You can also update JAVA via Apple’s Software update, or download it from this page (updated link to Java for OS X Lion 2012-002).

In the meantime, I whipped up a quick video tutorial on how to protect your Mac by turning off JAVA in Safari.

Not sure if you’re infected?  Christina Warren wrote up some AppleScripts to determine if your Mac is infected (download link is at the bottom of her page).

If you have any questions, do let me know!

I also used it as an opportunity to test the accuracy of my iPod Nano’s pedometer versus the GPS-based app in my iPhone, RunKeeper. By the end of the walk, the Nano reported 6.14 KM and the iPhone 6.00 KM, a difference of about two percent, which is close enough for me. I’ll test it on a longer walk next week.

As well, in the past weeks, I’ve caught up on my photo uploads to Flickr, including the rest of the photos from our trips to Algonquin and FanExpo last summer.

The shots from last summer have not had the benefit of any post-processing, but I’d love to know which photos you liked the most.

Having a setting in iOS to designate safe zones like home or work (designated by GPS, wifi hotspots, and maybe Bluetooth), and when the iOS device was within that zone (say 50-100 metres of the spot) the iOS passcode lock would automatically disengage.

This would encourage iOS users to use the passcode lock while away from these zones (increasing security), while easing the security when the device was “safe”.

iPhone Feedback February 21, 2012, a photo by WTL-Ottawa on Flickr.

What I will be attempting is each time I send feedback, be it about hardware, software, a service, or even a meal, I will repost it here, unless it could affect security or if it is harsh (in my mind, although I have rarely had to send anything with scathing nuclear-holocaust-like comments).

I would enjoy your opinions on any of the feedback I post.

Given the amount of video that I have shot over the years on DV, I have a rather large number of miniDV tapes kicking around.

One day, I was capturing some footage and noticed that my iPhone fit into the DV tape case. Ever since, I’ve had one to two on my desk.

Many iPhones will fit, even with a case on it unless it happens to be an unusually thick one.

This will probably work with similarly sized- Android phones, too.

Practically free, and works very well.

This post was inspired by Suzemuse, who tweeted earlier today “Yesterday @wtl taught me to make an iPhone stand from an empty miniDV tape case. I’d take a picture of it, but my iPhone is on the stand.”

Being at #FridayOffice, I borrowed Mark’s iPhone to use as model and took a quick shot of it.

As always, questions, comments and requests are welcome.

This past year or so, a few friends have lost their mothers, so this this has been on my mind. I barely knew my mother – actually, I knew my mother’s mother (whom we called Grandma Claire) much better than I knew her.

For the decade prior to that I had very little contact with her for various reasons. I was (obviously) quite young when my dad and mom split, and was largely unaware of the massive legal battle my father waged to keep his children. After this point, my grandma (my father’s mother) became our main maternal figure until dad remarried, and she passed away last year.

What this has left me with is pretty much only the vaguest of memories of her, like going over to her place Sunday mornings and watching Star Trek on CBC while my sister and I did homework, or sitting on the front veranda at the farm, or that she liked to laugh.

So, I don’t really have much of a sense of who she was, and earlier today, I realized I couldn’t even really recall what she looked like, with the exception of the last time I saw her alive, when I don’t believe she recognized me or my sister – but even then, the fog of time has obscurred that as well. This led me to digging through a folder of nearly over eighteen hundred scanned photos my dad had given me at our xmas family gathering last year, looking for photos of my mother, and I only found a handful, including the one in this post, which dates from about 1976 when I was about four or so.

I love the fact that my dad and I chat on the phone (old school!) for ninety minutes at a time, usually at least once a week. We talk about whatever comes to mind, and that’s awesome. While I know it’s not at all possible to have those kinds of conversations with her, I can still dig through my brain and try to learn from what I remember, talk to others in my family and see what they remember to get a better sense of the kind of person she was.

How does this affect you? Well, it probably doesn’t. But, if for some reason you aren’t on speaking terms with a parent, opening a dialogue with them to find out who they are.

A burned bridge can be rebuilt, if you do it in time.

Two thousand, eight hundred and forty-one days ago, I became a Mac user, and as I’ve told many people over the years, I spent months wishing I’d done it sooner.

There have been many people posting tributes to Steve Jobs, how his vision and sheer willpower was able to completely change so many industries, so I do not feel the need to address that.

What I would like to say is that while he was here, he defined excellence.

Now it’s up to us.

—

I’d like to add, for those of you reading on Friday, Oct 7, that ByMUG is having a special event tonight remembering Steve Jobs that is open to everyone.

Here’s a list of what I’m bringing up with me to read/listen to:

Books on paper:
The Stand by Stephen King
2600 Magazine Summer edition
Color Correction Handbook by Alexis Van Hurkman
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Majestic by Whitley Strieber

AudioBooks
The WWW Trilogy; WWW: Wake, WWW: Watch and WWW: Wonder by Robert J Sawyer
What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard Feynman
Tell Me a Story: Science Fiction One by Arthur C. Clarke, William Gibson, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Terry Bisson, Avram Davidson
Weapons of Choice by John Birmingham
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA’s Spytechs from Communism to Al-Qaeda by Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, Henry Robert Schelsinger

Audio Podcasts
Dr Kiki’s Science Hour
The Edit Bay
Get-it-Done Guy
Grammar Girl
The History of Rome
The King Cast
Learn Japanese Podcast (all 176 episodes)
MacBreak Weekly
The Math Dude
Nova ScienceNOW
The Nutrition Diva
Scientific American’s Science Talk
Search Engine
That Post Show
White Coat, Black Arts
60-Second Earth

Now, the podcasts (with the exception of the Learn to Japanese one) are part of my “normal” listening, and have just piled up somewhat as I’ve been quite busy with work this summer.

The Stand will the the book I read the first three or so days I’m up there. I haven’t read it in probably a decade, so I’m looking forward to seeing how the story feels now.

The next item I’m excited to read is (finally) Robert J. Sawyer‘s entire WWW series – I’ve been eagerly awaiting this for .. years, but now the last novel is out, so I can plow through all three books one after another.

Yes, I consider listening to an audiobook reading, but I listen to podcasts. Go figure.

We’ll see how much reading I get done this year.

So I made a quick video to help show what I do with it: Pop Stretching Tip

I tend to go through a fair amount of diet Pepsi while I’m working and eventually, I decided that I should see about reducing the amount I drank, so I moved to a smaller glass, and then, eventually, I began to dilute even that.

After a while of doing for every single glass, it got tiresome, so I mixed one two litre bottle into two two litre bottles, mixing in an even amount of water. And, a while after that, I tried mixing it into three two litre bottles, and I’ve been drinking this combination for about two months now.

I’ve tried similar combinations with root beer and creme soda which I enjoy as well.

Admittedly, the taste is different, but I don’t mind it – the 3x diluted diet pepsi tastes somewhat like ice tea to me.

And yes, for all you people who are going to harp on me who think I don’t drink enough water – I’d advise you to look at this image of my typical liquid intake. I drink plenty of water, and tea as well – I always have gone through lot of fluids.

Anyway, enjoy and maybe give it a try. Let me know how it works out for you.

While the question isn’t what Stefan meant, I think nonetheless it is valid if you take Apple to mean an iOS device. With the power available in iPads running iOS5, (and, I suppose other tablet devices, but it appears that consumers overwhelmingly want iPads), more and more people do not need a home computer anymore, so why bother buying one and leaving it sit at a desk?

I know, I know.  It sounds like crazy-talk, but for an average use (I don’t believe I qualify), an iPad meets all of the requirements to do what people want to do with a computing device; Email, surf the web, watch Netflix and YouTube, create & edit documents, and play games.

We have already seen substantial numbers of users shift away from desktops to laptops – they want to be portable, able to work anywhere, so the next reasonable step to me is to move to something nearly as (if not as powerful as) and is lighter *and* easier to use.  Enter the iPad.

So, I think asking the question if someone’s next computer will be an iPad or Mac (or tablet / laptop or desktop) is fair  and we will see a surprising number of people moving away from computers to iPads.

Anyone who knows me, especially ByMUG meeting attendees and people who have taken my Introduction to Mac classes can attest that I am a hardcore believer in having good, reliable backups.  After a recent ByMUG and at my friend David’s urging, here is how my backup mechanism works.  It is almost certainly more than what you need, but if you have questions, feel free to ask!

I’m one of the people who has lost data, and have learned my lesson.  In fact, I kept the hard drive that died, and mounted it’s controller card on my wall as a reminder.  Think I’m kidding? You can see it in this photo (just right of center, top of the photo. If you look carefully, you’ll find the platters from the drive as well).

System description
Before I talk about the how, let’s talk about the what.  Part of my day job is as a web developer and I like to have backups of all of the servers that I (or my clients) have data (websites) on, which brings me to the first rule of backups: Don’t trust other people’s backups. There’s nothing worse than thinking someone else has it covered to find out *after* data loss that they didn’t.

As well being a web developer, I also edit video, which itself generates terabytes upon terabytes of data, all of which needs to be backed up, as well as all of my business and personal files; my music, photos, videos, email and other cherished digital bits and bytes.

I do understand that my situation is extremely unconventional; I don’t think I know anyone else with as much data to back up. But I do, and so can you.

Part One: Time Machine

Time: Zero, does it on it’s own.

Cost: ~$100 – One hard drive (mine’s an internal 2 TB). Externals 2 TB drives can be found for probably $150 or less these days.

One of the hard drives in my MacPro is a dedicated Time Machine drive, which makes incremental backups of all my files on the system drive (even my DropBox).  In my case, this serves as a safety net to protect against accidental file deletions and to fill in the blanks for my offsite backups.

Time Machine is dead simple to configure (want a video?), and works as long as the back up drive is plugged in (and on). This is a great first step to backing up that all Mac users can do.

Two: Web servers to Dropbox

Time: A few minutes per web server (and runs nicely in the background)

Cost: $199/year - for 100 GB – I use Dropbox as a mechanism for delivering files to clients (like 4 GB DVD images)

Once I had migrated most of the websites I maintain to ServerNorth, Myke and I got to talking about backups and he reminded me that I could use rsync to back the web server up to a folder on my computer.

In this case, I decided to rsync the webservers to a folder in my Dropbox account.  Dropbox is a service that allows you to create a folder on your computer that is encrypted (AES-256 encryption) and sent up to a server, and (here’s where it gets amazing), any computer you connect to with your Dropbox account will have a copy of the files. So, in my case my Mac Pro, MacBook Pro and iPhone all have access to the web server backups.  Even handier, DropBox allows me to create a shared folder with clients who also then have a backup of their web server files.

I could automate the rsyncs, but I like to do them manually so I can keep an eye on them.  Down the road, this section may get it’s own dedicated post if there’s demand.

Three: Docking station and SuperDuper!

Time: About 20 to 40 minutes

Cost: BlacX $30 to $48 and SuperDuper $28 -

Every Thursday night, I put one of my backup drives into my BlacX docking station and use SuperDuper! to make an exact, bootable copy of it.  Should my system hard disk stop working for any reason, I can put this drive into my Mac Pro and pretty much carry on from there.

Four: Media Drives to Drobo

Time: About twenty minutes

Cost: Drobo $370+ and Hard Drives $Varies – hard drive prices are always falling, but I usually budget around $100 per drive these days.

Much of my video work resides on two other hard drives in the Mac Pro, cleverly named Media and Media 2. This data needs to be backed up as well, so I back this up to an original USB-only four bay model Drobo, and a newer Firewire 800 four bay model Drobo.
I selected the Drobo as a local backup device as it took four hard drives of differing sizes and made them one contiguous, redundant space which can survive the failure of one of the hard drives with out any data loss, without my having to fuss with the occasional hassle of managing my own RAID array.  If a drive fails in a Drobo, you pull it out, swap in a new one, and the Drobo takes care of the rest. Here’s a video I did on January 1, 2009 of a drive being added to my Drobo.

Five: Software CDs and DVDs to Drobo

Time: A few minutes per disk (one time)

This part of my backup regime is the newest. I recently have finished making disk images of all important software CD and DVDs using Apple’s Disk Utility (File –> New –> Disk Image from…) and saved the disk images onto the Drobo for easy access and safe keeping as I do not particularly trust CDs and DVDs over time.  I’ll write up a post on how to do this one of these days.  However, with Apple moving to distributing all it’s software through the App Store, this will become a little less important.

Six: Drobo to Docking station

Time: About twenty minutes to an hour a month

With all the data going to the Drobo, that has to be backed up as well, so about once a month, copy the newest files from the Drobo to a drive connected in the BlacX.  I haven’t actually worked out an ideal way to manage an incremental backup of the Drobo, so I’m open to suggestions.

Seven: Docking station drives to Bank Vault

Time: A few minutes a week

Cost: $100/year – for Safe deposit box

All the drives that I’ve backed up Thursday night using the BlacX go to the bank with me on Fridays to be deposited into a safe deposit box, and have the previous week’s backup drives taken home with me.  This means that at any point, shy of an asteroid hitting the city, I would at most loose a week of local data (but not what was in Dropbox).  And if an asteroid hits the city and I somehow survive, I have a entire set of non-data loss problems to deal with that would be much more pressing.

The backup drives don’t have to go to the bank – they could go to a friend or family member’s home.  I use the bank as it’s the most convenient for me (and I get my banking done at the same time!).

Wrapping up

Keeping backup copies of your data isn’t complicated, as you can see – and admittedly, my system is pretty extreme, but yours doesn’t have to go that far.  The first step is to at least start somewhere.  For Mac users, buying an external drive and setting up Time Machine is a great first step.  There are plenty of options for Windows users (recommendations, anyone?) as well – I’m just not much of a Windows user anymore.

You wouldn’t believe how many people who have bought backup hard drives but have never  plugged them in to run that first backup because it will take a long time.  Plug it in, set it up and go to bed!

My Simple Rules of Backup:

1. Do not rely other people’s backups. Been there, done that, had to deal with consequences.
2. Be regular. Work your backups into your routine so that they get done.
3. Store your data in at least three places, including one offsite.
4. Test your backups. Once in a while try booting off your bootable backups to make sure they work. Finding out they don’t work when you need them is almost the same as having not backed up, plus all the wasted time.

If you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions, I’d love to hear them – I am always open to improving my backup system, or helping others get something in place.

When I hit my mid-day low, I decided it was time to get out on my bike to see if I could remember how it worked.

As the saying goes “It’s just like riding a bike”. I got onto my bike, and headed out onto King Edward, successfully navigated traffic to Sussex, and then started southward on the Rideau River Eastern Parkway all the way down to Hog’s Back Falls, and then down the east side of the Rideau Canal to Sussex and then home again.

I was particularly pleased that my average speed was around 20 km/hr, and the burning of over 800 calories certainly didn’t hurt either. Once I hit a reasonably straight, flat section, I made a run for it to see how fast I could get up to. Pedal, pedal, pedal. Faster, faster faster. My bike computer hit 41 km/hr and then I coasted for a long time, and resumed cruising along at my regular pace.

Now, it’s time to head off to badminton, and see if my legs will still work there.

Maybe it’s time for you to get out walking or cycling instead of napping or watching TV.

The route ended up being a bit over 25 kilometres, including a stop at the shop that had my bike, and walking to Confederation Park, noticing something was wrong, going back to the shop, letting them fix it, heading back home, and then to the nearby Metro to grab some dinner.

The walk started around 1:30 and ran until about 6 PM, with me actually walking around four hours, including stops at the Arboretum, Galaxy Camera, the Silver Snail,  and the bike shop twice, to fix something they’d missed.

My long walks are something that I don’t get to do enough, but really enjoy.  It’s (largely) quiet, my mind gets to wander, I get to watch the world, and as a bonus, I get exercise.  I consume podcasts and audiobooks by the dozen, or just listen to the sound of the world.

For the past few years, come spring, I start getting out on longer and longer walks, and one of these days, I’ll get up to my goal walk, 45 km. This year? Maybe. Who knows?

A few times in the past people have joined me for portions of the walk, but I believe that will remiain largely solitary as many people aren’t used to the distances I walk, nor the speed at which I tend to travel.

When I’m out, I tend to post my photos to Twitter and Flickr thanks to a handy app called Echofon (thanks, folks!), and down the road I’ll try to ensure that walk-realted photos are tagged walkabout to make them easier to find.

But do I ever love a good long walk.

Seeing as I normally check email within seconds of becoming conscious, this idea struck me as both odd and worth giving a shot.  So, I did.

Fast forward to three weeks later (to today).

For three weeks, I have been carefully resisting the urge to check email while I’m still in bed. Sometimes that urge is amazingly powerful, but so far, I’ve managed to not do it.  I check Twitter, listen to the CBC news at the top of the hour, read the news on a few apps (Globe & Mail, BBC News, NYTimes, CBC, National Post…), and jot down any ideas I’ve had. Then I get up and get my tea started and otherwise putter about before getting to the computer to check email.

Will I continue?

To be honest, I don’t think so, but I do believe that I’ll just shift email to the last thing that I do before getting out of bed, which, I think is a fair balance for my brain, and as you can imagine, your kilometreage will vary.

Oh, that brain of mine.

This got me to thinking about some of the early ones I’d made when I was just getting started in video.  One day, I’ll recreate my very first one, which was more of a stop-motion video of a chess game in which about three moves from a black checkmate a model of the Millennium Falcon strafes the board for a white victory, recorded one frame at a time using a NewTek Digiview on my Amiga 2000, with the laser blasts painted in with Brilliance (I think) frame-by-frame.

All that aside, I did a little digging in my files and found some actual time-lapse videos I shot during the summer of 1993, with my then kick-ass Panasonic shoulder-mount camera (I can’t remember the model number, I’m afraid – but it was huge).  I strung them together and tossed them onto YouTube for your enjoyment.  All three are essentially the same view, facing west from my apartment on Donald Street, and are in chronological order (but I have no idea as to the exact date, just that the tape was dated 1993).

YouTube Link

And yes, I do believe that I eventually damaged the sensor in the camera, after leaving it running exposed to the Sun for so long. Thank goodness I got the extended warranty on it.

I know, I know. About a year ago, I *really* broke the software I wrote to run this blog. The list of features (comments, anyone?) that would be nice to have grew. And grew. And kept growing at a steady pace. At the same time, my business really took off, so my available time (and, honestly, motivation) to work on it was dwindling down to null.

When I migrated over to ServerNorth, I  busted a bunch of things, and the time I wanted to spend writing, I spent fixing things.  I decided to do something about it.  After a few tests, I knew it was time to put my fancy-smancy custom written blog out of it’s misery.

So, after months years of my buddy David Peralty telling me to migrate to WordPress, it’s done, along with some great help from David to get things in order while I’ve been swamped with March 31 deadlines and other projects.

Here we are, everything looks pretty much the same, but with a working admin section so I hope that this will be the rebirth this blog’s needed.  Special thanks to David for all his help in getting this puppy on the road/in the tubes.

So, I have a pile of ideas for posts piled up, so I’ll start working them out, including what will promise to be a massive post about backups.  If you spot anything broken or not quite right, feel free to let me know and I’ll sort it out (eventually).

To demonstrate, I’ve made a video tutorial for your viewing pleasure:

Once QuickTime is open, simply go to File –> New Screen Recording (or press Control-Command-N) and the simple interface will appear:

The small triangle on the right side of the window will open the options window, allowing you to select the microphone, quality of the recording, and where the resulting video will be saved.

Once the video is recorded, you can bring it into iMovie, Final Cut Express/Pro, or other editing software and make any additional changes, if you so desire.

Let me know if you have any questions or requests!

When I buy either a new hard drive or hard drive in an enclosure with a drive in it, write a number on it, and record the information about it in a easy to use spreadsheet.

Here’s the information I collect about each of the drives; drive number (the number written on it), brand, model & serial numbers, drive size (in GB), interface (SATA or PATA for internal drives, or USB/FireWire/eSATA for externals), the warranty expiry date, and the supplier: Where I purchased the drive from.

I do not really need to keep track of what I am using the drive for, or what it’s currently called because frequently I wipe and rename my “floating” drives for specific purposes, like delivering content to a client.

For drives in enclosures, I use the purchase date on the invoice as the beginning of the warranty date.

To determine the hard drive warranty expiry dates, I use these links:
Seagate: support.seagate.com
Western Digital: websupport.wdc.com

If you use other brand drives, you can probably Google up the relevant link pretty easily.

Here is a blank copy of the Numbers spreadsheet, and a version done up in Excel for you non-Mac users.

An additional thing one can do is to add an item in iCal to set an alarm to go off a month before the warranty is up to check the drive.

More enterprising users could adapt this to cover more than just hard drive to all devices they purchase.

At an inappropriate time to people who are on vacation we awoke and headed off to the Via Train Station (isn’t it annoying that Ottawa’s train station is not actually downtown like it is on Montreal, Toronto and most other cities? It *used to be*) after a brief stopover at our local Bridgehead. We got to the train station well before we needed to – I just love taking the train, and everything about them – always have ever since I was a child, when I spent time traveling between Coteau-Station, Montreal, Ottawa, and sometimes Toronto. Before I wander off into a complete train-fanboy post, let’s move on. I like trains. And train stations.

The four of us boarded the train, and ended up at the very back, with another group of folk who were also going to FanExpo, so we ended up chatting with them along the way, sharing cookies, some anime and sci-fi nerdtastic jokes, and my 3G connection (iPhone tethering + OSX Internet sharing is handy).

Quick aside: Google Chat calling (http://www.google.com/chat/voice/) works over tethering – I called Sue’s phone to test it. Take *that* AT&T.

We arrived in Toronto on time-ish, checked into the Royal York (yay for early checkins!), dropped our bags off and went out for a bite to eat at the Overdraught Irish Pub before starting the day at FanExpo.

Once we’d picked up our VIP passes, we wandered in, and did our first big loop of the centre, bought a piece of art by Mengling Chen (super nice!), and wandered over to see if Felica Day (@FeliciaDay) and Amy Okuda (@amyokuda) were at their booth so we could pick up Season 2 and 3 of The Guild (@theGuild) – a web show we just love, and ordered our photo opportunity with them the net day – and I snagged a quick pick of the three lovely ladies. We continued our walk-about, getting a feel for the place, looking for cool tshirts, and eventually we wandered off in search of food.

We then decided to join Sue and Greg for a drink in one of the bars (Epic) in the hotel, and then headed off to the Steampunk party, which suffered from a bit of disorganization (apparently the bar in the Royal York didn’t know they were coming). After a bit of back and forth, we ended up directing them Epic, which had plenty of room for them, and I ended up shooting a video interview with Sue and Todd of the Toronto SteamPunk Society on her new iPhone 4, which she then just dumped to YouTube right out of the phone.

Saturday was odd – we had breakfast in our hotel room, eating some of the food we’d brought along with us on the trip, and then headed off to FanExpo. Well, there was much confusion as to where the VIP passholders should go when we spoke to the security/volunteers, who just kept sending us further down. Eventually, we ended up on the inside, and without realizing it until a few minutes later, we were on the show floor before anyone else. So we wandered around, while vendors set up, and snapped shots of Bruce Boxleitner, Summer Glau, and Felicia Day.

We also found Suzanne of Gloomies a webcomic I started reading after meeting her last year. Tracey got a button or two, but next year, I get a Gloomies t-shirt, I swear! Anyway, it’s a funny comic, so add it to your to-read list.

This year, like last year, I met a whole bunch of independent comic book creators, chatted with many of them and even bought a bunch of comics. I do like to support the independent people, perhaps partially because I’m an independent too.

Once again, we met up with my long-lost friend Roxanne from “back home” – Riviere Beaudette, who I saw last year at FanExpo for the first time in 18 years – and met her 16 year old daughter Jessica for the first time – (how’s that for strange?). We all wandered about and headed off to one of the biggest booths was the Tron booth – for good reason – it’s being released in December, and one of the must-see events was the Tron preview, which we went to.

Like last year, they confiscated our phones and cameras, but apparently didn’t get them all – a few people snuck in audio recorders that we could see. Then, we waited. And waited. So we all chatted, catching up with what was new. Eventually, they previewed the Tron video game, which looked cool, and Bruce Boxleitner came out and talked about being in the original and the new film. Then, we put on our 3D glasses and watched seven minutes of Tron. Wowsers, it looks awesome!

Other stuff we did – took in Felicia Day and Amy Okuda’s talk, had our photo taken with them “professionally”, caught the last half(?) of James Marsters’ talk – he’s quite funny, then Summer Glau’s talk, who I thought was a bit uncomfortable speaking to such a huge room full of folk (I know I certainly would be), but she’s quite charming and entertaining.

Apparently, there were many issues with the day that (largely) didn’t affect us – massive lineups and delays. However, when we picked up our print of the photo of us and Felicia and Amy, we were amazed at the amateur quality of the work. The photo was taken in front of a green screen, poorly framed, and the matte was terrible – everyone has a green outline. I can understand that there are probably hundreds of photos to take and process, but for the love of shiny rocks, do it properly! Tracey put some thought into what she would wear – with the release of the Guild’s Game On Bollywood video, and seeing as how she’s a key member in Ottawa’s Bollywood For Fun and teaches BellyWood classes, she thought it would be awesome to pop into a Bollywood costume for the shoot.

Yes, I’ve commented on such to the FanExpo organizers. I’ll see if I can get the digital originals (*if* they keep them).

Once we left FanExpo for the day, we went to a nearby Tim Hortons (thanks to the Timmy Me iPhone app) with Roxanne, chatted for a while, sent her, her daughter and friends on their way home, wandered back to the hotel, and then out for a quiet dinner.

Sunday morning, we checked out of the hotel, and dropped our bags off at the train station so we didn’t have to lug the all over FanExpo. We then saw some of the lineup issues others had talked about – while we were in the VIP line we were let in at the same time as regular pass holders.

Once we were in, we went off to get the photo autographed, and were floored when Felicia and Amy indicated that this was one of the better photos they’d seen thus far. Ouch. Tracey got a photo of Amy Okuda, Felicia Day and I with my iPhone.

Once that was done, we wandered about the show floor some, and then decided to take the Gothic Lolita Fashion talk. There was a bit of difficulty with getting the laptop connected to the projector, so I couldn’t help myself and went up to get it working.

We almost skipped William Shatner’s (@williamshatner) talk – and were glad we didn’t – he’s hilarious and full of energy! There were two moderators on the stage with him, who almost immediately realized that they were completely un-needed.

When that talk was over, we wandered through the show floor, taking photos and buying up the tshirts I’d scoped out over the weekend. Once I’d blown through my budgeted amount, we wandered aimlessly around some more, snapped a few more photos, and finally left FanExpo.

The four of us decided to have a bite to eat before boarding the train back to Ottawa, at Casey’s, and got a server on her first day, with the usual expected mixups.

Hanging out in the train station is fun, and the train ride home was pretty good. I was quite productive sorting/uploading photos, answering email and whatnot while Tracey slept/listened to an audiobook most of the way.

FanExpo sent out an email a few days later, apologizing for the problems that were had at the event, and next year the show will be better. And we’ll be there. Maybe even with a costume on.

You can see all the photos of at my FanExpo Flickr Set or the FanExpo 2010 Flickr Group I started, which includes photos from others.

Well, that’s what you may think.

Oh, wait. You’re probably right in thinking that. Sorta.

Two of the last things we did before heading out of Ottawa was to Inception- which was, I’m pleased to report a not bad at all movie. We both enjoyed it, but don’t really understand what some people are so confused about. We also went to see the Mosaika – Sound and Light Show on Parliament Hill.

Anyway, moving on.

This year’s trip to Algonquin was a bit different in a few ways;

As our first vacation without Boing, it was another sad milestone, but we’ve gotten used to it now. We also realized that most of our camping photos were of Boing either lying in the sun, being cold, at the front of the canoe, or lying in laps.

Once again, we had bears in the campground – we never saw them, but apparently they were sighted fairly regularly in the area around us. Reportedly, a couple of bears were shot and killed by park rangers the night before we arrived – which, unfortunately, is really all that can be done to bears who have become habituated to people and the people who don’t keep a clean site. We’re a bit extremist in our ways, keeping the site clean and food stowed away, but it’s served us well. If only other people would learn to do it and never, ever feed any animals in the park (except Grey Jays – more on this later).

The first five days we had to ourselves – we do love our friends, but we were in no shape to be of company by the time we made it up to the park.

No, really, I’m not kidding in the least. The first three or four days, I slept on average fourteen hours a night, got up in the late morning, ate breakfast and then lay down in the hammock to read a book until I dozed off. I’ll guess and say I probably was moving around for four hours a day.

We did get out in the canoe a few times, and even went on a walk with a naturalist, who at one point discussed how the Grey Jays were in danger in the park and we should feed them. Thing is.. we didn’t really see any. Lots of Blue Jays, though

One other thing happened while were were on the walk – an older couple had two foreign exchange students with them – a Greek and Cambodian in their early 20s, I’d guess. Tracey had noticed that everything the Greek woman had seemed to be sparkly. Now what got me – and I guess the couple are city folk, but still, really. The naturalist was discussing how beavers modify their environment to better suit them, and the Cambodian woman asked the man what beavers where.

His reply floored me. “It’s like a cat” he said.

I know. I know! At least I managed not to laugh aloud.

A cat? Sure, they both have fur… but…

So, I had one of my (sometimes annoyingly frequent) internal discussions as to wither or not I should be helpful and correct him. In then end, I decided that seeing as he was the authority figure for them on their stay, I probably shouldn’t undermine him.

But… A cat?

My simple description of a beaver, which I think should be fairly universal (on this planet, anyway) would be; “A beaver is like an aquatic rat, several times larger, has a wide tail to aid it in swimming, and eats the bark off trees that it knocks down.”

Onwards.

The exact order of arrival for our visitors isn’t important. This year, we were treated to a slew of people who have never camped with us before. Many could only manage a day or two, in which most time was just spent relaxing and chatting.

I do hope everyone managed to enjoy their time in the park, and we were very happy to have everyone up. Hopefully, next year, we’ll see some of them again. You can have a look at some of the photos we took on Flickr.

We returned home, unpacked everything, but it away, mowed the grass, and decided to go see a movie, so we went off to see Scott Pilgrim VS The World. Plainly, if you haven’t seen it, go see it while it’s in theatres – this movie is *hilarious*. Both Tracey and I laughed and laughed all the way through the movie.

Then, we were off getting ready for FanExpo, which I’ll try to write up in another post.

If you find an application that does not have them, fear not, there is a simple solution:

For the sake of this example, we’ll create a keyboard shortcut for Safari’s “Zoom Text Only” option, found under the View menu.

First, you’ll want to go into System Preferences and open the Keyboard section.

I do this by pressing Command (that’s the key on either side of the space bar) and the space bar. This opens Spotlight, and type “keyboard” in there. One of the top options should be the Keyboard pane of System Preferences. This is how I launch almost all applications. Alternatively, you can click on the Apple logo at the top left of the screen, and pick System Preferences there, or you can look in your Dock to see if it’s there.

Select the Keyboard Shortcut tab if it already isn’t. Now, click the plus sign in the lower middle of the window (arrow) to create a new keyboard shortcut. The minus sign would delete one if it were selected.

Now, a window will appear to let you select which application the new keyboard shortcut will affect.

In this case, we select Safari, and then we enter the menu selection exactly as it appears in the menu: Zoom Text Only.

And then we press the keys (simultaneously) we want to use for that shortcut, in this case, I selected Option + Shift = Comand = Z.

Now that we are finished, we can check in the Safari menu, and we can see our handiwork – without even having to restart Safari or reboot. Notice how the keyboard shortcut now appears in the menu item.

Unfortunately, if you create two shortcuts within an application that use the same key strokes, you won’t be stopped from doing so, and the first listed shortcut will only effect (at least they both don’t work). And yes, I have filed a bug report, as should you (if it matters to you).

Have any questions? Like to see another how-to? Shoot me an email, or tweet at me.

First, a little history

When we arrived at my family’s 1999 Christmas, we were first introduced to Slinky, this somewhat bug-eyed miniature pinscher who instantly adopted Tracey and her lap.

Tracey was just as taken with Slinky and when she found out that dad was looking for a home for her, she was ready to bring her home right then. I asked for a bit of time to consider, and within a month or so, Slinky was in her crate in the back of our car driving to her new home in Ottawa.

We pondered a name change to match her more closely, and I came up with Boing, based on her seemingly unending amount of energy, and the Amiga’s Boing Ball.

We’d spent the time researching how to train her, and we began the process of crate-training and clicker-training her.

The first few nights of Boing’s spending the night in her crate provided us with some valuable data; having children might not be for us. No matter what we tried, she demonstrated her impressive abilities at making different sounds at a wide variety of volumes to indicate her displeasure with being in the crate at night instead of curled up on our bed.

Eventually, the battle of wills settled into a truce of sorts; she would willingly sleep on top of her crate in the bedroom, until she got bored and started to walk around, wake Tracey up with her incessant tick-tick-ticking, and then get kicked out of the bedroom. Sometimes sleeping like the near-dead like I do is a serious advantage.

Boing quickly became an integral part of our lives; I’d chase her around the apartment making funny monster noises, work on teaching her new tricks, she’d stare at Tracey to indicate she wanted more lap-time.

Nearly everyone who met Boing liked her, although initially she wasn’t too great with children (or my sister) who loved to pull on her soft, floppy ears, but over time, and with a bit of training the kids, she learned to tolerate them and even sometimes be playful.

People tend to anthropomorphize pets – especially one as expressive as Boing, with her bug eyes, floppy ears and huge eyebrows to emote what we thought she was thinking. Over the years though, we did, I think learn to read her fairly well, and her us.

Boing loved camping where she’d merrily lie in the sun, defend our site from the squirrels and chipmunks, or sleep in the hammock with Tracey. She’d get excited when we would bring out her life jacket to go for a paddle. Although there was ample room for her to lie down, she much preferred being up front so she could see everything.

Last year, she had it figured out that she didn’t have to stay up with us at night while we played cards, instead making a bee-line for the tent to go to bed instead of staying up and shivering for hours.

When motivated, Boing was quite clever – she learned a slew of tricks, and I thought it was pretty hilarious when I renamed her crate to “jail”. I’d tell her to “go to jail”, and she’d tear off to get there as quickly as possible.

Nearly every day, Tracey and I have lunch together, and Boing, after a fashion, ate with us. We would almost always add a bit of the soup or other table scraps to her food for variety, and she would excitedly watch us for the cue that she could go and have hers.

She’d watch us with the laser-like focus that only she could muster when motivated by the potential of yummy food, with her little stub of a tail wagging away at 75 wags per minute, and sometimes, if it smelled *really* good, a bit of drool.

Boing would spend most of her day sleeping on a box that Tracey and I had built which put her roughly equidistant between us. I could also tell when she was sleeping in later years as she’d developed a slight snore when she was deeply asleep.

Of endings…

Unfortunately, in the second week or so of April, Boing started to act a bit unusual, and we rapidly realized that something was very wrong.

Tracey took Boing in to the vet for them to have a look see, and then I took her for some blood tests. The walk over with her was a very clear indicator to me something was really wrong. Boing loved to pull on the leash – she *can* heel, but everything is usually so exciting. I ended up carrying her in a duffle bag within two blocks of our place to the vet and all the way home, which she certainly seemed to enjoy the higher vantage point.

Within a day or so, it was determined that she was suffering from chronic kidney failure (incurable), apparently something that is common in older dogs.

I remember the moment very clearly when Tracey called me to tell me what the vet had reported, we discussed it and finally, I said it aloud; “Boing’s dying”.

Saying the words drove home that our googley-eyed, stubby-tailed, furry constant companion and occasional pain in the butt was dying. This was something I knew would eventually happen, but not for many more years. Wrong.

Conceptually, “quality of life” is simple to understand, and makes complete sense to me.

Both Tracey and I believe in quality of life, not quantity. Ideally we hoped that Boing would pass away at home in her sleep, but by the afternoon of Friday the 23rd of April, it was clear that we should take her into the vet to have her put to sleep.

In practice however, actually deciding that Boing was suffering enough to warrant ending her life was one of the most heart-breakingly difficult decisions Tracey and I ever had to make.

We got ready for the thirty minute final walk to the vet with Boing, who did not have the strength to walk, so I carried her the entire way in the duffle bag.

The staff at Beechwood Animal Hospital were amazingly kind, and quickly moved us to an exam room to be with Boing.

The time came to make the decision if we wanted to be with her when she died or not, and clearly neither of us had the emotional fortitude to do that.

We were given as much time as we wanted with her and when we were ready to leave, we let the staff know, who kindly took over for us, helped with the paperwork and asked if we wanted to be notified when Boing died, I said yes.

The walk home seemed much further, as we contemplated the beginning of our lives without Boing.

We arrived home and moments later, the phone rang rang in that way that we both instantly knew the news it bore was not good, but I answered it anyway, as I really didn’t want that message on our answering machine.

The woman I vaguely remember speaking with assured me that Boing had died peacefully and painlessly, and after that things get really fuzzy.

The effect of the loss of such a close member of our little family is difficult to put into words. Tracey and I decided fairly early on that we were not going to have children, so Boing was as close we were going to get.

A short aside; sometimes when people lose their pet like this, asking days later if they are planning on getting another pet is pretty much akin to asking a parent whose child had just died if they were planning on having another.

Drastic, certainly, but from our perspective, it’s the same thing, let me tell you. So maybe you shouldn’t ask – just wait for them to bring it up.

Reflections.

Tracey quite quickly put up a last post on Boing’s blog that notified everyone what had happened, along with a link to a pile of photos on Flickr of Boing we’d taken over the years, and I posted the tweet; “.@BoingTheMinpin passed away Friday night ~7PM after a 2 week battle w/ chronic kidney failure. It’s been a rough few days, needless to say.“, both of which reminded the two of us of the quality of our friends, on and offline. Thanks to you all, it helped.

Nearly seven weeks have passed since Boing died, and I still catch myself doing things as if Boing is still here, or expect to see her little bug eyes looking at me when I wake up in the morning.

Both our lives were deeply enriched by the little bug-eyed dog who thought she was as big as a Newfoundlander.

I’ll think of her frequently, miss her dearly, and remember her fondly.

Thanks for coming into our lives, Boing.

I waited six hours to partially to make sure my cousins Janice and Karen didn’t hear about it as a Facebook update – (my tweets are sent to Facebook to give an illusion that I’m on there regularly), and partially because I couldn’t write it yet.

We couldn’t say that it was entirely unexpected – Tracey and I were loosely planning on going down on Sunday to see her as we’d been warned by dad that she had been decidedly unwell the past week or so (which is code in my family that means they’re dying).

That doesn’t really make it easier. That said, having the opportunity to say goodbye doesn’t always help either.

Grandma was our (my sister and I) main mother-figure in our early life while my father was a single dad. We spend many afternoons, evening, and weekends there with her and grandpa.

Things I remember about grandma

Almost every year in grade school, grandma conspired with teachers to have a birthday party for me in school, and made cakes with coins wrapped in wax paper as surprises for the kids.

I’m pretty sure I was in Cubs and Scouts because of her, so part of my super-human-camping-dude kung-foo is due to her.

As I wasn’t the smallest kid around, she always said I was “husky”, which to me sounded much better than fat. Heck, it sorta sounded like I could be dangerous – you know like Jack London’s Buck.

She teased me about having a hollow leg dedicated to mashed potatoes. I think I still do.

If I did something to make her cross at me (her terminology), I’d know nearly instantly – by the stare I’d get.

She loved to watch Coronation Street and Dallas.

Sometimes, I would watch her play cards with her friends, and she’d get me to do reconnaissance for her. Of course, they all knew what I was up to, and then one day I realized she had me spying on her partner, they all had a good laugh.

Chicken noodle soup with cheese and crackers fixes nearly everything.

Like most grandmothers, she was an great cook and excelled at desserts (cookies and puddings).

She’d take my sister and I to the store she worked at and let us run amok.

She taught me manners and how to be polite, apparently too well, as sometimes I get teased about it.

Apparently she mixed brandy into my warm milk to help me sleep as a kid. I still like the taste of brandy today.

While I was socially awkward as a kid, I envied how she seemed to know everyone where ever we went. I’m getting there.

I have a vague memory of going to the “north pole” somewhere in New York state with her and grandpa (and Jenn, I think), but got “the look” when I asked why we were driving south to go to the north pole.

Only after her death did I learn a few things; she spent a year in the hospital in the 1960s recovering from burns that covered 18% of her body from a kitchen accident.

She apparently knew that she was dying, and was firm in her wishes that she be alone when it happened, and that she be immediately cremated after. To my knowledge, we do not have any incidence of zombification in our family, so I thought this was somewhat curious.

The wakes and funeral where everything I guess one would expect from such an event, people came from far and wide to pay tribute and say goodbye to such a wonderful woman.

To say I will miss her doesn’t convey the depth of the feeling, but each day I live, I know that many of the best parts of my personality are because of her.

A few days before the event, I was kindly invited by JCovert of the National Arts Centre (NAC) to attend Mozart’s Final Piano Concerto Beyond the Score® (originally produced by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra).

Unfortunately, Tracey was unable to come with me due to client appointments she had previously made for the custom sewing aspect of her business.

Some other local bloggers were invited to attend as well, such as (in order I ran into them) Bambi Blue, SimonSage, Suzemuse (who kindly texted me from four meters away), AlienDaddy and FenderGurl.

Prior to taking our seats, we were taken aside by Daphne Burt who gave us a run down on how the evening would go – tried to not use the word “mimes” when describing one aspect of the performance, a bit of history of the NAC, and pointed out the “Nixon room”, which during his visit to Ottawa in April 1972 (I was two weeks old) was declared by the Secret Service to be the most secure location at the NAC in case of.. well, I’m not sure – maybe a bar fight? This is Canada, after all. Back on topic.

The evening was split into two parts; the first was spend going through the concerto, one section (movement?) at a time, with the narrator (Bill Richardson), and an actor playing the part of Mozart (Pierre Brault) giving the audience details about the music itself, as to what was taking place in that era, and what potentially Mozart was thinking about when he wrote specific parts.

This must have been very difficult for the orchestra – play a bit, pause, play a bit more, more pausing, then playing again, over and over. The start-stop-restart-stop nature would drive me batty.

After a brief intermission in which I wandered around the lobby eavesdropping to get a sense of what the audience thought (quite positive), and then I looked for Suzemuse and friends, who were busy shooting video and tweeting.

The second half of the show the NAC’s Orchestra got to play the entire piece all the way through, which after the insight provided in the first half, I throughly enjoyed.

After the performance, we were treated to a tour backstage – which for me, he who salivates at the sight of DVD extras – was fantastic, where we learned that about the Fortepiano that the NAC borrowed from Ottawa U, and some of the challenges with putting on such an event, and then listening to Pierre Brault acknowledge that the future of reviews for performances is many individual voices, while surrounded by photos of many of those who have worked at NAC.

More photos can be found in my Flickr set. And, as a special treat, thanks the the folks at the NAC who kindly allowed me to record from my front shirt pocket using my handy-dandy iPhone, a couple of minutes of audio for your listening pleasure:

I waited a while to see if this experience would affect my long-term music-listening habits, and I’m pleased to report that it actually has. In the past few of months, I now regularly move out of my “Tom’s music” playlist, which is where my daily listening comes from – it’s a hugely variable range of tunes (Lacuna Coil, Sting, Moby, Pink Floyd, Megadeth, Bjork, Johnny Cash, Daft Punk, Underworld, Epica) and into my “Classical” playlist, which is largely popular classical, but I’m working on expanding that (suggestions are welcome!), as it seems to have found a place in my life.

Predominantly, it seems that I listen to classical when I’m pensive, or need to clear my mind so that I can focus on a new task, or to wind down.

One of the difficult things I have found with classical music is that it’s hard to find the “good stuff” – most places that sell music online provide a thirty second preview, which is almost entirely useless for classical. In many cases, the first thirty seconds are spent slowly warming up to the piece which doesn’t give me much of an indicator as to what to expect.

Currently, I rely on two sources of daily free music – the eMusic and Magnatunes’ daily free song, both of which are occasionally classical in nature. But beyond that, I turn to you, my readers; Any suggestions?