After several no-vacation years, I ended 2008 with a (short) trip to Strasbourg, France. For much of the last year, I have started doing things that I have abandoned in the last 8 years. The year has been quite eventful, much of it not evident from the lack of posts (which I hope to correct this year). After a frantic last-minute scramble for the visa, I managed to get to Strasbourg. I managed to escape the record-breaking snowfall in Vancouver. Strasbourg was cold, really cold, but is quite beautiful during the Christmas week. ...

It lasted about 2 years. I made next to nothing, but I owe my software development career to it!

Quintessential road trip songs. The 70s rule! roadhouse blues by The doors Eyes on the road and hands upon the wheel! I can’t tell you why by Eagles Coz I really can’t tell you why! Highway Star by Deep Purple ...

To air out the feet

You should be using Open-DNS, if you answer yes to one of the following: Are you frustrated with crazy-long wait times before even the website url shows up? Is your ISP is a cheapo-*#$% using a crappy machine for DNS, and you wait enough to count the seconds between pressing enter and the little thingy on the browser status bar says “done”? Are you subject to phishing attacks? Do you want peace of mind? Do you want auto-correction of urls? Want to block your teen from accessing “excessive” porn? Do you need a new dog to carry you paper? OpenDNS is for you (well, for the dog, you’ll have to move your ass and get one yourself). It is quite trivial to setup and really speeds up your browsing speed. You can can set it up for each computer that you use, or better still, change the configuration on your router, which would apply across all machine connected through that router. ...

A Year in the Merde by Stephen Clarke rating: 5 of 5 stars If you are on your way to Paris, or on the way from Paris, or in Paris, or … nevermind… just read this book if you are associated, in any way, with Paris. You’ll love it. (If you are French, read this too, get angry, rebel and then revel in the glory! :) ) View all my reviews at goodreads. ...

Found these guys playing at commercial and Kitchener. If you wanna listen to them head out to cafe du soleil on commercial drive, Vancouver on Wednesday in the evening

Here’s the the top 3 requested features from iPhone users at large. And here’s what they thought people wanted. Some Product Manager at Apple needs to think how much this is hurting Apple’s brand. Do they want to be branded, yet again, as a company that completely ignores their customers?! At least give some indication as to why you can’t get the top three features in. Sure they have a lot of less demanding, faithful sheep in their flock, but now they are going mainstream, and they need to get their act together. Come on Apple! Stop making me feel bad about choosing a product by a company that doesn’t give shit about what I want. ...

Jamie at Home: Cook Your Way to the Good Life by Jamie Oliver rating: 3 of 5 stars Too much text and recipes are wantonly complex. A bit contrived, but not as bad as it sounds. A lot of comfort food. This book is about eating well, and not for the health conscious View all my reviews.

I got really sick of using Adobe AIR apps that take up more and more of system memory for an app that does twitter. I’ve decided to put my “coding for myself” hat on and write a QT based C++ application (that should be cross-platform). No name as yet, but I will find something soon. QtTwitter is taken. Mebbe, once I have a working version, I can get ownership of the project on google code. ...