I’ll wager that Matt Harding’s “Dancing” videos (also available in low-bandwidth and on Vimeo) have done as much to foster international goodwill as this year’s overhyped, overcommercialized Olympic Games.

I’ve known about Where The Hell Is Matt? for a while now, watched the video(s) many times, and yet it never fails to bring a tear or two to my eyes. I think the video speaks for itself far better than any hyperbole that I might try to add, so I’ll only say that if one geek doing his funny little dance is enough to bring a bit of the world a bit closer together, then maybe there’s still hope for us all.

I ordered a Milwaukee chop saw from Amazon.com last week for some fabrication I need to do at the shop. (Following my delight with the new drill press, I’ve resolved to buy some proper shop tools rather than improvising with cheaper electric hand tools.) I needed the tool for this weekend and was happy to see them offering $3.95 1-day shipping by FedEx—an amazing price for shipping a large 50-pound box.

The chop saw arrived on time as promised, but I didn’t get around to taking it out of the box until yesterday, whereupon I found “a little” damage had occurred in shipping: the main arm of the shop saw had completely sheared though. Most impressive since the box it came in showed relatively little sign of damage.

Luckily Amazon’s return/exchange process is about as easy and painless as they get, but this setback does further delay my reassembling my Spec Miata’s engine for the next race…

Replaced the “header” images at the top of the pages with some photos I took in and around the Monterey Bay Aquarium today. The images change randomly so don’t be alarmed if you get a different image each time. Once I get my MacBook back from the Apple repair people, I’ll have access to all the other photos in my library and hopefully find a few that will work as header images.

The short bit of testing I did was enough to convince me that switching vtluu.net to WordPress would be a good thing. So now I have. Bear with me while I get everything fleshed out a built up…

One of the running jokes I share with some of my fellow Canadians at work is that we like to say we’re from “Canadia”. After all, if Americans are from America, then from Canada come Canadans, n’est-ce pas? Therefore we must be from Canadia.

I also noticed “we” beat the Fins to advance to the semi-finals in men’s hockey at the Olympics… Go Canadia go!

… some of them are utter morons.

That’s all I have to say about that.

Wrote my first piece of PHP code today to implement the Archives section. PHP is cool—writing CGI scripts in C/C++ (or Perl, if I had known it) was always a big security challenge.

There was a time when I was on the leading-bleeding edge when it came to Web development… Okay, so maybe that time was around 1995. After I did the previous redesign of my home page (in 1997) I kinda let things slide with regards to “Web technology”. I did a bunch of stuff for mathNEWS when I started the site and during the five or so years I was webmaster, but the thing about (mostly) running a bi-weekly ‘zine website (and going to school, etc.) was that it didn’t leave much time for actually improving the site’s technology. In fact, it looks to be pretty much the same way I left it two years ago (plus new content).

The problem with having a heap of eletronic components is you end up with an equally big heap of remote controls. Remote controls that inevitably get lost, albeit temporarily—but always at the most inconvenient moment.

Using a universal remote doesn’t really help either. Sure, it’s convenient, but it never entirely subsumes other remotes… and so it just adds to the heap o’ remotes.

I wish I could just control all my electronics by voice, or thought. Or maybe I should just chain all my remotes to my coffee table… which I still haven’t gotten around to getting.

A UCSD study found that people who sleep less live longer (I know that’s a gross oversimplification). One thing for sure is that you gain more time just by virtue of not spending it sleeping.

Sleep is overrated. Now if only I could keep my eyes open…

“That’s all I have to say about that.”