I live in Lethbridge with my spouse and 5 of our 6 children. I’m a writer, focusing on social issues and the occasional poem. My politics are radically left. I recently finished writing a book debunking several capitalism myths. My newest book writing project is on the labour history of Lethbridge.
I’m also dichotomally Mormon. And I’m a functional vegetarian: I have a blog post about that somewhere around here. My pronouns are he/him.
Mary dropped off my dry cleaning today.
They charge 4.50$ for each tie and six-something for suit coats. I’m having two ties and a coat cleaned and it cost more to clean two ties than it did to clean an entire suit coat.
Seems a bit backwards to me.
Google is really on a roll. First it was their Google Maps that took the Internet by storm. Now they’ve released a weather service. All you need to do is type in “weather” followed by a city. For example:
For the movie features, you can search both for a movie if you only know what the movie is about but forget its name, or you can search for current theatres and show times.
Just in time for the Oscars, we’ve created a new “movie:” operator that enables you to find movie-related information faster and more easily, whether you’re looking for titles or actors, director or genre, famous lines or obscure plot details. Can’t remember the name of that film where Tom Hanks made friends with a volleyball? Search for [movie: Tom Hanks talking to a volleyball] and Google will tell you: it was Cast Away. Want rental recommendations? Try searching for [movie: awesome car chase] or [movie: good chick flick].
Looking for a multiplex near you? Use “movie:” followed by a U.S. zip code or city/state to find theaters and showtimes in your area (a search for [movie: Mountain View, CA], for example, will show you what’s playing near the Googleplex). You can also just search on “movies,” “showtimes” or the title of a current film, and your top result will be movie-related info for your area (if you haven’t already saved your location using Google Local, just fill in your U.S. zip code or city/state and click the “Get Showtimes” button). And for those on the go, movie showtimes are also available on Google SMS (send a text message to 46645 — aka. GOOGL on most phones — to look up showtimes for nearby theaters).
Very cool. I can’t wait until they include Canada.
Can you imagine? You live in Lethbridge and you want to take a drive to Regina (who wouldn’t want to). You could use Google to get driving directions, find local attractions, find out current movies and even check the weather. What’s next? Sorting hotel room availability and pricing?
Someone here at the Faculty of Management just bought an IBM ThinkPad T42. It’s hard to find anything cool about laptops nowadays, but this one manages to implement something.
Fingerprint security.
It has software that allows you to scan in the print of one of your fingers and then assign the scan to a user account. Then when you boot up and come to the login screen, you just scan your finger, and if it matches, it lets you in. No username to type, no password to remember.
Even better, you can assign different fingers to different accounts. You could assign your pinkie as the admin account and the index finger as the general user account. In a experiment of antiestablishmentarianism, you could even assign your middle finger to your Microsoft hackor account.
How cool is that?
Netscape has released a public beta version of Navigator 8.0.
It’s built on the Gecko engine, but users apparently have the option to switch to Trident (IE’s rendering engine).
I haven’t tested the features since I will be using it for testing purposes only, but this has to be the ugliest browser I have seen since the 1990s.
Judge for yourself though.
It looks like Google has extended its map database to include locations north of the 50th parallel. Now people can get travelling information for Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg and the like.
Very cool.
There are a few bugs still. For example, Happy Valley-Goose Bay in Labrador does not have street names and you cannot zoom into the maximum amount. Other than things like that, it rocks. Can’t wait until it’s out of beta.
Now if they could just allow me to scroll with my scrollwheel.
Todd Dominey pointed out the oddity of E! Online‘s pseudo-logo for the Michael Jackson trial.
Is it just me or do your eyes fixate on the empty center of this Michael Jackson Trial graphic that E! has been plugging non-stop? Every time it comes on TV, my eyes nearly go cross-eyed. That space between the “L” and “J” is not just wide, but dead center in the layout, and I can barely look at it without feeling like I’m about to fall down a hole.
Personally, I think the dead-space looks like an upside down whiskey flask.
Mozilla Foundation has released version 1.0.1 of its most popular browser, Firefox. The new version consists of security updates.
“Regular security updates are essential for maintaining a safe browsing experience for our users,” said Chris Hofmann, director of engineering for the Mozilla Foundation.
Download here.
Jason bemoans the ignorance of many persons in misspelling his name. While I certainly cannot say I have experienced the same issues given that I have a single last name, I have experienced many issues with my name.
My full name is Kim Jason Joseph Benoit Siever.
By far the most common misspelling of my name is people calling me Tim, Jim, Cam or Ken when speaking with me over the phone.
Another complaint I have is when correspondence I get has only my second name as my middle initial. The other two are rarely included. If you’re not going to include the other two initials, don’t include any. I’d rather be known as Kim Siever than Kim J. Siever. In fact, when I graduated from college, they had me down as Kim Jason Siever. When I arrived at the rostrum to walk across and shake the college president’s had, I requested that the announcer repeat my first and last names only.
I abhor filling out application forms that have a very tiny space for a single middle initial. I usually just leave it blank unless I can fill it all in.
Speaking of my last time. I once worked for a company in Vancouver that needed to set up a username and password for the call taking software. They already had a Kim working there, so my boss put me in the system as Jason. It wasn’t long before everyone—call takers, dispathcers, couriers, everyone—was calling me Jason. I got tired of it, and asked my boss to change it. I told him that if I was going to be called by something other than my first name, I would rather be known as Bubba.
My third most common issue is being referred to as Ms. Kim Siever. It has become so bad, that I have changed my email signature to read Mr. Kim Siever and to have my email headers to read Mr. Kim Siever. Now I come off as pretentious. So be labeled as pretentious or be referred to as female. I have to pick.
What’s very funny is when someone phones who has both me and my wife as account holders—like the bank, for example. If my wife is talking to them, occasionally she is asked, “Is this Kim”. If they think my wife is Kim, who do they think Mary is? Actually, I get customer service and account reps always confirming “Is this Kim” when I phone them, as if they are thinking “he doesn’t sound like a girl”.
For what it’s worth, “Kim” is actually a boy’s name. Always has been. It became attached to girls when Kimberly became popular. When Kimberly was shortened, it overshadowed the less used boy’s version.
Finally, I am frequently dealing with my last name being misspelled. It has been spelled in many different ways, including the following: seaver, seiver, sievre, sevier, fiever, liever, sieber and severe. My favourite was “sykes”. Not sure where that came from.
I feel sorry for my daughter, Sinéad Aurora Fève Siever. She has many of the issues I do but with the accents. At six years old, she is already correcting people: “With a D”, “Sheh-nay-DUH”, “There’s an accent on the E”.
I enjoyed the flurry of activity that Cameron Moll inspired by asking everyone to post cropped screenshots of their current projects (version 1 and version 2). I received a lot of inspiration from what I saw.
Veerle has asked for everyone to post photos of where they work. Some of the workspaces are very cool and I covet them. I am grateful for my workspace, but I sure could use a better desk and a chair with arms. 🙂
Anyhow, I was inspired while testing out our digital camera at work to invite others to post photos of themselves. Part of me wants to put faces to all of the faceless designers out there whose work I have been admiring and blogs I have been reading. Another part of me wants to see what people look like when they do not have time to freshen up.
To start things off and hopefully discourage others from prepping themselves before posting, here’s my photo.
I haven’t cut my hair since I shaved it in the summer. My winter beard has been growing since the last week in September. My wife keeps threatening me with a haircut this week or next.
For posting your photos, please be sure the photo is 300 pixels wide and 225 pixels high. Please also host the photo on your own webspace. You can use regular XHTML to post your photo.
Oh, and if anyone is shocked at my ad-lib photo, you can find a prepped me over here.
(Thanks to Jonathan Hollin for the hat tip.)
I had a project I was working on that required me to import events from a database and import them into a Flash movie. After searching for a long time for a method that was easy and quick, I discovered Getting Data Into Flash by Dennis Baldwin.
Dennis’ solution was exactly what I needed. Well, actually, not quite what I needed. His solution worked for getting the data from the database and importing it to Flash. That was the biggest hurdle. What it did not do was allow for importing separate records. So I modified it.
The first thing I did was to modify his ColdFusion variable line into a sort of loop (make sure everything between the cfoutput and cfset tags are all on line).
<cfset x = 1>
<cfoutput query="qDates" maxrows="5">
&eventDate#x#=#DateFormat(qDates.EventDate,'dd mmm')#
&eventTitle#x#=#qDates.Subject#
&eventTime#x#=#TimeFormat(qDates.Time,'HH:mm')#
<cfset x = x+1></cfoutput>
The qDates query is the one that queries the database in order to pull the events I want. The maxrows attribute is how many events to return. If I only wanted three, I would change the “5†to “3â€.
What the above code does is creates a very long variable line that includes the date, title and time of five events.
Now, we switch gears into ActionScript.
I took the ActionScript on the container movie clip in Dennis’ example and modified it to run another loop.
onClipEvent(data) {
total = "";
for(i=1; i<6; i++) {
eventDate = eval("eventDate" + i);
eventTitle= eval("eventTitle" + i);
eventTime = eval("eventTime" + i);
total += eventDate + " - " + eventTitle + ", " + eventTime;
}
}
You will also noticed that I assign the variables to the container clip instead of the root. In addition, I needed to evaluate the three variables because of the addition of the use of the loop’s index variable. If I had left it as eventDate = "eventDate" + i; for example, it would not have recognised "eventDate" + i as a variable.
Finally, I set the variable on my text field to be _root.mContainer.total so that it will import the values from the container’s (in my case, I renamed container to mContainer) variables.
There you go, a simple way to import multiple records from a database into Flash.
