All posts by NotWeasel

Dedication to My Beautiful Wife

I wrote this in November of 1999. The post is talking about a site called dedication.com that doesn’t exist anymore as it used to. It’s as true now as it was then. Happy Valentine’s Day, baby. ❤️

Original text follows:

I was thinking about this site earlier today and thought I should drop by sometime soon and leave you a message. 

That was earlier. 

Now the weirdest thing just happened. 

I was reading something you wrote for me a long time ago when I came across some lyrics I wanted to look up.  I accidentally typed “lyrics” into the browser address bar rather than the search box in AltaVista.  IE5 did its little auto-search thing and brought up a link to www.lyrics.com which I then clicked on.  Suddenly a bunch of popup windows showed up and, low and behold, one of them was dedications.com!  I haven’t been here since the last time you sent me a dedication which was months ago and, out of nowhere, here I am. 

Well it seemed a little too fated to pass by so here’s the message I was thinking of writing you. 

The fates have played quite a few hands in my life with you and I think this was definitely one of the better ones.  I can’t begin to express how much I enjoyed chatting with you this morning.  Life would be perfect if only I could hold you in my arms for just a little while. 

We’ve had our highs and lows but I think the highs have far outdone the lows and I look forward to the future when we can have fun together again without thousands of miles and a jungle separating us. 

I miss you, Michelle.  More than you realize.  Perhaps more than I should and certainly more than I thought possible.  Maybe absence makes the heart grow fonder and maybe it just makes it feel empty.  I’m not sure.  All I’m sure of right now is that I’m looking forward to seeing you again and that it can’t be soon enough. 

Good luck with your upcoming exams and in everything you’re undertaking.  I know you’ll do well.  Your ambition has always been something I admired.  Hopefully I’ll be able to take you out for Valentines Day.  Or perhaps Canada Day.  However long I’m waiting, I’ll be here with open arms when you return. 

Whatever situation we’re in, I’ll always be here to give you a big hug when you need it.

Love you, sweetheart.

My Favourite Tooth is Back!!

People who’ve been around for the long haul here may remember the saga of my favourite tooth.

It’s been a long time coming and I’m happy to finally say that it’s BACK!! After losing that one, a few years later I cracked the one next to it and decided that enough was enough.

I’ve spent half a year or so going through the process of getting two new teeth to get me back to where I started. Hopefully the new one serves me as well as the original did and lasts a fair bit longer.

Corel Can Eat a Bag of Dicks

There’s a lot going on right now with my personal nerd projects and part of it involves retiring the web and file server that’s been serving me well for what feels like forever now. It’s been a good run, Windows Server 2008!

As I’m getting ready to shut it down, I’m taking some time to go through all my old files and clear out stuff I’ll never need again.

In that ancient stuff I found some old CorelDRAW files I made back in the mid to late 90’s. The oldest is dated October 4th, 1995.

It stands to reason that none of the software I have today would open them. The kicker here though is that apparently even COREL software won’t read them anymore and it seems like they’ve made a business model out of dropping support for older file formats on a regular basis.

If you use CorelDRAW, apparently you have to open and resave all the files you want to keep or you’ll never be able to open them again. Way to punish your long time users, Corel!!

Anyhow, in a thread on the CorelDRAW community forums that started “over 15 years ago” and has a latest post from “over 2 years ago” I found a little tidbit that I hope to pass on to others in the same predicament.

There’s a site called cloudconvert and they are able to convert the ancient .cdr files to .svg format and did a fine job of it.

You can find the converter here: https://cloudconvert.com/cdr-to-svg

Finally, here’s a rainbow I drew for some reason in 1996.

Welcome to the New Look!

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here and a lot has happened. The world has changed.

Some things are better and many things are much, much worse, but still the world marches forward. I hope all of my readers are doing as well as possible in the pandemic era. My heart goes out to all of you that have experience heartbreak and loss.

It’s been nearly two decades since this blog was launched and the Internet is a vastly different place than it used to be so I hope you’ll appreciate the changes made here.

The biggest improvement is that it’s finally usable on mobile devices, which was nearly impossible on the old platform without all sorts of pinching and zooming that I expect exactly nobody could be bothered to deal with.

All the original content has been migrated into the new system and I’ve had quite the nostalgic fun going through some of it to fix some issues. There’s a bit more to do to fix old links and some formatting but for the most part it should all be good to go.

As for me… well… I’m still here and life is good.

Welcome to new NotWeasel!

Deep Regret on Past Behaviour

In light of recent events, I feel like it's become necessary to get this off my chest now before it takes on a life of its own.

Back in my high school days, over 20 years ago, I once attended a Halloween dance dressed as a girl. I don't know whether there are any pictures of this out there, but I feel I should get ahead of this now so I can put it behind me and continue to pursue my career and political goals without this hanging over me like a ticking bomb that could go off at any time.

I never meant any disrespect for girls and it didn't come from a place of hatred or belittlement of women.

I sincerely apologize if any girls were offended, both then or now, by this and deeply regret having made the decision to do it.

I only hope that I can move forward from this with people understanding that I have nothing but respect and admiration for women and have never felt that they were lesser people or deserving of ridicule.

Please forgive me. I wish I hadn't done it but I cannot change the past. I can only move forward from here hoping that people will judge me for the character they know me to have and not view me in a lesser light due to the mistakes of my youth.

Don’t Worry. Be Happy.

Most people will never be “successful” in any definition that means people outside your immediate circle will ever talk about you.

Nobody is ever going to write a magazine article about me. Nobody is ever going to write a magazine article about a list of people that even remotely includes me in the most superficial way.

I just recently learned that some people make hundreds of thousands of dollars a MONTH playing video games on Twitch.

I’m content with how my life is going but that sure puts my level of success in perspective.

There’s a LOT of people out there making a TON of money through a lot less effort than most of us put out. That’s awesome for them.

There are WAY MORE people that are working a lot harder than I am and not doing nearly as well. In the overall scheme of things, I’m pretty darned successful.

But nobody will ever write an article about me. And that’s fine.

If you’re not satisfied with where you are in life, then take steps to change it. If you’re NEVER satisfied with where you are in life (and aren’t struggling with real issues like poor health or poverty) then I suggest you re-think your definition of success.

It’s normal to want more and to strive to do better. If you’re not happy with where you are along the way though… well… what’s the point? The more you get the more you’ll want and before you know it you’ll be facing down the end game and can’t go back.

Nazis are Inhuman Monsters and Should be Executed for their Beliefs

I know that's a very loaded headline so there's a few things I'd like to get out of the way right off the bat.

Firstly, I mean it. Exactly as it's written. If you encounter a Nazi it should be ok to simply shoot them in the face and be done with it. If you think this makes me just as bad as they are then I encourage you to look into the parodox of intolerance.

That said, I also want to acknoledge that there are a lot of people out there that think they're Nazis but aren't actually. Whether through ignorance or stupidity they don't actually know who and what the Nazis were and have rallied around some ideal they don't understand. I vaguely sympathize with those people, though only to the extent that I feel bad for stupidity in general. In their case I'm mostly just embarassed for them as their stupidity frames their awfulness to be even worse than it already is.

I acknowledge that you can be a white supremacist asshole without being a Nazi. That still makes you awful, but doesn't mean you should be killed for it. That would be a Nazi way of thinking and in no way would I even suggestively endorse it.

And that's the kicker.

Nazis weren't just right-wing zealots. They were monsters. If you don't believe that torturing and murdering the people you dislike is a perfectly reasonable solution for dealing with them, then you're not a Nazi. You can't redefine what Nazis are and try to portray yourself as a kinder gentler Nazi. If that's your way of thinking then you're not a Nazi and should be standing right beside me in condemning anyone who is.

The world seems to be normalizing this insanity. The president of the United States has defended actual Nazis. The people of Toronto just cast over 25 thousand votes for a Nazi sympathizer to be mayor. I fear that people are forgetting what Nazis are and that it's allowing a dangerous rise in tolerance for people who cannot be tolerated.

If you disagree with me on this premise and don't think they should be killed, then I suggest that you too don't actually know what Nazis are and what they did.

Now I know that we will never tolerate the execution of Nazis who haven't otherwise committed any crimes yet, but if there's one thing I'd like everyone, no matter your political persuasions, to take from this it's this: If you find yourself shoulder to shoulder with Nazis on any issue whatsoever, the most important thing in that moment is to separate yourself from them and to condemn the Nazis.

There is no issue whereby your shared beliefs make it ok to stand with them. They are everyone's mortal enemy. Whatever it is you're standing for, you must first be opposed to Nazis. Only then can you deal with whatever issue it is that is so important to you that you even considered allying yourself with a Nazi in the first place for.

How Bitcoin Mining Works

I wrote this to try to explain Bitcoin mining.

Here’s an analogy for Bitcoin mining.

Let’s say I open a giant factory to make origami sculptures. I open the doors and say that anyone that wants to work for me is welcome.

You bring your own paper.

I pay per piece and I pay in gold coins worth about $10 each.

I want an average of 3 sculptures per hour. If the people are producing more than that, I’ll make a more complicated pattern that takes them longer to fold.

Whenever someone brings me a completed sculpture, everyone else throws their paper in the garbage and the next pattern I want folded goes up on the big board.

The gold coin I pay per sculpture never changes but let’s say the price of gold goes up 10% every day.

Do you bring your paper and come work in my factory?

Also, China sends a giant delegation of expert origami artists to work for me.

Note that just because you're not very good at origami doesn't mean you can't take a crack at this and maybe get a gold coin.

If you like, you can get together with a bunch of your friends and even a bunch of complete strangers and come to an agreement that you'll all go to the factory and, if any one of you earns anything, you'll pool it together and then divide it up based on how many folds you made. Even if all your papers ultimately went in the garbage, you should still get something out of this.

Obviously you're gonna want some ringers in your group and they'll be folding way faster than you are and with more accuracy. It's only fair that they'll get a bigger share of the loot. So number of folds seems like as good a measure as any to divide it up.

Steve will collect all the coins for the group and put them in a bucket in his basement. He'll give you access to a spreadsheet so you can check whenever you like to see how many coins your group earned and how much of it is your share.

One day Steve will tell you he went to put the latest coins in the bucket but found it empty. There's no coins in it. Steve has no idea how this could have happened.

Steve will then buy a yacht.