Chris Blackwell's Domain

confessions of a web developer

Archive for the ‘General’ Category

My name is Chris Blackwell, and I AM CANADIAN

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Last night I watched the closing ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics, and what I felt and thought was truly remarkable. Dozens of celebrities stood up and proudly proclaimed they were Canadian. The highlight of the night for me was Michael J. Fox standing in the center of the stage, telling the world that just because he has lived in the US for the last 30 years, he is Canadian and proud of it. I am proud too!

I don’t often advertise on this website that I am Canadian, and I try to stay clear of geographical specific information so not to leave out anyone. However, I felt the absolute need today to tell everyone, and remind others, I am Canadian. The last two weeks have been absolutely magical. I’m not talking about the record setting 14 gold medals (although that was nice too). I am talking about watching my country come together and cheer as a single nation united. In my lifetime I have never seen this in Canada. It was absolutely magical, heart warming, and has left me with a lifetime of memories.

Canadians are a very special group of people. We have such a diverse country, both geographically and ethnically. We are a bi-lingual country (french and english), but a large percentage of our population speaks other languages. Quite often Canadians talk about their heritage proudly, whether it be from Franch, England, China, Jamacia, Finland, Italy, etc, but the last two weeks, everyone was Canadian, and no other flags were waved. It didn’t matter if you were not a sports fan, or didn’t care for the Olympics, everyone wanted to be part of the winter games. We dared to believe, and believe we did.

There were so many moments that made these Olympics stand out for me. There was the incredible story of Joannie Rochette, who was set to compete in woman’s figure skating before her mom sadly past away of a heart attack while on her way to see Joannie skate. Joannie decided to skate anyway, and carried the country on her shoulders as she won the bronze medal. She was given the honor of holding the flag during the closing ceremonies and I believe no one else deserved it more than she.

The moment I will remember the most was not one of victory, but one of loss and selflessness. Mellisa Hollingsworth was one of the favourites to win gold in the woman’s skeleton race. Unfortunately it was not meant to be and she ended up with a 5th place finish. Hollingsworth was in tears after her 5th place finish. She told Canada with tears in her eyes,

“It’s really hard. I feel like I’ve let my entire country down.”

She didn’t.

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New 27" Intel Quad-Core i7 iMac

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

Today my new 27″ iMac arrived after more then a month wait. I ordered this machine on November 27, 2009 and it only arrived on Thursday. Today was the official unboxing and I’m happy to share the experience with you.

This is going to be replacing my existing iMac. Since I have a lot of iTunes media (TV Shows and Movies take up a lot of space), my needs for storage were fairly large. I am also going to be installing Windows 7 on this machine via Boot Camp so that I can play a few games (like Star Trek Online early next month). So taking everything into consideration I ordered the following specs:

27" iMac in Box

So far I am absolutely loving this machine and I can’t believe how much power they were able to fit into an iMac form factor. The draw back to this is heat. This machine runs HOT! The processor itself only idols at around 50c, but if you put your hand on the back of this machine, you could actually burn it if you left it there.

27" iMac Booting Up

I used Boot Camp to partition the hard drive for the Windows install. I allocated 500GB for Windows, and left 1.5TB for OSX. There was a display issue when installing Windows 7, as the default driver for the ATI card is not compatible and leaves the screen blank. There is a fix for this that I will be posting tomorrow.

27" iMac Installing Windows 7

Overall I’m very happy with my new machine. I think this is a powerhouse of a computer, and the price is really good value considering everything that comes with it.

I was considering last summer moving to a Mac Pro for storage and power reasons, but now this iMac takes care of everything I needed to do, at about half of the cost. Granted there is still a need for the Mac Pros, especially if you want more than two monitors, but for most consumers and prosumers needs, this new iMac fits the bill.

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Please Don't SPAM My RSS Reader

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

Every morning I roll out of bed, make my way to the coffee machine and then head to my computer with one thing in mind: check my RSS Reader! This has been my morning routine for over two years now and it works for me with one little exception now. The amount of unread posts that are absolute junk! When I wake up in the morning and see I have 130 unread items and I end up only reading about 5, that is not acceptable by any means. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, so where has the real simple part gone?

I can?t read the news on the net anymore

I had to completely unsubscribe from all news company?s RSS feeds because they really don?t get it, and, are by far the worst at posting junk. When a news company reports on an issue they create a post about it and then my RSS feeder is updated with that post. But then they post another article about the same topic, and another, and another. Before too long I have 5 unread messages in my RSS reader about the same topic. Come on guys, consolidate this into either one post or one RSS message. Every time I try to subscribe to a newspaper?s ?general news feed?, it has over 200 unread messages by the end of the day. How am to keep up with that?

All in a race to make Google happy

A lot of these sites are posting very frequently so that Google indexes them faster and faster, and the more their competitors post, the more they feel like they have to retaliate. Even some of my favorite sites like Lifehacker and Engadget have slipped a little and are now submitting dozens of posts a day. Engadget by my count is up to about 50 postings a day! Are there really 50 new tech stories to talk about each day?

What?s this whole quality thing about?

You?ve probably noticed a trend or lack thereof on my blog. I don?t post anything unless I have something meaningful to say. You don?t need to read yet again about the new MacBooks that Apple released, or another post on how badly Windows VISTA is doing, because you?ve already read it. It?s been covered! So I don?t waste my time and I don?t waste yours rehashing the obvious. Make sure your posts are original, note worthy, and to the point.

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