The latest in "scandal" news is Sharon Stone offhandedly suggesting that the recent earthquake in China might be related to bad karma for that country's treatment of Tibet - and how it made her cry when she heard about Tibetans helping out Chinese afterwards, despite them having been treated badly. Because, shouldn't we all do our best to help others out, even if they aren't nice to us?

This has apparently outraged several people in China, one a theatre owner who's now banned all of her films and complained about how she's bringing personal politics into the discussion of a natural disaster.

I find this quite humorous. Of all the cultures to understand a passing comment about karma and how things come around in cycles, you'd think that China would be somewhere at the top of the list - given that they embrace philosophies that embody that principle to a degree more than most others.

Disagreeing with the implication that they have done something bad to warrant the disaster in return is one thing, but reacting in such immediate hostility to the possible suggestion of karma at work (as well as to the positive sentiment toward Tibetans) is silly.

I have a problem. After having watched Blu-ray movies on my home theatre system I'm now spoiled. While regular DVDs still look good, Blu-ray discs look even better. This is now preventing me from purchasing any more DVDs - unless I suspect that they might either never be released on Blu-ray, or that their source quality is such that Blu-ray, itself, won't make things look better than they already do.

My problem, however, is my existing movie collection. How many of the movies that I currently own do I want to "double dip" on? In other words, what do I buy in Blu-ray that I already have in standard DVD format? One answer is anything that relies on really good cinematography. Another, is any movie that I really like. The issue with the second answer, however, is that I only have movies that I really like in my collection.

Also, what do I do with all of my regular DVDs when I end up with their Blu-ray equivalent? Keep them, give them away, sell them somehow?

For years now I've used TextPad as my text editor and have always liked it. When it went from version 4 to version 5, however, I found that the new version (written in a different language) had some issues. This was especially evident with the initial version 5 release. The community forums had a common theme: people complained about a major version change that seemingly only introduced bugs and degraded the user experience. The minor version updates fixed most of these. But the whole experience of a major version release with no new significant feature set changes, and things being broken initially, soured my experience with it. I could have gone back to version 4 again (and I did briefly) but my nature is to remain at the latest release of whatever I use.

I started looking around for some alternatives. I looked at freeware products first, my first choice in applications. In that category, I can highly recommend PSPad. It does everything that TextPad does, and some more, and just feels more comfortable to me. Plus, it's free. The only thing that prevented me from switching to it was a lack of good macro support. I review, and report on, on daily basis Bugzilla entries for new and fixed SeaMonkey problems. I had set up a series of macros in TextPad to do this, but was tired of not being able to have it solicit me for input, paste what I'd entered into my document, and then continue working with that. So, unfortunately, I had to leave PSPad behind.

I finally settled on UltraEdit, and paid for a license. I've just now finished tweaking my macros, and I must say that my daily bug reporting experience is now far better than it ever was under TextPad. I know that I'm using only a portion of UltraEdit's features, but I already ready know that it's a far better product than TextPad. (Not that I want to disparage TextPad - it served me well over the years - it's just that UltraEdit is, relatively speaking, a better tool.)

My opinion of American politics just keeps on being reinforced. Most recently by two examples of what I would call absurd reactions to factual events.

Both Florida and Michigan violated Democratic National Committee rules by holding their primaries earlier than was allowed. As a result, these two states have had their delegates stripped from national results. Now, however, people are complaining because the race between Obama and Clinton may be too close to call if neither Florida nor Michigan are counted.

What's the answer? That's something for the DNC to decide. But, if I'm to give my personal opinion, whatever answer is arrived at must not include counting anybody in either of these two states. There should be no second primary, there should be no counting of partial results, and there should be no "proportional" or 50 / 50 representation as have been variously proposed. If you violate a rule, and are then penalized, you don't get a "redo" just because of other events that happen.

If the DNC wants to change its by-laws to say that any state that violates its rules gets no representation - unless by having this happen something inconvenient happens down the road, in which case something else happens - that's fine. But they haven't done that yet. Also, assuming certain assumptions about regulatory boards and by-laws, any by-law change at this point could not apply to the 2008 primaries and election, only those held in future years. (I may be wrong about the timing here, and it may actually be possible for a by-law change to take effect for this election, but I'd be surprised.)

In short, get over it, live with it, and come up with another solution. I would almost find it fitting if, because of this screw up, there was no viable Democratic nominee at all. While this would not be my personal choice in terms of who I'd like to see as the next American President, it does make some kind of logical sense to me.

The other thing that really bugs me is the reaction to Geraldine Ferraro's statements about race and the number of votes given to each candidate. The word "racism" is meant to denote an irrational negative reaction against somebody, or some group of people, based on ethnic origin. Ferraro was not saying anything negative about anybody, she was simply making a statement of fact. The statistics clearly show that the majority of black voters have been voting for Obama. Similarly, Clinton has captured a majority of female voters. Statistics cannot be racist - or sexist.

While it's certainly possible that there is some explanation for Obama getting the majority of black votes, and Clinton getting the majority of female votes, aside from the fact of their race and gender - it's far from likely. In the absence of any kind of confirmed alternate hypothesis, the most likely reason for the votes that they're getting has to be seen as due to their race and their gender. If the two candidates were the same race and gender, the voter demographics would be considerably different than they are right now - and votes would come down purely to a consideration of policy and personality.

But, given that they are not of the same race or gender, I see no reason why Ferraro's statement should have caused anybody to react to her in a negative way. Anybody looking at the facts reasonably should be able to see that, statistically speaking and everything being equal, Obama would not be getting the same number of votes if he weren't black - nor would Clinton be getting the same number of votes if she were not a woman. (As a sad commentary on the way people react to such things, however, I do understand the political reasons behind Ferraro having to leave the Clinton campaign. I don't think that she was wrong in what she said - I just think that she was politically unwise in saying it.)

I have no doubt if there were a presidential candidate in a wheelchair that they would be garnering the majority of votes from people also in wheelchairs or otherwise handicapped. While it's nice to think that "justice is blind", and people vote purely on policy and personality, this is not the case. It's just not human nature to completely ignore things like this. Look at nationalism. Does it really make sense that, only because of my geographical location, I should be prouder of Canada than any other country? Surely, that should be based on things that the country does better than others - not just on the fact that I happen to live here. The same goes for sports. Are the Maple Leafs really the best hockey team, and the team I should be rooting for, just because I happen to live closer to Toronto than to any other city? No. But that's how things work. It's human nature and it has to be acknowledged.

Here's just another example of political correctness being taken to a silly extreme. Jane Fonda was recently on The View and was talking about The Vagina Monologues. At one point, she referred to a section of the show by it's name - "Cunt". Shortly after this happened, Meredith Vierra decided to issue an apology on behalf of Fonda, The View, and NBC. All sorts of other people also got up in arms, including the Parents Television Council, calling Fonda's utterance, and NBC allowing it to be broadcast, an "outrage".

So, it's okay for the Bush administration to defend the torture of alleged terrorists by snowboarding, to attack other countries on suspicion of harbouring weapons of mass destruction, to have no problem with blood, mutilation, and other graphic violence in mainstream movies, and to reap the profits of the exploitation of society by oil companies while at the same time denying or not acting on global warming - because this would impact their bottom line. But, apparently, despite this, it's not okay for somebody to appear on a supposedly educational adult talk show where the subject is a respected and critically acclaimed play whose purpose is to encourage the open discussion of human sexuality, and to show that the repression and fear of words that describe these things hurt us rather than help us. How ironic, then, that Fonda was hypocritically censored for the very thing that The Vagina Monologues argues against.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Fonda said the word on purpose. Not in a hostile way, or because she was swearing or trying to put somebody else down, but because she was hoping to get exactly this kind of reaction and point out the continuing stupidity of American culture. She was, after all, one of the vocal opponents of the Vietnam war, so she's no stranger to this kind of thing.

If NBC didn't want such a thing to be expressed on air, maybe they should have decided not to talk about The Vagina Monologues in the first place? Oh, but wait. If they start not talking about anything that might lead to something "inappropriate" I guess that means that they might as well not be on the air at all...

Again, I'd been holding off on posting anything here - hoping that I could report our condo renovation completely finished. However, there are still a couple of bits left to go. Luckily these are relatively minor. On the whole, everything is done and we're enjoying our time in our new place.

At work, I have transitioned away from technical support and am now one of the team members on our "KCS" (Knowledge Content System) project. This is an effort to categorize and streamline all of the problems that customers report, along with their solutions. If done correctly, we feel that we can significantly cut down the number of support calls - as people can locate the answers to their problems (at least the common ones) quickly online. This will also help new support engineers coming into the company.

The title of this post is one that I came up with in a recent 3 day brainstorming workshop. Everybody liked it so much that we're going to have it printed on T-Shirts (or some other clothing) and use it as an "unofficial" slogan for the project. A more official slogan will also be developed.

I am really enjoying my new position at work, and I don't miss support at all.

I hadn't written about it at the time, but I've re-hauled the left-hand side of this Web page. I think that the buttons that link to resources now look better and take up less space.

I've also updated the version of the Blog software from Movable Type 3.x to 4.x. While this should have no noticeable change in terms of the site itself, my own experience (as I type and edit entries) is significantly different.

On one last note related to "appearance", the renovation of our condo is now almost complete. We ended up moving out for a month and staying at our local Hilton hotel while the work was being done. There are still some things left, but the bulk of the work is done, and the rest should be finished within the next couple of weeks. (Hopefully before our "House Warming" in two and a half weeks.) It looks really good, and we're both glad that we went ahead with the project.

I wanted to save this post for something important. Before I get to that, I should mention what prompted my extended absence - it's been almost 9 months now since I've posted anything here.

It all started last December. I got a phone call from Cogeco to say that they wanted to install a new cable modem. I thought to myself that would be fine, it never hurts to get a newer model from time to time. They came by and installed it while I was at work. But I came home to discover that they hadn't replaced my old modem - they'd simply installed a second modem, to sit alongside my existing one. Up until then, I'd been running VOIP and business Internet from the same device without a problem. Somebody in "administrator land" decided that this couldn't happen, and that if I wanted (residential) VOIP and business Internet, I'd need to have two separate devices, one for each account.

Aside from the inconvenience of having another device sitting under my desk in the study, I had a more real problem with this. By using two different modems, the cable signal was being split yet again. I suppose that in normal circumstances this wouldn't really be a problem. However, in our condo the signal strength from Cogeco sucks in the first place. This has been a problem ever since we moved in. The wiring in the building itself is a mess, as is the actual infrastructure under the city streets - but this isn't something that Cogeco has ever been willing to properly address because of the cost involved in doing so. Needless to say, I wasn't happy.

I removed the extra modem and re-wired things back the way they'd been. It didn't work. I called Cogeco and explained things. They weren't able to fix it at their end.

At this point, things devolved into a surreal nightmare. I spent about 5 hours on the phone with Cogeco over the next two months, as well has having 3 other visits from technicians. I got involved with technical supervisors and a sales manager for the region. The short version of the story is that even though there was no technical reason to have two modems, that was what was decreed and they couldn't do anything about it. For the last two weeks, I had accepted having to have two modems - but even then, with both hooked up, would things work. Something about the way they'd configured my account's technical settings had changed at their end - and they had no idea what it was or how to fix it. One day, it just "magically" started working again.

During these two months we were without either Internet access or VOIP (so we could neither send nor receive calls except on our cell phones). At times, we were without either. For some brief periods of time we were also without TV. Also, during the course of all of this, I had to "undo" damage that was done by various technicians to my home theatre set up - which resulted in TV shows not being recorded. Additionally, I had to force the cable to be split in a certain way (not as anybody defaulted to doing it) and insisting on getting a new "splitter" at the cable drop source to support this split. Otherwise, the signal strength would simply be too low to service all of our cable based devices. Poor Michelle. For the first few visits, somebody would show up from Cogeco while I was a way - and mess things up. I'd come home, get upset (not at her), put things back, and then phone Cogeco again. Towards the end, I had to make sure that I was there in order to babysit and prevent them from doing things incorrectly.

At one point, when I was in touch with the regional sales manager - in order to leverage escalating my situation - I mentioned that I was on the Board of Directors of our condo, and that we were thinking of switching everybody in the building over to Cogeco. She stated that she would have a building inspection done, and then call me back after she returned from her vacation to set up a meeting between the Board and herself. This never happened. I also never bothered contacting her again, since, by then, we'd finally got our cable working properly. I can't say that my opinion of Cogeco has changed much since then.

But I never did "recover" from this extended outage and get back into posting articles here. When I did start to think about it again - I realized that my next post would be me 200th, and I thought I'd wait for the event of the next paragraph to finally occur...

For the exciting news to be conveyed in my 200th post - we finally got our inheritance from my grandfather's will. The amount that was available to us in the first week was enough to pay off our CIBC loan, one of Michelle's credit cards, one of my credit cards, and give Michelle's mom some funds for her Ireland trip. It also paid for a pool table. More on that one shortly.

The remainder, and bulk, of the funds will be freed up next week. With it, we'll pay off all of our other debts (aside from our mortgage) and then use the rest for some renovations in our condo that will greatly help our home comfort. Primarily, we need a new shower, but everything else we do (including enlarging our existing shower when we do get a new one installed) will only increase the value of our property above and beyond that of the cost of renovation itself.

Getting rid of all of our debt is a huge thing. I think I've carried a balance of some kind on one of my credit cards ever since I was a student at Trent University. But, more than that, all of the money we'll be getting on our pay cheques will be going straight into our pockets. (Again, mortgage payments and condo fees aside - but I can live with that in the context of there being nothing else to worry about.) This will drastically reduce our stress and our ability to just lead our lives as we'd like.

There is also more financial good news on the horizon. VMware had an IPO just yesterday, and, while valued at $29/share the previous night, it opened at $52/share when trading started. I was given a not insignificant number of options in VMware stock a couple of months ago, based on my number of years at the company and my current employee level. While it will be a bit before I can exercise them, converting them into either cash or stocks, I have no doubt that I'll be in a good situation. I have no doubt that VMware stock will be going up like either Microsoft or Google in the years ahead. If / when we get more money "that we don't know what to do with", picking up more VMware stock would certainly not be a bad idea.

Also, on the subject of stocks, I went and looked at my EMC stock. I was able to exercise some options whose vesting period had passed. I now have actual stocks in EMC, rather than just options. That's pretty cool. So, I'll be ending up with stocks in both EMC and VMware in the not too far future.

Lastly, in the year to come, I believe that we'll be getting even more money. Not only was some of the inheritance money held back, just in order to make sure everything works out okay for Rachel and her farm, but there will still be the proceeds of the sale of Kay's house - which I believe she also intends on sharing with us to some degree. I feel a little bit like a lottery winner - even though I still feel a bit conflicted about the actual source of the money.

As for that pool table. There seems to be a consensus that our condo's gym could use a pool table. It's all just been a matter of when and how to come up with the money. The Board doesn't, currently, have a budget for it. One of the owners recently presented us with a low-end pool table / ping pong table as a possibility. It's a decent enough table, although not really a "proper" pool table in any sense of the word. (But, everything else aside, it would have been okay.) However, in researching both the current value of this table and that of more standard pool tables, I found an incredible bargain. A tournament sized (4.5' x 9') Dufferin pool table for 1/4 the cost it would be new. This is just like the tables I'm used to playing on at Boston Manor - where we go play when we feel like it. I've immediately jumped on it. Pending "official" approval of a committee and the Board, and sorting out some issues in the gym (things need to be moved around, and some electrical work has to be done in order for that to happen) this seems like it's on its way. I've already given the current owner a deposit to "reserve" it against a final decision next week. If (hopefully when) this happens I'll be ecstatic owner of my own table, and have access to it whenever I want.

In terms of our condo suite itself, renovations aside, I woke up last Saturday and ripped out the hedge that had been dividing our patio in two. The landscapers will be coming tomorrow to trim everything back (this is now longer overdue) and will be removing all of these bits. We'll be left with a nice clear view of the lake - and of our own patio, from one side to the other. We'll be putting some earth in the, now empty, planter and some flowers. We may or may not do something else with the space next Summer.

It's been another one of those period of time when I haven't got to posting anything here in a while. There are several things that have gone on that I should have written about but didn't. Rather than create a lot of new entries, I'll just mention each of them here in summary:

Email

Glen and I set things up so that email to our server would be received via IMAP rather than POP3, and had clients upload their messages to the server. This means that, now, no matter where any of us are, or what client we use, we'll always have access to the same set of email and archived messages.

Pegasus doesn't quite integrate correctly, causing folders not to be refreshed automatically in some cases. I'm not certain yet if I want to dispense with Pegasus altogether or wait for an update. (I've used Pegasus for a very long time now, and it would be sad to see it go.)

Windows

Thanks to my MSDN connection from work, I was able to download Vista Ultimate and get a serial number for it. I've upgraded our home computer from XP to Vista. All in all, it's quite nice. There are some minor issues with compatibility, as well as annoyances with security that don't really apply to my situation but which I have to deal with anyway. However, I quite enjoy the new UI changes, and it seems to be a bit faster than XP. (Although that could just be because I reinstalled a new OS - rather than it being Vista specifically.)

In the process of the upgrade, I managed to lose Michelle's Palm Pilot contact database. Although she no longer uses that device, she had kept up with the contact database software. I'm kicking myself over this one, because I'd been so careful to back up everything else.

Rash

I woke up about a week ago to discover I had a neck to knee rash. It itched a little bit, and I stayed home from work so I could get to a doctor. It ended up just being a reaction to something, I don't know what. It's gone now. There's the possibility that it was stress related - but I'm not sure about that.

Work

Friday is my last day in the building I've been working at for the past 2 years. We move - across the street. I'll be something like 30 seconds closer to home. However, it will mean that I won't need to cross the street to get between the building and the bus. In the Winter, when there's lots of snow, I'll be grateful for this little perk.

Board Of Directors

This actually happened a while back. (So much for chronological order.) I was voted onto the Board of Directors of my condominium - as were the other people running I was hoping to see get elected with me. So far, it's been busy, and a fair bit of work, but I'm loving every minute of it. The people I'm with are all fantastic, and we all see eye to eye in general terms. I'm having lots of fun.

One of the Directors, who had originally been on the Board, resigned right after the elections, so we're working on filling the vacant fifth seat. I'm hoping we'll find somebody who fits into the culture of the new Board.

Links to two pieces of software I use, and which I put on the left-hand side of this page, have disappeared in different ways. One, Image Grabber II, is nowhere to be found any more - apparently the site is gone. So, clicking on the link actually downloads the software itself, which I've put on my server, rather than trying to go to the site. The other thing that's changed is the FastStone Image Viewer program. While the site still exists, it was only the beta version that had the contact sheet wizard (and a few other things) for free. Now that it's out of beta, you have to pay to get that extra functionality. However, you can download the most advanced beta (prior to final release) here - also from my server.