowed to play with the guitar, I haven't been able to put it down. The feel of the neck is absolutely amazing and the sounds that the POD produces are simply amazing. With all of the amp, cabinet, and effects models, it'll take a lifetime for me to discover everything, I think.

I look forward to spending lots of time with my new guitar. And who knows... maybe this time next year my playing won't suck!

Ooooookay then

2006-12-05T16:52:00.000-04:00

Wow.... last update was March 20th? What in the hell have I been doing that has kept me from producing any updates since March 20th?

It's been a hectic year, that's for sure. I've traveled more than 60,000 miles for work (and the year's not done yet), spent time with my family, and tried to work on my hobbies.

There are all sorts of interesting things that have been going on, so I'm hoping to make some time over the next few weeks to get this thing up to date. My Christmas vacation starts December 18th, so I should be able to find some spare cycles in there - particularly while Olivia is napping. :)

Stay tuned!

Guitar work

2006-03-20T10:11:00.000-04:00

I haven't been picking up my guitar anywhere near as often as I should or as I would like. Having said that, though, it's not like it's been sitting in the closet collecting dust.

Back before I got completely and utterly hooked on C64 remixes, I spent quite a bit of time listening to Shanty Raid-io, which is an Internet radio station that plays piratey-themed music and is run by people who spend their time playing the Yohoho Pirate Puzzle game. Being a Maritimer and being obsessed by all things piratey, it's easy to understand the attraction I had for the station.

While they play lots of great tunes, there was one in particular that really caught my ear - One For The Road by The Jolly Rogers. It's a fun song and the guitar work is quite simple - simple enough that I figured that even I could learn how to play it.

As I always do when I hear a song that I'd like to learn how to play, I consulted the almighty Internet for a guitar tab of the song. I searched and searched and searched some more, but all I could find were the lyrics. Problem. However, although my musical skills are very weak, the song sounded simple enough that I figured that, given enough hacking away, I would be able to figure out all of the chords.

I managed to get the chords for the verses figured out with little trouble, but the chorus proved to be much more difficult. Over the course of a few months, I'd pick up the guitar and try and try again to figure out the chorus. After much aggravation, though, I believe that I finally have the results. In hopes that maybe my hard work will help someone else, I'll include the chords here. Rather than post the whole song, I'll only bother with the first verse and the chorus.

Intro: lots of D's

Verse:
D D D D
G G A A
D D D D
G G A D

Chorus:
A
D D G G D D A A
D D G G A A D D
G G G G C C D D
G G G G C C D D
A E
A E
D D D D G G A A
D D D D G G A D

- Mike

Everything old is new again

2006-03-19T10:08:00.000-04:00

I spent a good deal of my adolescence playing games on my C64, and while it got me into some trouble from time to time, I have nothing but the fondest memories of those days.

I have dozens upon dozens of favourite games that I used to play, sometimes endlessly. With simple (albeit still powerful for the time) graphics and a 3-voice SID chip for sound, game play and innovation were important for making a game great, which is in stark contrast from today's 3D behemoths, where everything is about better graphics, faster refresh rates, and the like.

Graphics and sound were very rudimentary during the early years, but became much more advanced as people began to discover the awesome power of the VIC-II and SID chips. Indeed, the demo scene was a great influence on discovering the true capabilities of these chips.

With the true power of the SID chip revealed, programmers and composers such as Rob Hubbard, Ben Daglish, Martin Galway, Maniacs of Noise, et al began producing incredibly complex and catchy tunes. Although the chip had only 3 voices, clever composers were able to create tunes that sounded like there were 4 or more voices. Truly a remarkable feat. Songs such as Thrust, Chimera, Trap, and The Last Ninja series have managed to stick in my head for YEARS after I last turned on my C64 and played those games and demos.

About a month ago, a friend of mine starts talking about this Internet radio station that is playing old C64 tunes. I type 'c64' into Shoutcast and come up with SLAY Radio. Intrigued, I tune in. What I discover, however, truly amazes me.

Not only do they play original music files (which they call SIDs, which can be confusing because the original SID format produced really bad music, yet was popular for some odd reason), they also play remixes. Yes, you heard me right - remixes. It turns out that there's quite a movement in Europe where people take original game music from machines such as the C64, Amiga, and NES and rework them. Sometimes the songs are only slightly tweaked, keeping very close to the original sound, but other times they are given major overhauls, sometimes without containing any of the original sounds at all. Not only are these remixed then played on internet radio stations, sometimes concerts are organized and they are played LIVE! Absolutely incredible.

SLAY Radio is VERY well done. The web site isn't too bad and, if you register, provides functionality to view the current song queue and even make your own requests (you search for the song, click the button and it shows up in the queue). The playing mechanism is also linked to an IRC bot (SLAYRadio) that hangs out on #slayradion on the EFNet network. It doesn't offer all of the same functionality of the web site, but it does offer some things that are not available via the site.

The live shows are scheduled fairly regularly and the DJs take their task very seriously. They know these tunes and their history very well. They've got great personalities and make the whole live experience really good. On top of that, the live shows are recorded and made available, usually shortly after the broadcast has been completed.

I first tuned in almost 2 months ago and I haven't been able to stop listening since. I stream the station all day long while at work. There are sites that contain all kinds of the remix MP3s and I've downloaded many of them so that I can lug them around on my laptop and MP3 player when internet access is not available. I've been travelling a lot lately and being able to play back the live shows has been a livesaver on the ridiculously long flights I've been suffering through, such as the 13.5 hour flight from Toronto to Beijing. (For some good fun, download the entire "24-Hour Fleming Show", which I'm currently working through, much to my delight).

- Mike

Overloaded melody?

2006-03-01T05:19:00.000-04:00

It's common knowledge that the melody for both the alphabet song ("A-B-C-D.. E-F-G...") and Twinkle, Twinkle is the same. If this is coming as a surprise to you, try it yourself. It seems to me, though, that the melody is shared with at least one other childhood tune.

I put Olivia to bed the other night and turned on her Ocean Wonders Aquarium (which she absolutely loves, by the way). The song that started up was Twinkle, Twinkle. As I was leaving her room, I started singing to myself.

"Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool?"

I'm, like, "What the hell? That song is clearly 'Twinkle, Twinkle', so why am I singing 'Baa baa black sheep'?"

Now, I may totally be on crack here, but I'm pretty damned sure that the melody for all three songs is exactly the same. If this is true, I wonder how many other kids' songs also share this melody.

- Mike

Basement update

2006-02-19T11:18:00.000-04:00

Whoa... it's been quite a while since my last update here, and a lot has been going on.

So, the update on the basement. No, it's not done yet, but we've been enjoying it all the same.

We were on the verge of having it complete, until the electrician went to put in the pot lights in the home theatre room. He cut a couple of holes to install the light, but when he reached in, he wasn't happy with what he found.

"Hey, you know you've got insulation in the ceiling?"

"Ummmmm... yup. It's supposed to be there. It's been in the plan since day 1."

"Yeah, well, I can't install THESE pot lights into a ceiling with insulation. You need to get the other kind, the ones with the big metal boxes."

Well la-de-da, thank you very much for telling me that NOW.

I shan't bother you with everything that happened after that, except to say that the contractors were out a few days later, cutting holes in the ceiling and building drywall boxes into the ceiling so that the lights we had originally purchased could be installed. The plan was to cut open the ceiling and build the boxes, have someone come out a couple days later and do the taping/mudding again, wait a couple more days for it to dry, sand it, paint it, and then have the lights installed. That was all a month ago at this point. All that has been done is that the boxes have been build and the ceiling put back and taped. We're still waiting for paint and light installation.

Luckily, though, none of that has taken away from us using the basement, so we aren't in any hurry to have the work finished. Besides, they don't get paid until the work is done, so if I can earn a little bit of interest on the money before giving it to them, then I'm happy.

And how about my HD problems?

Well, I called up Eastlink about switching to a box with an HDMI connector. However, those connectors are only available on PVR boxes, which they wanted to change me another $10/mn for. The $15/mn I'm paying now hardly seems worth it, so I certainly wasn't going to add another $10 to that total. Besides, we just don't watch enough TV to make having a PVR worthwhile.

So, no problem - I went to Future Shop and bought a DVI->HMDI connector, hooked it all up, and now I've got a much better picture. Sort of...

Some channels have been absolutely amazing - CBS in particular. Some channels are really awful - TSN. Some are good sometimes, but not others - PBS, CBC, etc. Annoyed with the whole picture quality problem, I asked a videophile acquaintance about what I should expect as far as quality is concerned and he gave me a lot of good information.

Most of the shows that I've seen on CBS, NBC, Fox are shot in HD, so naturally they look amazing. Shows shot in HD for CBC and PBS also look amazing. However, I think PBS sort of upconverts a lot of non-HD shows to HD and, as a result, the quality can be pretty poor. The biggest disappointment, of course, was Hockey Night in Canada. I was really annoyed by the terrible (and inconsistent) picture quality. It turns out that all of the shows that look really good have had lots of work to ensure they look good. Because they are filmed and broadcast later, the engineers can spend lots of time fiddling with the compression algorithms. For live broadcasts, however, they have no such luxury. They're pretty much stuck with a middle of the road configuration, resulting in some things looking incredible, but others being outright horrific. Hockey, being a fast-moving sport, suffers greatly. American Idol (no, I don't watch that useless tripe - I was only experimenting) is pretty good. Things like giant logo screen wipes are just plain awful.

One of the major reasons why I wanted HD was so that I can watch sports. Given that sports suffer in picture quality the most, and the fact that we get our HD channels from eastern Canada, resulting in everything being on an hour later, I doubt that I'm going to keep the HD stuff.

It's a shame, though. I love watching PBSHD, and I totally love the on-screen guide that comes with the HD box. I've been doing a bit of research into switching to ExpressVu, but I think I'm too lazy to make the switch. ExpressVu has a lot more HD channels (like Discovery!) that I would really enjoy, but the price to play is pretty high. We have 3 TVs in the house, so we'd have to get 3 receivers, and that really sucks.

I'm going to hang in for another couple of months to see what happens. If Eastlink adds more HD channels, I may continue my subscription. If not, I'll be getting rid of it.

- Mike

Happy New Year

2006-01-01T11:15:00.000-04:00

I won't bother regaling the details about our riveting (not!) new year's eve. All I will say on that topic is that, once again, we had to fight to stay awake until midnight. We watched the countdown, I gave Andrea a kiss, and promptly fell asleep. Pretty much the standard for us on new year's eve.

One of the (apparently) most important aspects of the new year is coming up with a set of resolutions for self-improvement that everyone will most likely fail in attaining. Oh, sure, everyone has the best intentions to keep those resolutions, and may actually keep at it for a month, maybe two, but ultimately this year's resolutions are doomed to become next year's resolutions.

On that note, I'd like to offer up my own list of resolutions for 2006. I have every intention of keeping these resolutions (just like everyone else). :)

More practice with my guitar. I've been hacking away on this thing for several years now and I should be a lot better than I am. Hell, I don't even know the scales yet. Pitiful, really. I would really like to get an electric guitar, but there's no point in laying out the cash for that sort of thing if I'm not going to get the best use out of it.
More time with the telescope. I've got a lovely 10-inch Dob and I've only used it a handful of times in the 1.5 years that I've had it. I'd like to get some additional equipment for it (UHC filter, a couple of eyepieces, Telrad, laser collimator) that will hopefully encourage me to head outdoors a little more often. Olivia has a pretty good routine now, so it shouldn't be too difficult to get out for a couple of hours a week.
More coding time. I've had a couple of ideas for coding projects running through my head for a couple of years now. I've gotten partway through one of them (DVD inventory system), but I just haven't had the necessary motivation to work on it. As with the astronomy, I'd like to spend 3-4 hours a week working on these projects.

The trick to keeping these resolutions is time management, which I've never really been good at. The other major component is laziness. It's a lot easier to sit down and read a book or watch TV than to work on other things. I will use the 3 items I listed to help drive the two fundamental resolutions. I'll keep my fingers crossed that I can achieve at least some success.

- Mike

HDTV

2005-12-26T21:53:00.000-04:00

Interest rates have been climbing over the past few months, so it was a really good time to take our variable rate mortgage and lock it into something a little more stable. We made a well-timed decision and, given the continued increases, one that is definitely working in our favour.

Since we were refinancing, we decided to add a couple of bucks to the existing mortgage and finish up our basement (well, half of it). Along with a full bathroom and a new office (so that I can finally get all of my shit out of the dining room), we're building a home theatre. I'll go into more details about how the home improvement project is going (hint: it's been stupid slow) in a later post.

Of course, you can't have a home theatre without something to watch, so we bought a Panasonic 50" DLP HDTV (I'll add a link as soon as I find one - the one I was going to use no longer exists). It's a pretty decent TV, but while the basement is being worked on, we've had it set up in our bedroom (I know - lame) with a basic co-ax cable connected to it. The picture has been pretty good, but I know it could be better.

The electrical work was supposed to be completed last week, so I called Eastlink to get them to come out and set me up with HDTV. Eastlink provides about 10 different HD channels at the moment, so even though it's an extra $10/mn right now (soon to be $15), it will probably be worth it (most of the shows Andrea watches are broadcast in HD, as is PBS). The electrical work wasn't completed, but I decided to set up the TV in the basement anyway, rather than having everything hooked up in our bedroom.

When we first built the house, I knew that I'd eventually get to the basement, so I had the cable guys leave a drop. Unfortunately, the drop is on the opposite end of the house from where the TV room is. The cable guy, while setting up the HD gear and installing the jacks that I want in the basement, commented that I may need a signal booster (the electrician, while working on the basement and running the co-ax for cable, also noted the same thing several weeks before). He hooked everything up, but didn't think that there was a problem.

One thing the cable guy did mention was that since I have an HDMI jack on my TV, I'd get a better picture if I had an HDMI HD box. He suggested that I give Eastlink a call and let them know and that they'd send out an HDMI box for no extra charge. I assured him that I was do that ASAP.

It turns out, though, that the quality is less than optimal.

Andrea and I decided to watch a Maple Leafs hockey game on CBCHD (one of the main reasons for getting HD in the first place!). While things were slow on the screen, the image quality was pretty good. As soon as the pace picked up, though, artifacts were showing up around the players. Artifact is likely not the correct term here - basically it looked like the signal compression algorithm was inadequate, kind of like a low quality Quicktime or WMV file. And then there were the blocks. On a far-too-frequent basis, the image would be reduced to nothing but annoying blocks. It never lasted more than a second or two, but I was getting better quality from the straight co-ax!

I also noticed that, in general, the non-HD channels didn't look all that good through the HD box. I'm not particularly amused at this point, but I haven't gone through any of the motions to resolve the problem yet - that's this week's project. Here's the list of stuff I'll be doing to correct the problem:

Get Eastlink to replace my current box with the HDMI box. The installer said that that should improve the overall picture quality.
Get the installer that shows up to spend some time (10 or 15 minutes) checking out the quality of the existing channels, looking for, in particular, the blocking problem. I suspect that he'll say that I'll need a signal booster, so I'll be sure to mention that to the CSR when I call about getting the new box.
I've asked a friend, who also gets the HD service, about the artifacts/pixelation issue - he suggested that I call Eastlink and get them to re-program the box. He was having a similar issue and that seems to have solved his problems.

So, after the box is installed, if I'm still having problems, I'll be giving them a call again to see about what changes need to be made to the box. These sorts of changes can be done remotely, so hopefully they'll take effect immediately.

If none of that works, then I'll cancel the service and complain rather loudly - maybe even consider switching to satellite.

I'll post updates as I work through the list.

- Mike

It's beginning to look a lot like....

2005-12-16T10:22:00.000-04:00

Where the hell did November and December go?!

Here it is, December 16th, and the house isn't decorated for Christmas yet. Andrea's freaking out because everything is so far behind. She's done some decorating over the last couple of weeks (especially this week) and we brought the tree into the house last night. It's not decorated yet, but at least the house smells like Christmas.

I'm not stressing out so much about it because, as a child, we never really started decorating the house until about this time anyway. Heck, the tree wasn't even up and decorated until the 23rd. We'll do up the tree this weekend, which will be just fine with me. Andrea, on the other hand, likes having stuff done at least 2 weeks before. Yeah, she's a weird one. :)

Of course, taking 8 days to go to Munich probably wasn't the best idea during the Silly Season, but the way I see it is that the decorating will get done in time. I love how the house looks with all of the decorations, but, really, as long as the tree is done and we have a couple of (fake) boughs around the house with some lights, I'm perfectly happy. Given the choice between a fully-decorated house and Europe, Europe will win every time. :)

I've got lots of shopping to do next week, so I'll pack up Olivia and get out of the house for a few hours. That ought to give Andrea lots of time to do whatever it is she wants to do.

Today's my last day at the office until the new year and I'm really looking forward to relaxing (if that's going to be possible!) at home with Andrea and Olivia, drinking tea, watching the fire, and just absorbing everything. Christmas will probably be hectic this year (babies make everything hectic, don't they!), so I'd better get in the relaxation while I can.

- Mike

Just a wee bit of travelling

2005-12-07T09:12:00.000-04:00

So, I find myself in Munich this week, participating in the DSL Forum quarterly meeting.

I'm the main technical representative for the company I work for, as well as the editor of one of the parking lot documents. Being an editor means that I pretty much need to attend all of the meetings, so I'll get to do quite a bit of travelling (at least 4 times a year) for the next little while.

Travelling seems to be feast or famine for me. Back in 2002, I did a lot of travelling - about 10 trips, all told. Lots of trips to the US and a few to Europe. I travelled enough that I achieved Elite status with Air Canada. I was pretty happy about that, since that meant I would get the upgrade coupons and get access to the Maple Leaf lounges.

All of that travel was promptly followed by 2.5 years of virtually no travel whatsoever. I travelled twice in 2003, and neither of the trips with Air Canada, so I didn't get to use any of my Elite benefits. Figures. I also only travelled a handful of times in 2004 (once to Denver, twice to Madrid).

So, what happens this year? Right after Olivia was born, I seem to be travelling quite a bit. LA back in July. Philadelphia in September. New Hampshire in October. San Francisco in November. Munich in December. Every trip lasts about a week. It's crazy!

Andrea, naturally, is not too thrilled with my being away so often. To be honest, while I love visiting new countries, I hate leaving Olivia. The fact that Andrea is home by herself with Olivia makes things even worse, since it's very hard work raising a child with two people, let alone by yourself.

Things a little different this time, though... I've brought Andrea with me to Munich. I've been slaving away all week while she's been galavanting all through Munich and even to Salzburg. She deserves the time away, of course, so I don't mind hearing about all of the cool things she does during the day while I'm stuck in meetings.

And there's no real end to all of the travel in the near future. Potential trips for 2006 include New Hampshire, Vienna, Athens, San Jose, and Atlanta. I'm thinking I'll get Elite status again in 2006.

Guerilla .NET not so guerilla?

2005-10-02T22:05:00.000-03:00

Back in July, a colleague and I went to Torrance, CA to attend DevelopMentor's Guerilla .NET 2.0 training course. I enjoy learning about new technologies and I was anxious to see how .NET compared to Java/J2EE. I absolutely love writing code and DevelopMentor's motto of "Write code day and night" (or something close to that) certainly appealed to me.

Overall, we learned lots of interesting things, but I found the course to be rather disappointing. I really did expect to write code day and night. Instead, we worked on labs for about 10 hours. There was just so much information to cover, which didn't leave a lot of time for labs. On top of that, the labs tended to be rather simple. I was certainly looking for more of a challenge.

We opted to attend the 2.0 course because it is scheduled to be released sometime in November. However, we probably should have taken the 1.1 course instead. Most of the people attending the 2.0 course were already very familiar with 1.1, so they were really only looking for the differences between 1.1 and 2.0 (changes, new features, etc). As a result, the instructors met halfway with the material. For those of us that had never seen .NET before, we spent a lot of time trying to catch up. I suspect that those already familiar with 1.1 were probably pretty bored most of the time. Chris and I had spent some time learning C# syntax before the course, which kept us from being completely lost.

C# is very Java-like, which made it pretty easy to learn. I liked the delegates (sort of like function pointers), which can help code look a little tidier than with anonymous inner classes. I'm not so sure about the attributes yet. I'm pretty sure that I don't like the weird ? shortcut. In a lot of ways, some of the features of the C# language look like hacks to get the language to perform certain behaviours. I suspect that my current opinion will change as I use the language more.

I find it interesting that Java and C# are pretty much headed down the same path, what with generics and the like. No real surprise, I guess, since they're both solving the same problem.

One of things that really disappointed me was the realization that .NET is not Microsoft's answer to J2EE. Chris and I had mistakenly believe that .NET had equivalents to EJBs and the like, but really it's Microsoft's answer to J2SE. Sure, MS provides ADO.NET (basically ODBC) and ASP (similar to JSP), but those are technologies built on top of .NET.

Microsoft seems to have this incessant need to change things that are already standardized (or at least generally accepted). Case in point is ADO - they could have easily taken ODBC/JDBC and built a .NET equivalent (NDBC?). Instead, they came up with new method names and the like. I find that really annoying.

Although there were a lot of things that I did find annoying, there were also some things that I really liked. One of the big wow things for me was the ease at which Visual Studio lets you build web services-based applications. The whole WSDL browser and code generator stuff is really slick. I built a small GUI-based app that used web services to retrieve weather info and display it in about 5 minutes. I was totally juiced by that.

I could continue offering up opinions about C#/.NET, but I really don't have enough experience yet for those opinions to have any meaning, so I'm going to stop. :)

There was an optional programming competition that was part of the Guerilla course, with prizes being awarded for the best programs. Being in class 12 hours a day didn't leave a lot of time for working on such a task, but Chris and I spent some time figuring out what we could put together. Chris and I hummed and hawwed about what we could do. In a room full of programming geeks, technologically-slanted apps should do the trick. However, experience has taught us that style wins over substance every time.

The group went to play laser tag one night and we convinced two of the instructors to have a go at Dance Dance Revolution. Chris took a great picture and he came up with the idea of hacking up the picture a bit and writing a program to simulate the instructors playing DDR.

We stayed up late a couple of nights and finally came up with a decent app. We animated the players, played music from the game, and gave each dancer their own skill level. The whole thing was really cheesy, but it looked hilarious.

Apparently everyone else thought so too and we won first prize. Our instincts to go with flash and dash and make fun of the instructors was proven correct.

All in all, we learned a lot of stuff about .NET during the course. I think the most important thing we learned is that the system is capable of a lot of stuff and we've been given just enough information to know how to dig deeper for whatever it is we need. I was really disappointed in the lack of coding, but the sheer amount of material to be covered meant that there just wasn't a lot of time for that.

Would I take another Guerilla course? I don't know. The instructors certainly knew their stuff (they were fabulous, actually), so going to another course just to collect info about a certain technology would be worthwhile. But I would certainly change their slogan.

- Mike

Whoa, where the heck have you been?

2005-09-06T09:21:00.000-03:00

Yeah, I've been gone for a while. Family life has been keeping me insanely busy. The time that I would normally use for updating the blog is usually taken up with baby duty.

A lot of stuff has been going on and I'm hoping to get caught up with everything over the next couple of weeks. Here's a brief rundown:

Andrea took Olivia to Toronto to visit her family for 2 weeks (you'd think I'd have had lots of time to catch up at that time - 'fraid not)
My running has been suffering - not only am I having knee problems, I'm having a hard time finding the time to get the running in
I went to Torrance (just outside of LA) to participate in a DevelopMentor Guerilla .NET training course
Just got back from the Nova East star party, organized by the Halifax chapter of the RASC

I'm on vacation this week, so I'm hoping to be able write up some details about the items I just listed. Stay tuned.

- Mike

9:00 has been cracked!

2005-07-15T21:40:00.000-03:00

I took the day off from running yesterday (not really by choice - crazy busy at home) and started my run today fairly refreshed. After the 9:20 per mile performance from Wednesday, I felt pretty good. As on Wednesday, I was looking forward to bettering my previous time, but not by anything significant. Big improvements come over time and not overnight. Or so I thought.

I've been reading some articles about distance training and one of them talked about how short distance runners, when slowed to marathon pacing, do far better than runners whose training is focused mostly on endurance. The reasoning is that the short distance runners develop better lung capacity and a more efficient running stride. The end result is that if you include lots of speed training along with the regular endurance training, you will see a shorter marathon time.

I've always had a very short running pace, which isn't really efficient. Tonight, I tried altering my running stride. Instead of short and fast strides, I took longer and slightly slower strides. I noticed an immediate improvement. Halfway through the run, I continued with the long strides, but I picked up the pace a bit to something a little closer to my usual pace. It was an intense struggle to maintain that pace through the last mile, but I managed.

The end result? 3 miles in 26:38. Woo!

Now that I know I can do it, I'm going to focus on perfecting my stride and slowly increasing the distance. My next milestone is going to be 5 miles in 45 minutes. I suspect it'll take me a few weeks to reach.

- Mike

A hard ol' go

2005-07-13T22:28:00.000-03:00

I was a little late getting out for my run tonight (9pm), but at least I still got out, which is important. It's certainly a lot easier finding time for a 3- or 4-mile run than it is for 5 or more. Even a 3-mile run takes me 45 or more minutes - 10 minutes for stretching, 30 minutes for the run, 5 or 10 more minutes for cooldown stretching.

I was very surprised by my performance tonight - I was able to bring my time down to 9:20 per mile. It was quite a struggle for me to maintain that pace for 3 miles, but I did it.

My struggle tonight elevated my already heightned respect and appreciation for the expert runners who can do a marathon in less than 3 hours. To do that, you need to run a 6-minute mile - for 26 miles. An amazing feat, to be sure.

I still have such a long way to go...

- Mike

And so we begin again... Part 2

2005-07-12T22:12:00.000-03:00

I haven't got a lot of running in over the last couple of weeks, so it's prudent that I start off my training with shorter distances for the next few weeks and then only start increasing the distance once I feel comfortable again.

I'm going to have to draw up some sort of training schedule soon, but I'm thinking about doing four runs of 3 miles and one run of 5 miles each week for the next couple of weeks. I will probably increase the long day distance by at least 1 mile per week. that should give me lots of time to get me to the 15-mile mark.

Completing 13 miles in less than 2 hours means that I'll have to run a 9-minute mile (13 X 9 = 1h57m). In all of the training for the full marathon that I did, I never really did better than a 10-minute mile, so cutting out an extra minute per mile and maintaining that pace is going to be difficult.

Tonight was the first night that I got out as part of my new training schedule and I surprised myself by running a 9:45 mile. By focusing on speed over short distances for the next few weeks, I should be able to get that down to 9 minutes.

- Mike

A change of plans

2005-07-12T09:07:00.000-03:00

It's been a few days since I made my fateful decision about dropping out of the Valley Harvest and I must admit that I've been pretty bummed out about the whole thing. Of course, there's really not much I can do about it, so I guess I'd better just suck it up.

And then this morning, things changed. Again.

I was in the shower thinking about how I was going to stay motivated until January, when I could start full-out training again. I tend to lose interest in things rather quickly, so I need lots of motivation to keep me focused on my goal. Trying to keep up a maintenance program for 6 months was going to be hard for me.

As I've mentioned before, I've really only ever been interested in the full 26 miles because running a half marathon is really quite easy (distance-wise, anyway). So if the distance itself wasn't going to be a challenge, I started thinking about what I could do to turn it into one.

When I ran the Bluenose back in May, it took me 2:35 to run the first 13 miles. If I'm ever going to crack the 4-hour mark for a full marathon, I'm going to have to bring that time down to less than 2 hours.

Ding! There's all the motivation I need right there.

And so the new plan is to run the Valley Harvest half-marathon and to do it in less than 2 hours. If I'm successful, it'll push me a long way towards breaking that 4-hour mark for the Bluenose next May.

- Mike

Decision time

2005-07-07T21:39:00.000-03:00

I've been trying very hard over the last few weeks to try to get myself up to a 25-30 mile week, but it's just been too difficult. Between work and spending time with the family, I'm unable to find a minimum of 1.5 hours a day to dedicate to training (minimum days are 5 miles).

And so I have decided to abandon my efforts for running in the Valley Harvest marathon in October.

With the Valley Harvest off the table, that leaves next year's Bluenose as the next race. Olivia will be much older and a little less needy by January, so finding the time to dedicate to training should be much easier. We'll just have to wait and see, I guess.

Of course, I don't want to start from scratch again come January, so I'm going to try to get in 3-5 miles as often as I can - 12 miles a week would be great, but I'll just have to wait and see how that plays out.

- Mike

And so we begin again...

2005-06-12T21:04:00.000-03:00

Even before I actually ran the Bluenose, I started working on the idea of running the Valley Harvest marathon in Kentville in October. Given the awful conditions for race day for the Bluenose, I figured I owed it to myself to try running a marathon in what would almost be guaranteed to be better conditions (knock on wood).

Once I had actually completed the race, I made up my mind that I was definitely going to go for the Valley Harvest. My original plan was to take a week off from training altogether and then jump right into a 30-mile-a-week maintenace program (5-5-5-5-10) until July or August and then start working on a full marathon plan. Alas, life had other plans for me.

Instead of taking a week to recover from the race, it took closer to two weeks. On top of that, Olivia was only about 6 weeks old and still quite a handful, needing to be fed every 2 or 3 hours. Add in the fact that I started back to work on May 31st and you can see how it was rather difficult to find the time to get a run in.

On June 8th, 2.5 weeks after the marathon, Andrea could see that I was getting frustrated and told me to go for a run. Now, I figured that after such a short time period (2.5 weeks of rest really doesn't seem like much when compared with the 20 weeks of training that I had just finished) that I'd be able to rip off 5 miles with little to no trouble at all. Boy, was I ever surprised. It was all I could do to finish 3 miles.

Ok, so I couldn't pull off 5 miles my first day out. I figured I'd run 3 miles a day for a few days to shake out the rust and then I'd be able to return to my normal 5-mile days. But I couldn't. I was so sore after those first 3 miles that I had to take a couple of days off. I couldn't believe how much my body atrophied in just 2.5 weeks!

At this point, I've managed to get in a couple of 5-mile days since getting back into the saddle, but I've been pretty sore - sorer than I normally would be after a 5-mile run. I'm hoping that if I take a little more time to ease back into my routine that I'll be fine and still have time to get back up to 30 miles a week before the end of July.

- Mike

Revenge of the Sith

2005-06-02T18:38:00.000-03:00

Despite Lucas' reputation for bringing out wooden performances and producing atrocious dialogue, I enjoyed The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. They certainly don't compare to the original trilogy, but they were entertaining nonetheless. As such, I expected to be entertained by Revenge of the Sith as well.

Going into the movie, there were three main things that I was interested in seeing:

exactly how Anakin became Darth Vader
how the gaps between the prequels and original trilogy would be wrapped up
how a story that really has no happy aspect to it whatsoever would be handled

And, I must say, I was quite pleased with how the whole thing played out.

Even with my initial lowered expectations, I must admit to being surprised by the relatively awful first 30-or-so minutes. I went into the movie expecting to see a dramatic sci-fi movie, not some hokey, badly-made comedy film. I just couldn't believe it. Thank god that the story settled down into the proper genre shortly after.

The love scenes between Anakin and Padme were, predictably, mediocre. There weren't many of them, which made me happy.

I was a little confused about why Anakin wasn't dressed up like a padawan anymore (longish hair, without the rat-tail), and the reason was never highlighted during the movie. Luckily, I've since watched the animated Clone Wars series, which explained everything.

Samuel L Jackson made it clear in the past the that he didn't want Mace Windu to go out as a punk, and I must say I was happy to see how the whole thing went down. I'm a little surprised that he was actually able to defeat Palpatine, especially when you consider that Yoda and Palpatine fought to a stalement later on in the Senate chamber. It was at this point that Anakin finally took his first step down the path to the Dark Side, delivering a "sucker punch" to Windu and allowing Palpatine to dispense with him.

Overall, I felt that Anakin's turn to the Dark Side happened much too quickly. We are given a definite time frame in the movie - probably about 8 months from when Padme tells Anakin that she's pregnant at the beginning of the movie until the twins are born at the end - and I find it hard to believe that Anakin was able to be turned from the Light Side, which he studied for more than 10 years, to the Dark Side that quickly. That would suggest that he was predisposed to the Dark Side, which surely the Jedi Council would have detected. At one point, Windu says that perhaps they have interpreted the prophecy incorrectly, which could help explain the rapid downfall.

I rather enjoyed the irony around the fact that Anakin eventually makes the leap from Light to Dark in order to learn the skills necessary to keep Padme from dying, only to find out that it was his turn to the Dark Side that leads to her death. And by his own hand at that! It's never explained in the movie, but I get the feeling that Palpatine was feeding the visions of Padme's death to Anakin in order to push him over the edge.

I felt that Hayden Christensen's acting was the worst of everyone in AotC (no fault of his, really), but I was very surprised by his performance at times in RotS. I actually felt his hatred for the Jedi and Obi-Wan near the end of the movie.

I loved how all of the loose ends were tied up. We got to see how the droids would not know anything of the past in ANH. We got to see how the twins were separeted. We got to see how Yoda and Obi-Wan ended up as they did. I loved how Grand Moff Tarkin was introduced at the very end. The one thing that didn't make sense is how far along the Death Star was at the end. There are 18 years between RotS and ANH and, if I remember correctly, the station becomes fully operational shortly before the beginning of ANH. What took so long and how did they manage to hide its existence for so long? There are only a few years between the destruction of the Death Star in ANH and the creation of the new one in RotJ. Why the difference? I suppose they could have started the second one shortly after the first, but I think this was a slight timing oversight.

In the end, it wasn't the best movie I've ever seen, but it was definitely the better of the prequel movies and one that I am anxious to watch again.

- Mike

5:38:01!

2005-05-22T20:30:00.000-03:00

I can hardly believe it - I ran and finished a marathon!

It was, without a doubt, the greatest challenge I've ever faced, made all the harder by the deplorable race day conditions.

I had four main goals for the race:

Actually complete the distance (ie, all 26.2 miles)
Run non-stop for as long as possible
Run as much of the course as possible
Finish somewhere around 5:20

Having completed several 16- and 18-mile distances during my training, I had no doubt whatsoever that I would be able to cover the entire distance through some combination of running and walking.

Knowing that I could complete the course, barring some sort of freak incident, I wanted to be able to run as long as I possibly could. I was shooting for at least 20 miles, but anything more than 18 would be great.

I acknowledged the fact that I probably couldn't run the entire distance (it's hard to train, sleep, and eat right when you've got a newborn), but I did want to really push myself to run every step of the distance that I could.

The 5:20 finish time was really a stretch goal, but under good running conditions, I felt that I could probably make it.

As I described last time, the forecast for the day was none too favourable. In fact, deplorable would be a little more accurate. I must admit that, although I knew it was going to be bad, I still was pretty unhappy when I woke up in the morning and saw the awful conditions. My resolve never wavered, however, and I eagerly prepared for the race.

Finally, after showering, eating, getting dressed, and dropping Olivia off at the grandparents', Andrea and I were off to the Metro Centre.

The first bit of news we were given once we got there was that the start time was going to be delayed at least an hour - ie, original start time of 9am was pushed back to at least 10am. That wasn't such a big deal to me, but it did mean that Andrea would not be able to see me actually start off (she had to leave to get ready for the christening of her best friends' daughter, who happens to be 3 weeks to the day older than Olivia).

Along with hoping for better weather conditions by waiting the extra hour, we also found out that the delay was a result of the planners trying to figure out how to salvage the race. With the high wind conditions, it was no longer safe to run across the bridge. It was also mentioned that parts of the course in Dartmouth were flooded out.

There was quite a bit of talk of canceling the race. However, the organizers realized that that was not an option - too many people spent too much time training to have the race scrubbed. There was also talk of reducing the full marathon to only a half. I really hoped that they weren't going to do that. I had trained to run the whole distance and if I couldn't do that, I wasn't going to bother at all. After much delay, the organizers were able to get the city to allow the first half of the course to be run twice.

The time for the start finally arrived. Everyone started lining up, getting ready for the starting gun. The first person out of the gate was the lone wheelchair athlete. There was a great amount of cheering and applause when he crossed the start line.

I was surprised by the electricity in the air. I was very excited about getting started, but I was also really nervous. I'm not really sure why, but I do have a habit of getting nervous when doing new things. *shrug*

The full and half marathoners all started at the same time, so there were a lot of runners at the start line. In fact, it took about 5 minutes from the starting gun just to get to the start line. As a result, my "official" time is longer than my actual chip time.

Although the weather was awful, there were a lot of supporters along the track, waving like crazy and cheering everyone on. It was really great. I probably spent too much time/energy acknowledging the cheers, but it was great fun.

The first few miles of the race were pretty painless. There was lots of rain and wind, but I didn't really notice it. Well, not until the course turned around and we were running straight into it. I'm not sure of the wind speeds, but I'd be willing to bet that the winds were at least 40km/h. With the gusts, sometimes it felt that I was running up against a brick wall. It was kind of demoralizing - running as hard as you can and not making any real progress. We had to run into the wind for several miles and I was beginning to wonder if I'd be able to keep it up the first time, let along a second lap. Of course, I was completely soaked by all of the rain by this point and the strong wind made things very, very cold. It was not pleasant by any stretch of the imagination.

Around the 8 or 9 mile mark, I started to wonder if I was going to be able to make it. Luckily the course turned again and we were running with the wind, which gave some reprieve. However, most of the second half of the first lap was uphill. That kind of sucked, but at least I wasn't quite so cold (my hands were literally blue for most of the race).

Finally, I go to the 13-mile mark. I stepped over the line and began the second lap. I was pretty sore and tired at that point and my heart sank a little at the thought of having to do all of that again. The one thing that really kept me going was the goal of trying to run more than 18 miles without stopping.

Running along Barrington street, straight into the wind, for several miles was incredibly difficult the second time around. I pushed and pushed as hard as I could, each step becoming more and more difficult. It was all I could do to make it to PPP. Finally, at the 20-mile mark, I had to stop. I also had to pee like a race horse, so I stopped. It sucked that I had to stop, but at least I managed more than 18 miles without stopping.

From that point on, I would walk for a bit and then run for a bit. I tried very hard to run as much as I could. Of the final 6 miles, I probably walked about half. That disappointed me, but I was just so tired and spent. The wind really took its toll on me.

It was right around the 22-mile mark that I came upon Andrea and Emma, my niece. Andrea had been planning on meeting me in various spots along the course to cheer me on. I've got to tell you, seeing the two of them there, waving signs and hollering at me really spurred me on. It was only about 30 seconds, but it made all of the difference in the world.

As soon as I ran past them, they got back into the car and drove to another spot and waited for me. They did this a couple more times along the remaining miles. When I got within two miles of the end, I told them that they should probably head over to the finish line.

I walked for a little bit until I got to the 2km remaining point. I wanted to finish as strong as I could and I pushed hard to run right to the end. There's a bit of a nasty hill right before the finish line and it was quite a struggle, but my training route ends with a mile-long hill, so I was used to having to work hard to finish. I got to the top of the hill and a volunteer directed me towards the finish line which, thankfully, was downhill.

I ran into the Metro Centre and Andrea, Emma, and her parents (my sister and brother-in-law) were all cheering me on. There was almost no one left, but I didn't care. The sense of accomplishment I felt was almost overwhelming. I felt so good that I almost didn't want to stop running. In fact, a volunteer had to tell me to stop so that she could cut the chip off my shoe. :)

The official time - 5:38:01. Slower than the 5:20 that I was shooting for, but pretty respectable, given the conditions.

I've never been so tired or spent in my whole life, but I'd also never felt so invigorated. I can't even describe how I felt. And pretty much the first words out of my mouth were, "oh yeah, I'm going to do that again." Robin Williams once remarked that while you could certainly spend your time doing cocaine, running a marathon gives the same high and only cost a pair of shoes.

Interestingly enough, some combination of my elation at having finished and the excitement of my family attracted a reporter from the Halifax Herald, who asked me some questions about why I was running, how long I trained for, etc. It'll be in the paper in a couple of days, I suspect.

And so now I plan to take a week or two off to recover and then start thinking about what I'm going to do next. The Valley Harvest marathon in Kentville is in October.

- Mike

Not looking so good...

2005-05-21T17:20:00.000-03:00

The weather hasn't been so good for the last few days, what with the constant stream of rain, and it's looking pretty miserable for tomorrow's race. That's certainly a drag.

The Weather Network has a 7-day forecast that I have been watching intently since last weekend. The weather is notoriously hard to predict in this area and the forecasts are wrong as often as not. It's hard enough coming up with an accurate short-term forecast, so when I saw rain for the 22nd the week before (ie, the tail end of the 7-day forecast), that pretty much told me that I could look forward to sun. As the week progressed, the forecast for the 22nd continued to change and at one point, they were predicting sun and good temperatures for both Saturday and Sunday. Alas, that was not to be.

Heavy rain started near the end of the week (and I mean heavy). The forecast for Sunday changed again around Thursday - lots of rain, relatively cold temperatures, lots of wind. It remained the same on Friday and here it is on Saturday and the forecast for tomorrow hasn't changed.

Oddly enough, it's been quite nice today. No real sunny breaks, but no rain, not a lot of wind, etc. Given the forecast for tomorrow, the race should have been bumped up to today.

So how are things looking for tomorrow? 50mm of rain, winds of 40km/h, and single digit temperates. How lovely.

With that kind of weather, what to wear for race day becomes very important. If it was going to be nice, my running shirt and shorts would be sufficient. If it was going to be cold/windy and not raining, my sweat pants and a sweater would be fine. However, the rain adds a whole new dimension. The sweater and sweat pants would be ok, except for the fact that they will hold a lot of water, making the run even more difficult, especially with all of that wind. If I don't dress warmly, though, hypothermia will be a real problem. I decided that I needed to buy some appropriate clothing.

Half an hour later, I'm back at the Running Room. They had all kinds of great water-resistant windbreaker like jackets. I did some research on the website before I headed down and had two potential jackets picked out - the SOHO jacket and the Unisex Reflective jacket (some sort of Running Room-branded jacket). From my research, I preferred the Unisex, but the cheapskate in me had me leaning towards the SOHO (hey, $15 is $15!).

Once I got to the store and really looked at the two jackets, I opted for the Unisex. I liked the look, feel, and features of the jacket better. There were lots of colours to choose from (although I would have to go to the expo booth to find a blue or red one) and although I'm historically into drab and dark colours, I figured I'd spice things up a bit. I hummed and hawed between the yellow (listed as gold on the site) and bright green and decided that yellow was the way to go. So add another $80 to my equipment total. :)

One of the nifty things about the jacket are the zippers that run along the sleeves and down the sides of the jacket, which serve as vents. I won't be needing those tomorrow, but I'm sure they'll have some use in the future. I was wearing the jacket around the store and noticed that sometimes the zipper would rub up against the underside of my arm. I immediately recognized that as a source for chafing, especially on a long run, and the short-sleeved running shirt that I already have left some of my bare arm exposed to the zipper. I'm sure you can guess where this is going... $50 later, I found a long-sleeved mesh shirt (very similar to my short-sleeved one).

Now that I've got my new shirt and jacket, I'm all set for tomorrow. I tend to generate a lot of heat while I'm running, so I think I'll be fine if I wear my shorts only (ie, no sweat pants).

And so I wait....

- Mike

What a little piggy!

2005-05-17T08:39:00.000-03:00

There's no doubt about it - Olivia is a ravenous little girl and has been pretty much since the moment she was born.

Olivia was 8lbs 1oz when she was born on April 18th. As is typical with all newborns, she lost some weight over the next couple of days. Olivia was having quite a bit of trouble getting a hang of the whole breastfeeding thing, so she didn't get a whole lot of food the first couple of days. On the 19th, she was down to 7lbs 7oz. On the 20th, she was 7lbs 6oz. Nothing really out of the ordinary, but the nurses were cautious.

Because she hadn't really been getting a lot of food over those two days, she was pretty upset a lot of the time. She'd feed at the breast for 30 or 45 minutes, be calm for 10-20, and then start screaming again. Two days of this behaviour finally took its toll on Andrea and I and we were at our wits' end.

Recognizing that we were about ready to give Olivia away to the next person that walked by, our nurse suggested that we try giving her some formula so that she'd at least have a full belly and let us get some sleep. We started with only one ounce, but as soon as she finished it, she quieted right down and went to sleep. We've never looked back since.

Breast milk is best, of course, so Andrea was pumping off as much as she could during the day (and she continues doing that today), but we continued to supplement with formula. It was 1oz at first, but with each feeding, she would take more and more. By the middle of the 3rd day, she was almost up to 4oz.

As a result of feeding her the formula (and the sheer amount she eats), her weight loss obviously stopped and she actually started to gain back a few ounces. We left the hospital on the 22nd and the public health nurse visited us at home on the 23rd. When she weighed Olivia, she was back up to her birth weight.

Olivia is now consuming 4-6oz per feeding, with 5-6 feedings a day, and the results are incredible. By the 27th, she was 8lbs 14oz. On May 9th, she was 9lbs 14oz. She also grew 2 inches in length between the 27th and 9th. She's starting to bust out of the 3 month sleepers we have for her, resulting in Andrea hanging out in the second-hand clothing stores (we're pretty lucky in that we have 2 very good stores within a 10-minute drive).

Olivia is progressing incredibly well, and I very much look forward to the next stage of her continued development.

- Mike

The right equipment makes all the difference

2005-05-11T21:08:00.000-03:00

I've been meaning to write this up a long time ago and now that I'm home for 6 weeks with Olivia, I've finally got a few minutes to try to catch up with some of the things that I've wanted to write about over the last couple of months. (I can't believe I just said that I actually have a few minutes!)

I tend to be quite a cheapskate, so one of the appealing notions of running was that I wouldn't need any additional equipment. I already had a pair of sneakers, t-shirts, and some shorts, so I was good to go. Or so I thought.

I began my training in earnest at the beginning of January. I was only running a maximum of 5 miles one day a week at this point (3 and 4 miles for the other days in the week), so I hadn't encountered any problems. Shortly into February, however, my feet started getting sore on my long days (6, 7, 8 miles). I knew I was in real trouble when I started developing blisters on my feet. Andrea had been telling me all along that I really should invest in a good pair of shoes, but I had been resisting that idea because of the cost (cheapskate, remember?). Finally, I realized that she was right and decided to give in.

I probably could have gone just about anywhere to buy a good pair of running shoes (Cleve's, SportChek, etc). Instead, Andrea convinced me that I should go into the Running Room. A friend of hers at work went there and had been raving about how informed the staff was and the various services they offer, such as running clinics. I knew I'd pay a premium for anything I'd buy there, but I decided to check it out. And boy, am I ever glad I did.

It was busy in the store when I got there (I was pretty surprised by that, actually), but while I was waiting, I noticed that all of the staff seemed to know all of the clientele. That was pretty reassuring, since that meant the store got a lot of repeat business.

Someone finally got to me. She took a look at my feet and asked "You've never been here before, have you?" I wasn't quite sure how she knew, but I acknowledged her assertation.

"Take off your shoes and roll up your pant legs."

As I complied, I noticed that everyone in the store was walking around in sock feet with their pant legs rolled up. So that's how she knew. :)

"Have you ever bought a good pair of shoes before?" she asked.

I looked at her and said, matter of factly, "I've never paid more than $30 for a pair of sneakers in my life."

She gave me a look that hinted that maybe I was just there to buy the shoes and had no intention of using them for training. "Well, you're going to pay a lot more than that today."

As I said, I'm really glad I went there. I had no idea that buying a pair of good running shoes was such a complicated process. I always thought that a shoe was a shoe was a shoe. Not so. Manufacturers make different types of shoes, based on foot structure and how you walk. I don't remember all of the details and I'm too lazy to look them up, but I was completely surprised.

The associate had me walk and run up and down the store so that she could see how I impacted the floor. "Aha! So that's why I needed to roll up my pants," I mused. It was kinda weird at first, but everyone else was doing it too, so it wasn't too bad.

After a few minutes of analyzing my walk and my feet, the associate went to the wall of shoes and selected a pair of Saucony Omni 4 shoes. I'd never even heard of them before. Amazingly enough, they were an absolute perfect fit. I'm really not sure if it was skill or luck, but I was impressed anyway (I'm willing to bet it was skill). Just for kicks, she brought me several other pairs of varying manufacturers and types to try, but none of them really fit. I opted for the first pair.

During the fitting, she eventually asked why I was looking for a good pair of shoes. I mentioned that I was training for the Bluenose Marathon. I think she was relieved that I planned on actually using the shoes for their intended purpose. I mentioned that I was getting blisters and she indicated that blisters are usually caused by improperly fitting shoes and improper socks. I tend to wear cotton socks, which tend to hold moisture. She immediately recommended that I buy a proper pair of running socks (mostly a polyester-like material that wicks moisture away). I really didn't know what I was doing, but I bought a pair anyway.

And so I continued my training. And lo and behold, the blisters went away and my feet stopped hurting, almost immediately. After only a couple of days, I was very glad that I paid about $140 for a pair of sneakers. I also tried wearing both the new socks and some of my old socks. I immediately noticed a difference. Again, I was so surprised. Eventually, I noticed that one particular bag of sports socks I got for Christmas worked really, really well (even better than the running socks I bought), so I've been sticking with those ever since.

As my training distances increased, my nipples began to start chafing. Like everything else I wear, most of my t-shirts were 100% cotton. Luckily I found a great tip on the web site where I found my training plan - the tip was to apply Vaseline to your nipples before running. What a huge difference. Instead of being rubbed almost to the point of bleeding, I suffered no problems at all, no matter what the distance. Eventually my wife bought me a proper running shirt (again, made of a wicking material) which has done wonders for me. Sometimes I finish a run and my shirt is actually dry!

So it turns out that my initial thoughts about running being a cheap hobby were completey incorrect. I've laid out $140 for shoes, $10 for socks, $40 for a running shirt, $20 for shorts, and $40 for a 2-bottle water carrier. Still cheaper than playing hockey, I guess. And had I not done it, I'd have given up on the training several months ago.

- Mike

Olivia has arrived!

2005-04-25T10:04:00.000-03:00

As I mentioned way back in February, I'm going to be a dad. Well, the day finally arrived.

Olivia Lauren Digdon was born on April 18th, 2005, at 6:24pm via C-section. She weighed 8lbs 1oz and was 20.5 inches long. She's got a full head of very light hair (just like her mom and dad) and bright blue eyes. Despite a plethora of claims stating otherwise, she does NOT look like Don, Fred, or Brian. :)

It's been an interesting journey up to this point and it's kind of hard to believe that she's finally here.

Andrea and I had been trying for about 18 months. The fact that we hadn't been successful really wasn't bothering me at all, but it was really upsetting Andrea. I knew it would happen eventually, but that didn't keep Andrea from being a little depressed.

So, let's fast forward to August.

Andrea gives me a call at work. "Are you sitting down?"

"Why?", I ask. I spent a couple of seconds trying to figure out what surprise she might be about to spring on me. Andrea had been taking Clomid for several months, but her prescription ran out and hadn't been on it for a couple of months, so pregnancy was the last thing on my mind.

"I think I'm pregnant!"

I felt some excitement and disbelief all at the same time. "Pregnant? Are you sure?"

"Well, I just took two tests, and they both came back 'positive'."

We were both surprised. She has mentioned that she's not even sure why she took the test in the first place.

Andrea has the unfortunate luck of people not being available when she has exciting news. Back when I proposed to her, she tried desperately to call her mom & dad, but they had mistakenly knocked the phone off the hook. We eventually had to drive to their house to give them the good news. This time around, I was scheduled to go out to dinner for work with some people from our RWC head office. Dinner was slated to start at 7, so I didn't have enough time to get home first. I also knew it would likely go late (I believe I got home around 11pm). So poor Andrea is bouncing off the walls and I couldn't be there to share the moment with her.

Apparently Andrea still didn't quite believe that she was truly pregnant, even though the home pregnancy tests are typically 99% accurate. While I was out for dinner, she ran down to the grocery store to buy a couple more home pregnancy tests. I believe she eventually took 5 different tests, just to be sure. They all came up "positive."

I eventually got home and Andrea was still up - she was absolutely glowing. I can't remember the last time I saw her so happy. We stayed up for several hours talking about the major journey that we were about to undertake.

And what an interesting journey it's turned out to be so far.

- Mike

Dodged a bullet

2005-03-28T08:47:00.000-04:00

I've just realized that it's been awhile since I've written anything. A lot of stuff has been going on, so I figured I'd better bring everyone up-to-date.

Last time I talked about the groin injury I was suffering with. I was pretty cranky about the whole thing, especially since I had just registered for the race the day before the injury. While I was moping about the house, Andrea gave me a fresh perspective.

"Ok, so you can't run the full marathon. So what? There's nothing that says you can't walk part of that 26 miles. I'll still be very proud of you."

While I admit that the thought of not being able to run the whole race was certainly going to be a disappointment, the furthest distance I had ever covered was a mere 13 km during a forced march (with full pack!) during my basic training days. The ability to run/walk/crawl 26 miles was still going to be a significant accomplishment. I started to feel a little better.

I ended up taking the rest of the week off from running.

My normal training routine is to do the long run on Sundays, take Monday and Friday off, run a short distance on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and run a medium distance on Wednesday. Since I wasn't feeling 100% by the time the next Sunday rolled around (scheduled for 12 miles), I had to rework my regimen. It's very important that I get the long distances in before the race, so I absolutely did not want to drop any. So, instead of running the long distance at the beginning of the week, I decided to run them at the end of the week (Saturdays instead of Sundays). By running the 4 and 5 mile distances at a 5.5mph during the week, that gave me a little extra time to recover from the injury.

So, Saturday the 19th rolls around. This was going to be the day that would likely dictate my future as a marathon runner. If I managed to complete the run with no problems, I figured everything would be good to go for the rest of my training schedule. If there were any problems, I was going to have to take several weeks off, leaving me destined for either the half-marathon (which was probably the most likely) or running and walking the full (less likely, especially because of the time limit).

I actually felt pretty good during the run - good enough that I did 13 miles instead of 12. That last mile was absolutely brutal, but that was because I probably wasn't properly fueled before the run (one bowl of oatmeal in the morning was not enough). I did manage to complete the distance in 2:35, but it was far from my desired pace.

Just to be sure, I took two days off after the run, leaving me with only 4 runs during the week instead of the usual 5. I felt really good all week.

This weekend, I went for the regularly scheduled 14-mile run and I had no problems at all (if you don't count a 20 km/h headwind as a problem!). I finished in 2:40, which was only 6 minutes off of my 5.5 mph pace. I was pretty happy about that. I suspect that the carb overloading I did the day before and in the morning (2 bowls of oatmeal) went a long way to helping me through.

I'd like to think that things are back on track. I'm very careful about my stretching, and I try to stretch out my groin area frequently. So far it appears to be working. Provided that nothing else happens during the remaining 8 weeks of training (I can't believe I'm halfway through!), I feel like I'll be able to make through the full race.

Keep those fingers crossed!

- Mike

My worst fears realized

2005-03-10T12:48:00.000-04:00

So I've been doing this running thing for a few months now, steadily making progress with my 16-week training plan. For the most part, I've been running indoors, mostly because I hate running in the cold. However, the weather has been pretty decent lately, so I've been running outside as much as I can.

On March 6th, I went for my first long outdoor run - 11 miles. It was great to be outdoors, but let me tell you - running outdoors is a lot harder than running indoors. Not only do you have to deal with headwinds (of which there were plenty), there are hills, uneven terrain, and the effect the cold has on your breathing. The first 8 miles were pretty good, I must say, but I struggled through the last 3. It was very hard, but I made it, and in 2:05, which was only 5 minutes behind my desired 5.5 mph pace.

*fast forward to March 9th*

When I go for the long runs, I try to maintain the 5.5 mph pace. When I do the shorter 3-5 mile runs, I like to try to up the pace to 6 mph, just because of the extra effort it requires.

I did a 4-mile run on the 8th (after one day of rest from the 11-mile run), at 6 mph and had no problems whatsoever. The 9th was also a 4-mile day and I continued with the 6 mph pace. Somewhere around the 2.5-mile mark, though, something wasn't right. Thinking it just a sore muscle, I finished up the run. I did think about dropping my speed down to 5.5, but decided against it. It would prove to be my undoing.

After hobbling back to the locker, I realized that I pulled a groin muscle. It wasn't the worst thing to ever happen to me, but I was limping around quite badly. I walked around some more and did some stretching to try to help it along, but nothing seemed to help.

"No problem," I thought. "I'll sleep on it tonight, take the day off tomorrow, and everything should be fine. I'll only lose one day, but that won't impact my training."

I was particularly worried about this, since I had finally registered for the race the night before.

*8 hours of sleep later*

I can barely get out of bed. I know now that perhaps something serious is happening here. My hopes of running the race are dwindling at a rapid rate. At this point, there's nothing I can do but wait and see if the problem corrects itself before I have to throw the whole thing out the window.

And so I wait...

A marathon? What the hell am I doing??

2005-02-27T21:06:00.000-04:00

Not only have I been putting on a few pounds over the last few years, I've also been pretty slothy. I've been thinking about how to rectify the situation, but I've been unable to come up with a good plan.

When I was younger, I used to go to the gym and lift weights at least 5 days a week. Of course, it was easier back then. My dad had a weight set in the basement, which I used a lot during high school. While as a student and an employee at Dalhousie University, a membership to Dalplex was included and was 60 seconds away. While living in Ottawa, I had to actually walk right past the gym to get to the office. I'm not exactly what you would call "dedicated", and history shows that I'm usually not willing to go through any sort of effort to actually get to the gym, which is really the only reason why I managed to get to the gym at all in the past. I once joined the Y, but it took 15 minutes to walk there. After a couple of cold mornings, I pretty much gave up.

I've been thinking about buying a Bowflex for several years, since if the equipment is in the house, I will definitely use it. They're pretty expensive though and, with all of the other things we needed to buy, it just was not possible to buy the Bowflex.

What to do, what to do....

About a year ago, a guy that I went to school with (and a former co-worker) was talking about his new-found love affair with endurance athletics. He spends his time training for ironman triathalons, and his website contains pictures of him participating and a blog describing his efforts. I went through the whole thing and decided that if he could do it, so could I. Well, at least some portion of it anyway. :)

I figured that training for and participating in a triathalon was probably a little too aggressive to attempt, at least for now. Financially and logistically, it would be rather difficult since I'd have to buy a bike and find a swimming pool (there are none anywhere around me). However, I did have a pair of sneakers, so I figured that I'd focus on the one component of the triathalon that was readily available to me.

I'm going to run a marathon.

As luck would have it, Halifax has it's own marathon - the Bluenose Marathon. The inaugural race was in 2004 and will be run again in May of 2005. So, armed with a pair of sneakers and a real timetable and goal, I began my training.

Not knowing anything about how to train for a marathon, I turned to the all-knowing, all-seeing Internet. My research led me here.
The site lays out a 26-week training schedule. Since I had lots of time to prepare, I started following the plan.

The pre-requisite for the plan is that you need to be able to run for a minimum of 30 minutes without stopping, and that's what I started working on. It took me a couple of months, but I did eventually make it and I then started working on the training schedule. And then two things happened....

By now, we're starting to get into October, so the days are getting shorter and the weather is starting to get a little colder. Things were also pretty busy at work. As you can probably guess, my training started to slide. Eventually I stopped altogether.

I spent a month considering how I was going to continue. I knew that I could run outside, but I really am a wuss and I don't like the cold. I considered getting a treadmill, but the money issue that kept me from buying a Bowflex continued to be an issue.

It was around this time that my employer indicated that the company would subsidize a gym membership. As it turns out, there is a Nubody's gym just up the street from my house and they have all kinds of treadmill equipment. It looked like things were going to get back on track for my training.

The gym membership plan wasn't going to kick in until the beginning of January, and having not done any running for 2 months and the May deadline fast approaching, I knew that I was not going to be able to continue following the 6-month plan.

The marathon was now a mere 5 months away and I knew that I was going to have to build myself back up to running 5 miles before I could even start the real training. I worked out a plan to get me built up again in 4 weeks, leaving only 16 weeks until the marathon. As luck would have it, I managed to find a 16-week training schedule here. The plan is aggressive and there's no room for setbacks or slacking, but I was confident that I could do it.

And now here we are, the end of February. I managed to get myself back up to 5 mile runs and I started the training schedule, right on time. Today I started week 5 of the schedule, which consisted of a 10-mile run. It's the furthest distance I've ever run or walked and while it just about killed me, I did it.

There's still a lot of work ahead of me, but with every successful run, I feel more and more confident in my ability to actually accomplish this goal. I will continue to share my trials and tribulations during this process.

- Mike

Yeah, it's been a while

2005-02-23T10:46:00.000-04:00

Ok, so doing an update once a year isn't going to make for a very interesting blog. :)

There's lots of stuff that's been going on in the last year, and I plan to write about as much as I can in the next few weeks. Here's a quick summary:

I went to my first star party last August, which prompted me to finally upgrade my department store telescope to something a little more substantial
I found out that I'm going to be a dad
I got inspired to train for and run a marathon

I'm not very good at organizing my time, but I am hoping that the training, all of my various hobbies, and taking care of a newborn will teach me some valuable time management skills. If it works, I'll find that I have more time to keep this site up-to-date.

- Mike

Jumping on the bandwagon

2004-05-17T16:23:00.000-03:00

Gee, another weblog. What a surprise.

I read a handful of weblogs and the creators of those logs spend endless time extolling the virtues of weblogging. Enough people have written about it that I figured it was time for me to see what all of the hype is about. So here I am.

Let me start off by saying that I have lots to say and I have nothing to say. Confusing, yes, but you'll eventually see what I mean. I'm just as likely to ramble on about absolutely nothing as I am about something that I'm passionate about.

So what turns my crank? I'm a senior architect for a software company, so I'm very interested in application frameworks and the techniques required for building good software. When I'm not thinking about that, I like to concentrate on my three main hobbies: playing guitar (acoustic), driving British cars (1979 MG Midget), and (most recently) amateur astronomy.

I've always wanted to improve my writing skills (I'm rather envious of the REALLY good writers out there), so that will certainly be a goal for this weblog as much as yakking endlessly about things in which no one else will be interested. :)

Having said that, I throw open my arms and shout a big "Hello world, here I am!" And perhaps some of you will share my little corner of the Internet.

- Mike