With 600 metres to go Whitfield had taken the lead but likely started his charge just 100 metres too soon.  The German, Frodeno, overtook Whifield and looked like he still had more in the tank.  For 500 metres I had the same feeling I got with Ben Johnson in ‘88 (before the tests) or Donovan Bailey in ‘96 in the 100 metre dash - extreme pride and happiness.  I’m still really happy for Simon but I hate to say it, there’s nothing like a gold medal.

Congrats, Simon!  You did your entire country proud.

The most common questions I get asked by people who are really interested in what I do is ‘what are you using to build your websites with’ and ‘what javascript framework  do you use?’  It was in explaining my choices to Scott that I felt like it would be worth explaining them to the world (potential clients may be curious).

The lesser of the two questions is what I’m using to build websites.  The desktop application I’m using is Adobe Dreamweaver but I’m really only using that for the code collapsing, snippets and site organization.  My foundation of choice is WordPress.  I’ve found it to be almost infinitely customizable and flexible enough to cover just about any project.  I found Joomla too big and hit WordPress next.  I’d love to give Drupal a try but I have a strong belief that being really strong with one tool makes you more marketable than being slightly experienced with several.  I have not met a site that WordPress didn’t like.  (But just because WordPress is in my ‘lesser’ category, don’t be fooled into thinking it’s not important.  WordPress is amazing.  It’s only lesser because it’s so easy to use and largely unnoticed by site visitors.)

The bigger impact tool I’m using right now is a javascript framework called MooTools.  Scott had never heard of MooTools and I guess this is where the line between web surfer extraordinaire and web programmer is drawn.  A surfer may know which blogging tool or BB platform he’s looking at but he’s unlikely to know which javascript framework is in use.

MooTools isn’t for javascript n00bs.  You have to be fairly comfortable with coding in general but also with CSS and the DOM.  Once you’re pretty good with those, stepping into MooTools is heaven.  Once I started working with MooTools I realized that there really wasn’t a single thing I couldn’t do with a web page.  It’s that powerful.

Once you’ve decided that MooTools is interesting and deserves looking into further, have a look at Aaron Newton’s Clientside.  All of the things you want to do on a daily basis with MooTools are covered.  Man, it’s almost all done for you!  Aaron’s got a book coming out in August and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

I used to rely pretty heavily on the official MooTools forum which was shut down when version 1.2 of the framework was released.  I don’t lean quite as heavily on the community now but I invite everyone struggling with a MooTools script to try the unofficial forum at http://mooforum.net.  I cruise it quite often and try to help where I can.  My handle there is Lweel8 (it’s a bumper stumper for my punctuality when it comes to sporting events).

Best of luck to everyone out there.  I hope to see you in the forum.

My boss is really into post-apocalyptic movies and books.  If it’s dark and dreary (or has vampires in it) he loves it.  He recommended that I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road a long time ago but it wasn’t until I saw the movie No Country For Old Men (based on a McCarthy novel) that I decided to pick it up.  I hate seeing a great movie knowing I could have read the book first.

You see, the movie The Road comes out this fall.  I know it will be good because it stars Viggo Mortensen, and he doesn’t make crap.  I’ve tried to steer clear of any spoilers because I’m now reading the book but what I do know is the general story.  It is, of course, a post-apocalyptic story about a man and his son heading south to avoid the freezing cold of the coming winter.  From what I’ve read in the first 25 pages, the event occurred several years ago and the man has survived much longer than most.

The book very quickly goes from dismal to scary.  On page 5 is a phrase that so closely aligns with how I feel about my kids that I wish I’d written it.  The man is watching over his son while he sleeps and he says, “If he is not the not the word of God God never spoke.”  At this point I was very in touch with the man and thought how much we are alike.  I put the book down for a break when the man asks himself on page 29, “Can you do it?  When the time comes?  Can you?”  Clearly this is not the world I live in.  The thought of saving your child from unspeakable horrors by ending his life - that deserves a break.

It’s another one of those, “what would you do in the same situation” type of books that I love and love to talk about.  Feel free to leave me your impressions of The Road.  I promise not to read them until I’ve finished the book (which will likely be very, very soon at the rate I’m reading it).

Update:
Finished the book in one  day - a new record for me!  I do recommend it but it is not for the faint of heart.  Very emotional for fathers of young kids anywhere.  The large print and style of writing makes for a nice quick read - you could probably get through the whole thing in one transatlantic flight…

It looks like Toronto isn’t trying to compete this year.  The crappy thing is that part of the problem is that Mats hasn’t decided what he’s going to do next year.  His delay means that Toronto has to hold onto the purse strings just in case they need to spend $7 or 8 million bucks on him.  Of course, this is only adding insult to injury.  The sensible thing to do for everyone involved would have been for Mats to waive his NTC back in the spring to allow the Leafs to get better.  As it stands, the Leafs have made no big additions and could very well be headed for the basement (not that last year was a great showing).

Montreal, on the other hand, has added some toughness in Laraque and has retained most of its young core that made them one of the best teams in the regular season.  I’m not going to say that Laraque makes the Habs a Cup contender but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

We’ll see.  Maybe Sundin will go to the Habs.  I think that would officially make him public enemy number one in Toronto.  Can you imagine if he brought the Cup back to Montreal in his first year after 13 years in Toronto?  I can.

The Mozilla servers serving the web pages have all crashed but the files themselves are still being served.  I don’t think this is well known…

Firefox 3.0 (EN-US)

Update: Mozilla has fixed their web pages and now all of the links that, earlier today, showed version 2.0 are properly showing version 3.0.  SO GO GET IT!

My latest victory came on Friday night.  The lights at the Roblin Lake Dome, ahem, wouldn’t come on so our slowpitch game was canceled.  The boys thought an impromptu game of poker might sate our need for something macho to do.

I’m clearly not the right guy to give advice, being that I’ve only played a total of 8 rounds in my life, but the one tip I’ve found that really makes my position stronger is to only have three types of bet:

1. The check or call (you don’t always have to spend money)
2. The silo bet (is strong but doesn’t require any time or thinking to count)
3. The all-in

By limiting my plays to these three types of bet my opponents don’t have the opportunity to examine my reactions.  I know that I’m either going to call, push a silo or push all-in.  If I have to decide how much to bet and then worry about what kind of message I’m sending whether I’m too high or too low I’m clearly going to lose.  I would be out of my element in a hurry.  I’ve found that my opponents really get no read on my betting and I’ve really only been beaten by poor cards or bad rivers.

I also don’t think that revealing my methods will hurt me in the future.  The guys I play against don’t really get out (on the Internet) much.  Besides, this tip can’t help you read my cards or my face.  I’ve watched a fair amount of WSOP and celebrity poker on TV but I will never play enough poker to know, or care, what a good or bad bet is.  I have a hard enough time remembering the blinds and what beats what.

Best of luck to everyone not at my table!

I was gassing up my truck this morning to the tune of a small country’s GDP when I caught a whiff of the fumes.  I was instantly transported back to every summer Sunday morning of my youth, filling up the boat.  There was an hour every Sunday morning when my dad and I would head down to the boat before everyone else to get ‘er ready.  We’d take the top down, stow the life jackets and the cooler, and then we’d take it around to gas up.

As a bit of an aside, there really isn’t anything else like Georgian Bay at 8 or 9 in the morning in the summer.  It’s glass calm, the sun is just coming up and you can feel the heat of it on your skin but it’s not hot yet, it’s quiet, so quiet, and then there’s that smell.  The sickly sweet fumes of gas and the Bay mixed together.  It’s not unlike an elixir of youth - or joy.  I think it is actually impossible to be upset or worried about something when you’re down at the dock, before the crowd, on the Bay.  Lesley, when I go, just spread my ashes somewhere down the South Channel.

With gas prices heading through the stratosphere I imagine that pleasure boating will leave the realm of the middle-class to be enjoyed only by the uber-rich.  That’s a real shame.  I know I’m not the only guy out there who spent his formative years bonding with his dad over the fumes of an old Starcraft.  Like most guys, my dad didn’t try to teach me anything about life when we were alone, that kind of information you had to glean from his actions and from eavesdropping at parties when I was supposed to be asleep hours ago.  No, the stuff I learned from him in the early mornings was more about him and the kind of father that I wanted to be.  He’d sit in the back of the boat, being my first mate.  He’d wince when I came in too fast in the early years.  He’d comment about my wake (it was always too big but I just couldn’t drive that slow).  But in the end, he always let me take the lead, make my own mistakes, and learn on my own.

In the later years he’d just open a book and read until we got to the dock.  He’d follow my instructions and then let me run the show for the whole day’s boating.  Everyone knew that I was running the boat.  I know he was paying attention though because he’d never fail to thank me at the end of the day for such a good boat ride.  Imagine that, thanking me when it should have been me thanking him.  As much as I liked driving the boat I think the thank you at the end of the day was even better.

I often think about the years ahead and how I’d love to move my parents closer to me and my family.  I don’t get very far before I think about Georgian Bay and what it has meant to me, my dad, and my family in general.  I was raised on the Bay.  I proposed to Lesley on the Bay.  I think I’m about as close to it as a man can be to a body of water.  The thing is that my dad was there for all of it.  So is it really the Bay that I love?

Happy Father’s Day, Big Isi (the BBP).

(more…)

Before you start flaming me with why other phones are better and that iTunes sucks you have to stop for a minute and examine the facts:

• I don’t currently have a cell phone
• I have a ton of iTunes-managed music, podcasts and video
• I need push email for my business
• I need mobile Internet access for my business

This device has all of those features in one package.  The fact that it carries a maximum price of $299 USD (for the 16GB model) makes it even sweeter.

The only question of affordability now will be the service plan.  We all know that Rogers is the only carrier currently capable of 3G, and that the 3G coverage isn’t even that great yet in Canada, but Mr. Jobs has pushed his ideal of availability to other carriers in other countries before.  Here’s hoping that he does so in Canada as well.

While Apple didn’t fully comply with my list of must haves (32GB would have allowed me to fit all of my tunes) they did run down a pretty good list of functions and added value features.  You can read about Steve’s keynote speech at WWDC08 over at Engadget.com.

Hopefully Rogers will extend their Vision network to include the Belleville area - Prince Edward County specifically.  I won’t hold my breath.