If anyone knows of a company in the Vancouver-area on the lookout for a tech support/network admin-type, I’d sure appreciate hearing about it.  Thanks.  I’m looking at getting into a few more social networks, in particular LinkedIn, to see if that will open up some opportunities.

Other than that, I’ve been taking a fair number of photos with the K100D, and I’m looking at setting up a photo blog.  I’ll post more about that when there’s more to see there.  And of course, CanuckNation.ca is still going strong - in fact, we’re now listed on the Canucks Fanzone site.

Other than that, there’s not much around.  I’m in the process of getting caught up on my feed reading, and anything I find to be post worthy will appear when I come across it.

For the last couple of years, CanuckNation.ca has been hosted on a box in the server room at my place of employment, which, without a doubt, has some benefits.  The cost (zero) being the most beneficial.  However, the biggest drawback is that when the power goes down in this area, it always seems to be late on a Friday, which means that there’s no one in the building to reboot the machine when the power comes back on until sometime Monday morning.  Being that the machine doesn’t host any business-critical sites (internal or external), it’s not high on the priority-list to get back online.

In the past this hasn’t been so much of a problem, but the power seems to be a little more flaky lately, and it’s gone down at least twice recently, once for a whole weekend like I mentioned above.  I don’t make a whole lot of money with the site, but it’ll be a lot tougher to make more when it suffers extended periods of downtime.  So, the other night, I decided to move the site to BlueFur, which is where my other sites are hosted.

I exported the blog in Wordpress, and configured a new one on BlueFur, and finally got around to importing the file into the new site.  Changed the DNS records, and had a look at the new version of CanuckNation.  Hmmm….why wasn’t the theme information included in the export?  For some reason I thought that it would be.  Not that big of a problem though - just download the theme info from the old site and FTP it to BlueFur. 

Then I realized that the information in my sidebar widgets also wasn’t exported.  This wasn’t good, because when I tried to get to the site using it’s exact addressing scheme, it still redirected to the new site.  So I had to change the DNS records again, setting them back to the original site, and wait for that to propagate out so that I could get back into the original host.  I then went into the widget settings and copied all of the individual widget info to a text editor that I could just paste back into the new host.  A pain, but not the end of the world.

Then it was time to change the DNS settings yet again, pointing them again, to BlueFur, and waiting again for the propagation to occur.  Once that was done, I set up the sidebars the way that they had been on the original site and had another look.  Everything was perfect, except for the fact that my links (blogroll) hadn’t moved either.  Being the rather extensive list that it was, I check the Wordpress export plug-in, and found that, no, it doesn’t actually export the list.  So it was gone, unless I decided to go back and repeat what I’d just done with the widget settings.

Which I’m not going to do.  Too much downtime in such a short period of time wasn’t something I was willing to put people through, so I’m going to rebuild the list.  A number of them may have turned out to be dead links, or not the best sources of information anyway.

Now I’m in the process of drafting a checklist for myself on what I need to do before moving a blog to a new host.  Hopefully I won’t need it anytime soon, but once I get it done, I’ll post it here for anyone who might be interested.  Or if someone knows of a link to one that’s already been done, I’d sure appreciate a chance to have a look.

Let’s get it straight that this is not to lessen the events that happened on September 11, 2001.  That was obviously a huge tragedy, but September 11 happens to be a great day for me as it’s the day that my wife and I got engaged, albeit in 1997, not 2001.

Every year we make the trip back to the spot in Old Orchard Park out in Port Moody where we got engaged, and mark the passing of another year together.  It’s a place where we’ve gone a lot in the last twenty years, and it’s one of our favourite spots that isn’t in downtown Vancouver.  We’ve done the walk all the way around to Rocky Point more times than I can count, although we didn’t get a chance to do it this year.

Luckily the weather was great, though, and I was able to get some great shots, including the one above.

If you’re looking for a place to get out of the city and have some quiet time, you’d be hard pressed to find a better spot than either Rocky Point or Old Orchard Park.

So, here’s the steps…

Open the tools menu       

Click on Options, which will bring up the Options box.  Select the Minor Tweaks tab:

Now click on Show saved passwords

And finally, you’ll see a list of all of the passwords that Chrome has saved for you.

If you highlight one of these sites, and click on the Show Password button, right underneath it, your password will appear.  Like I said, great if you’re the type of person who can’t remember your passwords, but just be aware that this feature exists if you’re on a machine that a number of different people use.  Or on the Options page, tell Chrome to never remember your passwords.

And before someone starts screaming about how Google is putting out an insecure browser, be aware that Firefox does the exact same thing.  So it really comes down to your comfort level.  If you’re the only one who’s ever going to have access to your machine, it’s probably not going to be an issue.  But it’s still something that you need to be aware of.

This upgrade fixes a potentially ‘irritating’ issue if you use open registration on your Wordpress blog.  This issue would allow a user, using a specially formed username to change another registered user’s password to something completely random.  The attacker would never see what this random password is, so they wouldn’t be able to login as the other user, but it would still turn out to be a headache for the blog’s admin.  So from Wordpress’ standpoint, it’s not actually a security issue, as the attacker isn’t able to do anything with any other account other than change the password.

So if you’re not using on your site, you don’t have to rush out and get the latest download, but if you are, it’s recommend that you do so as soon as possible.  But it never hurts to be running the latest version at any time, does it?

His first court appearance was last Tuesday, but he was a no-show.  The report was that he had become sick while in custody, and was actually in the hospital, but a second date was set for yesterday.  Local TV showed his lawyer arriving at the courthouse to meet his client (he couldn’t have gone to the hospital?) but, again, he didn’t show up.  Still in hospital, the reports said.

So a third date was set for today, but his lawyer has already confirmed that his client won’t be making an appearance today either, although he’ll be meeting with his client, and enter a plea on the Friday. 

To be honest, I don’t know if the families of the victims were in the court earlier in the week to get a look at the man that changed their lives forever, but don’t they have the right to do so?  Shouldn’t the accused be present as well?  The mysterious illness that Mr. Irving is suffering from has certainly been kept quiet by the media, who don’t give the impression that they’ve tried to find out a whole lot about the man, other than what the police have made available.

Perhaps there’s a reason for all of this, but it certainly can’t make things easier for the families of Maija-Liisa Corbett and Hyeshim Oh to keep having things delayed like this. 

It’s time to start the process, so that they can attempt to pick up and move on from this terrible tragedy.

Coquitlam River Park

Obviously the whole idea stems from the fact that September is when school starts, and it’s a chance to make new resolutions about how you’re going to focus on the coming year, and do the best work that you can, but it also used to be a time of new cars, and the new TV season, which, while less important, was still a regular occurrence when I was a kid.

And the start of the hockey season doesn’t seem like it’s a million years from now anymore.

It’s the season of change, with the run-up to Christmas starting (somewhat) in earnest a little earlier each year.

So, it’s time to make a few resolutions. Public ones. I’m going to increase my blog readership (both traffic wise, and in the number of RSS subscribers), both here and CanuckNation.ca. I’m going to start losing the weight that I should have for a couple of years now. I’m going to improve my PHP, Wordpress and HTML skills. Make myself more marketable.

I think that’ll about do it for now, anyway. I’m sure I’ll think of other things.

But that definitely doesn’t mean, "Not Ever", because I like some of the things that Google has done here.  First up, it’s a tabbed browser, and if it hadn’t been, that would have been the deal killer right there.  A non-tabbed browser is no longer an option, and hasn’t been for years.

Secondly, it’s fast.  Particularly on sites like Google Reader, and Gmail.  Not that they’ve been optimized for Chrome or anything like that, mind you, but those sights tend to have a much cleaner, streamlined interface, which is going to cut down on load times, etc.

Some things are going to take a  little getting used to, such as the lack of extensions and mouse gestures that can be configured in Firefox, but it’s nice to see that things like CTRL-T work for opening a new tab, the same as Firefox and IE.

And I absolutely love the ‘Create Application Shortcuts’ option.  Essentially, this will allow you to save a website (Gmail for example) as a standalone application, that’ll put an icon on the desktop, quick launch bar, or start menu.  Click on that icon, and up comes your Gmail.  If you’re a fan of Mozilla’s Prism app, which essentially does the same thing, you’ll love this too.

Is it going to steal market share from Firefox?  Some, maybe, but not very much.  However, it probably will take a little more from Microsoft, and the IE market share.  It’s a clean, streamlined, simple browser to use, and if that’s what you’re looking for after dealing with a lot of bloat in your web browser, than Chrome might be just what you’re looking for.

Give it a try, and I’d love to hear feedback.

First up was heading into town to catch the sunset at English Bay. We got there a little later than we intended - almost 8:00pm - so the sun was already almost gone when we got there, but I was able to get a shot or two before the sun was completely gone.

Sunset at English Bay

After that we spent time wandering around the West End, eventually winding up at the Comox Road Long Bar and Grill at the Coast Hotel. Good food, and good music. We’ll be looking to head back there for a weekend sometime in the near future.

About 11:00 or so we drove back to English Bay, parked the car and walked down onto the beach and watched the waves pound in while sitting against one of the logs. We couldn’t see anything towards the water, but that wasn’t the point. After we got back in the car, we noticed a skunk waddling across the road and heading in the direction we’d just come from. I’ve seen three skunks in my life, all in the West End. Not where I thought I’d see them, that’s for sure.

Not yet wanting to head home, we crossed the Granville Street Bridge and parked by the water at Vanier Park, amazed at just how windy it had gotten. We sat there for about an hour, watching boats practice maneuvers on the water.

Now it was coming up on 1:00am, so it was time to head home. Maybe it wasn’t the most exciting night - out at the clubs or anything like that, but it used to be the kind of night that we used to have - and we definitely missed it.

It’s something we’ve got to do more often. S’good for ya.

Apparently he kept going through the restaurant until he hit the back wall, so it wasn’t a matter of inattention on his part, but police haven’t said yet whether or not the act was intentional or whether there may have been a medical event that led to the crash.  However, the fact that the driver was arrested, and not taken to hospital would tend to discount the chance that he’d had a heart attack, stroke, etc.

A single photograph and more details are available at GlobalTVBC.com

Ironically, about two years ago, almost the same thing happened at the Quiznos right next door to the sushi restaurant, when a driver accidentally pulled forward and pushed a woman standing out front of the Quiznos through the front window, killing her.

I’ll post more details as they become available.