VanCity, I’m so tired of you

I’ve been a loyal VanCity customer since I moved to Vancouver in the mid-90′s. I wanted a local bank whose values seemed to match my own politics. I was swayed by their enviro-visa give-back program. I loved the annual $1,000,000 community-project fund. I loved that they were very progressive in their LGBT (or however you [...]

Better redirection

For sites powered by the Pencilneck CMS, we’ve for ages and ages had what we called “Friendly URLs”. These are common across CMS’s, blogs, etc (some ironically, I don’t use them on Tannock.net because I’m too lazy to reconfigure my config & htaccess files). Back in the day, we did this by physically writing a [...]

City-owned fibre: new revenue stream?

I was reading this article on Ars Technica about the town of Monticello, MN, who had tried to build its own 50Mbs fibre network after TDS (the local cable monopoly I assume?) had done nothing. This story ends with (of course) TDS taking the city to court (incidentally, the city won at every level, all [...]

Installing root Certificates for ColdFusion

This another one of those post-this-here-so-I-don’t-have-to-google-forever items. In May of this year, Verisign introduced a new intermediate root certificate. This september, Paypal renewed their own, forcing API users to be using this new root certificate on their end for all API calls. So that’s all fine and dandy, the solution is pretty easy: Go to [...]

BCHydro Power Outage Alerts: A suggestion

Today, when the power went out at work, the first thing I did (after getting my laptop tethered to my phone) was to go to the BC Hydro Power Outages page, then check the list of outages and finally, double-checked the map to see if that was the correct area. As I clicked on the [...]

I’m a mean dad

Every night before bedtime, we read stories to Liam. Many nights, Liam will then take a book into bed with him to “read” (in quotes because 1, he’s not really literate yet and 2, the lights are off so it would be hard to read anyway – this worked better for him in the summer) [...]

Thoughts on Bill C-300

I was just listening to the debate on CBC’s The Current between John McKay, Liberal MP for Scarborough-Guildwood and Jon Baird, president of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC).  The debate was regarding bill C-300, a private member’s bill put forward by John McKay that proposes a system of government oversight of overseas [...]

Minor site Tweaks

I’ve made some minor edits to the site: The biggest change is the header: I’m now pulling in a random image to be the background for the heaader – these are all photos I’ve taken (with the exception of the “comrade”, who used to feature more prominently on this site, and is still my “icon” [...]

My Photography Workflow

At BarCamp on Saturday, 2 of the sessions I took part in were led by John Biehler & Scott Prince. First, a photowalk in & around the Discovery Parks building. You can see my photos from that on Flickr. That in and of itself was awesome, and fun to take advantage of such a beautiful [...]