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Month: February 2002

Life, Death and Cascading Style Sheets

Published by NiteMayr on February 23, 2002

Here is my first post as a legally married person. So yes, for those of you keeping score that is ony 4 and half years later than I should have gotten married.

The wedding went, umm, well. We had a civic ceremony presided over by what my parents called a “wee-free” minister which is a Church of Scotland protestant minister. This made my mother in law happy as she hates the whole idea that I’m Catholic, since she hates the Pope or something. Anyway, my wife was lovely and as usual there were cameras all over us. Since there are no pictures that I care to share with you here, I’ll just say that the dress was so nice that it looked like a million bucks, and Jenny made it look like a Billion.

As for married life, its much the same as living in sin, but now I can say “misses nitemayr, why is my server box offline” rather than “hey you, reboot that box!”

I’ll check in later, I’m sure.

Pay attention, you are missing the point

Published by NiteMayr on February 13, 2002

I was listening to a local show called “speakers Corner” on City TV, a local TV station here in Toronto. The person on screen was talking about how it is more important to be compassionate than it is to be a “nice person.”
Initially I thought this was pure pap, aren’t they the same thing?
However, when you look at it from their angle, the speaker was right. Take for example the “Martha Stewart” model of nice, she appears to be a kind host with her guest’s interests in mind. However, if we observe the motives she is putting forth we see it is her own self-gratification that is at stake, by means of her guests. This is not to say that being nice should make you happy, but it should be the motivation for kindness. I think what the speaker was saying is it is better to be kind by design, rather than as a means to an end.

As a means to an end kindness will always work, unless you are disingenuous. The old saying is “…you catch more flys with honey…”, but what if you are only waiting for the flys to eat the honey, to get at the ring at the bottom of the jar? Extending the metaphor even more, isn’t that the hard way of emptying a jar?

Speed up please!

Published by NiteMayr on February 10, 2002

There you have it, my isp has finally started to uncap our speeds. My web surfing has finally re-claimed the upper 200K mark. However, one of my neighbours must be some sort of surfing freak, as my speeds dip dramatically during “normal” surfing hours, however friends who are on the same service do not have the same issues.

This is not to say that the service is without issues, but it has improved since we stopped using @home as our only routing/traffic partner. One neat feature is the transparent web cache, the only reason I noticed it was my wifes computer wasn;t showing her actual IP on connections to this web server. We are not on the same segment.”