Journal Posts

I was recently generating some new server and email passwords, and realized that while most of the strong password generators available online work great for desktops, they aren’t very user friendly for entering on iOS or mobile devices. Often you can find a few checkboxes and sliders for those tools to make it a bit more iPhone friendly, but they don’t always work. Ideally a password that you frequently use on an iPhone or other iOS device should be “strong” (i.e. have possibly a symbol or two and a mix of upper and lower case characters), but should also be fairly easy to type. So this morning I decided to write a bit of PHP to generate an iOS friendly strong password. Basically the idea is to only use mostly keys that are accessible without having to hit shift or the keyboard button that switches to symbol mode. function generate_password( […]

I’ve been reading a lot of Breaking Bad predictions these last few days and I thought I would toss my own hat into the ring. I’m sure I’m going to be wrong on a few counts, mainly because the writers have been really great at surprising us. There are lots of spoilers here, so don’t read any of these if you aren’t totally caught up with watching Breaking Bad. Here’s what we know based on the end of the last episode: Andrea, the girl Jesse was dating, was murdered by Todd, and Brock is now motherless Jesse is being held captive by Jack, Todd and their crew and is making 96% pure meth Walt’s family no longer wants anything to do with him Walt is heading back to Albuquerque, and will pick up a M60 machine gun along the way We saw Walt acquire the ricin in a previous flash-forward, […]

I’ve been working on a travel eBook for a few months now, mostly on airplanes and during the odd evening. It’s been slow going since I have a lot of other things going on right now, but I’ve managed to make a bit of progress each week. I’m pleased to announce that last night I managed to put the finishing touches on it, and it’s now officially available. My travel ebook contains two main topics: how you can make and execute plans for long-term travel (anything more than a week or two), and how you can redesign your life to make traveling easier. There are lots of great resources include, such as the top travel services I use on the internet, where the best places to find cheap travel insurance are, and some of the best motivation and business books I’ve read during my travels. The book is now available […]

Rebecca Bollwitt is one of those rare people who doesn’t need an introduction. Her Vancouver blog, Miss604.com, is well known in Canada and parts of the United States, and has been voted the #1 Vancouver blog for the last four years. Rebecca has organized several conferences in the Vancouver area, including two WordCamps, several Twestivals, and several blog-until-you-pass-out 24-hour sessions of Blogathons. Not only is Rebecca actively involved with Vancouver and her website, but her and her husband also co-founded a WordPress-centric design and development company called Sixty4Media. She even co-authored a business book that contains some powerful business, blogging and WordPress tips: Blogging To Drive Business. And like me, Rebecca can perform both of her jobs while travelling, something I find more and more people are adjusting their lives to accommodate. Rebecca also does a great deal of travel, both personal and sponsored trips, all the while writing for […]

Anyone who likes to cook can appreciate the challenge of making food without a nice selection of herbs and spices. When I’m back at home, I have a pretty full spice cabinet with probably about 30 different containers ranging from saffron to gran masala to coriander. But unfortunately when I travel finding some of the herbs and spices that I’m used to can be a challenge in many parts of the world, and basically impossible in other parts. A good example of that is chilli powder – it’s basically available in every supermarket in Canada, but I couldn’t find it anywhere when I was in Brazil. Since I was making plans to go travelling for at least a few months, I thought it would be a good idea to take along some of my favourite spices for my trip. That way when I rent apartments for a few weeks or […]

When you travel around as much as I do, you eventually find yourself in need of a rental car. While I’m usually quite happy to take a bus, often it’s more economical to rent a car for a few days, especially if you’re trying to get to a hard to reach destination (Cape Reinga in New Zealand was one location where I purposefully rented a car). If you’ve ever pulled up to a gas station in a rental or unfamiliar car, I’m sure some of you have wondered how to find the gas tank. I personally used to slow the car down, pop the gas tank open (often using the lever near the floor), then rock my head back and forth a few times hoping to catch a glimpse of the gas tank in either the left or the right side-view mirrors. In dire situations I would be forced to […]

One of the hardest parts of traveling to remote countries is that it is not always easy to find some of the foods you enjoy the most back home. That in itself presents a great opportunity for exploring new foods, but let’s face it: sometimes it’s nice to have some tried and true comfort food. A good example of that for me is mexican food. It’s probably my favourite cuisine, and it was pretty rare that we didn’t have tacos at least weekly in my household growing up. Unfortunately in many parts of the world I’ve been in, finding mexican salsa can be a real pain. Even if you can find it (like here in Brazil), it’s an imported item that can easily cost $10 for a small container’s worth. Thankfully making fresh salsa at home is a pretty easy task, and one that I’ve performed a few times over […]

For many software developers, grabbing a can of soda is far more natural than grabbing a glass of water. At several companies I’ve worked at previously the employers even stocked the fridges with free soda. So when given a choice between grabbing a can from the fridge or getting a glass and going to the water cooler, often soda was chosen, especially in my case. When I was younger I never gave much thought to how much soda I consumed, but definitely in the last few years I’ve been more conscious of just how many bottles of diet soda I go through. I remember a period of time where I would show up at work and pretty much drink a 2L of diet coke every day when we were developing a huge software product. Not only is that an awful lot of chemicals to put into one’s body, but it’s […]

Other than the odd time when I’ll go down to Future Shop and make a purchase, I do almost all of my shopping online these days. Part of that reason is that I live in a small town that really doesn’t have a great selection for many items. The other reason is that I’m often busy, and so I can simply make an order online and have it show up a week to ten days later. The same can be said when I travel too. Other than the markets that you find all over the word, and the odd mall, some things on the road are still best to purchase online. A good example of that is when I bought a new DVD drive for my Macbook Air while in Thailand. I simply logged into Thai version of the Apple store and had the item shipped to me in Thailand. […]

I’ve been a ‘world traveler’ for almost two and a half years now. Back then I hadn’t really been away from Canada for very long before, and the thought of spending multiple weeks, let alone multiple months, in a foreign country was a pretty strange idea. Now the idea of loading a backpack up and heading to a new country feels about as foreign to me as doing a load of laundry. If I saw a plane ticket somewhere for a good price, I could probably be at the airport in three hours, ready to go on a new adventure. One of the pains of being away for an extended period of time though is figuring out how to accomplish many of the things you normally do at home (such as paying bills) while away. It’s not as easy as it sounds, and there are lots of different tricks I […]