Zero gravity would make me happy

Remember when you were a child, and all you wanted to be was an astronaut so you could go into space and flow?

Well, Rick Mercer reminds us exactly why we had that childhood fantasy. Rick does a zero gravity flight, and by the look on his face it looks like the most fun thing ever.

Seriously, have you ever seen ANY grown man look like he is having as much fun as this guy?



I'm so jealous.

Welcome to Winter

I've got some winter pictures here that I took not last year, but about 10 minutes ago.

It's October 21st for Pete's sake, not even Halloween yet! It's been years since I've seen snow stick before Christmas.

I guess that's what I get for moving to Barrie :)

iPhone-ish Blackberry revealed prematuraly ... in a bad way

Arguably the most anticipated phone after the iPhone is the Blackberry version of a full screen phone. Do a Google search on "Blackberry Thunder" and you'll see rumours back to April or so.

Today the first ever Blackberry Thunder video was leaked on youtube, showing how it works. It is indeed very "iPhone-ish". Some guy with a really annoying voice has a turtle neck pulled up around his face to conceal his identity (poorly). Skip directly to minute 2:55 to see the Blackberry Thunder portion of the video.



Normally, this kind of pre-exposure can actually fuel the hunger for this type of device as it circulates wildly around the internet.

However, this problem is, the introducation of this phone comes not with excitement and praise, but with the words: "I don't like it".

Ouch, RIM has to find some way to counter this bad PR and fast. The intro to the iPhone was like a shock and awe campaign, while RIM gets "I don't like it".

Listen up RIM, your phone may not be ready yet, but you've got to hold a press conference on this thing pronto with a bit of fanfare before the words "I don't like it" become the primary marketing slogan for your phone!

I found a Facebook security hole... sort of

I think I just stumbled upon a fairly big security hole in Facebook.

The other day I mysteriously started receiving these really bizarre text messages on my phone along the lines of the following:

Facebook msg from Jimmy-Joe Bobkins
(Espanola High School)
Subj: hey

"yo homeslice
tried calling you
maybe your out with the boy :D
haha"

"Wierd" I thought. I chalked it up to some dude in Mexico trying to send out mass txt messages to see who would reply so he could scam them. I ignored it.

The next day the messages continued with content like:

"sooo anyways preetty bored , wondering what you were up to, anywayss call
me, lover"
"Umm not that i no of"
"Umm perhaps"
"Lmao"
"sorry"
"Haha no"

Clearly there was some sort of conversation going on there that I was not a part of... but somehow was landing on my phone. What the heck was going on?

I looked up Espanola high school and lo and behold, it wasn't in Mexico at all but rather in a nearby little town. Why would a mass txt message spammer/phisher be based out of Espanola?

Then it hit me, I moved recently and had signed up for a new phone number. I must be getting these facebook messages from whomever had this phone number before me!

Then I realized that if somebody got MY old cell phone number, they would be receiving MY facebook messages!

I quickly logged onto facebook, and changed my profile to update my cell phone number for forwarding txt messages. That should stop somebody else from getting my txt messages. I think it will also stop me from getting these mystery text messages, because I could no longer get the second half of messages when I replied with 'n' to get the remainder of truncated messages.

So, if you use facebook and you change cell numbers, lookout, somebody might be reading your mail!

Cool "who won the olympics" widget

Thanks to "morejamesmore" who pointed out this medal counter after reading my last post. It will calculate medals won per million people, and medals won per trillion GDP.

The results seem to come up a bit different than mine, so I don't know what's up with that, but it's pretty cool.

Olympic medals per capita

We've all seen the Summer Olympic 2008 medal count, with China and the United states and Russia dominating the top spots, and everybody else way behind.

Canada sits at either 19th or 14th place, depending on if you think the rank is by the number of medals, or the number of gold medals.

Well, this doesn't seem exactly fair to me, as the US has 10x the population of Canada, and China has nearly 20% of the world's population!

So, I decided to waste a significant portion of my afternoon to determine who won when we consider the population of the country. So, I looked up all the medal rankings and the population of all the countries, and used "medals per 100M people" as my metric.

If you're a sucker for detail, the full results can be found here, but I will try to summarize them.

The results are as follows (Out of 87 Countries that won at least 1 medal):

1. Bahamas - 604 medals per 100M people
2. Iceland - 331
3. Slovenia - 248
4. New Zealand - 218
5 Norway - 216
6. Australia - 215
7. Cuba - 210
8. Armenia - 199
9. Belarus - 195
10. Estonia - 151

35. Canada - 54
36. Russia - 50
45. USA - 45
68. China - 7.5
87. India - 0.3 (Out of 87 countries that won a medal)

So, for Canada there is some good news/bad news here. Overall, we actually rank WORSE on a per capita basis, but we did beat the top three countries of USA, China and Russia, so that's kind of nice.

But wait a minute here, the Bahamas, Iceland and Slovenia won the olympics?! Bahamas and Iceland have populations of just over 300,000, but won 2 and 1 medals respectively. These small populations kind of throw the statistics off a bit.

So, lets say to "qualify" to be in the top ranking group, you have to win at least 5 medals.

The ranking then change slightly (Out of 41 countries that won at least 5 medals):
1. Slovenia - 248
2. New Zealand - 218
3 Norway - 216
4. Australia - 215
5. Cuba - 210
6. Armenia - 199
7. Belarus - 195
8. Georgia - 129
9. Denmark - 128
10. Croatia - 111

25. Canada - 54
26. Russia - 50
31. USA - 45
39. China - 7.5

A few interesting things to note:

• I thought Canada might do better on a per-capita basis, we actually do worse. In the end we are somewhere in the top third.
• China is almost dead last on a per capita basis.
• Georgia, which is currently in a state of quasi-war, managed to still be one of the best performing countries.
• Slovenia is a tiny country of just over 2M people that managed to pull off 5 medals. Kudos.
• Of the top 20 countires, all but Australia (21M), Cuba (11M) and Belarus (9M) have a population under 5.5M.
• Cuba beat the USA. That's funny to me.

After going through this, it got me thinking, what other insteresting ways might there be to determine who "won" the olympics?

• Break the countries into divisions based on population. (I.e. "heavyweight" division would include China, India, USA, Russia, etc..., "Middle weight" would include Canada, Netherlands, Malaysia, Australia, etc... "Lightweight" would include Iceland, Slovenia, Bahamas, etc...)
• Who won on a medal-per-GDP basis?
• What's the per capita ranking of the G8
• To account for the amount of "summerness" that each country has , what is the per capita ranking when grouped by distance from the equator?

Mac + Vista + Parallels + Bootcamp + Virtual Machine ... Just don't do it

I'm in week 2 or 3 of my new "Mac" life now, and definitely appreciating some of the finer points of owning a Mac.

However, I do need some windows apps on a fairly regular basis, so I decided to load Windows on as well. There are a few options available to those who want to run windows on a Mac:

1. Use Max "Leopard's" built in "Boot-camp" feature that lets you boot into Windows. This feature is fairly solid, as it gives you a reliable version of windows that uses the full power of your Mac's hardware. The obvious downfall is that you don't have access to your Mac applications unless you reboot into the Mac OS. ALSO, you can't install Windows XP if it's only service pack 1. Bummer, because that's what I had a disk for.
   
2. Use a program like parallels or fusion to create a "virtual PC" and run windows. While running your Mac. This is great because you can run everything at once. The downside is that your computer takes a bit of a performance hit, particularly since you have to "allocate" a certain portion of your RAM and video ram to the windows partition. So if you're running Vista, unless you have at least 2 GB of RAM, you're going to feel the pain. You can also run ANY version of windows, even windows 95 or DOS if you feel particularly nostalgic. Also, unlike boot-camp, you don't have to repartition a portion of your hard drive and allocate it to windows.
   
3. Parallels has a feature where you can use Boot-camp AND a virtual machine, so that you can run a version of windows while running your mac, OR if you want to go full speed, then you can ALSO run the same image of windows in Boot-camp. Presumably, this would give you the best of both worlds.

I was ambitious and opted for running boot-camp & a virtual machine, with Vista. I thought it would be great.

I was wrong.

The reality is, you lose a lot of the benefits of a virtual machine when you do it off of a boot-camp image, such as being able to "pause" the VM, take "snapshots" of the VM (easy backup), being able to "hard reboot" windows and sharing the same files on the desktop and "My documents folders".

So, when Vista would crash or freeze or slow down or run out of video memory (which would be fairly frequently), it would bring the Mac down with it, and I could reboot my mac. ARG! All the benefits of windows, but all it's problems too! This is accentuated by the fact that VISTA is a memory hog, so to try and get it to run better, you have to give it more RAM, which in turn makes your Mac run slower.

Another problem is that if Windows crashes in VM mode, then you can't reboot it in boot-camp mode, and vice versa. You have to reboot it in the mode that it crashed, then turn it off again and reboot to go into the mode you wanted.

My final solution: I'm going to keep running vista, because it's kind of nifty and apparently it's the "future", but only in boot camp mode. If I come across any processor hungry apps (games maybe?) that require windows, then I'll boot into Boot-camp Vista.

I will run my copy of windows XP in VM mode only. It's less of a memory hog so I shouldn't see too much of a hit on my system performance, and I'll be able to run all of my windows apps while in my Mac.

My biggest problem with this solution is that I'm going to have to install all my applications twice. This will be a problem for any apps that have single computer validated license keys (such as business versions of MS Office).

I'll let you know how it goes.

An interesting note: I started installing XP when I started writing this article, and it just finished now. That took about a quarter of the time it normally takes to install XP on a PC!

New Mac User: Day 1

After a year of internal debate, I finally jumped ship to a Mac yesterday. I ended up with a Macbook. After my first day, here are a former PC-er's first impressions:

The Good

• An amoeba could set up a wireless network connection
• It's shiny
• Mac's way of selecting from all your open windows (expose) is WAY better than Vista's fancy but useless cascading windows feature
• Really easy to set up my bluetooth devices
• Configuring the system is fun and straightforward (there's no "Apply" button)
• Built in apps are much much much better than their built in windows equivalents (mail vs. outlook express, itunes vs. media player, imovie vs. movie maker, iphoto vs. windows file system, dashboard vs. MS widgits, spotight vs. buried search)
• Macs extra apps are nifty (garageband & photobooth are fun, calendar can import web calendars, time machine is much more than a "backup" program)
• Surprise surprise, MS Messenger IS available on the Mac
  

The Bad

• The keyboard isn't quite responsive enough
• Macbook pro get's REALLY hot
• Right clicking doesn't work until you change your system preferences
• You can only resize your windows with the bottom right-hand corner of the window
• Safari browser... Why bother when there's Firefox?
  

The Confusing

• File menus show up at the top of the screen, not the app. I couldn't figure out how to find the settings on any of my apps for the first two hours of ownership.
  
• What's with the "squiggly key"?
  
• File system looks like my iPod... weird.
• .dmg files vs. .exe files and "Mounting" programs as devices instead of installing them
• My regularly used shortcut and navigation keys are all different
  

As "easy" as the mac is purported to be... it definitely takes some getting used to for someone born and bred with a PC, but it is fun. It's kind of like learning to ride a bike again. I'm sure I'll have it figured out soon.

Is New York the natural "disaster-movie" site?

I just finished watching "I am Legend", a movie which features the total destruction of New York (and borrows heavily from 28 days later, castaway & Signs) and realized that I've seen a lot of "destroy New York" scenes in the movies and TV.

You might think that in a post-911 world, the annihilation of New York would be off-limits, but not so. The practice of destroying New York was fairly fashionable pre-911 and today it seems even more popular.

I believe that there are a few reasons for this:

1. Landmarks include times square, the empire state building and the statue of liberty, what other city can match that? (Maybe London and Paris...)
2. The city is really a symbol of man's power in the world, thus it's destruction represents man's weakness
3. Emotional resonance: you either live there, or have at least one relative/friend who does
4. The arch-rival of Los Angeles (i.e. Hollywood)... is New York.
   

Here's a list of "New York Destruction" flicks I could come up with, am I missing any?

Pre 911

• Deep Impact [Asteroid]
• The Siege [Terrorism]
  
• Independence Day [Alien Invasion]
  
• AI - Artificial Intelligence [Global Warming]
• Planet of the Apes [Smart Apes]

Post 911

• The day after tomorrow [Global Warming]
  
• An inconvenient Truth [Global Warming]
• Heroes, Season 1 [Nuclear Explosion]
  
• Heroes, Season 2 [Deadly Virus]
  
• I am Legend [Deadly Virus]
• Cloverfield [destruction method unknown] (not yet released)
• United 93 & World Trade Center [Terrorism]
• War of the Worlds [Alien Invasion] (Well... it's in New Jersey, but that's just across the river)

Honorable mentions for partial destruction:

• Godzilla, King Kong, Gangs of New York, Armageddon, Ghostbusters I & II