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Scams, there are quite a few of those around us. Overpriced products and services sold with misleading descriptions, the scams that appeal to the child inside us who wants to believe in miracle and magic, the scams that we fall for just because we are used to fall for them.

Telephone companies are really good at selling the later kind. As an example, they sell a voice mail service for 7$ a month, which I paid for during several years without hesitation. Hey, that thing is much better than an answering machine, and it never breaks. These days, you can get an answering machine for 20$; it contains only solid state components, which makes it unlikely that will break, and it will gladly let you retrieve your messages remotely over the phone. At that price, answering machines have 10 times the capacity of the voice mail service offered by the phone company.

My mother saw through the voice-mail scam long before me; her answering machine gave her many years of good service but eventually it failed and she asked me to find her a good deal for a new one on the Internet. I was looking at the new models and I was delighted by the features: maybe it would be better if I gave her mine and offered myself an upgrade.

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A portable tranquility generatorSeptember 18

There is a lot of noise in my life. There is the fact that I live in a lively city with busy streets and a lot of night life. Thats the kind of noise that I like. Then there is the noise that is killing me: office noise.

I work in a cube farm of the wost kind. Not only are partitions low enough to make it practical to shout over instead of moving your ass, partitions are made of painted gypsum instead of cloth. As a result, noise is reflected all over the place instead of being absorbed. Not all noise is created equal: it was shown that conversation is the thing that kills the concentration of office workers the most. At work, we are packed tight and I can hear at least 10 persons when they are talking, which certainly can't help my productivity.

A few weeks a ago, I asked experts for advice. They praised the quality, isolation, and comfort of several pair of head phones. Thanks to their recommendations, I'm now the proud owner a pair of Beyer DT770 Pro and I finally can enjoy tranquillity at work.

Montreal Python 4September 16

We've had to wait for a long time and the great summer might have something to do with it. Okay, okay, the summer was crap but we still had to wait. At last, Montréal Python 4 is uppon us and it's going to be a really special one.

Hugo Boyer will bring his CNC machine tool and grind away material from a block of stuff until he gets some actual object. Hugo uses Python to process his CAD files and to control the CNC. Don't miss this presentation: it's going to rock.

Montreal Python 3June 26

The Montreal Python user group meeting is tonight. Martin Blais of xxdiff fame will present a dependency analyzer for Python modules. See you there.

Videos of Montreal Python 2May 12

Videos of Montreal Python 2 are finally ready. A big thank you to Pior for his hard work behind the camera and in the cutting room.