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I just wanted to take this time to wish everyone who reads this a happy holidays and a hope for all the best in 2010.

It has been another interesting year for me, moving to Bermuda once again, hopefully this time for a bit longer, but only time will tell that story. At the moment I am home in Nova Scotia with my family, which makes me happy. I only get to see them once or twice a year, so I definitely enjoy these times.

I suspect that 2010 will be a busy one for myself, but enjoyable none-the-less.

Some of you may have noticed an increase in the frequency of new photos going into my Flickr account. I haven’t really mentioned anything yet, but this is due to the daily shoot. That is a page I created which contains more information regarding what it is, but the summary is that once a day, the @dailyshoot account on Twitter posts a photo assignment to help motivate you to get out and make some photos. My page is a mash-up matching the instructions from Twitter to the photos I post on Flickr for it.

So if you are a bit of photo buff and feel like you have been languishing of late, perhaps this is the motivation you need. It was for me.

For anyone not in the know I am currently part of the Pacific Standard Tribe, visiting family and friends in Vancouver for a couple of days before drifting slightly eastward to Banff on Thursday. And since Banff isn’t a place that I am recently familiar with, I made sure that I was preparing for being there. It seems that everything I brought and packed was considering the current state of Banff, but an old state of Vancouver from when I was here last in June. Neglecting to remember that in the winter months it rains in Vancouver. A lot.

And not the type of rain that can be avoided with good timing and a careful watch on the doppler radar, this is a soul-crushing long-term drizzle that I suspect won’t let up the entire time that I’m here. At least is what the forecast seems to indicate. So while I brought gloves, scarf and toque to prepare for the -2°C temperatures in Banff, I didn’t bring an umbrella or rain jacket. How soon we forget. In Bermuda, rain is something that happens at a point in time. And you can literally watch it pass by overhead.

Bottom line, looks like I’m going to get damp. I’ll try to borrow an umbrella, but I’m not going to let some water from the sky stop me from seeing my friends and doing what I need to do. I’ll let you know how Banff goes at some point too (I’m there for the CanUX conference)

Well it was a slow Hallowe’en at our place in Bermuda, no one arrived at the door looking for candy. That just means more candy for me. I did even dress up for it.

I’m in the midst of creating a new web project which is small enough that it has a good chance of getting done. I using it as an excuse/reason to dabble with something new, technology-wise. To balance all the Microsoft that I get at work, I’m playing with Ruby again. Only this time not with Rails. Rails is so much more than I need for this. This time I am playing with HAML, Sinatra and at some point Passenger. If these things don’t interest you, then you have my permission to stop reading now, because it isn’t going to get better.

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Every year we celebrate the day of our birth.¹ Well many people do. Others elect to deny the passage of time by not acknowledging this annual event. We also like to celebrate/recognize anniversaries of other notable events such as marriages (relationships in general) and tragedies. In fact we recognize the concept so widely that most languages have a specific word for it. Coming to English via Medieval Latin, anniversary signifies a yearly return. Interestingly enough modern usage is borrowing upon this concept in an increasingly liberal manner. For example, I think that “10 year anniversary” is a tad redundant and that “10th anniversary” makes more sense. However, I know that the former is perhaps even more pervasive.

It is the other usages which pose the problem. “Our two month anniversary”. “Our three week anniversary”. Almost everyone understands what is being said here. But there is a contradiction here. I can’t speak for such development in other languages (feel free to comment if you have an idea), but in English I can picture two possible lines of evolution in this situation. The first is that new words will form derived from anniversary. The second and ultimately more likely scenario is that anniversary will lose its annual connotation and will be properly modified with other words like in my examples above.

All of this is an elaborate and well-researched introduction to my main point: I am 10,000 days old today. So you can call it my 10,000 day anniversary (which is a bit odd sounding), or we can coin a new word and call it my 10,000th dayversary. I don’t really like the form of that word though. I don’t like the yv together, it isn’t a combination which happens in English, so perhaps we can borrow on the more melodic spanish translation of day and use diaversary. With the pronounciation as /dia/, not /daɪə/. The word we use shouldn’t distract from the significance of the day. I think society would be more interesting if we denoted age in days as a matter of course. If the drinking age was 7000 days instead of 19 years (in NS and other Canadian provinces). I can definitely appreciate the extra cognitive overhead this would impose, and realize that is the reason we use years. Even with years, it takes me a fair bit of time after a birthday before I can consistently recall my new “age” if asked.

If you would like to play with dates and see when your next significant diaversary is I recommend visiting timeanddate.com. In general it is a great site for the temporally inclined (or those who would like to be).

So today I sit down to do a bit of work on my website only to find that my local version of the site won’t load. It is saying that it can’t reach my server. Well, since the server is running on this very machine, it was clearly an issue with the server software. And I realized that since I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard, it was likely something with the Apache configuration files.

Long story short, it was the SSL configuration file. It is located at /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-ssl.conf and it had been overwritten with the default file. So it pointed to a certificate that didn’t exist. It was thanks to Time Machine that I was able to quickly recover from this. Otherwise I would have had to remember the changes I had made. Let this be a warning to anyone else who hasn’t already upgraded and who has customized the SSL config. This could manifest itself as a server that won’t start (bad) or as an improperly configured security setup (worse).