I struggle to write an introduction to this post - it has not been a kind winter to loved ones in our family, particularly grandmothers. On Monday, January 5th 2009, Clare Adel "Pat" Irish (or simply "Gram") passed away, leaving a husband of 57 (and nearly 58 later this month) years. What's left are memories of a caring wife, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, and indeed, what loving memories they are.

A few years ago, I believe for their 55th wedding anniversary, we all gathered in their living room as a family and asked them what the secret to a long marriage was. My grandfather answered, and I'll never forget it: "When you care enough, you try a little harder." He is the living definition of the word devotion, and I can think of no one better for my grandmother to have spent her life with.

I'll keep this short, as I could easily go on and on about my grandmother, and I will only say this: Living may be the hard part, but boy did she make it look easy.

You can take rest now Grandma, we all know you deserve it.

(For those interested in reading her obituary, it's available here: Clare A. "Pat" Irish)

Hey everyone - it's just prior to supper time here at the Irish's, thought I'd give everyone a (not-so) quick update.

Christmas Eve and Day were both great, hanging out with my family again was very refreshing and of course very fun. I was given the honor of playing the trumpet for my parent's church service on Christmas Eve (I normally do for Easter/Christmas services). That went well, and we had a quiet rest of Christmas Eve. Christmas morning was fun with the opening of the gifts, and in the afternoon we had a great time at my grandparent's house in Spencer. Unfortunately, as we were literally in the driveway about to leave, my grandmother tripped over a marble spacer on the floor and fell. Her kneecap cracked (not quite broken completely, but almost), and bruised up her face pretty badly. She is in the hospital now, and due to the fall, she's having complications in her brain. The doctors are working on fixing her up, so we all hope she'll be okay soon.

In more uplifting news, I received a new camera from my parents! This will come in very handy for our trip to Costa Rica coming up this Thursday (whoa!). We'll be there a full week, all-inclusive with an open bar. My brother and sister-in-law (and mother- and father-to-be) were super generous and gave us a Ryobi Table Saw for Christmas. Now I can finally start making some basic furniture for our house. I just have to give myself a quick lesson on it, and I'll be ready to go.

Okay, well that's about it. Below I've included a couple of pictures I took while I was there. The house pictured is my parents house, where I was born and raised. The second is a panorama of train tracks down by my grandparent's house in Spencer. When we were kids we used to run down there while we were visiting them and put pennies on the track to get them all flatened. The photos below are resized considerably, given that the originals were over 8000 pixels in width. If you'd like a higher resolution of either, go ahead and leave a comment.

So I got my work permit in the mail yesterday (WOOT!), and went to renew my old SIN card. It all had a feeling of deja vu...

Anyway, I've got my SIN, my work permit, and I'm ready to work! Starting the job hunt today. Wish me luck!

Cheers.

Checked the mail at 12:50pm today, and there it was. Two envelopes, one for Nadia and one for me. Nadia's was the letter from immigration telling her that she was approved as a sponsor for me, and my letter was telling me that I was approved for both permanent residency and my work permit. The work permit will apparently be sent soon by Vegreville. As soon as I get it, I can begin working again!

I won't "officially" be a Permanent Resident of Canada until I am contacted by Canadian Immigration (CIC) in Scarborough for an appointment, at which time we'll have to pay another $490 for the "Right of Permanent Residency" and then we'll most likely get the official documentation. That should happen in January or February if what we've been reading from others' experiences are accurate. Anyway, that doesn't matter all that much in comparison to getting the work permit. Once I receive my work permit I'll be able to begin working full time again!

WOOHOO!

Nothing in the mail yet from immigration. We're hoping that tomorrow will be the day. Thanks to everyone who have given both Nadia and I support.

Over the weekend my wonderful wife gave me an early Christmas gift (due to mail-in rebate deadlines, haha). It was 2GB of RAM for my computer. She had snooped inside my computer to see what memory I had, and got me the same kind. I don't want to sound as excited as I was due to fears that I may sound as nerdy as I actually am, so we'll just say that I was really, really happy with it! My excitement led to me taking the leap into installing Windows Vista x64. I had been running XP x86, but with 4GB of RAM, it would only recognize 3.5GB. I figure if I upgrade to an x64 OS, I might as well make the leap to Vista as well - so I did.

I (cough) acquired it (cough) on Sunday and was able to install it Sunday night with no issues whatsoever. One of the main reasons I waited to make the jump to Vista was because of its well-documented issues at launch. I'm convinced it was released without being even 90% completed, and was the product of a deadline, not of quality. Now that SP1 (Service Pack 1) has been out for quite some time, and SP2 is currently in beta, I felt (and have now confirmed) that all of the kinks must have been worked out. User Account Control (UAC for short) was still extremely annoying in giving popup notifications asking you to Allow or Deny permission for almost any program you run. A neat little tool called TweakUAC fixed that right up by putting UAC into "Quiet Mode." A great example of the annoying UAC was when I attempted to delete a shortcut in my Start Menu > All Programs menu. It had to ask me 3 separate times if I was sure I wanted to delete this measly shortcut. YES, DEAR GOD YES JUST DELETE IT.

Anyway, I have all of my normal everyday programs installed again, and everything is running very smoothly. I really love the new UI, all of the Aero effects, etc. etc. It's a breath of fresh air from the stagnant fruitiness of Windows XP (although we said the same thing about Windows XP when it came out regarding Windows 2000/ME).

I had a somewhat awful night's sleep last night, I've been somewhat hazy all day, and I just finished a session of karate tonight. Needless to say, I could probably qualify as a pile of mush at the moment. Time to hit the hay and hope for a great tomorrow.

Cheers.

Decided to clean up the extraneous sections of this website. My portfolio was way too out of date, so I completely got rid of it, and with the Presidential Election now over, there's no point in having a Politics section either.

I should probably get going on that CSS part, though.

My contract work looks like it will be picking up again.  The major reason there was so little work done in November was because almost every member of the team (there are only about 5 or 6 of us) went on a 2 or 3 week vacation. December should be back to normal.

I've got a couple of side projects going on as well. The wife of my brother-in-law's friend (had to think about that for a second) is opening up a wedding service company, so a website is being completed by both Nadia and myself. My contract with the Region I Chapter of the VPPPA (www.vppregion1.com) is bringing in some work in the realm of a new design, and added functionality. Fortunately, this means I won't be entirely broke for Christmas. Unfortunately this means that things like reading the Feynman Lectures, brushing up on PHP, and learning Ruby on Rails and Python will have to be moved to that friendly old backburner.

In my last post I mentioned I'll be heading home to Massachusetts for Christmas. This is now confirmed, and I can also confirm that Nadia will be joining me! Last year she wasn't able to accompany me due to work restrictions, but we have got around that this year.

That's all folks!

Happy Thanksgiving to all of my American readers out there! Although I will be home in Canada for the holiday, I will be having a Thanksgiving feast complete with a 12lb turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, biscuits, corn, gravy, and a homemade marble cake for desert! Oh how I love having two Thanksgivings (Canada's is in October)...

As for that power outlet, it turns out that my original brilliance in getting that dimmer switch to work wasn't actually brilliance at all. It was the reason my power outlet wasn't working! A huge thanks to Terence and my father-in-law for helping me figure it all out, and teaching me a few things along the way.

Oh yeah! My visitor record extension finally came in! YES! It means I can visit my family for Christmas without having to worry too much about getting back into Canada! You see, if I were to visit my family on "implied status," it would mean that my permanent residency application would basically have to start over if I were denied entrance back into Canada, which is a very good possibility if I'm only on implied status. SO! This also means I can go to Costa Rica in January! WOOOOOOOO

Alright, I better get started getting ready for tonight! Cheers!

This weekend is nearly over, and it's been all about the house. Yesterday, we spent the majority of the day out and about, shopping for different things. We tried to find the clearance store for kitchen backsplash tiles, but they weren't open yet, so we took a trip to Home Depot (to two of them, actually) to find a melamine panel that matched our cabinets. Our plan is to create a shelving area between where our kitchen cabinets end, and where the countertop ends, so that we can eventually tile across the whole width of the countertop. Well it turns out that neither Home Depot have the melamine panels we need in the right color (Beech), so that project was put on temporary hold, along with the kitchen tiles.

Today I managed to install a dimmer switch for our pot lights, my first electrical project in the new house, and it actually turned out just fine. The bad news is that while shutting off the switch at the fuse box in the cellar, I blew out one of the recepticals in the same room. And even worse, it was the receptical powering our TV, cable box, Playstation3, and Xbox360, so we had to maneuver our way to a different power outlet to get power to them. I went to Home Depot and picked up a new receptical (one with test/reset buttons), but couldn't for the life of me get the grounding wire around the screw while installing it. I was running out of daylight so I decided to wait for tomorrow to try it once more before I inevitably call in an electrician to put together a measly power outlet for me. We'll see how it goes.

Until next time!

About 15 minutes from leaving to go to karate tonight, I've got perogies in my stomach and I'm ready to go. Super pumped about Call of Duty: World at War coming out tomorrow. Co-Op play in the single player campaign = awesome, Nazi Zombie mode = awesomest.

I've been making some progress in my calendar webapp, you can check it out here while I have my server running: http://72.138.250.109:444/index.php

And my wonderful cousin-in-law Karen just linked me a pair of wedding rings on Etsy: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?ref=vt_related_1&listing_id=14837461. Wow. I told her if they were $300 cheaper I would absolutely buy them.

Yeah, I know. I have been very neglectful of my website. It has been crying out to me to update, and I have ignored it. Any doubts you have about what kind of father I'd ever be are extremely valid.

Anyway, here's what's been going on the past month or so. Nadia and I are both doing very well, and are still a very happily married couple (I know, I thought she'd have kicked me out by now too), and our house is coming along nicely. Nothing major (or minor, for that matter) to repair, it's completely furnished, so now we're just sort of waiting for my permanent residency to come through so that I can get a job, and then we can afford getting things we want but don't necessarily need. Besides, isn't that the ultimate objective for a homeowner?

Yesterday we celebrated Sierra's 1st birthday with Kin and Ian, along with several members of the family. Nadia and I had a great time, and afterwards spent the late hours of the night playing video games with Karen and Terence. Contrary to very true rumors about Karen's playing ability, she managed not to die very much, and we were all proud.

And now for the thing no one really cares about: what I've been doing to keep myself busy. My contract work has been slowing down a bit, but all is well. I am trying to learn the basics of a couple of new computer languages: Erlang, Django, and software like YAWS. I'm getting quite comfortable with JavaScript through jQuery, and am getting more comfortable with PHP. A recent project of mine is creating your basic calendar web application via PHP/MySQL, with basic features like adding/deleting events for specific dates, etc. My plan is to expand on that idea to provide advanced functionality, while using new languages as a means to learn by experience. I do have one major hurdle to overcome, in that I probably have an IQ around 50, but hey we all need challenges to overcome, right?

Okay, I'll leave the post off with a pretty funny video from 236.com: http://www.236.com/video/2008/get_your_war_on_new_world_orde_10121.php