It’s a little disappointing to see that you have been excluded from the list when you are trying to use someone’s service. I can still search by going to the home page and finding Montreal but when I first went to the page and saw this… wow!
(click to enlarge)
I will be taking a week off doing this :)
See you in a bit, and geek on for me!
If you know me then you know that I have been cheering for the Dutch side in the World Cup because my dad is from Holland and I am one of three in the first generation Canadian on his side. Too bad we lost yesterday but it wasn’t their best showing in my opinion. The ref seemed to take the momentum of the game but if nothing else he was consistent!
What am I getting at with my gadgets? Yesterday while watching the game I was at the cottage up north with some friends and we caught the game via satellite. Since putting that thing up 10 years ago I have seen the dish cut out only 2 times and that was in VERY bad weather. Wouldn’t you know it in the cover of the blazing sun the satellite cut out in the 105th minute. “Please stand by while we establish a satellite signal”. AHHHHH! WTF is that?
Just lucky enough though to have my satellite radio with me. Slammed the XM on the home dock and tuned into ESPN to listen to the game. Well commented and for the 15 minutes that I was without video I was saved. Great to have it there for the music but even nicer to not have missed anything in the big match.
Now I get a chance to relax from sports for a while. I am a huge Montreal Canadiens fan and when the Euro or World Cup is on I am completely into that as well. We have fun as a family with it but it’s far to stressing for a passtime :)
What sucked? Not being in a sports bar downtown to watch the game where it wouldn’t have cut out.
What was awesome? Forgot about the game in 15 minutes because I was at the cottage and on the boat by then having a blast with friends and family :)
Geek on!
Well maybe not hiding but I have been there for work. What a beautiful part of this country we live in. I was there working on a migration to new computers for a large group of people. The poor guy there has way to much on his plate so they called in the Wolf :)
I tweeted a while ago that the hardest thing to get used to in PEI was having not to dial the area code for all my phone calls. That’s just mandatory in the big cities in Canada now. It was nice to only have to remember 7 digits!
Little tired to be thinking deeply about what I feel of this or that right now. Hotel living seems all fine and dandy when you are on vacation but when I am away from the family I don’t sleep well at all. Two nights of feeling like a bag of crapola, one good night and then one where I just tossed around needlessly. I can’t win it would seem.
Home I am and happy for it too. I flew into Montreal this morning at 11:30am just before a huge storm hit. The rain went up my pants; I swear. The landing was still bumpy with the captain on and off the throttle like it was a well pump handle and the flaps at 30 degrees but I held down my pretzels and water just fine. I may have ripped the underside of my seat however due to the vice grip I had on it.
Tonight, supper with dad for his birthday – Happy Birthday dad (yesterday) and then up north to the cottage with friends and family. Can’t wait.
Oh and I have to mention that the Dutch are in the World Cup final. Something I have yet to see in my life.
So here goes…
Hup Holland Hup
Laat de leeuw niet in z’n hempie staan
Hup Holland Hup
Trek het beestje geen pantoffels aan
Hup Holland Hup
Laat je uit ‘t veld niet slaan
Want de leeuw op voetbalschoenen
Durft de hele wereld aan
Go Holland!!!
Geek on!
e9fac6deb1774157b1e64d2b6a2682cc
In the past 4-5 years there has been an increase in online consumption like never before. Mostly what we see are people consuming old media products through new media services. There are the old media’s website like the 4 big US networks where TV shows can be seen as well as services like Hulu.
The most difficult thing to stream has always been live content. There are services for it that work quite well like uSream and others but for a major event things have been difficult to keep up.
You can really appreciate in the case how far we have come with these services when you look at world cup coverage. In Canada our coverage is given by the CBC. Amazingly enough they have broadcast all the games on the internet as well. The quality is quite simply amazing. If you have a good enough internet connection you will get an HD stream!
Perhaps this is a tip off to the CBC but to be honest it just makes me happy that we live in a time that you can see a game even if you are not in front of a TV.
I also caught someone watching the game on their cell phone but I think that was a Rogers service. When that can come for free as well then we have really turned a leaf!
Geek on!
Very cool – overheard someone else talking about it!
“The definitions I grew up with were that a geek is someone unusually into something (so you could have computer geeks, baseball geeks, theater geeks, etc) and nerds are (often awkward) science, math, or computer geeks. But definitions vary.”
For some reason it really does feel like they get it :)
Happy Monday, Geek on!
This week (to be honest week and a half) has been crazy for me. We had a few days away with the family, work is busy and there is a lot of work around the house. Spring tends to do that somehow doesn’t it? Well I am not dead, maybe dead tired but that’s another problem.
What’s coming up for me? I have 3 trips in 2 weeks across Canada. First stop Vancouver, then Montreal and then Toronto. I live in Montreal but I am going to have to stay in town at the hotel for a few days because I need to be present in case of emergency. It’s a trip where I go back to my roots at this company – support. The support team needed help because of vacations etc and I obliged and am going to help.
Bryan and I have been working on a redesign of our podcast. Last fall we tried to get something off the group and made 2 episodes of a podcast called Everyday Geek. I don’t think that they were bad but they weren’t really what we were looking for, so we stepped back. We now have bigger and better ideas but it’s taken some time to get it going. Lots of details to iron out but we should be able to record in the next couple of weeks. Very excited about that. I plan to post the podcast up here as well so you can all have a listen.
Time to get crackin’. Three days of work before I am off to Vancouver and I have a lot of stuff to cover. Hopefully I can get some articles written during the evenings but so far that hasn’t been very easy! Tonight I need to help a neighbour with his ailing pool. Poor guy sprung a leak near the light and just got his pool levels right. Had to empty it down 18″ to give us room to work later.
Wish me luck and GEEK ON!
I have often told myself that I don’t want to be bothered at the cottage. In case of emergency I have my cell phone that if standing on the right corner of the deck does just fine. Cell service has improved quite a bit in the last few years and at some level that even bothers me.
Red Bud Macro St. Donat Lac Croche
In the past year I have been really concentrating on this blog, getting involved in some start up podcast ideas with a buddy so really focusing on what I am doing with my online time. It is in this spirit that I am starting to ache for an internets connection when I am away from home. Most places we visit are connected but the cottage is obviously not. All my articles about the cottage in the past talk about a quiet place away from the internets but I am not ‘feeling it’ as much anymore. I want to make sure that I can keep up to date.
I have thought about getting high speed up there, but I don’t think that would work. Basically having high speed up there means that anyone coming up can use it and then the cottage loses something. There is something about a place where we can all go and be connected to each other without distraction.
As I write this I still am in a struggle. I want to argue both sides of the debate but it would sound like a crazy man talking to himself. I think what I need is a device that is better for web applications than my Blackberry but is not a full computer. Some would say the 3G iPad would be the answer but I would argue that it’s not. It might work in this case but I am not looking for a device that would work there but have no real personal benefit apart from there.
Perhaps a more advanced smart phone. I wonder if something would change if webkit were already active on the BB. My buddy uses Opera on the BB which is leaps better than the original browser but the iPhone and Android browsers are better. I know I am picky buy feh… if I don’t have fun using it, then I get bored quickly. Ramble, ramble, ramble…
In any case I think that the internets hard wired into the cottage is still out for me. There is no escape with connection. It would end up that people would bring their laptops to the cottage and then we would end up spending time with our machines instead of with each other. My wife would most likely bring up her machine to check her work email. That would just change the whole feeling.
How do you deal with this sort of thing? Is there a place where you go to disconnect – literally?
Geek on!
So what the hell am I doing? Well I am standing here with enough time to write this article at a brunch buffet. We come here for mother’s day and it’s always been good but I have a tough time with their buffet design. They have a few small stations one for dessert, one for crepes and omelets and one for regular breakfast food like bacon and french toast. The problem is that their restaurant holds a lot of people!
The idea is that instead of a couple of large stations with food you should think about having twice as many stations half the size. Les lines because they would be devided in half. Half the line length the happier the people.
What does that have to do with tech? A LOT! Have you noticed in recent years Intel has taken the focus of the processor upgrade from GHz to how many cores you have? That is because a processor even slower in speed will actually seem faster if it has more ques. Same thing would go for any information path in your computer. For instance if you had 2 pipes of information running at 100 mhz from your memory into the processor then changed that to 4 pipes at a slower speed of 75 mhz, you have increased your throughput. Magic :)
Weird things come to mind when I am bored. Could have also been that the hunger wasn’t helping :)
Geek on!
(I have to tell you I wrote this on Sunday otherwise it doesn’t make sense you seeing it now)
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