evanroberts.com

Back in January of this year, the BBC had an interesting article listing key events of how the price of crude oil per barrel has increased from a few dollars back in the 1970s, all the way up to $100 per barrel:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7083015.stm

This past Friday, the price of crude oil was $139 per barrel. WTF. I don’t drive, so I’m not hit by these prices (I do offer to help pay for gas for those who offer me rides, though), but it really makes me wonder how people can afford to keep using their cars.

I also find it funny how Dubya is now trying to reverse a ban on offshore drilling in an attempt to deal with the high prices Americans, and the rest of the world, face at the pumps:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7460767.stm

He calls the ban “outdated and counter-productive”. Hmmm. You know what is outdated? The constant meddling of the United States government in the affairs of foreign countries, especially in the Middle East. You know what is counter-productive? The Bush Administration and the conflicts they have started around the world, mostly in the Middle East.

Oh, and let’s not forget McCain, the rising Republican star. He is for offshore drilling (surprise!), but is also trying to reign in the environmentalists to his side by pledging a goal of 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/us/politics/19nuke.html

What is it with politicians setting goals, especially during campaign times, that far exceed the term of office they are seeking? At best, McCain (God forbid) could serve an eight year stint in the White House. Quick math puts that up until 2016. Not 2030. So… why is this a goal HE is setting? Chances are, he won’t live to see 2030 in the first place, considering he is 71. He is setting a goal of 45 nuclear reactors to be built within the next 22 years to deal with the energy crisis we’re dealing with today!? Read that again: 22 years from NOW. What kind of a pledge is that? I seriously hope American voters don’t fall for this. Lofty goals like this are only used to grab more votes, and the last thing the Republican party deserves are more votes in their favour.

Anyway, that’s enough ranting for one post. 

Yesterday’s workout at the gym didn’t hurt at the time, but later on in the day I started feeling it in the arms and the back. I knew that the following morning I would probably be aching, and sure enough, this morning, I was. It was painful to lift my backpack and put it on my back. Good lord… am I THAT out of shape?

I think not.

Being my first upper body workout in quite some time, my muscles were more than likely screaming “WTF!?!?”, followed by threats of “YOU SHALL PAY TOMORROW!!!”. As expected, they came through with their threats. But, this shall not deter me. For far too long I have not worked out when I had the chance, and then hated myself for it. Even last year, I set a goal with myself that I would weigh a certain weight by last August, or I would buy Windows Vista. As it turned out, I found a loophole in my goal, as Windows Vista was included with the Dell I bought at the time.

I ended up looking for a way to cheat myself out of my goal.

That’s sad.

Not any more. The pain, while… uh… painful… is a surprising motivation to continue. Eating right, I’m doing that. Riding the bike, love it. Going to Spinning classes, hell yeah. Playing Ultimate Frisbee, as soon as my ankle is no longer an issue. What’s missing? Good old fashioned working out. Time to bring that back into the mix. The only thing that is a pain in the ass is knowing what the exercises I’m performing are called, so I can then note them down. But, that’s a small bump in the road.

They say “No pain, no gain”. Well, I’m feeling the pain right now. Let’s continue so I can see some gain.

This past Saturday, Sparky invited me out with his friend Eric to go “wheeling“. Basically, this is a form of off-roading… but with a Jeep. The idea of a road-worthy vehicle driving up rocky paths that are difficult as it is to traverse on your own two feet is astounding. He’s been doing this for years, and after many invites, I finally was able to go along with him.

We went to a place known as Greens Mountain, which is about 40 minutes outside of Bobcaygeon. Its a mini-mountain located out on Crown land, and what I initially thought was going to be the trail turned out to be the trail TO the trail. During the day, we caught up with other dudes with Jeeps who were going over the same obstacles, which ranged from muddy hills, ponds, and rocky slopes. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, which was great, and the weather was pretty much perfect. The only complaint I had was the amount of mosquitoes and deer flies… my legs were chewed to pieces. Still, we were going through some swampy areas, so it wasn’t too unexpected.

I recorded some videos on my Nokia, but they’re pretty crappy (Nokia isn’t known for it’s amazing ability to create camera phones). Also, it records them in a *.3GP format, so Windows users may need Quicktime installed. Either way, they’re better than nothing, so if you so choose, here they are:

• Sparky’s first obstacle - 1.6MB
  • Sparky takes his Jeep down a minor rocky incline, and drives up the other side. Essentially, this was a giant rock ditch with some water at the bottom.
• Eric decends the “Superman 1″ - 2.5MB
  • There’s a certain decline known as the “Superman”. Apparently, it is so called due to the fact that it looks like you’re angled at 170 degrees and about to topple over. There are two ridges side-by-side though, so it’s questionable which one is the actual “Superman”. Both look insane though. Here, Eric goes down one of them, which we’ll call “Superman 1″.
• Sparky decends the “Superman 1″ - 2MB
  • Sparky takes his Jeep over the edge. I’m standing in a swamp to film this, which also happened to have the highest .
• Dude decends the “Superman 2″ - 2MB
  • One of the other dudes on the trail decends the larger of the “Superman”s.
• Dude plows through water - 2.6MB
  • It was either go through the pond, or go down one of the “Superman”s. This guy decided that the risk of water damage is preferable to structural damage from driving off a cliff.
• 2nd dude plows through water - 3.2MB
  • Seeing that the other dude made it through without lasting injury, the last dude of the group makes his way through the water.

All in all, a fun day.

Afterwards, we headed back to Lindsay to get some wings at Wild Wing, which were decent wings. The service wasn’t the best, and they had the air conditioning on full for some reason, but wings and beer were a welcome reward for getting through the day unscathed. There, we met up with a dude named Mitch that Sparky and Eric met before, and visited his place for a bit to check out his shop, and then made the journey home.

I’ll spare you all image of what my legs look like, and instead, provide you with this nice image of Sparky and Eric’s Jeeps:

Just one of those useless little things on sites, but I wanted to have my own favicon, which is the little picture that displays right next to the URL in the address bar. I used to have one, waaaaay back in the day, which is sort of a funny story:

I found this little red maple leaf image that I liked, but it wasn’t a favicon. I was using my Windows machine a lot during that time, and so I opened up MS Paint, imported the image, and then saved it in *.ICO format, which is necessary. During that process, MS Paint reduced the colours in the image to 16, which effectively turned my innocent-looking red maple leaf into something that resembled a marijuana leaf. I found this hilarious, and installed that on my site. However, a few years later, during a crash which resulted in the hard drive in my old FreeBSD box melting, I lost the image, and the site. Turned out to be a good thing as I wasn’t happy with the site, and hardly updated it. I was also using PostNuke, which at the time was a pain the ass to maintain and update.

Anyway, this one wasn’t that difficult to create as all I had to do was take a snapshot of myself, crop it, resize it to 16×16 pixels, and then used “convert” to change the image format from PNG to ICO. Then, placed the file within my theme directory, and voila! Searching for instructions on the ‘net resulted in all these shareware applications that would convert the image for you… blah blah blah. It’s amazing how many programs are out there that you have to pay for to do the most simple things if you’re too lazy to look up how to do the task yourself. I’m not paying for a one-time process… that’s idiotic.

So. There we have it. Yet another mugshot of myself on my site. Exciting, eh? 

Haha…

There is good news and bad news for President George W. Bush as he pursues his valedictory tour of Europe this week, according to a new worldwide study by the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

On the one hand, the image of the United States has improved slightly in many countries over the past year. On the other, the new optimism appears to be driven largely by the fact that Bush will soon be leaving office.

- source -

Personally, I really REALLY hope that Obama is elected. Not only would having a black President be a great thing to help end the continuing racial issues we’re always hearing about on the news, but the last thing the world needs right now is another four year stint with the Republicans in charge. Best to have the Democrats in power so they can clean up the mess left behind by the Bush administration before the Republicans can fuck things up further.

Come on America! Be smart! Vote Democrat!

Today, I hit a milestone: I weigh 179.1 pounds. I haven’t weighed this much (or less) since before I started working at easyDNS in 2004.

Two and a half months of eating right (for the most part), being more active (biking, Ultimate, Spinning, etc), and drinking less. 20 pounds. I picked up one of the 20 pound weights I have, and was somewhat taken aback… this is what I am no longer carrying? Good lord.

So, as my target weight was 175 pounds, and I am almost there, I started thinking: If 20, why not 30…? I’m not starving myself; I’m working hard, and eating right (again, for the most part), so 170 pounds shouldn’t be too hard to achieve. As such, I have updated my target weight: 170 pounds. Hopefully, the extra 10 pounds is all contained within my gut.

If I can do all this in two and a half months, I’m sure I can do a bit more before the summer is over. I’m not at the point where I am considering signing up for a year membership with Quad just yet, but once it gets too cold to ride my bike to and from work, I’ll seriously think about it. I’m really liking the extra energy I have these days, and also liking the fact that I’m not as chubby in the face!!

I wonder how long it’ll take to hit 170…

So, the UPS is charged, installed, everything is plugged into it (server, router, cable modem), and I can monitor it’s stats at my leisure. Its a GREAT relief to finally have a UPS ensuring my server isn’t brought down due to a brownout, or even a blackout… as long as it doesn’t last more than 68.9 minutes.  

Stepping away from my usual naming convention of planets and moons (and sometimes sci-fi), I decided to name the UPS “Thor”. If you don’t know who that is, then I suggest some light reading here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor

Many thanks to “System Control” (aka, my Father) for setting the hardware up and plugging everything in!!

Biking to and from work isn’t that big of a deal anymore. Sure, when I started, 6.1km each way sounded daunting, and the hills killed me. That was then. With the addition of Ultimate Frisbee and Spinning to my activity palette, I’ve found that my endurance is up, as well as my energy. All very good things.

However, I’ve never biked to and from work AND taken a Spinning class in the same day. Realising that I hadn’t done so, I made a point today to ensure that I tested my legs. Surprisingly, it wasn’t that difficult at all. I didn’t take my bike to Quad, as I don’t like the idea of locking it outside, and there isn’t space in the room for me to put it, so I took the streetcar across King… which took FOREVER. I was really concerned that I wasn’t going to make it in time; isn’t that the case when you REALLY need to get somewhere fast, the world just seems to want to try it’s darndest and make you late. Waiting for the streetcar to arrive took at least 10 minutes, and as we got going it was moving so slowly that I briefly considered getting off at Strachan and walking from there, but decided against it (hey, a bit of laziness during a crazy exercise day is acceptable!). In the end, I got to Quad with minutes to spare, but enough time to set up my preferred bike.

After the class, being all sweaty, and because it was so nice out, I decided to not take the TTC, and walked with Adam for a bit along King as I made my way back to the office. Once there, I packed up all my gear, and made the journey home on the bike. I thought that my legs would be rubber, especially considering that this was the hardest Spinning class I’ve gone to (Quentin seemed to be in hardcore mode), but it was all good.

Still, while it doesn’t hurt now, tomorrow is another day. We’ll see how that goes.

The thunderstorms we’ve had here in Toronto have pretty much made me aware of two things:

• My love of watching lightning strike things is fairly normal.
• I need a UPS for the server.

All it takes is a minor brownout to bring the server down, which isn’t too much of an issue as the machine is set to turn itself back on should the power go out, but it can lead to database corruption… which isn’t so cool. Last night I had to restore a part of the database that my website is based upon, which was a pain in the ass. Never did something like that before, and there’s no better way to learn how to do something than by flying by the seat of your pants!

One could argue that this is only MY site, and it’s not like it is a company website worth millions of dollars, but I like my site, and I’m sure some of you do as well. Thank you for visiting.

Anyway, Sparky has had a UPS for a number of years now, and it has worked fairly well for him. His server remains up, his connection to the ‘net remains up, and should he want to watch TV during a blackout, he can… for about 20 minutes. At his recommendation, we got an APC RS-900, which can theoretically provide around 40+ minutes of power; more than enough for one Mac Mini, router, and cable modem. Another thing that is completely cool is that there is a daemon for Linux known as “apcupsd”, which can be used to monitor, manage, and grab information from the UPS, which just rocks.

Check it out:

I *really* like how the UPS logs the “recent events”. For example, with last night’s thunderstorms, Sparky’s UPS logged when there was a power failure, noted that the batteries were being used, and then logged when power was restored. He’s also mentioned how you can set the daemon to send emails detailing the status of the outage (which should work, as a power outage doesn’t necessarily affect cable or phone lines), and that you can even set it to perform a controlled shutdown should the batteries get low. How neat is that!?

We’ll see how this works out, but I’m sure it will be MUCH better than the current configuration.

WOOHOO!!!

July 11th cannot come fast enough!

http://www.apple.com/ca/iphone/buy/

As expected, Rogers will be providing the service for the iPhone when it is released in Canada. This rocks, as I am currently with Rogers.

Still, I’m going to wait a bit to see how well the new iPhone works on the Rogers network before shelling out cash to get one. Always a good idea when dealing with new hardware upon a network. As well, I want to be sure that I won’t have any issues when it comes to using my calendar.

Either way, it’s about time we got the iPhone up here!