iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

What a great first Stanley Cup game! Back and forth action and the Oilers played a great game….. right up until the end. Edmonton’s newest, and most valuable, player Dwayne Roloson had his right knee slammed into the post as Carolina’s Andrew Ladd crashed into him after Edmonton’s defenceman Marc-Andre Bergeron checked him.

Ty Conklin was then placed in net to replace Roloson, he promptly got the second assist on a goal on his own net. Roloson’s season is over and this is the biggest concern the Oilers have, being down 1:0 is almost trivial.

By “excited disappointment” I mean that this loss means that the Oilers can’t win the cup before game five, and with Roloson gone, probably game six. Game six is in Edmonton on July 17th and so am I! I’ll be presenting at the WebCT Users’ Canadian Conference that week. I don’t know if I’ll make it to the game, but I will be celebrating on Whyte avenue after that game or game seven on June 19th.

Go Oilers Go! Here’s to a bumpy road to the cup!

I presented at the Ontario University Computing Conference (OUCC) this week. The presentation went well and I had a good balance of keener’s and skeptics in the crowd. The bad news is my plan A and plan B for recording the presentation for a future podcast both failed – so we’ll have to figure out what we’ll do about that.

One of the first keynote speakers was federal Liberal leadership candidate Bob Rae. Mr. Rae talked about the need to disperse decision making and not consolidate everything in Queens park, especially in the education and health care sector. “They have to be given the freedom to make decisions, the freedom to fail – I suppose I’m an expert on that.” he quipped in one of his many self-deprecating jokes about the late 90s.

The conference quickly turned into the Wikipedia conference when Mr. Rae complained that he was introduced as graduating from a Toronto high-school that he had never attended based on information gathered from the Bob Rea Wikipedia article. When he checked his own article he found all kinds of inaccuracies and ultimately his wife edited the article, and as far as I’m concerned, really improved it. I documented his concerns.

The Wikipedia conference went on as Tim Bray, from Sun, spent 3/4 of his one hour keynote talking about the articles he maintains and how good Wikipedia actually is.

OUCC went very well this year. The influence of it’s host, Guelph University, was felt in strong eLearning conference stream and the people who ran the conference. Congratulations to Guelph U and OUCC.

You can listen to the two keynotes at the OUCC website.

I just moved mattclare.ca from a friend’s web host to my existing A2WebHosting account (for passnerd.com). I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, but I anticipated that it wouldn’t be too smooth. The final push was the bandwidth messages I was starting to get every 6 hours:

The domain mattclare.ca (mclare) has reached 80% of its bandwidth limit.
Please contact the system admin as soon as possible.

Fair enough. I’d out grown my generous free hosting and had a number of run-ins with the sys admin (see previous posts on 404 and error logs). So now I’ve moved to a hosting package with more storage for both my web sites and my IMAP E-Mail and, most importantly, more bandwidth!

The best part about A2WebHosting is a I get ssh (secure shell, or secure cammnd line) access to my Linux hosted site — and that get’s the Linux/UNIX geek in me very excited!

Thanks for patience.

Looking for a house? Need a new car? See a future for yourself in the UK?

Here’s the ultimate package deal: Buy this house in Durham for £367,000 and this 1998 355 F1 (F1 = paddle shifters!) comes with if for free!

The house is listed at £367,000 – which is the appraisal of this house and all the others in the neighborhood, so the Ferrari is free. The only catch is their building a brand new neighborhood across the street for the next year or so.