Blogging about not blogging

Sorry but a friend of mine from the Dilapidated States of America is in town so I won't have time to write for the next day or so. (It should tell you something that I am writing Friday's post on Saturday at 3am.) But I am already thinking of ideas for my next post which will be either late Saturday or Sunday.

In the mean time, have a good weekend.

Space Travel and Politics

NASA was supposed to launch the Space Shuttle Atlantis this afternoon. Mission STS-122 was originally scheduled for December 6, 2007 at 16:31 EST. It has been rescheduled to 16:09 on December 7. This was disappointing, I love watching shuttle launches, even if only from my laptop monitor in the office. One day I'd like to take a long vacation and go down to Cape Kennedy and watch a launch in reality, actually feel the wind and the heat. The truth comes out, Michael's a space nut, here's another dirty little secret, I always has been a total space nut.

Truth be told, if I could have any job in the World, it would be a rocket scientist at the Marshall Space Flight centre, or maybe JPL. I wouldn't mind working at Houston either for that matter. I don't care that besides the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in sunny Pasadena California, Marshall and Houston are both in bible thumping hard right Red states. The thing is, I just love to dream of travel to far away places.

Actually one thing I think will be really exciting is the Ares I and Ares V launch vehicles. These mammoth rockets are intended to do something that has not been done since late 1971, land people on the moon and return them safely to the Earth, more than that, the Constellation project (what the Ares are part of) is the start of a permanent settlement of human beings on the lunar surface. I find it hard to believe that even if this in no way relates to the dreams of skaters anywhere, it doesn't sound at least a little inspiring?

If it were up to me, NASA funding would be hundreds of billions of dollars a year and the Pentagon would have to make do on NASAs current real budget. Of course if that were the case I suspect Osama Bin Laden wouldn't care so much about the United States. Then a modest Pentagon budget would be even easier to justify. But I rant, even if I am correct, uselessly.

I finished the book Fast Food Nation. What an unsettling read, the reason for all the outbreaks of E. Coli in beef? Fecal matter in the meat, in other, blunter, words, there's cow shit in your hamburger! Think McDonald's French (Freedom?) Fries tasted better in the 1980s? Well they used to deep fry them in beef tallow, now they deep fry them in Canola Oil and use "natural" flavours. Pop quiz, what does natural flavour have in common with things derived directly from nature? Answer: not very much. And don't get me started on what McDoos has done to the American work force, slave labour pool. You have to love these huge companies who so enjoy expending their marketing budget bemoaning government regulation but heaven help the sorry congressman or senator who would dare to oppose farm subsidies or any other corporate welfare that the US Fast Food Industry makes such profitable use of.

Sorry I'm ranting, but I just watched Who Killed the Electric Car while on the Elliptical Trainer and I guess I am becoming an exceedingly angry socialist. Oh well I've got a lot to be angry about if I am at all liberal. My government (no I didn't vote for these idiots, I voted for the Wimpy Ultra Liberals instead of the Ultra Wimpy Liberals, not to be confused with the current crop of Want to be Ultra Conservative But Are in Fact Pandering Inarticulate Thugs) is making my country into the embarrassment of the World at the Bali Climate Summit.

Here's one I just discovered while looking up the links for the three major English language political parties, take a look at the Liberal, NDP and Conservative party web pages. Now when I said I voted for NDP last time it was because the local Liberal Candidate supported the Toronto Port Authority. No way could I bring myself to vote for he who must not be named. But really look at the web pages, both the Liberals and NDP describe what their vision for Canada is, agree with it, don't agree with it, they have a vision. As for the Conservatives, their web page is a cheap mockery of Stephan Dion. Today they are ranting about how Mr. Dion thinks, like just about every economist with a pulse, that the GST should be hiked and income taxes cut. They show the income from a GST hike $16 Billion, and don't mention the income tax cut. Stephan Dion is a smart man, I am told that so is Stephen Harper, looking over the two web sites, I can believe Mr. Dion is pretty bright, or at least has some good people, but the Prime Minister, he is employing a real hack on the web site, good job sir, you represent me and I have never been more embarrassed about the current government!

Argh! Why do we have to put up with these ninnies? Oh well, tomorrow I promise I won't rant on politics in Canada.

On searching for substrings.

I was reading over some Blog’s today, Lesley (my wife) had told me that Kevin (see Finding the Dream on the Blog Roll at right) had made a number of allusions to me. On closer inspection I could only find one direct reference to me, so I used Internet Explorer’s ‘Find (on this page)’ feature. Now I’d like to point out, that the Find tool is really just a pattern matching algorithm, probably Boyer-Moore or the Knuth-Morris-Pratt (KMP) algorithm.

Now I want to stress, both Boyer-Moore and KMP are very old, very well studied algorithms and they work, they work really reliably, in fact, they have been mathematically proven to work every single time. So I want someone to explain to me why when I type ‘Michael Cole’ in ‘Find (on this page)’ Internet Explorer comes back blank, yet I know for a fact that there is at least one instance of ‘Michael Cole’ on the page, heck I even put the cursor a couple words in front of my name and ran the blasted search. Good work Microsoft, bang up job there, sort of like Edlin, you guys never fail to disappoint.

Why do we nurse expectations of greatness from Microsoft? Lets face it, they are never going to deliver. Unless you want to call Vista "delivery".

Thanks to Eric (see EGCSkates on the right) I may decide to start swimming again. Second thought, hauling home from the pool with wet hair in the winter... nah, but I may take up cycling in the spring and summer. One thing I always liked about riding, almost every street in the city is safe for a cyclist - well car drivers are still criminally insane, but hills and rough road surface is not a problem, street car tracks, can be a problem, but not as much. Best of all, when I skate full out I can crack out 30 km/h, maybe 40~45km/h with a really strong tail wind. But when I ride, 30 km/h is a moderate resting speed.

Well enough of dreaming of an open road. I have cat litter to clean and exercises to perform. To all my friends at TISC, I will not be at Scooters this weekend, a friend of mine is coming from out of town and spending the weekend. But like General MacArthur said, I shall return.

News you can loose

So my friend Peter Doucet of Speed Skate World (see the Blog Roll on the right) has once again been published on the Inline Planet. Well done Peter, and the day before my birthday, coincidence? I think so! But Peter since when has cooking been a hobby? If that's the case, what does our speed skating chef specialize in? I hope not Kilgogi.

Lesley, my wife, has decided that she wants to learn how to skate. I cannot describe the elation I felt at that announcement, sk8ette dreams perhaps? Oddly she wants to learn to skate so she can play hockey. This may go down as the strangest marriage in Canada. For the record, my Chinese born wife grew up in tropical Hong Kong and just slightly north of the tropics Shanghai. Now she wants to engage in that most Canadian of sports, the good ole' Hockey game. (Meanwhile her fourth or is it fifth? generation Canadian husband wants to... well frankly move to Australia, I hate this cold.)

I had a chance to read through Sigrid's Blog (see the Blog Roll on the right) today. One thing that I noticed Sigrid said is that sometimes your ability in one sport improves by doing a different activity. Its true, sometimes in the summer I think I concentrate too much on skating better, further, faster. I should probably take it easy, then again, that's really what winter is for, unless of course, I start ice skating.

For my birthday my parents bought me a lottery ticket (frankly if that was all they bought me I would say they spent too much, but of course there was more). Anyway the reason for the ticket, when I was younger and had no mortgage I used to tell my dad the $2.00 a week he spent on tickets would be more wisely spent on belly button lint, which is true. Now that I am in debt up to my ears I joke about what I would do if I won. Naturally I'll never win, I don't piss away my money on lottery tickets, so I think my dad's perverse sense of humor kicks in when he gives me a Super7 ticket and I have to figure out if I actually won anything. Turns out I did, a free Super7 ticket! Fate, it seems, is not without a good strong sense of irony.

On a networking related note, if there are any network architects out there, getting an Autonomous System number from the American Registry of Internet Numbers is ludicrously easier than I was lead to believe. It is probably for the best if I do not go into detail, suffice it to say, not everything in computing is as hard as you are told.

Cat on the lap

So today was supposed to be a vacation day, you wouldn't know it from the way my Crackberry buzzed nonstop.

Anyway a depressing thought for all of us Canadians, it seems we aren't the immigrant friendly nation many of us would like to think we are. Being that my wife is a landed immigrant (permanent resident) and not yet a citizen I was already well aware of some of the issues faced by new immigrants but it is not a happy thought, send us your physicists, doctors your innovative yearning to drive taxis! Apologies to Emma Lazarus.

So today Kilu spent much of the afternoon and evening on my lap, he decided to plant himself there and I was not allowed to get up from the couch for the rest of the day. Mind you its a lot better when he does that then when he plants his rear end right in the article I am about to read in the morning paper. Cats have an unusual ability to know, daddy is reading this article, so that is where I am going to lie down. (Can't they lie on one of the advertisements?)

Oh I've been watching old episodes of Connections on YouTube. If you like European history and have a technical or engineering frame of mind do a search for "Connections Episode 1 Part 1 of 5". There were a total of 10 Episodes and one thing I like about this particular T.V. show is it actually stimulates some intellect, even if it is vintage mid to late 1970s T.V.

The Boys

First a thanks to Eric Gee (see EGCSkates on the right) for clearing up a little skate history. I was pretty sure that I had heard somewhere that 5x84 was not as old as 5x80, I guess the big question, when 5 wheel skates first came out where they 80s, 76s, or something else entirely? That must have been quite a long time ago, I remember just after I got my first pair of inlines, Rollerblade Lightnings (4x76) in 1991 I saw a pair of Rollerblade "Racerblades" that had 5 wheels that were the same as the wheels on my Lightnings. I remember thinking, cleaning and maintaining skates like that must be a big pain. I know there are 5 wheel skates that older than the Racerblade, I've just never seen such an animal.

There is actually a pair of Racerblades on Ebay right now, my god do those things look awful, the hard exterior, crummy wheels, I'd like to think that a good skater on a modern pair of rec skates could do better than the same person on the Racerblades.

Anyway today I did not go to Scooters, at 7am I got to the car, and drove an entire city block, well actually I changed my mind about half a block from the driveway. The road conditions were awful, it would have been more sensible for me to cross-country-ski to Scooters. When I heard on the radio that there were multiple car accidents on the highway I turned around and hightailed for home, nearly getting firmly embedded in a snowdrift on the way.

Today was a day for sleeping in and catching up on my back issues of Scientific American. Speaking of which, there is an article online that discusses a Biodiesel Jet airplane, very cool, although it emits green house gases, a mix of 20% Biodiesel and 80% diesel produces 50% less green house gas than 100% petroleum diesel, except almost all modern aircraft (even helicopters) use Kerosene not diesel, so that was not as promising as it looked on first read. Common guys, use hydrogen! (Useless trivia for you, the fuel used by the first German jet engine? Hydrogen, using Kerosene is a step in the wrong direction.)

At the behest of senior management I wanted to discuss my cats today. One of them already has a picture embed here in the blog. Here is a really old image of the other guy:

Now his name is Kalubee and when we adopted him he was skin and bone, his tail has a bend in it, probably broken bones that did not set properly and he had some insects living in his ears that kicked up black stuff into his outer ear, it was really gross. Since then he's put on at least 10 pounds (about 5kg) the insects were taken care of with medicine from the vet and the tail well, that will always have the bend at the end. But it makes me feel a lot better to know that between my wife and I this fellow is in much better shape than if we had not taken him.

Its not say its been a bed or roses, about a year ago Kalubee got really nasty Gingivitis and ultimately the vet had to remove almost every single tooth in Kalubee's mouth. Fortunately the vet explained cats often swallow their food without actually chewing on it, which is why the uber expensive dental food we were giving Kalubee at the time didn't do a damn thing. Actually now that the problem teeth are removed Kalubee's been a much happier guy, except when we go to cut his nails, he does not like that. (We believe declawing a cat is cruel, its sort of like surgically riping a person's finger nails off. Yum Yum.)

Then there is Kilu, he's a very social guy. Whereas Kalubee likes his routines and does not much like to hang out with other people Kilu demands a great deal of attention, usually by rolling around in front of me. If that does not work he will walk up beside me and rub himself on my legs, yes I have nearly tripped on him many times while walking around the house. If Kilu does not get his required attention he will cry. I sometimes think my cats are more human than some of the people I have crossed paths with, certainly more dignified.

Every morning as I get ready for work Kilu comes downstairs to wish me well and every evening Kilu waits at the front door for my return. (Kalubee prefers to wait at the top of the stairs and supervise the entire exercise.) I can tell the mood of both guys by the type of sound, the meow or the pur have several unique variations, that they make. If the defining trait of humanity is our emotions, I am quite confident that cats are as human as we are.

Another decade

It seems appropriate that today I reflect on the past 3652 days. Its hard to believe, but when my parents were my age they had a saying, don't trust anyone over 30.

Well lets see, 1997, that was the year Tony Blair was elected Prime Minister of England, for the first time, the country had not been run by Labour for almost 20 years previously. Jean Chretien had just been re-elected, Bill Clinton was inaugurated for a second time, the economy of East Asia made a massive swan dive into the toilet. In the developed World things were really doing well, George Walker Bush was busy mismanaging Texas and had yet to get a chance to screw the entire country over. Donald Rumsfield and Dick Cheney were both working in the private sector when they were not busy starting the Project for the New American Century.

The Internet was starting to make serious inroads into daily life. If you had a PC, in 1997 it was almost certainly running Windows 95, I was triple-booting 95, NT 4.0 and Linux, I think Kernel 2.0.something. The web browser of choice for me in early 97 was almost certainly Netscape, but by the end of 97 it was probably IE 3 or 4. Remember Justice Thomas Penfield Jackson? The Microsoft Antitrust trial wouldn't start for another year.

I was an avid cyclist in those days, I had a brief foray into inlines several years earlier but decided that it was too dangerous a method to get to school. State of the art inline speed skates back in those days had five 84mm wheels, or were they 80mm? On ice the clap skate was around for a while but it wasn't until 1996 or 1997 that it really started to get noticed.

Personally, 1997 was the year I went from Grade 13 to first year Math at Waterloo.

Since then, lets see, well I've got a Bachelors in Math (Honours) Co-op, major in Computer Science from Waterloo. I've also got a Masters Computer Engineering, Ryerson. I went from earning about $10/hour as a swim instructor lifeguard to... well I won't say what I earn today, but an awful lot more than I was making in 97. I've got a wife, two cats, house and mortgage.

The Son-of-a-Bush, massively overreacted to the attacks of September 11 and persuaded the entire country to involve itself in an entirely foolish and senseless war. (Question, what war truly is anything other than foolish and senseless? And no, World War II should never have happened, the French could have stopped Hitler in 1936, but that's a rant for another day.)

It became apparent sometime between 1997 and now that Democrats have no balls and Republicans have no heart. In Canada it was revealed that Reformers have no more integrity than any other political party and the Liberals are, I think, the best of a really bad multiple choice quiz.

My inlines have 110mm wheels, I think 120mm are a hoax but I've already written about that. I've pretty much given up on cycling, its too simple, I need something more mentally stimulating, hence the skating.

Finally as we all know, history has not ended, despite claims to the contrary.