A new year is upon us. 2012. And if you believe anything about the ancient prophesies of the Mayans (see the book Fingerprints of the Gods), we may have just celebrated our last New Year's Eve ever, so I hope you had a good one.

Myself, I spent it like I've spent the last few - watching the countdown in bed while my wife and children were fast asleep. But, the good news is that they were all sleeping, and it seems like it might be possible to get a bit more of that this coming year, which is all I'm really hoping for. With a bit of extra sleep, a lot of other things seem to take care of themselves.

Hope you had a great 2011, and here's to better things in 2012.

So it's been about a week, and I haven't noticed any ill effects of the transition to VM. This means I can start reallocating any hardware scraps from my old machine that are worth saving, and then pitch the rest (to a proper e-cycling center, of course).

One issue that I HAVE notice is that the standalone hardware would reboot automatically after power fluxuations, etc. The new machine, being a VM, will stay dead until I resuscitate it if the machine encounters unexpected problems. There may be ways around this, but it's not a big enough concern for me to really research it at this point.

For now, we're hitting the end of November which means it's time to focus on Christmas shopping and wrapping up work for the year, before taking a well-deserved break. Oh, and maybe some Saints Row 3 if Santa has been listening...

If you're seeing this, that means you're seeing the new and improved website.

But it looks exactly the same, you say. Well, that's because it is. But it has now been completely virtualized, and moved to another machine so that I don't have so many archaic towers set up in my home office.

Hopefully this will allow me to cut back on some wasted physical space, perhaps even some energy use at the home, and more importantly, make it a lot easier to do backups and manage the behind-the-scenes stuff that even a modest site like this entails. Mostly because I spend so little time on this site now that if it were to go completely sideways, I'm not even sure I'd remember how to set it up again.

The site in general may be slightly slower because it's a virtual machine now, but I'm expecting that the better hardware that it's running on should help offset that (and actually even improve things a bit), so I'll be keeping an eye on the performance in the short term.

If you notice anything wonky, be sure to add a comment below.

A few years ago I posted about how I'd gotten my first blackberry, bringing myself into the world of so-called 'smartphones'.

Well, it died last week. A slow, painful death. In fact, not even a complete death. The phone itself 'worked', but stopped taking input from the keyboard and trackball. I could see incoming calls and texts, but couldn't answer them. So it was one of those living comas - alive, but no communication to the outside world, much like the Metallica song "One". Unfortunate for me, but as it turns out, more unfortunate for the Blackberry family.

Conveniently enough, it died shortly after my contract expired, which meant it was time to get a new phone anyway. I knew this had been coming so I'd actually been doing some prep on what phone to get. As you can tell by the title, I decided on the iPhone4. I really was hoping the blackberry would last until the iPhone5 was released, but since it's mid-Sept and still hasn't even been announced yet, I'm not even sure the 5 will be in stores for Christmas.

In the first 2 days, I downloaded a dozen apps, set it up on my home wireless network, tried FaceTime with my family in the other room (I'd gotten my wife one for her birthday a couple months ago), sent 30 texts or so, and made no phone calls. I've still probably only made a half-dozen calls in the week that I've had it.

Overall, I'm quite happy. It's crystal clear - much better resolution than the old blackberry, and the speed of the apps is pretty impressive. I only have 2 minor complaints, which are really just features that the blackberry had that I'd sort of taken for granted and only noticed after switching.

• I miss the little blinking red light on the blackberry that let you know you missed something. A call, text, email, whatever it might be. You can see the light from across the room and don't have to go pick up your phone and swipe the screen every time you want to check if something happened while you were in the other room.

• I miss the auto on-off feature on the blackberry. It allows you to set the phone to turn off at a certain time, and then turn on again at another time. I'd set mine to automatically turn off at night, and turn on in the morning - not just to save battery, but also to prevent those annoying beeps and whistles as things happen overnight. I don't need to be beeped at 3am because some idiot just made a comment on my facebook status. Obviously, you can still manually turn the iPhone off at night, but it's much nicer when it's done automatically by the phone and you don't have to worry about forgetting.

So anyway, here we are. I'll let you know how it goes, but overall, you can tell the iPhone is much more about the "features", and less about the phone.

Which, to be honest, is what people seem to want these days, and so far it's working for me.

Test emails are still failing, so please don't send me any yet. Well, you can send all you want, but I won't receive any of it.

Been a busy few days, I'll update you more later. But the most important thing - last night was the season opener for my hockey team, and although we lost by a hair, I got 2 goals and was designated the team's MVP for the game. An excellent way to start the season (for me, not the team as a whole).

But I also played 2 games of ultimate frisbee that morning, after sitting on my ass the entire summer. I had to take 2 ibuprofin just to get out of bed this morning.

Luckily we don't play again until ... tonight.

If you're seeing this, that means that my new DNS servers are working. And I feel the discuss it, because it wasn't all roses and sunshine when I started.

So the short version is that I had been using a site called everydns.net for my DNS services for as long as I can remember. It was free, and it did what I needed, which were the two big selling features. However, a year ago they were bought by a company called DynDNS (or dyn.com now), who left it alone for awhile, but has now decided to charge everyone.

Ok, fine, you have a business to run. But I know there are other free DNS servers out there that would suit the needs of this site just fine, so why would I start paying?

Enter xname.org. Now, I hate to slag on a free service, because it's really hard to justify holding a free service accountable for anything. They provide something for free, and you either take it and be happy, or you leave it. Well I took it for 3 days, and then I left it. I monkeyed around with settings and configurations and testing, and resetting and reconfiguring and restesting. After 3 days this site was still down, and no amount of tinkering was able to get it routed properly.

So I decided to move on and try yet another company, which ended up being freedns.afraid.org. That was last night, where I created my account, entered my info, and today the site is alive and well. So somehow I managed to do in less than an hour with Free DNS what I couldn't do in 3 days with xname.

Anyway, we're back online thanks to freedns.afraid.org, and I'm hoping to carry some of this momentum forward because I'm starting to get the itch to delve into the site again.

How long have I had this site layout? Anyone? Anyone? It feels like forever, but I think it's been about 3 years. Which IS forever, in internet time. It's complicated math that I can't really begin to explain tonight. But it's true. 

Anyway, I digress.

The point is, I really don't like this layout anymore.

I remember when I implemented this new .NET site, one of the benefits was that I could make 'themes' that could change the layout with a simple click of the "Theme" button over on your left. Yes, just look to your left. You see it there, underneath all that other crap? You, the empowered User could change it to suit your taste, selecting one of the myriad of themes I'd created. Anyway, like so many other things in life, it's a great idea rendered impotent by lack of action. There is 1 theme there, this one.

One of my other annoyances is this godamn tiny font on the main page. If you click on the heading and go to the actual article, the font becomes nicely readable. But this annoying 2-point font is fucking ridiculous. But changing it isn't as easy as you might think, because half this webpage is COMPILED code. That means I need the original source to redo anything - not just editing .asp or .html pages. I'm not even sure I have the latest source anymore after multiple PC formats over the last 3 years. I definitely have A VERSION of the source code, but I'm not sure if it's the latest one, and what other effects using that source would have on this existing site. I have a feeling a lot of other things which are working fine now, would suddenly break. But, as I get older, I'm starting to think that's a worthy trade-off vs this tiny fucking font.

So really, it's like I'm stuck in this content limbo until I decide to take the plunge and fully immerse myself for awhile as I commit to bringing the code up to date.

I'd like to promise that I'll do something about it, but I wouldn't insult your intelligence like that.

In the meantime, I WILL see if I can try and find a new free DNS host, since my current free one has migrated to a less free (re: pay) service, and that simply can't be tolerated. I believe the switchover of my existing service is Aug 31, so if Sept 1st you can't reach the site, you'll know it was because I was too lazy (or slow) to find another service in time. But rest assured, I will find another service.

Well, probably. 

After just over 4 years, it seems that my beloved Oilers have finally righted a long overdue wrong.

Some of you may remember that back in February of 2007, I wrote about a grotesque business decision that ripped out the heart and soul of my favourite hockey team. The Edmonton Oilers traded Ryan Smyth to the New York Islanders. Smyth, also known as Captain Canada by almost everyone in the hockey world, left the place he called home for 12 years, and was sent packing to the cold United States without so much as a thank-you. The team went on a horrible losing streak after that in 2007, and really haven't been the same since, including finishing last place overall for the last 2 years.

Now, make no mistake - the loss of him didn't cause all of that shittiness. But it certainly didn't help. He's not an elite goal-scorer, although he does alright. But there were many a game where the team just gave up, and that type of attitude was completely unacceptable under Smyth's watch.

But as of yesterday (June 26th, 2011), he has been pulled back into the fold! Yes, he actually requested a trade from his current team (the LA Kings) back to his shitty Oilers. And my shitty Oilers found a way to make it happen.

Now I'm not saying my team is going to finish first in the league next year. But I will say this, my friends - they put a huge piece back into place. And I'm not talking just about a player on the ice - for the first time in a long time, the team is starting to feel right again.

A few days ago, I finished reading a book called "The Road", by Cormac McCarthy. Apparently there was also a movie made starring Viggo Mortensen which more people seem to be aware of, but either way, the book exists.

Not only does it exist, but it seems to have fared well among the literary critics - winning several awards in 2006 that I've never heard of, and culminating in the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Not only that, the book was selected by OPRAH to be one of her Book Club Books back in 2007, and he was interviewed on her show. Yeah, welcome to the Big Time, Cormac.

I could tell you that I knew nothing about any of that when I bought the book, and you might believe me or might not. It doesn't matter. I bought it because I happened to be in Chapters(^TM) and it was on a bookshelf labeled Recommended by John or Kathy or Vince or someone and it was about a Dad and his son, and hey, I'M a Dad with a son, and it was about survival in a post-apocalyptic-world, and I like post-apocalyptic worlds, that was good enough for me.

What is the point of all this you might ask? Very simply, it is to tell you this. Don't buy this book, don't look at it on the shelf in the store, and by no means should you consider actually reading this book. This goes double if you're a father, and double-double (yumm, Timmies) if you're a father with one or more sons.

Spoiler alert (skip to the next paragraph if you feel like you need to ignore my advice and still plan to read this) - At the risk of spoiling the ending and sabotaging my manhood all in the same paragraph, not only will I say that the entire book leads up to the father dying in the end, but I'll also say that I had tears streaming down my cheeks, and left the book feeling thoroughly depressed and hopeless. It was horrible, bleak, and damn-near made me throw myself off my own roof in an attempt to stave off the mind-numbing gloom it invoked. And it never, ever deviated. I kept thinking it would get better, and it didn't.

Sure, a good dose of isolation and starvation combined with crippling emotional and physical pain could potentially help you appreciate what you have - there wasn't a single night of reading where I wouldn't go into my sleeping son's room and give him an extra kiss on the forehead - but my son gets a kiss from me every night as it is. That happened even before this book slapped me in the face with obliteration of human life, dessimation of the earth's ecosystem, and the grim possibility of never having clean, warm sheets again.

Thank you Cormac, but no thanks. I have plenty of shitty days of my own to depress me if I need it. I don't need your book polluting my head with the thoughts of my son watching me die, or the rest of my family and friends disappearing from the face of the earth.

Thanks, but no thanks.