John Bain

Tribute to MCA

Mon, 28 May 2012 08:48:45 -0400

Tribute to MCA

@ottawacitizen This is how you spend a sunday :)

Sun, 27 May 2012 10:26:20 -0400

@ottawacitizen This is how you spend a sunday :)

5K Completed

Sat, 26 May 2012 19:22:49 -0400

5K Completed

My first real IKEA hack: Bought a GORM from IKEA for $25, cut...

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 23:37:00 -0400

Final product on my patio

My first real IKEA hack:

Bought a GORM from IKEA for $25, cut it up and used it to build a terrace for the cucumbers. Dont have alot of room in the apartment so they’re going to have to grow up. Gonna use the remaining shelves to build a deeper planter. I used twine for the vines to grow up and used 2 coat hangers to provide the strength in the shelf. For those wondering why its so high off the ground; its because the planter needs to be higher then the glass balcony… I may move it down once the plants start growing

…not an official quote :)

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:34:00 -0400

…not an official quote :)

"3.15 mi route in Ottawa, ON - 5K route for Ottawa Race weekend 201 - Route Mapped on #MapMyRUN"

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:18:06 -0400

“3.15 mi route in Ottawa, ON - 5K route for Ottawa Race weekend 201 - Route Mapped on #MapMyRUN”

- 5km Run Ottawa Race Weekend in Ottawa, ON | Running Map | MapMyRUN

Audio

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 23:56:06 -0400

Work Force Adjustment ... life's little challenges.

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 23:11:00 -0400

Got my letter yesterday and the writing had been on the wall for months. I haven’t been layed off yet … not by a long-shot but I am competing against 5 other people for 3 positions. I may be overly confident on this but I’m not really concerned about losing my job, its just the interruption of my plans that fills me with rage.

Thats right I had plans and now i have new plans.

Decide if i want to pursue a future in the public service.
Blow the dust off my resume.
Build a list of employers in the Kanata Tech Park
Start pounding the pavement cause its gonna be a long fucken process.

In other news Janice and I were about —><— that close to purchasing a house.

Thank god we didnt pull the trigger on that one.

Its in you to give ... so do it ...fuck!

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 21:52:00 -0400

Our Son Kellan was diagnosed with Diamond Blackfan Anemia when he was 6 months old. He first got sick when he was only a month and 2 days old. He was only hours away from heart failure, he had hemoglobin count of only 21, it should be over 110. He cant make any red blood cells of his own. He has been recieving regular blood transfusions every 4 weeks to keep him alive.

Apperently there are only 1000 reported cases world wide of this disease. Pretty rare I think. Steroids have not worked for him and now we have to make a decision to do a bone marrow transplant or let him stay on tranfusions for the rest of his life, both of these options come with many complications. So hug, kiss, and tell your kids that you love them as much as you can because we never know how long they will be with us.

Its really not fair what happened to Justin, his lovely wife Kaylene and of course Kellan. So if you were a guy a like me just reading facebook status’s then what else could you do … what else then become a bone marrow donor!

How do you become a bone marrow donor?

Its pretty easy just follow this link and become a “One Match Donor”. the service is run by the Canadian blood services … same people that take care of the blood banks. Once you have completed the registration a “home swab kit” will be mailed to your house. Do the swabs and send them back in a special envelope they give you.

No blog post is complete with out pictures! :D

They call me Mr.

Swab case, swabs, labels … wheres the candy ?

Got A Full load Here

Mission accomplished!

Wondering what does it look like when you donate bone marrow/stem cells?

Easy Peasey

So ya click the link and help save a life … ya fucker!

Picked up a 2.4ghz 3 channel Micro helicopter from the hobby...

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 17:42:00 -0500

Picked up a 2.4ghz 3 channel Micro helicopter from the hobby shop today … so much fun.

Might have to upgrade it to a larger scale :)

Song of the night

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 23:28:29 -0500

Song of the night

The conclusion to his story … does well to highlight our...

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 22:47:52 -0500

The conclusion to his story … does well to highlight our problems in a copyright society but fails to show a way to fix it. Cinematography is amazing but this stuff gets depressing if you watch to much of it.

Vimeo has links for the first 3 videos which speak more about movies and music

stungeye:

Everything is a Remix - Part 4 - The Transcript

Also: Parts 1 through 4

“Our system of law doesn’t acknowledge the derivative nature of creativity. Instead, ideas are regarded as property, as unique and original lots with distinct boundaries. But ideas aren’t so tidy. They’re layered, they’re interwoven, they’re tangled. And when the system conflicts with the reality… the system starts to fail.”

Copyright is sooooo 1700s.

Tumblr Staff: A New Policy Against Self-Harm Blogs

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 01:18:06 -0500

Tumblr Staff: A New Policy Against Self-Harm Blogs:

This seems to be a reaction to Jamie Hubleys tumblr blog

Back Story

staff:

One of the great things about Tumblr is that people use it for just about every conceivable kind of expression. People being people, though, that means that Tumblr sometimes gets used for things that are just wrong. We are deeply committed to supporting and defending our users’ freedom of speech,…

Operation: Make Linkedin work for me. Gonna spend part of...

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:56:48 -0500

Operation: Make Linkedin work for me.

Gonna spend part of tomorrow fucking with Linkedin, see if its really money maker people say it is.

Picture created with pixlr-o-matic

Free Online Canadian Television

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:13:24 -0500

Canadian Television networks that offer there content online for free, If you go online you can watch these stations:

How-To get free HD Television in Ottawa

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 22:37:00 -0500

If you live in Ottawa and you don’t want to give Rogers or Bell your hard earned cash then you can do what I have done and it only cost me 20 bucks and I get all the HD channels I need.

Things you need:

Digital HD antenna
+25 feet of coaxial cable(May need longer if you live in a house)
A television with a digital tuner(Almost all new tv’s have these built-in to them)

The antenna can be purchased from many retailers but the cheapest ones can be bought from Walmart, XS-Cargo and Factory Direct.

My antenna came from Factory Direct and cost me a total of $14.99! Some assembly was required to but nothing super technical.

From my own experience the price of the antenna doesn’t equate to the quality/reception of the antenna. I use to use this one but it was TERRIBLE, good thing I never payed 70 bucks for it. :)

1. The Unboxing

2.Some assembly required

3. Almost there

When you have your antenna assembled, attach your coaxial TV cable to the antenna and put the antenna in your house/apartment window. Hook the other end of the cable to your television, your television still neets to be setup to use OTA which is burried in your TV’s menu system … I dont have steps for this part. :D

Once your television is finished scanning for channels, sit down in your favorite chair and enjoy all the free HD television you would ever need.

A TV antenna works best if there is nothing blocking your line of sight to the antennas. So if you mount the antenna high you can get all these channels:

CBC (English) 4.1
Global 6.1
CBC (French) 9.1
CHCH 11.1
CTV 13.1
Omni1 14.1
TVO 24.1
TQ - Tele Quebec 30.1
TQS (V) - CFGS 34.1
TVA - CHOT 40.1
CTS 42.1
“A” Channel 43.1
Omni2 60.1
CityTV 65.1

To learn more about Ottawa OTA go here.

The ones in bold are the key ones for me, if I want to watch other channels like Space or Discovery I connect my laptop to the televison with an HDMI cable. If you go online you can watch these stations:

The not so free sports packages:

[Solved] Adding Adsense ads to your Tumblr posts

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:15:00 -0500

It’s very easy to place Google Adsense ads to the body of your Tumblr posts. In our example we’re going to demonstrate how to embed a 468x15 text Google Adsense ad into the middle of our post, this process is the same for all javascript based ads.

Before doing any of the instruction below this line create your desired blog post without any Google Adsense ads in it, take care of the text, positioning and formatting first!

Once you’ve created and published your post go to the dashboard of your Tumblr blog, click on the Cog icon to go to your blog Preferences page:

By default Tumblr strips out advanced HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from the regular post editor.

To ensure that Tumblr can accept the JavaScript code thats needed for our Google Adsense ads, we need to ensure that under “Edit posts using”, you’ve selected “plain text / HTML”:

Be sure to save this new preference.

In a new browser tab goto Google Adsense and copy the javascript that was generated when you created your Google Adsense ad, copy it to your clipboard and go back to your tumblr blog:

What you need to do next is edit the blog post you created previously, you will notice that the editor is now showing plain html markup. Find the area where you would like your Google Adsense ad and paste in the Javascript from Google:

Our inserted Google Adsense ad:

Save your changes and go view your tumblr post, it may take few minutes for the Google Adsense ad to appear.

Remember:

Because of how the Tumblr post editor works if you make any other changes to the post after the ad has been added then when you save the changes you may actually strip out javascript and effectively kill your Google Adsense ad.
Dont edit the code from Google, changing the code will cause the Google Adsense ad not to work

Canadian Public Service(PS) Right for Me?

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:26:00 -0500

I need to get some of my thoughts down on this virtual paper/papyrus/parchment.

For about the last month and a half or so the topic at hand has been rolling around in my head, “Should I quit the PS ?”. Dont get me wrong the PS is an alright employer, I would never give them the great status but they’re a close second. :)

The reasoning I have been using to help make this decision is to weight the positive and the negatives.

Positives:

Great pay for entry level.
Culture of support.
Huge networks of people.
Ability to take training and goto conferences at no cost.
Union Shop.

Negatives:

Being uni-lingual creates a HUGE glass ceiling for any promotion.
French training provided is a joke.
Horizontal movement is restricted by a unionized class system.
Seniority of time often overshadows quality of work, experience and dedication to tasks.
Union Shop.

If you look at the points above you may have noticed they’re mostly related to advancing in the workplace. This has always been a huge issue for me as I require/need new challenges. Not in the sense that I cant sit still(ADHD) but once I master one I need to build on that skill and move forward … a natural progression to becoming a Manager/Chief/Director.

Maybe my future is in the private sector, it gives me:

The chance to compete with peers.
Opportunity to work toward promotion.
Unilingualness is less of a factor.
Is usually more agile.
Ability to learn/use new technologies.
Higher income in the long term.

So you may be wondering what are the largest limitations to me becoming a Manager/Chief/Director ?

All Managers MUST speak/read/write in both official Canadian languages.
Because of the structure in the PS many people stagnate and stay in one position for years if not decades, this creates limited chances of promotion in ones own group.
Because of the unionised shop employees who are CS1’s can’t do the work of a CS2(This is the class system I mentioned earlier) or even apply/compete for open CS2 positions. This is often called “At-level opportunities”.
No vehicle/road-map is provided to move from a CS1 to a CS2.
Department of Shared Services has removed alot of the opportunities to move around in the IT groups of many departments.
You may have not heard of it before but its shaking the public service at its core, its called the “Canadian strategic and operating review” which basicly translates to layoffs and limited opportunities for promotions

I’d love to hear from others who have had to deal with this issue, who has left the public service ?

I think my next step is to speak to my manager and explain to him what I want out of my job. If I cant get what I want then why stick around … right ?

[Solved] Treadmill RF DSL interference

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 02:00:00 -0500

The Problem:

My old man had a second generation treadmill that when turned on would knock out his DSL and even cause his television to shut off. After some quick googling I discovered that this is a very common issue. According to dslreports.com

RFI is insidious. It can sneak around no matter what you do … totally wipe out your DSL.

Noisy RFI … can reach your computer or modem through the AC lines, but more likely by radiating from the AC lines to your phone line. … RFI can interfere with various sections of the spectrum needed for DSL, causing lower sync rates and throughput, and in some cases repeated interruption or even total failure to sync.

The Solution:

Find a power bar with an RFI/EMI filter to clean the power/signal coming from the offending treadmill. I had tried 2 different powerbars and only one worked.

1. Didn’t Work Rocketfish 7-Outlet Surge Protector (RF-HTS105)

This powerbar/surge protector sports a A 47 dB EMI/RFI noise filter which DIDNT work at all

2. Did Work Monster Power Center (FS MP HTS400)

This powerbar/surge protector sports some technology called “Monster Clean Power Stage 1 v2.0”

Once I plugged the treadmill into the Monster Power Center I was able to see the improvements immediately.

Hilarious canadian standup

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 12:33:25 -0500

Hilarious canadian standup