Dave Kellam

Some things I’ve been playing around with lately:

Adium – has replaced Proteus as my messaging client. I used Proteus for two years but development has slowed and Justin has moved on to work with Apple and iChat. Check out some of the Adium Xtras too (I’m using the Big Icons (Shrunk) message theme).

Smultron – a text editor that Riz pointed out. I haven’t used it that much, but it’s handy to have everything that you’re working on grouped together. It’s a pretty solid replacement for my everyday use of SubEthaEdit.

Texshop – I haven’t used it much, but I’m planning on learning the basics of TeX in the near future.

Growl – Is a universal notifier. Meaning that you can have consistent notifications from Applications like Mail and Adium.

Carbon Copy Cloner – want to make easy and complete backups? This’ll help you out.

FoxyTunes – not strictly a mac app, but pretty cool none-the-less. It’s a music controller that resides in the status bar of FireFox. Handy, considering the browser is one of my most used/open programs.

QuickSilver – I’ve been using this one for awhile, but I’ve been making more frequent use of their plugins directory, they have tons of them.

Well, the election seems to be over for now and Bushy seems to have won. This is a major concern for some people, especially those in the northern states that seemed to vote for the other guy. So, what do we do about the problem of all these disenfranchised people? Why look at the pretty coloured map, all of the blue states have a direct path into the frigid nation to the north. Except Hawaii of course, but it’s a backwater and doesn’t have any roads.

The obvious solution for the blue guys is to join Canada. It’s not like Canada controlling the North-Eastern US is a new idea, we captured and burned the White House during the War of 1812. Those western states would be a nice addition though — through them Canada would control most of the west coast (minus Alaska) and the United But Somewhat Fewer Number of States of America (UBSFNSA) would have to have to go through us to get to the Pacific.

It’s not going to happen, but adding New York and California to Canada would effectively triple the size of the nation. After the states have joined us, the newly formed Canadatu could unilaterally declare war on the UBSFNSA and bring democracy to the embattled nation.

I really haven’t had much to say over the last month or two. The news seems to be all about the American election and I’ll I can do is bash Bush. It’s too easy. One of them will get elected eventually, things won’t change much. Even if Kerry wins, he’s not going to coming running out the front door to tell you all of these dark secrets he discovered.

I managed to go through a few site layouts through October, I’ll hold onto this one for a little while. I need to be less lazy about getting older work up and creating new stuff.

I think Cogeco is acting up again. If it isn’t squirrels pulling cables out of the wall, it’s the monkeys that work there messing around with things.

At the moment though, I’m not really sure if it’s just them or it’s Akamai. I’ve been noticing that a lot of my google searches have been timing out, but I haven’t been doing much browsing so I didn’t notice many other things down. Today, a whole slew of sites are taking forever to load, including the Weather Network and Apple.

At first I thought it might be Google AdSense which a lot of them seem to use, but upon further research I figure it’s either Cogeco screwing up Akamai or Akamai themselves screwing something up. Akamai is the host for Google, Lycos, Apple and other major internet sites. They also used to host Yahoo and Microsoft. A lot of non-Akamai sites are screwing up because of AdSense.

Akamai has had a few cockups already this year though (May 26, June 15), so I wouldn’t put it past them. But Cogeco has taken 5 days to send a guy over to climb up a ladder, so I wouldn’t put it past them to screw up either.

Just a few things, first off, I changed the look of the things. I was sick of the old green and blue, this was a quick style sheet change to appease me. I have something else waiting in the pipes, but the CSS isn’t playing nicely, and I haven’t had time to sit down and fix it.

I started the practicum portion of teacher’s college this week, so I’m up by 6 every morning to head for Brockville. It’s been going well so far, it’ s draining mentally and physically, not unlike a lot of other jobs.

Lastly, it’s my birthday today. Doesn’t really feel like it though, so in my head I’m celebrating on Friday.

I watched some of the presidential debate tonight, after discovering the live feed on bbc. Nothing spectacular, although Kerry seemed strong and composed, Bush seemed a little on the bewildered side.

My favourite Bush moment was him flubbing an accusation against Kerry, “He needs to speak clearly, he’s sending mexed-missa… mixed-messages, he’s sending mixed messages…”. It probably won’t show up on a transcript. This picture is gold too, the first ladies look exactly the same.

Transcript: part 1 / part 2

A seven-year old girl is revered as a living goddess amongst hindus and buddhists. She only comes out a few times a year to celebrate festive occasions. It’s not easy to become Kumari:

Each Kumari is chosen aged only three or four, always from the same Buddhist clan, and has to have 32 attributes, including thighs like those of a deer and a neck like a conch shell.

My favourite quote would have to be this one:

Under quite new arrangements, living goddesses nowadays are all entitled to a formal education with a tutor of their choice.

I’m glad living goddesses are entitled to a formal education.

I’m convinced that the major media outlets have all declared Bush way ahead in the polls to encourage voting. Democrats are more likely to come out and if they fear losing. Either that or they want to create a bunch of work and news for themselves by analyzing where polls went wrong and creating snazzy special report graphics. Vote for Pedro.

I was checking out the new RSS/Atom/Whatever capabilities of the Firefox 1.0PR build and realizing that I haven’t been posting to the main log all that often. I seem to do a lot better with the quicklinks, but I’d been neglecting their feeds. So, I have created both atom and rss versions of the quicklinks. In other exciting website news, I registered davekellam.com but it’s just mirroring eightface, nothing special.

I’m starting to use Firefox a lot more instead of Safari, it seems to be slicker these days. I’m using the Noia 2.0 (eXtreme) theme and a bunch of plugins. I’ve been noticing a few of their new features, like an RSS link in the corner and the ability to bookmark feeds. The find feature has been revamped too, it’s now a search bar at the bottom instead of a popup window and it does live searches (you don’t have to hit enter).

The internet returned to our humble apartment during the afternoon today. Sure enough, the guy just climbed up a ladder and screwed the cable back in. I love our detached consumer culture that lets you wait five days for a central dispatcher to send a guy over to walk up a ladder when you’re less than a kilometer from the local facility.

Anyway, internet is back and I can download more things. Things! It was kind of frustrating having no access, when my schooling seems to center around internet based research.