Personal

I’ve been using Gmail as my e-mail service provider for a few years now, and due to their excellent spam filters, I’ve been able to ignore the continuous stream of junk mail hitting my mailbox every day. Despite their efficiency at identifying and hiding spam e-mails, I remain genuinely concerned about keeping my e-mail address hidden from the public view.  E-mails that are publicly available are easy targets for spambots, which are automated programs that scour the Internet for e-mail addresses. Once “harvested”, these addresses are sent junk mail, spam. Sometimes, however, it is desirable to have an e-mail address visible to the public – to do so, a special approach should be taken to protect it from spambots. For example, you … Read more

There are times where I wonder what I’m going to write next for this blog, and then, there are times like today – something totally insane happens, and I have no doubt about what I’m going to write next. Still, I’m very picky about what I put on here – I refuse to post mundane details about my everyday life – one of my most important rules. The only exception to this rule occurs when I feel a particular story could be entertaining, and make people laugh. If I consider it a funny story, then I’ll put it up. This is one of those stories. A few days ago, while eating supper, I felt a pain when closing my jaw … Read more

So lately, Joseph and I have been having fun with Rainbow Six Vegas 2. The game is a fairly well-made first-person shooter, and we enjoy playing co-operative games every now and then. The other day, we discovered that the game has a “Custom Head” feature. The feature allows you to map your own face onto your in-game character.  When we actually got around to trying it, we were pretty impressed with the quality of the results. Consider the following screenshot: I kept that “Custom Head” for a while: …and it resulted in a great set of photos.

I found this little historical gem at my parents place: Let’s review this quickly: I like how my first question challenges the logic of his whole operation, and the next one aims to strip him of his disguise. Notice how the area under the word “May” in “May I have these toys please?” is scratched? I probably initially wrote “Can”, but then I figured that “May” made more sense. Nice. “Meet me in my room. If I am asleep wake me up.” – I’d like to think this was a trap for this Santa fellow. Maybe I was hidden, waiting to de-mask the man as he attempted to wake me up. This was probably not the case. That “signature” is … Read more

As you probably know, I work for a software development company –  and during a routine lunch hour, I  began wondering why our software still shipped with offline help files (CHM), rather than offering the help files online. You see, every now and then, our company discovers that the help files are missing some information; however, we can’t do anything about it until the next release. Sure, we can temporarily alleviate the problem by creating external knowledge base articles, but it doesn’t fix the fact that clients have the same help files, without the new information. This situation brought an interesting question to the table: Why don’t our products have web-based help? I came up with numerous advantages and disadvantages: … Read more

Last year I decided to get drop my land line, and just get by with a cell phone. All was well, until one day where I wasn’t able to find my cell phone. I somehow managed to lose it in my apartment, and since I no longer had a land line, I couldn’t call my own phone to get it ringing. To locate it, I ended up sending an instant message to a friend on MSN, and he called my phone. That worked well enough, but it required someone else to be around. The next time I lost my phone, again in my apartment –  I couldn’t contact anyone on MSN, so I looked for an alternate solution. I googled around … Read more

Last year, I spontaneously adopted a male kitten from a local pet shop. I’d always walked by this pet shop, but was never actively interested in getting a kitten. Having grown up with cats, they weren’t anything new to me – but this particular kitten was different. His fur was blond… I had never seen a cat that color before – the ones I grew up with had been much darker. I was used to black, gray, brown, and mixes based upon those colors. So ultimately, I bought the kitten – and soon realized he was very different from other cats. First off, he isn’t afraid of water – at all. In fact, he has a weird attraction to it. … Read more

When I first got around to using my copy of Windows Vista regularly, I quickly became annoyed of one particular feature – User Account Control (UAC). At first, I saw it as an acceptable comprimise for the sake of security… but after a while, it became clear that most the apps I use actually need Administrative access. I found myself forgetting to launch the shortcuts with Administrative privileges, and then I’d have to close the application, and launch it properly by right-clicking and saying “Run as administrator”. I put up with it until, one day, I was checking out the Properties of a shortcut… when I discovered a checkbox I’d never noticed before. Eventually, I grew so frustrated that I … Read more

When I was 17, I remember accompanying my father to check out some of the local garage sales. You see, in my hometown (and likely in other towns too), we had yearly garage sale “festivals”. This is what my father jokingly called them – there would always be plenty of people at these things. I would later wonder how effective these people would have been if they had actually used their numbers to support a cause, rather than their own personal desire to acquire material goods, at a bargain; however, on this particular day, I was just looking for cool stuff. On this day, I only bought one item. This item was a 3 foot tall, 3 foot wide – … Read more