Personal Weblog - Viewing Archives: October 2002

Greymatter up and running - and the sun!

Well, it seems that I can't stop doing things to my website. I think I'm obsessed... I just replaced all my weblogging from Blogger to Greymatter. That was a bit of a challenge to import all of my old posts but since you are reading this then it apparently worked. I still can't believe the amount of free knowledge there is out there when it comes to HTML and web development.


Today I was discussing with Merlyn how in 10 years when our kids will be teenagers, they will be sending emails to us at work from school or we from work to them at school. Then I realized that we might not have email, but some other kind of messaging system. Will the wearable computers be sophisticated enough to be popular and reliable? I can't begin to imagine what the future holds. The more I think of it though, the more I realize that I shouldn't be thinking of technology... of course, I should be thinking of our health, the environment the polluted air. There used to be time when the word asma was something kids learned from a medical textbook if at all. Now every classroom has cases of kids carrying inhalors. Peanut butter and jelly sandwitches are banned for fear of your buddy sitting next to you will drop to the floor convulsing from a "peanut allergy".


Yes, technology is good and it is fun but our future as a human race on this planet is uncertain. We must look at the sun which shines down on the plants that get eaten by cows that get sloughtered for hamburgers grilled on our backyard bbq's and go into our mouths... Yes, if you think about it we are the sun, yes, the sun. Everything gets tied back into the sun somehow.


Even though I have so many computers around me, I wish I had more grass under my feet. As my daughter sings, "Mr. sun, sun, Mr. golden sun, please shine down on me"...

Posted by Michael Aivaliotis at 01:50 AM | Comments (0)

Pumpkin Time

Last night I went to bed at 3am. I was trying to figure out how to setup a mailing list on the LAVA web that I maintain. Well, it was fun. Since I started working on my personal website and other sites, I've learned an incredible amount about HTML, perl, CGI, PHP etc. I also have reduced my free time to nil. Come to think of it i never had free time in my life. I never understood that term. I own a television set but never turn it on. Sorry, I lie, I turn it on for the kids sometimes.


I got so carried away in my experimenting that I forgot that I had to take Jasmine to her Saturday morning Greek school class. Yes, everything you saw in "My big fat Greek wedding" is true. Only I'm the Greek and my wife is the non-Greek. In any case I had to wake up 4hrs later and drive Jasmine to school. I think Jasmine likes this ritual of the two of us alone in the car without any distractions. I try to spend time alone with each of my kids so I can bond with them. During the short trip we try to talk in Greek to practice and listen to Greek music from the latest CD's I put together off of the web.


After school we all went to Pingle's farm and market. I always try to take the kids to the outdoors to experience and learn about where food comes from - not from the supermarket. We were treated to a free tractor-pulled wagon ride to reach the picking spots. We had wheelbarrows there to carry the heavy ones. When we got back to the main area we saw sheep and goats, bunnies and lot's more pumpkins. There was a huge corn maze shaped into a dragon, I told my wife to literally get lost. After buying some apple pie, apple cider and small gourds, I noticed something really cool. They had a pumpkin cannon. Yes, you heard right, a compressed-air powered pumpkin cannon. It had it's sites set on a hay castle in the distance. With every BOOM there was an accompanying SPLAT as the pumpkins dropped onto the castle from above...

Posted by Michael Aivaliotis at 11:42 PM | Comments (0)

Checkout forums

Well, it's back to the grind again. Actually back to the code...





My website is awsome! There, I feel better now. Actually check out the forums section. Nice eh? It looks like something that I slaved over for days and days. It turns out to be a very nice package. It's called phpbb and it is very easy to setup. There is a forum there where everyone with the last name of Aivaliotis can chat and try to trace their roots. I mean it would be great to get an online community where we can all have the same last name. Cool. If you have this name then you probably heard the stories your parents or grandparnt stold you about the origin of this name. Pleae share these stories in the forums section. I plan to write a short story with all this input and make it publically available through this website.

Posted by Michael Aivaliotis at 11:45 PM | Comments (0)

Just found this: When NASA

Just found this:


When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300 C. The Russians used a pencil.

Posted by Michael Aivaliotis at 12:56 AM | Comments (0)

Greymatter

I just discovered an opensource web logging software. It's called Greymatter and it seems to do everyhting that Blogger does and more. Not only that but it runs on your own server so you keep all the posts local all the time and you don't need to rely on any other site. This is great, I guess I now have to convert all my blogger posts over to this new system. Just when I was getting used to Blogger...

Posted by Michael Aivaliotis at 12:14 AM | Comments (0)

Thanksgiving once again - Time

Thanksgiving once again - Time Off.


Got the standard frozen Butterball turkey that everyone else lined up for at the super market. This thing is solid as a rock. When I entered into the living room carying this ice block, the kids atarted yelling, turkey!, turkey!, turkey!. I love my kids, they make me feel alive. Their faces and manerisms are so pure and innocent.


Last year I cooked the turkey. This year I'll cook the turkey again, why not? I must have been a chef in another life because I seem to have the knack for it. Plus getting some tips off the internet doesn't hurt either. I'll have to look up a new turkey cooking tips site... and here it is.

Posted by Michael Aivaliotis at 12:17 AM | Comments (0)

Metro Morning

When I drive to work in the morning I listen to 2 main radio stations. I listen to Howerd Stern comming in through a Buffalo station (Howerd was banned from broadcasting on a local station in Toronto a few years a go) and Metro Morning - the CBC morning show. Just the other day I realized how strange this is. Metro Morning is a serious news and event show geared to the Globe and Mail crowd, you have to be at a certain intellect to listen. Now how is this possible? Why does my mind like to interject farting noises and porn star interviews to stories about the Queens' visit to Canada and the crisis in Isreal? How does this register with the demographics marketeers of the CBC? What envelope would they file me in?

Posted by Michael Aivaliotis at 12:47 AM | Comments (0)

I just added commenting to

I just added commenting to the bottom of my weblog posts. Now if you disagree with what I'm saying you can give me instant feedback. It's more like throwing rotten tomatoes at me at the click of a button.

Posted by Michael Aivaliotis at 12:28 AM | Comments (0)

Be sure to check out

Be sure to check out all my pics at the NIWEEK2002 link on the left. I finaly got all the pictures uploaded. Now I need to work on taking stills from my Video camera and then videos. I also want to upload pics from my 2002 trip to Greece, wonderful. Stay tuned for that!

Posted by Michael Aivaliotis at 01:18 AM | Comments (0)

Driving to work this morning

Driving to work this morning I saw the phrase "Ratify Kyoto" written on someones back car windshield. Hey, shouldn't you be riding a bike or something?... I was driving a 9-seater Chevy Tahoe. :) Sometimes I wonder if we realize how privaledged we are to be living in a country that has cheap gas. That black liquid is the blood that pumps through the veins of the industrialized world. It just so happens we became industrialized due to gas and the low price. Nobody beats the US in gas prices however, and Canada gas prices are always jut high.

Posted by Michael Aivaliotis at 01:15 AM | Comments (0)

Public libraries are the Napster

Public libraries are the Napster of the written word. What does that make librarians?

Posted by Michael Aivaliotis at 01:15 AM | Comments (0)

Just found out that the

Just found out that the movie "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" beat the blair witch project as most sales of an independant film. Boy that was a huge return for Tom Hanks: Pay a bunch of unknown actors little sums of money and run on a cheap budget for as long as you can. Then sit back and enjoy multiple returns on investement.

Posted by Michael Aivaliotis at 01:12 AM | Comments (0)

The site has changed quite

The site has changed quite a bit since it went up. I now have a dedicated virtual hosting plan, shared with other domains. I like this better, well for one thing my domain name shows in the URL. My last postings complained about URL forwarding problems, well no more. I also have 5GB server space, yup that should be plenty. Enough for videos! Gotta get my DV Cam out. Now I can torture everyone in the world with boring home videos, cool.


I feel I have a home now. My own little space in the world wide web. Big deal! - Now the trick is what to talk about. As hard as it may seem, I think about things all the time but the thoughts just dissapear as quickly as they appear, must be all those rocks in my head. I should carry a notepad around to jot my thoughts in, then transfer to this weblog. Hey wait, I'll use my palm... Ok, where is it now. Ahh, here it is in this shoebox marked "useless purchases" up in the storage closet. I knew when I bought that thing a year ago that I wouldn't be able to live without it. I have to re-learn the palm handwriting language - voice dictation where are you?

Posted by Michael Aivaliotis at 01:19 AM | Comments (0)

A lot has happened since

A lot has happened since my last post. Death has touched my life. The pain is too fresh to talk about. I need time, but I will... patience.

Posted by Michael Aivaliotis at 01:01 AM | Comments (0)