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musings of mark since 2001

   Last day of work for this year, a nice short week with the New Year’s Day break in the middle. Not a lot of people doing business on the continent, the day was over by 3:15. New Year’s Eve for me was according to tradition, stayed home and was unsuccessful at keeping awake till midnight. Had a good time though, Brenda was over for a few hours and we watched Canadian classics like Royal Air Farce and This Hour Has 22 Minutes, (turn your speakers on for this web site’s intro!). Topped it off with a good dose of stand-up from Montreal on the Comedy channel. A really nice day weather wise, but as the evening wore on it was apparent there wasn’t going to be too much outdoor activity for the first day of the year tomorrow, and I ended up talking her out of walking home and drove over to Collins Farm before hitting the hay myself here by the ocean.

   Sunday evening, two more sleeps until the New Year starts and small flakes of snow, (not sleet this time), are starting to fall on the deck. Looks like the weather man is going to be right and that big system coming over will make it here. Just in the couple minutes of opening up Word and typing this and looking out, the arms of the deck chairs are now almost all white with what is now big fluffy flakes of the white stuff. Looks like it’s going to be interesting going over to the continent tomorrow, at least I start late enough that most of the accidents will be done with and there will be lots of salt. Glad that the little GLC doesn’t have to do that.

   The phpBB forum software is up and running at: http://www.markgroen.com/forum/. It seems to be working flawlessly, no doubt from being able to take advantage of the MySQL database engine on this site I’ve been playing with. Haven’t done a whole lot of customization to it yet, got other projects to work on too, but wanted to get a working example of it to show the Grey Cross people. It would seem to be a natural for an organization like theirs to start their email harvesting and get a database of info started.

   Nice little Christmas here on Bowen Island. It was stormy last night and half expected to wake up to a power outage, or at least the cable/internet going down in the storm. Neither happened out here in the ocean, although there were outages on the continenet in Surrey and White Rock and some people had to cook their turkey rather late. Brenda called about an hour after I had been over to the farm house to feed/visit the cats and when I answered the phone, her whole family was in the background singing a Xmas carol to me, cool. She’s called every day since she’s been gone, and we see each other just about every day when she is here, guess she must like me huh?
   Everyone down in Redmond called after lunch, it was great to hear Dad’s voice along with talking to David and John. Dad is sounding pretty good, although methinks he was feeling like a grandfather when John and Christine’s boys got cranked up this am around the tree. Thank goodness he’s got a hearing aid and was able to take it out of his ear when the decibel level of the presents being opened turned to jet landing intensity!
   Talked to Margaret as well, I had just hung up with John, Dad, and David, when a few minutes later the Queen had her Christmas message on the telly. Of course I had to call back and give her the news. Best way to link to the BBC website to see it is through the Queen’s own web site at:
http://www.royal.gov.uk/output/Page1.asp Too bad she is still locked into M$ and using ASP on her site, the kingdom could take a lesson from South America as they embrace Open Source software and lose their reliance on a U.S. based Microsoft.
   Last but not least, ( I haven’t heard from David and Kelly in Calgary yet), Richard sent an email on Xmas eve! Haven’t heard from him in ages except for keeping up through the grapevine about his latest hernia operation. It was just a short little note saying “hi!”, but nice to hear from him anyways. I wrote a much longer email back to him to get him up to date on what has been happening to me since the summer.
   And on yet one more side note, got my database for this web site up and running and have wrote a little php program for a bulletin board. It’s really basic right now, no user/password modules added yet so it’s totally anonymous, (not a Good Thing

), but seems to be secure enough to go live with it on the web without worrying too much about somebody hacking it. Hmmm, thinking this through a little more, better to download the Vancouver PHP User Groups bulletin board and use that code instead for my final version. It’s nice to be able to write your own, but now that I’ve done it myself and know that I can add the necessary code and modules for a complete set up, I feel comfortable standing on the shoulders of giants and using a few hundred lines of some one else’s open source code. After all, their work has been tested against some of the best hackers/coders in the world; it makes you feel good that what you are running on your own web site will stand the test of time and is not reliant upon the whims of a mega corps like M$. Makes the dreams of ARPANET and the concept of an invincible communication system all seem worthwhile when it’s the populace that ends up being the controllers and not the govt. Getting off the track here, more on: how the Bushies internet monitoring system will fail dismally, why anyone can have their own web and email server for FREE, and the OTHER internet – - some other day than this day.
   One of those days that for me turned out to be just one of those perfect days beyond all expectations.

This article is going up the charts on Google:
It just hit me the wrong way