Blessed by the Potato

There’s this girl in my lab who came in when I was out defending my thesis over the summer and kind of laid claim to my lab space, everything got rearranged, and it’s been a little annoying to have to adjust. But now, all is forgiven, for it turns out she’s the freaking heiress to the Vachon/Hostess empire! She came in this week with a crate of Jo Louis, 1/2 Moon, and assorted other snack cakes and the like. A box about a foot high and easily 2×2′ in area, filled to the brim with disgusting sugary treats (though some of them were granola-y treats, which isn’t quite the same). On second thought, maybe her dad’s just a store manager or something, it was hard to pay attention to the details with that much chocolate staring me in the eye.

It’s strange, having that much food in front of you. You can say no to them when they’re for sale in a grocery store. If someone brings in a dozen Jo Louis for a snack at a meeting, you can still turn them down even if they’re for free. But when there’s a crate of them, it’s like the sugar reaches critical mass and just overloads your decision making process and you have to take at least 3 or 4 or else where’s all of it going to go?

So for a while I’ve been using the caldendar extension for Mozilla, but for some bizzarre reason the folks over there split it off into a stand-alone product called Sunbird (you can still get a plugin for Thunderbird, the mail client that goes along with Firefox, but the latest version of the calendar just outright sucks in Thunderbird now. It’s got something to do with the way they tried to make it fit in a pane instead of open in its own window).

I got Sunbird, and as a calendar client it’s not bad at all (though I do miss the days when email, web browser, and calendar were all a single icon on my quicklaunch bar). One of the features I really liked about it was the ability to push your calendar file to a webserver so you could sync up your client on different computers (work & home, in my case). That saved me from emailing myself reminders to put up on both separate calendars a bunch. The service I used was over at www.icalx.com which has a few neat features in addition to using their server to sync your calendar: you can also publish a public version of your calendar so anyone with a compatable program can see what important events are going to occupy your time. Their servers will even convert your .ics file into a HTML-viewable calendar for when you (or your stalker) don’t have access to a proper calendar reader. All very keen.

So this has been going along nicely for about a month now, and then today somehow I fucked it up. I don’t know exactly what happened, but basically I added a new event to my calendar, pushed it to the server, and then refreshed my calendar to make sure it was there… and everything was gone. The only event left was the one I just added. Fortunately, I had a slightly older version that I had printed out (no electronic backups, which was stupid of me), so I entered in November’s entries again, and published it… and again, the only entry I was left with was the last one I had entered.

Given that I consider myself reasonably tech-savvy, and completely messed this up so easily, I don’t know if I can in good conscience recommend any of these tools.

Update: Upon searching my hard drive for .ics files, I found that Sunbird had made a backup a few days ago for me, so I reloaded that and got almost all my entries back (everything except what had been entered today). When you go to publish, don’t use the file->publish command, as that seems to be what’s screwing me up and only publishing the selected entry. Instead, go to the calendars tab and select the calendar, right-click, then use “publish entire calendar”. Hopefully they’ll add that to the menu under file, otherwise that could get pretty damned annoying (especially if you accidentally kill your calendar, as I did). One further annoyance I found is that it won’t always remember the address you want to publish to (though it does remember it to grab the calendar in the first place).

Update 2: I thought it was easier than when I ran into the trouble: I was still using an old version at home. At work (where I have to deal with my calendar the most), it does remember the address for me when uploading (current version as of Nov ’06).

I’ve heard a lot of people rave about “Curb Your Enthusiasm” over the last little while, and most recently had someone strongly recommend it, so I got my hands on season 1 & 2, and I seriously don’t see the appeal at all. In fact, I think I hate it.

It’s sort of like a scripted “reality” show about a TV writer (specifically, Seinfeld co-creator Larry David) while he runs around annoying people and being rude (or yelling at/about rude people). I see that there are a few funny moments in there, but they’re separated by long stretches of random yelling, screaming, bickering people repeating themselves, and awkward pauses. I just can’t get into it and the last few episodes I’ve seen (in season 2) didn’t even have any of those funny moments to make it worth it.

So about 2 years ago or so, I bought a case of caffeine-free Coke, though I have no idea why. I drank about half the case, and really noticed the taste difference. The rest ended up under the sink for a very long time. One or two exploded (or so I thought) quite some time ago. I cleaned up the mess, and for reasons that escape me now, put the intact cans back under the sink.

Now that we’re moving, we’re poking around under there again, and two more cans have leaked. The weird thing is, they didn’t explode, and they didn’t have any punctures in them. They just… leaked… a little. The cans were still mostly full, but some sticky, nasty caffeine-free Coke escaped its aluminum prison and made a mess of the cupboards (it dissolved the paint!). It really disturbs me how it was able to apparantly leech through the can over time like that. It’s all the more unsettling that most of the Coke still stayed in the can.

So from now on I’m going to stick to the old-fashioned stuff with proper caffeine.

I also played some more MechCommander 2 this weekend. It’s a fun (old) game, and there are some decent user-created maps and extensions out there. I think I’m done with it now, and uninstalled it. I haven’t had much time for gaming, and probably won’t with the move coming up, but I’m still trying to think of what I want to get next. I still haven’t played through Civ IV: Warlords much, but I think that’s largely because it’s the sort of game that needs a whole weekend devoted to it. I’m pretty sure I’ll hit that pretty hard around Christmas though, if anyone else wants to try some multiplayer. In the meantime, someone at work pointed me to Star Trek: Legacy which won’t be released for a few more weeks yet… One thing I know is that I won’t be spending my free time trying to partake in NaNoWriMo, no sir.

As I’m sure most of you know, we have a very simple and relatively effective form of democracy here in Canada. Paper ballots hand counted in front of eyewitnesses who can be representatives of political parties or volunteers from the public, using a first-past-the-post system with multiple ridings. Unfortunately this simplicity hasn’t always been good for selecting a government that’s made up of representatives of everyone’s point of view. I’ve had a link to Fair Vote Canada on the right there for quite some time, and now I’m going to add one to the Ontario Citizen’s Assembly on Electoral Reform.

I’m adding this because Ontario is now (along with BC) considering the possibility of reforming its electoral process, and this is a pretty exciting process that I’m going to try to follow. I’ll post updates to try to keep everyone up-to-date on what’s going on (basically, to provide the digest version along with my commentary), but for now I’ll keep it short because I’ve got a lot of background reading to do still.

Basically, the government has called on 103 random citizens (one for each of Ontario’s ridings) to form a committee to hear input from various groups and individuals, and try to decide on an alternate voting system to propose to the legislature in May. From there, we could have a referrendum next fall. One issue that’s surfaced already is that the government is proposing that the threshold to accept a change in voting systems will be set at 60% of the vote plus 60% of the ridings in favour. That’s actually quite a feat to beat, and I think I might be writing my MPP to ask her to reconsider voting on that.