Markus’ Blog

Since I had never done it before, I decided to give YouTube a try and see how it works.

It so happens that, a few days ago, Queen Calli Boo the Kitty decided to go into our linen closet to try and get comfy on our bath mats. So I got the camera out and shot a little video of her adventures. That’s the one I uploaded to YouTube today.

First, a picture of how it looked in the end:

And now the video (provided YouTube is done converting it yet):

Live commentary by Brigette ;-).

Update: Yes, the video is quite dark, but the original is not that dark. You can still see what’s going on there. Not so much on the YouTube version.

It started in January: I got the wisdom teeth on my left side taken out. The second stage, taking care of my right side, should have happened four weeks ago. That didn’t work out, though, because the dentist anticipated he’d more need time than he had booked for me.

So, the procedure got re-scheduled for today, 8:00am, to be precise. So it was getting-up-early day today, combined with some hearty breakfast: two poached eggs and toast. This combination is known to fill me up for quite some time, which is very much needed, considering I won’t be eating much for the rest of the day and most of tomorrow.

It went quite well, even though the right side was definitely tougher than the left. The upper right tooth was jammed against another tooth, the lower right tooth was jammed against the jaw. That made the whole endeavor more complicated, time-consuming and uncomfortable.

It wasn’t too bad, though, because I was done in less than an hour and a half. Although that’s roughly twice as long as the first extraction, it was still less than the two hours the dentist had set aside.

The remainder of the weekend — I’m off work today, so it’s weekend for me already — will be devoted to taking it easy and recovering.

It’s done. Finally. The first release of libghoto2 that supports USB cameras under Solaris 10. Older Solaris releases don’t have libusb and thus it is not possible to support USB cameras there.

This is also the first version released by me. It’s been over two years since the previous version of libgphoto has been released, so it was long overdue. The previous version was released by a different maintainer.

Like I said, it’s not just a regular update from 2.14 to 2.3.1, the important added bonus is USB support under Solaris 10. It works on SPARC and x86 alike.

CBC news is reporting that according to the 2006 census, immigrants make up for the vast majority of the 1.6 million new Canadians between 2001 and 2006. This gives Canada the highest population growth rate among the G8 countries.

It continues to say that just less than half the national population lives in the metropolitan areas in and around Vancouver, Montreal and Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe. That makes for one uneven distribution of the population. Interestingly and surprisingly — to me — the article also reports that all three territories gained in population as well.

I did fill out one of the census forms last year for the first time, so I am part of that number, which I quite like, although I am not a citizen yet.

Surprisingly, Vancouver is not among the 10 fastest growing cities. Abbotsford (#9) and (very surprisingly) Kelowna (#5) are, though.

All in all that’s quite a change from the census numbers I am used to (in Austria): declining and aging population is basically what the results are there.

We have decided that is is finally time to retire the HP 990 C — or almost time, at least.

It’s not so much that the printer is bad (it is not at all), and it even has a duplex unit, which I quite like. However, ink is quite expensive to re-fill and a cartridge doesn’t last all that long (that’s even more true for color). Furthermore, ink sometime smears and print quality is generally not as good as laser printers.

Given the current prices, it seems reasonable to get a laser printer as a replacement. Better print quality, lower printing cost, and since we aren’t planning on printing pictures, better over-all satisfaction.

It hasn’t been decided yet if we’ll go color or stay B & W. That depends on what’s out there and the price, I guess. There are other features I consider more important than color capability (and Brigette doesn’t think we’ll need color, either):

1. I absolutely need the printer to be supported by Open Source drivers (as listed on LinuxPrinting.org) or else I’ll be S.O.L. with my Solaris box and that wouldn’t be good.
2. I would prefer the printer to have a network port. That way we can access it from both our computers without one acting as print server, which has to be on at all times (like it is right now). That’ll be more important when Brigette gets a laptop as her main workstation. It’ll presumably be in power-saving mode for the most time when not in use, as opposed to always-on.
3. If the printer supported Postscript natively, that’d be even better.

I found a few Samsung printers at FutureShop and NCIX that look promising as well as a couple of HPs. We’ll see. The hunt is on.

If anybody has any preferences/recommendations, please don’t hesitate to make them known.

We have entered the next phase of the bird poop story. Yesterday, we got a letter from court informing us about the mediation session that has been scheduled for mid-April. This morning, I finally filed our reply to their ridiculous counterclaim, where they are asking for almost double the amount from us as to what we are claiming from them. (I don’t have to mention that we disputed every single point of their counterclaim, right?)

I am sure the mediation session is going to be interesting. A gut feeling tells me, this stupid issue might actually make it before court. Why? Because this is not the usual dispute with a contractor or something, where both parties are giving in a little and come to an acceptable agreement.

The previous owners of our condo are obviously not going to give in, otherwise they would have approached us a long time ago to try and work something out. What did they do instead? Ignore our letters and counterclaim imaginary figures that are way higher than the original claim itself. Of course, they are not going to get away with that, but it sure shows their mindset.

We are not going to give in either, not anymore. At this point, only 100% reimbursement for our expenses of getting the deck cleaned (and filing the claim) is going to be acceptable. Would we have been willing to settle for less, back in September or October? Probably. We wouldn’t have been happy, but we wouldn’t have been poops either. Now, however, after all the time and effort spent, nope, now it’s got to be a full ruling in our favour.

What annoys and upsets me the most is the following:

• They ignored our letters on purpose, not taking us seriously, thus forcing us to either give up (and be stuck with a bill that we shouldn’t be suck with) or go all the way. However, they still think it’s our fault that this matter escalated so badly.
• The audacity to counterclaim twice the amount when they didn’t even have any expenses (other than alleged lost wages), pisses me right off. I despise this kind of attitude. I expected them to dispute our claim, yes, but never in a million years would I have thought that they would actually try and claim money from us.

Like I said, it’s going to be interesting, and unless the mediator makes a very convincing case that one of the two parties has almost no chance of winning the case (and the ones not winning won’t be us ;-)), the “pigeons” will end up in court. Come to think of it, even if he or she does make a convincing case that they can’t really win, they’ll probably try anyways — given what we’ve seen from them so far.

We are going to spend the upcoming weekend in Whistler for a nice, relaxing time together. We’ll leave tomorrow morning and we’ll be back Sunday night.

The plan is to take a Greyhound bus up to Whistler Village and spend a fun weekend together. This will supposedly mean: good food, good wine and/or beer, nice evening entertainment (no night clubs, though :-)), a visit to the spa, strolling around the village, go snow shoeing and whatever else we can think of.

Yay!