Brian Hampson - Life and Other Things

The new daily paper in Vancouver BC, “24 Hours”  wasn’t even on the street that long.  It seems that they didn’t have permission for the placement of their paper boxes.  The city wheeled around and collected them all and impounded them.  Get the licence and pay the fine.  Ouch!

Anyone know of a tool that will delete files that are listed only in the MFT and not via the API?

Some nasty little app installed itself on one of the PC’s I look after.  It hid it’s process and filename from the Windows API.  I used the RootKitRevealer from http://www.sysinternals.com/ to find the files.  regmon from sysinternals.com let me know what process was continually fighting my teatimer (Spybot S&D) to put the HKLM/Run entry back in over and over.  I couldn’t get to the process, so I just used pskill (from the sysinternals.com pstools) to kill the process. The Entry stopped showing up!  Hah!

After a reboot, I could find the files via the windows explorer, and deleted them…what a PITA!

Anyone know of a tool that will delete files that are listed only in the MFT and not via the API?

And, as usual, I will find myself up on the Sunshine coast for another fun filled week of camp with NorthPointe Outdoor Adventures.  No more blog until Saturday.  Next NorthPointe camps for the Vancouver area will be in the Summer! 

Have fun in the city folks, because we’re heading out!

In a classic case of “Man bites dog” the CBC is reporting that a northern Manitoba school teacher has made bullies wear hockey helmets that say “I’m stupid: I bully”, and also participate in roll playing where the other kids in the school ridicule and call the bully names. 

I like this.  Let the kid know what his insults and taunting have done to those that are weaker.  Now, what do you do about GROUP bullying?

Tony Pierce has 20 basic points on what to do in a Blog.

And to many of those points, I say “Screw It!”

Do what you want.   It’s your Blog.  People will diss you, people may praise you, but be ready for it all.  If you’re going to be live on the ‘Net, you’d better have thick skin.  Get out there and take a chance.  (Do watch for the blogging about work and getting fired thing.  It happens a bit too much these days)  Let your feelings be known. Say what you you want.  This is YOUR piece of the ‘Net and YOUR place to inform people.  Get out there and do it!

Have fun, play nice, and other kids will share their toys with you

The drawback to living in the part of the North American continent where spring comes early, is that allergies come early too!  I’m dying from alder pollen!  I have been living the last two weeks in a reactine induced haze.  Constantly tired.  Non-drowsy, probably if  you don’t take them every day for 2+ weeks!  I want some rain to clean the air!  I’m dying.  

So, those of you living snowbound can rejoice in the fact that you don’t have to suffer with all this pollen yet.  Silver lining and all that jazz.

The Pacific Spirit Area had it’s annual Kub Kar rally today.  We had about 50 cubs out for the afternoon running.  I took some pictures.  Here they are.

Omar pointed out some of the interesting new “Incubation Projects” underway at MS.  Looks like not only Google can do cool things with Javascript.

Incubation projects are VERY basic prototypes of ideas which may or may not ever see the light of production.

Cool - the MS monster moves…Look out!

Some handy quick tips for Excel.

After finding out that a bunch of applicants knew, ahead of their official notification, that they had been accepted or not, HBS decided to disallow them admission based on their “hacking” activities. A couple of scary points here:

1. Hacking is not, and never will be simply changing the URL to see if it brings back a result.  If you publish something on the open InterNet and don’t have it passworded, then it’s tough nuggies to you if people get the information and you don’t want them to.
2. What if someone ELSE “hacked“ the URL for your application?  Would you be S.O.L.?  Sort of a denial of service concept.  How do they determine “beyond reasonable doubt - to keep them from thaving their collective asses sued off“ who actually “hacked“ the system?

I don’t like it.  I don’t like it at all.

Tony’s Vineyard was fined $3000NZD by the New Zealand Commerce Commission for having an out of date website.  The prices on the site didn’t match what they were at the restaurant.  When people complained over a period of 6 months, nothing was done.  Fined!  I’d like to think that in a dispute over pricing that the company should have to honour it’s present lowest advertised price. 

People don’t realize that having a website is not simply “Put it up, and the masses will come”  You need to give it some attention, change it as required and make it reflect reality

Burnaby RCMP put a dent in these losers’ racing plans - BEFORE they killed someone this time.

Not only did they stop them…they impounded the cars! 

This needs to happen EVERY time.  And if they find you guilty, sell the car for parts.  If they sold it whole, they ‘d probably end up just creating another racer

You wanna race?  Get legal mods done and go to a track!

We’ve all had it - the annoying co-worker that just won’t leave.

Here are some tips to help get rid of them.

I’ve found many syndicated blogs that are about Photoshop. It’s the hot new topic, when you consider all the millions of digital cameras being sold to people that take lousy pictures.  What I can’t find is a good syndicated blog about Adobe Illustrator. I’d love it if Illustrator tips popped up periodically on my news reader.  Alas - nothing that I know of.

Do you know a blog that is about Illustrator, and is syndicated? Leave me a comment with the URL

Here is a good tutorial that talks about dragging and dropping images on your web page, as well as making copies and other cool DHTML effects.

The general consensus is that the colour photograph was invented in 1903 by the Lumiere brothers.  Which leaves us with the only likely country taking pictures during WWI being the French.  Here are some of those pictures.  Rare colour glimpses into wartime Europe during the “Great War”.  Lots of moustaches!

Also cool - old photos from Russia, using 3 colour filter technology.