On my continued report of 2006, I’ll say that the second week ended with a bit of a bump. I was sitting at home on Friday evening and around 8:20PM my telephone rings… It was my wife, stating she had just been in a car accident.

I jumped up off the couch, wrestled with trying to get a stubborn sock on my foot and sped off to the intersection she gave me to make sure everything was OK. Upon arrival a spectator filled me in on what she saw happen… my wife was in the middle of the road turning left and clearing the intersection on a yellow light, when another car tried to make it through the yellow / red light. It just so happens that the car that tried to beat the light was a female off-duty OPP officer, who we’re told is a sweet-heart.

This unfortunate accident resulted in both parties being charged. Karla got “Left turn – fail to afford reasonable opportunity to avoid collision” which is a $110 fine and 4 points. We’re still thinking about whether to fight this in court or not, because the fact is that Karla did nothing wrong, she did exactly what she was supposed to do.

All in all, Karla’s poor new Yellow Saturn is pretty much destroyed and we’re waiting to hear from the insurance company as to what the verdict is as to whether it is a write-off or not.

We’re just so lucky that both Karla and Tanya are OK and I’ll definitely be giving updates on this as they happen. I’m especially interested in blogging about dealing with an insurance company for the first time. We have all of our insurance through State Farm and have always been happy dealing with our local office, this should be a good test of their system.

Experience Log with State Farm:

[-] Small Issue:
My local office wasn’t open on the weekend so I had to wait until today to talk to them. We could have filed the claim with the 24 hour toll-free number, but I’d rather talk to my local people.

[+] Positive:
First thing Monday morning I was speaking with my local office and they got everything started for me right away. They asked a few questions and said I should expect a call shortly from a claims officer. I was called within an hour and the lady setup a rental car for my wife, and contacted the garage where the car was towed. Easy as pie thus far.

After not blogging much over the Holidays this year I have a few important life-notes to blog about today. Two Thousand and Six has started out with a major up and down, and staying true to chronological order I’ll start with the bad before the good.

.: The Bad News :.
On January 2nd, 2006 my Grandmother passed away in the hospital after falling ill two weeks prior. I miss her already and wish I would have spent more time with her and called her on the telephone just a bit more often. Human nature I guess, to need something tragic to happen before realizing what you’re missing.

My wife and I left for Richmond, Quebec at the end of last week to attend my Grandmothers visitation, funeral and burial. I’m so glad I had the opportunity to be there and shake hands with the the few hundred people that showed up at the visitation. Many of them told a few stories of how they knew and will remember her and everyone paid their respects. The funeral service was short but powerful and finally the burial took place a top a snow covered cemetery in Ulverton, Quebec where she was laid to rest beside my Grandfather who passed away 12 years earlier.

I will always remember and cherish the times throughout my life I have spent with my Grandmother Simpson and I thank her for all my great memories. I would also like to thank my wife, Karla Simpson, for all of her incredible love and support during this difficult time. Karla; you are an amazing person and great to me and I love you with all my heart.

.: The Good News :.
On January 2nd, 2006 a long time friend (and ex-girlfriend actually) Cassie, asked me to be her “Man-of-honour” in her wedding this summer. She actually called me only a few hours after I had found out my grandmother had passed away, so I was sort of at a low-point, a bit confused at first, but delighted none-the-less. After I had a few minutes to let everything sink in I realized what an honour had been bestowed upon me… I don’t know any other weddings who have had a man standing up with the bride. I only had two small reservations before agreeing to the title.

1. No matter how cute I’d look, I would not be wearing a dress / skirt of any sorts to the wedding.
2. I will not be accompanying her to a male strip clubs at any time for her bachelorette party or any other event.

After both conditions where agreed to with a few laughs, I accepted and I am really looking forward to to accompanying her on her wedding day, August 5th, 2006.

A bit of history behind Cassie… she’s an army brat that moved around a lot when she was younger. I met her through another really good friend of mine, Kevin Hogan, while he was dating her during our first year of high-school. After Kev and her broke up, Cassie and I briefly dated for a few months and then called it quits before she moved away. After she moved, we always kept in touch, keeping each other up to date on our lives, friends, family, etc. I have always found it interesting to hear Cassie grow up over the past 10 years and see her settle down with her fiance John, who from what I know, is a really nice guy and perfect match for Cassie’ personality.

Thank-you Cassie and John for the opportunity, I’m looking forward to seeing you both again soon.

This topic just does not want to die and I need to blog about it to get the anger out of my system.

Every year, the same group of idiotic wanna-be Christian enthusiasts whine and complain that more and more people are not saying “Merry Christmas”, but instead are saying “Happy Holidays” or “Seasons Greetings”. As far as I can tell, their argument has always been “It’s Christmas time, stop taking Christ out of Christmas. This is the time of year that we celebrate the baby Jesus…”, and so on and so forth.
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Last night my wife and I along with a friend (Greg) went out to Moxie’s for a good dinner and a beer. I can’t seem to get enough of their ranch-house chicken burger, spicy fries and basel mayo dip. Yum. Either way, while I was attempting to eat the yummy yummy fries, my teeth for whatever reason got angry at my tongue and attacked. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve bitten my lip / cheek / tongue before, but damn, this time there is actually a chunk out of the side of my tongue causing me constant pain and slurring of words.

So my two-bit piece of advice for the day: chew slowly and keep your tongue away from your teeth. Teeth aren’t always friendly, they will turn on you and attack without warning.

Best Regards,
Matt Simpson

So I was sitting here at work listening to music, working on some database stuff during the first major snow fall of 2005, when all of a sudden I hear what sounds like thunder. I quickly shrugged it off as a snow plow and went back to work. A couple minutes later our administrative assistant comes in and says “Did you hear the thunder?”, to which I replied, “It can’t thunder during I snow storm, it was a snow plow.” We both looked out the window and saw the roads were still snowy but I didn’t think anymore about it until I heard it again (this time the music was off). It rumbled and rumbled and rumbled. So of course what do I do? I jump on the net (I actually went to Ask Jeeves first because sometimes Google doesn’t answer questions that well). Sure enough I see “Thundersnow”. Can you believe it? Who would-a thought.

Morale of the story: To save yourself from looking like an ass by saying it can’t thunder when it’s snowing, learn about weather phenomena like Thundersnow.

Best Regards,
Matt Simpson

I actually spent a bit of time today reading most of the comments on a Slashdot article titled Ask The MythBusters. In summary, they were looking for 10 questions to ask the MythBusters next week, which is sort of neat. There were some good questions, as well as some not so good questions, but one that stood out in my mind was:

Most restaurants seem to believe that ice is free, and therefore tend to overfill the ice to save money on soda. However, the energy required to freeze water to make ice should be considered — is the real cost of ice actually less than the cost of an equivalent volume of soda?

I just thought it was interesting, I have no idea the answer to that, but it’s fun to ponder.

Best Regards,
Matt Simpson

I have yet to figure out why every time I release a new version of ListMessenger, I always end up going to bed at a ridiculously late hour. It seems to me that no matter what I have completed and tested, there is always just that one more thing I want to get done. Either way, I slept soundly last night knowing that ListMessenger Pro 2.0.1 was out the door and there would be no more support issues for Internet Explorer and HTMLArea! ha. It made my day this morning when I read a post in the forum that said it now takes only a few seconds to queue 10,000 subscribers, much better than a few minutes in previous releases. I don’t know why I never knew about SQL’s INSERT SELECT query before, it’s been around forever. I guess it’s just one of those things you don’t know is there unless you need, and to my defense the documentation on the MySQL website is not so good.

What’s next in ListMessenger development? Well, I have to do ListMessenger Light 2.0.1 now, which shouldn’t take me too long to remove the Pro features… I assume I can do this in a night or so (so that really means a week). I also need to update the documentation and information on the actual listmessenger.com website as well, especially the demo. I have actually started to setup the new demo on it’s own sub-domain but I stopped last night because I was too tired to actually restrict the demo features. I would love to finish that tonight, but I have to finish that Microeconomics assignment that my professor so gracefully said he would accept on Wednesday in class from me.

I’ll blog about the new features I’m planning for ListMessenger 3.0 at a later date. Blogging about it seems to help straighten things out in my head as well. Thanks for letting me bounce ideas off you 😉

Best Regards,
Matt Simpson

Although I work full time for Queen’s University, develop ListMessenger as a side business, teach part-time at St. Lawrence College during the winter semester and spend what I consider to be a lot of quality time with my wife, I thought this year that I should go back to school and taking some courses at Queen’s. So off I went, jumping through the hoops and finally landing in Bachelor of Arts and Sciences (honours) with a major in Applied Economics.
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Here’s the story: I arrive home from work late yesterday afternoon to find two new messages on the telephone. The first one was an automated message from “Credit Card Company A” (we’ll call it) stating that it was not a solicitation call and they believe there has been fraudulent activity on my wife’s’ credit card; needless to say I was concerned. The next call was from “Credit Card Company B”, this time a real person stating that my wife needed to call them right away; needles to say I was now very concerned.
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