Announcements on

Meet my new minion: GRYPHON!

Wed, 02 May 2012 21:19:38 +0000

I’ve long since been missing canine companionship since my legendary pal Blaze’s days became numbered. The last few years have not been particularly accommodating of a battlehound… Finally, however, the time has arrived.

Enter Gryphon, the awesome puppy! I got her through a rescue organization (AARCS). She’s a damned smart pup and has inspired us to meet tons of people in the community now. Annnyway.. Read on to see the full photo album of her first month with us, during which she aged from 4 to 5 months old.

Thank you Steve

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 19:08:12 +0000

Thanks for all your profound, inspiring and helpful inventions Steve. You’ve made an admirable mark on the world.

World, meet STP 1.0 for Windows

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 23:16:33 +0000

Well, after a craptacular number of requests via email and youtube, I’ve finally finished tossing together a Windows version to help out all my anonymous totally random friends.

I should point out, THIS WORKS on Windows 7 (and quite probably Windows Vista). But I should confess the lame situation with the Text-to-Speech engine in Windows is the lack of voice profile options. Apparently there’s a way to install voice packs. I’ve written STP for Windows to take advantage of such options on systems they exist on. But… If anyone actually finds a voice profile pack that ‘clicks’, be sure to let me know and I’ll see about hooking that in to the installer.

8 Years, 2 Degrees, 1 Internship & 0 Regrets

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:15:36 +0000

Well, for those that know, it’s been a damned long time in coming, but I have finally fully graduated as of June 7th and 8th 2010.

The tale of my 8 year tenor at the University of Calgary is somewhat of a unique animal, there was a lot of pain and a great deal of fun. As I look back after just completing that journey I am delighted to be through it and I’m keen to move on in to new areas of life. But I also know that these years were great and I’ll happily reflect upon them as I drift away from this phase.

Cheers to our sage cat, Mr. Jasper

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:20:16 +0000

Jasper, our epically sage cat left us March 24th, 2010.

He sported a remarkable disposition unlike that of any other cat I’ve known. He expressed a vast range of positive emotions (with the occasional impressive act of disapproval). Jasper’s one of a kind character sets the bar for kitties everywhere and earned him an assortment of loving nick-names such as “Puppy Cat”. His grace is unrivaled and we will unquestionably miss him.

Dawning.ca Spruced Up

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:12:36 +0000

Previous Dawning.ca Layout

I’ve just spent a few hours re-designing the layout of Dawning.ca. The old one served me very well and I really liked it. I had heavily modified the previous theme to work for me and work it did. I may tap it some time in the future as a backup… As you can see to the right, the new style is fairly different compared to the image. Although I kept the workflow as I think it was already pretty good.

YouTube Grabber App

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:06:27 +0000

I’ve whipped up this little YouTube video grabber for myself and I’ve opened it up for the moment. If I see it getting spammed or abused in some way, I’ll probably password protect it, nevertheless, you can check it out here.

What it does

This little app takes a YouTube video link and then adds the reference in a database. A seperate script then polls that database and looks for new URLs. It then uses another script (that I did not write), called yt-download, to fetch each video and dump it to my fileserver.

Webserver replaced, again..

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 12:14:26 +0000

Howdy, so I’ve returned to hosting my site on a professional connection rather than over my lameo home setup. I’ve grown tired of n00bful downtime due to power outages, ISP outages, people tripping over cables or gnomes screwin around.

As such, dawning.ca is now hosted on a server I’ve got running down in Texas with the valuable help of Linode. That’s all for now folks.

Update

I ran in to some interesting configuration problems with this new server that was causing it to frequently run out of memory. I think I’ve resolved those matters with some real help of this article.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog!

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 07:14:16 +0000

How I love Joss Whedon! His revolution has launched as of today! Below is the teaser for his made for internet series “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”. The first episode was released today at DrHorrible.com.

\t \t \t \t Teaser from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

The Dr. Horrible website currently is having a really hard time keeping up for the traffic demands (which is a great thing - mostly). An alternative option is to buy it straight up on iTunes! It’ll be the first thing I do when I get home from work tonight!

Alistair Turns 3!

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 12:19:04 +0000

Check out the new pictures!

ASUS EEE Tweaked out & for sale

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 09:17:59 +0000

Check it out on E-Bay if you’re interested: Click here

New Photo Action!

Tue, 29 May 2007 12:52:27 +0000

Howdy! So after some investigation, I’ve found a plugin for my website here that’ll let me display my facebook photo albums. Massive thanks to Aaron for his plugin for this! It seems to be working quite well right now and so I figure I’ll move my images over from my existing photo back-end (Flickr) to Facebook.

For example:

7.04!!!!

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 09:46:49 +0000

Ubuntu Linux 7.04 has JUST been released! This Linux distribution has been uniting the penguins and is totally rocking the linux desktop world and I’m starting to see some massive progress on the server side too. Seriously, if you ever thought of trying out linux in the past but haven’t, this is the the time to give it a go! Go download it from here or go to the main Ubuntu site and get a torrent or a mirror or whatever! Have fun! :)

Apparently I'm a musical artist or something..

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 19:25:12 +0000

At least, that’s what Amie St. calls you when you publish your own music on it.. Check out my Song “The Dawning” I’ve just put up on Amie St. You can download a copy of it there.. It’s nothing of particular significance - I used GarageBand to make it, fun little program!

2006 Santa Party!

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 16:44:40 +0000

The 2006 Santa party has been yet another resounding success! I have included various small video clips from it on YouTube. Go to the Photos section to see the pictures from the lastest SP!

Here’s a video from the party: YouTube Video

A minor update

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 17:55:29 +0000

Howdy - perhaps a few weeks late, but alas here are the pictures from my recent ski trip to Sunshine. Definitely a prime example of a wicked time. Check out the pictures in my Photos section.

Wow 14 day trial disc!

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 13:42:46 +0000

So I was chillin at London Drugs, picking up some random cable when I noticed a little DVD package for sale for $2. I simply had to get one. It’s a World of Warcraft Trial DVD. As such, it must contain all the game files needed, which makes the $2 worth it (they actually gave it to me for free). See, those of us who play this game find that an installation of it kinda sucks. This is due to the multiple CDs needed to provide the ~6gb of content that needs to be installed. Well, anyway, I figure this will come in handy for my “Warcrack” pushing hobby.

Photos Photos Photos!

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 16:05:49 +0000

Howdy gang.. Well, I’ve FINALLY got a pretty decent photo gallery setup now!

It’s been a long time coming too! At this point I’ve only got ~30pictures in there, so I’ll have to add more, but that’ll happen pretty rapidly.

For those who are interested, I’ve found a tool that lets me integrate photos I store on Flickr in to my website here! Sweet!

Go here to see the pictures.

Time trotts forward

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 01:44:01 +0000

Howdy… So I think I’m gonna stick with this new theme. It’s pretty cool, but sure to click on the little images on the banner @ the top.

Other than that… Nothing to report to your internet nuts.

Post a comment if you find it takes a nasty long time for my pages to load for ya.

Cheers!

Life.. in the world of me sitting here now...

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 01:28:44 +0000

As I sit here late at night, knowing full well that I need to get up and rack my brain intensely for countless hours.. I find myself drawn to writing a post on my little website. I feel badly for those of you who actually do check here expecting to see glorious progress. Yes, there has been quite significant progress, but still… You my faithful friends will have more content to fool with soon enough (ish). [gotta love “ish” for ambiguizing everying. Yes, “ambiguizing” is a word, ish]

Back to school!

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 10:31:48 +0000

It’s time for me to jump back in to the fire and nail down yet another year of school. Given this is now my 5th year and I still have 3 (probably 4 with internship) years to go I find myself using all my Jedi powers to keep myself jazzed about the remotely near future.

As I write this post I sit in the second row of my Engg 319 (Lame statistics for bored Engineers). The prof continues to spew out material, all of which I have definitely encountered in other courses. I suppose this happens when you take more than one degree. Je ne sais pas.

Damned Samba

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 23:55:35 +0000

Well, my progress has been stopped in its tracks for the evening. I can’t seem to get my server to let me write files to it in the manner that I prefer. After many hours of checking and rechecking, I’ve made no progress. Bothers me that I’ve setup a ton of these before and never had this problem.

But perhaps it’s best I stop anyway as I have an exam I really need to be focused on studying for.

Yet another new dawning.ca website

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:46:33 +0000

As I work away trying to get this new web server of mine to work just the way I like, I find I keep having to rebuild this website.. So, with some luck, this will be the last rebuild and away things will go!