Here are 50 of my favourite photos from Flickr. Can 50 photos tell you anything about someone?

My Dad is looking for a particular style of CD case. These are usually found a “dollar stores,” but he hasn’t been able to find any recently. If you happen across any, please email Dad — source located in Mississauga; thanks.

If I wasn’t otherwise engaged, I’d be seriously thinking about renting this house in the south of France this spring. I don’t know anything about the house itself, or about the owners, but we were in the same region last year and had a wonderful time. This house is even closer to Spain than we were (2-1/2 hours to Barcelona). If you’re looking for a spring trip, I highly recommend the area.

Rain. No, hold on, snow. Oops, rain. Add some wind. More wind. More rain. Okay, back to snow. Large flakes. Bit of rain. Lower the temperature. Nope, raise it up. Back down. Okay, there.

My grandfathers both died in their 80s, so, all other things being equal, I’m halfway to death today.

As chance would have it, I’ve been working heads-down for the last two weeks on a complex (but satisfying) new project for Yankee, so I’ve had precious little time to consider the implications of this. As such, I haven’t had the opportunity to, say, rededicate my life to solving the African poverty crisis, or swear off red meats, or resolve to spend more time reading fictional works by obscure Canadian authors.

So, somewhat ironically, I find myself with nothing profound to think or say or do on this Important Day.

For the sake of posterity, let me record that I love my family, enjoy my work, and live in a community where I feel comfortable. That’s not a bad place to be at the halfway point.

I got a call here in the office yesterday. The guy on the other end of the line wanted to know if I was interested in blogging about his product. I can’t remember the name of the product — it was something like Morphotrax and Mingobot or Malapropzinger. It was a set-top box for Internet-delivered television. He spent 10 minutes singing its praises: revolutionize television, allow for true interactivity, etc. Will Change The World, etc. Resellers all over the world. Big into the Indian market.

Great.

Except that the product doesn’t practically exist yet. You can go to their website and see all sorts of snazzy PR and even pop up a “PC player” (no Mac version). But there isn’t anyone on the other end of the wire yet, no way to actually watch “Internet television.”

I told him that I didn’t tend to blog about “speculative products” that I couldn’t experience myself. He replied that there are lots of bloggers blogging right now about their World Changing Product. The implication was that I Shouldn’t Get Left Out.

Right.

So here’s my advice to you: if you want me to blog about your product, make sure that your product actually exists first.

I gassed up my Jetta this morning. It was only my second tank of fuel for this year. I hadn’t filled up for so long that I actually forgot which side of the car the gas cap was on.

Last night I filled in the last empty space in the air travel strands that are going to bind our spring trip to Europe together. Here’s a breakdown of what each chunk of our trip is going to cost (prices are for all three of us combined, all taxes and fees in, converted to Canadian dollars):

It’s costing is $838 each for air travel, which seems pretty good for travel to five countries over five weeks on four different airlines.

A testament to how little my finger is on the bleeding edge, until this morning I’d never come across the WebKit Open Source Project, described as “the system framework used on Mac OS X by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications.”

I was prompted to take a look by this post by Andrew Sutherland concerning the new “Web Inspector” feature. So I grabbed the latest nightly build and fired it up at YankeeMagazine.com, a site I’ve been re-conceiving in CSS over the last few days. Here’s what it looks like:

The “Web Inspector” tool (right click on an element, select “Inspect Element”) fulfills the same role as the Firefox “DOM Inspector” tool, albeit somewhat more beautifully. Here’s the same element being inspected in Firefox:

Regular readers will recall that, when I turned 39 last year, Catherine concocted a wonderful surprise for me, a worthy pillar in my family’s pantheon of surprises.

Well, this Wednesday I turn 40, and my family outdid itself.

Oliver and I got up Saturday morning and, as usual, prepared to carry ourselves to the Farmer’s Market. It was so warm and sunny out, that I developed a plan to take the bus out then walk over to the Formosa Tea House at Ellen’s Creek, then take the bus back.

At about 9:45 a.m., though, I got a call from Johnny: it looked like the Yankee webserver had crashed. I took a look, and Johnny was right: we could ping, but not connect otherwise, and the Yankee websites were down. I told Catherine and Oliver that I’d be back, hopped in the car, and came over to the office to investigate.

Twenty minutes of further investigation suggested that the server had, in fact, crashed. I got on the phone with Peer1’s Network Operations Centre (the server is based at Peer1’s New York City colocation facility) and they arranged to dispatch an on-call technician to go in and take a look.

An hour later (the trains from Brooklyn were slow on Saturday, apparently), the tech was onsite, the server rebooted, and I began a forensic analysis of what had gone wrong (this is only the second time the Yankee server had all-out crashed in ten years; as it turns out, a runaway Perl script had consumed all the server’s memory and brought everything to a halt).

I spent another hour or so continuing to monitor things, looking at the Tripwire and server logs and so on, just to make sure my diagnosis was right. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Catherine and Oliver helpfully brought over some food and iced tea to keep me going, and then disappeared into the sunshine again.

Just as I was satisfied that things were humming along again, I heard someone coming through the door into the office. I looked up and saw my Dad in the doorway. And then my Mom. And then Mike and Karen and Steve and Johnny and Jodi and Catherine and Oliver. I just started to laugh. I laughed so hard that tears fell down my cheeks and my face turned red; I couldn’t stop.

Through some miraculous feat of logistics, my family had assembled itself, from several points west in Ontario and Quebec, in my office on the weekend before my birthday. It was an amazing surprise, and the best present I could imagine.

We all decamped to Johnny and Jodi’s for a fantastic pierogi lunch, followed by birthday cake. We all went out to the Eliot River Dream Park in Cornwall to enjoy the sunshine, and then crowded into the Formosa on the way back for a drink (thus packing 10 people into a space meant for 4 and causing a dramatic upsurge in closing time business). We went out to Sirenella for an excellent dinner, returned to our house for a rousing game of charades, and then everyone repaired to their beds and fell immediately to sleep.

This morning we all had breakfast together, took some photos, and then Mike, Karen and Steve were off to the airport to fly home (Mom and Dad stay until Tuesday) and I returned here to the office to pick up where I left off.

Wow.