iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the disaster in South Asia by now. I know I received some money over the Christmas holidays and I felt compelled to make a donation, and I hope you do too.

The Red Cross is taking donations on-line, and I’m sure it won’t take you longer than 3 minutes to donate. [Red Cross, How to Donate]

UPDATE: Google now has info on how to help here. Also, globalsecurity.org (a favourite site of mine) has imagery and tsunami information.

It’s cold, the thermometer I keep in my kitchen said it was -15 C^o outside last night and 15C^o inside. The water line to my toilet is frozen because I think it might actually cover every inch of my house’s outside wall. So with all this winter weather out there I thought I’d share my tips for winter driving.

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1. All season tires = no season tires. With the cheap foreign labour now available to North America, winter tires and black steal rims are cheaper and easier than you’d think.
2. Keep at least half a tank of gas in you’re tank, no matter what the size. The condensation in the empty tank can freeze and plug-up the fuel line. If this does happen to you either get the car into a warm place or get someone to fill up an emergency can of gas for you and bring it back to you inside the warm car (with a window cracked, and the lid secured, and the safest driving they’ve ever done). This happened to my sister last week and she had to get a tow to Canadian Tire and wait for three hours to have them simply start the car and give it back to her. [[Three years later it looks like this might have more to do with a bad starter than fuel - or my sister]]
3. Ice scrapers, a shovel, washer fluid, oil, a blanket, food etc. are all important to keep in your car.
4. Make sure those windshield wipers are OK. I like to up-size my wipers, as long as they don’t touch when down they’ll be fine. That way you’re not peering around a frame of salt to see traffic lights.

I’m sure everyone sees those Airline flight emergency guides and thinks about how funny they look, and what the pictures really appear to describe. Well check out Airtoons.

“If a chemical weapon follows you home, try to act casual.”
Another similar site is this spoof of ready.gov, America’s anti-terror site/guide. This one’s done by idlewords.com.

Ted Nolan, former coach of the Buffalo Sabers and other good teams, surprised us by wanting to use our department’s facilities to send a message to a hockey coaching workshop in Yellowknife today. A friend of his who works at Brock called us up Thursday afternoon to do it Friday morning. He showed up, we sat him in front of a camera and tried to put an interesting background behind him, and started recording.

I then plugged it into my PowerBook, download the video, titled it, and compressed and published a high and low quality version and published it to a web site (which I won’t give you the URL for!). Later that day the guys in Yellow Knife where able to present it to the group, saving an air flight.

He’s a really nice guy, and had some good comments on coaching in general. How’s a coach-of-the-year and nice guy like that not get renewed by the Sabers? One more reason not to like the Sabers.

It’s old news now, but that’s the only version of the New York Times we get in St. Catharines: Old.

The Thursday December 16th issue of the New York Times had a two page ad paid for by the spreadfirefox.com community, myself included. We all know I’m an advocate for Firefox and Open Source development and I don’t think it’s about free (as in beer) software, it’s about an effective development model that produces good results. So, in appreciation of a product I literally use for over four hours a day I throw some cash towards spreading the word.

You can view the PDF version here (takes FOREVER to load!!!!).

Well then, check out the dulllest blog in the world.

Lindsay’s new iPod, and Maclean’s recent article prompted me to put together my thoughts on Apple’s iTunes.

First off, iTunes and the iPod work with both the Mac and the PC. The iPod works a little better with Firewire than USB 1 and 2, but most PCs these days finally have firewire and USB 2 isn’t that bad. The iPods are expensive, they hold a lot more than all the other MP3 players, but they are expensive BUT iTunes is free at iTunes.com, now let me convince me.

The hands down biggest feature of the iTunes music jukebox is it’s search features. Type something in the search box and instantly all the results are there, and as each key is pressed the results are narrowed. So as I type ‘tr’ I see all the ‘travis’ and ‘the tragically hip’ music I have, then as I type the ‘a’ for ‘tra’ I see just the ‘tragically hip’ music. Imagine the satisfaction of finding the song that was stuck in your head with no more than four keystrokes.

A feature I really appreciate is the music sharing. Through a technology known as zeroconfig, which Apple re-branded Rendezvous, iTunes can find music on other computers in the same network. It’s an easy, legal, way to play your own music in a deferent room in the house. Shouldn’t be hard, an LP could do that, but try it with any other jukebox. I have over 50GB of music, so I use this feature and a open source program called daapd to create a shared music server on my linux server, which has enough storage for that much music. It also allows me to play my own music at work. Most of that music is either in MP3 or Apple’s AAC, which is just MPEG4 (which means better quality and high compression). More info here.
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This weekend was my cousin Amy Arbuckle and Bill Bradley’s wedding out in Kitchener Waterloo.

The service was in Startford and best described as short and sweet. The reception was held back in Kitchener and my aunt had outdone herself with all the snowflake themed decorations. The other amazing sight was Bill’s dad, who lost 110 pounds for the occasion! Speech’s were great, and my parents danced the night away. Of course Amy look amazing and I think the Clare family is pretty lucky to have Bill as part of it now.

Lindsay also looked very nice. She looked like a Kennedy at the ceremony! She also finally had a good chance to meet my cousins; as they got her drunk at the reception.

I wanted to have a photo up for this post, but I neglected to hit my father up for his pictures before I left Markham. (I’ll get one soon)

Sunday was also Lindsay Turko’s* birthday. After I sent her flowers at work on Thursday I wasn’t sure if anything could top my gift, but her parents managed to do it with an iPod.

All that said: I would suggest that the two topics that I am the most ill-equipped to include in my blog (so far) are birthdays and weddings. So all those that can give a better account are welcome to in the comments section of this post.

* Why did I include my girlfriend’s last name in my own blog? Because I told her it’d be funny if mattclare.ca came up as the number one Google result for her name

By now you likely heard that the Supreme Court of Canada ruled to extend marriage rights to gays and lesbians in a unanimous opinion. I for one feel better about my own Canadian citizenship after the decision. (Parliament can allow gay marriage, top court decides, The Globe & Mail).

Why should two people that committed to each other, and who are that big a part of each other’s life’s, not be granted the rights that extend from marriage: property, health/survival benefits and other legal rights, to simple visitation rights if one is dying in a hospital? I don’t think the union needs to be called marriage, but since a log time ago religious marriage was codified in civil law, there seems to be little choice. Additionally, I’m glad that each religion is free to make it’s own decisions about if it is going to honour it or not. Both decisions are in the spirit of what the founder’s intent was when the charter was created.

Another bit of good news about honouring the rights of Canadians was Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty words about Debbie Peliti, who found $40,000 and turned it in to the cops and was given a $2,000 reward.

Peliti is on welfare, and a mother of six. Her welfare case worker had called and inquired about the reward, as her benefits ’should’ be reduced because of her ‘earnings’. The NDP brought it up in the house and Dalton did the right thing and met her and told her she would not be penalized for her honesty.

Here is what I really made my drive back from St. Catharines today, quoting CTV’s T.O. woman to keep reward for turning in loot article:

…..He also said the former Conservative government’s vilification of anyone on social assistance created “a different impression” of welfare recipients.
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I picked up a copy of risen (risenmagazine.com) today because Billy Corgan was on the cover. As you may or may not know, I’m a huge Smashing Pumpkins fan. Not only do I have over forty of the bands released disks *, but more than that, I consider Mr. Billy Corgan a major inspiration in my life. Every teen has their angst, Billy channeled his into expressions of love, sadness and happiness that shaped how I see the world. That resonates with me (and most other bloggers).

The interview covers how Billy suffers his fame willingly, but suffers none the less. He said the lowest point was when one of the staff members at the funeral service for his mother (which, not mentioned in the article, is not his biological mother….) said “I’m sorry to hear about your mother. Can I have an autograph?”. The supposed, hard hitting magazine printed that Billy told him to ‘f-uck’ off. Building on that, Billy spoke about a tabloid article that he saw with photos of Brittany Spears at the beach and the caption ‘Cellulite at 22?’. Celebrity is pain: it’s pain to be a celebrity, it’s pain to be holding yourself up to that (body) image.

One section that I thought really captured what is Billy Corgan was his response to ‘Would you rather be blissfully ignorant, or have knowledge and be a little grumpy?’.

The other day I was looking at my cats, and they were blissfully being cats, chasing a bug or something, and I thought, God, I’m going to have to bury these guys some day. That’s the beauty of life; you can’t really appreciate the depth of your love for something unless you’re willing to embrace the sorrow that exists as the expression of life. It’s there. If you want to stay in the moment of oh, that’s cute, the cats are playing, I don’t think you can get to the depth oh how amazing it it that these two little creatures are programmed to chase a bug.
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