Bottle Bandits

I just happened to be coming home early from school today because my Wednesday group meeting got cancelled for the week, and noticed a number people in my neighbourhood on bikes laden with LCBO bags. Today is recycling day in my neighbourhood, and it appears that on recycling day, between 10-12, there are quite a few people going around houses and collecting the wine and beer bottles that have been put out for the deposit you can get at the beer store.

On the short walk from the subway to my house, I saw 4 bikes pass, each with attached baskets of bottles and at least 3 LCBO bags tied to the handlebars. On my street, I passed by a man rooting through my neighbour’s recycling bin and pulling out two wine bottles.

Now, I knew people did this, I mean, it's easy money if your broke, but I didn't realize just how many people in just one neighbourhood did. I'm also surprised a bit by the number of people who don't return their own empties for the change. I mean, I know it's not much, but since I'm going to go to the Beer store anyway, I might as well carry a few empties and save the $2.

Web Browsers

I'm just going to make a quick mention of Opera. This is an awesome and under-utilized web browser. I've been maing more use of it lately, and it's just nice to use. It's got tabs that are fast loading. It remembers what pages I was on after restarting. It actually displays pages correctly. Seriously, this thing actually works.

You see, I recently had a few run ins with IE over some css, I got annoyed. Firefox also often points out it's issues to me.

I first started using Opera at work when viewing these immense result files from our automated testing that would crash IE or Firefox before they could load half of them. We did some work to reduce the file size, but even then, those browsers were slow to load them. Opera however, took the files, even the full sized originals, and loaded them fine. It's a fast, quality program. After some reading (over my IE css issues), I also discovered that Opera was even the 4th broweser to pass the Acid2 css test. (Test your browser here! Though I can tell you now IE and Firefox fail.)

So, I've been using Opera. Not for everything. Clearly Firefox has a lot going for it considering all the web developer extensions. But I'll see where I go with Opera.

Even More Snow

So, we got another major snow storm over the weekend. March?! We usually loose all our snow by mid-February in Toronto nowadays. It's quite impressive. We've almost beat the record for Toronto snow fall set in 1939. In fact, as there is some amount of snow due at the end of the week, so we may beat it yet, though I think it's unlikely.

So, most people I've talked to are definitely ready for the winter to end. Most are very tired of shoveling. Me? I'm loving it. There has been a distinct lack of snow for most of the past few winters, and I like snow, so this has been nice.

I don't even really mind shoveling too much either. Some would say that that's because I have no driveway to shovel (well, we have one in the back, but no cars to use it, so…), but then again, I have a very long house with a narrow walkway along the side which needs clearing, so I think that's just as bad. After this storm, I had quite the digging job to cut a path through. The front yard is starting to get amusing too, as the piles are getting large enough that I don't know where I’ll put any more snow if it comes.

The lane way, which often gets 3 feet deep for the whole length. (I should have had someone stand there for a height comparison, but it is deep)

The snow pile out front.

More Snow

And another snow covered day begins. Now in March!
This has been quite the winter.

Enjoy everyone.

Gary Gygax

I've heard the news that Gary Gygax, one of the creators of D&D, and founder of TSR, died this morning.

I have nothing very deep to say on this. I feel that many other blogs have said much more than I could. The Wizards of The Coast D&D site has an obituary on it's welcome page. Paizo's Blog has a post from their head publisher remembering him. Kenzer and Company has posted their "Eulogy for a Gamer" on their site as well. No doubt countless other sites and blogs across the net have also made posts, comments, etc.

For me, I will say that he did not simply create a game and found a company, but helped start a whole genre in gaming that has survived, grown, and created new genres itself. Without D&D, there would be no other role-playing games, likely no collectable card games, and no World of Warcraft. But more than just a genre, it kicked off a whole community of gamers of all ages. One thing I don't often think of from my past days of working in a comic book and gaming store, is just how wide a range of people came in who played RPGs.

New Office

No posts for a week or so. It's been pretty busy. I pulled several day-long coding marathons in the labs with my team getting my latest compiler assignment done. But oh well.

Today though was the first day at my new office, the company I work for having moved over this past weekend. Hopefully the roof of this new building won't leak when it rains. Hopefully the elevators won't break down once a month stranding people between levels. Hopefully the temperature controls won't have us switching from sweaters to shorts during the course of the day.

We're in cubicles now though, but that doesn't really affect me too much, as I was sharing an office with two others before, and prior to that, my desk was in the hallway. Plus, the software team has walls separating them from everyone else (so we don't scare away people?). So all in all, not too bad. We also get these nice lock-cabinets for our stuff.

My desk

Things are still being organized a bit.