Older blog entries for dyork (starting at number 299)

Anniversary - 300th Advogato entry - This entry marks the 300th time I have gone to the '/diary/' page of Advogato since I first created this account on May 9, 2000. Life was quite different then. I was still at Linuxcare and was heading up LPI, was travelling 2-3 (or more) weeks each month, was just learning about DocBook, just starting to use SourceForge, etc. I had just recently visited Ottawa for the first time for a trade show...

Little did I know how much life would change. (Do we ever?)

I didn't know then if I would actually keep writing here, but in the close to three years since, Advogato in general has been a very useful place to keep up on what old friends are doing... and to learn what new folks are up to. I've met some great folks out of entries here, had some business opportunities arise out of notes, had many questions answered that I posted here... and generally learned that a good number of friends do actually read this to keep up on what's going on with us. It's been an interesting experiment in sharing information... and I've learned a whole lot along the way.

Doing the math, this diary started 1,032 days ago, which means that I have wound up averaging about 3.5 days between posts (3.44 to be precise). Interesting. We'll see how long it takes to get to 600 entries...

92% spam - Been keeping track of the percentage of received messages at my home personal e-mail account that are spam. On a recent evening, I had 571 messages waiting, of which 543 were spam. The percentage seems to be similar on other days as well. Always around 90-92% spam. Yes, indeed, I need to get a spam filter installed.

Makefaq - Was contacted by someone wondering if I was going to put out another version of makefaq anytime soon. Nice to be asked, but in truth I'm not really planning to do a release soon simply because: a) my time outside of work is pretty much sucked up by the wee one these days; b) no one has asked for any new features/changes or reported any bugs; and c) the thing is... it works! Not a lot of need to change something that's working well. So, no immediate plans.

Who knows, though... I could get in a state where I absolutely need to do some coding, at which point I'll look at the TODO list and start pounding away.

Pet food and wireless Internet - This BBC report is quite humorous, if real. If it's not real, it's at least a good joke!

Curling - Close game last night, but in the end we fell by two points. The good news is that we're still in fourth place and so we enter the 3 weeks of single-elimination playoffs to determine the end winner.

Reno - A weekend of projects as we try to get the house ready for an onslaught of small children at some events in the next few weeks. Finishing up some drywall, taping and painting... plexiglass behind some railings... hanging some more French doors... putting up cabinet doors over the lower part of a bookshelf in a vain attempt to prevent little fingers from spreading CDs all over the floor... all that fun stuff... :-)

The Chloe Journals - We can tell that it is only a small matter of time before she starts being able to pull herself up to a standing position (against furniture, for instance). She's lately been kneeling but holding her whole body erect. She's tried to pull herself up, but can't get last part. She has, though, figured out how to open cabinet doors... and the French doors between the living room and dining room are no longer an obstacle if only one is shut (with a gate blocking the other one). :-) Wonderful little girl!

Software Consulting - MichaelCrawford: Best wishes with your job seeking. I have known a number of folks who have been in consulting and then went into corporate jobs... and then in some cases have gone back to consulting. I've considered consulting in the past, but for the reasons you outline have chosen to go for the regular paycheck (and less money) instead. Best wishes with the choices.

LinTraining - Still haven't had a chance to clean out all the dead entries we found in our great cleanout the other week, but in the meantime, I approved new submissions to the site from the following areas:

  • Brazil
  • Germany
  • Italy
  • Pakistan
  • Panama
  • California, USA
  • Maryland, USA

Also received a note from someone frustrated by all the dead weight in the database... he sent messages to 15 centers and all but 5 bounced back as undeliverable. I did say it was time to purge the database, didn't I? :-( I must find the time to clean it out...

ClearQuest - murrayc: I haven't used ClearCase, but have had similar dissatisfaction with ClearQuest, the companion bug-tracking tool. Within our group we use Bugzilla and, warts and all, it has worked quite well for us. However, other groups use ClearQuest and through my interaction with those groups I have needed to use it. I have been amazed at how incredibly clunky and cumbersome the Web interface to CQ is! It's been stunning, really. I'm looking forward to trying the "thick" client, but have so far run into issues getting it installed on RH 7.3. (Watching others use the Windows client, though, hasn't overly impressed me.) It's quite interesting to see that Bugzilla so outclasses CQ so far.

Now, in fairness, BZ doesn't have the integration with a code management system that ClearQuest does with ClearCase. (Yes, I know there are ways you can integrate it... they're just not as easy as CQ/CC.) And I've also been using Bugzilla for years and am at this point extremely comfortable with it... so I'm just really learning CQ. We'll see.

Curling - the Brier - The Nokia Brier continues to provide some amazing curling to watch. Randy Ferbey's rink from Alberta continues to steamroll the competition with a 9-0 record going into the 4th day of the round-robin competition. They've locked a berth in the 1-2 playoff game tomorrow and, we would expect, should wind up in the final on Sunday. They have been absolutely incredible to watch. So have the other teams, of course, but the Ferbey rink just stands out so far above the others.

Curling - NOT the Brier - Then you have our team that will play in about an hour over at the Nepean Sportsplex. Despite ourselves, we now find our team incredibly in fourth place going into the last night of regular play. Tonight's games will determine the final standings and determine who goes into which playoff bracket. The top six teams will compete in the next couple of weeks, as will the bottom six. We'll see... the competition is heavy... :-)

The Chloe Journals, part one - sickness - The poor little girl has spent much of the week with fluid coming out of both ends... she seems to have caught a stomach virus that we've been told seems to be going around the area. Quite nasty and she is very uncomfortable (and by extension, so are we). Went to the pediatrician last night, though, and he said everything else seemed fine with her and he thought she should be over it within the next day or so. We definitely hope so! It has been a VERY rough week!

The Chloe Journals, part two - all your keyboards are ours - For the past several months, I have successfully been able to sit at my home office desk with the wee one on my lap and with a spare (disconnected) keyboard in front of me. She bangs on the spare keyboard. I reach around her and type on the "real" keyboard. It has worked well (outside of her constantly wanting to reach up and remove my glasses! ;-) but no longer... the smart little kid has figured out that Daddy's keyboard is the one that actually does something, so now she wants to use *that one*.... and Daddy's mouse is so much cooler because it has a red light coming out from underneath it...

I knew the spare keyboard trick had a limited lifetime, I just thought (hoped?) it might last a bit longer! :-)

Curling and SMS Messaging - So the CBC, in conjunction with Zim (Michael Cowpland's latest venture), has set up a service where you can get updates via SMS about the games being played at the Nokia Brier curling championships in Halifax, Nova Scotia. You can get live scores from your favorite teams (at the 5th end and game finish) as well as playoff info. You will also, in theory, be able to participate in SMS polls. I signed up to try out the technology from ZIM.

Curling - My own curling last night was NOT even remotely close to that of the Brier teams. All of us played horribly and we wound up losing by something embarrasing like 11-1... and we quit after 6 ends (instead of 8) just to stop the pain. Not a good night at all.

Mozilla, plugins and MIME Types - Today's challenge is that we have an application that we use internally that has a Java applet as part of it. The Java applet won't run in Mozilla 1.2.1 because it is looking for:

  application/x-java-applet;jpi-version=1.3.0_01

Given that I have installed JRE version 1.4.0, I would expect that this wouldn't be a problem.. I mean, surely the applet must check for "1.3.0_01" or later... but no, it seems that it MUST have that very specific version. When I do "About Plugins" in Mozilla, I get a very long list of MIME types supported by the Java plugin, including the following:

  application/x-java-applet;jpi-version=1.4
  application/x-java-applet;jpi-version=1.4.0_01

However, since "1.3.0_01" isn't in the list, the applet can't work. I figured... no problem... it's just some preferences file somewhere in my '.mozilla' directory. Nope. Nor in /usr/lib/mozilla or /usr/lib/netscape or /etc/pluggerrc or /usr/java/j2re1.4.0_01. I also tried adding it to the helper applications list in Mozilla... nope...

So now I'm really puzzled. It would seem to make sense that when a plugin is installed, it must register the MIME types it supports somehow in some location, but where that location is does not seem to be easy to find.

If anyone knows and can drop me an e-mail, it would help me keep my sanity just that much longer.

By the way, this application in question is a commercial app for code/bug tracking, not something we made ourselves. (If we had the source code, we could, of course, change it so that it doesn't only require an old version of the JRE.)

030303 - I realized that today is "03/03/03" no matter which way you arrange the month, day and year fields. If you have some attachment to the numeral 3, it is probably a good day for you today.

Cold - Radio reports that it is -29 degrees C this morning, with the windchill bringing that down to -43 C. Keep in mind that -40F = -40C. On either scale, all you can say is that it is insanely cold. (And of course, in the summer, we'll be up over 100 degrees F with 90% humidity - welcome to Ottawa, the land of extremes.)

Great Big Sea - If you live south of the U.S./Canada border, you have probably never heard of this band, but I have to say of all the CDs we were playing this weekend, they were among the best for driving. Great beat... a nice mixture of different types of songs... fun music. They are kind of a mixture of folk, pop, Newfoundland sea shanties, bar songs... an eclectic mix... you can understand after listening to them why they can be viewed as the "Great Big Party Band" as their music is definitely upbeat and for a party.

For those of you living in the southern U.S. and California, you can see them on tour this month. I haven't seen them in concert, but I hear they give a fantastic show.

Rob Levin and people whining about him - elliot: I'm with chipx86 on this one... why can't people just leave Rob alone? Yeah, he's irritated his fair share of people, but if you look at the bigger picture, the work he's done on freenode (formerly OPN) has served to enable so much other work within the community. If you don't agree with him, or if you dislike him, that's your choice and you are certainly within your rights to state that you have an issue with him... but it gets annoying to see people continually bashing his work.

I have issues with a number of people in our community. We're all human and we all have flaws, some larger than others. But we have to keep our eye on "the big picture". Does publicly flogging someone repeatedly because you dislike them really help us move forward?

If you have an issue with Rob and the way he moderates freenode, or the policies he has, don't whine about - go create an alternative. "Show me the code". If you don't like his IRC network, go build a better alternative and attract people to your network. If you are not going to go build a better alternative, try entering into a constructive dialogue with Rob to see if there is some way to resolve your disagreements. If you are not going to do either, than what gives you the right to complain?

Two very overused but very accurate cliches come to mind: 1) If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem; and 2) Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Long entry... another long car trip where I was working on more documents...

The Porous Border, part 53 - There's a war about to happen. Troops are shipping overseas. Everyone in the U.S. is on edge about security and terrorists. Homeland Security has the alert on "Orange" or something like that. They are interrogating Arabic-looking men in Chicago and New York city. News reports talk about increased inspection of passports and lengthier delays at airports.

In the midst of all this hysteria, here was our border crossing from Canada into the U.S.:

U.S. Customs Agent: Where do you live?
Me: Ottawa
Agent: Citizenship?
Me: American
Agent: Status in Canada?
Me: Work authorization.
Agent: Are you bringing in any goods?
Me: Just a birthday gift.
Agent: Value?
Me: Around $40 U.S.
Agent (waving us on): Have a nice day.

You will note that, as per usual, we were never asked for our passports. But that was it... our comment to each other as we drove away was "so much for the increased security due to Iraq!"

Now, in fairness, there were the two of us in the front and our 10-month-old daughter visible in the back seat. We are loaded up with kids supplies and other stuff. Parents of infant children are probably not rated very highly as possible terrorists.

Still, it is so annoying to hear people in the U.S. media talking about "all the terrorists coming down from Canada". There was even a report in the paper last week about a U.S. Senator (I forget which one) who was saying all this on the floor of the U.S. Senate with regard to some type of Homeland Security act or something.

Other than the minor detail that all the Sept 11th terrorists originated inside of the U.S. and did not come down through Canada, what these critics are all missing is that it is U.S. Customs letting people through the border! It's not like if you are in Canada you just can automatically enter the U.S. (although that's pretty much been our experience). There is a border crossing where you must stop that is staffed by U.S. Customs officials.

So it's not Canada that is letting terrorists into the U.S. It is the United States through Customs, Border Patrol, etc. Don't blame Canada when the problem is in fact with your own staff!

In truth, I can understand why crossing the U.S.-Canada border by car is not as stringent as, say, an airport. There are literally tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of cars going in either direction each day. The lines can be quite long on a regular day. And the reality is that the vast, vast, vast majority of people are just trying to get to their job on the other side of the border or, like us, visiting family and friends. Still, it's irritating to hear people in the U.S. talk about all the terrorists coming down from Canada...

Tuesdays without TIME - A recent Tuesday was rather momentous because of what did NOT happen. For the first time pretty much since I was born, the mail arrived on Tuesday and did NOT include TIME Magazine. Growing up, the magazine with the bright red border was a constant weekly reading staple. Going on to university, I was given a subscription that I chose to continue and have continued in the many years since that time. Even after our move to Canada, we continued to receive it (albeit the Canadian edition which was slightly different in interesting and curious ways).

However, over the past year or so, the content has kept seeming to get more lightweight. TIME has almost seemed to be turning in People magazine. Instead of nicely detailed articles providing context for the news of the week, the pieces have just seemed to be more and more fluff. Kind of like USA Today, you read the articles and find yourself wanting to know more. (Now there are many times, like when travelling, that I want the digested news of USA Today, but that's not the purpose I have subscribed to TIME.)

So we recently pulled the plug. Or more accurately, I chose not to renew. We'll spend that money on some other weekly newsmagazine that hasn't turned into celebrity profiles and fluff pieces. Probable candidate is "Maclean's" which is a Canadian weekly that seems to be pretty decent. (If anything, it seems to lean the other way and have more text and not have as many photos as TIME did.) We'll see.

On a tangent, in informal surveys of people, it seems that many of us in the U.S. grew up in either a "TIME" or "Newsweek" family and never strayed far from what we started out with.

Snow - Driving through a pretty strong snowstorm in Vermont (Lori's driving right now). Almost whiteout conditions at times, but then it lightens up. Once again we are thankful for the wonderful performance of Air Subaru in conditions like this.

Lunch in Montpelier - Ever since we moved to Ottawa, Lori and I have struggled with the thought of where in the U.S. we could ever consider moving back to if things didn't work out in Ottawa. Given what an amazing place Ottawa is, this is truly a dilemma (and one we hope we don't have to face anytime soon), but one of the places we definitely would consider would be Montpelier, VT. Being the capital of the state of Vermont (did you know that?) and home to a couple of (admittedly small) colleges, it's got a wonderful little downtown area, cultural events and theatre and very outdoors-oriented events/shops/etc. It's about 45 minutes from Burlington, which is the metropolitan area of Vermont (which, at probably 100,000 people or so, isn't exactly on the scale of Ottawa!)

It's a great little place and has been our frequent lunch break on travels to/from New Hampshire. Add to that the unabashedly liberal politics (Vermont is the only state who actually has elected a Socialist to the U.S. Congress. Did you know there was one?) which are a nice contrast to the ultra-ultra-conservative politics of New Hampshire. (Remember the year when N.H. was the state that chose Pat Buchanan over George Bush, Sr, in the presidential primary?) It's also surrounded by fantastic mountains and scenery. All around a great little place.

Of course, moving from a city of 700,000-1,000,000 to a "city" of 7,000 people would be a bit of a culture shock. :-)

The Porous Border, part 54 - In fairness, let me record our border crossing from the U.S into Canada:

Canadian Customs Agent: Where do you live?
Me: Ottawa
Agent: Your citizenship?
Me: American
Agent: How long were you away?
Me: Since Friday... two days.
Agent: Total value of anything new you are bringing in?
Me: About $100... just some baby clothes.
Agent: Any tobacco or alcohol?
Me: No
Agent (waving us on): Okay, have a nice day.

Once again, no check of the passports. I have less of an issue, though, given that the newspapers are NOT full of Canadians whining about how we are letting all these terrorists in from the United States. If they were, I'd point out the same hypocrisy as I did above.

New Hampshire and Linux - riel: It was pointed out to me that you are moving to the great state of N.H. from Brazil. The good news is that the area you are moving to has a very thriving Linux community in the form of GNHLUG and its associated sub-LUGs. A really great group of folks there.

Jon "maddog" Hall also lives locally in Amherst, N.H. The state also has the motto of "Live Free or Die" on all its license plates and signs, which does have to have a special status in the annals of state mottos. No wimpy "Garden State" or "Vacationland" here... "Live Free or Die". Very appropriate for free software advocates. (Although it is more often used in N.H. by people who advocate their right to have guns and not wear motorcycle helmets or seatbelts.)

The Chloe Journals - Quick quiz - You have on your plate before you some truly wonderful salmon, baked to close to perfection. The kind that just flakes off and melts in your mouth. You also have some asparagus that was, quite frankly, left in the steamer a few minutes too long and is a bit on the soggy side. Which do you choose to eat? a) the excellent salmon; or b) the overdone asparagus.

If you are our child, of course, you go for 'b', the soggy, overdone asparagus! We can't complain, of course, because she likes to eat broccoli, asparagus and most other vegetables, but at moments like that it is rather comical.

A foot of snow - and we don't blink - On Sunday we had roughly a foot of snow... 31.something centimeters to be a bit more precise... and while New York and Washington may be shut down by half this much snow, here it was just another day. I fired up the snowblower to clear our driveway and then we went out for breakfast with some friends. Good old Air Subaru again proved to have no issue with our unplowed streets. (Although given that it has about a 9.5 inch clearance and there was more than 10 inches of snow on the ground when we went out, it was getting close to the limit.)

Part of the reason why it's no big deal is simply that we as a city are ready for this type of thing. Here's what the paper reports as the complement of Ottawa snow equipment:

155 salt spreaders
62 plows
91 graders
74 sidewalk plows
21 snowblowers

Add to that the 350+ very large dump trucks that are being used to cart away snow from the streets... and you have quite the team to fight the storms. By the way, those 21 snowblowers aren't the homeowner kind - they are the big mammoth size-of-large-dump-truck kind that load all the snow into the dump trucks.

Just another day in the Great White North!

XML at Five - I enjoyed edd's musings about XML at five years old. XML has indeed changed my life in many ways as well.... mostly relating to my use of DocBook, including some tools (well, my .vimrc file), some presentations, and also the latest version of makefaq which includes a DocBook XML export function.

Along the way, I also assisted in the transition of Linuxcare's courseware from FrameMaker into DocBook... and then I set up e-smith, inc. (which is now part of Mitel Networks) with single source publishing using DocBook. The folks here at Mitel in our Customer Documentation group still use that single source system and are quite happy with it, as it generates HTML, HTML Help and PDF off of one source file (actually, now a set of linked XML files).

I've also learned a great bit about XSLT and have used it for a whole set of different purposes. I also created XSLT stylesheets for the Linux Documentation Project and have used them for creating a good number of different documents.

So yes, edd, XML has changed my life in a number of ways as well.

Teleworker launch - The product is live and downloadable. Our VARs are elated... all is good. It's excellent to see Linux being the platform for incredible applications like this.

python - Suffering from a lack of programming lately... desperatly need to get back into doing some python programming... I have a task that I want to work on... just have to find the time to do so...

Pen turning - Took a class about "pen turning" at Lee Valley on Saturday. Lori had given me the class for a gift. It was quite excellent. Go in at 9:30, put square blocks of wood on a lathe... gouge... sand... finish... and leave shortly after 12 noon with a beautiful looking pen! I can see why my uncle is very into wood turning (he creates bowls, though, that are much larger). Definitely could be an interesting (and non-computer-related) hobby.

The Chloe Journals - Mobility is in full force... she's even crawling with her arms straight up, although she more often crawls on her forearms like pictures you see of soldiers crawling under barbed wire. The fun part about her crawling on her forearms is that she builds up a huge amount of static electricity... and her hair starts standing straight up! Never would have believed it if I hadn't seen it. She continues to be an amazing little girl (but of course I am insanely biased! :-)

The news about our teleworker product launch - So the news release was issued about one of the products I manage. Our teleworker product hits GA (General Availability) on Monday, February 17th. Only one week away... and everything looks good to go! All reported bugs have been fixed... we're just in the final week of trials... and then away it goes!

This solution is just winning raves all around from all of our resellers, our customers and pretty much anyone else who tries it out. The voice quality of our solution is so far ahead of any of our competitors.

The cool thing for me is that the solution runs on our Linux base platform. It's proprietary software that uses our own toolkits and libraries that have been engineered to work with our phone systems. But all of that is sitting on good old Linux underneath! There were naysayers that thought the software should just run on a Windows server, but our team showed the doubters that it could be done - and in doing so saves the company all those horrendous Windows license fees (and of course we don't have to worry about all the reboot issues).

So now we have a solution that allows a remote worker to have a phone in their home office that is simply an extension off of their corporate office using just their broadband Internet connection. We secure the communication, of course, and give the user all the features they would have at their corporate office. It's truly amazing.

The other day I did a demo here in Ottawa for a visiting customer from the UK. While there, I showed them how easy it was to program my phone as an (previously arranged) extension off of a phone switch in the UK. They then just dialed 9, got dial-tone in London, and called their office to check their voicemail. They were quite blown away.

It is, after all, the Internet, where you can pretty much kiss QoS goodbye, so the fact that it sounds as good as it does actually amazes me... but our developers did some great work. And we're certainly not immune to network issues. I've had calls degrade when a router was busy somewhere. But overall the stuff we've done for jitter buffering and other things like that has made the quality pretty darn amazing.

And it's just great to be involved with a product that is launching as well as this one is!

Babylon 5 - Season Two on DVD - Saw the excellent news on The Lurker's Guide today that Season Two is available for pre-order. It should ship at the end of April. Given that this is the pivotal season when things really start to heat up, I'm very much looking forward to seeing the episodes without commercial interruption.

Bio - It was pointed out to me that the biography I had up on my web site was woefully out of date... it still had me as President of LPI, a position I haven't held for most of two years now. It shows that I haven't been speaking at conferences lately... otherwise my bio would be up to date.

Insert part A into hole B - We have been searching for a new dresser for our bedroom for quite some time now and after deciding we were just to frugal to pay the big bucks at the nice furniture stores in town, we instead made the pilgramage to dear old IKEA. The only downside to that of course is that it is all self-assembly... I think the dresser had about 20 boards and (literally) 200 little screws, cams, nails and other pieces. Fun, fun, fun...

Curling championships - The only good news was that the Karcher Junior Curling Finals were on this weekend - men's final on Saturday at 1pm and women's final on Sunday at 1pm. So that was the middle of both days... assembling IKEA furniture with curling on in the background. (Why both days? Ah, because we purchased end-tables Sunday morning to do with the dresser...) Amazing curling in both of them. Well worth the time spent. Truly amazing to see these 20ish men and women curling as well as they do. (Of course, some of them are 18 years old and have already been curling for 10 years!)

The Chloe Journals - Planning for the first birthday party is now underway... relatives notified... many will be coming... ahh, the work that must be done! ;-)

9 Feb 2003 (updated 9 Feb 2003 at 01:42 UTC) »

The end of Netscape 4 - and Mozilla 1.2.1 - When I couldn't get into a website today I finally said "enough is enough" and made the time to go out and download the latest stable Mozilla, which is version 1.2.1. My home desktop is SuSE 7.2, and I haven't been able to find RPMs for it... and I've been preferring to do all installs via RPM just for the ease of installation and de-installation.

But enough already... Netscape 4.77 is just too old and too broken... Mozilla is all I use at work, but I just hadn't gotten around to it at home... today I did. And the web suddenly looks so much nicer!

So goodbye, Netscape (and good riddance to 4.x!)... you were a dear friend ever since I started using you back in 1994 or whenever it was that you were still called Mosaic Communications... and in truth, using Mozilla is still pretty much the same as "using Netscape"... but the Netscape logo is no longer on my desktop. And I'm really not that upset...

Mozilla and the mouse wheel - Already discovered one thing about Mozilla that I love... configured Control+mouse-wheel to enlarge the text. Very cool!

MacOS 10.2 - I had to buy some new inkjet cartridges at the computer store and just couldn't resist the nice white box of MacOS 10.2 with the Jaguar-skin X. I've listened to so many people rave endlessly about MacOS X, and, well, Lori's iMac just sits there with MacOS 9.x not getting much use at all (she's been using the WinXP box in the office more)... so I think it needs a conversion! :-)

Almost ready to filter spam - On my quest to clean out my mailbox, I'm getting nearer to being able to filter spam. Today I set up my 6000 MAS to pull mail down from my ISP via fetchmail. That injects it into the qmail queue so that it gets scanned for viruses... the next bit will be to add spam-filtering into the system (which is on the way). So I'm almost there... which will be a very nice day, indeed!

Curling - On Monday night I stepped out onto the ice and delivered my first rock - and everything just clicked! After a year-and-a-half of learning to curl, all of a sudden it just worked! Suddenly I was able to send the rocks down to where the skip wanted them. In curling lingo, I had "line". I was able to stay upright as well - suddenly my balance was there. Now, that balance and line came, though, my weight wasn't so good. Now that it was so easy to throw stones, I wound up firing many of my rocks straight through the house. But I was on such an incredible high after that game.

Thursday night was a similar experience as I played another game with the "high-tech" curling league... once again things were just suddenly working.

I attribute pretty much most of this to a tip given to me by a colleague who I curl with on Thursdays. He pointed out that I needed to be holding the rock to the side of me, rather than in front of me, as I was doing. Repositioning my hand seemed to have an almost miraculous effect! It was just great given that I've been working up to this for the past year-and-a-half. Let's see if the trend continues next Monday.

The Chloe Journals - More pics on the web site. More vain attempts at childproofing... today brought a gate near the stairs to the basement, tomorrow will be plexiglass behind the railing that is open to the basement. She continues to be absolutely adorable, but of course I am incredibly biased!

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