Peter's Useful Crap

Typically I think of SportChek first for hockey equipment needs in Metro Vancouver, due mostly to the number of locations they have. However, I’ve found their selection and service to be a bit lacking lately. I was recently looking for inline hockey pucks, specifically the red Pro Shot ones used by the PICH roller hockey league:

Of course, Sportchek didn’t seem to have them. Here are two recommended stores (which also have online stores) to find roller hockey pucks:

• The Hockey Shop in Surrey, just across from Surrey Central SkyTrain station. They had many different types of pucks. I can give a generally good review of The Hockey Shop — they seem to carry everything hockey, and have friendly, helpful staff. The particular type of puck I was looking for was cheaper here.
• Cyclone Taylor Sports, which has a location in one of the Richmond roller hockey rinks.

Back in the day, DRM-free mp3s were harder to find, especially in Canada. Online retailers were trying to use proprietary formats, applying licenses to audio files, and making it hard to play digital music files on different devices and in different programs. Basically, they were punishing people for wanting to actually pay for their music. And the American retailers that were selling DRM-free mp3s wouldn’t allow Canadians to purchase them. Thankfully, much of the industry seems to be coming back to straightforward, mp3s.

In addition to the pioneer Puretracks.com and Zunior, Canadian online music stores Archambault.ca and hmv (among others) are also selling mp3 downloads. Archambault is also an over 100 year old bricks and mortar retailer, and is based in Quebec. Of course, I was looking for a French song at the time, but the Archambault website has plenty of downloadable music in both English and French, as well as versions of the website in both languages.

The purchase process at Archambault.ca is incredibly straightforward: you add song(s) to the basket, enter your purchase information, and it sends the downloadable file directly to your browser. You can then choose where on your hard drive to save the song(s), which do not have any digital restrictions. This is how I wish the purchase process had been many years ago! I’m always appreciative of alternatives to iTunes, as sometimes you just want the audio files without the implied device lock-in and bloated application to manage it.

Price per song on everything I saw on Archambault.ca was between $0.99 and $1.29, with many albums at $9.99 to $15 (excluding tax).

Chuzzlewit is a nice script font that we used for a wedding program:

It worked out well, and it’s free! Kudos to whoever created it.

Download Chuzzlewit as a TTF

The load time on a typical web page is made up more of the image, JavaScript, CSS / stylesheet, Flash, and other assets on the page, and less of the actual HTML. Recently I was trying to do a quick analysis on different pages of a website, regarding how much of the page load was coming from assets local to the server, versus those external to the server (such as from widgets, social networking buttons, and so on). Local assets / content can be moved to content delivery network (CDN), to ease the burden on the server and to increase page load time. (This is among many other performance improvement tips, of course.)

Firebug is a highly useful developer tool (implemented as a Firefox plugin) that shows all of the requests on a page:

However, while you can sort by URL, you cannot filter or exclude all URLs local or external to a server and get a quick analysis of local requests. From what I could find, there are no Firebug extensions that can do that either.

The free Pingdom Tools “Full Page Test” is a quick, web-based tool that does a similar analysis to Firebug, but that also provides a summary at the bottom. Therefore you can, among other things, easily calculate the size of all local and external assets (or as they call them, objects):

Here are some pictures of East Delta Hall at 10379 Ladner Trunk Road in Delta BC, before and after being decorated for a wedding. We fit 17 tables of 8 people each, plus a head table seating 10 at the side, plus a dance floor in the middle of the room with the DJ on the stage. There was also room for a gift table and a dessert buffet table. The hall comes with a built-in bar (with bar fridge), a large kitchen with 2 stoves and 2 fridges, bathrooms, and 20 round tables (most of which we were using).

Check the website for the Corporation of Delta for information on how to book the hall.

Click on any of the pictures to view a bigger version of them.

photo by Rosanna	photo by Rosanna
photo by Morgan Hargreaves Photography	photo by Morgan Hargreaves Photography
photo by Morgan Hargreaves Photography	photo by Morgan Hargreaves Photography
photo by Morgan Hargreaves Photography