August 29 2011:  Tourism in Canada? WTF?

On the Trans-Canada highway between Sicamous and 3 Valley Gap is a "tourist attraction" called Crazy Creek. This road-side turnout features "Hot Pools and a beautiful hike to a suspension bridge and waterfall", in their words.

What's motivated me to write this is the ridiculous admission fee they demand. To see a fucking waterfall. Nine dollars and fifty cents for a single adult. To see a fucking waterfall. Since when can anyone charge money to view a fucking waterfall out in the middle of nowhere? This is capitalism at its finest, folks. Extortion, even, as you're half-way through the hike already before running across the "toll booth" and asked to pay up. Fuck. That. Shit.

Oh, and the Hot Pools? Just a swimming pool that's kept really warm. And with another separate admission fee.

Are you listening, Government? Remember back in the day before User Fees ruined everything?

August 15 2011:  Back At It

Well let's get back to basics. Who says you need thousands of dollars worth of gear to enjoy taking pictures? Gear certainly helps, when you know how to use it. But we can still have fun with a modest amount of equipment, right?

Photographing people has never been my strong suit. But I think I got a couple winners this weekend. Erin and I took on the Taste of Calgary festival at Eau Claire. Even though we didn't sample a single dish, rather we wound up just drinking beer at the Barley Mill. However the walk through downtown was amazing.

Here are two pictures of Erin that I think turned out amazing.

August 03 2011:  Welcome to the Freak Show

The following is a completely true tale of shock and horror! My Condo is haunted!

It started immediately. When first moved in to the Condo and started painting, there was one wall in particular that just wouldn't take the paint. No matter how much it was sanded down and repainted, no matter how much paint thinner was applied, nothing would stop the paint from bubbling and peeling on this one wall. Weird. But paranormal? Meh.

Now, attached to this freak wall is the front closet. The closet has the type of door that slides sideways on a track. Well, half the door was off the track, so the door stayed open permanently. To close it meant pulling it, scraping across the floor, making the most obscene noise ever as it grinded across the tile. One day I came home from work and went into the kitchen to make dinner. Then I sat in front of the TV eating. From the front door I kept hearing noises, but dismissed it as noise from outside. After the noise continued for quite a few minutes, I got up to check it out. Nothing outside. The noise continued. It was coming from the closet. WTF, the closet door was closed! After heaving on the door to shove it open, the cat jumped out of the closet, his hair standing on end, and went yowling all the way to the bedroom. He hid under the bed for the rest of the evening. Unusual?

Across from the freak wall is the kitchen. Directly speaking, the refrigerator. Now, I wouldn't say I'm OCD, but I am a bit particular about how I like things. When I place items in the fridge, such as beer bottles, I like to line them up nicely and 'face' them, that is, line up all the labels facing the same direction. On several occasions, I have nicely placed items in the fridge, only to come back later to find them scattered and disorganized inside the fridge. On one drinking evening in particular, I recall re-lining up my case of beer bottles three or four times within the span of a couple hours. Every time I came back to the fridge, the bottles were scattered.

I'm a man of science and logic. I refuse to believe in paranormal activity. There must be a logical explanation, right? I mean, just because I can't explain it, doesn't mean there isn't an explanation. Right? RIGHT?

July 29 2011:   Dear Shaw,

Let's start with some back story. At the end of June, I was sent a message from Shaw saying they are changing our Head Office's static IP addresses. Static IP addresses that change. Go figure. That's fucked up enough. Anyways, I was given a deadline to make the appropriate changes on our ASA Firewall and Router/VPN devices.

So I came in after hours one Sunday evening and made the changes. And all was good.

The following week, I suppose Shaw flipped the switch on the changes on their end one afternoon, because suddenly our primary internet connection and primary VPN tunnels went down. After some testing, I found that the new gateway was unreachable, however the old, original gateway was still up and working fine.

I called Shaw. Of course they first try to blame it on my network config. Only after directly connecting a laptop to the Shaw modem and demonstrating the situation did they take responsibility, and escalate the call to a higher level. They said they'd call back within 5 minutes.

After about 20 minutes (total downtime approaching three hours) our connection came back online. But I still received no call back, and no explanation to what the issue was, and how they resolved it.

Now, let's fast forward to last night.

I set up a second router at home. On my residential high speed account, I'm entitled to two dynamic IP addresses. I could only seem to use one at a time. Whichever router booted first was the only one to receive an address. Clearly my account was not provisioned to use two addresses.

I called Shaw. After "longer than usual" wait times, of about 40 minutes, I finally got to speak to a fucking idiot! This call centre asshole didn't know shit about networking concepts in general, let alone how Shaw internet works. I had to explain to him how to do his job. I flat-out told him to simply provision the second IP on my account. Of course he ignored my suggestion and blamed everything on my own network config. I demanded to be escalated to a higher tier.

After getting through to the next tier, the tech immediately recognized the situation and within 30 seconds was able to get me my second working IP address. All was good.

Or so I thought. It was all working for about 20 minutes, then my modem dropped offline.

I called Shaw. Again, 45 minutes on hold before getting through to someone. I explained what happened previously, and what lights were flashing on the modem. This indicated immediately that there was a provisioning error on my account. He took responsibility for the screw-up and had my connection working again within five minutes.

Ok. Thanks, Shaw, for consuming over five hours of my life this week. Fuckers. If your internet wasn't so fucking fast I would switch to Telu….. oh no. No, I wouldn't. Shit.

July 13 2011:   Google Plus

Google+ is the big G's attempt at social networking. Again. Anyone remember Buzz? How about Wave?

Actually, I thought Wave was pretty damn cool. However, I believe it was marketed towards the wrong group. Instead of being a communication and collaboration tool for friends, families and tweenies, it should have been directed to the corporate world. It would have killed Sharepoint.

But I digress.

Google+ has some really cool things going for it. First and foremost, and most obvious, is the tight integration with other Google tools, such as Docs and Picasa. And I believe more integration will follow.

Also worth mentioning - Google 'Circles' is a very cool concept, giving users more granular control over the sharing of their content. Instead of making a post and having all your Facebook friends see it, Circles allows you to share content with only certain groups or subsets of your contact list. Now you can share that drunken photo with your friends, but not your family or co-workers. Great, just what we all need, more photos of you making a jackass of yourself.

Unfortunately despite a fresh, new look at sharing and a revolutionary way of doing it, Google+ still has the same problem as Facebook and all other Social Media sites: user submitted content. Users are still going to be subject to the same drivel as FB and Twitter… the endless stream of posts we don't want to read. Users sharing what they had for dinner, where they are every second of the day, obscure cries for attention with little to no detail.

And that is the reason I believe adoption will slow and become ultimately stagnant - similar to what we are seeing now with the slow decline of FB activity of the last few months. A Social Network site is only as good as its subject matter. Until we have a method to promote interesting and meaningful content and collaboration, I don't see this changing the game. The next big thing in social media will have to revolutionize not HOW people share, but WHAT people share.

June 28 2011:  Microsoft. My Mortal Enemy.

Office 365. I spent a lot of time testing this shit for feasibility in my workplace. As my previous post implies, I've rejected it.

However, that's not the end of it. Our current BPOS service which provides Exchange Email, Calendar, Contacts, etc to my company is end of life, being replaced by…. Office 365. So what does this mean, for me and my team?

We have to touch every single computer in the organization. The existing Single Sign-on client has to be manually uninstalled, and replaced with the new version (where's my msi installer, Microsoft??? You can take your exe and shove it!). Office 2003 and previous is not compatible, so any machines with old versions need to be upgraded - at $350 per license! IE6 is no longer supported, so all machines have to be updated to IE7 or better. All OWA URLs change, and all mobile devices have to be re-configured.

On the infrastructure side, our current MS Online Active Directory Synchronization tool goes away. I now have to set up Active Directory Federation Services.

This is a lot of work; time and money, for my technical staff.

Remind me why we are paying Microsoft for this service? For the amount of work they are creating, they should be paying me.

June 23 2011:  Office 365 Fail

In the beta, I have the ability to select from two subscriptions: Office 365 Plan P1, which includes Lync, Sharepoint and Exchange, and Office Professional Plus, which includes, well, everything in the Office Pro suite.

First downfall - the Office Pro subscription does not deliver Word, Excel, etc in a web browser as expected. Instead, it prompts the user to download a 772MB installer. This installs the entire Office Pro suite locally on the computer. Dealbreaker #1

It also requires Admin privileges to install. Dealbreaker #2.

Isn't the whole point to Office 365 so we don't have to install Office on local workstations, and we can easily assign licenses to users without I.T. staff intervention?

Now, there is Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote Web Apps. They pretty much load the 2010 Office application in your web browser (even works in Firefox!). However, you cannot open/edit/save files to your local computer, only to the 'team site'. Dealbreaker #3.

Oh yeah, for this to be Mac compatible, you need to have Office 2011 already installed locally. Dealbreaker #4.

I should have quit after Dealbreaker #1.

So where is the advantage to Office 365? Perhaps there is some value in having the Office Pro license only cost 10 dollars per month, rather than forking over the $350 up front?

However with shared computers in the company, it only takes 3 users on one computer to make up the cost of that license in one year. In the second year, we are losing money.

I guess we stick with good 'ol Office Home and Business licenses for now.

June 13 2011:  Mac in the Corporate Environment

This got me thinking about some amazing new virtualization products that I'm super-geeked to start playing with. Citrix and VMware both have products that will essentially make the hardware (and software) platform a non-issue.

Imagine the CEO of your company comes by your desk with his shiny new MacBook Pro and asks, nay, demands! that he be able to run the corporate asp dot net application in OSX. How would you pull that off?

Get this. Abstract the hardware. That's what virtualization is all about. We now have the ability to run nearly any application, designed for a specific platform, on any platform we wish. I mean, virtualized desktops and virtualized applications (xenapp, app-v, thinapp) have been around for a while. But it's getting even better.

Going back to our demanding CEO example, we now have clients available for the Mac platform. I know my company executives would eat that shit up if they knew it was available. I can't count how many people in this company have asked if they can use their Mac at work, and the answer was always "No, here's a Dell laptop, take it and be grateful".

I believe we have to let go of the old methodology of controlling employee devices. We should give them more choice. Let them use the tools they are comfortable with. VMware is going to let me do exactly this.

June 09 2011:  Sirius vs Slacker

I've maintained a subscription for four years now, ever since I bought my truck which came equipped with a receiver built-in. Over those four years I've seen the bit rate quality decrease in order to make room on the spectrum for more channels that I never listen to, and the subscription cost has steadily increased to rate they ask now, over $180 for the year.

I'm exploring other options. Slacker Radio being the first.

It's great. Slacker offers three levels of service; the basic plan, Slacker Plus and Slacker Premium, at rates of Free, $48 and $120 per year, respectively. Thus far I have only been using the free basic plan. And it does not leave me wanting. Channel customization is great, play selection is great, and any advertising is few and far between.

They also offer a mobile application which does a great job of streaming to my Android device over Bell's mobile network. I have yet to experience any interruptions or buffering issues.

Adios, Sirius. It's been fun but in this geek's opinion, your price-point no longer makes you competitive with the new online radio options available.

June 02 2011:  The G-Cloud

This is interesting to me for a couple reasons. Cost reduction being one of them. Utilizing an Iaas model, businesses can save quite a bit of money. Gone are the concerns of power, cooling and rack space for a datacenter. Administration costs and time go down significantly. There are positives to cloud-based infrastructure, no doubt. And it has its place.

However, as a hardware geek, I am all for building private cloud. That is, my own virtualized datacenter, rather than using someone else's hardware.

I prefer this for a few reasons. One of those reasons is NOT security. But that's another conversation.

First and foremost, I still want physical access to my hardware. There's nothing like having the peace of mind in being able to physically press a power button.

Second, I like to feel in control. Let's go back a few weeks and pick on Amazon. Their EC2 cloud servers went down, taking with it several major websites and businesses. Thousands, if not millions, of dollars were lost in the downtime. And administrators who have services hosted there? They could do nothing but twiddle their thumbs while Amazon scrambled to fix the problem. From an Admin standpoint, there is nothing worse than receiving angry call after angry call, and having to say "it's out of my hands". Hitting closer to home, my business is using Microsoft BPOS for Exchange email - this service had intermittent issues for a couple days. What do I say when the CEO of the company comes to me with complaints that his email isn't working? You can't tell a CEO to "sit tight".

Finally, even though Iaas services are improving, I still like the overall control an administrator can get from a well-designed VMWare implementation. Things such as being able to re-allocate hardware resources on the fly, or on a schedule, to handle the peaks and valleys of demand put on servers during a typical business day. All of which I'm sure I'll be elaborating more on in the near future as my Datacenter build project progresses.

There was no official word as to the reasons why the UK Government backed down from their cloud infrastructure project. This is one geek who would like to hear more.

May 30 2011:  Dear Government: Don't you fucking dare!

What it proposes, is that major ISPs around the globe would be forced to modify their DNS records based on government/court orders, in order to stop the domain name resolution of malicious or rogue websites; effectively making these websites unreachable.

It sounds good, in theory.

But there are further reaching implications that only a true geek would understand; certainly not a room full of crusty grey haired elected representatives.

Without getting into nerd details about how DNS name resolution works, passing this proposal would certainly introduce a large amount of collateral damage including bringing down completely valid and un-related websites.

And don't even get me started on the idea of a global, government-run DNS system. They have their fingers in enough pots already. Stay out of my internets!

May 27 2011:  My good friend, Harley Smith, has motivated me.

This, my friends, is how a professional rolls.

May 25 2011:  Pouring out some beer for my lost homie.

Truly a testament to the talents of the human race. There are some fucking smart people out there.

http://xkcd.com/695/

May 22 2011:  It's a start.

Its time to extend my resolve to this long-neglected website.

In the coming weeks, stay tuned for updates, updates, updates. About everything, about nothing in particular. Most definitely photography. Probably technology and other geek rants and raves. Whether that be about robot building and other electronic wizardry, smartphones and tablets, networking and cloud computing. Who knows. I might even talk about friends and family and *eek* love.