Category Archives: mattsimpson.ca

No “K” in Cuba

I haven’t written a blog post in a while, but I thought I would hop on tonight and express my mixed emotion about my upcoming holiday.

Since, erm… December Karla and I have been planning on going “somewhere warm” for a holiday the end of October / first part of November. I have been excited for quite a while, and when I found out there were actually five or six people game for a vacation, I was uber happy.

Well three weeks ago Karla found out she got a new job!!! YEY FOR KARLA! I am so proud of my wife!!! The down side to this amazing career opportunity of course is that she can no longer go away on our vacation.

Karla was gracious enough (after a minor bribe of the cost of the trip in new clothing) to be understanding and “let” me go away “somewhere warm” without her. So off we go, all four or five of us… oh wait, we had to switch the week we were going because the original date no longer worked for me, which means now two traveling companions also can’t go when we were going. So off we go, all three of us… oh wait, who was the third person anyways?

In summary, the vacation dwindled down to just two of us; myself and my friend Andrew. Which is totally awesome!!!! We are going to have a friggen fantastic time in Cayo Coco, Cuba at the Nh Krystal Laguana for 7 days, all inclusive. I totally can’t wait, I’m so excited.

Oh don’t worry there will be pictures… I will post them when I get back.

A Hockey Matt-ch

IMG_5190.JPGAny close friend of mine will tell you that I am far from a sports fan. In fact I would say that I work pretty hard to avoid hockey, baseball, football, etc. That said, when presented with the opportunity to attend an NHL hockey game I would likely take it. I’ve attended 2 NHL games this year actually, one in Montreal (Habs vs. Carolina) and the other in Ottawa (Sens vs. Pens).

The game in Montreal was my first NHL game ever, and I must say I was not overly impressed. Perhaps because I’m not actually a hockey fan, perhaps because I was some what intoxicated during the game (a la Huron County friends) or perhaps because our seats were so high up (like above the press box high up) that I felt as thought I should be harnessed into my seat.

This is why I decided to give the Senators a chance. This game was a heck of a lot better. It was moderately exciting and they put out the Penguins (game 5 of the Eastern conference semi-finals I’m told), plus the Scotia Bank Place is a nice stadium and I could actually see the players.

I managed to bring my camera into this game, feel free to check out the photographs.

Zero-Seven Random Weekend

Destination RandomThis is a message to inform Karla, Greg and Jocelyn that you have been chosen to participate in a random event, code-named Zero-Seven Random Weekend. While the details of the event will not be disclosed you will need to know a few things in order to complete the weekend successfully, safely and enjoyably.

  • The date of the event will be e-mailed to you separately.
  • You will not likely be getting a lot of sleep during the time that we are away. Please rest up before we leave and prepare yourself for a low-sleep situation as best you can. This means very early mornings and likely very late nights. This is not a relaxing event, be forewarned.
  • You must have a valid drivers licence and it must not expire before June 30th, 2007. If it does, you must renew it long before hand in order to attend. Please check your expiry date to ensure this.
  • You must have a valid health card with you (of course) in case of emergency. Again, please check your expiry date to ensure it is valid.
  • You must bring comfortable footwear as we will be doing a lot of walking and there are big hills. Not necessarily hiking boots, but something comfortable.
  • You need 3 days worth of your “normal” clothing. I recommend a backpack and / or small bag that you can carry with you without getting too frustrated if you need to carry it for several hours at a time.
  • You may want to bring a bathing suit (not required, up to you).
  • You will want to bring your camera.
  • You will need to have some money with you. Bring some cash, maybe $50.00-ish. You can use credit cards in some cases.
  • Make sure you bring your sense of adventure, it will be a pretty fun weekend.

The name of the event says it all… Random Weekend. I am sure that it is technically possible to figure out parts of what is planned for the weekend, but part of the fun is the unknown, right! Ponder it for a while, perhaps discuss it, but don’t overburden yourself. Let me take care of the details.

Energy-Star, Local Super Hero?

The other day I was on my way home from work (at dusk) and I noticed that the outside lights on my house were unusually bright? I mean, I had purchased 40 watt smaller incandescent bulbs quite some time ago and all-of-a-sudden they were uber-bright? Upon further examination, they were new compact fluorescent bulbs, which I have in the interior of my house.

I happened to glance next door and noticed my neighbor had the same bulbs in her fixtures, so I figured that she was being nice and energy efficient and replaced mine as well. Mystery solved, or so I thought…

Later that night after it got dark, I happened to glance out my front window and look down the street to find that nearly every house had the exact same uber-bright energy efficient bulbs in their outdoor light fixtures.

Is there some sort of energy-star, replacing our light-bulbs? It’s a mystery I tell you, a mystery. I’m not upset or anything like that, I’m happy… who do I thank? Is this a good Samaritan or my tax dollars at work?

Haiku-to-time

A haiku dedicated to my favourite PHP function, strtotime():

oh strtotime() bliss
a function creating ease
such simplicity

Karla Fall Down Go Boom

Just thought I’d blog about Karla’s spill last week. She was running down the stairs to catch me before I left to work (to tell me that Castro was not dead) and missed a stair and fell right on her tail bone.

She’s been laid up on the couch now for 3 days and a bit… huge bruise. Sorry guys… no pics 😀

You can catch Karla’s side of the story here if you’d like.

An English Adventure 2006-07

This Christmas, for the first time in our lives, my wife and I travelled over the chilly North Atlantic to see for ourselves what the “Old World” really felt like. The first purpose of our journey I suppose, was to visit my adventurous younger sister, who about five months ago moved from Canada to Peterborough, England for a job opportunity. Having my sister in Peterborough was fantastic, because it allowed us not only to see where and how she lives, but also because it ended up saving us quite a bit of money, which in turn allowed us to stay for nearly three weeks. The second purpose of our trip was business; I intended on meeting a few colleagues, with whom I do ListMessenger-related business with, as well as a web-hosting client of mine.
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The Bends

I can somewhat giggle about it now, but half an hour ago I was some upset. On the way into my house this afternoon, I tripped on the step and knocked my 12″ Powerbook G4 a bit on the step above. It was in my nice thick neoprene laptop bag and the bump wasn’t that hard, so I didn’t thing much of it. Tonight I went to work on a few things and found that my beautiful aluminum Apple case had a large bend in it, and there was also a few small ripples. 🙁

After freaking out for a second I shut off the machine and found that the top left corner of the laptop (about 1/3 of the machine) was in fact bent out about 1 cm. Yeah, so my computer now had a good curve to it, which made the battery not sit flush in the bottom.

I ended up carefully bending it back into position with careful pressure on the wound, and it’s now straighter than ever (it never did seem to sit flat before).

I was initially peeved about the aluminum actually bending, but I suppose with the -20 degrees Celsius weather today that a plastic PC laptop would have been destroyed. Gotta love Apple.

The Simpsons Are Going To England!

Well if you stumbled across this post because you were looking for the Simpsons TV show episode where Bart finds Mr. Burns’ $1000 bill, then they decide to go to England on vacation (which by the way is called The Regina Monologues) this isn’t it… sorry about your luck.

Karla and I are heading to the UK, and we are pretty dang excited about it. Neither of us has ever been to Europe before and we’re going for nearly three weeks and plan to see everything we possibly can see during our stay.

My sister moved to England about 3 months ago for a job opportunity, and since this is technically her first holiday season away from the family and on her own, I thought it would be a nice time to jump over the pond and pay her a visit. While we are there I plan to visit a few clients and colleagues as well, which I’ve previously never met in person before so that will be a nice adventure.

I plan to take copious amounts of pictures on my Canon Rebel XT while I’m there as well (Sidenote: On a new 4GB compact flash card that I just bought for $102.00CAD from TigerDirect… can you believe it? 4GB’s for $100! That’s sick… I paid more then that for my 64MB SD not too long ago) so prepare for a new vacations section in my photo album 🙂

If you know of any “must see” places… please feel free to suggest them. We have no solid plans at this point, but are just planning to travel as much as possible and take in everything we can.

Recent Spam Influx

If your inbox is at all like mine, you have all-of-a-sudden started to receive a heck of a lot more spam than you are used to in the past month or so. Have no fear, you are not alone. The Internet has recently experienced a large influx of spam e-mail thanks to Russian hackers who control a network of hacked PC’s some 70,000 computers strong.

I don’t normally post these messages; however, this affects so many people I want to make sure you are all aware of it. Please read the following article by eWeek for more information: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2060235,00.asp

A final note: Windows users… does your computer have the “SpamThru” trojan?