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Diego William

On May 16th, two excellent friends of mine — Christine and Edgar — became parents of a bouncing baby boy. I asked them to stop bouncing him, but they wouldn’t listen to reason. From the proud father:

Hola a todos,

Les escribo para darles una buena el viernes 16 de mayo a las 7:35 PM (Vancouver Time) – 9:35 (Peruvian Time) nacio Diego William Lazarte-Norquist. Tanto Diego como Christine estan muy bien. Todos estamos un poco cansados pero recuperandonos poco a poco.

I am really proud of them. Christine is amazying, she is so strong. Diego likes to suck all the times. He is really cute.

Aqui les estoy enviando una foto de Diego minutos despues de haber nacido.

Diego William

Well, I have to go now. Tomorrow I have to go to work and leave everything in order so I can take a week off.

Bueno, un saludo a todos

Edgar.

Happy zeroth birthday, Diego! My heartiest congratulations to all three of you!

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Happy Birthday, Vicky

Monday has rolled around again, only this time I’m at my desk at home. As all Canadians know, today is Victoria Day, also known at various times as Queen’s Birthday, Empire Day, or Commonwealth Day. So back in 1837, presumably Victoria popped out and started her long journey towards becoming the sovereign of the British Empire. Fast-forward to 2003, and we still honour her memory by hopping into our cars, driving someplace sunny for the weekend, and consuming way too many beers. I’m sure she’d approve.

I didn’t manage to get away this weekend, but that’s partly because I’m faced with a dilemma: to go for a nice long walk along the water’s edge or to spend the day in my cubicle. I know, it’s a tough one isn’t it?

The problem is that I have a deadline to meet on Friday. It’s the biggie. The one deadline that my team has been working towards. We wrote three new manuals and rebuilt the online help. It’s a big deal. For my part, my work is pretty much finished already, so I don’t need to show up, strictly speaking. But appearances are important. Also, I plan to work next Saturday and/or Sunday.

I think I’ll put on my shoes and see which way they take me.

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Abandoned

My neighborhood is in a state of transition. Once, fifty to seventy years ago, it was a residential neighborhood. Over the decades, light industry took over, replacing homes with warehouses and factories. Now the industrial buildings are vanishing and the popular False Creek developments threaten to encroach on the empty land.

Photos from the neighborhood

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Sabotage

For me, the morning routine on the cube farm begins with a trip to the coffee vending machine. This evil monstrosity has been our source of caffeine since that fateful day in July when workmen carted away our beloved coffee urns. Since then, coffee has been acrid and unmistakably mechanical in nature. It’s hard to describe the subtle difference between a cup of freshly-ground coffee-maker coffee and machine-pressed liquid. They are similar, I suppose, but there’s a certain roundness of flavour that the machine fails to capture, and a delicate hint of machine parts seems to linger, unless that’s just my imagination.

There are two flavour selections on the machine’s panel: French and Hawaiian. Despite my expectation of either croissant or ham-and-pineapple, respectively, they taste identically bitter to me — like Safeway brand, but with a hint of WD-40.

When I noticed that both hoppers were empty in the machine, a subversive notion overwhelmed me. I opened the machine and very deliberately filled the French hopper with Hawaiian and the Hawaiian hopper with French. If nobody notices, then I believe my point will have been made.

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Cackling with glee

Warning: techy stuff ahead. Non-geeks may get glazed look and fall asleep.

For months now, bandwidth thieves have been “borrowing” images from my site for use on their own site or bulletin boards. Today I decided to do something about it. I installed an .htaccess file in my images directory.

As you may know, you can use an .htaccess file to block people from using images that are hosted on your server. You can also use it to replace images with another image of your choice. Some people have suggested using a naughty image for this, so that the thief’s site would then become littered with nekkid people. But I’m not that mean. Also, my hosting service provider wisely prohibits pornographic images on this server.

Instead, I made a simple animated GIF that alternates between solid yellow and solid magenta. Anyone stealing my images will now have a site full of irritating flashing squares. Hmm. Maybe I should reduce the rate of the flashing — I don’t want to induce seizures.

Here’s a sample from the Google cache, just to give you a taste.