Staying in contact

I notice that the latest version of MSN Messenger includes an option to automatically update contact info for IM buddies. That's handy, and it's interesting too. It represents a decentralisation of the address book that I've considered a good idea for some time. If you still know who you want to contact, they shouldn't drop off your radar even when they change names, move cities, swap out their mobile phone plan, get a new email address and change IM networks all at the same time. I imagine that the generation of my kids will have no trouble organising a high school reunion because they'll have all the right tools available. Their kids will never even have a reunion because they'll stay in contact over the Internet for the rest of their lives.

On the other hand, if you don't want someone to find you again, you should be able to withhold your information from them. Privacy rules are necessary in that sense because we do live in a world with stalkers and plain old crazy ex-boyfriends and girlfriends.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's still tough to maintain contact these days.
PPS - Even with all our modern tools.

The Sunday Mok - Nintendo

Sunday - After church in the morning, I spent the afternoon waiting for a call from a floor polisher that never came. Deb and I watched Princess Diaries 2 at her place, then it was just church in the evening and a quiet Coffee Club supper.
Monday - I had a long meeting in the morning to discuss the direction of a general information management database and bought some new business shirts at lunchtime. After dinner at Deb's in the evening, we watched The Best of Victor Borge.
Tuesday - I had a bad night at karate where I couldn't balance, couldn't remember my techniques and couldn't even catch my breath properly. Deb came over for dinner and we watched some Scrubs and chatted.
Wednesday - I appreciated the sleep-in I got in the morning. The floor polisher came to give us a formal quote, then Deb and I did some major cleaning up in the downstairs study. We filled the recycling bin. I had dinner at Deb's with Mal, Linda, Mia, Sam and Scott.
Thursday - Deb met me for lunch, then we each bought a Nintendo DS. Dinner at Dad and Beth's in the evening.
Friday - Youth group in the evening was not too well attended. We helped set up for the church fair. Deb lost one of her rings and we eventually found it out the front of the church.
Saturday - I got up at 06:00 and spent all day at the church fair. For most of the time I helped on the bowling lane because I know that one goes easier with two people. Some of us had dinner at Sizzler afterwards.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm enjoying Brain Training on my DS.
PPS - Also New Super Mario.

Friday Zombie Blogging

WhoIsSick.com is a Google Maps mashup that shows you semi-live sickness data for your area as entered by users of the site. It should be relatively obvious what the zombie link is. Imagine logging in to WhoIsSick.com and seeing a whole lot of those little pie indicators sweeping across your city listing symptoms like "rigor mortis" and "craving for human flesh". Terrifying.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It might make a funny online flash mob situation.
PPS - Which I would certainly not endorse, of course.

The role of IT support

The job of the IT department in a company should be to enable communication and provide tools for productivity. They do have to secure data that requires it, but I think we over-emphasise that aspect. The IT department is there to serve the users and enable them to perform their jobs better, not to lock them out of increasingly more applications and network access protocols. If we get into a mindset where the IT department are the World Wide Web Gatekeepers, I think we have a problem. If I say "I can't connect to my clients this way" and IT says "Oh, we didn't think of that. Let's talk about how it could work", that's more like it.

Personally I'd love to say to our help desk staff that Mozilla Thunderbird is the email client I prefer over Lotus Notes, then have them reply that they'll set up the servers to allow me to use it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Always remember that humans are in control of the machines.
PPS - Adapt your machines to suit your needs, not the other way around.

Software review: Launchy

I love Launchy. It's a keyword program launcher that I heard about on productivity site Lifehacker and it's sped up my computing in a few instances. Now I can load up my note-taking program with a few keystrokes rather than reaching for the mouse. I had to set it up to search my desktop shortcuts, but that was well worth it. I appreciate the ability to select my remote desktop connection shortcuts from the keyboard.

The one downside is that I'm more aware of which programs can't be easily driven by keyboard, since my mouse hand goes to my mouse less often. A program like Launchy makes it clear just how far Windows has moved us towards a mouse-driven world.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Launchy is free and pretty slick.
PPS - It's made it to my standard toolkit.

Flat fee online television licensing

What if we licensed television online the same way radio stations license their music? Cory Doctorow mentions this now and then for music online, but there's no reason the same model couldn't work for television.

The music model goes like this: sign up every college band in the world for license fees. Allow all college students everywhere to gain access to the entire world's college band music output for any purposes they like, completely DRM-free for a flat fee (say, 50c per student per month). Based on a random sampling of downloads, redistribute the fees as royalties to the bands.

I think the same kind of model can work just as well for television online as for music. Granted, TV is slightly different, but I think it can work.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Movies too.
PPS - The flat fee would be collected and redistributed by internet service providers.

Friendships decaying over time

I don't generally consider that friendships decay over time. I think that's because I've been kind of bad at making new friends over the years - I want to keep any and all that I make. So it confuses me when someone says that they no longer consider themselves my friend simply because we haven't spoken very often recently. I imagine it also confuses them when I strike up conversations out of the blue.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I may be bad at contacting them regularly, but I can't forget my old friends.
PPS - I don't want to, either.

Copyright on one-run preaching DVDs.

I bought DVDs from a conference in Adelaide where they were careful to point out that (a) these DVDs will never be produced again and (b) orders will only be accepted at the conference itself. Fair enough, because I wouldn't want to keep going back and producing more on my own, so I don't think they would either. The problem is this: they have a copyright notice at the start that forbids all copying. So, technically, if I want to share these non-profit Christian messages with other people, I'm breaking the law. I can't copy them even for people who couldn't afford to go to the conference or didn't know about it.

Why copyright? It was probably just a choice based on the fact that DVDs have copyright notices elsewhere, so these DVDs need them too. It wasn't motivated by protecting profit or recovering costs because there was no profit and the costs were all covered already by conference fees (for the cameras and editing) and the DVD order price (for blank discs and burning effort). The message should be allowed out as freely as possible. Putting the copyright notice on there was a tad short-sighted in my opinion.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It might have been put there by external editors.
PPS - And it might just have been part of standard procedure at that company.

The Sunday Mok - Harry Potter Week

Sunday - After church in the morning and a short nap, Deb and I rented a few DVDs to watch during the week. I sang in the evening church service and heard such vivid tales of the Supanova sci-fi/fantasy night that Deb and I want to go next year.
Monday - It's been a relatively quiet week at work. In the evening Deb and I watched Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. I liked the first half a bit better than the second.
Tuesday - We had a presentation at lunch from an instrumentation company. I attended, but it's really out of my area of expertise. I ran to karate in the evening instead of taking the car. Afterwards, Deb and I watched Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets which I think was my favourite so far.
Wednesday - I gave blood around lunchtime. It had been long enough since my last donation that I had lapsed out of their registry, so I had to go through registration again. In the evening Deb and I watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I drifted off to sleep near the end, so I missed a little bit of it.
Thursday - I helped Deb put together the youth group program flier, then we watched The Break-up, which I'd have to describe as an unromantic comedy. I cringed at the shouting matches.
Friday - I helped with some safety assessments in the afternoon at work (not paper cuts). At youth group in the evening we went down to a local park for a barbeque. With the numbers we're getting (just one that night) it may be appropriate to redeploy some of our leaders elsewhere.
Saturday - Deb and I had a meeting with Gwen in the morning, then looked for music for the reception. Deb had her hen's night that evening, so I stayed home. I burned some DVDs for Mal, watched Full Metal Alchemist and went to bed. It was an early night.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I remember liking Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire when I saw it, too.
PPS - I might pick up more if I watched it again.

Friday Zombie Blogging

There's been a zombie attack on Twitter! I can't read the actual story right now (must be a heavy server load) so for now I'm reading the news coverage. Apparently it's a Twitter feed from a fictional zombie attack, meaning that it tells you how two brothers are fleeing from their small home town after a zombie invasion. It sounds fascinating.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I do hope the Twitter servers are back online soon.
PPS - I don't use Twitter myself.

Annoying people don't mean it

People rarely realise how annoying they are, and only very occasionally do it on purpose. So if you assume that someone is doing something deliberately to annoy you, you're probably wrong. If you let it build up inside you, the first time it comes out will sound exasperated for no reason.

For instance, say someone is crunching chips near you while you try to watch television. This is probably not a deliberate act to keep you from hearing, but if you assume that it *is*, you might try waiting patiently for it to stop. When you can't take it any more, you'll burst out with "STOP EATING YOUR CHIPS SO FREAKING LOUDLY!" which will take the offender completely by surprise and serve to generate bad feeling between you. So if you're one of those people, just take a breath before you burst out at the next annoying person you meet and remember that they probably didn't mean it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Sometimes people do it on purpose.
PPS - Just remember that's the exception, not the rule.

People are essential to success

It is never our procedures, manuals or training materials that bring success. It is not our money or our advertising or our location. It is our people. As such, we must think first of the people who work for us and do right by them. If we do that, the work will come in and the money will follow, the advertising will be done for free by our clients and our procedures will be grown and improved as part of our daily work.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It does take longer to grow a business with Good rather than Evil.
PPS - But Evil businesses collapse quickly.

What is the technological singularity?

I'm reading about the concept of the technological singularity on Wikipedia, just trying to get my head around it. I think the idea is that technology starts advancing so quickly that it represents a fundamental break in the nature of the world. Cory Doctorow described it in an interview as "things getting better and better until they burst".

It's hard to squeeze a big concept like this into my tiny brain. It seems to me that the world would grow an extra dimension. You need to see something like that from an outside perspective to make sense of it, and the only way to explain that from my point of view is from totally outside the three spatial dimensions as we know them.

If you look at the number of blades on disposable razors (stick with me, it's from the Wikipedia article), it's increasing exponentially. Extend it onwards into the future and you have infinite blades by 2015. So what does that mean in practice? You can't fit infinite blades on a disposable razor, so it must be something else. Everything post-Singularity starts sounding like that: a totally logical but inconceivable notion.

The whole of this concept makes about that much sense. You start talking about crazy things like computers that build better ones faster than you can count the generations. By the time one is finished building the next, the third one is designed and running. You're standing between two mirrors and you see the reflections start to propagate, then accelerate, and then they all stack up and rush back to the mirror face and you're falling. You don't even know where you are any more, because the world has popped and it moves too quickly for you to keep up.

The concept of ascension as in the Stargate universe can be seen as a kind of singularity result. When your own earthly intelligence builds at a rate that exceeds the capacity of this universe, your mind bursts beyond it and you ascend to a higher plane. Your life there, though far beyond what lower mortals comprehend, is still mundane relative to the other denizens of that plane. I think that's the post-Singularity answer: it's huge, but once you're there it becomes mundane.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't understand half of this.
PPS - I don't think I can.

The right to communicate globally

It is the government's job to ensure that the rights of each citizen are upheld through the creation of appropriate laws and the agencies to enforce them. When communications technology (broadband Internet and telephones specifically) is a basic right, the government's job is to create and maintain an agency and infrastructure to uphold that right. That means a state-owned telecommunications company that is motivated not by the bottom line but by service of the citizens. If Ma and Pa Farmer in the remote outback want broadband Internet, then, they can get it at an affordable price or even (dare I say) free because of their tax money.

Now obviously electronic communications is a less urgent right than food, shelter and the right to live, but how do people hear about your problems if you're invisible and silent, cut off from the world? If you're stuck in an alley in a rich city and people who could help you walk past every day, oblivious, what's would be the first step? Either call out so they hear you or get out where they can see you. If everyone physically around you is in the same crummy situation, you need a wider audience. That's what the Internet is for.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We used to have a state-owned telco in Australia.
PPS - We let the government sell it.

The Sunday Mok - Odd Jobs and Wild Hogs

Sunday - Deb and I attended the Uniting Church in the morning rather than the Baptist, then took a nap. After lunch we worked on our wedding order of service and watched Ella Enchanted. I ran the computer for the evening service.
Monday - I slept in a bit before a youth group planning meeting at my place. We cut down a pesky guava tree in my back yard. At Deb's we watched the old-school Ninja Turtles movies and Just My Luck.
Tuesday - I've been listening to podcasts (mostly Cory Doctorow) on the bus all week. I worked on odd jobs at work all day. Karate was good, and was followed by City of Heroes.
Wednesday - The odd jobs theme continued during the working week. It gave me a chance to improve things rather than just fighting metaphorical fires. Deb and I tried to watch Scrubs but the disc was a bit scratched.
Thursday - I finished a tool at work that should save me lots of time updating project codes and eventually pass the job on altogether. After dinner at Dad & Beth's, Deb and I watched Scrubs.
Friday - Deb and I dressed up nice and went to dinner at Dos Amigos, then saw Wild Hogs which was funny stuff.
Saturday - I eventually got up at 08:30, went for a jog and headed to Deb's. We scouted some locations for wedding photos then drove out to Ikea to buy a bed frame. They were sold out of the kind we wanted. The evening was a 70s themed party at Tracey's with the church folk.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I was going to say I hadn't had fondue before.
PPS - There was only one other time.

Australian television downloading habits

We download television in Australia because we like television and we have to wait six whole months to get it through legitimate channels. Meanwhile our internet friends in the United States are talking about shows we haven't seen yet and won't see until they are very old news. How do we continue to relate to our friends in the global community when our local media channels have a half year gap between them? We go where the television is. In pre-internet days that would mean trekking across the globe to the right geographical location, but also in those days we might never have heard about our favourite show because it just didn't play here and nobody could tell us.

Now with the internet we don't need a geographically dense population of the right demographic to make a successful television show. We have a global pipe that can get our show to exactly the right audience worldwide simultaneously for near-zero distribution cost. So what's standing in the way? Well, for one thing there are myriad lawyers lining the virtual borders with copyright banners and licensing contracts.

Then there are the problems of how much (and just plain how) to charge for it and make money. Someone's got to figure out both of these problems together. If you start selling all the content over iTunes six months ahead of an arbitrary local schedule, will you put the local free-to-air broadcasters or pay TV providers out of business? What kind of mayhem will result when people can just buy television that has no ads in it? How will we promote new shows when there's no time scheduling to provide lead-in and there's no advertising between acts?

Until these hysterical questions are answered, it's unlikely commercial television will move forward into a proper global culture.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't bother with much television any more.
PPS - That's mostly a quality issue, though.

Google Calendar SMS alerts

Google Calendar SMS reminders are the best thing to happen to me this week. If you provide Google Calendar with your mobile number (and you are with Vodaphone or Optus if you're in Australia) you can get reminders for your events sent to your mobile phone via SMS for free. My main temptation will be to send myself too many of these reminders initially, and it could be a little while before I find the right balance, but for now it's an excellent service of which I plan to take full advantage.

My main problem with my calendar is that I can't see it all the time, and that's because my phone is very old and can't sync with my PC. Having the ability to get SMS reminders of calendar events this easily will definitely help me stay on top of my calendar.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I anticipate getting a newer phone fairly soon.
PPS - Not sure exactly when, though.

Friday Zombie Blogging

Babylon Fields is a TV show filming at the moment and due to premiere on CBS "later this year". The premise is that the dead awaken and just try to go home to resume their un-lives. Naturally, there's not much to go on right now, but you could keep track of the IMDB page if you so choose.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've also heard that Grindhouse's Planet Terror is worth a watch.
PPS - Not yet released in Australia.

Brisbane's water crisis affected by population growth?

I've toyed with a theory about Brisbane's water crisis over the past few months that goes something like this: we have a weekly influx of 1500 people coming to live here permanently, and they use water like the rest of us. At that rate, even with arbitrary water restrictions of 140 litres per person per day, our water needs are increasing at a rate of 1.47 million litres per week. By the end of one year of population growth at that rate, our water needs have increased by 76.44 million litres per week.

Our "level 5" water restrictions are meant to save us 48 litres per person per day. If the current population is 2 million people (which is an overestimate) level 5 water restrictions will be overtaken by population growth and increased water demands in just over a year.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I did some calculations on required rainfall for water tanks too.
PPS - But I'm not confident enough to post them.

Software designed for the good of the customer

When software design choices are motivated by some interest besides the good of the customer, the program has already failed. This makes DRM a failure. It also makes bloat, feature creep and pointless chrome a failure condition. It means that the customer will want what's best, but doesn't always know what's best, and making that decision for them is a big responsibility with big consequences.

DRM is a failed design because it looks for the good of a third party rather than the user. Once you get your songs from iTunes, for example, the DRM there attempts to control whether you can play that music on another computer or a device not made by Apple. At best, that's silently stabbing your customer in the back, and at worst you lose the customer because you're fighting with them.

If people want DRM-free music, they know where to get it: the peer-to-peer networks. They might start out wanting to do the right thing and purchase the music, but once they run into the DRM wall that says "no, you can't use it that way", chances are they'll defect. I see it as a losing battle.

If software is designed right, then it always does what the customer wants. It won't tell you that your portable music player is unacceptable. It won't tell you that you can't copy and paste from this or that document. It won't lock you out of your operating system for failing to dial home and tell the vendor that you really did buy it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If you try to force the customer's hand, you'll force it away from you.
PPS - There are plenty of developers doing it right on their own time.

New note

To me, a note-taking application that makes you issue a "new note" command before you start writing is broken. Note taking should be very free-form, not limited by the software. Forcing users to click a "new note" button (even if it has a keyboard shortcut) is like putting a plastic sheet between every single sticky note in the pad. The customers don't want it and it's not necessary. I could never get used to it after a note taking application that just lets you start writing, so any program that makes me take two actions (open program, "new note") gets immediate black marks next to just one action (open program).

Trust me. It builds up. Anything you have to use all the time gets its quibbles and irritations magnified before they fade into familiarity.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If the program is meant to stay open all the time, it's a little different.
PPS - In that case there will always be an action to focus on the program before writing.

Solutions and technology

Technology is not an answer in and of itself. It is not a destination, it is a tool. If you can't think about your problem without computers, you can't make them give you the solution.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm starting to learn to see the user over the tech.
PPS - The perception of functionality is more important than actual functionality.

The Sunday Mok - Happy Easter

Sunday - After church in the morning, Deb helped me prepare for the Brisbane Zombie Walk. Maybe next year she'll come along. Dinner was at the church during the evening service, followed by supper at the local Coffee Club.
Monday - I started evaluating ThinkingRock as a tool for implementing Getting Things Done. I found a few annoyances during the week. Bible study in the evening consisted of four of us at the manse, then Deb and I watched a couple of Hellsing episodes.
Tuesday - A standard day at work consisting of odd jobs. Karate was a bit easier than usual in the evening.
Wednesday - I finally finished some personal scanning that I brought to work over a year ago. After dinner Deb accompanied me to a church service rehearsal for Thursday, then we chatted for most of the evening.
Thursday - I spent most of the work day figuring out some timesheet transfer problems. Deb met me for lunch, which was nice. I met my step-nephew James for the first time in the evening. Being only a week old, he was essentially unconscious, but deadly cute. After the church service, Erin, Laura, Deb and I watched The Passion of the Christ at Erin's.
Friday - I slept a teeny bit too late to make it to the Good Friday church service on time. I was only 10 minutes late, though. We followed the service with a youth group Easter egg hunt, then Deb and I spent the rest of the day watching DVDs - a bit of Hellsing and some Scrubs.
Saturday - I went for a run in the morning, then did some touch-up painting with Deb and Linda. Mal, Linda, Deb, my Dad and I shared lunch and in the afternoon Deb and I went to Officeworks at Milton. Left unrestrained, I could spend a fair amount of money there. We saw Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the evening with Murrae and Tracey. I liked it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The animation was quite hyperactive.
PPS - Overall, TMNT was a positive-flavoured flashback.

Your own private jet (butler not included)

We are creating larger and larger passenger airplanes all the time, requiring the expansion of major airports that are already micro-cities out in the sticks for various reasons. This is, apparently, an economy of scale, where bigger craft means less cost per passenger, but requires massive infrastructure to support it.

Now, if someone figures out how to reduce the size of the planes, their piloting requirements and the logistics involved, we get a totally different situation. That's as long as this is all cheaper than the centralised option. If it is cheaper, everyone can fly more and fly to more convenient destinations. That would be one of the biggest wins in history.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You could fly direct from Weipa to Auckland by yourself.
PPS - For $20.

Friday Zombie Blogging

At the risk of harping on the one event for three different posts in a week, today I bring you my very limited and very low-quality set of photos from the 2007 Brisbane Zombie Walk as well as a couple of news stories covering the event.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not sure why the photos are such low quality.
PPS - Maybe I'll try uploading them again.

A soundless bubble

Sometimes I can't stand the sounds of the office and I want to block them out, but I can't concentrate properly with music playing. At times like that, I wish I had a white noise track I could play to block out sound but not distract me from my work. It seems like an extreme, crazy-person kind of idea, and there's a good chance that's accurate. I may be the only one who notices. Quiet is important for me to work effectively. I've considered getting noise cancelling headphones just for that purpose, but so far I've resisted.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - How much would you like to just turn off the ambient sound around you?
PPS - For me, that would be awesome.

Loyalty

Corporate loyalty, where the individual is loyal to the collective, is rare these days, primarily because the collective has been so disloyal to us as individuals. I heard a similar point to this espoused in Cory Doctorow's podcast novel "Eastern Standard Tribe", and it's started resonating with me. His point was that if you're not loyal to the collective (the corporation, the country, your subculture tribe) then don't expect the collective to be loyal to you and treat you well. That got me thinking about why we see no corporate loyalty in the modern workforce anymore. I believe the problem is as I've stated above.

Because we've heard (or experienced) stories of companies firing hundreds of employees at the drop of a hat, with no more reason than to boost quarterly profits, our tenures feel flimsy. Even if our own company is not one of those, it's hard to project the opposite image these days. So, with the end of job security comes the end of employee loyalty and that's that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've been at this company for 4.5 years now.
PPS - Everyone raises their eyebrows at that.

Time-dilated kitchen

Here's a weird science-fiction idea: if the kitchen at a restaurant was on a different timeline, it might be possible to put an order in and get the food straight out again from our point of view. Inside the kitchen, time would be passing at a normal rate but the dining floor would be moving glacially slow. The main problem would be keeping the cooks occupied for the in-between times and paying them for weeks of work every night. I suppose the solution to that would be to run the time dilation device only when an order is up. So the cooks stand around waiting for an order, then zip through it on fast forward, and go back to waiting again.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Now that would look very strange.
PPS - And probably the food in storage would spoil faster.

Shambletown

Yesterday was the second annual Brisbane Zombie Walk, and my first ever. I was dubbed "cubicle zombie" by my fellow faux-undead, and it took us a good hour to wander across town from the Roma Street Parklands to the City Botanic Gardens. Once through the gardens, we sort of dispersed in confusion, but it seemed like everyone was getting tired by then. It was nice of the police to help us out - they blocked off streets as we shuffled past, moaning wordlessly or calling out for brains.

We startled a few shopkeepers, but the folks at Tiffany's were unshakeable. They must be specially trained.

Stand-out costumes were the zombie Wiggles, and many others had gone to a lot of effort. In all, a lot of fun, but if I go again, I'll probably spend a little less time in character and a little more time meeting people.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Lots of funny looks once I left the horde to go home.
PPS - Many thanks to Deb for doing my make-up.

The Sunday Mok - Uncle Mokalus

Sunday - After the morning church service, Deb and I put the first coat of paint on the master bedroom here. It took a while because we had to resort to brushes instead of a roller for three walls. I set up the computer for the evening service, then Deb did the actual clicking around. Supper at the Coffee Club afterwards.
Monday - It felt like a quiet week at work, even though I always had things to do. For bible study in the evening, it was just Deb, me and John who led us. We went ahead with it anyway.
Tuesday - Deb came to watch the karate class in the evening, where we started at the top level kata and worked down, mostly for my benefit. When we start at the bottom and work up, we never get the whole way to my level. We watched a couple of episodes of Hellsing, which is a bit odd.
Wednesday - I made a couple of optimisations to programs at work, and both felt good. I picked up Deb's freshly-minted wedding ring, too. After dinner we watched Super Troopers with Sam and Mia. I laughed.
Thursday - Family dinner was suspended for the evening because my step-sister went in for an induced labour. She had a baby boy, so now I'm a step-uncle. I haven't seen him yet. Deb and I watched more Hellsing after dinner.
Friday - For youth group in the evening, we five leaders and the one attending youth painted mini golf props for the upcoming church fair. Since there wasn't much actual painting to do, we talked about movies, games and books for the rest of the evening.
Saturday - I went for a jog in the morning; apparently it was my first in some time. Deb and I painted more of the master bedroom in the morning, then went to see Glenys and Gary's new rented place and catch up with the gang. Just when dinner started, we left to meet Erin, Michelle and Bridgit at the Normanby Hotel. I thought there were going to be more people there.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I may get to see my step-nephew this week.
PPS - I hope so.