bradgrier.com

Month: December 2009

  • 3 books I’d give as Christmas presents

    I’m spend­ing much more time in malls and shops this month — must be the sea­son.  One of my favour­ite places to spend time is a book shop. Any book shop. Some­thing about them just make me happy. This year, I spot­ted three books that I’m con­sid­er­ing either giv­ing or get­ting for myself, just ’cause they’re…

  • A tale of two coffee machines

    It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wis­dom, it was the age of fool­ish­ness… …and with that I’ll end my Dick­ensi­an pla­gi­ar­ism and get on with it, my exper­i­ence with two single cup cof­fee makers and the cof­fee they pro­duce. …more This post is an…

  • The spreadsheet that saved Christmas!

    Ok, that’s a bit over the top, I’ll admit, but believe it or not, a spread­sheet cer­tainly did help me out this hol­i­day sea­son, by help­ing me and my fam­ily stay organ­ized as we worked through our hol­i­day gift list, fig­ur­ing out who is going to get what this year…especially if we’re in dif­fer­ent house­holds…

  • This is the week that was

    Tab­let rum­blings, a new Google Phone, and Pri­vacy. …more This post is an excerpt from one of my weekly posts on the Future Shop Techb­log. Check out the full post here.

  • Edmonton gets cool toys and big money gaming this weekend

    West Edmon­ton Mall is a place where things are done big. And I mean really BIG. This suck­er is so big that the indoor hockey rink has been co-opted to host this event. …more This post is an excerpt from one of my weekly posts on the Future Shop Techb­log. Check out the full post…

  • Winter Hoodoos

    The big snowstorm that hit Edmon­ton on Decem­ber 4th and 5th was accom­pan­ied by rather high winds, which depos­ited and sculp­ted the snow­drifts in my yard. Inter­est­ing shapes resulted.

  • Space. The final frontier.

    Winter in Canada means cold winter nights — nights that, if you’re on the prair­ies, are usu­ally cold, crisp and clear. Which means per­fect even­ings for star­gaz­ing. But if you’re tem­per­at­ure chal­lenged, live on the ‘wet’ coast, or are loc­ated in much cloud­i­er environs, then per­haps these two astro­nomy soft­ware applic­a­tions can help. Bonus points…they’re…

  • Don’t forget your Tech Rescue Kit

    This time of year many of us travel home to vis­it fam­ily. If you’re the least bit of a tech­ie, you’ll likely be called in to help someone dia­gnose some sort of com­puter prob­lem — hope­fully not very ser­i­ous. But if Uncle Billy’s com­puter ‘just stopped work­ing’ and you know you’re going to be spend­ing…

  • This is the week that was

    Google hogged all the lime-lite (and band­width) this week with a flurry of announce­ments. Every­one else seemed to be frozen in their tracks, except for Microsoft, who had to dig out of a bing! fail. And we got über snow on the prair­ies 😉 …more This post is an excerpt from one of my weekly…

  • 3 windows applications improve your desktop’s appearance

    Lately I’ve been try­ing to keep my win­dows desktop icon and clut­ter free. In my case, this has meant that I’ve been sav­ing less to my desktop (my default save-to loc­a­tion) and more to work­ing dir­ect­or­ies. And, since a cluttered desktop reflects a cluttered mind, I like to think of this as a bit of…

  • Full Moon setting on Wednesday morning

    The fol­low­ing post is a Quick­Hit™ — an art­icle or post I found online and thought was import­ant enough to share dir­ectly with you. Of course, you’ll see my thoughts or opin­ions pre­pen­ded or appen­ded to this post, oth­er­wise I’m just scrap­ing con­tent, and that’s not the intent. via flickr.com I man­aged to cap­ture this…

  • My iPhone accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express…

    Yes it’s true. Not too far in the future, my Gar­age Sale will take cred­it card pay­ments. Cour­tesy of a neat inven­tion that you knew someone had to invent; the Square iPhone dongle. The premise is pretty simple: Plug it into your iPhone Swipe a cred­it card to com­plete a transaction Square announced the device…