Using up Low Balance VISA Gift Cards

You have a $25 VISA gift card and after some purchases, there's now $1.17 left on it. How do you use it up? You can't get a Starbucks coffee with that, and it's a low enough amount that you (ok, I) would not be comfortable asking a server to put towards a restaurant bill.

I recently received my Square credit card reader, and it just occurred to me that this would be a good way to transfer the remaining balance to my bank account! Turns out other people think so too. I think the only constraint is that the minimum payment Square takes is $1.

Another thought was to donate these odd balances to charity, and I found a reference for that too. Not sure if all charities would allow these.

Finally, figure out what to do with these balances early! I dug up two cards I had from two years ago, checked their balances, and they're all empty now. It turns out the fine print says that a $2 maintenance fee will be deduced starting seven months after the card purchase.

Mysteriously Waking Laptop

I always put my Windows 7 laptop to sleep when I'm done using it. On rare occasions, I've noticed it mysteriously powering up, doing something with the disk, then shutting itself off. I've always wondered if there was some kind of remote access waking the machine up to exchange some data. When I see it happening, I even check the webcam light to make sure it's not secretly taking pictures! :-)

Finally, I witnessed this behaviour again this morning. I don't know why I've never thought of this before - I checked the system log for entries around the time this happened. Turns out it was something called 'S4 Doze to Hibernation'.

Turns out this is a feature of Sleep. I've always thought of Sleep as Standby but it's not quite the same -- by default, Sleep will stand-by for 6 hours, after which it Hibernates.

I've always complained about the random time it takes to wake my laptop from sleep -- sometimes, it's instantaneous; other times, it takes forever. This feature would explain it. If it has to restore from hibernation, it would definitely be slower.

Thanks to this post for explaining the mystery and showing how to change the setting!

Point-and-Click Escape Games are Great!

Point-and-click games are the ones in which you find yourself in a room or place, and have to go around looking for items or clues that will help you unlock doors or solve a chain of puzzles that would ultimately lead to your escape. I really enjoy them, and wanted to post a couple of resources that I've been using to find these games.

CTV's Kris Abel used to point one out every No Escape Friday. It looks like this isn't an active focus for him anymore, but it remains a great place to browse. Once in a while, he would also post a game that might not be filed under the 'escape' category but is still enjoyable, such as the recent Ugly American - Citizen Ugly.

Jay is Games is another great resource. On top of listing games, this site also hosts walkthroughs, which you can consult when you're really stuck in a game.

Try one... you might like it!

Lunar Eclipse

My apartment faces east and I was able to see the lunar eclipse from my balcony. It might be hard to see, but the lower left hand corner of the moon is being blocked out by the Earth. The silhouette you see is of the building across the street.



This was taken at around 19:12 MST on 2008/02/20.

Later, the moon turned a red-ish colour:



This was taken at around 20:19 MST on 2008/02/20.

New cars and track in Forza Motorsport 2

New cars and the Road America track were just made available to download in Forza Motorsport 2. It's cool to be able to purchase and download new content through Xbox Live, but I think I'm not going to be able to keep track of just how much money I've put into this game soon! :-)

One of the new cars is the 1973 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, which I attempted to drift for fun:



I like this shot because it shows a curved trail of smoke on top of the trail of rubber!

Police Recruit Graduation at Mewata Armouries

Kevin graduated from CPS Class #169 on Friday at Mewata Armouries. I've never actually been inside before, so it was pretty neat. Too bad I only realized you can go upstairs for a better view after the ceremony.



The mayor was there, the press was there, ... so it was a pretty big deal. Congratulations Kevin!

Outdoor Paintball

Johnson invited me to play paintball with his classmates and friends. It was my first time and it was pretty good! We went to an outdoor field east of Cochrane and played around four games.



What appears to be "plenty" of old tires and trees for cover quickly turns out to be inadequate for this beginner -- there never seems to be an appropriate "next cover" to move to.

Getting hit was actually not that bad, although I don't think any of my hits were from up close. One in the arm, one on a finger, one grazed my leg, and one in my back. It's all good.

For $52, I got camouflage coveralls (less worries about getting paint on your clothes and awesome for sliding and crawling around on the grass), paintball mask (gets hot, slides around on your face, and doesn't work all that great with glasses... but you need it), a gun (in this case a Level 2), and paintballs (400 for this price). Unlimited compressed air top-up's, free hot dogs, and free water/crystal-drinks.

Snowing Upwards

I'm not sure if everyone who lives in Calgary gets a chance to see this, so I took a video back in 2007/03. It shows snow "falling" upwards, which is pretty neat. This was taken from the 28th floor in a downtown building.

Trip Out East

August 2007: Johnson and I flew out to Toronto to visit Rob and Jeremy. It was a week of hanging out, doing stuff, sight-seeing, good food, and most importantly -- good friends. Some highlights...

A Dodge Callebaut (Dodge Caliber) as a rental car (Rob also called out a Mitsubishi Galaxy [Gallant]). The Caliber sounded really weird when you give it more gas, until we figured out that it has a continuous-variable transmission.



I cooked lunch one day and no one was poisoned. Johnson cooked for us that night:



Johnson and I downloaded as many crappy demos as we could find on Rob's Xbox 360.



We went to see Jeremy win a hockey game at Rinx:



Drove to Montreal. Actually, we managed to drive right through Montreal by accident, and had to turn back to get to our hotel.



We stayed right by the Guy Favreau Complex, and thus was born Rob's favourite French phrase ever:



Went to Centre Island in Toronto:



Being challenged by the maze on the island:



Rob denies plugging up Jeremy's toilet:



Getting wet at Niagara Falls:



And basically, our whole trip was 'sponsored' by Starbucks... I'm pretty sure we had at least one a day. :-)

Accessing Digital Media from the Xbox 360

Is your Xbox 360 hooked up to the biggest TV and the best audio system in the house? If so, you might want to browse the videos, pictures, and music stored on your other computer. I thought you have to run Windows Media Center for this to be possible, but it turns out you can just run something called TVersity.

Install it, then use the provided user interface to pick which files/folders are available for browsing.

Once you get this running, how will your Xbox 360 know that it's there? The Xbox 360 looks for a media server broadcasting its presence on the network. For this to work:

• The Xbox 360 and your computer have to be 'on the same network'. I don't know exactly what this means (same subnet?), but basically, if both of these are going through the same router, you're ok.
• The computer's firewall needs to allow this new type of network traffic. On Windows XP, these are called Exceptions. There're two exceptions:
  • uPnP Framework (TCP 2869 and UDP 1900) - this entry's probably already there but might not be enabled yet
  • TVersity Media Server (TCP 41952) - you have to add this port yourself

At this point, you should be able to browse media through the Xbox 360 Dashboard menus. Instead of picking Console, pick Computer. If all is well, you should then see something like 'TVersity on XXX', where XXX is the identity/name of your computer.

Good luck!

BBQ at Mahdi's

Back in August, Mahdi invited a bunch of us over for a BBQ.



Thanks man!

Shooting Firearms in California

When I relocated to San Bruno back in 2001, I had to write the driver's test to get my California driver's license. I often tell the story about how I was reading the driver handbook and came across a section in the book which had to explicitly tell the reader that it's illegal to shoot firearms at traffic signs. It was amusing to me as an outsider because it reflected, accurately or inaccurately, the kind of place I was moving to.

Anyway, I've told this anecdote so many times that I started to wonder if I just made it all up. Luckily, I was digging through things in my study a few days ago and found a copy of the California Driver Handbook 2000. There it is on page 29:

Parallels between Harry Potter and Naruto

Some weeks ago, I saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Possible spoilers about the movie ahead!

Towards the end of the movie, Dumbledore and Voldemort duel with high-level magic spells. It was pretty exciting. I remember sitting there and being strangely reminded of this fight in Naruto between the Third Hokage and Orochimaru. It was awesome because both were using high-level jitsu's.

So I looked it up, and it seems I wasn't alone in making that connection. Thought I'd share a couple of pages I came across:

• An analysis about the two worlds and the parallels between many of the characters.
• A forum post which draws parallels between Orochimaru and Voldemort, with theoretical discussion about who would win in a fight.

Neat stuff!

Finally Purchased a Xbox 360

Recently, my friends executed their evil ploy of giving me a video game for a game system which I don't own. The game was Forza Motorsport 2. I played the original so much on the original Xbox that I just had to play this one, so I finally bought a Xbox 360 last night.

I hooked it up to my LCD TV and found that the TV was capable of doing 1080i, which looks very nice. Love the wireless controller (you should've seen the mess of cables when there're four of us playing Halo 2 with headset splitters!). Not sure why the 20 GB hard drive came with half the capacity already used up, but whatever (apparently, there's space reserved for emulators and CD databases).



Forza Motorsport 2 has been great so far! You can "feel" and hear the tires as you speed through the turns. There is now a 'photo mode' where you pause the scene and can freely place a camera to take a shot of the action. To get that photo onto your computer though, you have to go through a two-step process:

1. Upload the photo from the game.
2. On your computer, download the photo from the website (by signing in with your Live ID).

The picture above is an example. It's one of me attempting to drift my first career car (1990 RX-7) through a corner. Whee!

Authoring DVD's on Windows

Kevin brought over some edited video footage on his laptop. Our goal was to put that on a DVD so that he can just pop it into anyone's DVD player. Since my computer has a DVD burner, this should be a piece of cake, right?

Apparently not. Even though my machine came with Roxio Creator Plus (Dell Edition), it only allowed me to make data and audio discs. Windows XP comes with Movie Maker, but that only does video editing. To get that video onto a DVD, put in chapters, make DVD menus, and so on, I need DVD authoring software. This is probably where Mac owners laugh and point to the iDVD that comes with their computer.

After a lot of searching, I came across DVD Styler. You can drag-and-drop your video clips (MPEG or VOB) into it, then slap some text buttons onto the main menu page and assign them to play the different clips. I followed the PDF guide and quickly created a simple DVD.

When you're ready to make the final DVD, the tool creates an ISO file. This is an image file which Roxio (and probably most programs that come with your burner) can burn to a disc. I popped that into my DVD player and it worked!

So far, I've only played with short low-res video clips, so I'm not sure whether there's anything to watch out for when working on bigger projects with this tool. When I have the chance later, I'll definitely try it out.

ThoughtBoarder Kicking Horse

ThoughtWorks had its annual snowboarding trip at Kicking Horse again this year. We had four condo units for three nights. It was great to sleep in, play Xbox 360, and spend some time on the hills with my co-workers.





There were so many cameras around this time that I barely took any pictures. Check out these huge icicles just outside the front door of our "party house"!



Or how about this amazing view from the top -- mountain peaks jutting out of a sea of clouds!

Photos from Johnson's Birthday

Johnson and Erin celebrated their birthdays at the Toad and Turtle. Here're some pictures from that night!

Zoolights

Every year, the Calgary Zoo is decorated with Christmas lights. This year, Kevin invited me to check them out with his family and Sylvia, and I got to take some photos. Since they're all night shots, lots of them turned out too fuzzy, but one of them turned out pretty well.