Mel, her cousin Maby and I volunteered for this year's Weekend to End Breast Cancer walk in Toronto. My sister-in-law, Natalia, was doing the walk so we figured that a great way to support her would be to help her fundraise and to volunteer at the actual event. Mel and Maby volunteered in food services, and I volunteered to drive a sweep van. I think I got the easier job :) All in all it was a great weekend. I met lots of great people, and witnessed the incredible power of the human spirit. For those who don't know, participants in the event must raise at least $2,000 (CDN) and walk 60km over the course of a weekend. Young and old, men and women, able and disabled all were there walking to support this cause. In the end, over $14.7 million dollars were raised for breast cancer research! Good job everyone! I'm defintely participating again next year, whether it be as a walker or a volunteer.

Way to go Canada for winning the World Cup of Hockey!

Mel and I just got back from our trip to the east coast of Canada with her parents, and as usual I took a few hundred pictures :) I've put up the "best" ones here. We were only there for a week, but we managed to visit St. John's, Gros Morne Park, Cape Breton, Halifax, Lunenburg, the Hopewell Rocks and Fundy Park. Kind of whirlwind tour of the east :) Mel's parents are still there visiting Prince Edward Island. What amazed me the most about our trip was the people we met. Everybody we met was very friendly and helpful to us tourists. We were always greeted with a smile. Quite a contrast from Toronto where most people seem indifferent.

Joe's rant about his shiny new PVR makes me wonder how feasible it would be to get one of the many free alternatives out there working with a digital tuner... Personally I don't think digital TV is worth it right now, at least not with Rogers. All the channels I like are only available in analog, and all the spiffy new digital specialty channels seem like people trying desperatly hard to come up with content to fill all this newfound digital bandwidth. So if you're just talking analog, I think it's far more worth it to buy your own PC with a huge harddrive, a few TV tuners and a TV out card. That way you have control over the software, you can use whatever remote you like (using lirc), and are not limited to just watching TV. Wow, all this from a guy who doesn't even have cable right now...

My sister just pointed me to this site: www.coolrunning.com. So now I'm all pumped to do my first half marathon in October. They've got a 12-week training program to get into shape for a half marathon, and I've only got 8.5 weeks until October 17th. Good thing I've been playing ultimate and going to the gym over the summer, or else I'd be completely out of shape!

I always get excited when a new release of python is announced. There are always all sorts of goodies to play around with. One of things I've been following for a while is PEP 318 which provides an easier way to specify class methods / static methods / whatever other kind of method you want. Basically syntactic sugar for wrapping methods. I have to say that among the various proposals for exactly what the syntax should be, the "@decorator" syntax is my least favourite. The '@' character has a definite un-pythonic feel, rather it feels closer to perl or ruby. Having the decorator specified on the preceeding line also doesn't make sense to me...A decorator is part of the function declaration, so it should be on the same line. The pre- or post-argument [decorator,...] syntax really appeals to me, it puts the list of decorators on the same line as the function declaration, and it obviously something other than the list of arguments to the function. Other 2.4 goodies that appeal to me include some nifty keywords to the list sort method ("key" in particular) and generator expressions. Now if only the path module would make it into the standard python library... Just my humble python-user's opinion.

Tim's Blog - 6 AM is killing me But then think how much stuff you can do when you get home in the evening!

Wow, it's only taken me 3 years, but I finally have my Lexmark Z42 working in linux :) It would always hang on me after printing a few inches...I figured it was a buffering problem somewhere, but it turns out that all I had to do was change the Output Mode from "Color" to "Raw CYMK" Of course! How could I have missed that? grrr...I love linux, but it still has a ways to go before it can take over the desktop world. update (July 9) Well, maybe I spoke too soon...It's not as simple as just changing the output mode, sometimes this hangs as well...I can't quite figure out what's going on, sometimes an entire page will print, other times it will stop partway through (usually near the top, but the Gnome Print Test Page would reliably stop just before printing the colour circles at the bottom) So if anybody from the gimp-print or cups development team wants help debugging a Lexmark Z42, let me know :)

Today is the first day that I'm going to be volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. I'm a little bit anxious, but mostly excited - I'm expecting to have a great experience and learn a lot. Too bad I had to wake up so early...

I had to change my web hosting company since my old one claimed that I was using too many system resources and demanded that I upgrade to a dedicated server. I offered to cut back on all the mysql queries I was making, but to no avail. So here I am, self hosting of my ADSL line, so hopefully my provider doesn't get pissed off... I've discovered a great service over at hn.org, they make it possible to be pretty much self-hosting when on a machine where your ip is dynamic.