Category: Misc

Yet Another Stupid Webcam

(Edit: This has been abandoned for now since I never really got it working as well as I’d liked.)

What am I doing in the office on a Sunday?

Not working, actually. Instead I’ve been setting up a webcam in my office. The view is not of the office itself, which would be extremely vain and boring, but of the Kensington area across the river. You’d be able to see where I live were it not for the apartment towers being in the way.

I still have to prettify the interface, but for now you can just select the last file listed in the folder. There is no specific refresh time on it; it’s set up to update whenever the image changes by a certain amount. I still have to experiment with what that threshold should be a bit, so it might not update often enough or too often for your liking for now.

Read on only if you’re curious about the technical details.
Continue reading “Yet Another Stupid Webcam”

Speaking of Books…

I figured I’d put my new card to good use and get some other books I need at the Chapters online shop, since some of them are hard to find in the local stores. It was however, largely futile; most of the titles I was looking for were out of stock or ‘temporarily unavailable.’ Well, nuts.

Fortunately, Amazon recently opened up a Canadian branch of their online store, and after a quick check there all of them were available, though a few were in the ‘1-3’ week timeframe. A lot of them were cheaper than at Chapters even after the club discount. Hurray! But them I remembered how I got screwed around by Amazon before… The last time I ordered from them, they claimed it would ship in 1-2 weeks. After three weeks of waiting, I finally got an e-mail from them saying that they were sorry it was late but they were still working on it. A couple weeks after that, another notice arrived saying that they’d given up and cancelled the order. Was it just a really hard-to-get book? Not really, it was a fairly recent release and I then went and ordered the same book from Chapters and it was in my hands three days later.

There was also something suspicious about the shipping times listed. I had a book set aside in my ‘saved items’ section and it was listed as being available in 2-4 days. I was tempted to add it to the list, but upon clicking it for details, the detail page listed the shipping time as 1-4 weeks! A glitch in the system? Or was it deliberately misrepresenting the shipping time of a book to try and tempt me into picking it…

So, I’m not entirely sure I trust Amazon anymore. But then I can’t even order many of these titles from Chapters. So, for now I’ve gone ahead and placed the order through Amazon. This will be their second chance to either redeem themselves or confirm just how lousy they might be…

Vandalism, Sort Of

While walking home across the LRT bridge, I noticed some bootprints and bike tracks. Not too surprising, except that they were down in the snow on top of the Bow river. The ice doesn’t really get that thick, what kind of idiot would risk themselves on that, I wondered.

Then I noticed where the tracks were leading. A bit farther down, some words had been stomped into the snow covering the ice. In the dim light I couldn’t make out what it actually said, but I did recognize the now-cliche ‘anarchy’ circled-A.

Yes, somebody actually risked life and limb to let us all know just how 3DGY they are…

In other news, I actually got my first credit card fraud check call today, to verify a recent transaction. I was so surprised by their call on a weekend and to the office that I probably sounded completely suspicious and the police are on their way right now. Hey, is that a siren…

This post has also made me realize that I have no idea how to do accented characters in X applications. Being a filthy Westerner I’ve never really needed to use them before. I’ll have to look into it…

You Are All Deranged

Us geeks are a weird lot, and perhaps this helps explain some of it: Five Geek Social Fallacies

I can definitely see aspects of what he describes occuring in places like EverQuest. The whole notion of a guild in these games is an artificial construct put together by people rife with these sorts of problems, so it’s not surprising to see them occur within the guild as well.
Continue reading “You Are All Deranged”

“You Wanna Fuck With Me?”

Does anyone want to buy the full-screen version of the Scarface DVD?

I wanted the widescreen version, of course, but it wasn’t until I’d put it in the player, hit Play Movie, and saw the ‘edited-for-your-screen’ notice that I realized I had the wrong one. I was quite surprised as this is the first time I’d ever picked up the wrong version of a movie. I looked at the case and saw the “Full Screen” lettering right at the bottom of the front, so I accepted that I’d just plain screwed up; I must have been in too much of a hurry, or assumed it would be widescreen since it was an ‘anniversary edition’, or just plain forgotten to check.

So today, when I went to pick up the right version, I checked to make sure it was the widescreen one. I found the rack with them, checked the front of the box, and…it said nothing. It turns out that although it mentions whether it’s full or widescreen on the front of the plastic case, it *doesn’t* say so on the front of the cardboard box wrapped around the case. It does say so on the spine of the box, but in easily-missed tiny print near the edge.

I’m still a dumbass for not checking in the first place, but come on Hollywood, don’t make this even more difficult. If you’ve got a rack full of the same movie in two different versions but the front doesn’t tell you which one it is, that’s just asking for trouble — I’m probably going to glance over them all, not see any difference, and think that there’s only one version there.

Whoa! *THUD*

Winter sucks.

Oh I don’t mind the snow, or even the frigid temperatures we get here. Having lived in Alberta for 21 years now I’m long since used to those.

No, what really annoys me is the *ice*. Here in Calgary, the temperature often wanders back and forth between below-freezing and above-freezing, especially in these early days of winter. An early storm this year left us with a fair bit of snow lying around, but because of these temperature swings it melts, and then refreezes, and melts, and refreezes again, and so on, until there’s layers of ice everywhere. In the parking lots. On the sidewalks. On the overpasses. On the stairs and hills.

The ice alone isn’t too bad since you can adjust your stride to account for it whenever you see it, but…then it snows again. Now not only is there ice everywhere, but it’s hidden.

Time to start taking the LRT again…

Threats From The Moon Gods

There was a full lunar eclipse tonight (well, almost full — I think the sun held on to a teeny little barely-noticable sliver), and I managed to snap a few photos.

My camera lacks manual controls, so the inconsistency of the following pictures is from me mucking about with various settings seeing if I could do better. They’re in chronological order, left to right, top to bottom.

The very last one is the darkest it got, and it was actually darker to the eyes than you see in the picture here. As is typical in these eclipses, the moon didn’t really vanish, the rest of it just became very, very dim, and the camera manages to pick it up better than the eyes alone do.

Tis The Season For Massive Blood Loss

Well, it is now officially winter. The first clue probably should have been the snow that’s been piling up for the last week now, but that’s not necessarily a reliable indicator. We had a freak two-day blizzard back in September, but that didn’t last very long.

No, the reason I now declare it winter is because my body is telling me so. A lot of people are attuned to the weather through various aches and pains and trick knees and whatnot, but the surest sign my body gives me of the change in seasons is the delightful gift of Spontaneous Nosebleeds. You’ve got to love waking up at 1am, slowly realizing you feel a trickle coming down your septum, slapping your hand to your face, and trying to make your way to the bathroom while still 99% asleep…

It seems I’m not the only one either; is this a widespread problem?

Too Damn Early

Evil creeps up on you gradually, one warning sign at a time. As I sit here in the office, one such warning sign almost escaped my attention. A mere flicker of light in the corner of my eye, it would have gone otherwise unnoticed had I not been letting my attention wander.

There, out the window, across the street and midway up the apartment building there, I spotted them. Lights. *Christmas* lights. Before Hallowe’en is even over.

Bah, humbug.

Drugs and Music

Say hello to all the apples on the ground
They were once in your eyes but you sneezed them out while sleeping

— “The Nurse Who Loved Me”, A Perfect Circle

Whatever they’ve been snorting, it must be pretty good…

(And the album rocketh. DownloadBuy it.)

Patch This

My e-mail had actually been relatively spam-free up to this point, but now over the last couple days I’ve been flooded with fake messages in one of two forms:

1) The Microsoft Security Patch

An obvious hoax if you look at the right spots (somehow I don’t think MS’s e-mail address is bqgkxiqisa@support.net), but unfortunately some people will believe it and get suckered into running it and infecting their systems.

2) The undeliverable message notice

These messages try to give you the impression that you sent a piece of e-mail with an attachment to someone and it bounced, hoping you’ll be confused enough that you’ll open it up to remind yourself what it was when, of course, it’s really just a virus in the attachment. The same one as the trojan above, in fact. There’s also a variation on this one where you get a legitimate bounce message from a mailer because it had anti-virus protection, except that you weren’t the person who sent it in the first place because the virus spoofed your address from someone else’s address book, and the anti-virus software has now oh-so-helpfully sent you a copy of the virus as well. :-P

Although they’re easy enough to spot and delete, they’re still getting annoying. I’m receiving about 30-40 a day now and at 110k or more each, they’re wasting a lot of space and risk filling my mailbox and preventing other e-mail from getting through. My private mailbox is fortunately untouched so far, but I do still need to check for the occasional potentially important stuff in the public mailbox, too.

I’m not sure what brought this flood on so suddenly, but now I really need to set up those filters…

(Update: Apparently this is the newly-released W32.Swen.A virus.)

Musical Madness

One of the stranger parts of civil law is the notion that a corporation is considered a ‘virtual person’ with all the rights and freedoms thereof. The analogy goes even further though; apparently companies and organizations and such can become sick and even mentally ill. Otherwise how can you explain the recent actions of the RIAA, such as:

I do sympathize with the artists and they don’t deserve to get ripped off (though with the way things are currently set up they don’t make an awful lot off of album sales anyway), but this is getting a little heavy-handed…

Papers, Please

Security is a necessary evil, of course. The keycard on the outer doors of the building? Well, there is a lot of riffraff around this part of downtown. The keycard on the elevators? Can’t have people wandering the floors after hours. The keycard on the floor doors? Gotta be able to tell the employees from non-employees.

But now they’re putting key locks on *every individual office door*. It’s not entirely new; a number of people in the company have had locks on their doors for a long time now due to expensive, portable equipment they have (we’ve had laptops stolen before, likely by delivery people who pop in and see nobody around), but now everyone gets one.

It’s not because we don’t trust each other. All of the locks will actually all work off the same key, so all of us can get into each others’ offices if necessary. What it’s actually for is to protect us from our subtenants.

A while back I had to move my office since we’re subleasing some of our space to another company to save on costs. No problem — until we discovered that we can’t build walls between us and them. The section they took is positioned such that the corridors leading between us *have* to remain open in order to comply with fire codes. We’ve put doors up instead, but again to satisfy the fire codes they have to remain unlocked.

So, next month, we’re going to have completely unknown people with access to our floor space as well, and the paranoia’s been gradually greeping upwards, culminating in the installation of all these door locks.

One more lock isn’t really a big deal, but it’s annoying to have yet another daily ritual I have to incoporate…

Pump Down The Volume

I picked up the latest Rush album ‘Vapor Trails’ shortly after it came out, and it’s been bugging me for a while now. Though I’ve always been a big fan and their skills are as finely honed as ever, something about it seemed a little ‘off.’ I’m not generally very musically inclined so it wasn’t immediately obvious to me, but after a bit of research and listening, it became clearer that the problem lies not within the music itself, but in the mixing.

Apparently the key word around studios right now is Volume, Volume, Volume. Now the volume of a CD track can be safely increased to the point where it just fits snugly within the 16-bit sample range, but apparently that’s not good enough for some studios. They’re pushing the volumes high enough that it exceeds that range, and exceeding it has consequences — it introduces distortion into the music. See here for a much more detailed technical article about this distortion problem.

The distortion is pretty minor though; you have to listen pretty closely to notice it. The other, more important problem this volume-mania has is that all of the individual instrument tracks have had their volumes cranked up as much as possible (a technique apparently known as “The Wall Of Sound”). The result is that the final mix sounds ‘muddy,’ with the instruments competing with each other for your attention. There are no subtleties; licks that would have worked better in the background are forced into the foreground and transitions that should have been built up slowly are instant and jarring instead.

There’s not much that can be done about it though as long as the studios are convinced that this is what has to be done to sell albums nowadays, since they seem to think that the kids won’t be interested unless it’s LOUD. Maybe the live versions will be better or a future remix could be possible…