Josh(ua Sarkis) Prowse

First, a quick back story. For months, I had been setting off the theft alarm contraptions at retail stores. I had no idea why. I never steal, and I feel incredibly guilty even at the implication, so this meant that every time I entered or exited a store, I was extremely stressed out waiting for the siren to stare blaring. It made the holiday shopping season a dread-filled pain in the ass.

But here's the funny thing: Nobody ever stopped me. Ever. Not once. A conservative estimate would be that I set off 100 alarms over the holidays, and I was stopped exactly zero times.

Then in January, I went to Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC, apparently pronounced "em-ee-see," not "meck") to spend some gift certificates I'd received for Xmas. When I went in, the alarm immediately went off. Obviously I hadn't stolen anything yet, but the smiling staffer by the doors stopped me. Not to frisk me, but to help me figure out why I was setting of the alarm. She took my jacket and vest, ran them each independently through their alarm, and we determined my jacket was the culprit. She went and demagnetized it, and then explained that sometimes when you put your clothes through a wash/dry cycle, they can remagnetize (for the record, I did wash my jacket in the early fall). I haven't set off an alarm since.

MEC's choice to staff their doors with people who deal with alarm events not only deters and identifies actual theft situations, it also quickly and considerately dismisses innocent shoppers. Both of these are great for business. In my case, the staffer went the extra mile to ensure I wouldn't be bothered by the uncomfortable feeling of being thought a thief ever again--they made my life better. There's little more a retailer can do to earn my trust and patronage.

Thanks MEC!

[Postscript: I used my GCs to buy a down winter jacket. The next day, a chinook started and the average temperature hasn't dipped below 0 degrees Celsius since. Go figure.]

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You can find this at Toys 'R' Us in the Sadness and Disappointment aisle.

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Well, Movember is over, but thanks to everybody who donated. It was a great experience having a mo' for the first time in my life, and confirming what a truly horrible idea it would be, if not for the fact that it helped raise money and awareness for prostate cancer.

I put together a little video for your amusement, and there's still time to donate at http://ca.movember.com/mospace/386150

Enjoy, and thanks again!

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I put my winter tires back on my car today. You may recall me taking them off back in May. Let's do some basic math to see how long summer lasts for car tires, courtesy of timeanddate.com:

October 13, 2009 - May 30, 2009 = 136 days (or 4 months, 13 days)

So in Calgary, your summer tires spend roughly two thirds of the year in storage.

(The photo is of my car's bug-covered bumper after driving from Calgary to Winnipeg. In the summer. Sorry, I don't have any pictures of my tires.)

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I saw this poster hanging on the wall in a Burger King next to the customer line.

Somehow, it comes off less as an endorsement of how great it is to work at Burger King than it does as a reminder of how unlikely it is you will ever find a job that makes you truly happy. And hey stupid, don't you think it's time you accept the fact that with your math grades, you should be happy that someone will hire you to flip burgers? Plus, you'll be able to ingest lots of high-fructose joy on your 10 minute breaks, fatso.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm pretty sure the ad agency phoned this one in. Either that, or they are playing a game where they are trying to see if they can get stuff with double meanings past the folks at Burger King who approve the ads.

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This video will show you how to install Ubuntu onto a USB drive, but in a "persistent" mode that will keep your changes, settings, documents, etc. It essentially allows your USB drive to act like a pocket workstation-- plug it into (almost*) any computer, boot up, and your Ubuntu USB installation will load instead of the (likely Windows) OS on that machine.

This is different from other videos in two respects:

1. The resulting Ubuntu installation is NOT a LiveCD installer; it's a fully functional installation, just like on a regular hard drive
2. You don't need to download or run any customization software; you just load the Ubuntu disk, put in your USB drive, and follow the instructions

Hope this helps somebody!

(*To the best of my knowledge, you can't boot to USB from an Intel Apple computer. Or at least, not easily enough that I'm going to explain it here. Just don't expect any USB drive created with this process to boot on your Mac.)

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This spicy thai beef salad (also known as "naam tok", "yum neue" or "yam nua") is one of my favourite dishes ever, and I recently realized how careless it was of me to have the recipe scribbled out on a piece of scrap paper (pictured above in the salad), so I decided to blog it for permanence.
 
If you have a piece of leftover steak, get the rest of the ingredients and MAKE THIS SALAD. Prep time is about 10 minutes.
 
Sauce:
4 tbs lime juice
2 tbs fish sauce
1 tsp sugar
1 dash roasted chilis
 
Salad:
1 steak sliced thin
2 tbs chopped cilantro
2 tbs chopped mint
1 green onion chopped
1 red pepper cut in thin strips
1/2 red onion diced
 
Instructions:
1. Mix the sauce together until the sugar is dissolved.
2. Mix all the salad ingredients together (including the steak).
3. Pour the sauce over the salad and mix to coat completely.
4. Wait about 10 minutes if you can.
5. NOM NOM NOM!!!
 
It's even better the next day after marinating in the fridge. Enjoy!

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EDIT: Thanks to Peter Harrison who pointed out that the Import/Export Appliance feature of VirtualBox will effectively clone a VM right in the VirtualBox GUI. This post/video is now officially obsolete!

ANOTHER EDIT: According to Victor Gilette, the open source edition (OSE) does not include the Import/Export features in the GUI, so these instructions may be of help to anybody using that version.

If you are not a geek, stop reading now.

Hello geeks, if you're into virtualization, you probably have heard about VirtualBox. I love it, but making copies of my existing virtual machines is not automated the way it is with Parallels or VMWare. It's not too hard once you get the hang of it, but the instructions I've read aren't too easy to follow, so I put together a screen capture of the process and posted the movie to YouTube.

Hopefully VirtualBox will automate and integrate this process into the UI soon, but until then, these instructions should help you get started.

(The video was captured on my MacBook with iShowU, and all editing and voiceover done in iMovie '09.)

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I had to try this at least once. It may be that once is all you get: 14 slices of bacon will do that. Also, this will be topped with cheese and rolled like a burrito when it gets out of the broiler.
 
If nobody hears from me by Saturday, let's just call it swine flu.
 
In other news, this is my first mobile post from my iPhone. Hope it isn't too garbled.

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