Great Ulti game tonight. It was a little warm out, but there was nooo wind! It was cloudy making it easy to see down the field, but the tradeoff was that it was muggy.

I had a great time at the game. I felt like I was running well, playing well, making good hard cuts. I caught a couple points and threw a couple points.

We were zoned a couple times which was an interesting tactic in calm weather, but we managed to march the disc up the field consistently, then unfortunately it would get thrown away or dropped near the end zone.

We were so close to winning for a while. We were down a few points, then managed to claw back to an 8-7 score.

During one point I was in the stack and one of my teammates made a cut and the throw to her was made. It sailed high and wide. I sprinted off after it, and managed to track it down to prevent the turnover.

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I've added Gravatar support to my site. I saw them somewhere else recently and thought they would be a fun addition. If you haven't signed up with Gravatar, then by default this site will show an Identicon instead.

Signing up at Gravatar is quick and easy.

I got out for a great mountain bike ride this morning. A friend of mine is making a return to mountain biking, and yesterday he suggested a ride at the dump. I had the time and jumped on it. I switched over the slicks to my knobbies and the bike was ready.

The forecast for today was a high of 24 and sunny, so I knew I wanted to be done before lunchtime. Add in that Sox had an appointment at 1 and I needed to look after Sprout, that meant riding early in the day. This suited me just fine since I wanted to beat the heat.

We started riding around 9:30, and the tour of the dump was just under 2 hours. I tried to find a route that took us on some good climbs but avoided some deadly descents. The route wasn't perfect, but my buddy wasn't afraid to walk I really wished I had brought a camera with me though. It was so gorgeous out and there were lots of flowers and trail riding shots I could have snagged.

I felt great throughout the ride. The temps were perfect, traction was excellent, and technically I was riding very well. I love these kinds of rides. My cardio felt good too, even though we stopped a few times for quick breathers. I'm looking forward to getting out again.

I do need to get a new front tire for my Chameleon though. The 2.65 Kujo is getting low on tread and really isn't needed on that bike. It is big, wide and heavy and I would like something new. Also the casing is coming apart in chunks. I can fully justify spending money on a new tire

The fam is going camping soon, and I think I will be able to sneak in a ride up in Parksville, near to where we are staying. Yay.

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Well, contrary to the lack of posting here, I actually have a ton of stuff tumbling around my head right now. And so, an Omnibus post that covers a couple of different items.

I've been heads down busy and haven't been attending (or organizing!) any social media type events lately. I did get out Wednesday night to attend the Freshbooks / Redwerks BBQ. Look, there's me holding a puppy (photo by Ianiv)! It was a beautiful sunny evening and the Redwerks rooftop patio is awesome. I ended up manning the grill, my secret ploy to meet everyone (at least, everyone that was hungry). It was nice to meet some new people and catch up with a bunch of regulars.

I'm trying Jungle Disk for my personal backup. In short, it's a cross platform app that both serves as a kind of iDisk as well as some simple backup operations, except that your data is actually stored on Amazon's S3 service. You pay a one time license for the application (and you can install it on as many computers as you want), and you pay as you go for storage. And can get your files from any machine.

I'm currently backing up my Documents folder to a Backup area, and then I also have a second "bucket" (that's actually Amazon tech talk, but it makes sense) that is a true archive -- I copy old stuff there and delete if off my local disk. I'm still debating whether it's worth it for me to put my entire iTunes collection online -- it would solve being able to get my music from anywhere, and it would cost about $12 / month (for 60GB). Not sure what the calculation is for streaming that music some of the time? And yes, this is like MP3 Tunes music locker.

So that's my use, but Jungle Disk *also* launched the WorkGroup edition -- which is the same thing, but lets multiple users in a company use it from a single Amazon account, with things like their own storage space as well as granular user permissions. So you can have a Finance folder that only senior management can access. And if you don't have senior management, then just think about how great it would be to have a small business shared file system that you can access from any computer, anywhere. That's $2/month per employee, which I think is a good price.

WordPress! I've been mucking about in WordPress core and theme code. Once was with Rachael's site, which I upgraded using the FTP dance. I really hate not having command line access.... The second was for the Bootup Labs Blog, which I moved off of WordPress.com so we could add some more plugins and do stuff like have a feed for every category / tag. Except, when I went digging around, it seems that the main feed is the only one that is ever injected into the link rel header. So, here's my feature request if you're interested in the gory details: http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7190 -- heck, I might even submit a patch :P

etc. There are so many things that could go in the etc. section. Should I talk about how Roger's iPhone pricing plans in Canada suck? Or about some thoughts on S3 and hosting shared files for the Drupal community? Or how my Raincity -- Bootup Labs transition is going? I've got lots going on, and I'll update here with extended posts on some of these topics. For now, it's summer, next week is Canada Day, and I'm going to spend time hanging out on Bowen with some of my favourite people.

P.S. Thanks to everyone that talked about their usernames -- that's one of the longest comment threads I've had in a while, it was fun!

Rogers has unveiled its pricing structure for the iPhone 3G in Canada, and it can be summarized in one syllable. Unfortunately, this is a family-oriented website, so I’ll have to use a different syllable:

Ouch.

First off: there’s absolutely no unlimited data plan. Rogers may claim they have tried to make the plans slightly less ridiculous, but they failed bigtime - it’s business as usual, continuing the time-honoured tradition of having Canadians pay through the nose for meager amounts of mobile data. The cost of data plans range from $60 for 400MB of data transfer to $115 for 2GB of data transfer. This stands in stark contrast to the simple, affordable AT&T iPhone plans in the US, which feature unlimited data, Visual Voicemail, 200 SMS text messages, roll-over minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling for every plan - and the cheapest plan is $59.99.

The differences are staggering. The cheapest Rogers plan only include 75 text messages, versus 200 for the AT&T plan. To match the capabilities of the AT&T plan, you’d have to spring for the $100 a month plan with Rogers. For $60 with Rogers, you get 150 minutes of talk time, versus the 450 minutes you get with AT&T for $59.99. That’s right - 3 times the talk time, and it’s 1 cent cheaper.

But wait! There’s less!

Rogers “Value Packs” are required for things like Caller Display, additional text messages, and Call Forwarding (which appears to be billed on a per minute basis, which strikes me is really odd). All of these “Value Packs” are noted with “Wireless Essentials Included” - really? I have no idea what that means, but if they’re included, why the hell are they an extra charge on top of the main plans?

By all appearances, the Rogers iPhone 3G  plans are optimized for complexity and designed to milk the consumer dry. Way to go Rogers, you’ve exceeded my expectations, but not in a good way.

Had an early ultimate game tonight. We were short a few players which meant more field time for everyone which was great. It was windy (as usual in Victoria) which made for a lot of turnovers and a lot of long points. Surprisingly very few zone defense points since the other team was short players.

I felt I played pretty good despite many, many bad throws. My cuts were good and I was often getting clear of my check and catching the throw. My defense tonight was pretty good too, even though half the points I played I was checked/checking a woman.

I had one defense move that I have to relate. I could see who the handler was going to throw the disc to but I was pretty far away. I saw the handler wind up and heave the disc so I started running. Right on the sideline I jumped as high as I could, but I mistimed my jump. I jumped too early, yet it felt like my hangtime was extra long for some reason, and I actually managed to knock down the disc. Awesome.

My pre-game prep is working well for me too. I try to eat well throughout the day and drink lots of water. I then try to eat something resembling dinner sometime around 2 hours before gametime. During the game I drink very little water. I stick to small sips just to wet my mouth. Riding to the game helps me warm up too which I know is good for me.

I'm really enjoying this season and when it is done I might see about playing pick up on Sundays. I definitely notice an increase in my cardio.

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I’ve been helping a friend set up a simple website (using WordPress of course), and it’s the first time I’ve used Joyent’s shared accelerators for web hosting. I’m just getting started, but I’m impressed by how sophisticated and professional the solution looks without losing how approachable and open TextDrive is known to be.

Recommended by friends in the open source community, I’ve hosted this site and a few other low traffic sites for friends with TextDrive since near the end of 2005. TextDrive and Joyent became one around the same time.

The TextDrive shared hosting experience has been good, but I also don’t generally expect much from shared hosting. I’m optimistic about this cloud computing thang though.

Photo by Aaron Schmidt.

After dropping Sprout off at daycare this morning I couldn't help but enjoy the warm sunny weather. A beautiful blue sky and warm temps are enough to lift anyones spirits and walking to work just capped that off in a spectacular way.

Nice start to the day.

Sunday was a fun family day. We headed out to Witty's Lagoon with some friends for a special CRD exploration day. The drive out was fine, but the walk down to the beach was long and a bit arduous with the chariot stroller Sprout was in.

Once on the beach he had fun. CRD had a tent set up, and they had seined a couple tide pools to show us the different fish and wildlife that live in those waters. Very cool to see the Shrimp, Peneye Gunnels, Fluffy Sculpins, Pointy Sculpins, pipe fish, and crabs. My favorite though was the barnacle covered rock. I'd never seen barnacles feeding before so that was pretty interesting.

At our blanket we also built some sand castles, dug holes, ate lunch, then got ready to leave. Sprout really didn't want to get into the stroller and ended up walking back to the car, which was a distance of over a kilometre. Over that same distance Sox also ran into three different sets of people that she knew. Weird.

Family days are fun.

Firefox 3 was released this week, download it and have a better web browsing experience while supporting open and innovation software development!

As I know from my own experience dabbling1 in web browser development, it’s an incredibly challenging undertaking. Using Firefox 3 is the most polished, rich browsing experience!

1. I worked for a short time on both Netscape 8 and Flock

Boing Boing pointed me to Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno’s “Unthinkable Futures” list, which included a disaster scenario that fired some neurons (it’s Saturday morning before ten, this is unusual):

People begin leaving the U.S. Many arrivals to the US keep resident status but choose not to adopt citizenship. The world sees more people without allegiance.

Whenever people ask me “where are you from?” I’ve always had difficulty answering the question. I was born in Australia, grew up in Canada, and hold Irish citizenship and US Permanent Residence status. Technically, I’m from somewhere around 30 countries.

I’ve always viewed multi-citizenship as an imperitive in an increasingly interconnected world. The ability to easily move and work in another country has always struck me as a logical complement to my highly transportable skill set as an engineer. While international treaties, such as NAFTA, typically simplify the process of moving between countries for highly-skilled workers, citizenship reduces the complexity even further.

In fact, one might even view citizenship as a new asset class. Not only is it an easily transportable asset, but it also can be passed on to descendants in most cases. When Ashley and I have kids, they could have as many as four citizenships: Canadian, Irish, Australian, and US.

That said, I, as many others, are wary of US citizenship. The primary reason for this fear is the draconian US tax law, which demands its citizens file taxes on their world income regardless of whether they are in the country or not. The US always wants its share in exchange for the benefit of citizenship. Other countries, in contrast, generally don’t require you to file taxes unless you’re actually in the country for a significant portion of the year.

I could see this becoming a liability for the US, leading to the outcome that Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno predict. US citizenship is only an asset so long as the US is a highly desirable labour market, and supports a high quality of life. In the absence of those attributes, the asset of citizenship is outweighed by the liability of onerous over-taxation.

Of course, in the long-term this hopefully becomes a non-issue as international borders and nation-states become increasingly irrelevant. Maybe.

Today is the end of week 4 of coding for WordPress’s Google Summer of Code. It’s hard to believe it has already been 4 weeks, and there are only 2.5 weeks until the half way mark. This year, we’re running a tighter program and I think the results will speak for themselves.

Like last year, I’m mentoring Ronald Heft, Jr’s. He is working on TypePad AtomPub-based Content Importer. Ronald has been good about keeping me updated, asking good questions, proposing solutions, prioritizing issues, and sharing his results with the community.

Today seemed like a good day to take a look at the code and take it for a spin. I identified some issues and Ronald immediately responded with a plan to investigate and address them.

It isn’t quite ready for you to test importing from TypePad, but things are looking good. It’s getting close.

BrendonC dropped by to leave a comment mentioning that Drupal in Python -- aka Drupy -- is a real project.

Here's the latest update (as of 6/17/2008):

Currently, Drupy can successfully run Drupal Bootstrap Phase 8. This means there is one more Drupal Bootstrap phase to be completed before alpha completion. For more details, check the Drupy diagnostic page, which is updated regularily.

Find the code on Gitorius, news and bugtracking on Sourceforge, and say 'hi' on freenode at #drupy.

Ulti tonight was fun. I felt like running for some reason, and run I did. The first few points I stayed away from being a handler so I could do some cuts. When time came for defense though I was playing a little lazy. Once I poached my check to help out a teammate and got burned. Another point I wasn't on top of my check as much as I should have been. Later in the game I was on the wrong side of my check (I was shallow and should have been deep). I was watching him to see what he was going to do. I saw him point to the open side of the field, and totally fell for the fake. He deeked to the open side then doubled back after I committed. Aargh.

Then I redeemed myself. I had a wicked point where I was all over the place making plays. I was a handler and was throwing well, but there were a lot of turnovers. On defense I was blocking, running down the disk, and generally causing mayhem for the other team. I wanted that point bad an din the end we didn't get it I was disappointed, but a few people commented on how well I played.

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• Websites as graphs - an HTML DOM Visualizer Applet
  View the structure of your website as a graph visualization. Very cool.

Mmmm, imagine you have finished an awesome breakfast of bacon and eggs. You have some pieces of meat stuck between your teeth and you want them out, yet you don't want to forget your breakfast.

Enter the bacon flavored floss. Mmmmm. Buy some here.

via BoingBoing

He's getting bigger, and bolder too. The little fish that appeared in my tank was spotted again tonight. I even managed to get a crappy picture of him. The first picture is the full grown platy, and the second is my mini platy. Very cute.

So far he seems to just hang around the plant which provides some pretty good cover. Hopefully he will continue to grow.

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