Dave Kellam

I did manage to get the new layout up before I disappeared for the weekend, i don’ t think there were any major glitches. It wasn’t a bad weekend to end up in Quebec, no possibility of rolling blackouts with them on a different power grid.

We made it to the Radiohead concert on time, despite the fates conspiring against us. Although, we missed Malkmus opening up. We’ll say that I did all together too much drinking that night, past sunrise, and had a rough time saturday afternoon. Alanah crashed, she’d done a lot of driving. Dave and I wandered around downtown for awhile and stayed up until the sun arrived.

Partied at Dan’s house in Montreal, that’s about it for the weekend. We played a drinking game involving typing in random word combinations that could be taken as sexual and seeing if they came up as porn sites. Yeah, we’re all dorks. I wrote down a bunch of the good websites that we came across:

www.cowlove.com
www.nasalsex.com
www.poop.org/
www.pooooo.com/
longest domain name
www.jesussex.com & www.smallballs.com
www.horseballs.com/
www.monkeyballs.com
www.elephantballs.com/
www.cloaca.com

None of those link to anything bad, but most of them made me laugh. Monkeyballs.com is probably the best one that we came across, so is horseballs.com (find the t-shirts).

It’s kind of funny, Americans are blaming Canadians (article):

Mr. Pataki said the current theory that state officials were pursuing is that there was a surge of power somewhere in Western Ontario that triggered the domino-like cascade of power plants’ shutting down.

And the Canadians are blaming the Americans (article):

The Prime Minister’s Office first said lightning had struck a power plant in the Niagara Region on the U.S. side of the border, but subsequently said there had been a fire at a Con Edison power plant in Niagara Falls, N.Y.

I’ve heard that it was an explosion in Manhattan, lightning strikes in Niagara, nuclear plants in Pennsylvania, somewhere in southern Ontario. Who knows.

Update: Turns out it was the Americans.

Well, that was fun. The power came back on in the wee hours of the morning. I was able to set my alarm clock, but forgot to set the right station/volume, so I ended up being late for work. I’m supposed to be seeing radiohead in montreal tonight. I know that the show is still on, but I’m not really sure how I’m going to get there.

The camp is a gong show, how are you supposed to run a computer camp when the network is down and they don’t want anyone non-essential on campus? Play games outside? Yeah, the computer geeks like that idea.

The power went off yesterday between the time I left work and got home. I ended up just chilling and doing some drinking down at the Scherzo. We got there early, had a few beers and left to go barbecue some meat that would have gone bad. There was wine and then back to the pub. Dave and I also wandered around giving out popsicles, they were all starting to melt. It was pretty chill; little noise and an incredibly beautiful night sky. I also found out something about a previous power outage (article):

On Aug. 11, 1996 — almost exactly seven years ago — a squirrel found its way into a grid on the U.S. West Coast and knocked out power in nine states and parts of Mexico, demonstrating the weaknesses in the system.

Yup, it was all downed by a squirrel. I can see it happening, those evil bastards have been acting kind of odd lately. Running around and getting into the garbage. I blame it all on them.

There’s a new design in the pipes; I got in a design groove last night and lost track of time, resulting in a late night and a day with not as much sleep as I was planning on. I’m used to it though.

This new layout should be up in the near future, I want to take some time to implement the template with some of the other sections, so I get a nice uniform feel to the site. I should probably redo all the sidebar posts, the format that they’re in is kind of dumb.

Go windows! With the whole not using windows, i tend not to keep abreast of bug announcements from Microsoft, they tend to find some major exploit every other day. Of course, my mom phones up last night and tells me that the computer is doing funky shit, like RPC and rebooting, I figured explorer was pretty messed on that computer (which it is) and told her to stop using it and outlook express, guess I was wrong. I got to the camp this morning and all the kids had the reboot message popping up on their screens, I didn’t install all of the patches when i created the disk image last week. Oh well, we got it fixed it was a just a bit of pain-in-the-ass with everyone trying to connect to Windows Update server to download the patches. Doing the sysadmin thing this week makes me feel a lot of sympathy for those poor it-support bastards that have probably had to deal with this all day.

The virus doesnt appear all that malicious, just annoying. If you’re using windows I recommend grabbing the patch and the cleaner. That should fix everything up nicely.

Didn’t really do all that much this weekend, just slept a lot and tried to recover from the weeks of dealing with children. It’s back to computer camp with the older kids this week.

I had my Saturday of police movies with S.W.A.T. followed by Narc. SWAT? Well, it’s not really that bad — it’s a popcorn action flick. The script was horribly written with a standard plot and the stilted dialog. It was the actors that made they movie, they managed to turn in some good performances with what they were given. It was entertaining, that’s what it was supposed to be; i just wanted to avoid the thinking and sit in a nice air-conditioned theatre. Narc was pretty good, another actor driven flick, kind of like Training Day. Oh, and Ray Liotta referring to Busta Rhymes’ character as Coolio was kind of funny.

I just did a clean windows install to setup the computers for camp next week, here’s what windows update looks like.
That’s a lot of updates.

And here’s a post office experiment, in which some people tried to see what would go through the postal service and what items wouldn’t make it.