Well, I’m hoping to finally break the cycle. I just grabbed the new iPhone app for wordpress and am hoping to be able to post quick things happeing in my life, and save the longer posts for when I have time.

—Insert Apple Rant here

This is probably the only time you’ll hear me rant about Apple – they brought out this awesome device called the AppleTV, I was super excited by it, has a really nice interface, easy to use, tied to iTunes, and was supposed to make life easier when streaming media to my TV.  Then I found out that they want you to only use the media format they use, which kind of screws anyone with any significant amount of digital video thats not in mp4 format.  Unfortunately I fall into that category, with somewhere around 1.2TB of TV recorded for viewing at my leisure.  To re-encode all of that, I’d a. have to have a ton of extra hard drive space, and b. way too much time on my hands.  So, really, Apple, get with the times already, just include the codecs in the next AppleTV update and allow me to mount my Samba share on it and I think a lot more people will buy your device.

—End Apple Rant

Even if Apple does include these features – which they won’t – I still think a Boxee box is just what the industry needs to jump-start it.  A lot of other companies have tried to bring out media center boxes, but they all suffer from one critical flaw or another; poor ui, no networking support, poor codec support.  So, I’m putting my money towards a Boxee box when they come out – looking forward to finding more details on December 7th during the Boxee Beta release.

Boxee Blog » a Boxee Box is coming!.

So, the simple answer to everyone’s question – how’s married life – I think can be summed up as, the same as life before the wedding (minus all the wedding planning).  For anyone out there looking to get married to their long time significant other, I would offer this one piece of advice, don’t expect radical changes to your relationship post-wedding.

And thats all the wedding advise I’ll offer, promise.

I’ve taken the liberty of setting up Varnish in front of Apache, I know my blog doesn’t get much traffic, but at least it should respond a lot quicker – sometimes I find wordpress to be kinda slow. I’m going to be tweaking the config, and once I have it just right, I’ll post my VCL code here for anyone who’s interested in optimizing Varnish for WordPress installs.  It also has the added benefit of protecting my blog should (hell freeze over and) one of my posts suddenly become popular.

I fixed the stupid problem I was having with tank by re-installing Ubuntu.  Since I no longer have any optical bays, I had to actually set up Ubuntu over a netboot install, which was kind of cool.  If I have some time, I’ll post some instructions on how to do it in case anyone’s interested.

To my surprise, its a notice saying they’re going to be upgrading my analog service to their new amazing “digital” service, because they can no longer maintain the analog phone lines. What a load of crock, I was actually a Sprint customer back in the day when Rogers bought them out, and I’m fairly certain that as a result of the buyout, Rogers had to maintain the analog phone lines. That being said, Ma Bell happens to own the lines and leases them out to Rogers, which I would guess cuts into their ever so precious profit margins. So, it would make sense, from a business perspective (aside from the whole giving Bell back their monopoly), for Rogers to try and stop paying the expensive leasing fees and give everyone VoIP, which costs them essentially nothing.

Anyway, the whole point of the argument, monopolies aside, is that I got the letter on July 4th. They are making the change to my line on August 1st according to the letter. Now, the real problem is that I rely on my analog phone line for my DSL, which I get through Sentex. Would seem Rogers can’t even get their act together to give their customers even 1 months notice of changes to their services. Unfortunately, you can’t cancel any contract without a month’s notice, GREAT GOING ROGERS! So, now, I’m forced to cancel my service with Rogers, get Bell to take over my phone line, and look, Rogers has lost another customer.

Really, wake up people, why can’t you get your act together and be a decent service provider like you used to be? Rising prices, crappy service, for what, a few “value adds” here and there? No thanks.

So, lots of changes around here since I last blogged, I now work as the Director of Technology for MRX & Associates and the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.  Much fun, unfortunately time is short and thus I have to keep this one short.

One other thing… Batman Rocked!

For the past 3 years, I have paid Blizzard approximately $700, and spent literally days of my life on their game. And really all I have to show for it is a few characters on their servers that aren’t really worth anything. Now, thats not to say I didn’t enjoy it while it lasted, it was a lot of fun and I definitely enjoyed the times I had with my friends. Unfortunately, they’ve moved on for the most part, and so I feel I have to move on as well.

Anyway, not much else to say about it, other than I’ve had a lot more time to spend on other games, I’m still working through Metroid, and I just picked up Mario Galaxy last night. I’ll have my opinions on Mario Galaxy up once I get a little further into it.

I will however, take a few seconds to introduce a project I’ve decided to work on (as if I wasn’t busy enough already). As you know, I play WoW fairly regularly (World of Warcraft for those un-educated). There are many resources for the game, and a LOT of addons amongst various sites. Keeping your addons up-to-date unfortunately can be quite the chore, and so some wonderful people over at WoWAce (www.wowace.com), have written a small program to search through their site and find updated addons. Unfortunately, they wrote it in .Net, which obviously doesn’t help us Mac users out there. In comes the Java WoWUpdater: http://sourceforge.net/projects/javawowupdater a small project I’ve taken on, to port the WoWAce Updater to Java allowing it to be truly cross-platform.

I’ll keep you all posted on my progress, but for now there isn’t much to show or tell. If anyone’s interested in helping me out on this project, and knows anything about UI design or Swing, I’d be most appreciative of the help.

Well thats it for now, have fun everyone!

J.

As can be seen on the Guelph Transit Website:

Beginning September 2, 2007, Guelph Transit changes its scheduled 30 minute service to 40 minute service, Monday to Friday during peak hours on all regular base routes*.

The asterisk refers to this bit of text:

* Regular base routes: 1 Woodlawn; 3 Waterloo/Fife; 4 York Road;
6 Auden/Eastview; 7 St. Joseph’s; 8 General Hospital; 9 Stone Rd. Mall;
10 College/Niska; 22 Conestoga; 23 Paisley/Imperial; 24 Industrial; 51 Gordon;
52 University/Kortright; 61 Victor Davis

So, pretty much all the routes, except for the university have been affected. Their reasoning for changing the amount of time between runs, I can only speculate on, however I have come to the conclusion that they did so for several reasons:

1. They obviously could not make the routes work in the 30 minutes alloted, as they were notoriously 10 minutes late always. Which would make a 10 minute delay in the routes seem somewhat feasable.
2. They apparently have this philosophy that all busses must wait in the downtown square, until the last bus has arrived before they can all go.
3. The planners at Guelph Transit are actually monkeys kept in cages.

Now, I may appear to be being harsh here, but I assure you, after this past week on the “new” schedule, I do not believe my arguments are unjustified. Firstly, on my route (the #3 Waterloo/Fife), there are always, and I repeat, Always, two busses that tail each other around the route. Thats great and all, if the route were actually busy enough to warrant it, very often, each bus is at far less than capacity, with numerous seats available. So, why is it, then that they would not just split those two busses up into two 20 minute runs instead of 1 40 minute run? To me, that would seem to make sense, as well as be more convenient. This brings me back to point #3 above, the planners at Guelph Transit are monkeys.

I’m not one to normally complain, or even label people, but I would also like to point out, that if you are going to change the bus schedule during peak times, when people need busses the most, you should at the very least, out of common courtesy for your customers, STICK TO THE SCHEDULE! Or at least provide accurate tools for us to check when the next bus will come. And now, its story time…

—–

So, I get up this morning, didn’t sleep very well last night (but thats a totally different story), do the usual, shower, pack my lunch, watch a bit of BT. Then I hop on Guelph’s “revolutionary” next-bus system, so I can see what time the next bus will come. Sweet, next bus arrives in 8 minutes. It takes 5 minutes to walk to my stop and that leaves a few minutes in case the bus is a bit early.

So, I grab my stuff, and head on my merry way. I get to the bus stop, stand around for 5 min, figure, hey, I’ll call the next-bus service and see if the bus got delayed. “Next vehicle will arrive in 3 minutes”. So… 10 minutes later, “Next vehicle will arrive in 1 minute”… 5 minutes later… I can see the bus and I’m now late for work after standing at the bus stop for nearly 20 minutes. Low and behold, there are two busses tailing each-other, each totally empty.

—–

As I said, this experience has been mirrored by other people I know, taking totally different routes, and thus I know it is not just me who feels this way. Why does it seem, like a community who is so environmentally conscious, would discourage people from using public transit, and thus increase CO2 emissions? Again, I would like to reference point #3 above, the planners are obviously not all there.

I’d like to conclude by asking a general question to anyone who might read this… does it seem logical, that during periods of high-demand (peak times as they are referred to as), to reduce service? Mark my words, soon you will see less people using public transit if this keeps up, and then there will be inevitable cutbacks because rider-ship falls, this is only the beginning. I know I’ll be walking, or worse driving, to work a lot more than I’ll be taking public transit after this experience.

Technorati Tags: guelph, transit