Is there anything better than getting your e-mail in-box under control?  This program is pretty e-mail heavy at the best of times but this semester and especially this week has been crazy.  I chip away and get my in-box under 100 messages and 25 more come in.  I literally received 40 messages today on one topic related to my duties as Academic Rep on Student Council. 

As I head towards the end of my time at FIMS at an ever-quickening rate, I have lots of occasion ...   more »

Even though the site's owner tends to frown on non-factual Q&A's, in my opinion Ask Metafilter is at its best when it has more chatty/big-picture/experiential questions such as the recent one asking for stories about things that fathers did to build strong relationships with their daughters.  Some good tips there for any parent with children of any gender though.  This thread also leads to an earlier one about "What does it take to be a dad?" which is equally good.

Sort of along that same line, I still remember being asked as a fairly young boy (aged 10-11) by an aunt and uncle who were expecting their first child, "what do you think your parents did to make you kids turn out so good?"  A bit of an awkward question at that age but I still remember my answer which is especially relevant considering where I am now in my life: "Reading to us and buying us lots of books." 

Shea and I whipped into Toronto today to attend the Baby and Toddler Show this afternoon.  A bit disappointing in terms of the number of exhibitors but this is probably a case of us being really early in the pregnancy mixed with the fact that they weren't giving out free books like the last time I attended a trade show at the Metro Convention Centre.   We met up with Quinn and Robin (and Rory in her new, sneaky-deeky carrying case) for supper at a Korean place then had a drink at cool little bar across from the Greyhound station before heading back to London. (I know "crappy little dive" is the more typical description of bars across from bus stations - see London, ON -- Wick, The) but this one was actually quite nice. 

I tried to get on to Toronto's free new downtown wireless service earlier in the day but you apparently need a mobile phone to get your user name and password txtd to you.  And I, being one of the few people left in society without a cell phone, was left out of this great benefit for the masses.  (I could see that policy if the wireless was supplied by Rogers Mobile - corporate synergy and all that - but it's Toronto Hydro.  So why?)  Anyhow, just based on the two introductory web pages I was able to load, it seemed pretty slow (big surprise when you're offering free Wifi to the country's largest downtown core) so I think the promise is still a bit richer than the reality. 

Finally, I've had a pretty good streak of consecutive days posting to the blog going but because I didn't get on the Net in TO today, that was broken.  Or was it?  I mean, if you can't cheat on your time stamps on "fall back" daylight savings time day, when can you cheat?  So I think I'll nudge this entry back to 11:59pm (instead of the next day at 2:22am) and carry on with the streaking (er, streak.)

This blurb was in the off-campus housing monthly e-newsletter which I somehow got myself subscribed to.  Yet another reason Saskatchewan is...unique.  (Seriously, the reason we haven't switched is apparently the dairy lobby thinks their cows won't know when to produce milk.  Or something like that!)

Is Daylight Saving Time worldwide?
Nope, it is mostly observed in temperate zones, where the difference in daylight is most obvious between the seasons.

Everywhere in Canada though, right?
Unless you live in Saskatchewan, the only Canadian province that does not observe Daylight Saving Time. This policy was enacted in 1966 to help solve difficulties that arose when time zones varied from town to town. While Saskatchewan is always on Central Standard Time, in the summer months, it matches adjacent areas that are on Mountain Daylight Time to the west and south, and in the winter it matches the areas on Central Standard Time to the east.  That must be confusing. Imagine living in Lloydminster, a town bisected by the Saskatchewan-Alberta border! This town has special exception on its Saskatchewan side and observes DST with Mountain Standard Time.

The Bookshelf Project is a Flickr group dedicated to photos of people’s bookshelves.

The Health Policy Initiative at Western is bringing Roy Romanow to campus for a public lecture.

Romanow will speak on What Kind of Society Do We Want?: Social Values and the Health and Well-Being of Canadians. The talk takes place on Friday, October 27 at 3 p.m. in the Arthur & Sonia Labatt Health Sciences Building, Room 40.

Romanow, former Premier of Saskatchewan, was appointed in 2001 to head the Royal Commission on the Future of Health Care.

LPL recently, and without much fanfare, switched from sending out overdue notices a week (!) after a book came due to sending a notice two days in advance of your books coming due.  It's a small change, very easy to do with ILS software these days apparently, but one that shows that even in a library that seems as corporate-minded as pretty much any I've visited (this includes many libraries in Alberta), sometimes serving your public wins out over the bottom line.  (Of course, I was at the LPL board meeting where they discussed this change and someone mentioned that there are studies which show that revenue from fines don't drop signficantly even with advance warnings.  So maybe this wasn't a completely magnanimous gesture.  But as someone who's racked up my share of fines over the year, not to mention someone who thinks you should always put the patron first, I appreciate the change.)

After a bit of a glitch (or a glit of a bitch if you're dyslexic), we're back.  Got through to Customer Support at NetIdentity very quickly today and my good friend Gregory doubled my transfer limit per month from here on with no extra charge.  Yay!

To celebrate, let's blow some bandwidth by linking to a few photos (just kidding - I don't think linked Flickr images count since I'm not loading them directly from my site - I should've checked though)

Here is the grad photo we took at noon today of students who are finishing the MLIS program this semester...

(This photo helps make it hit home that I'm almost done the program.  But what really made it hit home was when I was at Zellers last weekend to buy toilet paper and I was like "uhm, how much toilet paper do we need for two months?"  TP's one of those things, like salt or paperclips or Jack Daniels,  that you just use until it's gone then you buy more without much thought of how much that usage actually is or may be in the future.  (I ended up buying 20 rolls by the way.))


Doing UWO's MLIS program straight through in three semesters of five classes per semester with no breaks or co-op or terms with fewer classes is known as doing the "Suicide Five".  Below is a photo of the "Suicide Six" that I started with way back in January 2006 - Margie, Lara, Sian, me, Ian, Lindsay.  (It should've been the "Suicide Eight" but Nigel, who was in the other photo, got away before I could grab him for this one and Fiacre who's also done, had a meeting and couldn't make the photo day.  Actually, I just got an e-mail that the "real" photographer's memory card screwed up so we're doing it again tomorrow.  So maybe I can get a better shot with everybody then!)

Finally, here's a shot of Art Slade and Maggie Wood from the Lunch Bucket on Monday.  We didn't get as big of crowd as I hoped but they sold tons of book so that was good.  (Art: "I should speak to adults more often - they have more than their allowance to buy stuff!")

...I might as well sit here and talk to myself until I get this bandwidth issue resolved or the end of the month comes and it gets reset. 

Since I can still manipulate the layout of the site, I think people should be able to find me so that's good.  I put up a "Read This" element on the left navigation bar that leads to a plain text file where I posted an explanation (and also just realised I can copy my "behind-the-wall" updates there for the time being.)

So what else should I say at this point?  For the most part, I've been extremely happy with NetIdentity who provide my personalized e-mail (jason@hammond.net), web site (http://jason.hammond.net) since 2001 and blog (http://blog.jason.hammond.net) since February of this year.  I'd seen them before (I think they were called NameBank.com) and at the time, I was like "who would ever pay for that when you get a free e-mail address and web space from your ISP?  But when we were moving to Calgary (and knowing we'd be moving back to Saskatchewan eventually), I realised that there was an enormous hassle in updating e-mail subscriptions, address books and so on everytime you got a new e-mail address. 

To get around this, I looked into registering my own domain but I wanted something brief and memorable and relevant to me but unfortunately, hammond.com, hammond.net, hammond.org and all types of similar variations were already gone.  So I answered my own question by becoming someone who would use the NameBank (which had become NetIdentity.com) service.  For about $50 USD/year, I got my own e-mail and web domain.  These services are a bit limited in some ways (I can't run databases and other advanced features on my web page) but for the most part, they're easy to use and exactly what I needed.  It also gave me an e-mail address that travelled with me (and possibly will travel with me for the rest of my life - assuming I don't get all PO'ed by this outage and switch over to something else!)  In this day and age, I really think that's worth its weight in gold. 

The ready-made blog software they've offered for the last few years is a similar story - fairly robust while still lacking a few major features and not having the ability to tweak these types of things as you can with WordPress or other services which can be frustrating.  But again, for maybe $50/year more, it's worth it...at least for me, at least for right now. 

Web hosting prices have dropped since I first looked at my own domain - I think back then, it was a minimum of $8.95/month to host a basic site but now you can literally get web hosting for a couple bucks a month.  So NetIdentity is probably a lot more expensive than it needs to be.  But again, the convenience is a big selling feature is the personalized domain. 

Uhm, this wasn't meant to be a commercial message but I
think I'm still a member of NetIdentity's affiliate program so if the idea of having your own personalized e-mail address for the rest of your life (you can buy only the e-mail service for $24.95 USD/year) appeals, contact me and if you sign up for me, I get a big $20 credit to my own account.    Whoo-hoo!

Just trying to get through to my hosting company to resolve the bandwidth issue...but since they shut me off with no warning and no "cushion room" plus they have no way to manually add room to my bandwidth limit (without renewing all my services - e-mail, webhosting, etc - for a full year), I can't give them money even though I want to (nor will anybody be able to see this message until I get it fixed so I feel like I'm talking to myself here.) 

I've got to dig a bit deeper and see what's taking up so much bandwidth.  My first thought was "maybe that Digg link I posted got re-discovered?" but I don't think that's it.  I'm streaming a few images/photos from Flickr onto the site but I don't think those count against my limit (or they shouldn't anyhow).  A quick look at my stats shows that a person (or people) on MySpace are leeching an image I host on my own server space which takes up a fair chunk of my bandwidth allotment so I'll have to move that to Flickr or change the filename or something. 

But otherwise, no idea why I got shut down.  I guess I'm transferring a lot of data without even realising it.  I know from my stats there are quite a few people reading this page but I never realised it was pushing my limit this much (I was pretty close last month too apparently - like if five more people had looked at the page, I probably would've been over then.)