I failed to write this up at the time, and now it has been a couple of weeks, but I recently traveled to Cancun with some friends. I won’t be doing a day by day analysis like I did with the Greece Trip, as the Cancun trip was more laid back, and also because I didn’t bring a notebook with which to jot down details as things went, but I’ll try to break things down into the days, and I might get details wrong, but essentially the whole thing went like this:

Day 1:

So it was an early morning flight, and I stayed over at Laura and Murad’s. They were going out for the evening, and so I was just going to sleep. They were supposed to be back at something like 11pm to finish packing and take a nap of their own, but when I woke up at 1am, they still weren’t back and I was kind of concerned. I phoned Laura’s cell just to have it ring next to me on the couch. But only minutes later they got back. They finished packing and we met up with Chez and drove to the airport around 4am. Alicia arrived in her own time a half-hour later and we eventually made it on the plane. The check-in lady remarked to me that I was very lucky, a statement I still have yet to decipher. A few hours later we arrived in Cancun, easily found our bus and headed off to the resort.

We first wondered around waiting for our rooms to be ready. Laura and Murad had a room, and Alicia, Chez and I had one next door. It took quite a while for them to be ready, and in our triple-occupancy room they consistently forgot to give us three towels, and their idea of handling the sleeping arrangements was to push the two double beds (if even that wide) together. Alicia and I slept together (the unexciting form) with me trying to stay on the edge where the two beds join. Chez took the other bed.

Our first act on the resort was to get a round of 5 tequila shots, the burning was quite intense. Then we hung out by the beach and the pool. And we ate at the buffet for dinner first, though we had full run of the place with our black bracelets. The heat most of the days was, to me, almost cartoonish. I likened it to the wave of heat you feel when opening the oven to pull your dinner out. Even in the shade it was fairly intense.

A promising start

Day 2:

This day began with going to our Sunwing representative in the main building to hear about excursions. At first we were the only ones there because apparently no one else could find the building. We opted not to go with the Sunwing excursion offerings but to go with offerings from the hotel itself. Then we pretty much just relaxed for the rest of the day, with having our excursions the next day and another 2 days later.

We often swam in the pools since they had the swim up bar. It also had the advantage of being still, not being intensely salty and not being painfully rocky, which the beach failed to be.

Swim up bars might seem like a bad idea with the heat and swimming, but you’d be wrong

Day 3:

Our first excursion. My room nearly slept through it because our alarm was set to the right hour but as PM instead of AM. We rushed to get ready, some of us grabbed a quick breakfast at the buffet and made it to the van. It was a lengthy drive to the first section, which was in a jungle area where some Mayan’s hung out to take pictures of us and sell them to us. There was also the Cave. Ah, the Cave. We were meant to swim in it, and silly me, I thought the cave would be a horizontal one, where you swim into it. But this cave would be one you would merely fall directly down into, if not for the rappelling gear. So first we had a little ceremony with a Mayan who asked the land to accept us. If the land had any sense, it would have forbade me entry. I did make it into the cave, and out again, but it was an experience I’d rather not repeat, at least not with witnesses. But that was merely buttering me up for what was to come… for a little drive in the van later took us to the pyramid at Coba, and I managed after about half an hour and a liter of water to climb it. I can’t even be sure I didn’t die there and everything since has been residual neuron activity. Basically this excursion exhausted me physically and emotionally, and though I may be pleased after the fact that I made it to the top, I was less pleased at the time. Later we bought a CD with the photos they took of us (after forbading us from taking some ourselves at the cave) at quite the expense, but split 5 ways it was more reasonable.

I left behind pints of fluid at this place

Day 4:

This was a free day which I don’t have much recollection of what we did, other than relax. We played on the beach, which was always a challenge with the sharp rocks and the salt-water. That’s not to say it was fun, it was, but it was less fun the more the eyes stung to the point that you’d figure you’d be better off without them. I spent a bit of this time thinking about the day before and was pretty depressed about it. After dinner we went to the tail-end of a Mexican culture show put on in the hotel grounds, it was okay, but they did have a bit of a cock-fight at one point, and we were reasonably irked/displeased/uncomfortable with it. It didn’t go to any sort of conclusion, but certainly some feathers were flying at one point.

I was hoping the birds would turn on their handlers

Day 5:

This was another excursion, but was mostly relaxing on a catamaran. We were among a small group of english speakers, the rest I think were all spanish speakers. We went out a ways into the water and then did about an hour of snorkeling, which I found interesting, but from what I’m told doesn’t hold a candle to Hawaii. We then went to Isla Mujeres for some more beach play and lunch, and later on we did some shopping, but I managed not to buy anything. When we went back to the boat, it was raining, but us Canadians are hardy, plus it felt good compared to the heat I normally felt on this trip. We also bought some photos, I bought one of us underwater. When we got back we had our first bus ride from the docks back to the hotel. After getting back we probably just relaxed some more, it was a day for that. We ate dinner at a weird buffet where you got your sides yourself buffet-style, but people came around with skewers of meat and gave you some if you wanted.

We snorkeled in this, we were told not to touch the fish, but they would often nearly slam into me

Day 6:

This was our shopping day, so we got on a bus and headed to Market 28, which was more reminiscent to me of Turkey’s market during the Greece Trip. The shop keepers were quite aggressive in trying to get your into their shops, but usually we’d decide based on which ones had air conditioning, since it was boiling that day. I ended up buying a plate, since it was once of the few things I saw that I didn’t see at every single other shop, plus I thought it would go well with my Greece bowl. The guy who sold me the plate demonstrated its hardiness by taking his keys and trying to scratch the hell out of it. Then, as a comparison, took another kind of plate of his own merchandise, and proceeded to dig gashes in it with the keys. So in the end Alicia and I each got a plate, but we pretty well failed to get a deal on them. They were 20 each, but he almost talked himself down to 35 for the pair of them, and we tried for 30, but he wouldn’t hear of it (this compared to some of the other shopkeepers where it was quite easy to talk down). In the end we got them for 34, sigh. Still, as the only thing I bought (other than a fridge magnet for someone else) I’m pleased enough with it.

That night we had dinner at the one restaurant where you needed a reservation. It actually demanded, for men anyway, dress shirt, dress pants and shoes. I had dressy enough pants, and my shoes are always the vaguely dressy work shoes, but I had no dress shirt. The closest I had was a sort of white pullover with collar. I had told my companions that if I was denied entry to just go on without me, but I got in okay, and in fact we were an hour late. Well, they wrote 8pm on our reservation ticket, while 7pm on their own books, but it was fine, we got our meal, and they served one of the best white wines I’ve had that wasn’t actually an icewine.

This guy wouldn’t get out of my shot. I ended up buying a plate from him.

Day 7:

This was to be our last actual day, so it was mostly just relaxing. We hit our favorite restaurants for breakfast and lunch. For breakfast I had hotcakes which I forgot was a synonym for pancakes. For lunch we were back at the seafood place next to the sea we had been at a few days earlier. That time I had a bit of fish, which was alright but I’m still quite cautious of it. This second time I didn’t have the fish. We hung out by the beach a bit for our last swims. I decided to wear my sandals into the water which worked really well to avoid the sharp rocks and stubbing my toes. For dinner we went to the italian restaurant which, for some reason, had a fairly long wait. Once in, I copped out and had a personal pizza, but it being an italian restaurant I think its valid.

I’ll merge Day 8 in with this one because all Day 8 consisted of was finishing the packing, getting on the bus, getting back to the airport and getting on the plane. The only event of note was when I apparently set off the metal detector, a guy was telling me stuff in spanish and I just did what the movies told me, stand on the spot and raise my arms. They also put my carry-on through the detector again and swabbed it for some reason. As I was the only one to get subjected to that, I guess I did something wrong at some point, but I was a little anxious about it all, but that would be nothing compared to my trip to the states a few weeks later.

Last day at the beach, and just as rough as all the other days

Anyway, so that was the trip to Cancun. It was very hot, but fun overall. A week was a good length, the heat probably would have done me in if we had stayed two, heh.

Father Ted is a Irish Comedy (ishcom?) that I’ve more or less recently encountered, and I highly recommend it.

Basically it’s about the wacky adventures of three priests in a parish on the secluded and sparsely populated Craggy island, a fictitious island near Ireland. Father Ted, the titular character is mostly down to earth, less than completely moral but generally the sane anchor of the show. Father Dougal is young, childlike, living in fantasy and never quite aware what is going on. Father Jack is the old drunk who mostly is limited to the vocabulary “Drink”, “Feck”, and “Arse”.

Watch these clips to get a taste (but they are links, no one feels like allowing the embed, meh)
Intro (by The Divine Comedy)
Down with this sort of thing (sort of a meme now)
Being discovered acting racist (pt 1)
Should we all be racist now father? (pt 2)
Diversity slideshow (pt 3)
I don’t beeeeelieve it (One foot in the grave is also a good show)

If you enjoyed, go out and find the series. There are 3 of them (and being like television series over across the pond, it only amounts to 25 episodes. And there will never be any more, as Dermot Morgan, Father Ted, died during the wrap up party of the final series.

Drink!

So I’ve had yet another hardware issue, but this time with my UPS.

Last thursday, in the morning, my APC Back-UPS ES 500 started making a terrible noise, and I heard vista go duh-dun, the usual sound when a USB device is disconnected, and indeed that moment the monitoring software for the device, PowerChute, invoked a balloon message telling me it lost connection to the UPS. The noise lasted around 5 seconds, and then suddenly stopped, and all was well. I checked the status of the device thought the app which now apparently could connect to the UPS, and it said all was well, though the battery was charging, and was only at 57%. Odd, it hadn’t needed to go to battery in a long while. And the noise was quite alarming, like the sounds of dolphin laughter piped through a broken speaker.

Of course, it didn’t end there. The next day, in the morning, the exact same thing started to happen, and just as I was peeking behind my desk at the UPS to see what might be up, thwump, the computer reboots as gracelessly as possible (and the 4th graceless reboot in a row, all for different reasons). I was quite alarmed, the noise was just as terrible and went on for the 20-30 seconds before the reboot, and then stopped. And the USB had dropped out as well, before the reboot of course. I shut off the computer and unplugged everything from the unit, putting it aside while I rewired everything into the wall sockets.

I started searching the APC knowledge base and such looking for an explanation of this issue, and even resorted to emailing their tech support, which I had done before to get the Vista compatible version of the monitoring app when I ditched my old computer. The trouble is, the thing is supposed to beep, it just beeps in very specific ways. It beeps at a regular interval when the thing is on battery, it beeps for self-test, and it beeps continually for an overload. But the beeping it made for me during those ‘events’ were unlike any healthy beep. It sounded like the speaker itself was somehow messed up. I made this very clear in my email to the technicians, but of course the first three quarters of their reply was about the standard error code. I supposed it’s natural for them to assume that the users don’t know that their beeping unit is supposed to beep and that pasting back that same information will solve 90% of these types of inquiries. Just as natural as it is for me thinking them stupid for not reading the initial email properly saying it was very definitely not one of those types of beeps.

They did ask me further questions, the answers to which will almost certainly mean they’ll close the issue without any further digging. One was about the age of the battery, and it is quite old, so old that I can’t remember. Certainly older than 4 years, perhaps 5 or 6. On the forums, I read that apparently the lifespan given for any of these products is 6 years… that’s pretty bad, but also estimated 2 swaps of the battery in that time… ugh. A while ago the app was bringing up notices about how my battery was old and I should get a new one, but it was on pain of a lesser battery charge, not random noises and load-drops. Another question they asked was about the loads connected to it, and admittedly, there was a bit going on. There was the tower itself, and both LCD monitors, and then a power-bar with my four external hard-drives plugged in. All of that is not very good, but it never had any problems handling it before.

I haven’t heard back from them yet, but I suspect they’ll just say that with all that crap, and an old battery, anything could happen. Right now I have my own theory, but it has holes. The UPS sometimes runs self-tests, and from the sound the unit makes (deep click), which sounds like when it takes over due to a power spike/brown/loss, that the test actually throws the current load over to the battery. The battery, being old, can no longer handle the load, and it tries to signal the overload condition, a continuous beep. Now, there are a few issues I have with this: Why would the beep from the speaker be so screwed up? So little power that it causes it to sound like a robot coughing? And why would the USB drop out? Same? And the self-tests happen quite rarely (in fact, I’m not sure what actually controls or schedules them), so why did this happen two days in a row (where the second day, it actually couldn’t cope and the computer rebooted)? The only thing I can think of is that if it couldn’t complete a self-test on one day, it tries the same time the next day (both events occurred in the morning, and I think it was at the same time). Windows Event Log is no help, it reports Thursday’s drop out with the battery, but since on Friday it rebooted, it lost most of the logs around that event, but given where the logs stopped and started again, and given the time it took for me to rewire, I’m guessing it was at the same time each day.

So what exactly is the point of the self-test (if that’s what caused it) when it does something like this? Where’s my warning from PowerChute saying the battery is unusable? The requests for ordering a new one was based simply on age, not on any result of diagnostic as far as I know. It’s like a printer wanting you to replace a yellow ink cart that has barely been used because you printed a lot of black documents and it suggests replacements by page count, and you ignore it, until one day the yellow ink really is out, so the printer catches on fire. Anyway, I’ve wanted to upgrade to a newer unit ever since I got the new computer, so I went out and got an APC Back-UPS XS 900 (the two letter model number indicator doesn’t ever seem to match the advertised series, ES and BE, XS and BX). I was debating going with a different vendor given this experience, but everything I read online seems to indicate that APC was better, or at least as good, as the very few competitors out there for the yokel consumer space.

I haven’t rewired yet or plugged this beast in (basically the battery pack is two batteries, and the sockets are inconveniently in the back so I’ll have to rework the area it will sit in), hopefully it works because the forum did describe a few people who had units DOA.

This poor computer takes a lot of abuse. I’m off to Mexico in a week, so hopefully it gets the graceful shutdown it deserves.

So waterloo is going ahead with its attempt to rebrand, this time presenting two new logos, which seem designed to make us want to like the previous one more.

You win again gravity!

To boldly go where no university has gone before

Hmm, these seem even worse to me. The first one looked like it was trying to be hip or something. This first new one looks like its sinking into a weeping mire, or just otherwise depressed. I assume they were trying to go for a jaunty or casual angle, but the horizontal colour split just makes it look like it is sinking. And a black and white photocopy will look worse at best, or just a solid stupidly tilted W at worst.
The second of the new ones looks like its trying to be futuristic, and what’s more futuristic than not bothering to fully write out all the letters, thus my comparison to the star trek text. Photocopied, it will just look like crap, perhaps just WAT, or WATRLOO. In fact, if the E is giving them so much trouble, just take it out.

Maybe I just hate change, but honestly none of these three attempts do anything for me. At least they say that these are only for marketing purposes, so diplomas will be spared this and get the good old shield.

I’m the owner of one quarter of this horse.

Her name is Grace By Design, out of Bella Reena by Royal Mattjesty. My family split the stud fee, so I own a quarter. I’m slightly torn on the nature of owning (or partially owning) a race horse, since I don’t necessarily agree with forcing them to run in circles. But I suppose not to long ago they would have merely been beasts of burden or war, so it’s still a nicer life now, if not free.

A flash photo of a developed photo, some touchup required

A horse is a horse, of course, of course…

And there will be more where that came from.

– OR –
The Girl From Tomorrow, Part Two

A promising start

My Girl From Tomorrow blog post I think has more comments than all my other blogs put together, which is kind of scary. What is more scary is that searching “Katharine Cullen” on google’s image search (without quotes, and at least only right now, I’m sure since I’ve pointed it out, it will go to page 317) one of the images I’ve reproduced without written or oral permission is the first hit. That’s messed up. Something else amusing is that they messed up her credit in Tomorrow’s End, which has her as Katherine Cullen. I’m assuming it’s still her and not some evil twin.

So I thought I’d start off this entry answering a few of the questions from the previous one. Yes; sometimes; and not really no. One person took aim at my use of the term “capshul”, well, I know they are pronouncing it correctly. It’s just that out of all the words with the aussie accent, that one was most noticeably different to my pronunciation when I was a kid. Someone else said how they watched this recently and their inner child fell in love with Alana. Better than one’s outer middle-aged man anyway. Kind of creepy still to remember the huge crush I had on her when I was a youngin’, before I became this bitter shell of a man, I mean. Dipping back to the first entry for a second. The whole Katharine that was young and Katharine that grew picture was meant to be a reference to her apparently being a child extra in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, but hell if I know which one of them is her, crikey.

Anyway, so what can I say about Tomorrow’s End? Well, for one, the title is too short, so the opening music buildup thingy (if I knew musical terminology, I would use it) is too long for the letters to tumble down into frame, while the first show was a better length because it was scored for that opening sequence. They should have gone with something longer like “How the Future was Fucked”. That is how the characters from 1990 should have reacted, since basically they are told that no matter what they do, in 510 years time, the world will be a crap hole. They’ve seen the future, it is murder. In general, I didn’t like this series as much as the previous one, because it’s set in a dirty dark place that’s trying to be futuristic but without the budget for that. So unfamiliar place, with the familiar characters sort of scattered for a while, takes a while to build up.

I’ve already done the overall talk of the series from last time which I think still applies. So let’s get onto episode specific ranting and raving:
(more…)

I love James Burke. When I was young, perhaps 10 or more years ago, my brother brought home a couple tapes of a couple shows taped off channels that we didn’t get. The shows were some episodes of Connections, and some of The Day the Universe Changed. We both enjoyed them instantly. And I’ve come to realize that it’s one of those shows that some people get, and other people don’t. I’ve tried to show some of it to friends over the years, but no one ever found them interesting or entertaining at all.

But I do. I’ve watched Connections, Connections 2 (actually, this one’s not very good), Connections 3 (better, but a lot of the connections were how someone’s name started with the same letter as someone elses name, meh), The Day the Universe Changed (this is the stuff), After the Warming. I have some of the books, (Connections, Axe Maker’s Gift, Knowledge Web), and even the pretty-lame point and click adventure game.

Watch this, if it interests you, go find more. If not, thanks for your time.

So apparently my alma mater has decided to rebrand itself.

Here is the comparison between the old and new logo I swiped from The Register (I’m surprised a British tech column would cover this).

“No, shoot the streamers right at the camera, then I’ll take a picture”

I think it looks awful. I mean, they’re just trying to “hip” the place up a bit, I know, but people can detect that effect, and react badly to it. The old logo has a heraldic air to it, representative of an old institution (though the place itself isn’t that old) but that’s the feeling they should be trying to get across. Ivy takes time to grow.

They say the new logo isn’t really the new logo, but a transitional state along to whatever they end up using. I hope they ditch the laser beam rainbow.

Facebook pisses me off. It always sort of pissed me off, so I barely used the thing, but now I can’t even idle my account without them doing something stupid.

So I log in to find a notice at the top, it telling me that my current contact email was invalid. Seemed valid to me, sent myself a test email, worked fine. So I trawled through their help system, and came across this.

> It says my email address is invalid.
Unfortunately we do not support email addresses with generic prefixes (e.g. info@, webmaster@, etc.). Since email addresses of this nature are typically used for organizations and businesses, we do not allow them to be used for personal Facebook accounts. You will need to use a personal email address that does not contain this type of prefix. There are no exceptions to this rule.

What the hell is that? My email address may start with admin, but it’s my personal damn site… you mean you want me to create some dummy email address just to keep you happy? No exceptions to this rule? Why not? I can’t even imagine what they are thinking. And I assume that their list of verbotten words grows, since references to this asinine policy go way back, so I assume “admin” just made the cut.

It’s a small thing, but it’s a stupid thing, and just another reason to dislike facebook. Hell, you can’t even complain to them since they provide no customer support outside their FAQ help center. And since I presume this doesn’t affect most of the people using the site, there seem to be very few groups formed because of this, and they’re quite small.

I have to assume eventually this policy will expand until we won’t be able to use anything outside the form asshat_52@yahoo.com