really its not just the young ones that are geared up and ready for this trip – i am too! although i did get to go back home to visit mom and gord for a few days in april, i am seriously looking forward to turning off my phone and powering off my laptop and disconnecting from all the stress and urban fury of living in a ‘big city’.

there is something very humbling and comforting about returning home, and i look forward to it with great anticipation. strangely i’m even looking forward to the drive out, even though it’ll take us 3 days to get there.

i remember vividly the trip my grandparents took me on when i was a kid, thru the rockies. we went with a big camper motorhome thing, and i recall riding above the drivers seat in the bunk, waving out the front window at on coming traffic. we stopped at the radium hot springs and just about every road side attraction along the way. i was in awe of the mountains, so awesomely huge. they made me feel like a little speck of dust who just happened to be floating thru, on my way to the ocean.

i’m happy that i’ll be able to share that same type of experience with mandy and the kids, none of whom have ever been thru the great canadian rockies before. i’m pretty sure we’ll be stopping quite alot for roadside view and picture ops.

and if we can, hopefully stop in calgary to see my sister, alyssa. the last time i saw her she was just a kid, maybe like 7 or so and now she’s all grown up! lol can’t wait to see her again and introduce her to mandy and the kids

so if all goes well, we’ll be leaving bright and early on saturday morning. sure makes these last couple of days at work draaaag….

the trip – i have to admit – was by far the best trip home i have had. mom and gord (poppa)’s house is comfortable and inviting and despite having never been to visit mom in her new home, it felt just like home anyway. well, upgrade mom’s old crappy tv with a big screen surround sound, a media center and an xbox 360, it was just like it should have been.

the journey there was fun: me, driving and being fed timbits by the dozen by my trusty navigator mandy ( who really didn’t care if we got lost ), rachel ( who was awake for about 13 minutes of the 16 hour drive there), lily (who tried to wake rachel when she wasn’t napping herself) and cameron and abby who entertained themselves with hours of pictochat on thier nintendos and stuffing thier faces silly with the cooler of snacks that lay between them. while the kids took a morning nap on the second day, we stopped for a quick break outside of fernie that was absolutely breath-taking and spotted what mandy is convinced was an elk but i’m pretty sure it was a deer about 1/4 mile away in a clearing. that was the first of many deers, foxes, elk, horses, cows, bison, emus, llamas and other creatures along the way we spotted. i’m pretty sure the kids were sick of hearing ‘look kids, cows!’ by the 3rd hour of alberta.

nonetheless we made it to nanna’s house on time and were greeted with a fridge full of my favorite beer and a warm rodo’s pizza, as thick as your neck and as greasy as a frenchman. we spent the first few days catching up with mom as gord was visiting his father in ontario for the weekend. it was nice to have her all to ourselves i have to say and i think she enjoyed the chaos of chasing around 3 kids (plus rachel who also did alot of chasing herself when she wasnt’ playing assassins creed or napping).

i miss the little things about home. i miss the smell of the air before a big storm. i miss the deafening silence of the prarie sitting in a car at the side of the road at night. i miss the assortment of snacks (and yes mandy we’ll get you the box of bounty bars shipped in ASAP). i miss sitting around a fire and talking about really nothing at all.  but mostly i miss the most important things:  cameron spending even just a little time with his (great) uncle mitch. zipping around buffalo pound in his ailing golf cart for the thrill of cam and abby. mitch silencing camerons cries after getting bumped in the noggin with an offer to ‘go kill a woodpecker with this slingshot?’. priceless lessons… i will miss watching lily dote and incessently flirt with her uncle dustin – truly i’ve never seen her put on a show like she does for my brother. she’ll plop herself down in front of him, staring at him, smiling at him, making sure she is the center of his attention until he gives it to her, which only encourages her more. and little ben, getting to meet him for the first time was so great. he’s so chubby and cute, so quiet and expressive and he’s got such an adorable toothy smile that just makes me want to grab his little cheeks and never let go.

a week was definitely not enough. (although mom might say otherwise – i’m pretty sure she slept for 2 days after we left). sleeping in while nanna whips up a breakfast for the kids and keeps them entertained. mandy would rise early too and would sit out in the backyard with nanna, drinking coffee and chatting like a couple old ladies lol. after everyone was adequately bathed (the shower broke before we got there), we’d head out for our days adventure. to the beach, to the mall, to the tunnels of moose jaw. on the grand regina tour where we drove by just about every significant landmark of my childhood. we even stopped at my old elementary school and let the kids play while i sneaked a peek in the windows of my old classroom. then by thom collegiate, and finally by the university. our house on mclean st. the gibbs on stewart (and sheldons and cunninghams and goulds). pat and carls place on mcgillivray. a whirlwind tour to be sure but it was great and i needed it. for posterity, mandy’s camera snapped happily at every post and back alley, every house and school, every building that we passed that i mentioned.

this was also the first canada day i’d spend in canada in some 13 years, which was special to me. we went down to wakamow, surrounded by moose-jawians adorned in red and white, eating hotdogs and shaved ice. the kids jumping on huge inflatable hamburgers and forts. mandy searching for 4 leaf clovers in the park while gord tried patiently to get lily to cross the bouncy bridge on the play structure. then, a fantastic meal at the burger cabin made especially comfy by the fenced park/eating area complete with swings and play cars for the tykes, and a nice view of the river next to us. we never did make it back to the cabin during our trip but its definitely on the agenda for next year…

at dusk a day or so later, the familiar dark clouds began to roll in and the air gets sweet with the smell of rain. flashes of lightening flicker in the distance and its the perfect time to go watch the storm. gord draws a quick map and mandy and i hit the road. out on hwy 363 we make our way to the top of the largest hill outside the city, where you can see the flickering lights of moose jaw perfectly. and in the distance surrounding the city, a singular black cloud, darkening the picturesque horizon. the radio warns us of possible ‘tornadic activity’ but the amazing forked blasts of lightening that i haven’t seen in such a long time make me want to stay. mandy gets quiet and pensively suggests that we return to the city, which we do – probably the smart thing when the radio is suggesting people get inside thier homes and go to the basement as nickle-sized hail is approaching with this massive storm front. it rained a bit on our way back but that night we never actually got the storm, which veered off after midnight much to our dismay.

the week flew by, so quick that even though we ran out of things to do, i could have spent so much more time there just doing nothing more than hanging out at mitch’s cabin watching movies, going fishing, hanging out with my buds james and mike again, or doing nothing at all. maybe next year we’ll take 2 full weeks…all in all it was exactly what a vacation should be. time with family and friends, reconnecting and making sure that despite the old saying, sometimes, you can go home again

a trip home means adjusting from the frantic life of the city to the slower, more comfortable pace of a small town. it is very much a welcome change, although it always seems to be laced with a great reluctance to return to ‘reality’. thank god its the summer though – not sure i could stand -40 degree temps anymore…

i’m actually looking forward to the drive, oddly enough. there’s something eerily soothing about driving till your eyes are blurry, especially across the flatness and huge skies of the canadian prairies. maybe i’ll find some peace at a road side pull-off whilst the kids pee.

i figure i’m long overdue for a break. my vacation time at work is all banked up and i’m honestly ready to go now. thanks to facebook i’ve already re-established contact with at least a half- dozen people that i knew in my younger days, still in regina or moose jaw, and thirsty to sit down and catch up. my mom (newly married jamaican style), will be throwing a little bbq/reception to celebrate that occasion which i’m joyously anticipating. not to mention, we’ll be there for canada day to boot, eh.

google chrome is very cool. 

the team put together a smart comic-book like intro here to explain why there’s a need for a more non-traditional approach to the internet browser. the ‘old school’ browsers were born into a technological world devoid of mass phising, css and rendering issues, etc and are constantly playing ‘catchup’ to build features into the single-threaded design of the ie/ff browser we know today. 

chrome is different. visually and functionally, but different in a very very good way. for instance:

1. the tabs top all. thats right, the tabs (standard now in any practical browser) are located at the top of the page, rather than buried beneath the tool and address bar. this little shift is at the heart of the usability enhancements and makes total sense. each tab has its own memory space and runs independently of the others. if one tab locks or crashes, the others remain intact. plus i just love looking at the top of the pane to see where i’m at. easier is better. 

2. publish apps. oh yes you can! you can create desktop shortcuts to web applications that when clicked run in a special window with no browser controls (tabs, buttons, etc) and all you see is the app itself. like gmail – it works like a champ! 

3. it’s open source. need i say more? this means you, me and everyone else can start writing plug-ins and making it OUR browser. 

4. it’s fast and stable.  popups won’t actually pop out into a new window. the address bar is replaced by what they call the omnibox (yes its a gay-tarded name), but it works to suggest the url like the google search box, all in one. dig it. one box to rule them all. incognito mode doesn’t save your history for when you’re on a porn rip. 

personally i haven’t made the leap all the way to using chrome as my defacto browser of choice: that job still belongs to firefox3, but only because chrome yet (still in beta) doesn’t resize well in a dual-monitor setup and looks a little goofy if you try to move it from one monitor to the other. 

aside from that little and very minor snafu, its just as fast as ff3 if not faster, clean, stable, secure and promises to give MS a run for thier money if chrome ever makes it out of beta… 

another bit of a pain in the ass that any designer can tell you about is dealing with photoshop brushes. because of such a grand proliferation of folks out there crafting and making accessible via the web all sorts of great, interesting and must-have brushes out there, its uber easy to throw away a couple hours finding brushes, unzipping, putting in your presets folder, testing them out – and perhaps only to find that they’re not what you want. or even maybe they are cool, but its not easy to always remember what brushes look like by name. enter the ABRviewer: for mac, win, linux. this software will ease the pain of previewing all your photoshop brushes – quick, easy and free. just the way i like things…

Scrabulous is disabled for US and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here

oh god no! they’ve taken away my scrabulous!!! so apparently the two indian guys who set up scrabulous knew what was coming. despite the many petitions online and huge daily active user base, they were forced to close-up shop (on facebook at least – the original scrabulous site still works)

and so the hasbro/ea folks have whipped up their own version of the the classic ‘scrabble’ game and posted it up on facebook too. however, its only in beta and still has all sorts of little problems. i signed up, started a game and returned later to find this:

We’re working on some tech problems and Scrabble will be ready to play as soon as possible!

so not only did they kill off the most popular facebook app and try to replace it with their own, theirs doesn’t even work! either that or they’re flooded with ex-scrabulites in a mass triple word score exodus and their servers just can’t handle the refugee blitz.

either way, it blows. anyone wanna play tetris?

if you do happen to click the link, log-in, the only way to stop it from messing with your msn is to go in and change your password… got it? good.

well since we went on vacation last month, this cat has been given free reign on his whereabouts and using his handy cat-door, can enter and leave the house as he pleases.

all was well until about a week ago, whereupon jennifer awoke drearily at 4am to pee and kicked one of indy’s mousey cat toys on her way. the only problem – it wasn’t a cat toy at all. yes, it was a dead mouse.

since that time, he’s brought in other conquests to us – 2 more whole mice and then again this morning only the lower half of one, entrails trailing next to my work shoes.

we’ve tried locking out the cat door but he whines and cries all night until we let him out. then back to the bedroom window mouncing as loud as he can to wake us up when he wants back in. its almost impossible to get any sort of REM sleep in our house with both indy and lily periodically waking us.

aside from the obvious – skinning the cat and making moccasins, what can we do to prevent the plethora of rodent carci (is that a word? no…) from winding up all over our floor every morning?

thoughts?

as a result this is my attempt at barking out a bit about technology and the stuff i deal with, both professionally at work and the stuff i do when i’m not ‘working’. okay, its all just sorta fun to me anyway and its hard to call it ‘work’ when you enjoy the hell out of most of the stuff you get to do, but you get the gist.

so, one of my application servers needs a little re-jigging and resizing of partitions. not only is it a production machine, its also used as our citrix metaframe server. to dump and reinstall would be very time consuming so instead, we look to imaging software to ease the pain. now, i’ve used norton ghost before and its a fine product, however i figured it’d be time to look for something new and possibly even better, and thats when we found terabyte software, image for windows – dos – linux.

here’s the skinny on the whole process:

1. d/l the software and buy it.

2. create a bootable disc

3. attach a usb or firewire external hdd to your machine

4. boot to disc, run thru wizard, image your partition and voile!

well, almost but not quite. what wound up happening here was that image for dos doesn’t recognize the 1.1 usb 1TB myBook. enable legacy support. plug the drive in only when ready to boot. no go. create another boot disk with UHCI enabled in the options. nothing.

next – create an image for linux boot disc. holy crap, it boots and it sees the external drive!

the backup of the primary partition took about 2 hrs in my case and  took a 12GB partition and packed it into a 5GB file, browseable with the TBI viewer. rock on.

all in all, it took very little time to start imaging effectively with this tool and i only assume that anyone would be able to hit the ground running with this software and get the job done quickly. my advise to anyone having trouble with a usb 1.1 device being recognized however is just to skip right to the linux product here – works like a champ.