On Monday, we went on our first geocaching expedition. Geocaching is a combination hike and treasure hunt — you get the latitude and longitude co-ordinates of a “cache” from the geocaching web site, plug them into your GPS, and then go find it. The GPS is only so accurate, however, so it’s not like once you get to the co-ordinates, you look down and there it is. You need to look under rocks or piles of leaves or in tree stumps, stuff like that. You can find some in the city as well, though I suspect those ones are harder to find — you can’t just leave one on the sidewalk.

The web site has thousands of caches listed, and each one has an indication of how hard the cache is to find, and how difficult the terrain is. You can put a cache halfway down a cliff wall, but then only rock climbers are going to be able to find it. There are also caches hidden underwater for scuba divers to find.

The cache itself is generally a tupperware-type box or ammo container that has a log book in it, and sometimes some little “prizes”. The idea is that if you take something, you leave something as well. The one we found wasn’t in great condition though, there were some rusty coins in it, two pens that didn’t work, and a plastic toy. We signed the log book and then took the broken pens and left a good one.

Sometimes, the cache owner makes a game of it, and creates several caches, each of which contains a “clue”. Once you find all the caches and put all the clues together, that gives you the location of the final cache. Some caches also contain a trackable item, which is something that has a code you can enter on the web site. The idea with those is to take the item from that cache, leave it in another one somewhere else, and then update the web site. Then you can follow the item’s progress around the world.

I borrowed a GPS from a guy at work, just to see if this is something that the kids would enjoy, and sure enough they liked searching in the bushes once we found the general location. According to the web site, there are numerous caches around our area, and there are some up north near where our parents live. We’ve even found a bunch in France, so we might try a few of those when we’re over there next summer (bought our tickets last week!). We’ve signed up for a geocaching “class” at the Royal Botanical Gardens in October, so that should be fun as well.

While ripping CDs onto my iPod, I’ve noticed at least one and possibly two songs that have grammatical errors in the titles. This seems unbelievable to me. It’s not unbelievable that the original songwriters got it wrong, but that they and everyone else who read the song’s title before the album was released got it wrong.

Interestingly, the errors are similar in both cases. The songs in question are “Given The Dog A Bone” by AC/DC (should be “Givin’…”) and “Taken The Pain” by Haywire (should be “Takin’…”). Errors in the lyrics themselves I can understand, and I’m sure sometimes they’re put there intentionally, but I think these are just plain ol’ mistakes. I haven’t confirmed the lyrics of the second one, but it sounds like “You’re takin’ the pain from my heart…”. However, it could be “You’ve taken the pain from my heart…”, in which case it’s not an error.

At one point, I thought there was some serious redundancy in the Paul McCartney song “Live And Let Die”. The lyrics sound like “But in this ever-changing world in which we live in…“, but it’s actually “But if this ever-changing world in which we’re livin’“, which makes more sense. There’s “A Horse With No Name” by America, which contains the mind-boggling “In the desert you can remember your name ’cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain“. I’ve completely given up trying to analyze lyrics by some bands; Matthew Good (he has songs called “While We Were Hunting Rabbits”, “Advertising on Police Cars”, “Ex-Pats of the Blue Mountain Symphony Orchestra” and “Girl Wedged Under The Front Of A Firebird”) and The Tragically Hip (“There’s a cannon shooting coconut cream, forty gallons in a steady stream” ) are good examples.

Of course, in the original cases, it could easily be that whoever was responsible for the liner notes was solely responsible for the error. Tool’s album “Lateralus” has a song called “Lateralis”, but that is apparently a typo on some pressings of the CD. But if it’s just a typo, the story’s not that interesting.

On a radio show from Friday (which I listened to today via podcast), they were briefly talking about the English language — the difference between “further” and “farther” (I have no idea what the difference is), and how you don’t “revert back”, you just “revert”. One that always bugs me is “rate of speed”, as in “the car was moving at a high rate of speed”. Speed is a rate, so there’s no need to say “rate of”; just saying “…moving at a high speed” is perfectly correct, and “moving very quickly” is even better. Another one of those examples of people who try to sound more intelligent by using big words but end up sounding dumber because they use the big words wrong. I have heard people talk about others being “ignorant” when they really mean “rude”, but “ignorant” sounds better. They, of course, are ignorant of what ignorant really means. The classic line from The Princess Bride comes to mind: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Ironically, earlier in the same show, one of the guys had used the term “literally” incorrectly. He talked about someone who “literally took the bull by the horns”. Unless the guy was a cowboy or bullfighter, I don’t think so.

After thinking about Bob Layfield for the last few days, I thought about other people I used to work with, and googled a couple of them. Most of them I either couldn’t find, or found minimal information, but one turned up in a number of places: Alykhan Jetha (known as AJ) is the CEO of a company called Marketcircle, based in Toronto, which makes Mac software.

I don’t remember much about AJ. I worked with him at Comnetix for about a year, maybe a little longer, before he left. One thing I do remember — he was an Amway rep, and tried to get me into it as well. He invited me to lunch one day, saying he had a “business opportunity” for me. I had no idea what Amway was, but he gave me the whole dog-and-pony show. He told me that software development was what he enjoyed doing, and it paid the bills, but the Amway thing was going to make him rich. “In ten years,” he said, “I won’t need to work anymore.” Don’t know how well that worked out, AJ, since you’re still working. Then again, he’s CEO of a company that looks pretty successful, so I’d say he made a good decision or two somewhere along the line. Congratulations AJ!

I have been given the Amway spiel three times now, including once by a guy I didn’t know while in line at Harvey’s. My logic for saying no was that I did not go to university for 6 years, obtaining two degrees in computer science, to get rich selling toilet paper to my friends. That sounds snooty, and I suppose it is, but the real reason is that selling toilet paper and whatever other products they sell will not make you rich. The way you get rich with Amway is by selling the concept of Amway itself, and recruit people to be below you in the pyramid heirarchy. Then when they sell toilet paper to their friends, you get a cut. Do that enough times, and have some good sellers (or even better, more recruiters) below you, and you can make a bundle. Of course, I don’t actually believe in the concept of Amway (it’s just a legalized pyramid scheme that sells products to generate the income, rather than just having people “send $x to the person at the top of the list and then add your name to the end of the list”), so it would be hard for me to sell it, and I would make a lousy salesman anyway.

AJ is actually the second person I used to know who is an executive of a tech company. I first knew Cameron Ferroni through my buddy Jeff, since they were both engineers at UW. I remember thinking his girlfriend Gail was really cute, but way out of my league. Gail and I eventually became friends, and then she and Cameron broke up a couple of years later. A year or two after that, in 1992, she asked me out, we started dating, got married in 1995, had two kids, and are still happy together. After graduating, Cameron started working at Microsoft, where he worked on Windows for a while (writing some Winsock specifications that I’ve actually happened upon at work), and then basically invented the freakin’ Xbox and was General Manager of the entire Xbox software team. Now he’s also happily married and is CTO of a company called Marchex. Hey Cam, if you’re looking for your RAMPage rugby shirt, you left it at Gail’s place, and she gave it to me. I think I might still have it somewhere. Oh, and congratulations to you too!

Update: Forgot a couple: Crispin Cowan was a Ph.D. student at Western when I was there doing my Master’s. He was CTO of a company called Immunix until they were acquired by Novell. Don’t know if he’s still employed by Novell. I remember him describing hockey as a very stupid game, which was as exciting to watch as a packing peanut bouncing around in an air duct. Bastard.

Also forgot Brad Siim, another friend of Jeff’s from engineering. He was one of the founders of PixStream, a Waterloo company that was eventually bought by Cisco for many millions of dollars, making Brad very rich. He was also bored, apparently, since he left Cisco and went on to co-found another company called Sandvine, where he is now COO.

I’ve posted before about my old company, Comnetix. The head salescritter was a retired RCMP officer named Bob Layfield, who passed away last week after a long battle with cancer. Here are some of my memories of Bob, as a sort of online memorial.

First of all, let me say that I always used the term “salescritter” in a sort of endearing way with Bob, as a number of us did. We even used that term when talking to him, as well as about him, and he always took it in the joking manner in which it was always intended.

Bob was very proud of his RCMP career (and justifiably so). He retired as a Staff Sergeant, and was a part of the Musical Ride for a while. He was posted in numerous places all over Canada in his years as a Mountie. He had two daughters and when I knew him, one grandson, all of whom he talked about frequently. His family was always the most important thing in Bob’s life.

Bob was the consummate salesman. He knew the products inside and out, and could spin just about anything to his advantage. Occasionally, he sold our customers on features that hadn’t been written yet. Sometimes he gave them a specific date by which the feature would be ready, and then came and told us what he had promised. This, of course, annoyed us to no end. He even sold customers on features that we had no intention of implementing — he told people our application was ODBC-compliant, and that we could use any database product that supported ODBC, when in reality, none of us knew what ODBC was, and our back-end stuff was completely Oracle-specific. He had no CS education and often told us that he didn’t understand the technical stuff that well but could fake it well enough, but occasionally he would surprise us with how much he did understand.

Bob grew up in, I believe, northern Alberta, and one story he used to tell was about when he lived in a log cabin as a boy. In the middle of winter, the walls of the cabin would be covered with ice a couple of inches thick — on the inside. They’d light a fire in the middle of the cabin first thing in the morning and keep it going all day, and by the time they went to bed at night, the ice was gone and the cabin was warm and cozy. Overnight, the fire would go out, and by the time they woke up in the morning, the walls were covered in ice again.

When we first delivered the Boston Police system, all the developers spent a lot of time in Boston, and Bob was there as well. I’m sure he was down there for the better part of several months. He had a suite at the hotel, and his room eventually became the storeroom for spare parts. He had a stash of keyboards, mice, workstations or fingerprint scanners yet to be installed, platens for the fingerprint scanners, and cables galore. In addition to the hardware, Bob always had a large bottle of rum in his room as well (he was a rum-and-coke man), a couple cartons of smokes, and sometimes a few bottles of Sam Adams chilling in the snow on his balcony.

I took the GO Train into work every day, since I lived within walking distance of the Burlington station, and the office was within walking distance of the Port Credit station. One day while I was on my way into work, Gail called the office to say that she had gone home but had locked herself out, and asked Denise the receptionist (who is still working at Comnetix and is a freakin’ director now – way to go Denise!) to ask me to return home to let her in. Bob was there when Denise gave me the message, and without a moment’s hesitation, tossed me his car keys.

Bob was doing a demo for some company at some very expensive hotel in Naples, Florida, and I was going to go with him to set up the hardware and such. Since I was going to be in Florida for a couple of days, Gail took some vacation and came with me. The company that was bringing us down would only pay for one room, so Bob insisted that Gail and I take the room, and he would get a room at a nearby Howard Johnson’s or something, rent a car, and drive into the hotel every day. We offered to take the room for half the trip and then switch hotels with him (seeing as it was him the company was paying to see, not me), but he refused.

Bob could be a PITA sometimes, and we had many disagreements in the three years I worked with him, but he was a stand-up guy, a loyal friend, and I truly liked and respected him. I regret not having kept in touch with him since I left Comnetix. My condolences go out to his family.

Here is a story about a guy who bought something at Circuit City, refused to show the receipt when leaving, and was physically detained by the security thug at the door and the store manager. He called the police, who showed up, and arrested him for not showing his driver’s license. Obviously the cop was wrong for arresting him, and personally, I would have complied with the cop, but I applaud the guy for having the stones to assert his rights and not show his receipt. I don’t like the store’s policy of assuming all of their customers are thieves and forcing them to prove otherwise in order to leave. If the store wants to inspect your receipt before you leave, fine, but this cannot be a condition of purchase unless they tell you this up front. None of this even addresses the fact that showing your receipt doesn’t prove you didn’t steal anything unless they strip search you at the same time.

The only store I shop at that requires this is Costco, but it’s possible that the agreement that you have to sign when you become a member includes the right to examine your receipt when you leave. I’ve never questioned this — when asked, I simply hand over the receipt and wait to be allowed out. I don’t like this practice, but I simply don’t have the aforementioned stones. If we had Circuit City in Canada, I’d boycott them, but we don’t. We do have “The Source by Circuit City”, but according to their web site, they’re owned by a company called “InterTAN”, and not by Circuit City. Perhaps they’ve just licensed the name, or Circuit City owns InterTAN, or something. Anyway, I won’t be shopping there, nor do I shop at Best Buy, because of the numerous stories I’ve heard about how badly they treat their customers, including one I blogged about last March. I’m not generally one for boycotts, as they rarely accomplish the change they are supposedly trying to bring about, but even if the store never changes their policies, I feel a little better not shopping there.

Then again, in Canada, Future Shop and Best Buy are owned by the same company, and I have no problem shopping at Future Shop. I’m not sure if that makes me a hypocrite or just naïve.

While checking my spam filter today looking for false positives (which are becoming more and more rare), I happened across one with a very intriguing subject line. The message itself was a stock tip, but the subject line was “It’s possible of course that only similar processes to that which arise in a human brain can give rise to conscious thoughts.”

It’s probably rare that a spam message makes you think philosophically.

While driving into Waterdown tonight, I was driving 60 (in a 60 zone) in the right lane, next to a car doing about the same speed in the left lane. A tow truck came up behind me doing about 80 and flashed its lights at me — but not its headlights, the flashing lights on top of the truck. He had the lights off as he was driving, but as he approached me, he flashed them on for a second and then off again. I did nothing, partially because I was in the right lane and there was a car beside me, and partially because the right lane was ending in about a kilometre anyways. When the right lane ended I moved over, and the tow truck moved over behind me (there was time to continue in the right lane and pass me before the lane ended, but he didn’t).

This is something that has bugged me about tow trucks for the longest time — why do they have flashing lights on them? Police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks I understand; they sometimes have to get somewhere in a hurry, so they put the lights on and people move out of their way. But tow trucks? Who moves out of the way for a tow truck with its lights on? I certainly don’t. I can understand that if they are in the process of hooking up to a vehicle in a lane or at the side of a busy road, they might want to put the lights on to alert drivers that something is happening there, but while driving? What’s the point? Get over yourself, Mr. Tow Truck Driver. You’re performing a service that is valuable to society, but the flashing lights are a bit much.

I’ve got an idea for the automotive industry. It’s hardly groundbreaking, nor will it revolutionize anything, but I still think it’s a good idea. A number of times in the past, I’ve been driving along in the centre lane and I see someone in the right lane with his left indicator on, so I slow down to let him in, and he doesn’t go. I give him enough time to see that someone is letting him in, and then I say “screw it” and speed up again, only to notice that he was not signalling left at all, he had his four-way flashers on. I couldn’t see the right-hand light because of a trailer, or other cars, or because the light was broken or burned out, or whatever. Other times, I’ll be driving in the right lane and see a car driving on the shoulder, signalling left, so I move over to clear the right lane. Again, it turns out that he was not signalling but had his hazard lights on. Since the hazards and the turn indicators flash at the same rate, there’s no way to tell the difference if you can only see one of the lights, or one is not functional. It occurred to me that there should be a way to distinguish between them, and the simplest way would be to double the flash rate of the hazard lights. This way, regardless of whether you saw one light or two, you could tell by the flash rate whether it was a turn signal or hazards.

I turned 38 yesterday (it’s shortly after midnight), though I don’t feel a day over, oh, say, 35. Normally our family celebrates birthdays by (among other things) going out for dinner, where the birthday boy/girl chooses the restaurant. I love Chinese food, so I chose a Chinese food buffet place in Burlington that Gail and I used to go to a lot, but haven’t been in a while. However, Ryan had soccer last night, I have a golf tournament today, Ryan has a soccer practice on Wednesday, and I have a baseball game on Thursday, so we’re not going for dinner until Friday. They gave me my presents today though. Gail gave me tickets to see We Will Rock You (warning: link plays music without asking and (even worse) doesn’t seem to have a “shut the hell up” button – I hate that ) with a bunch of our friends at the end of August. As an unintended gift, she also took both boys to Ryan’s soccer game, which gave me an uninterrupted hour to continue reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

I was very impressed by the gifts from the kids — Gail said that they chose them themselves (i.e. it wasn’t Gail buying the presents and saying that they were from the boys). I broke my sunglasses a week or two ago when sliding into second base (I’ve kind of fixed them, but one of the lenses falls out fairly easily now), so Nicholas got me a new pair. Ryan got me a music stand, so I can put my music books on it, rather than putting them down on the overly-cluttered desk in the office.

I also got one birthday “gift” that I did not need. My golf shorts (I really should buy a second pair) were in the laundry, and as I said, I have a golf tournament later today, so I put in a load of laundry with the intent of moving them from the washer to the dryer just as I was going to bed. When I checked around 11:15, I found that the washer was still full of dirty water, and nothing was happening — there was no power getting to the washer. I checked the circuit breaker, which was fine, so I grabbed an extension cord and tried that. The washer groaned for a second and then stopped again. I had to empty all of the clothes from the washer into the laundry sink, then scoop out over 40 litres of water from the washer before I could find the problem, which was a pair of Ryan’s pyjamas wrapped around the agitator. I fought with that for a while before dislodging them. By this point it was almost midnight, and now I had to put the clothes back in the washer, restart it, and wait for it to finish so that I could put everything in the dryer so that I had golf shorts to wear tomorrow. I’m too tired to continue reading (not that I’m not enjoying the book), so I says to myself, “Self”, I says, “what activity can you do to pass the time when you’re tired and don’t feel like thinking?” You guessed it — blogging!

Well, the washer is done now, so I’m off to move the clothes into the dryer and hit the hay. Now that I’m old, I really should get to bed earlier.

In the spirit of melle.ca, this is a picture that I did not take of the most beautiful double rainbow I’ve ever seen. On our way to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (in IMAX 3D! Way cool!) last night, we saw it over Mississauga. It started out as just the base of a rainbow, and before long we could see the entire arc of one, and about half of the second. The full one was the most vibrant rainbow I’ve ever seen, literally lighting up the sky.

Double rainbows are rare enough, but the brightness and beauty of this one had me wishing I had a camera on my cell phone. There were a number of cars pulled over to the side of the road, and the occupants of every car I passed were all staring off to the east. Nature is amazing.