Some of you may have seen some strange behaviour on this site this morning - apparently one of the nameservers that I use has forgotten who I am. For most people that means that you’d be sent to the secondary nameserver that I have configured - which fortunately knew the address of this site. Unfortunately, some DNS servers don’t bother going to the secondary name server. For those of us stuck with that sort of DNS server, we saw a “www.nodecam.com is for sale” page until I figured it out and swapped the order of the two nameservers.

It was a bit strange to see that page show up. I gotta admit, it freaked me out.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Now Marge, you’ve come to the right place. By hiring me as your lawyer, you also get this smoking monkey. [sniff] Better cut down there, Smokey! [laughs]” - Lionel Hutz

I suspect that once I have the Mac set up, I’ll actually be quite happy with it. The problem is that it’s not exactly simple to set it up the way I want. That whole learning curve is a new thing to me - having been on Windows for a decade, I’ve come to know a lot about how the OS does things, so when I want to do something, I know how to approach it. We’ll see how it goes. At this rate, I should be a turtleneck wearing member of the Steve Jobs Brigade by the end of the month :P

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Bart’s right. Let’s none of us have a cow.” - Marge

So, the new computer arrived on Friday. I got it hooked up and working, but it doesn’t feel like home yet. When I installed Ubuntu on the laptop, I immediately felt at home with it. If I wanted to do something, I could do it. If I didn’t know how, I knew where to look for answers. With the Mac, I’m still learning the system’s quirks. Fortunately I had done a little bit of reading, so I knew what some of the biggest gotchas were ahead of time. I still don’t have it set up quite the way I want yet - for example, my mail is still on the laptop exclusively. I hope to be able to run with a network profile that will enable me to use Thunderbird across various machines seamlessly.

At this point I don’t even have nfs shares auto mounting at boot. Not that that’s a huge deal, but it will become one if my plan is to come to fruition.

I would say that from a pure usability standpoint, Linux wins (for me) while Windows comes in second, and Mac OS X is in last at this point. I’m sure that will change as I get more used to things, but Mac OS X is certainly not as intuitive as I expected. There’s a lot of jargon and things that the user is expected to know. I’m not saying that Windows and Ubuntu are jargon free, but at least it’s jargon that I understand at this point. Keep in mind that it’s been 10 years since I last used a Mac for anything of any substance, so I’m a little rusty.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Bees are on the what now?” - Homer

I shall embark upon the great task of upgrading this website to the newest version of wordpress over the next few days. I think I’ll start simple - I’ll hit one of the websites that literally nobody reads first, then gradually upgrade other sites as I see fit. Just so you know what’s going on in case things wind up broken temporarily. (Uh, wait - if it’s broken, you won’t be able to read the explanation…Hmmm)

Well, that’s the explanation anyway.

Last night was poker night, and this time around I walked away with a little more money than I showed up with. A good time was had by all.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “This has purple stuff inside. Purple is a fruit.” - Homer

William had a bit of a meltdown last night, so we didn’t wind up going to the gym. Instead, we fired up the TG16 games on the XBox, and he played some Bonk and some Chew Man Fu. One of the nice things about the xbox tg16 emulator is that it lets you search for “cheat codes” which can do things like giving you unlimited lives. On the Bonk games, I set it up so that William had unlimited hearts. On Chew Man Fu, I set it up so that he had a permanent bloop - those of you who have played the game should know what that means. As well, I set it so that the fireballs would not make their appearance. The remarkable thing is that he was fully capable of putting the balls on the correct squares - he just took his time doing it. It won’t be long before he’s playing that game without training wheels at Grandma’s house.

Meanwhile, the Habs were busy trading away Jose Theodore. I’m not sold on the deal, but the extra cap space that it freed up is probably the thing that tips this in Montreal’s favour. There are some interesting stretch drives shaping up in the NHL this year…

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Of course, none of this would have happened if you had been here to keep me from acting stupid.” - Homer

Pretty low key night last night. Erin gave a La Leche talk at the hospital, so William and I stayed home. He was watching Theodore the Tugboat one minute, and the next minute he was asleep. Apparently he hadn’t napped yesterday afternoon (which Erin neglected to mention to me ;))

So I watched a terrible hockey game instead. I haven’t seen a lot of hockey this year, and the hockey that I have seen has been pretty good. The Habs/Leafs game last night was brutal, and it was all due to the “zero tolerance” officiating that was going on. It’s been a while since I’ve seen so many non-penalties get called. It got to the point where I was surprised every time there was a whistle without a corresponding penalty. Pretty brutal calls both ways (though obviously as a Habs fan, I feel that they got screwed more than the Leafs did ;)) If that’s the way a lot of hockey has been called this year, I can see why some people aren’t too happy with the “New NHL.”

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Kids, you tried your best, and failed miserably… The lesson is, NEVER TRY.” - Homer

The whole city was under a thin sheen of ice this morning. My bus (the one I normally catch) was on time, but I was delayed because I couldn’t walk at anywhere near my normal pace, so I missed it. The bus I did catch was actually delayed fifteen minutes, but they just cut the route short and turned around because the next bus had already caught up. End result was that I was only about 5 minutes late for work this morning.

The buses all took an alternate route today, rather than turning right when leaving the bus mall, they turned left. The hill that goes over the mall’s walkway was too much for the buses. In fact, the hill getting out of the parking lot was too much, and as a result, the bus I took actually went out behind the old wal-mart on it’s way to Moss - a street it usually never sees.

And apparently we missed one of the outdoor water shutoffs, resulting in a bit of a fountain this morning (I haven’t seen the end result yet, Erin discovered it after I was already at work.

So, that’s a lot of ice around.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Young lady, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics” - Homer