so I met Mike McPhee today..

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Mike is the Marketing Project Manager at Kicking Horse Mountain Resort, my home mountain here in Golden. While Mike seems like a nice guy, I learned more information on the ‘total website revamp’ they are planning; release date is Sept 1st, 2006. The website budget makes this contract attractive. The part of the budget allowed to maintenance is almost half the contract, maybe the other comapny was afraid to charge too much up front.

I had estimated between 15k and 20k for the website. After answering his question: “So how much do you think it would cost to build the website as it is?” I always ask back: “Now that you know my estimate it would only be fair to know about your current budget!”. A few years ago I wouldn’t have had the guts to ask such a question, but today I do. And hell yeah, i’m entitled to!

The conclusion of the meeting was that i am the ‘most qualified guy in Golden’. Thanks Mike! Mike wants to hire somebody to do the work in-house while his boss prefers outsourcing: it is cleaner. Less complications, less obligations, less engagement. An employee of a ski resort has quite a lot of benefits like staff prices everywhere, free seasons pass. I already bought my season pass for a meager 480$ CAN tax included. Anybody who knows me knows I’m not a good employee; I work at irregular hours, i am not always happy to come into work and I prefer to stand out for myself than for the company I work for. Still staff prices at the cafeteria and the bars WOULD be an awesome perk.

So i’ll know in a few weeks. They currently hire Driven. I had researched them out before coming out here, them being the closest there is to a company I could work together with; but they are not up to par. They still have a lot to learn; quite a lot in fact.

I had heard that Sunshine Village paid 100k for their website. It isn’t all that great, don’t you think? For 100k I would make them an INCREDIBLE website. It was developed by Critical Mass of Calgary; I guess prices in calgary are inflated in all domains. Well, I don’t like that ski area, it reminds me of out east except with snow and more storms. In fact there is very rarely any sun at Sunshine Village.

Oh, so I now bear a cleanly shaved face. I wore nice clothes, prepared quite a demonstration (took 2 hours!) for this meeting. Well 2 hours ain’t that much really; but…

Martin Legris - Le 9 mai 2006 - PUS DE BARBE!

J’ai l’impression que c’est têteux de se raser pour un meeting du genre, mais je sais bien que c’est indispensable. La dernière fois que je me suis rasé ça a été pour la conférence PHP Québec 2006. Bref les gens ne me voient jamais la ‘face’ à nu, quand je suis allé à l’épicerie Paige la jolie caissière est resté surprise un bon 5 secondes! mmm Paige, si seulement tu avais quelques années de plus…

So let’s hope for the best. I’m not sure I WANT this contract on top of all the work I have planned over the summer. It would be a lucrative summer. I think i’ll need help!! ;)
Peace.

my painting..

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since mr. camera seller hasn’t received the money order yet, well, I will have to wait quite a while for my camera. Hence I think it’ll take another two weeks atleast, so here’s a preview of my first painting. I’m thinking of doing another one tonight ;)

first painting

i painted last night!!

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it’s been years since i touched a paintbrush; an artist’s paintbrush that is. I recently painted the house I rent in Golden, BC a nice bright yellow and while trying out colors I decided to paint shapes on the walls. They were nice shapes, big yin/yan shaped teardrops, a hot hair baloon whose basket was a hand reaching down, nice butt shapes too. It was an extraordinary experience to paint on such a big canvas; so liberating. I was completely submerged in the experience, I cried for a while, thought of the many girls i’ve been with; the ones I loved most (KARINE!!) and those that hurt me most. Or did I hurt myself using them? Hard to say really.

That night I had a dream, where I kept going down stairs, down and down and down the basement of a basement of another basement. There I found Marie-Eve waiting for me. She was my first real love and boy did I love her! My first reflex was to want to have sex with her, you know, for the old times. She didn’t want to! That was very reminescent of the old times thank you. So we walked around hand in hand and talked to people, and once in a while I’d try to make love to her and NO.

In a way it’s so weird that down so far in myself Marie-Eve is still there and she still won’t have sex with me. I’m rather impulsive on the matter and rather… always wanting. I can have sex 5-6-7 times a day.. up to twelve i’m sure. I did have sex for twelve hours in a row once; oh I was on ecstacy but still. Must have had 30 orgasms; crazy stuff.

So far down there she was, my first love with what hurt me the most, or the point that I won’t let go off of is she won’t have sex with me. Weird eh? I wonder if she’s gone now that I acknowledged that.

Now back to the painting.. so last night I painted on a 6″ x 8″ canvas; rather small compared to wall-sized canvases. But I did, and it felt great. Bright colors, abstract yet a mix of elements we can recognize, lots of opposites, fire, water, earth, greens and a soul. (I’ll post a picture when I get my camera!). Again I was completely captured, immersed in the experience. I didn’t really know where I was going; didn’t really think. What I was doing was projecting emotions on the canvas and my hand, the paintbrush and the beautiful colors were the medium.

Where it gets really interesting is how it changes me. For the last four or five years I always fall asleep in the same position: on my left side. Unless i’m with a girl or in an akward situation. But basically i cannot fall asleep in any other position. If I lay on my back I feel the energy of the universe too much, I get so high and my soul wants to leave my body. When I’m on my right side something doesn’t feel right, and when I’m on my left side, you can count to one, two, zZzZzZ.. Now last night I went to bed and i feel asleep on my right side! And I slept in that position all night, no matter how much I moved around. It’s weird eh? Painting liberates me.

I shall do more!

Peace.

hosting-unlimited… not!

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one of my clients is hosted at hosting-unlimited.net. They offer a great bang for the buck, 29 UK pounds for one year of hosting; I mean that’s a great deal. Their system offers CPanel for complete self-administration, a little restrictive on some aspects like 5 email accounts only, 500mb of storing, 5 mysql databases and you are not allowed to host multiple domains.

They use a system for billing called premium billing; basically everything is automated and they offer no phone support. It takes them 1 day or two to answer questions.

Recently she got her account suspended; she hadn’t paid her yearly fee. It was due on April 30th, and they suspended her on may 2nd. It took 4 DAYS to fix this issue, all of it happened because the email address she had used to create her account wasn’t active anymore. Hence she didn’t receive the notices. But couldn’t they try calling her? Or using the email account on the hosting account? No. Couldn’t they be understanding and put the website up right away when she got in touch with them; while she got around to paying? No. They were complete idiots when it comes to understanding their clients needs. They don’t care. They follow procedures and that’s it.

So I give them a two star rating out of five. If everything goes well and is in order, excellent. If anything goes wrong, man you’re in trouble!!

Peace.

road biking vs mountain biking!

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here we go again! why can’t they get along? I don’t know. In fact for me road biking doesn’t even EXIST. I love mountain biking, i love going cross-country mountainbiking to be more exact. I love going uphill for 10 seconds, around a corner, downhill for 5, another corner. I love the thight trails, the thighter the better. I love spending time inside of nature, not on the border of an infinite road; being alone and submerged in trees, insects, dirt, mud, creeks. The closer to the earth the better.. the windier the trail the better, the more roots the better.

What do I come to understand out of it? Well everything I like is opposite from road biking. But this guy, Jerome of Summit Cycle here (he’s a goldenite like me) who runs a mountain bike shop and has mountain biked for years and years and years well he says that road biking is excellent; in fact he does it more than he does mountain biking. Well Jerome, maybe your right, but I will never know cause road biking doesn’t exist!

Peace.

what do you do when two hot chicks

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who are kissing each other in front of you, then come talk to you briefly to say: “Are you having fun yet?”, not waiting for your answer whatsoever, and head 2 feet behind you on a bed to make out?

You read your own t-shirt which says: “I ride twins” in nice pink letters.

Well they weren’t smart ‘bitches’ (pardon my expression, I think I am influenced by the hiphop culture!! oh no!!). It doesn’t mean I ride two girls at once, it means I ride twintip skis!!

click to activate and use this control

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Frank Scuccimarri, good friend of mine, complained about a weird behaviour on the site http://www.flirtmontreal.com which we put online a little while ago. Basically to change languages you need to click on a link which is inside the header animation; in flash. In firefox this works no problem, but in Internet Explorer you need to click twice; once to activate the control, a second time to click on the link itself. As I found out by searching on google this is due to the fact Microsoft lost a legal battle over a software patent: they aren’t allowed to automatically load and install activex controls (or something like that).

As it turns out the fix is 4 lines of javascript and uses an apparent bug in IE, because a line of javascript that reads:
[code]
theObjects[i].outerHTML = theObjects[i].outerHTML
[/code]
can’t do all that much, except force IE to reparse the html? dunno.

For a more detailed explanation, click here.

Oh and this bug doesn’t appear unless you upgrade to the latest Windows XP patches. I think it dates from a little while ago, but.. you know.. i use IE once every blue moon.. so..

Peace.

Lawnmowing…

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This morning I was sitting on my rear deck, talking about everything and nothing with my roommate Dave. It was a gorgeous morning, the sky was azure blue, the moutains are still filled with snow, the mosquitos aren’t out yet! Lovely you see, except for one small detail: the sound of lawnmowers.

See, we call ourselves evolved creatures, we even go further and pretend to be intelligent. Yes how in the world is lawnmowing intelligent? I mean, think about it. How long have we been doing it? How much time gets wasted mowing the lawn and even worst, do you realize how bad it is for the environment?

You’d think that with the science of genetically modifying things, we’d have thought about making grass that doesn’t grow past the inch and half we want it to be; and good riddance! Oh, i know. All those couples who can’t stand each other will be at loss, the husband won’t have an excuse to escape the house every sunday morning after sex. Well have him find something else to do!

Do you realize that a lawnmower is much much worst for the environment than your standard car? And a car doesn’t score very high, as you know. Then WHY are we still mowing lawns? Couldn’t we put something else instead of grass? What is the standard length of the life-cycle of a lawnmower?

Don’t even try to patronize me saying it would kill a sector of the economy; hence that is why we don’t do it. Wouldn’t everybody prefer to be freed from such a job as dealing with lawnmowers and have to learn another (more interesting, thank you) trade? I mean, how challenging are lawnmowers.

Did I mention they stink too? Burning gasoline with oil isn’t the most brilliant of ideas.

Let me recapitulate:

  • Lawnmowers are noisy and disturb neighbourhood peace
  • Lawnmowers stink
  • Lawnmowers pollute during operation
  • Lawnmowers pollute when you produce them, and when we trash them

The only plus side of lawnmowing is freshly mowed grass smells good.. otherwise. Oh and don’t get me started on golf courses, places where the lawn gets mowed every day! Crazy!

If anybody has stats on how much pollution a lawnmower causes versus the standard car, please post them. The world needs to know.

Oh and it was a beautiful day. it’s just little things like this that slowly hack their way into my brain and no matter how hard I try to understand I can’t seem to. It would be great to know other people out there are like me: dreaming of a better world and ready to start with their everyday life.

Peace.