terrill.ca

And the end came quickly

"We had no idea, but we were looking at the beginning of the end, and the end came quickly." - Chester Higgins Jr. on the demise of traditional graphic design.

Growing up I somehow ended up in more than my fair share of old layout rooms. Newspapers, offset printers, copy shops – they all had these layup rooms with massive desks and stools. More space and seats than there were people in the shop. Little did I know those rooms were once busy hubs around which the businesses ran. Now I wish I had the chance to experience that.

You shall know our velocity

I'm off to Vegas where I'm meeting Jason for the weekend. I don't have many plans for the trip, other than to spend a lot of time in the pool and see the Hoover Dam. I'm considering a larger Grand Canyon tour, and we'll probably see some shows.

If you have recommendations please leave them here or send me an email/facebook. I'll be rockin' the BlackBerry while I'm gone.

From Las Vegas we're heading to Seattle where we'll spend the remainder of the week hanging around Amazon or something. My goal for Seattle is to not be freezing cold after being in the desert, and to see the Pacific which thus far in life has eluded me.

See you on the 5th!

Time warp via bad SQL

So I open up my site today and it's showing stuff from October 2005. Having not changed my SQL queries in a long time I initially thought someone had hacked my site or I had left PHPMyAdmin open and people went on a delete raid. Thankfully as I check out the archives everything was still there, albeit in almost reverse chronological order.

It took a few minutes to find the source of the issue. Most of my queries have an ORDER BY clause in them, "ORDER BY 'date' DESC" where 'date' is a column in my table. Something must have been upgraded on my shared server because it definitely doesn't like 'date' being wrapped in single quotes. So I dropped the quotes in at least 10 places and everything should be back to normal. RSS feed isn't showing the oldest stories any more (woot).

If I am hosting your site, then you may want to take a quick tour around your stuff and make sure it's all in order. If I missed anything let me know.

Fixed rate energy supplier scams

Every year around this time a huge scam takes place in Waterloo. The direct energy resalers (middle men) go out door to door and try to sign up unsuspecting students into fixed rate gas contracts, usually for 5 years. You can spot them a mile away - mid twenties, retard guys, acceptably dressed but still not professional enough to be taken seriously (especially if they were not carrying around the fake clipboard full of official looking crap).

Never ever talk to anyone who comes to your door about your utilities because no one should ever be coming to your door talking to you about your utility bill. They'll be pushy, ask for a bill, and won't take no for answer. They will have an official looking badge for some stupid sounding company "Superior Energy", "Planet Energy", etc. Show them the door.

I just had some stupid kid drop by my place at 10pm asking for my utility bills so he could verify they're all ok. I should have got his name and company before turning him away so I could call and tell them he's useless and was wearing a bandanna.

So beware, and make sure your roommates are aware because - as I've found out - these companies don't play by the rules and will literally take a roommates word for your own.

Comment spammers fail

You've gotta have pity on the poor sap who's job it is to write spam comments on my blog. I know it's not a bot because the frequency is too low, and my comment system so different from everything else. That means they have to navigate and click through the pages, then copy pasta their random sentence + url, and click submit. Probably all on some ridiculously low wage scheme. And it's funny that the work is in vain, since URLs have precisely zero value around these parts.

So to those unlucky soles spamming my site; keep wasting your life - it's hilarious.

Rogers hijacking failed DNS requests

Now is the time to write Rogers expressing your disgust with their new practice of hijacking failed DNS lookups and serving Yahoo! ads on the page. This is an assault on Net Neutrality, and we should not take it lightly.

If you have an account with Rogers, please write them and let them know that you do not like this and would like to see it reversed.

Rogers Contact Form

It's not what you drive

Yesterday I drove from Waterloo to the border of Ontario and Quebec and then back to Hanover. That's 1300 Kilometers, or about 800 Miles. We piloted the Ford Focus carefully because we were making a point - a 46.7 MPG point. According to the EPA the Focus gets 28 MPG on the highway, we squeezed 80% more out of it.

It meant driving at 100km/h on the 401, using the slow lane a lot, and being gentle pulling away from stoplights when they happened to stop you. I say 'when they stop you' because most of the time you can plan far enough ahead to avoid actually stopping. Seriously, that's all there is to it.

Top Gear pitted a Prius against a BMW M3 recently and guess who won? The M3. Besides being a knock to the pride of all Toyota engineers, this should be a wake up call to everyone. "It's not what you drive, it's how you drive it".

It's still no excuse good enough for driving a Hummer, or any Dodge vehicle (because they're all ugly). This also invalidates all arguments that gas is too expensive.