Category: It Happened to Me

Still Under Construction

If this blog currently looks half-done, that’s because it is. I’m generally pleased with the look of the content section — that’s the middle column — but the sidebars need a lot of work, and that temporary title graphic has got to go. Work and life have conspired to keep me busy as usual, but my inner Japanese engineer keeps looking at the blog and yelling “Kansei!” and “Kaizen!” and won’t let me rest until this thing looks just right.

Accurate and Up-to-Date

I just completed the clean-up task that involved the most drudgery: the cleaning up of my blogroll, the list that appears in the right-hand column. I’ve gone through every blog in that list and for each one, I checked to see:

• That the blog still exists
• The the blog is still being maintained (I treat having at least one new entry in the past 12 months and not having announced that it is shutting down as “being maintained”)
• That a link to this blog exists in a permanent list on that blog

Any blog that met all three criteria stayed on the blogroll and any blog that didn’t was removed. I also added a few new blogs that met the criteria. As of this writing, the blogroll is up-to-date.

“He’s Vewwy Highwy Wanked in Wome, You Know.”

If you’ve got a blog that meets the criteria listed above, let me know! Having your blog appear in my blogroll is good for your Google ranking. This blog has a Google PageRank of 7. For comparison,

• Little Green Footballs’ PageRank is 6
• Reddit and Digg have a PageRank of 7
• MetaFilter’s is 8
• BoingBoing’s is 9

Google’s algorithm gives your page a higher ranking when people with good PageRank link to you, so if you’d like to give your blog a boost, link to me and let me know about it!

Heading to work this morning, with the sun in a bright cloudless sky, the temperature unusually cool for the middle of August (23 degrees C, or about 73 degrees F for my American readers) and a cool breeze blowing about, I got hit with deja vu. Then it struck me: this is what the weather is usually like when it’s time to go back to school.

It’s funny how that feeling came up; I haven’t been in school since the end of 1994, when I wrote my last final exam ever. It was for my fourth-year databases course, and to commemorate the end of an era, I wore a suit to the exam, after which I joined my database prof, the late Dr. McLeod, at Crazy Go Nuts University’s Grad Club for some Glenfiddich.

I toasted the Good Doctor with John Belushi’s line from Animal House: “Christ! Seven years of college…down the drain!” [52 KB .WAV sound file]

Good times.

Do you still get school-related deja vu? Or anxiety dreams? (Very occasionally, I still have the nightmare where I’m being hit with a surprise exam or realize that I’d never even heard of the assignment due today.) Or are you still in school? Comment away!

One of the nice things about working at Tucows is that the Toronto office is a pretty decent space, being an old warehouse in the Accordion City neighbourhood known as Liberty Village. When your biggest complaint is an overabundance of natural light (which makes it hard to read a screen), things can’t be too bad.

The company recently picked up a couple of gas barbecues and hooked them up to a natural gas line on the deck. We inaugurated them last Friday with an after-work company barbecue where our CEO Elliot Noss played chef:

Fearless Leader barbecues on the Tucows deck.

Naturally, a company named Tucows would serve beef (and beef-like veggieburgers for those of us lower on the food chain).

I should check to see what the rules — if any exist — about using the barbecue are. I’d like to fire it up and make my own lunch sometime.

Even when I haven’t yet thrown my hat in the ring, a skirmish in the comments often makes me think of the line from Patton: “I love it. God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than my life”. If you haven’t checked it out yet, go see the comments to the post about the audiobook billboards poking fun at Dubya, as well as a premature declaration of victory by Kathy “Relapsed Catholic” Shaidle and Martey Dodoo’s apt summary.