Apparently, there's no standard for writing dates in Canada. I assumed that Canada used the annoying US-style convention of MM/DD/YYYY. I didn't realize that the British-style DD/MM/YYYY is also widespread. How ex­as­per­at­ing!

Personally, I always write YYYY-MM-DD whenever I can get away with it, as God and ISO 8601 intended. A bill is before the Canadian parliament aiming at stan­dard­iz­ing on year-month-day formats.

We got a new monitor today for one of our pairing work­sta­tions. At 2560x1600, it was higher resolution than its pre­de­ces­sor. I dis­con­nect­ed the DVI cable from the old monitor, leaving it connected to one of the video ports on the computer, and connected it to the new monitor. All I could see was static and noise on the screen. After trying a variety of other things, I eventually thought to use the DVI cable that came with the new monitor. It worked!

I had assumed that all DVI cables were in­ter­change­able. Reading the Wikipedia article, I see that at higher res­o­lu­tions, dual link is needed. I hadn't known such a thing …continue.

My LastPass browser plugin just upgraded itself to v4.0. For several years, I've been using LastPass to manage all of my passwords. I have literally hundreds of passwords. I can't even remember half the sites, much less the usernames. With LastPass, I can maintain a strong, distinct password for each site, which is robustly encrypted and backed up in the cloud, and I get good browser in­te­gra­tion and adequate Android in­te­gra­tion. We also use LastPass at work for our individual use and to share cre­den­tials.

There are still a handful of passwords that I have to remember and type, including the master password for my LastPass account, laptop passwords, and GPG passphras­es.

I've …continue.

When I buy a book, I want to be able to read it how and where I like, not where the bookseller dictates. With printed books, the very idea of the bookseller having any say is ridiculous. The book is now my property, to read where and how I like, to give away or to lend or even to sell. I've bought thousands of new books and thousands more secondhand books from bookstores.

Most electronic books are crippled with DRM. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, although Defective By Design prefers to expand DRM as Digital Re­stric­tions Management. DRM is technology that controls digital content after it has been sold. In …continue.

I've always been an avid—nay, avari­cious—read­er of books. But I have not been a listener of audiobooks.

I read quickly, much more quickly than anyone can speak, and I enjoy burying my head in a book. I've seen little reason, therefore, to listen to audiobooks. Lately, however, we've listened to some audiobooks on long car trips, as Emma, unlike me, has an Audible sub­scrip­tion. We enjoyed The Hot Rock, the first of the comic crime-caper Dortmunder books. Before that, I had read another Dortmunder novel, Bank Shot, aloud to Emma, while she drove us back from Portland, which both of us had enjoyed.

On our trip to Vancouver earlier this week, we …continue.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the rider was lost.

For want of a rider the message was lost.

For want of a message the battle was lost.

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

— proverb

I want to step down as the webmaster of the Northwest C++ Users' Group after serving for four years. The NWCPP website is built with the Pelican static site generator. I don't know who will succeed me as webmaster, but it's likely that they'll be a Windows user. Pelican …continue.

I've spent time over the last three weeks working on a new website for the Northwest C++ Users' Group. I blogged about the NWCPP website refresh over there. In brief, I moved the website from an instance of the Joomla Content Management System at Just Host to a static website generated by Pelican and hosted at Github Pages, and I'm happy with the results.

Not only am I the Webmaster (and Secretary) of NWCPP, I am also the webmaster for several other or­ga­ni­za­tions:

• Wild Geese Players of Seattle, a static HTML site badly in need of a makeover (I'm the Director, Dramaturg, and Webmaster).
• Freely Speaking Toast­mas­ters, a dynamic site based on the …continue.

I'm breaking radio silence to explain the un­char­ac­ter­is­tic drought of blog posts. In my last post, I mentioned that I had created a Twibbon overlay for Approve71.org, allowing you to overlay Approve71's badge over your Twitter icon.

The next day I went over to Ap­prove71's head­quar­ters and introduced myself to the tech team, Josh, Joe, and Adam. One thing led to another, and I spent that weekend writing my first-ever PHP code, which allowed you to upload a photo to Ap­prove71's website, stamp a banner on it, and then save it so that you could sub­se­quent­ly upload it to Facebook for your profile picture.

It's been a big success, …continue.

Twibbon is a service that allows you to overlay a cause's badge over your Twitter icon.

I created a Twibbon overlay for Approve71.org.

The results look great on Twitter and Twibbon.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, if I save the image and upload it to Facebook as my profile picture, it doesn't look so good. Even if I use the FB UI to pan around in the image, the cropping ruins it.

I just mailed stormideas, the people behind Twibbon, asking if they could do something similar for Facebook profiles.

This afternoon, I invited 200 friends, family, and ac­quain­tances to the Reilly & Bartholomew Family Journal. The Journal is the feature that we've been working on at Cozi for several months. It's a light­weight blog that's really easy to set up and post to, with straight­for­ward privacy controls.

More im­por­tant­ly, though, I invited those people to use Cozi for themselves.

I'm inviting you to read the Family Journal that Emma and I set up at Cozi. It's a way of letting our friends and relatives keep up with us. If you see a story you like, add a smile. We hope you enjoy it!

I'm also inviting you to start …continue.