Month: November 2005

A very good friend of mine once wrote me a beautiful note that had this quote from Violeta Parra. “Don’t cry when the sun is gone, because the tears won’t let you see the stars.”

I’m heading off to Drayton Valley (a small town just west of Edmonton) to visit my sister and her family for the long weekend.

It’s Remembrance Day tomorrow so as a special treat here is a photo of my Grandpa Scoville’s war medals.

He served in the Canadian Navy during World War II primarily posted to convoy escorts and submarine hunting. He had plenty of war stories, but I was either too little or wasn’t around when they were being shared.

One particularly interesting story was when he snuck onto a German warship that was docked at a neutral port and stole the Captain’s alarm clock. He felt so guilty about what a stupid thing it was to do that (I think) he eventually gave the clock away just to keep from reminding himself about that adventure. Somebody on his ship stole it from him.

For those of you more interested in cartoon / viking / battle of the bands type war, check out Jason Forrest’s animated video for ‘War Photographer’.

A clever fellow going by the moniker of TehDiplomat has created a playable version of Risk that uses Google Maps satellite images for the board. At present all players have to sit around the computer taking turns but apparently he is working on a multiplayer version.

Risk via Google Maps.

(via Waxy links)

I’ve been working at the university for a little under three weeks now. I like the work, I really like the fact that I’ve learned a lot about CSS programming and sometimes I find myself just cruising away at the code and then notice it’s lunch time or the end of the day. I hate pulling myself away when I’m in the middle of some great break-through.

Today for example I learned how to implement random image headers on the top of some of the pages I’ve been fixing up. The About Lethbridge page, for example, has both the new random image code and it also integrates an embedded google map that has the University marked in relation to the world. It’s pretty cool stuff – at least it gives me a feeling of accomplishment anyway.

I usually try to post links that I think the majority of my audience will appreciate and somehow I don’t think I have a lot of web programmers visiting my site but I guess you never know. Anyway I’ve found the following tips for webmasters from the W3C very interesting and helpful in my attempt to make better webpages.

Browsing the wikipedia I came across this little tidbit about Hotmail:

On 24 December 1999, MSN Hotmail, the free web based email service owned by Microsoft, became inaccessible for a couple of days when the domain name registration lapsed for passport.com – which Hotmail uses for user authentication.

The registration fee for the expired domain was paid by Hotmail user Michael Chaney on December 25 as a Christmas present to Microsoft and the 20 million users that were unable to access their mail.

Microsoft confirmed to Chaney a couple of days later that his $35 payment to Network Solutions did in fact solve the Hotmail outage problem. As a reward for Chaney’s quick thinking and generous move, Microsoft sent him a check for $500 and a copy of Visual Studio 6.0.

AL-QAEDA’S former South-East Asian chief, Omar al-Faruq, has escaped from a US military prison in Afghanistan. How bizarre can the war on terror get?

I came across a video comparing George Bush’s speaking ability over ten years. Maybe his decline in sentence by sentence speaking skill isn’t because of a presenile dementia, maybe the answer is in this (comedic) video: George Bush’s Speechwriter. (QT Mov)