Boss is cleaning his inbox of 1000s of msgs. What does it mean that 75% are from me? Do I send too much or do I have to work towards 80%?

Got an accidental e-mail from US military base looking to order stress balls from branders.com. Sorry, wrong e-mail address!

Does anyone know if the cameras on the SkyTrain are new? Never noticed them mounted on those center posts before.

I think the cleaning ladies play Company of Heroes on our machines when we leave for the day.

Reading up on Continuous Integration and Unit Testing for our #coldfusion development environment. Have SVN, we need to do much more.

Christmas in Princeton was good - very little snow. Left before the snow dump in Van and got back before the rain turned it all to slush.

Wow... only -3 C, but it feels like -20. Might be -30 in the morning.

Made the snowy but uneventful trek to Princeton BC. More snow expected soon. Kids excited.

Cool! We just started a Vancouver CF/Flex user group! http://ping.fm/kKUMe - looking forward to this immensely! Thanks Adobe!

Great part of working from home - having lunch with my family. Snow outside, warm inside, yummy eats. Work = bug fixing like crazy.

Congrats to @pingfm for the funding! Love the service guys! Merry Christmas! http://ping.fm/6h1z5

Snowed in, working at home. Feeling very fortunate lately - we are all so very lucky. Kids play last night was very fun - great job Katie!

Late night scrapbooking with the wife. Strange, but fun. Getting in touch with my crafty side? Oh well, long day tomorrow.

Celebrating early Christmas w my fam. Kids are excited, everyone has nice presents. Yay!

Dinner and game (Galaxy Trucker) with friends. Oh, and yummy ice cream. Thanks M&L!

Austin Powers moment - checkout girl turned to friend, holding two yams in front of her chest. "What's the code for these large ones?" Heh.

Braved a quick trip to the mall for small remaining things for wife. Went pretty well, and daughter Little D was helpful.

Like mouse gestures? Just saw gmote http://ping.fm/u4pwr posted to a mailing list, I don't like em, but it sounds cool.

Is it too much to ask? 18 hours with no snow and roads haven't really been cleared.

Congrats to my cousins M&C - the baby girl they are adopting was born this morn - may get to take her home this weekend. Merry Christmas!

Re: work. We have the makings of a great team, why can't we work together? Why can't management work with us?

Dear Santa, it's freakin freezing. I've tried not to complain about the weather all year. For Christmas I'd like to be able to feel my face.

Managed to get TwitterCFC running easily - http://ping.fm/paFBh thanks to Andy's RIAForge project http://ping.fm/8Jgvq and great docs at Twitter

Sigh. One more day until we send a major release to QA. Product is looking good, but could be even better!

Any #coldfusion folks out there play with twitter integration? Expected to find a twitter.cfc, but nothing obvious via google...

JSON in ColdFusion

Pretty excited these days about JSON... I've used it sporadically in many applications, but every month there appears to be new uses for it. I particularly enjoyed one use where we stored some interface preferences as a small JSON cookie. I also LOVE being able to call a CF webservice and auto-magically return JSON (covered in depth at Ben Nadel's blog here: JSON part II) - it's saved us a couple times.

Anyways, I saw a blog post today about the release of JSONUtil - very cool. It's a nice way to serialize and deserialize JSON in CF 7, and is based on CFJSON code.

In my main contract, we've been arguing a bit about returning JSON in the header vs. in the body. We are leaning heavily towards starting to return JSON in the response body, but we're a bit worried about the META tag that CF returns when working in development mode.

Here's some good reading about JSON and Prototype from Frank Tank. He argues nicely for putting JSON in the response body.

T

Just saw Day the Earth Stood Still. Can't give it more than 6/10. Disappointing.

Great Christmas banquet - got to see Rhythm and News perform.

Finally the world can know - talk to sister J about her good news... now, seriously. Talk to her. Give her a call, something. Now.

Updated my HTC phone to newest ROM last night. Thought it worked, but apparently I can't place calls or surf. Arrgg.

Felt like Baby T cried for 12 hours last night, got maybe 2 hours of good sleep. Late start, must get more done!

Playing with Google Friend Connect, pretty neat. Try it out here: http://ping.fm/8Lrkv

Enjoying the sun while I wait for V... lunch?!?

Urgently looking for developer to help with app, probably 10-20 hours of paid work. CF and GMaps experience? Anyone available?

Sorry to hear about Adobe financials and layoffs of 600 - http://ping.fm/8iibf{723FE5EC-A2C5-4A8B-A62E-708733D031D6} . Tough times!

CF logic functions - Imp and Eqv

Thought this was neat - came across this fellow CFer’s blog post about finding the CF Imp function.

Mentions the logic functions Imp (imply) and Eqv (equivalent). Kinda neat, I had totally forgot about Eqv() and I don’t think I ever really knew about Imp().

Explanations:
http://markun.cs.shinshu-u.ac.jp/learn/logic/logic1/html/eng/eqv-e.html
http://markun.cs.shinshu-u.ac.jp/learn/logic/logic1/html/eng/imp-e.html

Adobe Livedocs for logic expressions

Neat.

Security articles - cf script protection, captcha, cfformprotect

I stumbled across some good CF-related security articles this weekend.

Using htaccess rules to protect against SQL injection
http://www.luismajano.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/8/8/htacces-rules-to-protect-against-SQL-Injection-attacks

The good and the bad about built-in CF script protection
http://www.12robots.com/index.cfm/2008/9/9/Enhancing-ColdFusion-Script-Protection--Security-Series-10
This article also touches on ways to customize the script protection

Do we get much spam form activity? The use of captcha and reasons not to use it
http://techfeed.net/blog/index.cfm/2008/11/29/Reasons-not-to-use-Captcha

The best part is that that they talk about CFFormProtect as an alternative, which sounds very cool:
http://cfformprotect.riaforge.org

Helping with the stage for Scrooge. Nice to help, some people have put some serious time into this!

Oh, and Happy T-giving to all you 'mericans! Canucks celebrate our thanksgiving in October - http://ping.fm/PFLQJ

Managed to get a script working in minutes, allowing me to interface from ping.fm to any Jisko-based microblogging application. Yay!

Sitting at Starbucks Langley having hot choc with my 4 yr old daughter. Fun times and good lemon poppyseed loaf.

Accepted into the Centaur (CF9) prerelease program - looking forward to getting it up and running

Google GrandCentral shrinking/running out?

I've been in awe of the concept of GrandCentral, which was acquired by Google in July 2007. The concept of having one phone number, and being to control the routing and functionality of that number via the web is amazing. There are many services like it, but none that appear to have even close to all the functionality at the low/free pricepoint.

However, as a Canadian, it's been frustrating waiting for a phone number - the site currently supports the US only. I've been waiting for years.

So I set up a ChangeDetection account to watch the list of GrandCentral phone numbers to see if new phone numbers are getting added. What I've noticed is that the list of numbers is shrinking by a few every week.

Is the system running out of phone numbers? Are they closing the service in certain area codes? They haven't added any new area codes for the entire length of time I've been watching - since mid-October.

GrandCentral, when will you add more numbers? When will you add Canadian numbers? Please?

At Edmonds Santa parade w the kids. They are so excited, it's sunny but freezing.

It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. The enigma is inside a chicken, within a duck, stuck into a turkey.

Adobe Max - follow up pics and CF9

Well, I'm still getting my pictures up... so far I have the pictures of being all tourist in San Fran on Saturday.

Ray had a good summary about Cloud Computing with Stax.

I also read a good summary of CF9 at CodersRevolution. Check it out.

T

Headed into work late after getting in from Max. Great conf, looking forwarded to updating code and caching.

Adobe Max - San Fran - Day Four

Wow, a jam packed last day, made a bit crazier by the fact that we really had to rush away to get to the airport. It seemed that everyone needed to recover a bit from last night's party.

Right of the bat, today a couple CF gurus made our lives much happier - Mr Delmore and Mr Camden. Ray put on a fantastic and fun session about the Ajax tools within CF 8 and Jason "Slackware" Delmore spent 20 minutes just with Jay and I geeking out and trying not to tell us anything about Centaur. Thanks for reaffirming our faith in the CF community guys, you guys are great!

Rumour has it (not from Jason, that guy is TIGHT lipped!) that there will be some nice caching improvements to CF 9 (something like ehCache's in-JVM caching system??). After some of the sessions and discussions, I think there will be some major Ajax improvements and possibly some new ways to tie into event-driven programming. They are definitely pushing object-based programming. The new Bolt IDE sounds promising, and Jason made sure we understood the rationale behind a commercial CF-centered IDE. I'm also impressed with the way they are using Apache Derby now, great product!

To start the day we had a nice quick breakfast and some extra time to meet some other attendees. We headed over to Ray's "ColdFusion Powered Ajax" session which was fun and informative. It was neat seeing the UI elements and getting opinions from a CF developer we trust. The QueryConvertForGrid() function surprised us and the CFAjaxProxy is obviously quite powerful.

I hit the "Uber Panel" in the Unconference area, and listened to some discussion about the new IDE, and raced over to a session on CF Caching Strategies by my new hero Rob Brooks-Bilson. Great session, and exactly the way I would have wanted it to be. I loved hearing the real-life applications along with some good definitions of the terminologies used in caching. Both third-party tools memcache and ehCache sound really great. I'll definitely have to check out highavailability.com.

Jay and I grabbed some lunch and headed done to the pavillion for some swag, sitting with a couple of Adobe LifeCycle guys from Ottawa - go Sens!

Mr Corfield put on a great session on Event Driven ColdFusion that was a bit hard to follow (why would we want to do this again?), but it was obviously designed for CF developers that were finding the Flex and ActionScript programming models compelling. There were some great tips to follow up on.

We dove into a session about Cocomo - Flex is really gaining some wonderful ground, and seeing it in action connecting to Cocomo in the cloud - wow!

We raced to the hotel, took a quick taxi ride to the airport, waited for the plane, and got home in record time. Bags of swag and duty-free booze for the boss, and now it's time for bed.

Thanks Adobe, the conference was amazing!

Adobe Max - San Fran - Day Three

Well, another amazing conference day, but a bit disappointing as a ColdFusion developer.

Started really early, rushing over to the other hotel and grabbing a muffin and a juice. My first session was 'ColdFusion Powered Flex' - Simon was a great presenter, but it didn't really introduce anything particularily new for me. There are always a few good small tips and things to remind us about how the technologies work.

The keynote for the day was all about new products. We had been told by the ColdFusion team to eagerly await this speech. There were some great technologies introduced, such as Catalyst and the new Bolt IDE, but there was almost nothing about ColdFusion at all.

Alchemy was a bit interesting, if not odd. It allows C and C++ programmers to compile their code to Flash for client side execution. There was also a mention of the company Ensemble that creates plugins to allow Visual Studio developers to work with Flex.

My first session after lunch was ColdFusion Powered AIR. It was a bit dry and it didn't really introduce anything that wasn't covered in other sessions earlier in the week. However, it was nice to see the FaultHandler in action, and we used the Flex Builder debugger. I had trouble determining where the Flex ended and where the AIR began, which I think is a problem with the curricula. I suspect that the drag-and-drop from the Desktop to the application window was the main "AIR" feature that we were playing with.

The next session was about architecting ColdFusion for scalability. Consider I did a full day lab on it on Sunday and a few other sessions, it was a bit boring. However, Brandon Purcell did a fantastic job - I would have avoided all the other sessions and taken Brandon's instead. It was a very well-rounded session. I liked hearing about HAProxy, Nagios, Cloud Computing and the 'jrunx.kernel.jrun' class, and it was nice hearing that our work infrastructure is quite appropriate.

My last regular session was put on by Steve at Figleaf, and it covered ColdFusion, Ajax, Spry and jQuery. It was very intense, but informative. I'm still not completely sure why anyone would encourage developers to overload their pages with so many different libraries and JS references, but it made for an interesting presentation.

We hit the Sneak Peak and Max Awards - some amazing technologies were presented (check www.adobe.com/go/keynote). Again, nothing ColdFusion related. Funny enough, one of the CF engineers presented a way to run ActionScript server-side. I was left vaguely with the feeling that CF was being "phased out", replacing with Flex, wizards and ActionScript. Oh well.

The customer appreciation event was a huge party - Adobe rented both the California Academy of Sciences and the de Young Museum. It was intense. Buses took everyone to the Golden Gate Park, and we were served food and entertained inside museums! Jay and I took in the Planetarium, wildlife exhibits, African performers, contortionists, a retro arcade and more. Both facilities are amazing.

Aside from the lack of ColdFusion announcements, we also felt a bit disappointed after meeting some of our ColdFusion "heroes". We'll see - I'm sure it was an even longer week for them. Otherwise, we met a bunch of amazing people, many of them within the education world. Good to meet you all!!!

So another long day. We have a tight timeline tomorrow, and we're concerned we won't even make it to the airport in time - we'll figure something out!

The winning mobile entry was called Succubus Vertigo. Too funny.

Dude, the guy handing out the awards is drunk. Funny enough, so is Jay. Kidding.

Decent day of sessions, now sitting in Max Award ceremon with beer in hand. Woot.

Great lab by Simon, learned a couple new things to take back. Wish we had more time to cover things like returning errors from server...

Flex lesson by Simon Slooten (simonslooten.com) - great presenter.

Raced to the other Marriott, grabbed a quick walnut muffin and coffee and run to my ColdFusion Flex lab.

Adobe Max - San Fran - Day Two

The first full day of Adobe Max - it was great. Another sunny day, and this time the conference was mostly in the spacious and well-equiped Moscone center.

The breakfast was great - little cheese and sausage English muffins. Sat around and waited for the keynote to start (see www.adobe.com/go/keynote).

The keynote was great. They highlighted Cloud Computing, Social Computing and Device vs Desktop. During the Cloud Computer exercise, Maria Schriver came out with Ann Lewnes from Adobe and talked about their educational project for California Legacy Trails. A component of this project allowed teachers to create curriculum based on the content on the site, including quizes. For students, they could enter a drag-and-drop enabled AIR interface and put together photo essays.

At one point, Maria said that she felt like she was at a Star Trek conference - ouch!

We saw a wonderful sample app called Tour De Flex that highlighted many of the UI elements in a nice resource for documentation.

Steve Fisher came out and gave us a tour of the new Salesforce. He was very enthusiastic, especially about the AppExchange program, but there wasn't too much that was immediately exciting. One app was a conference tool that allowed administrators to manage conference sessions and drag-and-drop sessions onto the calendar. He defined 'The Enterprise Cloud' as cloud computing with: a full stack, access to relational databases, workflow engines, a robust security model and 24-7 uptime.

The Social computing phase of the speech was neat, with Adobe releasing Cokomo - a hosted service that allowed many users to collaborate in Flex. It included shared cursors, video conferencing and more. He made a special distinction that there was NO screen sharing - it was 'co-navigating', ensuring that data that was sensitive on one side would not be seen on the other.

Adobe also release Adobe Wave, a nice hosted solution for receiving desktop notifications from any web service. This could be handy for SerebraConnect and similar outsourcing services.

As expected, the Mobile and Device computing part of the speech was amazing - Windows Mobile screwed up the presenter several times, and the iPhone was never mentioned by name. Google Android was showcased, and looked wonderful. Andy Rubin from Google came out and agreed with Kevin Lynch that the progress was impressive.

My sessions for the day were extensive - I had a lab about using LifeCycle DS with ColdFusion to create messenging applications. One great use for this is to update the client on progress on long-running requests. The DataService and ArrayCollection functions are amazing.

Kevin Hoyt at Adobe revealed to us that the company Stax.net has been chosen to help Adobe get ColdFusion into the cloud sitting on top of the Amazon EC2 system. Amazing stuff.

In the afternoon I had a session on Deploying CF for Large Scale Environments. This session didn't interest me much, but I enjoyed hearing more about EAR and CAR deployment and the upcoming special licensing in Adobe for virtual servers and disaster recovery. The speaker pointed out some great tools at www.charlesproxy.com and adaptj.com for working with stack traces.

Jay and I then attended an Unconference about YSlow. We knew much that was contained in the talk, but there were some great points made. Brian Meloche talked about conbine.cfc (yay us, we were ahead of the curve!) and optimizing HTTP requests by moving image/asset requests to a different domain that is not cookie enabled.

We had a great dinner in the Pavillion, taking in all the sponsors and vendors, and went back later to meet the CF team and talk about CFML language development and the new CFML committee that is aiming for an 'open' CFML language.

Night, very tired

Wow. CF and LifeCycle lab - chat client in under 50 lines of code with Flex. Moving onto CF gateways.

Exciting speech by Salesforce. Adobe also intro'ed Cokomo for online collab and Adobe Wave for receiving desktop alerts - SerebraConnect

Kevin brought our Maria Shriver to discuss the technology behind the California Trails education project. Really cool.

Adobe Keynote started, really glossy. Great wrap around screen, loud music, excited people.

Got to the Moscone center for breakfast and the opening. Great facility and food!

Adobe Max - San Fran - Day One

Very busy day, long lab. Very informative, but not exactly what I expected. The conference seems to be well attended. Sat behind a really nice guy from a major US University - got to hear about some of the bureaucracy and process in a large educational institution.

Afterwards, Jay and I tried to find a good steak house, and ended up at JohnsGrill. Amazing place with live Jazz music and a theme revolving around Sam Spade from the Maltese falcon.

The lab was on Building High Performance apps by Figleaf. Great case studies, taking into account their customers like NIST and the National Park service. It didn't touch on security or actually building apps.

Some tips from our friends at Figleaf

• Shoot for CF page executation time of under 100ms
• Use 64-bit processors - they rock, especially on Linux
• To avoid JVM memory issues, consider deploying on JBoss
• Upgrade to JVM 1.6_10
  
• Use OpenSTA for load testing
• Check out SeeFusion for testing if the built-in tools aren't working
• FusionCube has a tool called 'Scope Enhancer' that sounds very useful
  
• Multi-processor machines are great, especially if there may be long running requests
• Remember that every JVM version change results in different optimization
• Remove IIS application pooling for the CFIDE directory
• The major scalability issue is usually garbage collection
• Disable the 'Save Class Files' setting - can result in too many class files
• Disable the setting 'CFC Type checks' in production to speed it up
• Consider using 'Cache web server paths', remember that this setting is set on an instance-by-instance basis
  

They suggest installing the multi-server install using the JRun built-in server, and then deploy a couple instances and bind them to IIS. We discussed the basic inner workings of JVM - eden, tenured and perm gen spaces. We talked about JVM settings like -xmsMemSize, HeadDump settings. The server monitoring tools are great, but add a lot of overhead when Memory Tracking is on.

There are issues with session replication in CF 8. Sticky sessions with instance clustering work great. Figleaf suggests considering writing session vars to DB using OnRequestEnd, basically replicating the sessions yourself.

Interesting, but not exactly what I expected.

Still going in the lab, a bit overtime. Touching on caching and cf_accelerate as well as cfthread. Good stuff to stay for, I suppose.

Delving into the built-in CF monitoring tools, pretty handy. Already knew about all the JRun log files though from a couple weeks back...

Need to check out using Scope Enhancer for monitoring JVM settings and memory usage: http://ping.fm/ML2FQ

Moving into tweaking JVM and datasource connections. Hope to hear about lots here.

Getting to the meat of the lab, instances and load testing. Great lunch, meeting other people in education and e-learning.

Never used nbtstat -R before to flush DNS after changing HOSTS for local development. Cool.

Need to read up on CF distributed mode a bit, although we normally use other techniques: http://ping.fm/OcPdk

Talking about clustering... lots of procs, lots of mem, use 64-bit, consider JBoss for good mem usage. Multiple instances are neat.

Just sitting down after break in first lab. Going well, nothing mindblowing. Great info about instances, odd things w session replication.

Amazing day. Missed The Rock, but walked everywhere, took a great Bay cruise, rode streetcars and trolleys and ate seafood. Woot!

Adobe Max - San Fran - Day Zero

Wow, what a great, and long, day leading up to Adobe Max.

San Francisco - what a beautiful city. We got off the plane and made the long trek to the hotel. The city was surprisingly quiet for ten in the morning, but the weather was clear, sunny and warm.

We took trolleys to Fisherman's Wharf, but missed the ferry to Alcatraz. Grabbed a nice seafood lunch with a nice view and then walked down the waterfront, all the way to some historical park and beach. Along the way we found a place offering Bay cruises. It was amazing - long busy boat ride under the Golden Gate bridge and a boat tour around Alcatraz island. A cheezy but really informative audio track played the whole way.

We took a cable car through the city back to Market Street, and wandered around Union Square. The atmosphere once the evening hit was WAY more what we would've expected - a total buzz, people of all sorts everywhere!

We took the opportunity to see the new Bond movie in a very luxurious theatre. Then back to the hotel for a nice Goat Cheese salad. What a great day - looking very forward to the conference!

Made it to San Fran! Nice hotel, not where the conf is, but close. City is pretty nice, weather is awesome.

J didn't make it past customs, whisked away screaming. Oh well, I got throught.

At airport, long drawn out check in, but incident free. Grabbed a cold drink, waiting.

Being driven around in rush hour by J&R chatting with GPa. Happy Friday!

Prepping for trip to Adobe Max in San Fran. This'll be great, lots of important sessions.

Got on the bust today with a large group of asian kids on a field trip. They're from my old high school. Sigh, I feel a bit old.

Long day of bug fixes at work. Sick about hearing about US election.

Bit creepy being the only person on a bus aside from the driver. Happy Halloween!

Standing at bank getting ANOTHER replacement card!

Commuting to work after a great weekend. Sky is clear, weather is cold, and my so called beard is keeping my face warm-ish.

Had a great Sat just w the kids... took little D to a party and went for nice walk after.

Helped put on a breakfast for 50-60. Eggs, pancakes and yummy sausage. Good times.

Geolocation services - Navizon and Loki

So I love the idea of Fire Eagle and I use BrightKite a fair amount, but they both suffer from the same problem - currently, you have to update your location quite manually.

With the popularity of the iPhone, we're very close to a time where application on our devices can help us track our location. At that point, location "wallets" like Fire Eagle will become very handy. Social Networks will become more and more location-based, and local searching via Google will become common.

So on my Windows Mobile phone (HTC Mogul, which I really love) I decided to try out Loki and Navizon.

Both look like great services. Loki uses Google Maps and has a Windows Mobile version. It is very search-based, but I was unable to get it to use anything other than a Wi-Fi connection for location updates. That made it kind of pointless for me. I couldn't find the place to set my Fire Eagle account as the recipient of location data.

Navizon had a more involved installer for the desktop, but the application installed easy through ActiveSync. Their technology seems amazing in terms of the different ways they can perform geo-location, and they use a nice Yahoo Maps interface. However, it refused to detect the GPS in my phone, a-la Google Maps, and the Wi-Fi didn't appear to connect. Using the amazing phone-based location appeared to work, but it was really inaccurate - it had me many cities over.

So both services installed well and looked pretty good. In both cases, however, they were not usable for what I wanted to achieve. I guess I'll try again in a couple months, or wait until I can be bothered to grab an iPhone!

Signed up and evaluating Kwippy and YouAre. Nice services, although not enough to differentiate them at this point...

Nice! Police action in our driveway as they take down some car thievin' youtz. Gun drawn and everything!

I'll have to try to get a quick vote in... crazy politics for our riding, makes it tough.

Holy cow.. colder in this skytrain car than outside!

Had turkey dinner with friends last night, then saw late night movie - Body of Lies. Good film!

Oops, wrong link to flying pics: http://ping.fm/rJbT1 and some video at qik.com/brandner

Flew around Vancouver with Little T on Sat. http://ping.fm/Fbu7O . Amazing. Thanks Ben!!!

So sunny, cold and brisk this morning. Love this weather, love this city.

I just made a funny! of course, it was at the expense of my coworkers...

Nice dinner at Coza with R&L - thanx guys!

This cold has me wiped out. Managed to drag myself out of bed, headed into work late.

Overheard in coffee line... "she got bitten by ants?"

Finally the van is fixed. Thx to Troy at Valley Transmission for finally coming through for us.

My question posted to ParentHack!

A question I mailed in just got posted to one of my favourite sites - ParentHack.com.

I was searching through older articles looking for tips on helping kids build organizational skills. Our 7-year old son is quite bright and active, but has extremely poor organization skills. Partially the way a 7-year old boy is wired, I'm sure, but it'd be nice to work on strengthening him in this area. We're hoping to come up with some ways to get him to focus on single tasks and maybe organize his own schedule a bit, as per this hack. We may tweak it a bit to be more task-oriented, but it's a great hack.

I'm looking forward to the comments. We've been wondering more and more about how routines and schedules can help, but it sometimes feels so artificial.

Thanks to two good friends, managed to almost get the siding done. Yee haw!

Someone conVinced a friend to he'll with siding, so headed home to get that done.

Van back in, more transmission work and no doubt more bux. C'mon seriously - can someone fix it and stop ripping us off?

Holy cow. Guy on bus beside me is eating a full breakfast and chewing incredibly loudly.

Still laughing. Found a bee's nest in a bird's nest while doing the siding. Something about that just seems funny to me.

Really enjoying the new Google Chrome browser - very fast. Of course, I'm biased since I'm a bit of a Google fanboy. Sigh.

Last night, little break to sit in a friend's hot tub and then back to the cork flooring until 1am.

Seeing the R kids, soaking in the last bit of summer. Still in the middle of too many reno projects.

Watching Little D play at the mall play area while Little T tests for his next kickboxing belt.

Litle family gathering w/ out of towners D, R and N and a bunch of other Brandners. Great to see you guys!

Sucumbed to peer pressure - yummy Oysi Oysi for lunch!

Yay passport office. Love it. Missing ID in one case, signature on another. I guess I'll be doing this again.

Hanging w Trev and Oliver, watching them play DS.

Fun Lions game so far, nice busy place. Mr Lazeo is doing well too. Go Lions!

Great Keg lunch with the coworkers, bit expensive but fun.

It was nice spending the day with my sick daughter yesterday, and she's feeling much better today. Now I feel like I have a lot of stuff to catch up on.

Wow. After a hot week camping and a warm weekend, the rain is sure coming down. Love it.

Caved and gave the kids McDs. Feel like a bad dad, but I tried to keep it "healthy".

Treyton had his first bite of food. Loved it, but didn't quite clue in. Loves sticking his tongue out.

Riding the rails. Tecnically on vacation now. Yee haw!

What th'? The bus now announces every stop in a crazy female robot overlord voice. Thanks Translink!

Baseboards are done! Mitre saw was awesome, but not aligned right, have to call Home Depot (The Deep as we call it) for some tips.

Frustrated with implementing tooltips. Arg.

Had the best call with a telemarketer. They called to sell me some sort of Disney book selection but they kept laughing and had to stop.

Waiting for Little T at his kickboxing class. C'mon little ninja, hurry up.

Yay, baseboards all cut.I'm the guy cutting in the backyard at 9 pm. Jerkface.

Racing home on hot Skytrain to help wife finish baseboards. Have to grab mitre saw first.

Sister J - there is cake in the fridge. I repeat - cake. in. the. fridge.

Jumping on the bus - back to work. Hope everyone had a Happy BC Day!

We're done. Floor looks great but baseboards have to wait. I'd post pics but the computer is now dead. 'Night all.

Almost done. End in sight. Frick - bamboo splinter under fingernail!

Late night, but still managed to get a bit of sleep. Headed out to get coffee and baseboards.

Flooring going well but so slow. Only 2/3 done. Need sleep.

Great church BBQ today, nice to help setup and tear down, not much of a leader though! Back at it with the flooring, going better.

Finally got the first row down after trying to find best way to deal with uneven wall and bit of raised foundation. Fun.

Ugh. Bought wrong underlay thanks in part to crazy Rona staff. Back to Ikea to improvise.

Finished ceiling, after couple baby breaks. Looking good, a bit slow. Moving a ton of furniture.

Floor tear out done. Got some SuperSeal underlay that seems cool. Considering painting the ceiling first.

Off to Rona to get underlay. Time to start the big flooring project!

Ikea - another one of those 'shallow' cultural experiences.

After 3 blackjacks in a row, ended up tied for first against company prez. He pulled it out, and won on a split. Sigh.

Lots of people must have taken the day off - kinda quiet downtown. Real clean after the nice rain though.

Riding the WCE in comfy seats but no leg room. Lots of families on board. Decent day today.

Always feels a bit like a cultural experience (although a shallow one) taking the kids for hot choc at Starbucks...

Enjoying the game with family and little T... so ar the Lions aren't doing well.

Headed out to dinner and drinks before the Lions game. Looking forward to hanging with little T too.

Finished the book 'The Telling'. Really neat story that touches on religion vs science on a far away land. Sort of a 'social anthology of the future'.

Well, van is fixed, for now. Tired of spending time and money on it. We'll give it a couple more days.

Our new product demo went really well. Supportive clients and hard working development team = success, for now. Celebrate!

Reading The Telling by Ursula K Leguin. It's a pretty great book so far; she's a great writer.

Sitting on a hot crowded train. Just finished watching the pilot of The Cleaner. Great show.

Waiting at the Albion ferry in the hot afternoon sun. As long as the van doesn't break down...

Headed to Cultas with a broken van. Good times. Weather seems great, sunny but breezy.

Thinking about the iphone, which I don't have. #1 like = the screen. wow. #1 dislike = vendor lock-in. More I read, the more worried I'd be.

Strangley smoky and busy at Waterfront station at almost 6pm. Another fire?

How can a major hosting and colocation company (rhymes with 'Peer One') be down for FIVE hours due to this Vancouver fire? Unbelivable.

Big power outage downtown due to underground fire. Some of our servers are out. Crazy.



http://ping.fm/1XVyI

Another beautiful day in Vancouver. Now if only the sister would hurry up so I can grab a coffee!

Had a nice swim in M&Ls new pool and still had time to go wish K happy birthday!

Grabbing iced coffee at Starbucks, yum. Off to garden and pressurewash at a friend's.

The tallest guy I've ever seen, here on the skytrain. His bald head hits the roof. Gotta stay on his good side.

Played with Google Lively last night, set up room at http://ping.fm/cfLt4 - come visit!

Testing out ping.fm for sending messages to multiple micro-blogging applications. Very well done app; scary to give usernames, etc...

Sitting with the family in the hospital

Sitting here at the hospital with a bunch of family, to some extent saying our goodbyes. In any case, giving the family hugs.

My uncle Gary is an amazing guy. If anyone can beat this crazy cancer, he would be the guy. Unfortunately, since it's liver cancer that has spread a lot, it's a tough go.

I have several uncles and family men in my life that are simply amazing. Funny enough, they are amazing in completely different ways. The end result is that as a group, they compliment each other very well.

My uncle Gary has all the good traits of a fireman and biker. I have met few people in my life with more integrity than him. He's a crazy hard and physical worker. I was talking to the sister and discussing how he stood alongside his family no matter what. Quite a role model as a man and a husband. Seeing the way he treats my sister (his niece), is also so amazing. He really respects women and loves family.

As a guy marrying into my mom's family, it looks as if he became over time the perfect brother-in-law. All the guys in that generation are incredibly close. Seeing them go through all this is heart breaking, but at the same time touching.

Best of luck uncle. We're doing everything we can to help and comfort your family. May you be blessed to come out of this in the best possible way. I'm thinking and praying for you and our family.

T

Funny video game ideas

That Wired writer Lore Sjöberg for Alt Text is hilarious. In a recent blog post he talks about the Mortal Combat vs DC Universe game, and comes up with a few ideas of his own.

My favourite quote related to games involving Superman:

An accurate Superman game would have one button labeled "Use Powers" and you would press it and win.

Awesome.

Anyone else have funny game ideas?

Worked from home today...

Testing Jott. Worked from home today and met with the tax lady. Fun fun. Bye. listen

Powered by Jott

Superdad? Not hardly.

We're in Metrotown the other day. Saturday. There was seriously no good reason to be there. The stores there are lame. It's so busy that you can't take more than a single step forward in any one direction.

I'm pushing Baby T in the new stroller that we have, weaving around and bumping into people. They all give me a look like I'm really in the way. I'm not feeling particularily welcome at this point.

We head over to Superstore. It's even busier there, especially by the checkouts. No one will let me past, so I'm an aisle behind the rest of the family. That's ok, no big deal, I try to be patient.

That's when the little one starts to cry. I mean seriously cry, crying like it is the end of the world. For a seven-week old baby, he does a really great job. It feels like it's echoing through the entire mall. I start to feel embarrassed and then I realize that it's acting like a siren.

People are moving out of my way, and smiling at me. They're pulling over and letting me past, giving me this little sympathetic nod and smile - "look at that great dad there pushing his kid in the stroller". Interesting.

Read this on the "Sweet Juniper" blog:

There is a fundamental unfairness to the way men are treated with their children in public compared to women. A man carrying a screaming infant while dragging a toddler ... well he's "such a good dad."

Mothers, I've learned from floor polish commercials, have to give 100 percent. Fatherhood is not unlike the Special Olympics. Sometimes you get a medal just for showing up.

Hilarious.

JRo Cherry Blossom Haiku

JRo the snake lady (more on that another time) spouted off this poetic nugget:

Cherry Blossoms
My belly hurts; pants tight
Where's the bathroom?

Aren't we classy?

T

Jro Trip Log - Polar Bears and Monkey Butlers

Another small update.

---
Well, we'll be on our way home soon. We didn't have much time to send you updates. The time in the resort area was great, but the last day of the jungle was a bit frustrating. So I have to say I'm a bit angry. We spent four hours that day trying to find a monkey butler for Ryan.

Saw a bunch more scary birds and a polar bear. That was a bit odd.

Finally after one our hikes we came across a little metal hatch with the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, & 42 written on it. Inside was a nice little cabana where we sipped drinks and spent our last day in the jungle with a guy named Ben.

Ryan's glad we didn't travel to Congo.

So the resort has been nice and relaxing. The people here are amazingly nice; I feel like royalty. Can't wait to get home and show off my large slideshow to everyone that will listen.

Hey, e-mail me back quick.. can one of you guys arrange for a ride from the airport? We're on an Oceanic flight, 815 I think. We'll be getting in at 4:23 or so, depending on delays.

J&R

---

T

Jro Trip Log - Day Seven

Apparently the tribespeople are letting Jro and Rro access the Internet more frequently. I have another (real) update from them.

---

We are now in San Ignacia and going to go do the ruins tomorrow. I love it here the people are sooooo friendly friendlier than anywhere i have been before.

Yesterday Ryan and I did the cave drop tour where we hiked in the jungle for 2 hours and then repelled 300 ft in to a giant cave hole - it was crazy and i have never sweat more in my life!

Anyway love you all - it is awesome everywhere here have internet and so Ryan checks the hockey scores and I email you all quickly.

---

Best of luck sis!

Jro Trip Log - Day Six

Got another update from the sister. Yay!

---

This place is amazing! There are lots of monkeys and we are staying in the cutest little cabana. No major bug or snake problems so that is good.

We went on our first tour today which was to hike for 30 minutes in the jungle and then hike 1 1/2 thru caves to get to the series of 6 waterfalls that we repel up and then on the way back down we jump off! Some were like 15-20 feet high and then we hike it all back out again. Long day but it rocked!

Anyway we were just thinking of everyone wishing you were all here with us.

---

Sounds awesome. I have a feeling that she wrote this under duress though, perhaps being pressured by the monkeys and snakes that run the place. Note the use of the Americanized 'thru' instead of the proper 'through'. Something is afoot here. Watch for later updates.

Jro Trip Log - No word

No word from J and Rro. Kinda hoping that the sis hasn't been eaten by a jaguar.

Word has it that they are having fun, although they now know a bit too
much about the early morning mating habits of tree monkeys.

Eww.

Ryan Walter from NHL at conference

It was a great conference this weekend. Ex-NHL player and Hall of
Famer Ryan Walter was the guest speaker. He spoke about leadership and
spiritual hunger.

I'm normally not really a ice-breaker game type of guy, but he really
had some great communication games. The builder and architect game was
a great team exercise.

It was also cool having so many fathers and sons there together. I
only brought little T to the last session, but it was cool how the
younger kids were so quick to participate.

He was a great guy, and he had some great old hockey stories. The NHL
in the eighties and nineties sure sounds like an interesting place to
be. Thanks to Ryan and all the other conference organizers for a great
weekend.

JRo's Trip Log - Welcome to the Jungle

Hey all. Jro is sending me constant updates on her trip, so I thought I'd post them here. Hope you're having a great trip sister!

--
Hey. So here we are in the jungle. Welcome to the jungle *guitar hero GNR*

OK, there's no power here, so no hair driers. No TV, no nothing. At least I don't have to worry about leaving anything plugged in. The place we're staying in is pretty cool, it will be nice to be at the resort in a couple days.

We're walking around aimlessly, Rro is looking for monkeys. Nothing. I swear our quest for monkeys is going to get us lost. If he doesn't find a monkey soon things are going to get ugly.

But what there is a lot of is birds. They are everywhere, and they are crazy. They're big, they're colourful, and they're mean. I thought this would help, but so far it's just starting to give me an anxiety attack. If another one flies at my head I might poop myself. It's probably because my hair is starting to look like a nest.

Anyways, I think the birds are getting into my stuff. Later.
--

Js Trip Log - Day One

Hey all. Jro is sending me constant updates on her trip, so I thought I'd post them here. Hope you're having a great trip sister!

--
Hey. We arrived last night in Seattle, and got to the airport quickly. I did my hair at the terminal, but by the time we boarded the plane it was frizzy and screwed up.

So we sat down prepped for the long flight, video ipod in hand. The lady won't give us extra peanuts, and there are a bunch of stupid old magazines to read. Rro won't even fork over for a soda, so all we have is little bottles of booze. Now he's half-drunk and belligerent - I thought that was my job.

Did you hear about that squirrel that went crazy on that US flight? Man, if that was me I would never fly again. Crazy squirrels.

Anyways, excited, we'll be there soon. Sixteen hours soon.
--

Spring camping at Evans Lake

So we went on our third camp this weekend at Evans Lake. It was
awesome as always - Evans Lakes is beautiful, and Mark runs a great
camp.

It's usually quite rainy, but the sun was out all weekend.
Unfortunately the wife was a bit sick, and we had to leave early. Who
brings a one month old baby to camp anyways?

One of my favourite moments was sitting by the water with little D
talking about life, nature and the mysterious underwater Galactapus.

Test post from SkyTrain

Just riding the skytrain, transmitting over the Interweb..

--
T

Test post from phone

Test post from phone

--
Tony Brandner :: tony@brandners.com
Brandner Technologies :: 604.880.1114

New Baby Brandner - Baby T

Well, he's almost 24 hours old now. Pictures are at http://picasaweb.google.com/brandner

Yesterday at 9:54am our third little one "Baby T" was born. He was a big one, 9 lbs 7 oz, and he's awesome.

The delivery was pretty quick. Out of the house at 5:30, checked in before 7. I grabbed a coffee after 8:30 and by the time I got back S was headed into heavy labour. An hour later and he was born.

He's beautiful, making all sorts of neat noises. We love him (of course) and it's been funny trying to remember how to care for a baby.

The other two are excited, emotional, and seemingly concerned as to how this baby brother will affect their life.

Well, my coffee break's over. Back to baby and mom.

T

What would Google be like before Information Technology

People who know me know that I really like Google and Google's services. I ran across these via the Google Operating System blog. It's really fun to imagine what Google would have been like before we all had access to the Internet.






True "Question Desk" from 1924:









Fake Google from 1960:











Some people remember calling their local library help desk to get answers to questions. I remember going through big encyclopedias in the library. Funny to think that we all have this information at our fingertips now.

JRo Volume One coming soon...

"Jro - Tell It Like It Is" volume one is on it's way very soon. A quick two minute video with some JRo ramblings.

We'd love some feedback and video ideas. Stay tuned.

T

Happy Birthday to me!

Happy Birthday to me! Thanks for the e-cards and messages everyone!

A friend sent this around - significance of the number 33.

One of the important facts:

A chicken in the background of the cartoon show "The Simpsons" has the number 33 as its wing.

And:

Canada's population is 33 million.

T

Seven weeks to new Brandner

Only seven weeks left now, how exciting!



T

Transformer and Halo, together in one place

This is neat. A Halo mod for Transformers from eBay on GeekDad
Perhaps I should say "Halo, Star Wars and Transformers together in one place"!
It's based on one of the Star Wars Transformers (I have many, but not that one) referred to as Clone Commander Cody.