Even though we lived in Victoria together for 5 years (ZenWife grew up here), we continue to be shocked by the house prices. We have been cruising the real estate listings, and even accounting for the exchange rate, what we can afford sucks.
Most of the stuff is 1970s nightmare cookie-cutter homes with no personality and even less yard.
It’s a wonder that they can get anyone to move here.
Technorati Tags: Victoria, BC, Real Estate
For those of you in the US who are not blessed with a way to tap into the Canadian feeds from the World Cup, you are missing a real treat. And you know what the treat is?
Silence.
It seems that the announcers that Rogers SportsNet and TSN have recruited to cover the games know how to keep their mouths shut and let the action unfold on the screen, with occasional salient comments on the action.
As well, the screen isn’t cluttered with useless graphics and streaming ticker notes. Just the score and a timeclock in the top left corner that disappears, and re-appears in about 2-minute intervals.
Sometimes, just letting the game unfold is the best way to enjoy the beauty and skill of the teams.
Technorati Tags: World Cup, Canada, USA, Rogers SportsNet, TSN
We have survived the wedding. Actually, I make it sound like it was a trial, but it was, in fact, a rather pleasant experience, even for an introvert such as myself. Beautiful setting out at Starling Lane Winery (I highly recommend the Blackberry Port).
Being in Victoria and area has reminded all of us why we love it here; and why we need to move back sooner, rather than later. Not only is Canada a far more civilized country than the United States, Victoria is a far more livable place than Massachusetts. We even did the rounds of some open houses today, reminding ourselves that although this is a far more livable place, the architecture for homes during the period the area was most intensely developed (1945-1980) was brain-damaged, if not completely diseased.
But the benefits are beyond count. An unseasonable warm day is 90F, with very low humidity. Humidity comes in the winter, in the form of rain, rather than snow. We are in plant zone 6-7 (and some 8), which for the gardeners in the crowd means that plants grow here far more abundantly than you could ever dream of in Massachusetts.
And the people are friendly. The gerneralization made about the people of Massachusetts towards outsiders are, in most cases, true. Unless you have lived in Massachusetts for 2-3 generations, you are treated as a newcomer, and should be either shunned or completely distrusted. We have encountered some notable exceptions, but they are few and far between.
So yes, a return to Victoria is definitely beginning to take shape.
Technorati Tags: Victoria, BC, Canada, lifestyle, Winery, Massachusetts
I have just disabled the PubSub measurements being taken for GrabPERF. Got an e-mail from Bob Wyman this morning saying that he wasn’t sure how much longer the site would be running.
As well, this means that the New York PubSub measurement location will disappear shortly. I will be disabling it shortly.
Google Checkout is out and the interesting thing is that many of the shops that are listed as signing up for it are hosted by GSI Commerce. No mention of a partnership deal, however.
Technorati Tags: Google Checkout, GSI Commerce
Yup, we made it to Victoria. It was a 23-hour marathon that involved:
And then today, I blew up my father-in-law’s router doing an upgrade. had to do a downgrade to get it to work, but i may be buying him a new one.
Tomorrow, I will be rested and want to do something besides sleep and try and keep in touch with the world.
I am still swamped at work, but I have a glimmer of space available to me, so I thought that I would drop by and let everyone know what’s happening.
We are well on our way to being ready for the trip to BC and Alberta that starts Monday (June 26). We have a dining room full of luggage, and have a lot of information concerning travelling with Miss Wiggles. It’s been nearly 3 years since I was “home” to Victoria, so it will be fun to scout out and see what’s changed since the last visit.
As a sidenote, if anyone in the Victoria, BC area wants to do a meetup while I am in town, I would be happy to attend — need some lovely beer from Swan’s or Spinnaker’s.
GrabPERF continues to chug along almost completely unmanaged. One tiny improvement I made to scatter plot is the only code change in months. If things settle down at work (not likely until we get an extra body in here to support me), I will be updating some of the measurement code and back-end systems. Until I have time to go through a formal review process, the system is in maintenance mode.
While I am on vacation, I will likely been able to write some more; lot’s of thoughts on IIS 5.0, Net Neutrality, Firefly, and other things that are deeply buried right now.
Technorati Tags: Victoria, BC, Alberta, Canada, Vancouver Island, GrabPERF
The news that Bob Wyman posted today (here) hit me hard. Bob was one of the first folks to see the value in GrabPERF, and to put his own money where his mouth was (as well as helping to host a GrabPERF measurement location).
I have valued his advice and support over the last year.
Best of luck, Bob. You and PubSub deserve better.
I am doing a brief study on something I have noticed in a couple of sites running Windows 2000 Server and IIS/5.0, most notably with server-based SSL in place. In order to verify my findings, I need a larger subset of sites/servers to gather data from.
If you have such a site, please leave me a comment.
Technorati Tags: Windows Server 2000, IIS 5, IIS/5.0, SSL, Web performance
Made a simple change to the Scatter Plot graphs today. Any measurement greater than 180 seconds (3 minutes) is flagged as an error in this view.
Why?
Thank PodTech. Som of their measurements were coming in at an insane 500 seconds plus this morning, and my graphing package couldn’t handle the scaling of data between 0.5 and 1400 seconds.
Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web performance, Scatter Plot