There are some things money can’t buy:

Picture 2-7 Are airport security workers putting their no-longer needed pornographic materials in passengers’ suitcases? This Air Canada luggage sticker reads: “THIS BAGGAGE HAS BEEN X-RATED AT POINT OF ORIGIN.”

There’s a bigger version of the image here. Apparently they have fixed the mistake – too bad! A little comedy on the plane never hurt anyone.

Read: BoingBoing

There’s yet another article on podcasting out, this one from the Boston Globe:

Podcasting is in the same place today as the Web was in 1994. These personal radio broadcasts, designed to be downloaded to an iPod or similar MP3 player, are homespun, rough-edged, and — let’s be honest — not all that riveting.

And isn’t that what makes them powerful? Isn’t that what makes blogs powerful? Obviously we are starting to see professional blogs, and we’ll eventually see some professional podcasts (probably a lot quicker than blogs) but I think part of what makes podcasting a powerful medium is that it’s honest. It may not be as riveting, but it’s a whole hell of a lot more down to earth than my local FM station.

I am picking apart one paragraph of the article, and I suppose that’s not fair. It’s actually a really well-written piece, different from most cookie-cutter articles on podcasting, as Dave Winer noted.

Michael Gorman, who is president-elect of the American Library Association (I am the webmaster for a division of their Canadian counterpart, CASL), has been getting a lot of backlash lately for some comments he made regarding blogs and bloggers. I simply haven’t had time to read what he said until now, but if you’re interested, it’s worth taking a look at.

READ: Revenge of the Blog People!

I figured I was on a roll, so I might as well upload the pictures Megan and I took at Northern Voice last weekend too. Enjoy!

On Friday night we had a birthday party for Kimmi. We went for dinner to Boston Pizza, then we all met up at Dickson’s for some cake, XBOX action, and movie watching. It was good times!

We basically played NHL 2005. I am not sure if it’s because it is really easy to have four players at once, or if it’s because none of us have watched hockey in a while, but that’s the game we chose! As for the movie, we watched Wimbledon. I was just happy to watch something with Kirsten Dunst, but in all honesty, it was pretty good. I kept expecting her dad to shout “Velociraptor! Run!” though.

Thanks to everyone for coming, and Happy Birthday again to Kim! You can check out some pictures from the event here.

I have finally had a few moments to post up some pictures. If you’re interested, take a look at some photos from the server upgrades we all did last week.

Not sure how much of a difference it will make to visitors until we get the upgraded Internet connection, but the new servers are now up and running smoothly. And man, are they ever fast (at least for the backend stuff)! It’s almost ridiculous how much faster they are!

Thanks for your patience with the upgrades 🙂

Hope you enjoy your day (first birthday in Edmonton in a long time), and I hope the exam goes well. See you for dinner!

Okay, this is just insane. We have been trying for three days now to upgrade our servers and Internet connection, and we have come up against problem after problem. It just never ends!

Our first problem, was that moving a hard drive to a different chipset renders it unable to boot. So we finally got the data off the drive, and copied it to another drive that had been freshly installed. Right after we did that, the drive failed. We don’t know why exactly, we have been being very careful with static and the like. So we got that drive replaced, and set it up again. Then we proceeded to setup the second server, and you’ll never believe it, that drive failed too. It was a slow death, as it would sort of work, then it would stop working, until eventually, it stopped outright. At that point, we decided we’d get new hard drives and set them up properly.

We currently have both servers running on a single machine right now, but things are not working correctly still (except my blog basically). Tomorrow morning we are going to pick up a the new hard drives, reinstall everything, copy the data, and pending another disaster, everything will be working.

We’re really sorry for the delay. Hopefully we won’t ever have this problem again (our old servers were on old, hard-to-upgrade hardware). After tomorrow, the only downtime I anticipate is a couple hours for DNS settings to propogate when we move to the new fibre optic connection.

Thanks for your understanding.

Kimmi is talking about Paris Hilton and how she is going to be in Playboy, and Andrew is talking about Paris breaking up with Adam Levine. Well, how about reading her notes, her address book, and looking at her personal photos?

That’s right, her Sidekick has been hacked and posted online. (Warning: Nudity after the click.)

Read: Engadget