I’m spending all my lunch hours researching and pricing vans. Sorry, you’re going to have to put up with a lack of content here for a while until we get this sorted out. Such a large volume of information to process.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “1…2…3…456789. Bye.” - Snake

Despite having been able to put Erin off for several months, we’re going to buy a minivan in the very near future. We’ve got a Dodge out for test drive right now, and are planning on heading to a Ford dealer tonight to see what they’ve got on offer. I hate shopping for a vehicle, but that’s what we’re doing.

The Focus has been a really good car for us, but unfortunately it’s just too small. I think the breaking point was when we realized that William’s new winter boots don’t fit between his car seat and the back of the driver’s seat. It’s going to suck to have car payments again, that’s all I know.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Well I can’t _give_ you the car, Krusty, but I _can_ let you have this little number for practically nothing: only $38,000.” - Car salesman

Living in Canada, I can see that there are obviously a lot of cultural similarities between Americans and Canadians. It’s actually remarkable that there are any distinct differences, but they are there. One of them is Remembrance Day. I know, the US has Veterans day, but I really think that Remembrance Day is a bigger deal in Canada than Veterans Day is down South. I think it’s at least partly attributable to the fact that Remembrance Day has a symbol - the Poppy - that is instantly recognized by everyone in the country. I’ve been wearing my poppy for a week now, and every time I see one, it reminds me how lucky we are that the youth of the “free world” went to war, and gave their lives to keep it free. It’s sometimes too easy to forget, and I’m glad that the poppy is there as a visible reminder. One day a year isn’t really enough to keep veterans in our minds.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “I do not make war against the dead.” - Homer

I was sick yesterday, so I didn’t get to report on our Mazda experience. We looked at a Mazda 5, to see if it would do the people-mover job for us. I think we’ve decided that it won’t at the price they’re asking. Not much to talk about actually.

Get ready for some geek-talk (ie. you can stop reading now if you don’t care.) I used to run this site on OpenBSD, which is known for it’s security focus. I liked it a lot, but administering it was a lot of work, and I didn’t have time to really do the job right. End result was that I was running a very out of date system that had only been patched a couple of times for specific vulnerabilities. Now, granted, attacks against OpenBSD are rare, and I never got hit by a successful one, but I was a little uneasy at how out of date I’d let the system get. The site currently runs on Gentoo Linux, which I’ve really enjoyed taking care of. Keeping in mind some basic security principles when setting it up really helped, but honestly I think it’s probably a lot more secure than my old OpenBSD install was (strictly because I do a better job of keeping it up to date.) Portage and it’s associated tools are great. etc-update/dispatch-conf are a godsend, and a big part of why I keep the system more up to date than I did with OpenBSD. I like reading about security vulnerabilities, and then realizing that I’d already installed a non-vulnerable version a couple of weeks prior. It’s not perfect, but it’s helping me do a better job of administering the server.

Why do I mention it? Well, news of a Linux/BSD worm hit the usual websites over the last few days, and I have since had a look through my logs - sure enough, there were a lot of attempts by this worm on my system. The attempts were all foiled by my configuration of the server (and the fact that I don’t have any of the vulnerable packages installed) which is always nice. Pointing all ip based access to a “nobody home” empty web directory would have saved me anyway, since the worm is completely IP address based. The funny thing is that the logfile that has all the attempts in it typically contains a lot more attempts to exploit windows based servers.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “If something goes wrong…blame the guy who can’t speak English.” - Homer

William is sneaky. He’s always loved those “rides” that they litter the malls with, and being a cheap bastard, I’ve always told him no. He plays on them, but I don’t put money in them. Anyway, Erin came up with a deal where if he saves up enough money he can pay for it himself - strictly from coins that he picks up off the ground. Anyway, that has resulted in some hilarity.

At one point we were going to drive somewhere, and he got the idea that he’d be able to see money on the street and pick it up as we drove along. I told him that he can really only pick money up off the sidewalk when he’s walking. His response was that he wanted to walk instead of drive. At another point during the weekend, he said “Mommy and daddy, get your wallets so you can give me lots and lots of money.” Ah - I get the distinct impression that’s not the last time I’ll hear that request.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Bart’s right. Let’s none of us have a cow.” - Marge

I’ve mentioned a music recommendation system that I stumbled across a few years back, but couldn’t remember the name of it. Well, Pandora isn’t it (I don’t think) though it’s based on similar data. The one that I remember gave you brief sound samples and asked you to rate them. Pandora just asks you for a song/artist that you already like, then based on the makeup of that song/artist, finds songs that you might also like. I haven’t spent a lot of time playing with it, but at first blush it looks promising.

The knee rehab continues unabated. I’ve got physio again today (third appointment this week) and it’s bending more than it had been. I think it’s bending a lot more, but the physiotherapist doesn’t seem too impressed. Maybe I’m just happy that it’s making any progress though.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Alright brain, you don’t like me and i don’t like you, so let’s just do this thing and I’ll go back to killing you with beer.” - Homer

I know, I’ve been really bad lately, skipping days like crazy. Things have been super busy at work lately, and with the knee still not 100%, things have been pretty hectic at home too. Halloween was good, William went as Superman by day, and a wizard by night. Quote of the day - “I magic’d you into a frog.”

That boy sure loves his candy. He’s fixated on it quite a bit, even though we don’t let him have much. Unfortunately, we got about 5% of the trick or treaters that we expected, so we’ve got a lot of candy left over. Scratch that. We have a lot of chocolate left over. Chocolate that Erin can’t eat. Chocolate that we don’t let William eat. A lot of chocolate… Hmmmm. Who does that leave?

Even though it’s old news now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t welcome Corbin Josephson into the world. Congratulations to the two happy parents, and the happy big sister.

Oh, and we’ve got snow here today. It’ll be gone by the afternoon, but it was a slushy walk to the bus today. Winter is here…

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Say what you will about our cafeteria, I still think they’re the best tater tots money can buy.” - Principal Skinner