Aaron Gladders

A proud day in a father’s life

agladders — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 04:43:05 +0000

Today my oldest boy asked me, “Daddy, how did you build the internet?”

Now admittedly I didn’t build it. But I realized in that moment, in my son’s eyes, I could have.

I’m a geek, and a dad, and I’m proud.

iCal -> gCal CalDAV migration….with a Nokia N95 and isync

agladders — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 20:46:24 +0000

Round 2 - it doesn’t look like you can sync events created on the phone to the gcal caldav calendar.

iCal -> gCal CalDAV migration

agladders — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 20:03:53 +0000

As soon as this came out I jumped into using (and we’re switching my company to it…today!). One problem I’ve run into is that my exported calendar is 2.4 MB. Google isn’t able to import that so I’m going to have to migrate over slowly.

Weber Q100 “Baby Q”

agladders — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 05:01:02 +0000

I broke down and picked up a Weber “Baby Q” Q100 and a rolling cart for transport. Should be good for car camping and beach days!

Spending most of my time on twitter these days, there has to be a good way to integrate the two so that information isn’t silo’d over there.

Nokia N95 firmware upgrade on a Macbook Air

agladders — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 04:33:37 +0000

This is largely for the search engines. I used a parallels winxp image and a usb cable. I used the Nokia Software Updater. I backed up my files using Nokia Multimedia Transfer on the mac first, just in case.

No problems at all, w00t!

Fido/Rogers does…..goodish

agladders — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:39:17 +0000

Rogers/Fido has dropped their prices and increased their data allowances with the recent uproar over the release of the iPhone 3G in Canada. A quick call to Fido and my charges have gone from $100 for 200 MB to $30 for $300. It’s not unlimited but I can’t fault them for reducing the price (finally) and increasing the allowance. Now I do feel as if I’ve subsidized the adoption of data plans into Canada but hey, I’m Canadian, eh. We seem to be ok with living within our tax structure.

Whatever the case, I won’t be complaining about Fido for a while.

Voicemail - I’m not alone

agladders — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 02:42:27 +0000

Michael Arrington has affirmed my voicemail habits - I am not alone. I’ve gotten very good at:

a) looking at my missed calls and just calling the person back or
b) hitting 7, 7 within 2 or 3 seconds of listening to a voice mail, deleting it.

This has consequences. My wife now leaves messages like, “Hi Baby, call me please!” instead of 10 second ramblings. Half the time we’ve already spoken and dealt with whatever she wanted to discuss.

I haven’t taken the plunge at removing my office line but my office assistant is now checking messages when she is in. Anyone that really needs to speak with me either emails or has my cell number, and knows to call it.

So - is it time to remove all voice mail from my life?

AG mobile

agladders — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 03:24:21 +0000

I’m using my phone quite a bit these days for mobile internet/bluetooth modem. Most sites I hit show full web pages by default; I can’t think of one that gives me a mobile version by default. Bandwidth plans in Canada are pretty pricey so it can be quite annoying to watch MB burn as you load some homepages.

So to do my part I installed Wordpress Mobile Edition and now the site has a nice little low bandwidth version for mobile access. Without changing the url.

Dotw - 1920’s Manhattan lacking bitters

agladders — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 06:33:47 +0000

Gismondi has recently been trouncing on BC’s draconian liquor laws - huge markups. Even worse, which he hasn’t been touching on, is that our liquor distribution board (LDB) doesn’t actually bring any value beyond distribution. It’s up to agents to import liquor into BC which the LDB markups up; they get their cut. And our liquor laws prohibit anyone but an agent from importing liquor in. So if I’m looking for orange bitters I basically have to make it myself. Or improvise.

The Manhattan is one of the classic martini’s. Rye, vermouth, a dash of bitters. Generally more rye than vermouth, 2:1. Except for the New 1920’s cocktail (a Manhattan) which calls for a 1:1 ratio of rye to vermouth. Unless you’re in BC and can’t get orange bitters.

So you improvise:

1 oz rye (Crown Royal, b/c we’re in Canada)
0.5 oz dry vermouth
0.5 oz orancio
perhaps a dash of benedictine for spice

And the consequences aren’t bad…

Amazon Web Services: static IP’s and geographic HA

agladders — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:25:51 +0000

Got a newsletter from AWS this morning, two great improvements that were holding me back from using it for production servers:

“elastic IP’s” = static IP’s linked to your account, so you can move them amongst instances
Availability zones = geographic high availability

Nice - we can use this for more than just development/staging now. On the fly production environments without resorting to hackery.