Weblog

A few days ago was the attack in Ottawa that woke Canadians up to the idea that terrorist activity at home was a real possibility, preceded by another attack against military a few days earlier. I had been expecting that some sort of attack was possible for some time, and wondered about the timing and how prepared the emergency services would be. To some extent this came sooner than I had expected. However, it turned out not to be a foreign attack and from one perspective was just a lone guy gone mad.

There have been a couple anti-discrimination cases in the news recently that seem to me to hurt the goal behind the complaints. A bakery in Ireland has had a complaint filed for refusing to make a cake that depicts gay marriage, and recently a bakery in Colorado lost a complaint filed against them for refusing to make a cake for a gay wedding.

I have decided to change this site's infrastructure from a manually maintained one to a content management system. This will make it easier to add content going forward. During the transition some content will be missing until I get it all ported over.

Hello all, I know it’s been a long time since I’ve talked with some of you. I’ve heard from many people over the holiday season and enjoyed reading your holiday letters. Here’s a synopsis of my past year to catch everyone up!

• Music
• Manji
• Bread
• Running
  • TO Pride run
• Swimming
• Gym

I had occasion to practice making moulded chocolates for a birthday party. It was a lot of work for the occasion, but was good practice. My previous attempt at making these chocolates was less than successful. The chocolate was tempered, but lost its temper either because of the instructions I followed to warm the mould, or to refrigerate to help set the shell, made worse when I had to rewarm it in the mould when it set too much.

I saw some Seville oranges at the grocery store and had to pick them up. It was definitely an impulse buy, I don't usually buy fresh fruit and certainly didn't know there would be enough of a market for these oranges for the stores to stock them. Getting these meant I had to make marmalade.

I've received a few holiday letters and thought maybe it was time for me to do my own. I apologize that I'm not a reliable correspondent, but at least this way I can catch people up with the main things going on. Of course snail mail is très passé and I'd probably miss a lot of people, so I'm doing it as a Web page.

As my airline miles card shows, I've done a fair bit of traveling this year (even though less than most of my colleagues).

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 was published as an official standard December 11, 2008. I've been involved with this work indirectly for 10 years, and directly for 6 years, so this represents the culmination of a lot of energy and focus. For the past few years we've just been processing the thousands of comments we've received. This year alone we pushed out three stages of the document, each of which required certain formal work to be done.