Today's trivial tech tip: Getting RSS feeds from diaryland.com blogs

Posted on Fri 04 August 2006 in misc

diaryland.com is a hosting service for people interested in blogging without worrying too much about the technical side of things. It still exists because it predated blogger / blogspot's free services and managed to attract a community consisting of some really great writers, like my friend cloudy.

The problem is …


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Northern Ontario scenery

Posted on Thu 03 August 2006 in misc • Tagged with Personal

Just wanted to post a couple of pics we took during the past few weeks.

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Walkway over the French River

About a half an hour south of Sudbury on highway 69 is the French River information centre. The centre is brand new and boasts an impressive display on the origins …


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Admirers of the little one

Posted on Thu 03 August 2006 in Family • Tagged with Amber

Dear Amber:

Little girl, you have a lot of people interested in seeing you; there is no doubt that you are well-loved by friends and family.

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Great-grandpa, a.k.a. Dennis

Your great grandpa travelled all the way from St. Catharines to see just how poorly you're being treated here …


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The rough beast slouches towards Lively

Posted on Fri 07 July 2006 in misc • Tagged with Personal

On Canada Day, Lynn mentioned the Firecracker 5K race around 5:15 PM as we were driving home from visiting Charlotte's family. Crazy, spontaneous me hemmed and hawed about it for another 45 minutes while ingesting a hot caramel sundae and a spoonful of my freshly made rhubarb crumble, then …


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Passing, brighter than ever before

Posted on Fri 07 July 2006 in misc • Tagged with Personal

I found out yesterday that one of my colleagues, Alain Letourneau, passed away overnight. He was just 41. He died of a brain hemorrhage after he fell and banged his head while shopping at a local mall.

The crazy thing is that nobody, including Alain himself, really expected him to …


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My answer to "I would recommend Vendor X to other libraries."

Posted on Tue 20 June 2006 in Libraries • Tagged with Libraries

I was recently given the opportunity to answer a customer satisfaction survey about the vendor of our integrated library system (ILS). It was actually my fourth opportunity, but I had passed up the chance in the past because the survey invitation stated:

You must use Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x …

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Walking: away from online poker, towards the fambly

Posted on Sun 18 June 2006 in Gaming • Tagged with Poker

I'm sure it has nothing to do with Amber, but my brain has faded into pure fuzziness the past couple of weeks. I'm missing appointments (both work and personal) and frequently wander from one room to the other wondering why I left the other room in the first place. Hell …


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High-traffic zone

Posted on Thu 15 June 2006 in misc • Tagged with Amber

Well, after living in Sudbury for five months we had had no visitors... then Amber came along, and--surprise surprise--visitors galore! It's been great seeing so many of our friends and family again, even though my hosting abilities have been put sorely to the test (purely as a result of my …


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Tour de Sudbury

Posted on Thu 15 June 2006 in misc • Tagged with Personal

On the cold, grey, windy morning of Saturday, June 10th, Lynn kicked my butt out of bed for the 26 km Tour de Sudbury. Over the past years I've built up a tradition of long-ish June bike rides, from the Ride for Heart in Toronto with Mike, David, et al …


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In-depth _and_ official DB2 and PHP documentation

Posted on Tue 13 June 2006 in Databases • Tagged with DB2, PHP

I should have mentioned this before, but now that I noticed Chris Jones' post on the Underground PHP and Oracle Manual, I felt obliged to point out that one of the final fruits of my labours at IBM is now visible in the DB2 "Viper" Information Center -- a set of …


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