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It's hard to believe that it's Christmas Eve, especially with the 25 C weather and strolling by the pool and so on.
I had intended to post a journal of our activities this past week, but I've been too busy, well, doing things.
I've taken advantage of the new digital camera as well, and maybe I'll get around to putting up a photoblog, but for now I'll just wish everybody a Merry Christmas.
I'm taking lots of pics and I'll get around to posting some soon. This morning I had to catch up on some email.
Yesterday was a nice first day and a relaxing intro to Qatar. In the morning, Richard, Andrew and I went to a saloon to get a hair cut and massage. We picked up some chicken wrap things for lunch from a stall downtown and then took a dip in the pool at the compound. When mom came home from school, she dropped us at the local mall while she went to a practice. We had a nice dinner and then browsed the upscale stores. In the evening we went to a Christmas gathering at the home of another family on the compound. Finally, we went back to the airport to pick up Richard's suitcase, which was delayed from London.
Plans for today include a visit to the souq's - the traditional barter marketplaces in Doha, followed by a visit to the college where mom teaches. I think there's another Christmas event tonight.
Kerry and I have safely arrived in Doha. There were a few flight delays, but nothing too complicated. It's great to see the whole family again, and we should have a great time here for the next two weeks. I'm going to post some pictures of the trip and mom and dad's place in Qatar, but right now I'm going swimming...
Note: the post times are still Atlantic Time (UTC -4) but I'm actually in UTC +3 time now, so it's 3 in the afternoon.
With my pseudo-libertarian, wanna-be philosophic political stance carefully cultured by years of reading slashdot and other junk-food tech web sites, I think it's only fitting that I add the privacy t-shirt to my wishlist and plug the privacy is not a crime website.
Oh, yeah. I'll update my wishlist for this Christmas Real Soon Now TM.
No, I'm not learning to fly, but my younger brother did this year, so Andrew, this is for you:
Today on slashdot and metafilter I saw an article about an Australian pilot stranded in Antarctica. More interesting than the news article itself, however, is the bio and story of Jon Johanson's three round-the-world flights in a homebuilt aircraft.
I recently applied for membership at Video Difference, a large independent movie rental store here in Halifax. It's a great store, with four floors, nice decor, and a selection of titles that really surpasses the blockbuster around the corner. Today I received a membership letter. Included were some coupons for free rentals and a letter. The mission statement at the top of the letter reads in part:
We develop meaningful and lasting relationships by offering a fun and enjoyable atmosphere.
Yes, the store has great atmosphere, but "meaningful relationships"? Please.
I never really took the time to look at my web site stats before, but since I was poking around to fix the MT send-entry spam vulnerability, I got curious.
First of all, I was quite shocked to see that there have been over 12000 individual http requests on my domain over the last three months. Secondly, the top browser is MSIE at 30%, but the second browser is mozilla, at 21%. Of course, not far behind is googlebot, at 19%, which probably explains why there have been over 700 hits on my humor pages alone (which are lame, badly out of date, and in serious need of revision).
I was flipping through the channels just now and caught the end of an ad for the wedding of the latest bachelor or bachelorette or whatever, which will be televised sometime in the near future. The voiceover was something to the effect of "blah, blah, blah-blah, blah, as America counts down to the television event of the year!!!!"
Who exactly is counting down, to what? Am I to take your word on it? Really? I can only laugh...
And on CBC, a bizarre short film with three excavators doing synchronized movements with their bucket arms, set to some nice classical music. It was by a Newfoundland filmmaker, to boot.
There is no blog entry today. In its place, we bring you these fine HTML products from around the world, provided by metafilter.com: