Markus’ Blog

As indicated in a previous post I was scheduled to receive a new Canon Powershot G9. Well, about two weeks ago was the big day. After ordering a display model from a camera store in Toronto, my new G9 arrived.

I took it with me on my trip to San Jose to try it out a bit. The pictures are not too exciting, as I didn’t do very much other than go to the office and go out to eat.

I like it a lot. Not surprising, it’s got many feature enhancements over my good old G1, which I bought in 2001. It’s also a lot lighter.

Apparently, a father held his own daughter captive for over two decades, abused, and had several children with her. I stuns and disgusts me how people can even think of doing anything like this.

All this happened in Amstetten, Lower Austria, maybe a 90 minute drive from where I grew up.

The story is making top headlines on CNN and the BBC, and probably most news broadcasters in the Western hemisphere.

Not even two years ago, a different case of a child being held hostage was finally discovered. That one happened even closer to where I used to live: in Gänserndorf, a mere 40 minute drive from Korneuburg. In that case, the victim managed to escape and the captor committed suicide.

Looks like my server’s IP address is going to change at some point this upcoming weekend. I still need to coordinate the exact time when that’s going to happen. This change could result in an outage of this site for hopefully no longer than 1 hour.

Speaking of change, I also upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1. I was waiting for the first bug fix release after 2.5 before switching. I didn’t feel like getting hit by new security holes introduced with all the new features in 2.5, hence the delay.

The upgrade took all of 45 seconds or so (that includes upgrading the database after installing the new Wordpress version). I used the Subversion upgrade process again. It’s still a charm as ever. No need to manually fiddle with anything.

Also, all plugins still seem to work.

The weather is not supposed to do that. Snow in April is just wrong. Especially in Vancouver. But it happened.

Getting back from a trip to San Jose, on April 18, I was welcomed by thick snow flakes falling from the sky. It even started to stick. About an hour after getting home, the view from our condo looked like this.

Of course it’s all gone again by now, but it’s still too cool for this time of year.

It took over a year to get 10,000 spam comments, but only six months to get another 10,000.

Not a good trend.

If it keeps up, I’ll be hitting 30,000 in July.

It’s been a “fun” couple of weeks and it’s not quite over yet.

In order to put our condo on the market, we’ve had some minor upgrades/fixes done to it over the last little while. New light fixtures were mounted, new wooden base boards in the bathroom (the plastic ones that were there before were just hideous) were installed, and our curtain rods finally went up.

Today we’re getting a couch (sofa bed) for our second bedroom. The couch is later to be re-used in the “library” of our new house. For now, the plan is to allow potential buyers to envision our second-bedroom-turned-office as actual bedroom more easily. I am waiting for the delivery guys at this very moment.

Tomorrow we’ll try for the second time to exchange our ugly, old light fixture in the bathroom. The first attempt revealed a big cut in the drywall that was not covered by our new fixture. So, we had to get a different one.

Then, there’s some painting that needs to get done. Some more tidying. Well, a lot more tidying. Curtains need to be hung. Then pictures need to be taken and papers need to be signed. And then, finally, a buyer needs to be found.

I hope all these steps go over fairly smoothly.