Yes! Timing really is everything.

A few weeks ago I was thinking, "It's been a long time since I've spoken with my good friend Chance..." so I gave him a call. Unfortunately (actually fortunately as it turned out) he did not answer and I had to leave a message.

Some time later I saw him reply to a post on a tech support list that I subscribe to at work. It reminded me that I had not heard back from him since I left my voice message so I sent him an email to follow up. After another email follow up Chance finally replied. He apologized profusely calling himself a "technological and social retard" which I think is going too far and besides, no apology necessary. We all get hung up on stuff and besides, I'm the king of letting things slide... I was just happy to hear from him.

ASIDE - Chance is an interesting (read: funny) guy. He's a self-professed Luddite and yet he started Formix which specializes in high-performance computing. Now from my vantage point, anyone that can design and implement a high-performance computing cluster is pretty savvy when it comes to technology. But being able to build computer clusters obviously does not equal knowing how to program your VCR. Or retrieve your voicemail.

So we decided that Shelley, Chance and I should go for a beer at the Stumbling Monk.

Practically the first thing out of his mouth was, "Do you two want to go to Whistler?"

Do I ever...!

So it's looking like we're not only going to be there but be there for New Years eve - what a blast! Chance has been staying in the same cabin for the last like five years:

and it looks really nice. I guess the owner had a chance to turn over the renting of the property to some developer or property manager or something ages ago and just wasn't organized to take them up on the offer before it expired. D'oh...! Chance tells me he could have doubled his money and kept the property. You know it won't last long but at least we still have this one year to enjoy it.

One of Chance's favorite things about Canada is that everything is labeled in English and in French. Like this tomato juice:

One of my favorite things about Chance is that he says stuff like this. And one of my favorite things about Canada is that it contains Whistler. Oh man, I can't WAIT.

I'm half German so it stands to reason that half of my family is German. And while it's certainly true that most of my German relatives don't even have Internet access much less the time or inclination to read this blog, it still makes me think about language more than maybe some other people. Maybe. Anyway, while I would say that my German is pretty fair, like anything else that you don't use on a regular basis it is rusty. So when I came across this translator on techRivet I thought it was perfect.

Just like Babel Fish or Google Language Tools the Windows Live Translator lets you paste in text and translate it into most languages. The gee wiz functionality for me was that you can add this to your web site with the following code:

I just added this to our blog near the top, right corner. Now my German relatives can continue to not read this with the benefit of translation. Neat.

Just this morning I was exercising outdoors and the sun was peeking through the clouds. Now my neighborhood is under 4" of snow. What do you do when it snows? You go play in it. I love this!

When Cameron and I arrived at TT Minor Park these two guys were already rolling a HUGE snowball around the playfield. The way it was picking up snow it looked like they were rolling up carpet or something.

You know how much that snowball weighs? A lot!

While they got to work on the center piece Cameron started packing a snowball by hand.

Here they are staging the middle piece.

Cameron helped by building the head.

So, if the middle section is too heavy to lift onto the base, what do you do? You build a ramp of course! When they were originally trying to lift it up I made the comment that it looked like the Atlas Stones event from the World's Strongest Man competition. They laughed. A little. And then got back to building the ramp.

And then you roll the damn thing up!

Nice. Now you just need to fill in the gap between the middle and the base a bit so the middle section won't roll off the base and you're good to go.

At this point my hands were numb and bloodless so I had to head home. Cameron hung around and helped these guys put the head on top and make some arms. Now that's the holiday spirit.

Too funny...

Having just implemented a permanent 301 redirect on my web server so that users who browse to criminale.com get redirected to www.criminale.com a co-worker shows me this:

It seems some other people think what I found cool to be stupid. That's the neat thing about the web, you can start a movement. And get people involved. You can make things happen. You can sway people's opinion and enlighten their minds. About really, really important stuff.

My only saving grace is that they say:

"...several websites choose to forward traffic from domain.com to www.domain.com for branding reasons and that's just fine with us. As long as they don't simply block all HTTP traffic on the bare domain name, they're OK in our book."

Thank goodness, looks like I'm in the clear. [deadpan]

For 'branding' (like I need that...) and for consistency and because I think it's kinda cool and old school like a classic car or something I wanted everyone that browses to criminale.com to get redirected to www.criminale.com. Here is what I did.

• In IIS, I changed the name of my site to www.criminale.com.
• In Properties > Web Site > Advanced I removed the criminale.com host header.
• I then created a new site called criminale.com and for now pointed it to the same directory as the www.criminale.com site. The only host header for this site is criminale.com.
• In Properties > Home Directory of criminale.com, I selected "A redirection to a URL".
• In the Redirect to: field I put http://www.criminale.com$S$Q. More about that below.
• I also checked the "The exact URL entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource" boxes.

All done.

The $S tells IIS to take the subdirectory location e.g. /martin/cycling/training.asp and the $Q grabs the querystring. It seems intuitive not to check the "The exact URL entered above" box but if you don't you get a very different result.

Here is the Microsoft knowledge base article that I used as a guide:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313074

When I was much younger my mother used to beak gingerbread and we'd spend some real quality time decorating it with candied fruit, nuts and icing. I remember thinking that the icing she made was so cool... it was 1) an incredible glue and 2) perfect for making icicles.

Well a few days ago Shelley got this authentic German gingerbread house kit and Wednesday evening Cameron and us put it together.

The icing was one egg white (beaten), as much powdered sugar as you wanted until the consistency was right and then a few drops of lemon juice for extra stickiness. It was surprising how easy it was to make and it was also surprising how many memories of my Mom came back just from whisking a damn egg white.

Anyway, I can't wait to eat this!

I also can't wait until I start using my digital camera instead of my phone to take pictures - man is that a ghetto shot.

Sometimes, after years of not finding what you want you come across it in the strangest way.

I was riding the bus home today and grabbed a copy of The Stranger to read on the trip. Now I love ads, often they are far more interesting than the articles in any magazine. So as I'm paging though the latest issue I saw a cool, little  black and white line drawing of an ad and promptly checked it out when I got home. It was for swrve cycling clothing. And they rock.

Ever ridden your bike in jeans? It bites. Seams rub you in all the wrong places, they bind and you have to roll them up so you don't coat them in grease or snag them in your chain and launch your self over the bars. And when your work place is close enough to home to make putting on the official cycling clown suite a humongous hassle I'm always looking for the perfect "ride to work and then still be able to wear it without looking like a fool" outfit.

I'm going to ask Santa for a pair of knickers for Christmas!

The half marathon is 6 days away. I've set the bar fairly low in an attempt to totally impress myself. In other words, my whole life philosophy. However, this weekend I felt excellent out on my long run Sunday despite freezing my nibs off and running for my life from a Ted Bundy look-alike (I think it was all that Thanksgiving Reading I did. Nothing like boning up on "The Stranger Beside Me" tucked all warm and tidy in your isolated cabin in the woods). I feel a touch of a sore throat coming on but my remedy for that will be total denial. Lots of juice, a vitamin and denial, people. That's the ticket. After all this, there is no way in H -E - double hockey sticks that I'm not going to claw my way across the finish line. There's going to be running Elvis' for crapsake. Elvi. Running. Can you even imagine the amount of chaffing that scenario entails? All the Bodyglide in the world is not enough. Lord love'em. And I will be there. If a wig-sporting, jumpsuit and jogging shoe wearing Elvis impersonator can do it, so can I.

Today while at the gym I saw him again. He's about 50 something years old and in pretty good shape really but...

• He always wears these hilarious black Tommy Bahama Fisherman Sandals instead of tennis shoes.

• All his shirts are really tight... Not so hot especially when your waist is not exactly like that of the Bowflex spokesperson.
• Although not a requirement for self-obsessed old gym prima dona, this guy is really, really hairy and obviously pretty proud of it based on the tight, v-neck shirts he wears.
• He spends as much time fixing his hair in the mirror as he does working out.
• His hair style of choice is classic John Travolta meaning it's HUGE, is incapable of existing without a blow dryer and requires lots of maintenance. Thank goodness he's up to that task.
• His hair, he keeps making sure every one is perfectly in place...
• Since it's all about him, of course he never re-racks his weights.
• Since it's all about how much you can lift, his form is atrocious.
• Since it's about chest and arms, well, he never does much of anything else. In fact, come to think of it, chest and arms are ALL I ever see him do.
• What's with the hair...? Enough already. You're at the gym and it's 5:30 in the morning! Who cares?
• He tans massively. Obsessively. Ridiculously. Two words: leather man. Two more: it's winter. Two more: nut bag.

About the only missing characteristic is an overpowering cologne but I have not been close enough to smell anything. That's a good thing I'm thinking.

Forget that plastic, wildly inaccurate, hard to calibrate pedometer you are carrying around - just remember where you went and then look up the distance on Gmaps Pedometer when you're done!

All it takes is a couple of clicks (or a few hundred if you went a really long distance) and bingo - you have your distance. Actually, you only have to plot half of your walk/run if you go for and out-and-back route.

You can even export the route as an external link which you can send to your friends to share.

The only bummer is you can only zoom in as far as Google Maps will let you so your route might not be exactly the same as the distance you traveled. But pretty damn close I'll wager.

Nice.