This weekend I was returning from the Montreal PHP conference, which as usual was a great deal of fun. In fact I was having so much I made back to my hotel room at about 5:30am in the morning, approximately 2 1/2 hours from my scheduled departure time to the train station, needless to say I had very little sleep. The adventure begins right at the checkout, which took about an hour since the hotel had conveniently lost the payment confirmation from the conference organizers. Consequently a great deal of time was spent searching through computer & paper records and eventually leading to an early phone call to Damien Seguy (conference organizer). By the time the problem was resolved it was about 9:00am leaving me with just shy of 40 minutes to get to a train station and board my train. Fortunately, the train station is a mere 15 minute cab drive away and I was able to get to my train just time, giving me ample time to stand in line to board the train. Despite a line up stretching for almost an entire lengt...

A rather educational article came to my attention today reflecting the thoughts of some US citizens about Canada on public television in what one may consider to be major news outlets. While I can only hope this is the opinion of a small minority, even that is a little alarming.

It would seem that good things come in two, this was proven yet again by the Postman who had delivered my two latest toys. These are the IDE to USB 2.0 adapter and my USB 2.0 laptop hard-drive case These Hong-Kong arrivals allow me to safely transport my 80 gig laptop drive, which has been "creatively" dubbed as the "Movie Drive". I am especially happy about this case as it does not require any external power, instead leeching off the needed power from my USB port which makes that much practical to use when I am on the road. The IDE to USB is a welcome arrival as well, as it will finally let me make use (I don't know what for yet, but that does not matter :-) ) the various IDE drives I got lying around the house/office.

It seems like the winter in Canada is going for an early start, this morning while enjoying my mandatory cup of coffee ;-) I've was a witness to the 1st Canadian snow fall of the year (in the Toronto area). It lasted only for a few minutes and within a few moments all evidence of this event melted, but non the less it was yet another reminder that the days of good weather are numbered :-(.

Yesterday I've upgraded the wireless card in my laptop from the basic Intel Centrino Wireless capable for B/G to an Atheros 5004 based card. While I had seen this card work on a friend's laptop I was non the less seriously impressed by it's performance. First of all Atheros implements something called [url=http://www.super-g.com/]Super A/G[/url], which allows the card to reach 108mbit speeds on A or G protocols. This allows the card to use more then one channel when communicating with the routers, effectively doubling the “pipe” capacity. Additionally the card also pumps more power then Centrino Wireless, for B/G it's maximum transmit power is 100mw (that's milli not mega ;-) ), which you can reduce via the driver when battery life needs to be preserved. The card also has something called eXtended Range (XR) technology that supposedly makes the card more sensitive. Normally I would skeptical towards techno-bable of this nature, but I can now pickup and use my neighbors open MSN wireless access point, which is...