Yesterday (Saturday, October 8th) we visited the Rockton World's Fair. It was a really great fall fair, and all in all was one of the better ones we've enjoyed (it and the Caledonia Fair from last weekend were the best we've ever seen). If anything, the Rockton fair seemed more legitimately rural than most.

It had all of the requisite animal shows, competitions in countless categories, and a half decent little midway for a little fair. Great fun was had by all.

Every Thanksgiving Day (in Canada) weekend we take a walk at Crawford Lake - it's a beautiful, geologically unique little lake left behind as the glaciers receded 10,000 years ago, and it's one of the better conservation aresa here in Halton. It's also connected to the Bruce Trail, and you can hike over to Rattlesnake Point from it. Unfortunately, like last year, the colour change of the leaves is a bit delayed, so it isn't as beautiful as it is going to be in a week or two. We'll have to return there then.

It's been around for a while, but a lot of people still haven't experienced it - The Quiet American's One-Minute Vacations Site. It's an expanding collection of user submitted 60-second audio samples from around the world. Absolutely fascinating to listen to, and many of them really do take you there. Take a minute break and go on a vacation.

While people often use the term "Audio Blogging" to refer to the spoken word (which, when fed through RSS, becomes podcasting), I see these sort of audio samples to be more analogous - though in the audio realm - to photo blogging. As much as I appreciate the Quiet American, it would be interesting to have a site like Flickr-for-audio-samples, with thousands or millions of samples from around the world. Heck, maybe just the Flickr we know and love, but with the addition of audio. It would be interesting to see photos of an Indian market, coupled with some audio samples, and be able to search and browse by keywords.

Of course naturally one would think "Duh...that's video with audio...That's Google Video", however video remains too unwieldy, and in the hands of a less-than-expert it very seldom captures the essence of a scene like a carefully taken photo does, nor does it facilitate quick and easy consumption.

Through the amazing magic of mobile computing and wireless networking, I'm finishing up some work while my daughter watches a (commercial free, courtesy of Treehouse TV here in Canada) episode of "Timothy Goes To School" beside me.

Today's episode features the "Japanese" character and her mother (both portrayed as cats, of course) doing a show-and-tell demonstration of a Japanese Tea Ceremony. While I wouldn't normally post an entry about an episode of a pre-schooler's television show, this provides a convenient segue to my interest in Japanese culture (from a philosophical and social-structure perspective - I don't own a single anime and I've never watched Robotech). The tea ceremony is one of the elements of Japanese culture that seems so...philosophically wise: Taking a moment to actually pay attention to, and appreciate, the most minute of details seems so enlightened, and is so contrary to most of Western culture.

To continue this long and drawn out transition to a post about the software business - About a year ago I decided to learn Japanese (with an eventual goal of an extended visit to Japan). When you have no immersion this can be extremely difficult, and in the limited time I've been able to allocate towards this fringe goal, I've learned the glyphs and pronunciation of the Hiragana and Katakana alphabets. Given that real world Japanese intermixes a massive set of Kanji in with that, not to mention that there's crazy things like words and grammar used to communicate, it really means that I have no functional Japanese ability beyond transcribing Japanese sounds. Nonetheless, it's been very enjoyable, and has indirectly taught me a tremendous amount about human language - it's akin to learning a new programming language, and circuitously gaining insight about the languages that you already know.

So what does any of this have to do with anything? One night some time back I was weighing how much time I really wanted to dedicate towards this fringe goal, and what, if any, software tools existed to help the process. My search brought me to Declan Software's ReadWrite series. Judging from my own experience, which I think would be similar to others, Declan is an excellent case study for small software publishers to learn from.

Not only did they allow me to demo their software to an extent that made me feel confident in a purchase - but still leaving me hungry for more - they also allowed me to satisfy my impulse with immediate satisfaction (I immediately got a full-unlock - no waiting for snail-mail. Obviously this sort of impulse buy would only happen for relatively inexpensive software, but if it wasn't as immediate I would have likely put off the purchase, during which I probably would've lost interest, or found a different product). Any worries I might have had about handing over credit card information to a small vendor dissolved when I saw that their payment processing was handled by regnow (who I'd worked with before).

To really put the icing on the cake, they also offer a small discount for buying a set of related products together (Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana).

All fears were eliminated, they satisfied my impulse, and they maximize the revenue by selling me additional products I didn't originally intend to buy. All from a random search engine hit.

(For those considering or studying Japanese, I highly recommend the superb JWPce as a great little accessory tool. With the dictionary, including English to Japanese, it is remarkably useful)

The weather was spectacular, and it was a perfect night for trick-or-treating. My 2 1/2 year old and my 7 month old son were dressed as cow-girl and cow-boy respectively (cow-person), with wonderful getups put together by my wonderful wife, and we did a little tour of the neighbourhood. A great time was had by all, and there was a wonderful turnout in my neighbourhood.

Well that's only partly true - our house actually only sees a couple of stragglers. There's a circumvention street that goes around behind us, and it always seens some great participation. On my little strip of about 9 homes, only two of us actually turn on our lights and actively welcome the trick-or-treaters...so no one journeys down here. A bit of a shame as it's a wonderful event.

I'm a big fan* of Battlefield 2.

With two amazing children, a bustling, demanding business, and a professional career, it's very difficult to find time to play, but I really try to get a game in every now and then to settle the brain a bit (I find gaming enormously beneficial when doing demanding software projects). The game is visually gorgeous, and in many ways it's the game I (and countless other gamers) "invented" in our minds years ago - "Imagine if there were helicopters and planes and boats and tanks, and different people had different roles. Boy, I'd love to be the helicopter guy shuttling people back and forth!".

In many ways, albeit at a much more arcadish level (e.g. less serious than real simulators), BF2 is a completion of the vision started with Falcon 4 (F4) and its dream Electronic Battlefield. F4 was a remarkable game far before its time, and it actually looks pretty good even on modern hardware (and it can still push modern hardware to their limits). The vision with F4 was much more vehicle specific though, and while many players would exist and battle in the same world, each would be using a specialized, extremely realistic client conforming to their specific interest. Not sure how that'd work if you wanted to eject and then climb into a tank...maybe you'd shut down the client and restart in the tank simulator.

We need a game with the gameplay of BF2, the flight realism of F4, and the troop realism of Operation Flashpoint.

* - BF2, like all large software products, does have numerous problems. For instance the surface to air missiles are infuriating: Not only do they have a ridiculously low hit rate against the enemy, letting enemy aircraft fly around with impunity, but they have an amazingly good (or rather bad) hit rate against friendlies. If you shoot off some SAMs at an enemy aircraft, you can be sure that they'll miss, but that they'll fly off and manage to find a friendly helicopter or aircraft somewhere else on the map.

Every 6 months or so I sell myself on the idea that I need to go to the gym more consistently (meaning "more than every 6 months", demanding of myself that I "find the time" which more accurately means "make the time"), so I pull together all of the gym-related paraphernalia, discovering once again I can't remember the combination to my lock.

So every 6 months I end up buying a new combination lock, promptly putting the combination hint sheet in a "safe place", and then forgetting it over the coming 6-months of gym downtime.

I wonder if you can buy combination locks in bulk.