Where hockey becomes a holiday

Ok, it’s not an official holiday, but it damn near should be. And to me, this Tim Hortons commercial is what Hockey Day in Canada is all about.

Off we go to GM to watch the Canucks beat the Leafs on the big screen. Should be a good time. Hope your hockey day has been good for you.

Update: The game was pretty cool, and that’s more than just the 6-1 win over the Leafs(who, I might add, suck). It was close to a real game experience. They blew the horn when the Canucks scored, gave away some free stuff at random points, and a fair number of Leafs fans for us to heckle were actually brave enough to hang out for the game.

True highlight? The first intermission of the UBC game that followed the CBC broadcast was a mini-game of some pee wee hockey kids. Check out the video I posted onto YouTube here. We actually left after that. Regina was up by three goals at the end of the first. Good action, but we were a little beat and ready to head home.

I have pictures from the event on Flickr. Pending review for quality control, look for some audio that Rebecca and I recorded at GM Place on The Crazy Canucks in the next few days.

Good day for a coffee walk

It’s just something you do on a day like today. Below freezing temps, hardly any wind, all the sun you could ever ask for, and a hot coffee in your hand. It’s been a nice two weeks to have Rebecca off from work, even if we haven’t left the city. In due time, you can bet that we’ll plan on making our holidays in much warmer climates. Not the greatest quality, but the cellphone can only do so much.

Somebody leaked it onto the subnet

24
I’m not sure how it’s happened, but the first four episodes to season six of 24 have been released into Internet-land. Yes, that is the upcoming season that has yet to officially premiere. I leave that up to you to track down where and how, but it is some pretty good television, not to mention the really great quality you can find it in.

Trust me, I’ve been scanning the headlines over the past few days to hear of Hollywood crying foul over it, but there hasn’t been anything. Clever marketing technique or rogue pirates on the loose? You decide.

I almost called it

No big secret that I’m not the biggest football fan in the world, but I do enjoy catching games from time to time. The Chiefs got eliminated, so the season is really over for a part-time fan like me. It’s tough to not be a Seattle fan in Vancouver though. And to tell you the complete truth, I’m with Rebecca on this one. We both like the color scheme on their uniforms, and that’s the main reason we dig the Seahawks. Other than that, couldn’t tell you much about the team.

Their playoff game against Dallas was on while she was cooking the other night. Late in the 4th quarter, Dallas was down by one point and setting up for a field goal attempt. Easy three points for the lead with just over a minute left to play in the game. I pretty much said that the season was over for Seattle. A bummer for sure, but just before the snap, I looked over at Rebecca and said, “it would be outstanding if they blocked the kick.” I didn’t expect this.

They played the botched snap over and over again, showing the guy who screwed the pooch, Romo, sitting there with his head down. Yeah, great for Seattle, but I’m surprised that Romo wasn’t crying somewhere in a corner. We both felt so horrible for him. You could just feel his pain.

I know I’m late to the post here, but the replay of that gets me every time. True pain might come next week for Seattle. Chicago’s next up, and the game is in the windy city. Odds are, my brother will say that the Bears will whoop the Seahawks.

iChat Update 1.0

For the past few months, I’ve been having problems with iChat connecting up with my family back in the states. Bandwidth issues are one thing, but these errors would give me headaches because no solutions seemed to work. Quiting out of all other applications, deleting certain preferences, and running on a non-wireless connection would give me nothing. Every time that the connection would error out, I’d hit that button to send a report directly to Apple.

Yesterday, Apple released iChat Update 1.0. These are the only details.

This update renews the .Mac certificate required by iChat for encrypting text, audio, and video conferences.

This document will be updated as more information becomes available. [apple]

That’s it? I can’t be sure if this solves the problems I’ve been having but am really hoping so. I won’t even get into the fact that the speakers on my Powerbook just decided to stop working about six months ago. Combine these two issues and I’m a little peeved.

Is anyone at Apple keeping track of all the problem reports I’ve been sending in? I’m not the only guy doing this. My godson has sent in numerous on his end when he has had problems syncing up with me over iChat. It’s annoying, and I’m banking that this helps with what I’ve been so desperately trying to figure out.

Five things you (probably) don’t know

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve gotten around to doing this, but Jeremy tagged me some time ago to do this “five things you didn’t know about me” thing that’s been going around. I’ve actually thought about this numerous times and come up with nothing good to plop down. I’m going to give myself about fifteen minutes to come up with the best things I can off the top of my head. Here goes nothing.

  • I was a band and choir geek in high school. I was in all the top choir groups, but not show choir. *shudder* I started out as a tenor, dropped down to the lower octaves of second bass, and rose up to a baritone/tenor when I figured out that rock stars don’t sing with a bass voice. Of course, this is all classical vocal training, but that goes a really long way, no matter what kind of singing you do in the rest of your life. In band, I didn’t apply my talents as much, but I played baritone, euphonium, fuglehorn, and valve trombone. I’m sure you don’t find this too surprising.
  • I have a series of dream jobs that I would like to have careers in if time and money were no object, not to mention talent for said position. List off the top of my head, but not limited to: astronomer, architect, carpenter, radio talk show host, painter, graphic designer, musician, UNIX programmer, writer, cinematographer, film director, actor, professional hockey player, professional baseball player, play-by-play sports announcer(hockey, baseball, or college football), interior decorator, plumber, forest ranger, guitar technician, roadie for a rock band, and broadcast engineer. I’ve already done the last one, but that is too much fun to not do again.
  • I lived in Japan for three months in 2000. Camp Adventure is a program that sends college students to U.S. military facilities to run day camps for children. I was at NAF Atsugi[wiki], located in between Yokohama and Tokyo. Camp counselor to fifteen kids by day, played throughout the backyard of Japan at night and on the weekends. Probably the best summer vacation I ever had.
  • I play bass guitar, and drop-D tuning is my weak spot. My dreams of success were set back when I slammed my left index finger in a car door about five years ago. It’s still tender when I run the frets and probably will be for the rest of my life because how poorly the bone healed at the tip of my finger. My bass is still in the states, so that means that I’m going to suck more than I did before when I get my hands on it again. I’ve only been in two “bands” in my life but never lived an even bigger plot to be a lead singer.
  • I have Gilbert’s Syndrome[wiki]. This might be a result or continuation of being jaundice at birth(of which I almost didn’t survive). This a major reason as to why I exercise through running and strength conditioning. It seems to keep the bilirubin levels in my body regulated. Otherwise, I start to really feel like crap.

Now I have to tag five more people? I’m not too sure who has and hasn’t been tagged yet, so please don’t rag on me if you’ve already been marked. I call on The Reverend Don Deeley, Yvonne, GZ Expat, Alanah, and J.J. Even though those last two are hockey bloggers, I’m curious about those things we don’t know about some of the biggest Canucks fans out there.

This didn’t hurt nearly as bad as I thought it would. However, nothing there is ever final or complete in story. For the sake of time, I tried to keep it brief as possible. I can get long winded about things if I’m not careful.

The Crazy Canucks #13 – Holiday hangover hoe down

Living and learning with what Ubercaster can do, but I set the mic levels way too high for the recording. The program had some nice tricks to make it sound decent through editing. Check out episode #13 of The Crazy Canucks. This one was certainly a little nutty.

Dave is a healthy scratch for this episode, but there has been so much that has happened since the last episode that it was hard to keep tabs on how long this episode turned out. There were some issues during the recording, but the audio was salvageable. That’s not to say that it might sound strange, but we will keep this in mind for the next episode to take changes into consideration.

Record as of this episode: 19-18-1
Northwest Division: 1st
Western Conference: 3rd

Four games to talk about, three teams played since the last episode: Boston, Columbus, and Calgary. The first two games were painful for Canucks fans, but the home and home series against the Flames was nothing short of pure delight. J.J gives us the inside scoop of his involvement with the CBC story on the whole Vote for Rory campaign, and Alanah seems to be getting a tattoo after losing a bet on Luongo’s save stats in the first half of the season.

This is the last episode of 2006, so have a safe and happy new year! We’ll see you next year, and expect more to come from The Crazy Canucks.

The Crazy Canucks

The Crazy Canucks sneaking on to the CBC

I got a pretty interesting text message from J.J. last night while sitting at home with Rebecca. “Whoa cbc was just over my apt and taped a piece on the rory thing“. I got excited and asked if he said anything about The Crazy Canucks because I’m a marketing sucker like that.

The piece turned out pretty great, but at the 49 second mark of the 2:38 long clip, that’s the last you see of J.J. Still, it’s a pretty sweet shot of the Canucks Hockey Blog in the background on his screen. You can also see The Crazy Canucks logo just a tad. This aired last night on CBC: Canada Now at 6PM. Way to go, J.J.!

By the way, did you vote for Rory yet? I know I’ve done my fair share, and you should, too.

Using MAMP for local site development

Those who pay close attention to the various projects that I get myself involved with will notice that I like to play around with the design of the sites. Call it whatever you want, but it always seems like there is something better that I can add or change to the way a site looks. It’s all apart of learning. You try to do something the old or stupid way, only to discover there is a new way that all the cool kids are using that makes things so much more simple.

The worst part about changing a lot of things is doing them publicly. You just can’t go in with an idea, make the change, and go about your business. When you are restless as I am, and I know there are lots of people out there with similar mindsets, the idea you tryout might not look as good as you originally thought. Even worse, it mucks up the whole site and makes it not function at all. Not a good thing, so you might try something else or go back to the way it was in the first place.

MAMPMAMP has really helped with that. It’s allowed me to install and run numerous test sites of WordPress locally[wordpress]. I play around and change things on the fly. Install plugins and surf the site in a browser with full function. Everything that MAMP can do is already there on the Mac(Apache, MySQL, and PHP) these days, but this application makes it work with far less headache. Launch it, do your work, and you’re golden. When I’m settled with what I want, the site goes into the wild.

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with WordPress 2.1, and the changes to the next version are looking promising. Drupal can also be managed this way. That took me a little more thinking to get that sorted out, but I was working without an explicit, step-by-step tutorial for MAMP.

I’ve also tried to install WordPress MU, but stopped short of being successful. Actually, I hit some snags and simply gave up. Some quick searches for solutions came up short, but I know that it can work with MAMP. Will have to give it another shot in the near future.

Tricks of the trade, and this might be more obvious to some. I figured I’d share because this has made work on my projects easier, especially taking that FTP part out of the equation. There are various ways to do local installs for WordPress and Drupal development for the Mac and PC, but I can seriously vouch for this one.

Art 2.0

This CNN article is particularly interesting to me because my sister is someone who is trying really hard to promote and sell her art in addition to her day job and being a single mom of two kids.

LONDON, England (Reuters) — Collector Charles Saatchi has launched a Web site for art students and a handful have already sold works online as the Internet begins to change the way the art world works.

With prices for contemporary art soaring, collectors say they have less time to travel to galleries and shows to see new works for themselves, while aspiring painters and sculptors find it hard to get noticed amid the pressure to find the next hot young stars.

For many, the Internet is the answer, offering low-cost access for thousands of painters, sculptors and buyers and, at the same time, providing a Myspace-style social networking site for artists the world over.[cnn]

Player by Elizabeth Bollwitt
Elizabeth Bollwitt: “Player”

My sister is a ways out from attaining extreme success with her endeavors on the web, but presence is important for sure. Beth took a hiatus from the world of art for a short time. In the last few years, my sister has gone to a variety of shows in the midwest. Painting is her true knack, but she can also do graphic design and wood carving. I can almost swear that some of her pottery projects from college are still floating around, but it has been a long while since I’ve see her do much in that realm.

Pointillism[wiki] is the style Beth specializes in. That might seem to be a painful process to some, but she has a real talent for it. Her inspiration comes from a variety of places. The collection has probably doubled, maybe tripled, in the last few years, and a print of her “Sunset Flower” sits on the wall in the living room of our apartment. The recent expansion of her original works has seen some incredible progression in the use of color and technique. “Player” has to be one of my favorites. At least when I first saw it, it really impressed me. I love the bold use of colors, and she has gone on to expand that concept in other paintings she has done since then.

Sunset Flower by Elizabeth Bollwitt
Elizabeth Bollwitt: “Sunset Flower”

Being an artist that offers themselves on the web is not as easy as it might seem, and I think my sister can speak to that quite clearly. Presence is the simple part. Gaining attention is the next big step, but actually achieving success is the golden ticket. Seeing the digital image won’t get people interested in buying as much as seeing the original up close will.

It’s comparable to when I saw Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”[wiki] for the first time. The reproduction that you’ve seen a thousand times before is like an over played song. It gets old, stale, and you don’t think twice the next time you hear it. However, with art, when you see the original painting, you get it. I had to be pulled away from that Van Gogh it because I couldn’t quit staring at it.

If you enjoy the samples of that you see in this post, then please visit my sister’s website, elizabethbollwitt.com.