When speaking of the harmony of natural law, this person said that it:

“…reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection…everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe–a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”

Guess who said that? Albert Einstein. From “Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology” by Max Jammer.

Mexican $5 peso coin front
[Download high-res version, transparent PNG]

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Of all the types of pain that I’ve been through in my life, tooth/mouth pain has to be among the worst – there’s nothing worse than feeling stabbing pain going from your jaw up your face, and there’s nothing you can do about it (I know you can relate Oilman). Last week I had the flu, and for a few days was consuming nothing but Gatorade and flat Ginger Ale – it was all my stomach could handle. After a few days of that, I noticed that I was getting some low-grade tooth pain. It wasn’t focused on a particular tooth, just a general area. I thought perhaps it was simply all the high-sugar fluids I was consuming creating some sort of sensitivity, but now that I’m back to eating regular food (more or less), the pain has gone up 100x and it’s clear I have something very wrong going on in my mouth. I spent a good part of the evening tonigh with an ice pack pressed against the side of my face. Not a great way to wrap up an otherwise nice weekend.

A few people have asked what I ended up using on my floor, so here you go: they’re rubber/plastic tiles designed for a garage floor. I bought them at RONA, our Home Depot-type store here in Calgary. I didn’t cover quite as much space as I’d originally planned, but it’s enough for me to roll where I need to in my office. There are small bumps on the tiles, so it’s not like rolling over hardwood, but it’s not too bad. I ordered some rubber wheels for my Aeron chair, which will hopefully help further. I’m still getting things set up, so the wiring isn’t quite up to snuff.

I happened to find an old British Airways boarding pass when I was going through some papers, so for my first official contribution to the newly created Object Collection category, I scanned it, cloned out portions of the text, and here you go:

Click on the image above for the high-resolution version (4000 x 1637, 1.75 MB).

I also created a lower resolution PNG file that has a transparent background, good for using in a scrapbook layout – you can download that here (2000 x 819, 2.8 MB). If you’re looking for another blank boarding pass, check out the Air Canada one.

Be sure to check out the whole Object Collection category to find more scanned objects.

Back in November of 2006, in the first month I started this site, I scanned an Air Canada boarding pass at a high resolution, edited out all the identification information on it, and posted it on this blog. I did this because I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for, so I decided to create it and share it with others. Little did I know how popular that blog entry would become, and how many people were looking for exactly the same thing. Over the past 12 months, that one blog entry has gotten 22,868 page views, making it one of the more popular pages on this blog. I estimate that since first posting it in 2006, around 100,000 people have visited that page. The #1 Google search result for the terms “blank boarding pass”, and the #1 Google Images result is that page.

Since I’ve invested some time in improving my green-screen scanning technique, I’ve decided to launch a new category on this blog: the Object Collection category. I toyed with the idea of launching a new blog/site around this effort, but I don’t want to create more work for myself than I have to. So the objects I scan will be posted to this blog, with the goal of creating a collection of high-resolution, transparent objects in PNG or JPEG (if transparency isn’t required) format. I’ll likely do them in groups of similar objects, so there shouldn’t be more than one new post every few weeks with objects.

I’ve been putting this off for at least two years now, but I finally had to bite the bullet and get it done: I had to tear-down my home office and move it in order to get my floor fixed. We moved into this house in 2001, and finished the basement later that year. We put down berber carpet, which at the time seemed like a good idea because basements tend to be cold. Then we got a little puppy named Keiko – and after a few months that berber carpet was covered in stains (house-training a puppy is a messy business). It was also problematic for me to not be able to roll my office chair from computer to computer – for a while I had a custom-cut piece of Plexiglas on the floor, but over time that cracked and broke.

Not wanting to pay another $500 to replace it, and realizing it was a bit demoralizing to be working surrounded by urine stains, it was time for a renovation to my home office. In 2006 I hired a carpenter, and he sub-contracted a flooring company (Underfoot Floors in Calgary), to re-do several key parts of my office. He built a custom set of shelves for me, and the flooring company ripped up the berber carpet and installed a hardwood laminate floor. For a while, everything was great – but then I started to notice that as I rolled my chair across the floor, it would seem to catch on the floor. Over the next year, I’d find little chips of broken hardwood laminate – bit by bit, I was destroying the floor. The entire point of going with the hardwood laminate was to get something tough enough to stand up to a rolling office chair. I brought in the carpenter and the flooring company, and there was a lot of shoulder shrugging and finger-pointing.

This is what the floor looked like after a couple of years worth of my chair rolling over it.

The problem was two-fold: the underlay that Underfoot Flooring used was quite thick. I had asked for a thick underlay in an attempt to plug up some of the awful insulation problems that Bay West Homes inflicted upon us when they built the house – on a cold day, my basement would be a good 15 degrees Celsius colder than the main floor. You could hold your hand along the baseboards and feel freezing cold air blowing in. Knowing nothing about flooring, I didn’t realize that by having the thicker underlay would cause the floor to move up and down more. You’d think that the flooring professionals would have pointed this out to me, right? No such luck. The particular flooring that I selected – completely based on colour and design, because hey, what do I know about flooring – turned out to have a bevelled edge, meaning that the pieces didn’t lock as tightly together as the indestructible Pergo flooring I had back in my condo. Again, I had no clue – Underfoot Flooring knew this was going in a home office, so I trusted their advice about the flooring options I had. Read the rest of this entry »

Looks like after all the Star Trek fans like me paid $100+ for each season boxed set, the powers that be decided to drop the price to a more sane level. I saw the boxed sets at Costco for $29.99 CAD each. Quite a good deal for some classic Trek!

I just got word via email that there’s a meeting for all Concrete Equities investors:

“There is a general meeting being held for “ALL” investors in Concrete Equities projects, including the Mexico Properties. It is very important that you attend this meeting being held:

Wednesday June 17, 2009 – 7PM
Southside Victory Village
6402 1A ST SW

We are now starting to receive emails from El Golfo investors asking “what is being done”, how does our investment stand”. To this end we have formed a Mexico steering committee and alligned ourselves with the Calgary Buildings Steering Committee.”

If you can be there, you should be there.

I was rooting through some old email this week, and I came across an old PDF file back from 2000 that had a computer system that I had spec’d out for a friend. I got a chuckle when I looked at the specifications – a 433 Mhz Celeron CPU, 64 MB of RAM, a 10 GB hard drive, a graphics card with 4 MB of RAM. Those look like typos today don’t they? Those specs wouldn’t even run a netbook today. And how much was this hot-rod computer from nine years ago? $1589 CAD. Oh, but it includes a 17 inch CRT monitor, so that makes it quite the bargain…