The ArcterJournal

So A Funny Thing Happened At The Barn....

2011-12-07T23:39:44Z

A couple of days ago I got a text from my wife saying something about "kitten" and "barn" and "abandoned". Cutting a long story short, so yea, we got another kitten. She was abandoned (as best we can figure) at the barn (theory being a dumped kitten turns into a barn cat, probably makes those responsible sleep better at night). She burrowed into A's shoulder and neck and purred her little brains out before she got a chance to even *see* the kitten.

As the difference in work and effort between 5 cats and 6 is only 20% compared to the 100% difference between 0 and 1 cats, or even 33% if you were to go from 3 to 4 cats. Of course, by that theory the amount of work to get more cats approaches 0, meaning that life will get easier the more cats I have! Well, that's my justification anyway. Here are some more pictures!

Another Stupid Cat At The Vet

2011-09-24T02:06:50Z

*sigh*

So Corny is at the vet again. This time he was panting and drooling yesterday, so A took him to the vet, who gave him an anti-inflammatory shot and some antibiotics and he was ok. The vet figured it was an allergic reaction to a flea bite (or something like that). This morning though he was panting and listless again, so I took him down this morning before work (gotta love the flexibility of the new job!). The doctor said he didn't like the sound of his breathing... Doc took him in for the day for blood tests, x-rays, and other expensive things.

When I called he said it was (basically) that he was constipated, which was causing pain, which caused the shallow breathing, so they're keeping him overnight to make sure the laxatives work (fun for the cat I'm sure). Sounds like after he poops his little brains out he should be ok and good to come home. We'll find out tomorrow. Unfortunately of course it's all expensive, $95 for x-rays, $150 for blood work, $200 for putting him on fluids, etc, etc, etc. Just when I thought that money was getting better. I anticipate that as soon as I recover financially from this then suddenly my car will get sick :(

Fingers crossed this is just a(nother) one time things with this cat. Again.

Comments Turned Off

2011-09-16T06:04:16Z

Sorry but I'm sick of deleting 30 comments a day from some Chinese guy trying to spam about headphones or some crap like that, and considering I don't get enough actual comments (or traffic that isn't spam) to worry about it, you know you can just send me an email or something.

Bah, stupid internet.

Where I've Been Lately

2011-09-15T03:32:35Z

Yea, yea, dead blog that has only 3 readers. Not completely dead, I've been feeling more guilty as time goes on and I don't update, or at least point to where I am actually doing stuff. Basically now that I've been working at Left of the Dot and my commute went down by about 2 hours a day I've been able to ramp up my photography business (well, "business" not in the terms of making any money, more "business" in the sense of taking up extra time (and being damn fun)). So you can go over and check out the Bailward Photography.com site and see the site, or check out the Bailward Photography Blog to see various pictures of mostly cute young ladies (hopefully) nicely lit up and posed. I'm trying to create a bit more "real content" there in terms of capturing what I've been doing in moving from amateur photographer to slightly-above amateur photographer.

I've also been (kinda) active over on twitter if you want to check me out at @alanbailward. Not much of interest there for the most part, but random tweets about photography and related things.

If you're interested in hiring me of course, or paying me gobs of money to take pictures of you, your family, friends, or more young ladies, feel free to let me know :)

Other than that, changing jobs, and having a horrible trip to Edmonton involving moving a horribly disorganized person up there, 32 hours in the hospital (don't ask), and breaking the truck we were driving back in on the Coquihalla, in a no cell service area at 1am, things have been pretty much status quo.

So hit the new blog, I will update here if anything interesting, it'll come here, eventually.

Ok, now I feel better.

Day Two At the New Job

2011-04-05T04:56:57Z

Well, this morning marked the second day, and start of the first "real" week of work at my new job at Left of the Dot. So far so good, though not without some griping and minor failures on my part. The latter mostly came this morning. See, right now I have no shower (another long story there for another post) so my brilliant plan has been to wake up in the morning the same time I did for the old job (with the earlier starting time), go to the gym (yay fitness), shower there, then catch the later train out and show up in the office at the required time, everything happy happy.

So this morning I got into a panic at the gym seeing that I was majorly late, and raced like a maniac to shower and get home, then back down to the train station just in time to catch the train, only to realize (after some time I'm ashamed to admit) that I had taken the train in that I did normally, which got me into Vancouver an hour and a half earlier than I need to. I guess my brain is so programmed to be at the train station at a certain time that it needs some serious re-training to get my timing down with the new schedule.

The rest of it is good so far. There was the "getting to know you" and "here's how stuff works" day, and now we're getting to the point that myself and the two other newbies are able to start looking at how to get some actual work done. Exciting and new.

Linux Counter Entry, 1999

2011-03-15T05:28:04Z

Hows this for a blast from the past:

All comments: help@counter.li.org Your record was created: 1999-04-23 05:07:09 Person info last modified: 2006-03-12 08:33:53 //PERSON name: Alan usage: Home, work started: 1998 homepage: http://arcterex.net/blog/
//MACHINE 52939 cpu: Pentium 75 # Interpreted as Pentium/75 disk: 2000 memory: 48 network: Ethernet source: debian.org distribution: Debian country: CA accounts: 3 users: 1 purpose: WWW server, File server # Interpreted as File server, WWW server sysclass: workstation mailer: smail, Smail 3.2.0.102

[Some entries highlighted for interest]

Wow, P75 with 48mb of RAM and a 2G hard drive, that's some smoking machine. Course, that 1999 entry was created a good 5 years after I started using Linux.

How You Should and Shouldn't Treat Your Customers

2011-03-10T23:51:20Z

Two starkly different experiences with customer service today.

First the Good:

Pretty simple here. I have been looking into online backup services and had let the 14 day demo of CrashPlan lapse without actually testing it out. Not only are the support people watching their @crashplan twitter account fast and helpful, but they were happy to hook me up with a re-up for my free account before I (inevitably due to their support in no small part) sign up for real.

Last the Bad:

This was an approximation of a call to MasterCard today to ask a quick question about extended warranty extensions with the version of the card I had. However their automated system and it's lack of usefulness really drove me crazy.

*ring*ring*

MC: Welcome to mastercard blah blah. For service in english, press 1, for s

beep

MC: For blah press 1, for account blah press 2, for member blah press 3, blah 4, blah 5, blah 6, blah 7, blah 8 [I'm not kidding here], and if you wish to speak to a customer service rep, press 0

beep

MC: Please enter your MasterCard number

beep beep beep beep .. beep beep beep beep .. beep beep beep beep .. beep beep beep beep

MC: Please enter the primary card holders month of birth, for example, for janu

beep beep

MC: You entered blah, please press 1 to confirm or

beep

MC: Please enter the primary card holders day of birth, for ex

beep beep

MC: You entered blah, please press 1 t

beep

MC: Please enter the primary card holders 9 digit social insurance number

beep beep beep .. beep beep beep .. beep beep beep [Luckily I somehow have this still memorized]

MC: Thank you, please wait while we connect you to a customer service rep.

*ring*ring* [granted a very quick connection]

MC Dude: Hi there, this is John, can I please have your MasterCard number? [Emphasis mine]

*audible sigh*

Now if I've just gone through 5 minutes of dealing with a robot with a huge array of questions and entering a ton of different numbers, you'd think that the system would be considerate enough to pass on the information. But no. I had to re-confirm my address, SIN number, etc with the guy again (who did apologize mind you, after I made a comment about "didn't I just spend 5 minutes punching that into your system?"). And yes I know I probably could have just hit 0 a few times in the phone call, or yelled into the phone, but I didn't at the time, and ended up pissed off enough at the inefficiency of their system (and impressed enough with the CrashPlan way of doing things) that I got off my lazy ass and typed this post up.

Portrait and Teeth, etc.

2011-02-25T15:21:06Z

Been doing a lot of "Strobist" stuff lately, the shot to the right is of the beautiful Terra-Jean whom I had the honor of shooting a couple of weekends ago at a meetup.com gathering of photographers, led by Chris Pike. Great time was had and I got some great shots if you hit that image's link and wander in and out of the flickr stream. I'm fairly proud of this shot as well of my coworker Cory, not because it's a great lit image (not that it's bad), but that it's all mine, in execution and gear.

Today is also a day I'm not at work because I get to get a tooth taken out. Sucky thing is it's a fairly prominent tooth, broken in grade 3 in a fall on the playground which has apparently decided to finally die and give me some issues. I would really rather not do this, if for no other reason than that it's my tooth dammit, but looking at myself in the mirror this morning that tooth is clearly grey and different than the others around it, so I don't feel as bad.

Snow 2011

2011-01-09T07:30:36Z

Well, it took it's time, but it's finally here (at least for a bit). We were sitting watching the new (and excellent) Sherlock BBC series when we looked out the window and what appeared to be snowballs were falling from the sky. Turns out it was just snow in huge flakes though. Grabbed my Pentax and took a few shots (here). Glad I have the weather sealing because the big flakes had a lot of water in them. Nothing special, but wanted to record that the snow (finally) arrived. Course, I have a feeling it'll be gone by tomorrow morning, no matter what the weather report says!

Computer Back To Normal

2010-12-25T00:00:18Z

So it was the power supply, and I didn't have to resort to spending a ton of money (well, yet anyway). After installing the new power supply, and finding the solution to my next problem (the system running super-slow with 4 1G sticks of RAM) - installing a BIOS update, everything is back to normal now. I've got 64bit Windows 7 running well, am busily re-installing all my apps and copying data around, and have installd VMWare and have Ubuntu installed to hopefully check the feasibility of using that as an alternative to a second physical machine on the floor.

Oh, and Merry Christmas to my 3 readers :)

Windows Done Did Blow Up!

2010-12-23T18:58:28Z

Another day of complete and total hardware failure :( The plan was simple... help clean up the office by converting two computers into one by moving my aging linux desktop (mostly unused except for the occasional consulting project I get) into a virtual machine (using either Virtual Box or VMWare) on my more modern (but still 4 years old) Windows system. Seems simple enough right?

First thing is that the windows box is only 32 bit, and that means I lose a chunk of the 4G of RAM I have in there. So my plan went something like this:

Upgrade windows 7 to 64bit
Copy across settings, re-install programs
Create virtual machine for linux
Copy across settings, re-install programs
Decomission old linux machine

First step was to install Windows 7 64bit on my windows machine. I have a spare hard drive, so I disconnected everything else and started at it. And it was slooooooow..... Getting to the first screen took 5 minutes, the second 10, and when I finally did get to the installing part it was going at about 1% every 5 minutes.

A bunch of reading suggested things like disabling floppy drives in the bios, disabling USB, etc, all of which were tried to no avail. After about five hours of this I was getting near madness. Mostly because I'd let it start going, it'd be horribly slow, and I'd say to myself "just let it go, it'll take forever but it'll be done", then 20 minutes later I'd get in a rage that I should have to endure such sillyness and reboot and try another method of making it go fast that I'd found. Finally I found that pulling 2 of the 4 G of ram out made it suddenly, magically work at full speed.

So now Windows 64bit is installed, booted, and ready to have me set things up. So I shut it all down, put the RAM back in, re-connected the hard drives (I'd need access to my old hard drives to copy settings across of course), and booted it back up.

Except it didn't boot up. The power light on the motherboard went on, but no fans started, no hard drives whirred to life, and my "powerful" (as of 4 years ago) system seemed dead as a doornail. Still is in fact. I've run through about every troubleshooting scenario I can think of, disconnecting everything, re-plugging everything in, and outside of replacing the power supply (I'll be grabbing one of those later this morning as all of the "spare" ones I have are old and ancient), my only conclusion is that the motherboard decided to fry itself.

Sucky for multiple reasons. I do enough photography stuff that I need the "big" computer and the laptop won't do. So I want to hold off on replacing it completely with a decked out 27" iMac full of RAM and hard drive space in a nice shiny box (a very expensive shiny box that is), and I don't wnat to replace it with a "London Drugs Special" system that'll kinda do what I want, but be still kinda sucky, and I really hate doing what I'm continuing to do which is upgrade bit by bit and have a box stuffed full of parts. Bleah. Fingers crossed that replacing the power supply will work anyway, and the damage will be only about $100 :(

No Freebies This Time :(

2010-11-02T05:34:58Z

Oh well, guess it's not always a perfect world in Apple support-land. The battery in my laptop has been less than steller lately, so I headed to the Apple store armed with this article hoping to get a new battery from them gratis.

Sadly, it was not to be. After explaining to the guy there about it, quoting the "80% after 300 charges" spec that they have, the guy hoooked me up to their battery diagnostic and pronounced it was "consumed", and not a bad battery at all. Unfortunately I had to go through the pretence of being interested before this and found out all sorts of good housekeeping tips for laptop batteries before he got to what I really wanted to know, that is, were they going to give me a free one.

Ah well, guess it can't turn up roses all the time, and I'll just keep on using the battery I have until it can't make it from home to work on a charge and have to look at getting a new one. Not a huge deal now, as most of the time it's plugged in at home and I sit in a seat with power on the Vancouver to home leg of my commute.

Upgraded My Laptop

2010-10-26T03:30:34Z

After spending a while hitting the limit of my laptop hard drive, and being annoyed with being forced to actually cull my data and videos and music to make it all fit, I finally realized that for under $100 I could almost triple the storage space I had in it with little or no worries (other than possibly voiding the warranty, not an issue in a 2.5 year old machine). It was actually pretty easy to do, other than one or two minor blips. There's lots of information online about how to do it, and other than the minor detail of needing a computer to read the instructions on while you have the computer open with it's guts exposed, it was up and done with no muss and no fuss.

First things first, reading resources.

This Extreme Tech article is great, and being the first hit on google was nice.
When I did run into one thing I needed confirmation on, this video showed that there were minor differences in the versions of the hardware (or at least from the first article).

So for $79 I picked up a 500G, 7200rpm laptop drive, and a few dollars more I got the SATA to USB connector kit that would let me connect the drive to the computer as a USB drive. This was needed to make the upgrade smooth. Oh, and a T-6 Torx screwdriver as well, as per the article. Seems apple can't leave it at just one type of screw in their bodies....

When I got home I made sure my homebrew time capsule backup was current, and nuked a few un-needed big files from the desktop. I assembled the SATA drive and adapter and plugged in the drive, formatted it, and then I broke out Carbon Copy Cloner. CCC is an awesome utility that basically will clone one drive to another and make it bootable if needed, so for me the theory was clone old drive to new drive, swap out drives, boot up on new drive, with all my data in place and no issues. In theory.

Unlike most stories about me and hardware, this time the theory was the reality. I assembled a bit of paper to keep track of which screws went where, consulted the webpages a lot for each step, got a little scared with the sticky cable attached to the top of the drive, and in the end, reversed the whole process to put it all back together.

End result, computer working properly, more than twice the disk space, and only about $100 spent on tools, adapters, and the actual drive. Well worth saving the random "dangnabbit what else to I have to delete now!?" yells.

Considering Shaw Home Phone

2010-10-20T06:02:41Z

Shaw called me up yesterday and asked if I was wanting a digital cable box for the low-low price of $0 (for the next 6 months) to "make my picture and sound better" because they were "trying to get their customers onto digital picture and sound" or something like that. I talked to the guy for a bit, and it seemed like not that bad a deal, free for 6 months, then $2.50 or so after that (should we decide to keep it of course and not accidentally forget). Not bad I told him, but how about a PVR. No no, this is just the digital tuner. OK, but it is HD right? No no, not HD.

Eh?

Ok, not much use to me. Basically outside of a few more channels (and lets be honest, I have 60 channels of crap now) it gave me nothing but another box and remote to deal with and a new interface to change channels with. So not that great a deal, even for free. But I told him, if you can get me the same deal with an HD tuner box, let me know and I'm all over that (hey, free is free, and I'd rather watch 60 channels of crap in HD than not in HD you know). Also I doubt they could do anything for me but it doesn't hurt to ask, especially if there's nothing to lose. Anyway, they said they'd call me back today.

So in typical big company fashion, communication was off and when I did get the call today I was cheerfully asked "so, you called asking about HD PVRs?" After I explained what was going on, and what I was offered and what I wanting, they offered me the following deal:

HD Tuner with PVR rent free for 2 years
Extra HD movie channels for 1 year
Shaw home phone service with voicemail etc and 1 year free Canada / US calling
Home phone number stays the same with no costs for porting it from Telus to Shaw

All for $20 a month less than what I pay now. That's not counting the fact I'd be able to stop my Telus service of $30-40 a month.

Now of course the devil is in the details. If I forget to cancel the various extras added on after 1 year they I get dinged at least a month of them before I cancel, and there are three different programs and two different anniversaries to remember if I want to back down to a lower rate after. But even if I left things as is after the 1 year promotional "loyal customer" promotion ends, I'm still going to not have a Telus bill that means my costs are at minimum $10 a month cheaper. And in theory if I nuke all the services back to minimum and either buy out the PVR ($400 ouch) or send it back I'm back to where I was or lower, even after all the promos are ended.

I asked a bunch of people on twitter and facebook about Shaw home phone and other than one guy who said that he got crappy and spotty service with it, the response was overwhelmingly "it's fine, no problems". Might even fix the crackly line we get on the home phone too. Only minor downside is that in a power outage the phone doesn't work (one person mentioned they have a 24 hour battery on theirs), but quite frankly I have that right now as our phone base station is powered.

Even if after a year I switch everything back and go back to exactly how it is now, a year of saving $50 a month means $600 in my pocket, which at the end of the day, makes sense. Unless someone out there in Blog Land has some really good reasons to not go with a deal like this, I'll probably take it. Apparently I get a recruiting fee if I pass it on to someone else too, so anyone who might be in the process of moving for example and are planning to get some brand new Internet or Cable TV service at their new home, make sure you make sure to tell them that I sent you :)

Another Apple Support Win

2010-10-08T21:06:37Z

As I mentioned a while back (not here, my blogging has been lacking lately), my power cord for my laptop frayed itself down to the wire. So I made myself an appointment at the Apple Store down the road from my work, and went in today to hopefully deal with it.

As expected, it was (mostly) typical Apple customer service. I arrived at the store about five minutes before my time, found a blue-shirted dude, gave him my name and waited a few minutes for him to get someone. When the guy arrived (Corey), I showed him the cord, pointed out the fray, and he said "yup, I see what you mean." After giving him the serial number for my laptop (which I'd thoughtfully snapped a picture of with my phone before I had left in the morning (didn't want to have to lug it out as well, and I knew they'd want it from previous visits), he took the cable, disappeared for a couple of minutes, and arrived back with a brand new power cord for me. No cost, no fuss, no fighting or complaining.

I can only thing of one negative to this, that being making an appointment ahead of time. I can understand it completely (there are a lot of people coming in for help, and not having some sort of order or system would make it insane.... I have been slipped in before though, after a bit of sweet talking, so it's not 100% draconian). Other than that, I doubt that there's much more that could have gone better.

Note that this is for a 2 and a half year old laptop without any sort of extended warranty. I'm not sure if they have a "if it'll potentially electrocute the customer give it to them for free" policy, or that if you aren't being a total dick they just give it to you because it costs them a couple of bucks but gives them satisfied customers who will pass news of the service on to their friends and family (like I am now).

I wonder if you could get this for another laptop. If I had bought a Dell or HP at Future Shop or London Drugs I can see it being free to replace, but I'd guess that FS/LD doesn't carry stock for all the laptops they carry, so they'd send you to Dell or HP. I don't know of a Dell or HP brick-and-mortar store, so while I'm sure you could do this at one of them, you'd have to find it first. Something to ask about the next time I'm in one browsing...