shaver

On Monday morning I flew to California for a workshop and a bevy of meetings, as I do on a fair number of Monday mornings lately. While I was in a meeting Monday afternoon, my wife was busy buying us a house. She was ably assisted by our great agent and the inestimably friendly other Mike, but I was tremendously proud that she was able to juggle the large sums of money, competitive bidding strategy, myriad paperwork and general waiting-and-wondering without missing a beat. If ever you have to buy a house while travelling, I highly recommend her services. (That link to mls.ca will probably rot relatively quickly; I’ll have to get Madhava to take some photos of the new place to replace it.)

On Tuesday, she put all that behind her, donned her Super Librarian hat, and taught a few hundred lucky U of T med students about how to properly search, research, and I suppose reresearch, as part of their Determinants of Community Health class. By all accounts — admittedly, relayed through a somewhat giddy Tyla — she did a bang-up job, which of course surprises nobody but possibly her. And all that on what some might consider to be rather short notice.

I couldn’t be prouder, I have to say. And she’s all mine! Nyah-nyah.

In 1996, I watch Peter Gutmann present a paper about how extremely difficult it is to delete data from hard drives such that it is deleted for keepsies. I remember the discussions with Marcus and others afterwards that centered around how incredibly doomed we were, as security professionals.

It might be that time again. I sort of hope I only have one of these doomed moments once a decade.

My favourite email tidbit from today:

Mike, I’m afraid the promotions we run in the Americas Division are not applicable in <Vendor> Canada. Also, we’re not allowed to ship outside of the United States (not even to Canada). My apologies for any confusion the prior e-mail might have caused.

Buggles, John Mellencamp, Bryan Adams, .38 Special, Survivor, Bon Jovi, Outfield, David Lee Roth, Van Halen, Bruce Springsteen, Asia, Heart, Billy Idol, Bruce Hornsby, U2, Phil Collins, Cyndi Lauper, The Romantics, The J. Geils Band, The Alarm, Def Leppard, Stevie Nicks, ABC, Duran Duran, a-ha, David Bowie, Rick Springfield, Wang Chung, The Hooters, The Outfield, Whitesnake, Blue Rodeo, Berlin, The Alarm, The Cars, Chicago.

nano.

Happy birthday, honey.

On Monday night, after reflecting on a conversation with my new doctor, my upcoming travel schedule, and the fact that I never took the vacation I originally planned for August, I decided that I’d try to take the rest of this week off.

Tuesday already had a Lightning phone conference scheduled, and I was also roped into a last minute review and a Business Week call.

I’m not very good at taking vacation, though you should presume that your mail is among the ~250 unread, non-bugmail messages awaiting my attention already.

Wednesday was better, though, in that I didn’t check my email until I got some urgent-sounding requests to submit information for payroll and benefits (yeah, that sure gets my attention!), and mostly spent the day playing video games and watching TiVo goodies. Eventually, I had to put pants on and go see some houses with my wife and our excellent agent. And then head up to Beltzner’s for Leafs and Veronica. I’m sure they were all glad that I did the pants thing too.

Tomorrow? More slackassery, a bit of Miriam-visiting and some tasty La Palette. I should have this vacation thing all figured out just in time to drive to Ottawa for Canucksgiving, and then fly to California for the week. Rule.