I wanted to see how quickly I could change the colour scheme of this page. As it turns out, pretty quickly. I like CSS, CSS is my friend. I think I’ll leave the colours the way they are until next week, when I’ll switch them back. Ideally I’d make a new logo too, but I’m not that ambitious (yet).

I looked into using MSAgent to do voice recognition in my arcade frontend, and decided found that there is a far better way - that being SAPI 5.1. I downloaded the SDK, and the documentation. It looks relatively simple to use, though I haven’t even gotten VB installed on my machine at home yet to test it out.

In other news, I managed to get my machine at home to hook up to the VPN at work, so I can access my machine from home. What does this mean to you? Nothing, really, except that now I can do updates to this page from home as well. I don’t know if I’ll be doing that much, but at least the capability is there now. As a side effect, I can now show off my internal website work when people come to visit and ask what I’ve been doing. Personally I’m pretty impressed with the application, though I know it’s all done with smoke and mirrors…

I read a good injury report for the Montreal Canadiens the other day. I’ll quote the article here (heh. You poor netscape users won’t like me for this)

And tough guy Gino Odjick, who hasn’t come close to playing a full season since 1996-97, is day to day with what has been described as “bus driver’s back.” Odjick said the ailment is the result of sitting on the bench too much.

Yeah, but at least it’s warmed up for the rest of the team.

Simpsons quote: “Can’t we have one meeting that doesn’t end with us digging up a corpse?” - Mayor Quimby

Had a meeting today that took most of the day with the fine people from webMethods. Interesting, though most of it was just a review of stuff that they presented the last time they came out.

Anyways, no quote for today, nothing else, just thought I’d let you know what the deal was.

I’m thinking more and more about what I want to do with my Arcade cabinet, seeing as the time is quickly approaching when I’ll be able to do something with it (ie, after the cruise is paid off, I might be able to sink some more cash into it) A while back, I came across a nice looking universal frontend that a guy wrote for his own project the SBox. It looks nice, but I think I’ve been thinking that I needed to make it nicer :) A while back, I’d been reading about some voice recognition stuff, and thought that it would be cool to have a voice controlled frontend. I’d also been playing around with Microsoft Agent. The other night, I put one and one together, and decided that I’d use MSAgent in combination with the sBox frontend, and do some voice recognition input type of thing for it.

I really don’t know how the MSAgent voice recognition works, but I think it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out. If I do, I’ll have a pretty cool frontend to call my own.

I got my arcade computer put together last night, and was playing around with it a bit - I couldn’t get it to boot to windows, though I didn’t try too hard either. I think I’ll spend some quality time with it this week, and see if I can’t get it set up, and ready for installation. I still don’t have a display device, and my control panel isn’t hooked up completely yet, but I’m not far off. I figure that I’ll have it ready to go by the time I can afford to get it a display. At that point, I’ll likely break the cabinet down and build a new one :)

Simpsons quote of the day: “This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That’s democracy for you.” - Mr. Burns

Apparently the guilty party does read this page - I guess I was on the wrong track. Apparently someone spotted a guy with a steering wheel attached to his pants shovelling…. Ah nevermind.

I watched some Johnny Bravo last night. Some of them were quite good, some of them were disappointing (especially Johnny Bravo meets Adam West - I had such high hopes) Now I’m down to only 12 episodes recorded ;) Heading into the CFFL playoffs, I’m the second seed, and I get to play the third seed. Boy am I glad that I have home-field advantage (cause it doesn’t matter at all.) The first place team has suffered injuries to it’s top receiver, and its kicker, as well as seeing it’s number one QB sit on the bench cause his team has nothing to play for in the real CFL. Lucky for him, his second string QB is also second in the league. Not that you care.

I still haven’t gotten around to registering that domain name. Maybe this weekend. I’ll keep you all posted.

Simpsons quote of the day:
Marge: “Homer, I think the baby’s coming.”
Homer: “Wow. A baby and a free burger. Could this be the best day of my life?”

I forgot to mention this yesterday, but when I got home Monday, the driveway and sidewalk was all nicely shovelled for me. Whoever did it, if you’re reading this, thanks. I suspect I know who did it, and I suspect that they don’t read this, but what the heck, I thought I’d post this here anyways.

Further to the website moving/domain name thing, I’ve switched to the @shaw.ca email addresses and stuff, so if this page stops working, you can likely find it at either nodecam.ish.cx or at members.shaw.ca/greg-mitchell though until it goes down, or I get a domain name, this is the primary site for this weblog.

I read an interesting story today about Mr. Magnet who can apparently carry 66 pounds of metal, attached by a steel plate which is just basically put on his chest. - The scientists say that he’s not magnetic, his skin is just very sticky. Sounds like somebody could use a bath…

Simpsons quote of the day - comes from Winnipeg Blue Bomber’s place kicker Troy Westwood, commenting after breaking a streak of 5 missed field goals: “I suck. I think that’s fairly obvious” Attaboy Troy!

Came across the Guide to Shooting Rubber Bands which is just bizarre enough to be readable.

I took our passport applications into the passport office today, managed to not make any terrorist jokes, and our passports should be ready for pickup on Tuesday next week. That’s a bit of a relief, cause I thought it would take a lot longer than that. I guess that’s the final hurdle for the trip this winter - other than paying for it of course :)

I might be moving this page somewhere else in the near future, and possibly purchasing a domain name (maybe www.nodecam.com? Any suggestions?) so I’ll keep this site updated with any news on that front.

Not much else new with me though, just doing the same old same old fighting with HTML and Javascript and VB and ASP and stuff here.

Simpsons quote: I was watching the Habs game on CBC French on Saturday night, when Montreal tied it up late in the 3rd period. Shortly after that, Buffalo scored again to pull ahead of Montreal. My response? “But-urns” That’s right, “I was saying ‘But-urns’” (note to those of you who don’t speak hockey French - “but” means goal, the French equivalent of “He scores!” is “C’est la but!” (but is pronounced boo)

It’s snowing here, and with all the Anthrax scares that have been flying around lately, it’s amazing that people are willing to leave their houses. It’s raining Anthrax! Seriously though, today is the first day of snow in Saskatoon since last winter. (I should qualify that - it’s snowed here before, it just melted right away those times though. I think this stuff will stick around for a little while anyways) I imagine that there are lots of accidents today, as all the people who’ve forgotten how to drive on snow/ice run each other off of the road. I’d have to say that the majority of the accidents that I’ve witnessed have occurred on the first day of snow. Interestingly enough, coming in second place would be accidents that I’ve witnessed at the intersection of 1st Ave and 23rd St. - at one point every time I went through that intersection I saw an accident (3 times in a row… Spooky)

Slashdot has posted a lot of strange stories in the past, but the “Brian Billick blames Ravens defensive woes on the teams recent switchover to Linux” is pretty funny. I read a bunch of the predictions in that article, and they all had “humorous” little explanations. It’s not as if the article actually quotes anyone involved with the team or anything. Oh well, it’s not like I expect good reporting on Slashdot anyways :)

I guess I should post this thing and do some stuff that I’ve gotta do today.

Simpsons quote of the day: [Ned and Homer are driving in a snowstorm.] Ned: “Homer, we just hit something!” — Homer: “Ooooooh, I hope it was Flanders!”