It's all about choices.
 

 
 
 

Last week I saw 80s rocker guy rocking out downtown. This is usually a clear sign that spring is here. I'm not sure where he goes in the off season, but whenever Victoria weather gets nice he's out there jamming on the electric guitar with his "portable" amp. Usually he has a helper pushing his amp in a shopping cart as he walks around town playing his solos. He's like our town's groundhog for the purpose of determining if spring is really here or not.

So given the fact that I saw 80s rocker guy jamming his tunes downtown and that it has been sunny and warm for a few weeks now, I thought spring was here for sure. But last night when I was leaving Steve's place to come home around midnight, I had to clear a few inches of snow off my parked car. Then I had the pleasure of driving home at 15 km/hr thanks to the downpoor of giant snow flakes filling the sky. It's rare enough to get snow in Victoria during winter, but it's very odd to see it in April. I guess it shouldn't be so surprising though, given that Victoria's weather can flip flop as often as any politician. But this begs the question: does 80s rocker guy really know when spring is here?

I just got back from the Open Web Vancouver conference with a friend from work. It was pretty interesting. We found out about a few new and useful web toolkits, learned some AJAX tips and tricks and got a general feel for all the new "webby" things people are working on these days. We also helped a few people with mapping related websites since that is our area of expertise. Overall it was a great trip.

Elsewhere, things are looking really good right now too. Asuka and I are still looking to buy a condo somewhere near downtown whenever the right one comes along. Work is continuing to be busy and interesting. The weather is getting nicer by the day. I'm continuing to enjoy mixing music and moving forward in that area of my hobbies. I'm able to hang out with my friends and wife regularly, even though we're all so busy. The Office is finally back on TV now that the writers strike is over, and the last season of Battlestar Galactica has started up (pretty much the only two cable TV shows I watch right now). My Xbox 360 is continuing to entertain me with great games like Rock Band. I've been winning money at my regular poker games lately. And I could probably go on, but you get the point.

To even things out a bit, what are some things that are annoying me right now? For one, the renters living above me have been extremely loud after midnight at least 3 times this week (but they got a lot of complaints, including from us, so hopefully that will stop now). Our small and cramped condo continues to be growing even smaller by the day. I still can't afford to stop doing contract work on the side, which continues to take up much of my free time. I keep meaning to start going to the driving range and golfing again, but haven't been able to yet. My camera, which is now about 6 years old, has been having problems for a while which makes me want to get that new Canon 40D SLR now rather than later. Also, both my desktop and laptop computers are really starting to act slow and show their age. But these are pretty much all things that will get sorted out over time.

So in general, things are going well. Summer is coming, along with a lot of great events, birthdays and vacation time. And life continues to be busy, complicated, enjoyable, frustrating and exciting. Nothing new really :).

The Home with House podcast for this month follows a theme of progressive moods. This episode represents the progression of feelings you might experience when waking up in the morning. From being fully asleep in bed, to being half-awake and groggy, and finally to being wide awake and ready for an eventful day, this mix mirrors the moods of these stages.

You'll notice that episode 5 starts off deep and soulful and slowly gains momentum and energy until the end. This sort of theme is a bit different from past episodes, but I think it turned out quite well. So I hope you enjoy Home with House episode 5, this one is called "Morningtide".

Morningtide tracklisting:

1. Gaelle - Rain (Speakeasy Remix)
2. Kevin Yost - Feeling You (Original Mix)
3. Sequential Soul - Breath Deeper (Ralph GUM & Benny Pecoraio Remix)
4. Monkey Brothers - Losing My Head (Peaktime Instrumental Mix)
5. Ethan White and Lisa Shaw - Find The Way (Jask Soul Seduction Vocal)
6. Miguel Migs - Petalpushing (Original Mix)
7. Knee Deep - All About Love (Original Mix)
8. Ross Couch - Rising Up (Dub Mix)
9, Samantha James - Breathe You In (Fiasco's Puff Puff Mix)
10. Deadmau5 - Jaded (Original Mix)

The behind-the-scenes blog updates are finally done, for now. What I thought would take a few hours over the weekend ended up turning into dozens of hours throughout the week. I think I've finally got everything working correctly now, but not without a few changes.

Firstly, I've decided to remove the archive link to my old blog. It took long enough to get my main site working with the new version of MovableType, and I don't think it is worth the effort to do the same for my old site. I'll be keeping those 4 years of blog archives for whenever I feel the need to look back on my musings and laugh, but I don't think they were accessed much on this new site. So that change shouldn't make a big difference.

One of the main areas that needed attention during the upgrade was the comments. That system changed a fair bit between the versions of MoveableType that I've skipped, so a lot of my comment code and templates needed to be redone. During these changes, I decided to remove the popup comment window and make the comment form reside on the individual blog entry's archive page. This should make the flow of posting a comment much easier.

Additionally, the CAPTCHA question I had installed with the old comment system to help prevent bots from spamming my site didn't work with the new comments. This was the old "enter the text below" question that randomly supplied some text for you to enter. The new CAPTCHA system that comes with MoveableType doesn't work on my webserver because I'm missing some necessary software, so I needed to install a less powerful plugin to replace it. Now when you enter a comment, you'll need to answer a simple static question which should be enough to prevent common bots from spamming my site into oblivion. At least I hope so.

Those should be the only changes you notice for now. The whole reason I wanted to upgrade was so I could add some more detailed categories and tags for my blog entries, but I'm too exhausted from debugging the problems to add those changes right now. You'll probably see those additions over the next week or so. In the meantime, I'll be mighty appreciative if you notify me of any bugs or errors you see on the website. I've made so many little changes that there's bound to be something that slipped through. Please feel free to post a comment to let me know of any problems you encounter.

I plan on doing some behind-the-scenes updates to this website over the weekend. I've been using an older version of MovableType to power my blog management ever since I started the blog back in 2003. I think I'm still using version 2.661 when the software has since had many updates up to version 4.1. So it's about time I finally spend some time to migrate over to the new world.

The main reason I want to make the move now is because I've been wanting to take advantage of some of the new features that come with the newest MovableType. Some of those include the ability to categorize my blog entries within multiple categories instead of just one, and the ability to create a more logical tree of categories and sub-categories. Also, I'd like to be able to tag my blog entries with keywords. This will be especially useful for tagging things like the Home with House podcasts and my other mixes with keywords like "jazzy house" or "funky house". In the end this will make my site more organized, easier to search for users, and hopefully it will also help increase the flow of traffic that comes here via Google and other search engines. That's the goal anyways.

I hope to make the changes in a development area so the live website doesn't go down or become affected during the process. But it's still possible that I might screw something up during the migration, so hang in there. The changes should be done sometime this weekend and when they are, you won't notice too much difference on the surface. Again, most of the changes will be behind-the-scenes and for my benefit, but there will probably be a few more searchable categories and options in the archives section when everything is done.

March's Home with House episode is here and ready to download. This month's mix has more of a progressive house feel to it, but I'd still classify it as a genre of deep house. I've included a number of great deep peak time tracks for this mix such as Lovelee Home which is a remix of last year's Lovelee Dae track, and Kalim Shabazz's awesome Peak Bomb. There are also a couple of great deep and energetic tracks by Ross Couch, an artist I've only recently discovered who appears to have numerous strong releases. You'll be seeing more of his tracks in my upcoming mixes.

Like last month's podcast release, this one also falls on a holiday. That's right, today is St. Patrick's Day instead of the usual date of the 17th. Apparently it gets moved only when it collides with some other Roman Catholic holiday which last happened in 1940 (though the Irish State holiday is unaffected by this, so I'm not really sure of the official date of this holiday in my region but I'm going with today). This is apparently the last time it won't be on the 17th until the year 2160 (check out the link above for more info about that).

So enjoy the new podcast episode, and Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Night Dealings tracklisting:

1. Jim Rivers - I Go Deep (Original Mix)
2. DJ Chus & Joeski - El Amor (Paulo Rocha Mix)
3. Q-Burns Abstract Message feat. Lisa Shaw - Innocent (Loveskys Confuse Me With Fear Mix)
4. Ross Couch - Time Out (Original Remix)
5. Morgan Page feat. Astrid Suryanto - Falling For You (Vocal Mix)
6. Blaze, Funk D'Void - Lovelee Home (Original Mix)
7. Ross Couch - Back In Time EP (One Day)
8. STP - Everything Is Beautiful (Main Mix)
9, Kalim Shabazz - Peak Bomb (Original Mix)
10. Kuningas - Waiting (Night Moves Mix)

Spring is coming fast and flowers are starting to pop up all over the city now. This change of season always seems to bring with it the feeling of freshness and excitement. And with that promise of new growth and sunny weather, I've been getting my creative processes flowing and working on this month's Home with House podcast episode. I should have it ready sometime later this week.

I went to see 10000 BC the other night. It wasn't very good. It had its good moments, mostly a few cool special effect scenes, but otherwise it was pretty corny. Any attempts to make the audience care for the main characters failed through horribly contrived dialog. It didn't help that some of the primitive tribal characters looked like they were freshly manicured and were wearing mascara in the same era that the Egyptians were apparently building the Great Pyramid with the help of woolly mammoths. The mammoths sure did look cool though.

I've also been watching a lot of the newer Battlestar Galactica TV series lately. Now that is a quality show. It does a good job of bringing up tough ethical and morale situations that many societies seem to be discussing these days. Things like racial issues (masked as humans and machines in the show), terrorism and wars, suicide bombing, the issues of messing with human DNA, the constant struggle of religions and science, and the whole idea of souls and what qualifies something to be considered alive and deserving of rights in this day and age. Of course, all of this is sewn into a science fiction series that is packed with interesting and flawed characters along with a cool story and good action. So yeah, I like it.

Otherwise, things are moving along as usual. I'm still looking to buy my first property anytime soon (which is whenever I find something I like in my price range), I'm working on that new DJ mix that should be ready any day now, and I've got a few seasons of new TV shows to continue watching. I've also got a slew of new photos that I've been taking thanks to all this great weather. So stay tuned for more blog updates soon.

We finally got around to visiting Saltspring Island for a photogroffee session this past Sunday. Caroline, Davin, Steve, Richard and myself took the ferry over to the island in the morning and met Jay on the other side. Jay acted as our official tour guide as we snapped a few thousand photos between the 5 of us.

We went hiking through some parks and forested areas, walked around Ganges and the marina, and eventually made our way to Jay's mother's place and shot some photos of her amazing art. She has created some very large brass statues and you'll see a few of them in my photos.

It was a great trip, and we barely skimmed the surface of the photogenic island. I hope we can make it back to Saltspring a few more times specifically for more photogroffee sessions this year. It's cheap and close, but far enough away that the locations are fresh to my camera. I've posted some of my favourite photos from this trip, and you can check them out below: