Month: March 2006

BC Ferries: Queen of the North Sinks

The BC Ferries vessel Queen of the North ran aground and sank last night. [here]

This is one of the ferries that sails the rounte from Port Hardy to Prince Rupert through the Inside Passage. Only two passengers are unaccounted for, and they may have headed home on their own.

This is the first sinking in the history of BC Ferries, and when you consider the number of people they transport and the number of runs that they have made, this is an amazing safety record.

And, as everyone expected, the crew of the vessel responded magnificently and got all passengers off. Thankfully, it is the “slow” season, and only about 100 people were onboard; in the summer, that number would have been up to 700.

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Statcounter: I can’t get to my stats — is this a problem?

I got a comment from someone yesterday saying that they couldn’t get to their Statcounter Web site stats. I thought it was an issue on the user end and he reported that he finally got in with another browser.

Well, I just tried with all three of my browsers and I can’t get to the Statcounter stats that I pay for. This is somewhat distressing to me.

And it appears to be some form of DNS issue.

I have submitted an email to the Statcounter team and I hope to hear from them soon.

Not a good start to my Wednesday.

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Weird encounters continue…

Standing in the security line at LAX.

Me: Nice Timbuk2 bag.
Guy: How do you know about Timbuk2 bags?
Me: A lot of people I know have them. they are pretty cool. [Editor: Sorry David! When you have a crappy bag like mine, they are cool!]
Guy: Thanks! Good to hear. I own the company.

“Guy” turns out to be Marc Dwight, owner of Timbuk2.

Weird day….


Marc Dwight was no longer at Timbuk2 only a few short months later [here].

People you see in the Bay Area

Ok…I think I had a 101 moment this morning. Dave Bresci, if you’re out there, were you driving southbound on 101 on March 21 at about 7:15AM PST?

And then! I saw a former supervisor of mine at my previous company in the security line at SJC. He knew who I was but tried to ignore me. He’s not someone I would want to see, and frankly, I thought he was dead.

Weird days.

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Taquerias in San Mateo

For those of you who live or have lived in San Mateo, CA, the choice of taqueria is often a heated and divided debate. The conflict arises between proponents of Pancho Villa and La Cumbre.

I fall in the Pancho Villa camp and had my first steak and shrimp burrito in nearly 2 years. It was as good, if not better, than what I remember. It is likely that I will eat there every night on this trip.

Call me boring; but I am led by my stomach. And the steak and shrimp burrito is calling my name.

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Near Marlborough, MA and have an extra Dell Inspiron 8500/8600 battery?

I have to fly cross-country tomorrow, and the battery life on my (work-provided) Dell Inspiron 8500 is shortly longer than it takes for me to down a shot of tequila.

If you have a spare battery for this laptop that I can beg, borrow, or buy, drop me an e-mail or give me a jingle: 508.410.3865

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The Trees are Tapped

If you are a long time reader, you know that we have three very large Sugar Maples in the front yard of our house. This allows us to do our very own back to the farm routine every spring: tapping the trees and making Maple Syrup.

It sounds like a romantic exercise, and is often portrayed that way. Well, let’s shatter a few myths this morning, shall we?

First, in order to extract the sap from the trees, you have to know exactly where to drill the hole. Yes, drill into a beautiful old tree; once you get past the general tree-hugger, “trees are our friends” mindset, you realize that this is no worse than you getting a blood sample taken. In fact, all of the tap holes from last year have healed over, or couldn’t even be found.

The objective when choosing a location to tap is to find the trees arteries. I have learned the secret technique: find a spot where there in a large exposed root, and see if it traces up to a large branch. Jackpot. The best kind combine this with a line in the wood that looks exactly like Schwarzenegger’s neck veins after a couple of hours of heavy lifting.

Once the tap is hammered in and the bucket|recycled milk jug is hung from the tree, all you have to do is collect the goodness every 4-8 hours.

Now comes the paint and plaster peeling component of the job.

Maple sap contains 1 gallon of syrup for every 40 gallons of sap. This means that Samantha has been boiling the trees’ gifts to us non-stop for the last 3 days. The house is just now starting to smell like maple, as we keep supplementing our base with more and more sap.

Saving money on the humidifier, let me tell you.

The trick to doing this in a suburban neighbourhood is getting past the disbelief and concern for property values that the neighbours show. They seem to think that this harvest of nature’s bounty is unnatural and should be zoned out of existence or regulated in some way. The best way to overcome resistance is to bribe them with some of the end-product. Every neighbour we bribed in this way has smiled and started drooling when they spot the buckets on our trees.

It is a great experience, and a reminder that there is a very interesting world beyond this plastic box I pound on every day.

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This is my boss

Scott Berkun describes my manager perfectly. [here]

Sometimes I sit back and realize that the people who need to be everywhere, in every meeting, need to work 12 hours a day don’t get it.

They may be successful, but what about their rise to the top has made them models for the rest of us?

Frankly, managers that need to work the way that Scott describes strike me as models of inefficiency and ineffectiveness.

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