burnaby t wallace

So, while shopping for the new car, we were browsing through endless brochures. Filling the pages are pictures of vehicles with happy people and their skis, laid back laughter as the car shows surfboards aesthetically placed over the passenger seat while two questionable characters look out to the shore.

Totally awesome, dude.

What the brochures need to do is show what people really do with the cars.

Here’s a picture showing what happens after shopping at Lowes and Target.

That’s packed.

So today is the first day I filled out a form and, when it asked for marital status, I put married. Whoa.

Well, the weddings done and now we’ve got the rest of our lives to catch up on what we’ve been missing the past few months (Harry Potter, what?).

I want to take some time to breathe for a moment and thank the following people.

Arnel-thanks for helping out. Your last minute freak-outs, not so much, but your helping hand was much appreciated.

The same goes for Alfred. Seriously. Now I can dance. However, I think it’s still a little too soon to look at the videos.

Jeremy, thanks for your help, too. Keeping things at bay and helping out with the heavy lifting, awesome.

Billy, your AV and network expertise helped make an unusual wedding event go smoothly.

Rick and Arlene. Thanks for your attention to detail and coming up with things I never thought about before the wedding. Oh, and no one lays a better chord. Thanks guys.

Benino and Alicia. Thanks for being real with us and helping us get the strength to perform in front of all those people. I hope your guitaring takes you places.

I also want to extend a very special thanks to Jeff and his mom. Before the guests come, while they are there, and even after they leave, you guys have helped me IMMENSELY. You even helped cook for more people than we thought. Seriously. I couldn’t have done many things without you. The both of you have helped things go as smoothly as they have. Your mom has made me feel like I was her son and she has helped me like a mother, as well. Her presence was amazing and I thank you both again for your help. We will see you in China when we get a change.

And to everyone that I am not mentioning here who have helped us out. Your help is much appreciated. Thanks again.

Well. Today’s the day. Here I go.

Whew. This has been a crazy set of nights. I just know that there’s no rest until after the wedding. The seating chart, the programs, the tuxedos, oi! Not to mention the dance practice and the voice practice.

Also, on the iPhone front, I have accepted that it is, indeed, a first generation device. I have accepted the fact that I had to take my phone back to get another because of a battery issue. I am almost getting used to going online just to access my to-do list. But the iPhone threw me a curveball yesterday when, while setting up the voice mail, it deleted all my contacts–yes, all my contacts. Not my calendar, phew, but all I had were phone numbers with no representation. I hope a firmware update comes out soon.

Oh, what’s this? Is this a blog entry with tags of both technology and wedding. Cool.

Last Friday, I went back to Apple to take back the iPhone I had. It seemed that it had some issues with the battery and I just wasn’t that satisfied with how quickly it was dying. So I got a new one. Now, three days later, I must say that the new battery is good–very nice, indeed. I haven’t charged this guy in two days, and I have been using it quite a bit.

That being said, it was not an easy journey to Monday (with respect to the iPhone, that is).

After getting a new one on Friday, it allowed me to make phone calls for about 15 seconds before stopping me. Then afterwards, all calls had failed. I couldn’t access the EDGE network. Nothing. So I went back to the Apple store and they took my SIM card and put it in the iPhones they had in the stock room and their own personal devices. It didn’t work there either.

So I went to the AT&T store. They gave me a new SIM. I put it in, and was instructed to connect it to my computer and re-activate it. So I went home, connected it to iTunes, and BAM…I was greeted with the scary screen that I am sure so many people have experienced. ITunes told me that it would take a bit longer to activate this phone and that I would get an email when that happened.

10 minutes pass…nothing. And I was waiting for a phone call from a friend to pick up at the airport. Plus, I am sure there are tons of voice mails, as my phone had been offline for about 3 hours at this point–during what is typically a busy time of the day for me to get phone calls.

So I called up AT&T using a special phone number found at Thomas Hawk’s blog post. Then I spent about 30 minutes troubleshooting on a conference call with several Apple and AT&T employees. What was funny is about 25 minutes into the troubleshooting, I got an email stating that my phone was activated.

So now I had to reset my phone (and account–which was discounted before–and after this second activation, is no longer–boo).

They don’t tell you this stuff at the store. So if you decide that you need to take your phone back to Apple, make sure you have the time and keep in mind how nasty it may get.

This is so funny. I love it. I just had to reblog it over here.

There?s a terrific story over at IT Toolbox that tells of a professor and one of his childish teenage students. Nicknamed ?Pima? (for being a pain in his ass), the student would goof off and pretend to be uber-l337 by changing the root password, arguing points in class - you know, that sort of thing. Since all the students? PCs are netbooted from a central computer in the class, when the prof. discovered root had been changed, he became curious.

Curiosity eventually lead the cat to become mischievous. He recorded some choice sound files with a microphone, wrote a script to play them back, and set the computer?s speaker volume at 75%. To make sure this little brat would be set straight, he even went so far as to pry the volume button off with a pocketknife!

The stage was set. Pima sat down with a shit-eatin grin on his face. Minutes later, three separate files were played at intervals:

YOU SHOULDNT HAVE CHANGED MY ROOT PASSWORD BOY!
MY HUMPS! MY HUMPS! MY ITTY BITTY HUMPS!
ATTENTION CLASS. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DONT PAY ATTENTION TO THE INSTRUCTOR, CHANGE YOUR ROOT PASSWORD AND COMPLETELY DISREGARD YOUR ASSIGNED WORK. THAT IS ALL.

Needless to say, Pima got is act together and now shows up to class 5 minutes early. Never mess with your CS teacher. Ever.

Thanks Crunchgear.

Whew…I am finding it so difficult to focus right now. All I want to do is work on wedding stuff. Luckily last night, I finished the wedding program. Dang. What a crazy ordeal that was, designing a program from the ground up.

Next thing on the list is the slideshow. So if you have any pictures with us in it, please send it my way.

Crap.

For a very long time, I called the iPhone a toy. I did this, as it did not sync with even basic business applications like Outlook. Well, a few months went by then I noticed that Apple’s website says that it can, in fact, sync with Outlook–albeit through iTunes.

Well, as cludgy and nasty as that sounds, it doesn’t even work that well. And yesterday, I found that iTunes crashes Outlook. Yep–so the calendar that is on Outlook is not the same as what’s on the iPhone. It doesn’t sync! And I can’t use it to check my mail because it’ll crash on startup. And I’ve done repairs on the installation on both iTunes and Outlook.

Seriously. This is suck.