The Blog of Harald

bq. Mummy, I suck more than you do!

— C. and M. playing C’s new dance dance revolution game…

bq. …like it or not, we spend most of our lives in the fat, undistinguished middle of the bell curve…

– “A. O. Scott, Where Have All the Howlers Gone?, The New York Times, December 18, 2005”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/movies/18scot.html

(via “The Quote of the Day Mailing List”:http://ca.geocities.com/quotationoftheday/index.html)

Having windows installed during the second and third weeks of December makes the house very cold :-)

In a wide ranging discussion about endangered species, overpopulation, and the enviroment, I mentioned the “rabbit problem in Australia”:http://www.csiro.au/communication/rabbits/qa2.htm.

bq. H: Unfortunately, rabbits have no natural predators in Australia.

bq. G: Except the Tasmanian devil. But I guess Tasmanian devils don’t actually eat rabbits.

three seconds later, M bursts out laughing….

(think about it :-)

The patches originally scheduled for June are finally done! Causes were many; a steady stream of new defects, staff defections, and general overload (both my team and QA :-). Now we just have to get all of our other “before the end of the year” commitments done before the end of the year.

That’s part of the lack of activity around here; another part is persephone 2.0, currently about half-constructed in a VMware partition on the home machine. I’m upgrading all the way from RedHat 7.3 to Ubuntu 5.10. That’s not really an “upgrade”; instead I’m building a new disk image from scratch, and then carefully migrating the configuration and data for each user and service. I’m hoping to be done by the end of the year…

I’m sure it’d be easier to just buy a new machine and put them up side-by-side. I’m not sure how Michelle would feel about that, though :-).

Also from John Scalzi, here’s the comedy list. Again, bold the ones you’ve seen (27/50), and mark the ones you own (3).

*Airplane!*
All About Eve
*Amelie*
Annie Hall
*The Apartment*
*Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery*
Blazing Saddles
Bringing Up Baby
Broadcast News
*Caddyshack*
Le diner de con
*Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb*
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
*Duck Soup*
*Ferris Bueller’s Day Off*
*Four Weddings and a Funeral*
The General
*Ghostbusters*
The Gold Rush
*Good Morning Vietnam*
*The Graduate*
*Groundhog Day*
A Hard Day’s Night
His Girl Friday
Kind Hearts and Coronets
The Lady Killers
*Local Hero*
Manhattan
*M*A*S*H*
*Monty Python’s Life of Brian*
*National Lampoon’s Animal House*
*The Odd Couple*
*The Producers*
*Raising Arizona* *
*Roxanne*
Rushmore
Shaun of the Dead
A Shot in the Dark
*Some Like it Hot*
*Strictly Ballroom* *
Sullivan’s Travels
There’s Something About Mary
*This is Spinal Tap*
To Be or Not to Be
Tootsie
*Toy Story* *
Les vacances de M. Hulot
*When Harry Met Sally*
*Withnail and I*

The list is from “The Science Fiction Film Canon”:http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003785.html, from the book “The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1843535203/103-9758806-6427829?v=glance&n=283155&s=books&v=glance by “John Scalzi”:http://www.scalzi.com/. He describes it as “Reviews and commentary on the 50 science fiction films you have to see before you die”…

I’ve bolded the ones I’ve seen, and marked the (two) that I own. 31/50; Not too bad…

*The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!*
*Akira Kaneda!*
*Alien*
*Aliens*
Alphaville
*Back to the Future* *
*Blade Runner* *
*Brazil*
Bride of Frankenstein
Brother From Another Planet
A Clockwork Orange
*Close Encounters of the Third Kind*
*Contact*
The Damned
Destination Moon
*The Day The Earth Stood Still*
Delicatessen
*Escape From New York*
*ET: The Extraterrestrial*
Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers (serial)
*The Fly (1985 version)*
*Forbidden Planet*
*Ghost in the Shell*
Gojira/Godzilla
*The Incredibles*
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version)
*Jurassic Park*
*Mad Max 2*
*The Matrix*
Metropolis (Extended version)
On the Beach
*Planet of the Apes (1968 version)*
*Robocop*
Sleeper
Solaris (1972 version)
*Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan*
*Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope*
*Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back*
The Stepford Wives
*Superman*
*Terminator 2: Judgement Day*
The Thing From Another World
Things to Come
*Tron*
*12 Monkeys*
28 Days Later
*20,000 Leagues Under the Sea*
*2001: A Space Odyssey*
La Voyage Dans la Lune
*War of the Worlds (1953 version)*

other than the chest cold :-)

Saturday we arose long before dawn to get the boy up and dressed for his soccer tournament. Dropped him off at the school bus, spun past Tim Hortons, and watched the sun rise somewhere around the QEW and Ford Drive. Fortunately, the day was sunny and warm. The kids played four awesome games, and BVG ended up winning the first ever Under 10 “C” tournament! This was the first year they had enough “C” teams for a tournament; in previous years they’ve had to mix the “C” and “B” teams into a single tournament. Naturally the kids were very excited…

After that, we dropped by the Dyments farm near Dundas to select pumpkins. Of course we had to ride the haywagon, and play in the hay fort, and run through the corn maze… fun was had by all.

As if that wasn’t enough to cram into a single day, we then flew home to Fairview Mall to watch Wallace and Grommit (and yes, the adults laughed at all of the adult-only jokes. “May contain nuts” indeed :-).

Unfortunately, all of that running around left us tired and grumpy, and we had a group fight before bed. Other than that, a perfect day…

Today was pumpkin carving, and a spot of laundry, and lawn mowing, as October continues to be unseasonably warm. And with the time change, I hope we won’t have trouble getting out of bed on Monday, for a change!

So the car wasn’t stolen after all.

The night guy at the parking lot realized that he still had a key and a car, so he locked the key in the little safe in the booth, called his boss, and headed home.

The boss concluded that while nobody was at the lot, Michaela would have arrived at her car, found no key, and headed for home some other way. In an unusual display of customer service, he came downtown, retrieved the car key, and parked our car in an underground lot across the street so that it would not get broken into or stolen. (Oh, the irony :-)

He fetched the car this morning, so when Michaela drove up in her rental car she found our missing car right where she had left it…

It could be argued that the parking attendant should have left a note or something. However, his intentions were good, and apart from some _panic_ on our part, nothing is damaged or broken; all in all, a happy ending.

Apparently we’ve been Noticed.

Last month a bunch of fraudulent charges showed up on my Visa card, and I was forced to replace it.

Last night, one of our cars was stolen from a downtown parking lot.

Where is my herd, and how can I go hide back in the center?

What happened to jack-fm? Since Friday there’s been nothing but music, commercials, and those inane “we play what we want” snips. What happened to the personalities? What happened to the *news, weather, and traffic*, for goodness sake?

Grr.

The first leaf of fall :-)

I thought it was strange that one leaf on my whole tree had changed colour.

I desperately hope that there is a special section of hell reserved for comment spammers…

The school is on the west bank of the (east) Don River Valley, next to a park. The park, used for soccer and other physed activities, is several hundred square metres smaller than it used to be, thanks to the August 19th floods. The river decided to carve out a new bend for itself! Based on the debris and marks, there was about 4′ of water on the field (and the school’s lower playground); much of the grass is buried in very high quality beach sand, and the playground is full of a conrete-like mixture of wood chips and river mud…

The bridge to the east side of the river is still intact, but was obviously underwater (and may not be safe, so it’s closed for now). Two trees survived, but a third one was uprooted and washed about 40m downstream.

I’d post pictures, but the camera is in the shop :-(.

The kids are back at school, meeting new teachers and old friends. “Blues”, because it means they’re another year older. This will be their sixth year at the school; the girl’s starting Grade 2 and the boy’s up to Grade 4.

G. has a new teacher that I haven’t met, but the early reviews are good. C has G’s old JK teacher, which should be a better fit than we had the first time around :-). All things considered, I’m looking forward to the kids having another great year.

My wife and my daughter are on the phone at the same time.

I figured I had about 6 more years before _that_ one…

I found five water leaks in my house today (three of them I already knew about) as a heavy thunderstorm trundled overhead for almost 90 minutes, apparently dumping 100mm of rain. (Even if I had a rain gauge, it wouldn’t have been accurate, what with the rain travelling sideways and all). The two new leaks are from the heavy rain; one was a leak behind the flashing on the garage roof, that ran down the inside wall of the garage and into the basement. The other was water spraying sideways out of cracks in a partially blocked downspout.

Meanwhile, it took the kids 90 minutes to get home from camp, because of accidents and severe floods on the highway. Which means they were in the schoolbus for the worst of the storms. Surprisingly, they weren’t completely freaked; I guess they’re getting used to it.

There were tornado warnings, and apparently a touchdown in Scarborough. The winds were relatively mild here; we had a few power flickers, but no outage (and no tree branches down). On the other hand, the nearby valley, which normally has an underground stream, was a neck-deep lake…

Wow, a gap like that usually means a vacation. Sadly, I have not been on vacation, but have instead been dealing with kids at sleepaway camp, weekend parties, laundry, office politics, new staff members, and on and on.

Oh ya, and catching up on television. I seem to have more stuff to watch over the summer than I did during the season this year :-). Hustle, Arrested Development, The L Word, Six Feet Under, Stargate Atlantis, MI-5… not to mention the new Battlestar Galactica season!

So how ’bout them Leafs, eh?

The sudden absence last week was due to a J2EE course; come the winter I’ll be adding a J2EE-based product to my CPE stable.

Our instructor was very good; he didn’t waste time with piddly details that are in the API docs anyway (except the important ones); instead he explained what the pieces are *and* how they all fit together! Suddenly, it all makes sense! Actually, used carefully, J2EE is pretty cool…

And he made me snort coffee when he mentioned the two types of session bean: _stateless_ and _useless_ :-)

The temperature just dropped over 5 °C in an hour. The sky is dark and ominous, and making loud noises.

Could it be? Is it? A *cold* front?

(It’ll only last a day, sadly; hot and humid is back on Saturday. Ugh.)