29…lookin' fine

July 13, 2005 under Life

Pat turns 29 today! Happy Birthday, yo. Now he’s a miner twenty-niner…whatever that means 🙂

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stop the wordpress-es

July 12, 2005 under ChrisBellini.com

I’ve now completely switched from Blogger to WordPress. I think it’s mint. Don’t you?

My archives were imported without a hitch. Applying the new theme to the rest of my site was a breeze, too. It’s a good thing that when I originally designed my site, I did so with plenty of PHP includes and content in MySQL tables, so switching the look ‘n’ feel was a snap. And if I deside to change the style again down the road, it’ll still be a snap 😀

My old Atom feed will not work anymore so those of you using RSS readers will need to update the URLs. Here are the new ones:

Feed: http://www.chrisbellini.com/wp-rss2.php
Comments: http://www.chrisbellini.com/wp-commentsrss2.php

Oh, and in case you’re wondering what’s in that little LCD monitor that I’m using as a logo. It’s the server component of a client/server app that I wrote in Python to update the LMHOSTS file on client computers. I took a screenshot of my code in ConTEXT and squeezed it into that monitor with my l33t Gimp skills 😛

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ch-ch-ch-changes

July 11, 2005 under ChrisBellini.com

It appears that Pat and Barry have already started using WordPress. I’ll be joining the ranks soon. I just have to finish tweaking a theme to my liking, apply it to the rest of my site, and import all of my archived blog entries from the past three years. The import is my main concern at the moment; I have a lot of entries.

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lovey-dovey all the time

July 10, 2005 under Life

It’s been one year already. Today is the one-year wedding anniversary of Dena and yours truly 😉 From a traditional point of view, the gift for the first anniverary is paper. So yesterday we went to a local Chapters and chose the “paper” we wanted. Dena chose “Desparation” and I chose “How Would You Move Mount Fuji?”. Then, I took her to Lily Ruth for dinner, which was a great place to celebrate an anniversary.

In other news, I’m thinking of ditching Blogger for blogging purposes and using WordPress instead. So if my site disappears for a while, you’ll know why 😉

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18 and 1 back

July 8, 2005 under Golf, Life, Sports

I joined Dena’s office in their annual golf tournament yesterday at Beaverdale. For a while during the first couple of holes, the clouds and thunder looked like signs of ensuing rain. Thankfully, the rain never came. Dena really wasn’t supposed to be golfing, since our physician warned against golfing until the end of July, but felt good enough to try. She played well and even birdied the second hole! I birdied six and thirteeen, and was within a centimetre of birdie-ing nine. She ended up with a 90 and I shot an 84. The real suprise will come tomorrow morning to see if she’s walking upright or not 😉

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taken back?

July 6, 2005 under Computers, Programming

Creating change; that’s what it’s all about.

Remember when I mentioned my small problem with the way the Iceberg Radio media player worked with Firefox? And remember when I created a workaround for this problem? The problem had existed for a few months and I released my workaround script to the world 10 days ago. Lo and behold, Iceberg Radio have made an attempt at fixing the problem for Firefox users on their side. This fix breaks my script, however (technically, my script still works if you launch the media player in a new window or tab, instead of allowing it to create a popup window). But that’s fine with me. I didn’t intend for my script to be malicious or radically change the way that the site is rendered so as to annoy and frustrate the Iceberg Radio web development team. Pure and simple, I wanted the site to work in Firefox the way it does with Internet Explorer. I didn’t want to have to go back to Iceberg Radio‘s website everytime I wanted to see the info about the song that was currently playing. I wanted a choice. I didn’t want to be forced to use Internet Explorer and nobody should be.

However, I’m still not 100% satisfied with Iceberg Radio‘s “fix”. I still can’t see the song info in the window title like I could with my script. But now, the info is displayed in the media player window atleast. It works fine on my Windows XP computers with Windows Media Player 10 installled. However, what really scares me is that within Iceberg Radio player is a link to this; the ability to run ActiveX content in Mozilla. One of the main reasons I use a Mozilla web browser, Firefox to be specific, is so that I don’t have to worry about all of the malware that is installed via ActiveX! I won’t be installing that extension anyway since it works fine on my computers as they are. I wonder who that really targets.

So I may try to investigate how they managed to disable my script; I have a couple of hunches. From a file comparison on the source HTML rendered in their player window with and without my script running, there are obvious differences. If I end up not modifying my script to workaround their workaround (ha!), then I thank all of the people out there who have downloaded and used the script for the past 10 days. When the Iceberg Radio webmasters saw a flurry of hits from agents called “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible) Greasemonkey” in their server logs, maybe we made a difference 😉

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microsoft wants…anyone

July 5, 2005 under Computers, Programming, Software

While reading a News.com RSS feed entry, using Thunderbird of course, I stumbled across this article. It mentions how Microsoft is trying to revamp its recruiting processes to keep up with companies like Google. This reminded me of when I posted about the hits on my resume that I was receiving from Microsoft IP addresses.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only person in Kitchener that noticed this. Some guy named Jose Sandoval got an email from Microsoft; he even wrote an entertaining blog entry on his website about the experience. Is Microsoft mining the talent in the Tech Triangle? 😉

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happy 4th, ya'll

July 4, 2005 under Life, Politics

On this Independance Day, Dena says “Happy fourth of July, everyone!”

She adds, “…and if you don’t have a good fourth of July, we’ll nuke ya!”

She’s celebrating the day by going to see Theory of a Dead Man with Natalie tonight 🙂

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i h8 summer

July 2, 2005 under Life, Politics

The heat that’s been scorching southern Ontario has finally taken a break, thankfully. Anyone who knows me is well aware of the disdain I hold for hot and muggy weather. It’ll probably get back up in the 30’s again, but I’ll enjoy this reprieve while it lasts. Looks like the Live 8 concert up at Park Place will have good weather. Dena tried to get tickets last week but she couldn’t break through the Ticketmaster queues.

I think the Live 8 concerts going on in the G8 countries (which consist of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, UK and the US) are a good idea, but I wonder if it’s really enough. Sure, the G8 countries could easily forgive the debt owed by African countries that’ll probably never be repayed anyway. But really, is that enough? Many of the African countries’ governments withold money and access to basic necessities from their citizens; some even kill their own citizens. I think debt relief is only part of the problem, but that’s just my opinion. If I had all of the answers to the world’s problems, I probably wouldn’t be here 😉

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happy 138th and 29th, eh?

July 1, 2005 under Life, Politics

Happy 138th birthday to the kewlest country on the planet!

Also, happy birthday to Chico! Seeing as he appointed me as his best man for when he marries Mel next October, it makes sense that I can embarass him a little. Now I don’t want to say that Chico is old, but let’s just say that the big three-oh is well within his sights…very much so 😉

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