Beens' Blog

Last night I had the good fortune to attend a private showing of Forty: The Sabres in the NHL  at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. This exhibit features over 200 photographs and videos highlighting the Sabres' 40 year career. It was very interesting to listen to  Louis Grachos, Director of the Albright-Knox, explain some of the history of the Sabres getting their start in Buffalo, as well as how this particular project got off the ground. For me, the highlight was seeing how the photographs evolved over the history -- the evolution of black and white to colour, as well as the evolution of the uniforms and the "character" of the game. If you're a hockey fan, a photography buff, or are just interested in Buffalo history, you owe it to yourself to visit the AK and visit this exhibit.  For more information, visit  http://www.albrightknox.org/exhibitions/Forty_Team.html .  ( Google Map link ) (Many thanks to the volunteers that m...

I love Facebook. And I hate it. I love it because it’s an amazing tool to keep in touch with friends. And I hate it because Facebook can’t be trusted with my private data, so I consequently don’t use as much as I think I’d like to. I was reminded of this when I read an article that stated: The Boy Billionaire, aka Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has done it again. His proposal to turn Facebook messaging into a sort of universal communications platform is probably the worst idea of the year. It's bad for the privacy of users and for corporate IT, which will have to deal with a huge spike in hard-to-defend Webmail. Ultimately, it may well be bad for Facebook, which will likely see its fairly pristine messaging service overrun by spammers and hackers. It then went on to state: A company that can't or won't take steps to protect the personal information entrusted to it by millions of users is about to vastly increase the volume of communication flowing through it...

I'm finding my Dropbox account to be more and more valuable for online backups and file access, especially when I'm on the road and only have my iPhone with me. If you don't have an account already, you can use this link to get an account and you'll automatically get extra storage space (I think 250 MB): https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTExMDUxNjk If you're not sure what Dropbox is, check out this video: https://www.dropbox.com/screencast If you're a student or teacher with a .edu email address, visit   http://www.dropbox.com/edu after you create your account to confirm your edu address (which does not have to be your Dropbox ID), then you will automatically get double the storage for each referral!

Will we reach 100,000 views by Christmas?

I’m normally a patient person, but when I sit down and actually think about the things that have gone wrong with my 2009 Hyundai Sonata, my patience starts to wear thin. For a car that's only a bit over a year old, it: had its brake rotors machined due to pitting, had a headlight enclosure replaced due to condensation, has had the radio turn off intermittently (no trouble found), had an oil leak fixed (replaced gasket?), has an exhaust noise when cold and accelerating through 2500 RPM (was told that this is normal), has a bad vibration between 80-120 km/h when cold (initially scanned and and told that it was engine-related, but then when they couldn't figure out how to fix it, they blamed the problem on the tires which of course were then out of warranty), and… …and now the heater system stops working intermittently. Here’s a video I shot showing the heater problem: At what point will Hyundai admit they sold me a lemon and act accordingly?

My school board (DSBN) is embarking on a program called the "Woodend Living Campus", and its goal is "to create an environment that will inspire students and the community at large to recognize their responsibility for the world we live in and empower students through exploration, discovery and teamwork". It looks like an ambitious project, and one I am fully willing to support with a daily vote. The project proposal is being hosted on the Aviva Community Fund website. I hadn't heard of this website before, but it looks like they have $1,000,000 to help sponsor programs that "create positive change in Communities across Canada". If you'd like to learn more about the Aviva Community Fund and my school board's Woodend Living Campus proposal, please visit http://www.avivacommunityfund.org/ideas/acf8867?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4cd213050cc785e0,0 If you decide to vote, you will have to create an account, which only takes a few minutes. It...

This is just a quick test blog from Windows Live Writer, which I’m testing at the recommendation of @dougpete in his “ An Upgrade Worth Having ” blog. I’m going to test if it can post a draft to my blog that can be opened on Blogger, as well as a quick test to see where it stores pictures that I attach from my computer. After I confirm that this gets uploaded correctly as a draft, I’ll finish editing it in Blogger and report on where it stores the picture. UPDATE The draft uploaded properly to Blogger (which is where I am finishing the editing), although it appears that some of my paragraph formatting got messed up somewhere along the way, so I've had to fix that before posting. The picture has been uploaded to http://lh4.ggpht.com, which turns out to be a server owned by Google. I assume that's a function of this blog being on Blogger (which is owned by Google), not a function of Live Writer. Overall, the test seemed to pass, other than some formatting i...