Mark's World » General

MMM Tasty

Mark Lise — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:35:13 +0000

I love cooking, and some of the simplest most rewarding items to make of savory goodness is Hummus and Gnocchi (pronounced N-Yo-key).

The hummus is red because I roasted some sweet long red peppers in the oven before putting them in with the chickpeas. For the base hummus recipe, I used the recipe from http://www.seasaltwithfood.com/2009/12/hummus.html. I like this recipie a lot more than the other ones I tried because of it’s lack of yogurt. I almost never have plain yogurt in the fridge so when I cam across this one I was delighted – especially when I found it tasted better than other ones I’ve tried

As for the Gnocchi, well that’s a family recipe. It’s legendary for those who have come to my house or my family’s place for dinner.

I’m not a very good photographer so excuse the horrible photos. Maybe in the future I’ll blog a bit more about my cooking adventures…

Netbooks + Easy Peasy = win

Mark Lise — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 20:01:33 +0000

In the search for E.T. life, and a linux distro that works *well* on the eee pc, I’ve found Easy Peasy. My first thoughts were “With a name like that, it’s a joke right?”. My experience with lame-named linux software apps has been comical at best.

I sourced the screenshots, felt it was worth trying so I made a liveCD for my USB stick. Sure enough, WIFI works out of the box, webcam works out of the box, and holy crap I didn’t needed to install ANYTHING ELSE. Skype, openoffice, pidgin, etc..were all there. So I decided to get rid of the atrocious Xandros P.O.S. setup and go for Easy Peasy.

There was only one bug that was incredibly annoying and I’m quite surprised it made it past QA: Ubiquity – it’s the annoying liveCD startup dialog that asks if you want to install easy peasy on your device even though it’s already there. Easy enough tho, apt-get remove solved that real quick. Kudos to Easy Peasy, you’ve made a great distro!

Easy Peasy Main UI

Recycling Woes

Mark Lise — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 04:02:41 +0000

I just read a blog post about recycling entitled: We Can’t Go On Like This. It talks a particular event arising at the recycling depot in Oak Bay. The writer goes on about some people who came to return 100’s of coffee lids that are not recyclable via the Municipal Recycling Program. The inference was they did the right thing to recycle, but they really should have thought about buying a Go Mug.

I couldn’t agree more, we can’t keep going the rate we’re going. It prompted me to leave the following comment:

That is brutal.. Something Timmy’s could do is to push and promote the use of a Go Mug for a discount at the till on their coffee. Many coffee shops offer discounts if you bring in your own mug – but I have yet to find one that advertises this.

The failure not only resides in our thoughtless consuming of goods, but the ones selling us those goods are not exactly helping the issue either! Has a grocery store ever suggested you buy a re-usable bag? Thrifty’s even gives you $0.03 rebate per re-suable bag you bring in at the till, but they don’t even advertise that either.

There is one exception, Superstore. They ARE the superstore, they do not give out plastic bags or anything. You must bring in your own transport. Not only have these guys taken the lead on this particular bag problem, but they’ve absolutely crushed it! When will others follow?

Varied reports suggest that 4% of the world’s oil consumption is for making plastic bags. I find that astounding. What are you doing to be green?

Google Latitude

Mark Lise — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 20:39:41 +0000

Now if there was a feature that would make me go out and buy something, it’s GPS-aware devices. My Wife recently hooked herself up with a Blackberry Storm. A timely purchase as Google this week released Google Latitude. She’s installed latitude for the BB and it’s pretty cool, accurate to within 1900 meters or effectively 1 mile (1.6km for Canada). This is cool and not so cool at the same time. If you use the normal maps inside the phone you get accuracy to 10 feet – it’s too bad Latitude doesn’t go down to that level quite yet.

I installed it on my HTC but of course my phone doesnt have GPS built-in. I have to manually set my co-ordinates! Anyways, I was suprised to see a number of my contacts already enabled Latitude. Now I’ll get sick (in fact already am) of manually setting my location in Latitude.

Walt Mossberg on Flock

Mark Lise — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:31:50 +0000

Well Flock has been reviewed by Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal, and that’s huge. He’s one of the most influential technology critics out there and he’s taken out some time to give us our report card. He obviously used our product extensively and has a lot of great points. It’s a solid balanced review in my opinion – see for yourself. The writeup is here, and the Fox video is here.

Asus EEE PC love

Mark Lise — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:01:18 +0000

Rumor has it that Asus is going to release the EEE PC Desktop. Some may think, WHY.. the EEE PC is an ultra portable laptop, why would we need something similar in the desktop space?

I’d say for those not wanting a giant box sitting under/on their desk whirring away, this makes for a perfect computing device suitable for most things home users need out of a computer. Email, internet, facebook, whatever the next cool Web 2.0 site is… you get the point. Why would my parents need quad-core, 4G ram etc? They don’t.

Minimalists will love it. Those living in small apartments want to make good use of space, and this little thing can sit in a living room or studio apartment without being completely obvious. Apple has similar functional (and stylistic) achievements with their Mac Mini and iMac products.

There’s a EEE PC in my house and I will most certainly pickup an EEE PC Desktop if/when it arrives. I’m guessing the price point will only be a few $100 more than the laptop version. Go Asus!

iPhone in Canada

Mark Lise — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:02:57 +0000

So there’s been a lot of talk on twitter and other blogs about the iPhone finally coming to Canada via Rogers. At least in an official sense. Lots of people already have the iPhone in Canada, but they miss out on some of the enhanced features that the AT&T subscribers down south have (along with data plan etc).

I’m indifferent on my feeling towards the announcement. It’s cool yeah, I’ve had requests from non-techies asking me “where do I get one?!” of which my reply is to direct them towards a $500 unlocked phone in the U.S. Some say that the iPhone in the U.S. is in part responsible for the data rates becoming affordable, I wonder if the same will hold true in Canada? I would think Apple wants us to believe that because it all goes towards a positive reflection on their brand.

The fact is, HTC and Bell have already beaten them to the punch but I don’t think their marketing to date has been successful. I currently have an HTC Touch from Bell on a $7/mth unlimited data plan and am loving it. Web, gmail, twitter, google maps, texting, camera.. it’s got it all. However, It seems as though I’m the only person in my town that knows about it! My only beef is they charge me roaming data when I travel to Vancouver. I suppose they gotta mess with you one way or another.

In any case, I don’t think I’ll be switching just for the sake of having one. Monthly data rates mean more to me than saying “I have an iPhone”. So dear Telus and Rogers: I’ll consider switching if you change your pricing, $15/MB is ridiculous. It’s not just about having an iPhone, the monthly costs have to be justifiable as well.

I look forward to the day where data rates are no longer the dealbreaker. Just like broadband cable did back in the day. Wow, was that only last decade?

DemoCampVictoria01 – Success!

Mark Lise — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:49:49 +0000

Well, what an amazing lineup of people we had and how well did that turn out! Jessica Pryde, Wendy Pryde and Dave Chard at Juliet did an OUTSTANDING job at making DemoCamp one of the – correction – *the* swankiest get together ever put on in our vibrant not-so-little town of Victoria. Dave’s buildings are something to watch for as the kind of development projects he’s doing definitely fit into DemoCamp’s philosophy of bringing a mix of people and businesses together to create vibrancy.

Here’s a pic from Tris’ photos, credit goes to Yule for doing it first on her blog

The presentations that came out where Songbird, BuyLater, SkyscraperPage.com, Flock, Professional Reading Environment, Person to Person Lending, a sensor platform for athletes, and DB programming. Lots of interest, interaction and buzz was generated from the whole event. I don’t think I could have imagined it kicking off any better than that. The crowd was interested and interactive – it’s like you’re all seasoned veterans now!

Tris Hussey, Boris Mann and Yule Heibel have already blogged about the event, so go check out their blogs too (Tris has some photos up as well).

Thanks again to Yule Heibel and Dave Chard – without you there would be no DemoCamp downtown! Thank you so much! I look forward to seeing you all at the next DemoCamp! woo

Community Platforms & Community Harmonization

Mark Lise — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:23:20 +0000

This morning I read a post from David Crow on “Community Platforms“. It got me thinking about our local community, that being Victoria and Vancouver. I have always been a supporter of community platforms and open source, but I’d like to see that go further into the real world. Vancouver has quite a buzz w.r.t. technology and so does Victoria, however here in Victoria you have to go searching for it to find it.

There are lots of user groups here in Vic, but there are little silos here and there and there’s no cohesion or merging of the groups happening. This is where I think DemoCampVictoria can help change. Lets see what happens when we try to bring some of those people together to create new relationships, learn about what others are doing and maybe help contribute to the direction of technology development in Victoria.

Now you’re probably wondering at this point why I mentioned Vancouver as a “local” town. It’s only a 30km trip North of Victoria (that can come with a wide selection of hot and cold entrees), and there are so many human-links between the two cities. Why not try to feed these connections? If you think of it as a platform, it only makes sense if you’re living in Victoria to add the “Vancouver plugin” your ecosystem.

Information Overload

Mark Lise — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 20:26:38 +0000

These days I’m finding it problematic to manage all my “relevant to me” news sources; blogs, tweets, facebook, email, phone, tv… I feel like as I add more sources of information, I am missing out on even MORE. It’s not that I am running out of time (I’m always doing that), it’s when I add an rss feed, follow someone new on twitter, etc, that I see a new perspective/area/tech items of the world that I’m missing out on. So then I spend the next 30 mins digging and exploring this new area – realizing how big it is and thinking, there’s so much stuff I was unaware of.

I have a data plan on my phone and I’ve rigged up just about everything you can imagine on it – from being able to respond to emails (yes everyone’s got this) to reading rss feeds, chatting on IM, to logging into my server to manage my system. So the problem does not lie within access to information, I believe it may be that there is just far too much stuff I want to keep tabs on.

I realize that trying to know everything about anything and/or doing it all is physically impossible, at least to the degree I want for myself. So what is the answer? How do you find the balance? Do you have to continually evaluate the sources, content, and prune them like an apple tree? I can’t help but think I might prune the wrong thing and wish I kept it.