Archive for May, 2007
May 31, 2007 at 9:34 am · Filed under Family+Friends, Home
On Friday night we snuck over to P and J’s while P took J out to “get a movie” so that we could give J a surprise birthday party. As she was coming up the stairs she said something like “sometimes when I come up these stairs it sounds like there are voices coming from our apartment”. Well this time there were. We spent the evening eating, drinking and watching Aidan show off for his audience.
On Sunday we invited P and J over for “tea” with J and K. They were ushered into an empty living room with six tea cups waiting on the coffee table. What they didn’t know was that 20+ of their friends and family were waiting in the parking lot to surprise them with a baby shower. I went off to “make the tea” and came back with the crowd. We spent the afternoon eating, drinking, and watching P and J open a mountain of baby gifts.
On Sunday night we heard a rhythmic “plink plink” on the baby monitor and went to investigate. We discovered water dripping from Aidan’s ceiling about two feet from his crib. That wasn’t such a nice surprise.
May 23, 2007 at 9:28 am · Filed under Games, Geeky
I play Magic: The Gathering. I’m not very good. The people I play with are very good. I get beaten. A lot. I need to fix this.
We all know that the only way to get better at something is to upload the skill from the Matrix practice, practice, practice. So with that in mind, I’m heading out on Sunday night to a Magic tournament so I can test my skills against some different people and maybe pick up a few hints and tricks. Who knows, I might even win.
With a hectic social calendar small and demanding child to look after, getting nights out is difficult, and these things have a nasty habit of clumping together, so I’m actually missing a rum cake party (a rum party may have been irresistible but rum cake I can handle) and another celebratory event just so I can sit in a room full of guys playing cards. Luckily I have a very understanding wife who happens to have a thing for geekiness.
May 22, 2007 at 2:18 pm · Filed under Home
Despite the lovely weather, we spent most of the long weekend indoors. The reason? Ikea. Last week Jen went out and purchased four bookcases and a kitchen island to add to the shelves and medicine cabinet we already had at home awaiting installation. Over the past three days I’ve been assembling the furniture, re-arranging rooms so that the furniture can be installed, drilling holes in walls for shelves and medicine cabinets and generally being IkeaMan.
On the plus side, we did get to go out for breakfast on Sunday morning, I do have a lovely shiny new kitchen island, and we did watch a very cool movie last night.
May 15, 2007 at 9:18 am · Filed under Family+Friends
Today I turn *mumbly mumble*. Birthdays on a Tuesday are no fun, so most of the celebrating happened at the weekend, when we went up to the country for Mother’s Day.
It was Aidan’s first trip to the country and he was so filled with delight about the whole experience that he burst into spontaneous unprovoked laughter several times. There is no better sound than a toddlers laughter.
After frolicking in the garden we retired to the house for a delicious lunch of home-made rolls filled with pulled pork made by Richard and a greek salad made by Elisabeth. That was followed by an enormous carrot cake with not enough candles on, which was fine by me.
Lunch was wrapped up with some unwrapping. Two gifts from Elisabeth and Richard, a copy of Christopher Hitchen’s “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” which promises to be a fun read, and a pi plate. Yes, I spelled pi correctly.
Last night we had a sushi dinner as a belated mothers day and early birthday meal and tonight I have an evening of gaming to enjoy.
I also got a big bag of boxers from Jen. I’m wearing the pink ones today. And I can’t believe I just blogged that.
May 10, 2007 at 10:54 am · Filed under Games
Yes it’s that time again. Find the book, report the catch on bookcrossing and tell us here in a comment. In this picture the red square is where I left the book. Go get it!
May 8, 2007 at 10:58 am · Filed under Geeky
I have an account with BMO Investorline from back when I dabbled in the stock market and got burned. I tried to log in to it the other day to change my address and discovered something disturbing.
When I first created the account, the password could be any length, so I chose a password which was 10 characters long. Apparently at some point since then BMO have changed their system so that passwords have to be six characters long. This is a disturbing trend that I’ve seen popping up in a few places, including where I work.
Fixed length passwords are a bad idea for one very simple reason. They are easier to guess. The number of possible combinations of six characters is much, much smaller than the number of possible combinations of random length passwords. Granted it’s still a fairly large number, but why not make it as large as possible?
So I called the bank to get my password reset. They asked me a bunch of security questions, which is good, although a determined cracker could probably find out the answers, but then they reset my password. They reset it to something very, very simple. Now I can only assume they use the same very simple password for all password resets, and I’m guessing they get more than a few password resets every day, so it’s probably a good password for those evil crackers to try.
I understand that banks are treading a fine line between making their online banking as user-friendly as possible while keeping it as secure as possible, but security has to come first. Always.
May 7, 2007 at 11:13 am · Filed under Food
BBQ season is upon us, so I decided it was time for some ribs at the weekend. As Blork mentioned a while ago, there are many techniques and “secret” recipes for the perfect BBQ ribs, but the generally accepted method is to cook them for a long time at a low temperature.
Of course, before you cook them you need to tenderize and flavour them a bit. I did that with a dry rub mix of paprika, chili powder, cayenne pepper, thyme, oregano and salt and pepper, rubbed into the meat the night before cooking.
The next day I took the ribs out of the fridge to come up to room temperature, then prepared the BBQ. I had some hickory chips left from when I made pulled pork last year so I threw them in an old tin with holes in and put them over the heat.
When the BBQ was stable at 300 degrees F. I put the ribs in on the side with the burner off and quickly closed the lid. 300 is a little hotter than I would like, but I only had a 3 hour cooking window. If I had the time I would do them at 200 for 5 hours.
I made a quick mopping sauce with apple cider vinegar, olive oil, water and pepper. You can add other flavourings if you like but I decided to let the rub do most of the flavouring. I mopped the ribs every 30 minutes.
After three hours the ribs were tender and delicious, but not quite falling off the bone. Slower and longer would’ve fixed that. I made a quick potato salad and a green salad to go with them. I’m having the leftovers for lunch today.
May 4, 2007 at 10:38 am · Filed under Skepticism
I was disappointed to see an advert for Narconon on network TV last night. I would like to point out a few things:
- Narconon’s “detox” methods are unscientific and potentially dangerous.
- The “treatment” costs $15,000.
- Narconon is a front group for Scientology.
- Scientology is a money-grabbing, lethal, criminal cult.
For more information read Narconon Exposed and Operation Clambake.
May 2, 2007 at 10:15 am · Filed under Family+Friends, Montreal, Pubquiz, Toastmasters
Last night after work I headed over to El Diablo Rojo, a tapas bar on Peel for a very pleasant evening with my fellow Toastmasters. There was free beer and free food and good company, what else could I ask for? The food didn’t seem very tapas-like but it was still good. Who knew beef and bananas would be a good combination? The beer was the non-spanish quebecois favourite Maudite and was stronger than I realized. The company had me discussing gaming, the UK, domain names, Facebook and craigslist and made me totally lose track of time until Jen called at 8:05 to ask why I wasn’t at quiz yet.
I dashed over to Hurley’s to arrive midway through round one of the quiz to join Jen and our other teammates, Marie-Jo and her Scottish beau Jonathan. We didn’t win the quiz but we had fun trying, and everyone now knows I want to have John Cusack’s babies.
May 1, 2007 at 12:12 pm · Filed under Geeky
A while ago I wrote about the possibility that Dell would be offering PCs with Linux pre-installed.
Today that came a step closer to reality with the announcement that Dell will be shipping Linux PCs in a few weeks. The best news of all is that they have chosen Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) as their distribution.
So which will you choose, a Windows PC with no software on it, or a cheaper Linux PC with everything the average user could need pre-installed? How long will it be before Microsoft are forced to bundle MS Office with Windows?
