After an almost 3 month vacation in the South, I have returned to a cold and snowy Montreal. I was hoping that I had skipped out on the winter weather, but 20cm of snow greeted me on my return and gave me the opportunity to work on shoveling technique. We're rapidly running out of space to put the snow, so spring better get here quickly :)

Hi all,

Just thought I'd share a photo taken on my vacation in Cape Town, South Africa - where I currently still am. Just my way of sending a little bit of warmth and sunshine up to the folks in the northern hemisphere...

I finally scraped together some time and updated my website to Drupal 5.3. I still had some flexinode content on the site that I have now switched over to CCK nodes. I also changed the Portfolio system so that each project is now a CCK node - I used image module for this before.

I am still planning on updating the theme, so this back-end update was the first step in that process.

Now I am able to use the latest and greatest version of CAPTCHA to block those freaking spammers. Try get through this, you little buggers!

Seems like the Captcha module I had installed wasn't working properly - it always said the answer was wrong. Anyway, I have now removed the module and have installed the Spam module instead. I have used it recently on a few sites and it seems to work well, so we'll see how it goes on this site. Just make sure you don't use the word "cialis" anywhere in your comment, or it will be deleted immediately - no questions asked. Yes, I hate spammers! May the fleas of a thousand camels infest their armpits!

Yeah, I know, its been a while since I put anything new up here. My only excuse is that I've been really busy with several projects. In particular, the MBA Case Competition really took up a big chunk of my time. It was held at the beginning of January, so that project is pretty much done, bar a few minor updates here and there. Now I'm doing a "History of the Competition" site for them.

Some other stuff I worked on:

• made the theme for COTA health, and helped on several other aspects of the site - it should launch fairly soon
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I recently upgraded to the new Firefox 2.0 browser and found it really great. The built-in spellchecker (for when you type stuff in text boxes) has saved my bacon a couple of times already (you can even download a Canadian dictionary). Also, the "restore previous session" function has been a major lifesaver, especially since I started having Firefox freeze up on me fairly regularly.

I am doing quite a lot of web development at the moment, and use a webserver that runs on my laptop to test out my designs. My laptop also has a fancy NVidia GeForce Go 7600 graphics card in it, which allows me to have multiple desktops to work on. In theory this is a great thing, but in practice, its these extra NView functions that are killing Firefox 2.0.

Good news! After creating a couple of website using the greatest content management system (CMS) around - Drupal - I have finally gotten around to upgrading my own site. Yeah, I know, things haven't been updated here for quite some time. But now, hopefully, I'll be able to keep more up to date. No more having to edit each page manually; all I have to do is login, edit the text, submit and voila: updated content.

I was going to use the latest release of Drupal in the up and coming 5.x branch, but seeing as its still in development, and the structure of the various modules is quite different, I am using the latest release in the 4.7 branch. This way, I can do things like photo galleries, create my own content types, etc., without having to try and rewrite those modules to work in Drupal 5.x (my programming skills are not quite there...yet).