| Leaving For Asia! | Mar 25, 2008, 8:00 PM |
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Things are wrapped up at Commercial Design and tomorrow I set out for a 2 month trip around Asia. I'll be meeting my sister in Osaka, Japan. We'll spend a couple days there and then move on for a week in Kyoto. Then I'll fly back to Naha, Okinawa, where Laura is teaching English, for a week and a half or so. Then it's off to Taiwan where I'll meet up with my buddy Nathan who's been teaching English in Hsinchu for 6 months. Looking forward to hanging out with him and driving around on scooters. On May 1st, I'll hop across to Hong Kong and meet up with Mark (a Chinese buddy from Toronto who'll be in Hong Kong at the same time). Looking forward to meeting his family, checking out the markets and doing some hiking over there. We're planning to head out to Macau for a day or two and end the trip with a couple of days on Lantau island. I'm pumped! The only apprehension I have is that Nicole can't come due to school commitments. The good news is she'll be spending two weeks in Sudbury while I'm away as part of a field course... so she won't just be sitting at home bored! |
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| New Office! | Jun 05, 2007, 8:06 PM |
| Commercial Design and Multimedia has moved into the building of one of our major clients, Jessam Communications. We have our own area upstairs, with space for new employees. Best of all, it's about 17km from home... a much more bike-able distance! | |
| Blood Alcohol Calculator | Nov 22, 2006, 8:16 PM |
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I've created a blood alcohol content calculator for windows mobile 5. It works on smartphone and pocket pc editions. Installation instructions: 1. Download the app here: http://medmonds.com/BloodAlcohol.CAB . You can download it to your device directly, or download it to your desktop and use the "Explorer" in activesync to copy it over. 2. Once it's on your device. Use the file manager to open the .CAB file, this will install it and add it to your start menu and your remove programs menu (should you choose to remove it later). 3. If you are warned about not having the latest version of the .NET framework, Click Here to download it. 4. Have a pint (or two or three) and then click the start menu on your device to launch "Blood Alcohol Calculator". If this doesn't work on your device... please let me know your device specs and as many details about what happened as you can provide: wm5bugs@medmonds.com |
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| Another Single Issue Election? | Jun 14, 2006, 8:20 AM |
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As the Toronto Municipal Election approaches, candidates are scraping together money, and citizens are getting a first glimpse at what the contended issues are likely to be. Many aren't surprised to learn how little things have changed over David Miller's term. It seems the talking-points of his 2006 campaign will be nearly identical to his choices for this years' election. The only change is perhaps that "gun-related crime and violence" will bump "the waterfront revitalization project (incl. the island airport)" from the number one spot. David Miller's main asset at this point seems to be that he has a lack of serious competition. Jane Pitfield (current city councillor) is probably the mayor's strongest opponent, but a poll by Environics reported on May 1st ranked her support at only 20%, compared to Miller's 54%. What issues would you like to see mayoral candidates discussing? |
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| Moved! | May 31, 2006, 12:12 PM |
| I've moved to the main floor of a house at Christie and Dupont. It's nice - we've got a lot more space and a yard... I'll be obtaining a BBQ in short order! | |
| Programming == Boring | May 30, 2006, 8:09 PM |
| Since when did "programming" become synonymous with "fixing other peoples mistakes"? Challenge me people! Give me an interesting project! | |
| New Car! | Feb 23, 2006, 1:27 PM |
 I just bought a 2002 Mazda Protege. Everything has been good with it so far! I test drove several different cars and really hunted around to find this beauty. I learned that car-hunting is probably worse than apartment hunting.I must say, on the days I have to make the trek to the office, 25-30 minutes of driving in the morning is a big improvement over 1.5 hours on the subway/sheppard bus/jane bus. I think the improvement is 50/50 : no bus / not having to wake up before it's actually light out. My import script is finished running, so back to work! |
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| mySQL's REPLACE INTO command | Nov 11, 2005, 3:09 AM |
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I was in an interview today and I showed the interviewer some sample code. I'd brought a function to save an associative array (eg $_POST) to a database table, taken from a database abstraction layer I wrote a while back for a small (low traffic) site. I thought it was fancy because it automatically built the sql statement and automatically detected whether an update or an insert needed to be done based on the presence of the primary key in the associative array. I felt like a total newb when the interviewer looked at it and said "couldn't you just do a replace into"? I never even noticed mySQL had a replace command, it's certainly not part of any SQL standard I can find. It may make my code as unportable as the grand piano my girlfriend Nicole wants so badly, but still, it could potentially eliminate one database operation and over 20 lines of code. So I did some investigating. It turns out mySQL's replace command is pretty neat, but I'm not sure it suits the purpose the function I wrote serves. From the manual: REPLACE works exactly like INSERT, except that if an old record in the table has the same value as a new record on a UNIQUE index or PRIMARY KEY, the old record is deleted before the new record is inserted. At first, this seems like a god-send. But then I started thinking about how this actually works. Instead of updating the original record, it deletes the original record and inputs a new one. This might be okay for some instances, but often I've used functions like this for multiple pages of a user sign up process. For example, on the first page, the user enters in their username, their password, and maybe a few other things. On the second page, the user enters in their address info... etc. If I rewrote my old function to use the replace command, saving the second form would blow away all the information from the first form. But just for kicks, I rewrote the function how this would work anyway. BTW, I found a great site that compares the difference between SQL implementations: http://troels.arvin.dk/db/rdbms/ |
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| Back from England | Sep 13, 2005, 6:02 PM |
| I've just returned from a vacation in England with Nicole. We had a great time, and took lots of pictures. Our first week was spent in London ( Story | Pictures ), after which we headed to Manchester ( Story | Pictures ) to visit my relatives. We also managed to take a few fantastic day trips out to Caenaferon and York. | |
| Starfest: Woodstock for Astronomers | Aug 08, 2005, 10:43 PM |
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I spent this past weekend observing the sky at Starfest. Starfest is basically about 1200 astronomers camping in a field near Mt. Forest, Ontario. Globular clusters we spotted included M4, M5, M13, M92, The Double Cluster (NGC-869 & NGC-884), M52, M11 (the wild duck Cluster). Nebulas included the ring nebula (M57), the veil nebula, the dumbell nebula (M27), the lagoon, the trifid, the pleiades, the North American (NGC-7000). We also managed to find several galaxies, including andromeda (M31) and it's two satelites (M32 & M110), The Whirlpool Galaxy (M31), The Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). Probably my favorite sighting of the weekend was the veil nebula through a massive 25 inch diameter telescope. The detail was absolutely amazing. The only downside of the weekend was that after staying up most of the night, we were consistently woken up shortly after sunrise by 'the ridiculous tent greenhouse effect'. |
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