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Somebody please tell me what happened to the past year - there's been so much that's happened in the past year it's amazing. Now I know why new parents don't have much to talk about except their child - it's an all-engrossing experience (if you pay any attention at all to your child). It's been great, but if someone were to ask what we've been doing outside of the scope of the baby, you'd get a big 'uhhhh' out of me.

One of the things that we've been doing as a family for fun is geocaching. It's something we can all do together, for the most part (we haven't tried dragging the baby boy out for, oh, snow covered hikes or anything). It gets us all out of the house and we've seen so many places we never would have been to on our own... and, it's a lot of fun.

I've started a separate geocaching blog at geocaching.kiwicanuck.ca to talk about our adventures and also bring up some technical points along the way. Do drop by for a visit, won't you?

Well, it's been months and months since I've posted anything... figured I would play a touch of catch-up here...

First and foremost, I've truly been enjoying being a father. There's nothing like spending time with your child, and it's truly something very special to watch him develop and enjoy life.

Second, since getting a handheld GPS unit at Christmas, we've got in to the sport of geocaching, thanks to the suggestion of my uncle. We've been out exploring our "back yard" and seeing lots of places we never knew existed. Getting the fresh air and exercise hasn't been a bad thing either.

Now that the weather's improving, I expect we'll be out caching a little more than the first few months have given us opportunity to.

Most recently I've been sucked in to crackbook, er, facebook. It's quite an interesting site of it's type, and normally I wouldn't have anything to do with sites like that, but after a good friend and my sister both mentioned it within a period of a week, I figured I'd check it out again - the first time I went to see what it was about it was locked out to everyone but college students.

Anyhow, I've only been a part of it for a few days, and it's been great because of the people on it... I've already caught up with a friend from my high school days, which has made it worthwhile all in itself.

And of course, work is work, and I'd better go get some rest if I want to show up for it tomorrow...

You know, it's difficult to explain how things feel when you become a parent... All I can really say is that you can't really know until you become one.

This past week has been full of anticipation, excitement, advice, knowledge, anxiety, concern, and wonder, and I wouldn't change a thing. We've been blessed with a healthy baby boy and everything's great.

I'd like to invite you to check out a few of the pictures we've taken of Quentin so far. As we've hardly spent any time in front of our computers the past week, we haven't processed much in the way of photos, but we'll be getting more going soon.

What I want to know is... those people who blog casually - how do they get the time to write, it seems, so much and so often? I'd love to do things like rant or praise life or whatever, but I often don't care enough to do it.

However, to all those folks that do keep up with what Donna and I are doing, a big "Hi!" goes out to you. I'm not dead, I just sysadmin more than I write. heheh.

Speaking of which - I figured that I would mention that there's been a bunch of changes with our website, and it all came about mostly due to these asshats who think that guestbook spam is cool, or even the slightest bit useful. Not here, buddies.

So I went to try and make the guestbook not allow spam, and, since I don't code, had to go looking for improvements that other people have made... say, in the form of a new version, or some add-in spam control, a captcha, whatever... anything to cut down on the automated bull#@!&$ that arrives at kiwicanuck.ca daily.

I quickly learned that the best thing to do was to upgrade to the latest version of the software that powers this site, Drupal. So, I did that. And found that the theme broke. I then found that the theme wasn't upgradeable. I found a bunch of things were broken.

So, I went into 'fix' mode, had to update a whole pile of other stuff, and, long story short, had to give the site a new look. I had to spend a pile of time debugging why other things broke when they were updated. It took awhile, during which time parts of the site were unseemingly ugly.

However, I'm happy to say that it's all been completed.

This was a very important process, you see, just so I could spend less time blasting spam... and now I can spend more time saying things like "I have a baby on the way and I'm so excited I could puke!" I'm not sure why I'm so excited, other than I've now read a book that suggests it's a good thing. ;-)

Heheh... I'll have to write more on that topic later. Dinner's buzzing...

Wow, it's been a busy few months.

Since the last post, we've arrived back from our vacation to New Zealand, shopped for an apartment or condo or townhouse to live in, purchased one, had Donna's mum (NZ for mom, heh) stay with us for 3 weeks over Christmas, been to Kamloops overnight twice to pick up/drop off my mom over Christmas, had Christmas of course, did New Year's, packed, moved, partially unpacked and found out we're pregnant!

And that's just the personal stuff. Professionally, the business I've been working at was sold in December, my job status was up in the air for awhile, which really was awesome to have the added stress on top of the rest of the excitement going on (such as dealing with pain-in-the-butt house sellers), and because of all the changeovers it's been looking like this job isn't going to be anywhere near as interesting as it used to be. But, that's just the surface of it at the moment and we'll see how it goes.

Fortunately, things have begun to settle down a bit. And just a bit - the excitement around having a morning-sick (at any time) wife is all new to me, we've still got a lot of unpacking to do (I'm amazed at how hard it is to get rid of some stuff even on Freecycle), and oh yes, we had an ultrasound this past week and I saw our baby's tiny heart beating. That's really something else - just the whole proof that I'm going to be a dad, seeing such a tiny thing with a pulse, etc. In a few weeks when we have the next ultrasound done, I'll be sure to get some pictures done.

And speaking of pictures, over the past few days during lulls in the roar, I've completely re-done the image galleries bit of the website. Some of our wedding and honeymoon photos have been added in, and I also created a new album of my own for all of the worst shots I'm in. I get a laugh out of most of them.

I'm going to post more soon... really, sure... within the next 6 to 48 months, I'm sure.

Well, it's about time something got posted, huh?

Tough to post about your vacation when you're A) specifically trying to avoid computers, the internet, phones, etc., and B) trying to communicate with others via email and the like...

But at any rate, we've been on vacation in New Zealand for nearly 3 weeks now, only have a few days left.

We've seen a fair chunk of the south island, covered probably 1500 km's or so by car (I think, though I'll have to do an actual tally), visited numerous towns, seen many different types of rocks, saw a penguin, seen glaciers, watched rugby (on TV), drank lots of local stuff, eaten lots of local stuff, seen more rocks and mountains, and I've met a bunch more of Donna's family.

First - If you were syndicating my blog from the old location, please use this link now: http://kiwicanuck.ca/blog/1/feed

Also, figured I should make sure people still get to see this rather humorous Learning Channel ad (which was on ye olde site)... (please see attachment)

I have mostly been of the opinion that spam is unsolicited commercial email... but I'm starting to change that opinion to 'any unsolicited, unwelcome email that wants something of you".

I hadn't heard of the "Gouranga" spam until very recently, and in the past week or so it seems to have taken some real life - I think I've seen it on the majority of the mailing lists I'm subscribed to, which is only a handful, and this morning I received it directly at one of my personal email addresses.

So I went googling for an answer as to what it was all about (feel free to search for it yourself), and found quite a number of references - many from 2003, few from 2004, and what looks like a real resurgence here in 2005. And unfortunately the prevailing attitude toward this sort of stuff is complacency... "it's a happy message", so it must be okay.

** Pulled from my old blog - original post date Mon 23 of May, 2005 **

Over the past few years, I had purchased several Maxtor drives for various purposes. A couple of weeks ago, the very last one of them bit the dust.

The thing to note here is that they're all well under 5 years old, and of course, hard drives really aren't cheap, especially considering I seem to have to buy a few each year to replace duds.

Well, I am living & learning. See, I stopped buying Maxtor some time last year, because of the problems I've had with them. I've RMA'ed Maxtor drives (to have them returned and fail not long after), and the best example was this drive that died very recently. The drive was *manufactured* Sep. 28, 2003. So it's impossible for me to have owned this drive even two years. Hell, it's barely possible I've had it a year and a half.

** Pulled from my old blog - original post date Wed 25 of May, 2005 **

Oh right... it's the whole "keep people scared and they'll do whatever you want them to" mantra. Seems to be working... *cough*bush*cough*

THIS is abysmal. Forget the fact for just one second that if this guy who's on trial is found guilty of child porn he should fry just for that alone... but what has having security software on one's computer got to do with anything?

Oh, right, if one has nothing to hide, they shouldn't try to keep anything secure, should they?