This is my third month back in Ontario’s capital, and my third day living in my new apartment. People have since long stopped asking me whether it is great to be back. I think it is because them assume it is a yes because I am still here But it is apples and oranges. And my answer would not be so black and white. This blog post is not about that, but about how AWESOME the weather is.

I am glad to finally be out of my parent’s place and living in the heart of the Annex. No longer will it take me 1-1.5 hours to get downtown. But I will need a bike to make affordable, lest I drop $120+ down on a metropass each month. Though picking a bike is becoming a job in itself. No use in spending good money on something that will likely get stolen. Moving downtown is a major improvement on quality of life for me, and something I am blessed to afford.

I hope it only gets better. We still have to finalize office space in the co-working space, and I get to throw a house-warming party.

And did I mention that my view is fantastic?

On November 2010 near the end of my contract at NetSecure Technologies, I asked for and received the ok to relocate and continue working from Toronto (and obviously, a renewal. Otherwise this blog post would be short and 2 months overdue). What was supposed to be a yearly adventure was extended a bit as they didn’t want me to leave immediately. I am obligated to stay in Regina until April 1st, but will likely stay for a few days/weeks after (depending on a number of other factors).

I have mixed feeling about this. While I do enjoy the city and would love another year to explore some more, I have had some difficulty adjusting to the different expectations of small(er) town life. I cannot see myself growing and enjoying some of things I did back in the big city, and I cannot make the same close friends that I did back in Toronto. But I think I have adjusted better in these last few months than I did all year.

That said, I will miss the good quality of life I have in the QC. Here, with my present salary I can enjoy the privilege of a car and owning my own one bedroom. Maybe after another year or two to finally buying my own place or a condo.

In Toronto, I’ll probably have to give up the car or share a apartment, or both if I want to live somewhere downtown.

It’s a fairly difficult decision for me to make. But I know that this decision will put me in the right direction in life. Even if going back to Toronto doesn’t work out, this experience leaves me hopeful that I can just pack my bags and find somewhere new to call home.

I’ve been listening to a few music podcasts, mainly TATW and ASOT, and am really enjoying some tracks (were have you been all my life Bart Classen? Oh. In the Netherlands…). And I really want to have some in my iPod Cowon iAudio 9.

This was not easy.

I really do wish to support artists, I really do. I purchased a ton of CDs (400+ songs, and yeah it cost me >$400) because I can’t always go to their concerts. I want to avoid having to illegally acquire this stuff. But it feels that I can only do it on their terms, for crappy technical boner-inducing-big-brother reasons, and I have to sacrifice my requirements.

What are my requirements? High bitrate MP3/WAV/FLAC. No DRM. I vote with my wallet a lot, and this is something I can get behind.

Really, I want to pay you. I was even willing to pay trackitdown.net a premiuum of $2.50USD for a WAV (for something I probably can’t hear the difference between). Oh, until I found this little gem :

All of the tracks downloaded through our website are ‘watermarked’ with a special form of copy protection that uniquely identifies the owner of each track.

– trackitdown.net HowTo (How to suck apparently)

I know I’m a little bit of a niche. Forgive me for going against the status quo and not buying on iTunes and wanting it under a free (as in speech) lossless codec. But honestly, anyone who wants your music for free gets it for free. I’m going out of my way to try to pay you and be fair to both of us about it.

Luckily, I have found BeatPort, which almost fits my needs. I dislike their flash-only website, having manually to convert wav to flac and fill in metadata, and the unfortunate restricted tracks for some songs. But they seem to be the most fair – to me at least.

Yesterday, I accepted an offer to work at NetSecure Technologies which is a company based in Regina doing Firefox extension and C# work (mainly the former. I never worked with the latter, and they are aware of that). This also means I have to relocate to a city who I know nothing about. In fact, I will likely be a typical snobby Torontoian for the year contract that it is for.

Unfortunately I will be leaving my current employer PPX. Good people. But I am excited about my new job responsibilities, and think it will be a better fit for me.

A few days ago, I went to buy a pair of new shoes. I decided that I would put effort this time into actually looking for vegan (or as they say, cruelty-free) shoes. Generally I am more lax about leather/pelts than most other vegetarians, but I still don’t like supporting the industry. So I decided to go and buy hemp shoes (FYI, paylesss hoes seems to have leather-free shoes, according to the TVA). I found this little place called Left Feet, which had hemp shoes that didn’t look like a hippy designed it.

The shop is small. Very small. With limited selection that caters to people who go out of their way to buy products that are typically made with leather. After I found a pair that I liked, I brought it home and saw a pamphlet at the bottom of the box (emphasis on their part, not mine).

Join the Blackspot Community

You’re now the owner of a pair of Blackspot shoes. It’s a purchase that could be unlike any you have made before. By buying Blackspots you’ve become a member of an international movement to regain control of our own minds and communities.

The open-source logo, hand-drawn on the side of your Blackspots, is a symbol of resistance against the kind of big-money hyperbranding that has been undermining civil society for decades. Earth-friendly, anti-sweatshop (made in Europe), cruelty-free, and pro-grassroots, the Blackspot model represents fundamental change.

The open-source logo they talked about looks like below. Despite the name the logo is white, not black. The black you do see is dirt. If you touch it, it feels sticky. Kinda like gum.

The reason why it’s called an open-source logo is because anyone can supposedly use it. It’s not a particularly great logo, and it likely didn’t go through over a dozen iterations.

On the plus side, they were very well priced for what they claim to do (organic hemp, biodegradable materials, made by unionized workers). I am happy with the purchase despite the smaller selection.

I came home about a week ago with Toolroom Knights mixed by Mark Knight, instead of my intended target of Mark Oliver. It was OK because I have, and still enjoy, Toolroom Knights mixed by Gabriel and Dresden. Both CD describe themselves as a “journey through the world’s finest house music”. But their styles are so different. I already found it difficult to describe the genre. Now it’s just impossible.

This has sorta turned out to be a mashup of NSID. But because I started mid-November, it’s

No Shaving In the Last Half of November and First Half of December. wxyz for the more obtuse title name.

I wasn’t sure when I started. At the very latest, it was November 14th. So yesterday marked the 31st day, and today is the day I can shave it off Happy New Years!
It wasn’t easy, and I hate the end result. But I enjoy the not shaving for 31 days part.

I’m covering up my beard here. I wouldn’t look too bad with some facial hair :

A comparison :

UPDATE : I originally wrote this mid-December, but kept it in draft until the beginning of January so not to spoil the other participants and for them to get all jealous. Thanks to one of my bank statements, I figured out I most likely started on the 19th, not the 14th. So I shaved 5 days too early. fail

I was bored today. I tried getting Dreamhost to play nice with Django, but they were impartial about the whole idea. It’s not officially supported, so I can’t send angry emails to Dreamhost. In the quest to look for different providers in the future, I found out that my ISP still had some old files that I made back when I was in high school, and beginning college. Back in my old ‘just learning to program’ days.

Ahhh the memories.

I was a big Pokemon/mIRC nerd back then. Yes, Pokemon was still popular to a niche few of us who haven’t grown up completely. It really was a misunderstood strategy game. Definitely a lot more then most people suspect. I stopped playing after the Ruby/Sapphire versions required you to battle for stupid EVs. But I won’t go there (once you know so much, the game gets to be less fun for stupid reasons).

So here is a flashback with links to some of the stuff I did back in the ol’ days :

Revised RBY Bot : this my first big programming project. I wrote a R/B/Y Pokemon battle simulator in mIRC script. It was revised because the first one I did, I took a break from programming after I finished it, and when I went back to it, I couldn’t figure out what the hell I did. I used the worst programming methodology ever: I wrote the entire engine before debugging. No lie.
So I rewrote it, knowing better the second time. It took a while, but I opened sourced it (under no license. In fact, I don’t recall even knowing what open source was. I just gave away the source code. But the objective was pretty much the same).
I pursued this project because there was a competing script authored by someone who wasn’t much liked in the community, but they put up with him because he had a more advanced Pokemon Battle Simulator script (his popularity, IIRC, plummeted when he gave it away to someone else/someone stole it. Rumors were that someone stole it by pretending to be a girl. But that sounds like a complete lie)
So I wrote one because I was fascinated by programming.

I made a blackjack mIRC script. It was fairly popular. I remember giving this away freely too.

MusicTron : A music player was another fun thing I did in mIRC script. I don’t think it was very popular.

Visual GSbot : Because all the advanced pokemon battle simulators where on IRC at the time, they were all command-line. This was an attempt to parse the output of the code and give it a visual representation

One of the 2004 Olympics. The Olympic flame looks like is being used to light a giant joint:

Wow. I haven’t done ambitious projects like those in a while.

I have been falling back into unhealthy sleep patterns again. Lately, I’ve been going to bed at 4 and waking up at around 13-14. I haven’t quite found the reason why. When in MV on weekends, I liked waking up earlier (ok, maybe 10 early ) because I have the rest of the day to do stuff. And during the weekdays, 8:20 wake-up times are the norm.

My mom thinks it is because I’m not working, and hence I don’t have a a reason to wake up earlier. I don’t think that is the reason. Mainly because I’ve been struggling with this even when I was in college/high school. I think the real reason is the unfortunate location of my room, and the amount of light that is getting in.

My room has a large window that lets you look out into the street. Which actually kinda sucks for privacy reasons, so I tend to have it closed (blinds + curtains). Unfortunately, the amount of natural light coming in is negligible. So even mid-day, if the lights were off you couldn’t tell if it was 10 or 14. The nice thing about the apartments is that I was on the 3rd floor, and the blinds were open enough that you could tell it was morning or afternoon. At the very least, the bright sun would wake you up if the alarm clock didn’t.

Something that actually did help when I was in college was when the lights to my room where on while I was still sleeping. I would usually get up an hour after they were on. (how do I know? My mom would call me and turn on the lights at 8, and I was usually up at 9). I wonder if I should invest in a new alarm clock or get a room where the sun can wake me up.

Since I have moved to other things, and have a few bugs that I fear may not be completed for a long time, I decided to release whatever it is I have in hope that it will help someone. Here be a prism extension to show preferences. Not complete and doesn’t clear private data (such as cookies, history, and cache. Something has changed over the past few months that I haven’t quite figured out), but I hope to solve some issues that people have been having.

I’m not offering support. If it’s broken it’s going to stay that way until someone else fixes it.