It’s been far too long since I’ve been active online, so I will take a moment to wish all a Happy Boxing Day, and 5th day of Hannuakkah. I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas Day, and that Santa treated you well.

We spent a portion of the day keeping my little brother company at work - from noon until five. For those who know what our usual Christmas Day is like could only imagine the length of time it took us to complete.

Side Note: I’m writing this post on my new Aluminum Macbook. Sexy it is - but more to come on that later.

Happy Holidays!

If you’re looking for a bit of humour during exams:

I’m not a fan of Mountain Dew, but this made me want to go out and give it another shot.

If you haven’t heard, Ellen DeGeneres got married to long time girl friend Portia de Rossi. Ellen announced she would get married after the California Supreme Court overturned a state ban on same-sex marriages in May.

More here.

Well if you were in the city within the last 10 days you likely found yourself down on the water front for at least some of it. The Halifax International Buskers Festival brought in 76 entertainers that put on more than 500 shows along the water front. I had a chance to make it down to the festival on a few occasions, each just as entertaining as the last.

People used to feel sorry for me for having a summer birthday - everyone’s out of town and no one gets to party. But being born in mid August definitely has its perks. Along with the warm weather, I get to spend the day down on the water front and take in some busker performances thanks to HRM’s planning of the dates that span 10 days almost always including my birthday.

This year was no different. Laura and I spent most of the day on the waterfront, taking in a couple of great performances. First was an Italian acrobat that among many great acts, finished his show by balancing with his head on a basketball, on top of tower about 3+ feet tall he made from 4 champaign classes, 8 champaign bottles, and 3 pieces of wood. Needless to say it was incredible, unfortunately there were no photos of it. The next performance we took in was an Australian couple that did acrobatics and juggling - they were a lot of fun to watch and were very entertaining, probably the most entertaining out of shows I watched.

If that’s not enough, I also get a personal meteor shower with lots of shooting stars, that’s usually on or a day off my birthday. Unfortunately this year didn’t bring the nicest weather and the skies were mainly cloudy.

With the buskers wrapping up, the next summer item to get excited about is Christensen’s corn on the cob! It’s sad how fast summer is coming to a close.

Today marks the last day of the Defcon 16 conference being held in Las Vegas. This annual conference held in the summer usually takes place after the other popular security conference - Black Hat, which was also located in L.A. this year.

The who’s who of security consultants, black hats, white hats, hackers, whatever other name you want to give to these security gurus would have been found in LA this week. Both conferences cover a wide array of topics including wireless security, radio frequencies, hardware hacking, SQL, network security, social networks, firewalls, even lock picking.

Needless to say it would have been cool to be in LA for these events. Hopefully we hear good stories from it this week coming.

is a term often used to describe software processing taking place on a distributed network, such as the internet. It’s been used commonly over the past few years in the IT industry.

The reason it’s been brought up recently in conversation is due to the fact that Dell is trying to trademark the term, “Cloud Computing.” Dell boasts a cloud computing service, and even owns the domain cloudcomputing.com. Regardless, the term has been used in news articles and other publications long before Dell applied for the trademark on March 23, 2007.

Considering NetCentric Corporation tried to trademark the term back in 1998 and had their application killed, leads me to assume that Dell may have a hard time getting this trademark approved. The application isn’t restricting the term to its own services or platform, instead it covers all potential use of the term. However, they were nice enough to note that the term “computing” on its own was not being trademarked.

For more info the trademark application serial number is 77139082. It was opposed April 15, 2007.

I won’t be surprised if it gets killed soon.

Apparently my information regarding Rogers’ plans was not correct.

To avoid further misinformation, I’m going to not post the new information I received.