not dead yet

Really, I've just been resting. I've moved across town. I've got a new job. I've had quite a few couch surfers from far away lands holed up in the rob-icile. I'm heading to the West coast of this fine country to attend the wedding of my eldest younger brother to his high school sweetheart. It's been a very busy summer and it shows no signs of letting up any time soon.

I'm spending too much time behind a keyboard and / or in a bar (or both), and not enough time in the sun. But fear not, the rumors of my death have been wildly exaggerated.

In the meantime I'll leave you in the excellent company of one of my new found friends-a-la-intarweb, one Mr. Ron Jenkees. When I was a young man it was only angry music that could sate my yearning soul. Today I want happy and I want lots of it, and my boy Ronnie has happy in spades. Thanks to you Ron and thanks to those still watching this space. Enjoy the tail end of your summer. I sure will :)

Sweden 1 - Canada 0

Last week the Vänsterpartiet or Left Party of Sweden tabled a motion to legalize piracy for personal use. This week the PC party of Canada tabled a bill to make it easier to prosecute Canadians who infringe on copyright for personal use.

Anyone have a job opening in Stockholm for an experienced mainframe geek with a penchant for downloading?

jiggabyte costs in canada at all time low

A few months back I wrote this crappy little Google Gadget to find me the best deal on hard drives North of the border. It pulls a listing off ShopBot and calculates the retail cost per gigabyte. Years of migrating my RAID from one set of disks to another had me fed up with doing the math myself, like most things I figured if a computer can do it faster then why the hell should I do it at all?

So for the past few weeks the best price has been hovering around CDN 17 cents / gig, but over the weekend it took quite a dive. I guess there's some kind of rebate at work here, but it seems mucho grande jiggabytes can be had for CDN 13 cents / gig today at NCIX. Of course, there's no guarantee the deal will still be going on at the time you read this, as the list refreshes pretty often.

Anyway I did have thoughts of cleaning up this gadget for public consumption, but like most quick and dirty hacks it did what I wanted so I never bothered fixing (read: creating) the UI or doing much else besides listing the best deals on my iGoogle homepage. There is code in there to sort by SATA/IDE, 2.5" / 3.5" form factors, brand, size, etc if you're feeling adventurous and really enjoy other peoples scripts. Of course if you do go in there and look about you'll surely perish in fits of laughter at my crufty DOM hacking and general abuse of Javascript as a whole.

four two zero

Once again, a happy four two zero to all.

overheard on the subway

Guy One: This week, I had like ten people add me on Facebook and I don't know a single one of them.
Guy Two: I know! Today I wanted to delete Matt, but if I did that I'd have to delete like three other people.
Guy One: (laughing) I just did a cleanup on the weekend, I deleted everyone from my home town!
Guy Two: (admits quietly) I deleted everyone from high school.
Me: lulz.