As I head into the new year, I have exciting things in store, chief of which one week from now is meeting Jacqui whom I’ve had more fun taunting after knowing her from a distance for 2-years than anyone since “Peter Cottondung” (don’t ask) in Junior High.
To understand how she makes me feel, here’s a little audio:
I predict we’re going to have a fantastic year… and the answer to that riddle will be solved shortly.
I also want to take this opportunity to say a big and hearty THANK YOU to the friends and strangers who’ve touched both of us by supporting Loving Jacqui with a kind word, your readership (even my friend’s 11-year old daughter, Cayla, is a shy reader, I’ve heard), and even your financial contributions. It was amazing to us in a good sense that a few people whom we didn’t even know (and a couple we did, like Jacqui’s friend) tripped on this blog and donated something to help us unite: people like Roby, Doug, and Dustin. 
All told, I probably raised enough to pay for my passport, which is 10 times my original goal of $8… just to see if it could be done.
Last but not least, my gratitude to Bear’s parents for raising such a one-of-a-kind outstanding daughter with a sidesplitting personality, heart of platinum, and, more importantly, a character to match. I will meet you soon as well as Jacqui’s beloved brothers, James and Johnathon, her sister Caroline, and her friends. I’m sure that *ahem* you have nothing but great things to say about her and don’t have any entertaining stories to tell me about embarrassing situations.
Let’s drink a toast to the future and Jacqui, you and I, let’s do it in person and for real in the coming days.
Happy New Year!
Wow… that was good and not only the food.
I just came back from my Dad’s girlfriend (of at least 15-years!)’s son’s house for Boxing Day vittles and fun.
I’ll post more pictures later, but for now, here it is: My dad, Dave, and my youngest niece, Angel-Jazdell (she’s a cutie).
Ah heck, let’s have another one… my mom, Gwen, sister, Ginny a.k.a. Phoenix, and yours truly on Christmas:
When these photos are finally edited (probably not until I get to Australia January 7th or later!) you can reach the proper photo album by clicking on either photo. Until then, clicking on them will just default to the Loving Jacqui Photos main page.
Well, as I go to visit my family and you visit yours, I just wanted to wish you every good thing.
Whether you are black or white, male or female, young or old, free or enslaved, whatever your religion (if any) I wish you all the the best and may every good thing come your way.
The next year will be trying for myself and for Bear and, indeed, for many in this world.
During it all, remember all that is good in life: love, family, responsibility, growth, struggle, joy, and pleasure.
[Edited] Bless you — and may you take actions that produce happiness.
Here’s a video of a recent holiday visit to my sis’s house where I got to spend time with her and my nieces: Something that brings me happiness:
… by lyricist Sammy Cahn and composer Jule Styne:
Oh, the weather outside is frightful
But the fire is so delightful
And since we’ve no place to go
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!
It doesn’t show signs of stopping
And I brought some corn for popping
The lights are turned way down low
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!
When we finally say good night
How I’ll hate going out in the storm!
But if you really hold me tight
All the way home I’ll be warm
The fire is slowly dying
And, my dear, we’re still good-bye-ing
But as long as you love me so
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!
My city is on the west coast and unlike the stereotype of Canada, it snows very rarely here.
The last big snow we had was in 1996. It snowed snow much they called out the military to check on people, especially elderly people, trapped in their homes here in Victoria.
I was snowed in a small cabin outside of Port Alberni for a week with my cute girlfriend. It was rough.
That was then and this is now.
 |
| Click photo to see pictures from Victoria, BC’s recent rare snowstorm. |
… and now I’ve discovered the most astounding woman, sometimes in a good sense, that I’ve ever met in my life and she’s from Perth, Australia.
At the risk of a bit of hero worship, this was a man.
Here is a brief history of his three famous voyages.
No, not the genius superagents who are alleged to have poisioned Alexander Litvinenko, outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, using tens of millions of dollars of radioactive isotope polonium-210 that left a trail from one end of Europe to the other.
Because, if you want to assassinate someone you should:
- spend $50-100 million just on the weapon because bullets are just so passé
- choose a weapon that can be easily tracked over buildings, cities, and oceans… even to specific apartments and couches in Germany for ______ sakes
- select something that’s dangerous for you too because, well, who doesn’t like a bit of radiation poisoning?
No, if that was truly an assassination attempt, and I have my doubts (I believe it could have been nuclear material smuggling gone wrong and that Litvinenko could have been one of the smugglers and killed himself by accident), these agents are far too smart for a mere commoner like myself to comprehend.
The greatest spy ever is undoubtedly former WestJet vice-president Mark Hill.
WestJet is Canada’s second largest airline and Mark Hill decided to run a corporate spying operation on our largest, Air Canada.
Essentially, he used a confidential Air Canada employee password to snoop around their website and steal flight schedules and private data so he could plan WestJet’s routes to maximize their profits and hurt Air Canada.
This wasn’t the most brilliant part, however. That came later when he boarded an Air Canada jet wearing a WestJet denim shirt and a leather jacket with a large WestJet logo on the back.
He sat down beside this nice man who said he works in, “…international corporate intelligence,” and who introduced himself as an ex-CSIS agent (CSIS is the Canadian Security Intelligence Service — our spies responsible for foreign intelligence gathering).
This “ex-CSIS agent” (really a former Royal Canadian Mounted Police staff sergeant and private detective for Air Canada) was reading a book, “The Art of Deception,” by Kevin Mitnick. He easily struck up a conversation because apparently Mark Hill was very cocky and was making fun of Air Canada while sitting on their airplane wearing a WestJet logo and he liked to talk.
The private eye proceded to watch him pull out sheets of paper from a manila envelope and enter confidential Air Canada data into his laptop.
So let me get this straight. You’re running a spying operation yourself, you’re sitting on your target’s property making fun of them while wearing your company’s colours, a man who introduces himself as an ex-spy who currently works in corporate espionage sits down beside you reading a book about about deception and you decide to open up to him and let him watch you enter private Air Canada data into your computer… on an Air Canada plane?
And for that, Mark Hill, I dub you the world’s greatest spy.
[Source: The Gumshoe and his target at 30,000 feet by Brent Jang]
UPDATE: From the University of Victoria Alumni 2003 Legacy Awards page:
WestJet Airlines vice-president and co-founder Mark Hill, BA ‘85, accepts his Distinguished Alumni Award. Mark says his studies of military history and strategy at UVic helped him to develop WestJet’s highly successful business plan.
“It’s the wussification of America that’s killing us.”
I was typing something on Friday before I left for work and a bit of motion just on the periphery of my vision to the left caught my attention. It was a spider on my desk.
I thought that I’m leaving Canada for 3-months soon and it’ll be on his own, so why hurt it? Just leave it be.
I continued typing.
When I got back from 10-hours later, it was still on my desk and I snapped the picture. I thought, “Jacqui, in all her sweetness, would have smashed it with a shoe by now.”
I, who believe in military force and the death penalty, found myself picking up the newspaper to walk to the window in another room. It was scared so I spoke to it, “You may be scared right now, but you’re perfectly safe; I won’t hurt you. In a moment you will be free again,” and I gently shook it off the paper to the ground a few inches below.
… to Dave and Dot Sutton at Sevenoaks Art for offering to provide a Sevenoaks logo-free can of walking Spam optimized for Loving Jacqui’s background colour. It’s for use on my intro-page to the invite friends form that you can see by navigating to:
» “… & Other Options”
→ “Options”
→ “Email This to Your Mates”
in the menu above.
Dave also created the animated Canadian and Australian flags in my sidebar and his website has many intriguing animations, graphics, and tutorials. If you have a website, I recommend visiting:
P.S. Dave just offered. It’s not done yet. Gee. Hold your horses, Jacqui.
UPDATE: Can of spam delivered. Dave promised and he delivered, for no other reason than it’s his hobby and he’s a decent fellow. Thanks for helping, Sevenoaks!
I will not tell her until then. Because I’m cruel.
Just finished making Loving Jacqui all Christmassy… we were talking about fellow British Columbian, Dave Shea, the creator of the Loving Jacqui template (before heavy modification).
He’s one of the luminaries behind CSS Zen Garden.
A year ago I had a roommate, Barry, who is a generation older than I, but he was just a very good friend to me.
I had a website I wrote in Microsoft Word. Here it is:
lovingjacqui.net/originalopenletter
(although I’ve since rewritten it in something other than Word!)
This is how I met Jacqui, of course, and writing it was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.
But I couldn’t have cared a less about web design. Heck, I wanted it in old school “typewriter” font because it is the closest thing to handwritten and I wanted it to kind of read like a handwritten letter.
It did kinda bug me that when I opened it in other browsers other than Internet Explorer, it looked awful. But since most women I knew used IE, it worked anyway.
My roommate told me that he designed his websites in Notepad. This kind of floored me.
“Notepad?”
“Yep.”
I had no idea about this at the time, but all a website is is a text file using a simple language, (X)HTML: (extensible) Hypertext Markup Language.
It’s very logical and simple. Write it in a text file, change the text file “extension” from .txt to .html and you’re in business.
This realization floored me, but I was intrigued.
Anyway, when I found myself understanding that Jacqui was attracting my attention in a way other women aren’t, I created this blog for her.
Barry had also introduced me to the CSS Zen Garden as an example of how powerful Cascading Style Sheets are.
Go there and see the design. It’s attractive by itself, but look deeper… on the right hand column you’ll see several other designs by other web graphic artists.
They all use the exact same HTML. Try them out.
They are identical even if they look different. What has changed is that each uses a different CSS file. You can visualize why “Cascading Style Sheet” is the perfect name. Everything just flows from it in this neat cascade that you can control by assigning unique “classes” and “ids” to different (X)HTML page elements. It’s how on Loving Jacqui you can press the button on the top right and switch the webpage from “Original Blue” to “Ghastly Pink” and fortunately back again.
The CSS Zen Garden is known around the web for being a beautiful example that has inspired many including me.
I was also talking with her about how I don’t like “alpha-channel transparency” background images.
“What the —?”
Before on the Internet it used to be that your only option for transparency was you could take an image and save it as a .gif file (as opposed to the equally common .jpg usually used for photographs because it offers small file size and millions of possible colours: .gif only offers 256).
When saved as a .gif, it is possible to make certain pixels (picture dots) 100% transparent, which means you can see whatever is behind them.
This allows you to put an image of a dolphin, for example, on your aqua web page and it looks like it belongs there. Even if it really belongs in the ocean.
Newer, more capable web browsers than Internet Explorer: contenders like Opera and Firefox, the one I use, follow more closely Internet standards laid out by the World Wide Web consortium (WC3).
This makes things easier for web designers because while Internet Explorer is common, you’re always trying to make it do things that it “should” do, but won’t do, not without significant tweaking and, “Why the hell does it do that when I just told it to do the opposite?” that you just don’t have to bother with with these other browsers.
For years these other browsers have supported alpha-channel transparency.
You know how when you look through the water, you can see the water and the person swimming beneath it?
Partial transparency = alpha-channel transparency.
Now that the new release of Internet Explorer, IE7, supports alpha-channel transparency, more web designers are placing a background image on their page and then make the surface you write on partially transparent so that you can see the background image like a watermark. They then fix it in place so that when you scroll down, the picture stays and the text itself moves.
This looks very cool and gives the website a certain “unearthy” feeling that makes the site seem light as a feather. It’s beautiful.
But damnit. I come to a website to read and having a photo with light and dark spots behind a partially transparent page makes it hard to read. I guess I’m not 18 anymore, but as a 34-year old, I shudder to think what it’ll be like to read this when I’m 80-something and Bear is lovingly blowing the dust out of my eyes as we send instant telepathic emails enquiring about our prescription drug plan.
So we’re having this conversation, and I’m telling Bear about how I dislike alpha-channel transparency and I’m reading a comment on another blog and I discover this link:
α-channel transparency done right: A Jacqui Bear style “Pretty in Pink” theme even I can approve of
“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
— Winston Churchill
American football, 41-17, with 2:42 left to play:
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