I saw this pic on cracked.com in an interesting yet vulgarity filled look at some of the current trends in gaming.

It’s kind of sadly really that all the video game companies want to make these days are first person shooters.

Very nice time lapse video of the night sky atop Spain’s highest mountain:

The Mountain from TSO Photography on Vimeo.

So Hannah, our adorably cute cat, constantly licks any exposed skin while we sleep. Over the past few days she’s been exceptionally annoying and it’s having an effect on our reactions. For example, this morning Hannah was licking my foot and the following conversation transpired:

Kari: We should really get an atomizer.

Me: You want break Kitty down into atoms?

Parts of PlayStation Network (PSN for short) are now back up and running as of Sunday. It seems like the plan is to restore things fully by the end of the month. I should probably point out that this only applies to the North American PSN. My understanding is that the European PSN and Japanese PSN have not been brought online at all yet because government regulators want to know exactly what Sony has done to fortify the network before allowing Sony to bring the network back online.

The PSN downtime has been an annoyance for myself personally in two ways. The first, relatively minor way, was that my copy of Portal 2 for PS3 arrived in the mail the day PSN went down. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal but I decided to get the PS3 version of Portal 2 because it came with a free copy of the Steam version for PC. I thought I would be smart a get two version for the price of one. Unfortunately, activating the Steam version required signing in to PSN .

The second, slightly more annoying, way that the PSN intrusion effected me was that I’m pretty sure someone got my credit card details from Sony and billed my credit card a whopping $950. I’m still waiting for a replacement credit card to come and during the time I’ve been without a credit card I missed out on getting some premium tickets to a new musical called Next to Normal that sounds really interesting and I missed getting pre-sale tickets to see the Foo Fighters. Not having a credit card sucks.

Hopefully Sony gets their act together and keeps this from ever happening again.

I was blown away by this video the other day of a transforming apartment that’s a crazy efficient use of space and an example of brilliant engineering.

You’re awesome!

I read a funny thread on Slashdot today that’s pretty typical of something that people commonly ask:

J. L. Tympanum writes
“After many years as a star programmer, I have taken a position which involves maintaining and rebuilding the in-house network of a small company. There are maybe 100 machines, a mix of blade servers running Linux and desktop PCs running Windows of all flavors. Basically, I have to learn networking from scratch. I have been given an ‘unlimited’ budget to buy routers, switches, etc., to set up my own little test network as part of the learning process. So the question is: what’s the right strategy here? What routers or switches or other equipment should I acquire? What books should I read? Should I take classes from Cisco, Global Knowledge, my local community college, or somewhere else?”

The funniest response was

canadiangoose responds
“Dear Slashdot,
I’d like to become an expert in a field in which I have no experience.

It takes many years for most of the folks working in this field to gain the knowledge required to be effective, but I am very, very smart. So much smarter than most people, infact, that it shouldn’t take me more than a month or two to get a firm gasp on things.

There’s just one small problem that is preventing me from teaching myself everything that I need to know to be able to do my job well. See, I’m not smart enough to know how to even begin to teach myself anything about this field. I’m sure if someone could just point me in the right direction, I’m quite sure that I’ll be able to make sense of things.

Also, which vendors provide “easy” buttons on their gear?

Please advise.

MrGenius

I can see where gentleman that made the original post was coming from. It’s a huge time saver if someone can point you in the right direction when it comes to learning something new. That said, asking for help while boasting about how smart and awesome you are isn’t the smartest way to go about asking for that help.

So my partner, the lovely Ms. Kari Allen (who’s also the best damn lawyer in all of Toronto), has been out of town the last few days and I’ve come to the conclusion that she should never be allowed to leave again . I’ve been incredibly lonely the last few days and miss her terribly .

An earthquake of magnitude 8.9 on the Richter scale occurred off the east coast of Japan on March 11th, 2011. The earthquake triggered tsunamis and caused severe damage to buildings. Japan has a little bit more money than Haiti so the devastation isn’t nearly as bad as what was seen there but it’s very hard to prepare for an earthquake of such magnitude.

Being a fairly advanced nation also means that Japan has it’s fair share of nuclear power plants. Unfortunately some of these power plants have been severely damaged resulting in explosions (as seen in the video below) and abnormally high levels of radiation in the air.

The good news is that the world is banding together to help. Canadians can make a donation at the Canadian Red Cross website.

If you don’t already use Dropbox (that link is my own personal referral, please use it to sign up so we both get more free space ) you really should.

It’s two main uses for me are as an online backup of my most important files and as a syncing tool between my work and home computer. If I was cool enough to have a laptop and iPad like my partner in crime and the best damn lawyer in all of Toronto, the lovely Ms. Kari Allen I’d use it for easy access to my documents on those devices like she does.

So don’t just sit there, get Dropbox!