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musings of mark since 2001

testing, testing, one two three and it looks like this is almost ready to go here again. Got a bad link or two here or there and the whole month of March/April is kinda missing but I wasn’t doing much anyways – to avoid writing about the war in Iraq. Still have to get the site search going again, check the contact forms, lots o’ tweaks on the blog, busy busy! Oh yeah, got a bunch of Perl to fix for EID again, yuck! Hopefully may be able to take a shortcut or two on it though, the DNS is happening tonight so will be working on it tomorrow am early hopefully. I’ve got a full day at the Pharmacy so it might get a little dicey.

   Not uploaded to the blog at the start of game seven of the Stanley Cup Playoffs 2003:
A stirring rendition of the Star Spangled Banner at the Canucks/Flyers play-off game tonight, only to be topped by the crowd belting out two perfect heartfelt versus of Oh Canada! when it was the home team’s turn to honour their country. It took about a minute into the game for the Flyers to score a goal and quiet down the Vancouver crowd. Not long after a blazing shot on Dan Cloutier and pressure on Osgood shortly after, we’ve got a home town hockey game going on here!
Friday night, and it’s game one with Mark Donnelly once again doing the honours of singing the national anthems to great cheers from the crowd. It’s still the same old Canucks for me, but the Minnesota Wild is a brand new team created from the expansion and they have gone the route of creating a defensive team with a good share of goons in the line-up. No doubt that Vancouver has the better players on their team, but to advance to the next round they are going to have to soak up a lot of body hits and not get frustrated by the big defence type of team.

The entire human genome sequence was announced this week as a complete library.
Some worry about a future of designer babies, of parents opting to raise their babies’ IQs by 20 points. But those claims made by the less responsible scientists are far-fetched. Fewer than 1 percent of that massive genetic code turns out to be the actual blueprint for what makes up a person; the rest is called “junk”, genetic memory, gibberish. From what they know, scientists can piece together a skeleton comprised of what makes up a human body, but it would be hubris to assume they could control qualities such as intelligence, creativity, musical ability or happiness. And more humble scientists say that they never will, that human experience will always come from the context in which genes are expressed, a body, parents, mentors. And only all those factors taken together provide the key to life

It’s been ten years since a nutbar in Waco, Texas was snuffed out by the US govt. The Houston Chronicle, long the bane of Texan politicians and GWB’s own in house nemisis beyond the world of the axis of evil visited the Koresh compound on this anniversary: HoustonChronicle.com – Surviving Davidians mark tragedy’s 10th anniversary
David may have been a nut bar, but no one ever voted for this with full knowledge of the consequences of their decision.

   Busy week! With the Bowen Island Arts Council (biac.ca) web site almost ready to go live and interviewing for, and then starting a new job at Cates Hill Pharmacy there hasn’t been much time to blog. Can’t believe I landed the position at the pharmacy, what a sweet deal! I’m not talking about the pay but the perks, the biggest one of being able to have a job on the island and just a short walk from home to boot. My ‘85 GLC with just over 60K on it just gets used less and less all the time, Granny Berry should be proud!
   The rest of it is great too, nice people to work with, hours that are reasonable and a chance to get even more rooted than I already am to this chunk of rock out in the Pacific Ocean. It’s right up my alley in that there’s inventory to control, stuff to sell, people to meet and greet and 97% of the customers are my neighbors on Bowen.
   My web development work doesn’t suffer either, plenty of time in the morning to answer those emails from other developers with questions and when there isn’t a site project in the works I can dive into my computer books or the garden and time left over for coffee at Collins Farm with my buddy. There’s a couple side (freebie) projects always in the works too of course, I want to make two drop down boxes and a call to the database for the BIAC calendar for people to jump to a selected month and year, never did find that bug in my own site search that makes it give an error on the first call, (and just checking, the latest search took 25 seconds, not good), the list goes on.
   Lots and lots of dandelions coming up the last couple days in the garden, working on the experience of my successful eradication of the nasty weed living in Dunbar(van); I’m dredging their roots out of the ground here as well. Hundreds met their demise today and the sea of yellow is mostly green once again (in spots) and the flowers that aren’t yellow have a chance to show their stuff after all this year, before getting choked out as in previous times. All that warm sun this afternoon though, so pretty – nice to nod off around five o’clock with a tingle from the extra ultraviolets still prickling the skin while drifting off to nappy time.