Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 10 Years in Canada

    It was 10 years ago today that my family moved to Canada [0][1]. As the sponsor for my wife and kids' permanent residency, I had been in Canada, getting things setup at a rental house in Quebec since April 1st of 2016. Most everything I found online about this process said that the sponsor needed to show "intent to relocate", and that the easiest way to do this was to move in advance of your family. So I worked on setting up the kids' school attendance, and getting a family doctor. I took a week off from work in June and drove back to the States, helping to pack, sell off the last of our belongings that weren't going, and load up a U-haul for the trip north.

    We got to the border at the Derby Line crossing in Quebec in the afternoon. Despite our anxiety about this part of the process, it turned out to be pretty easy. We had all the required paperwork ready, including detailed inventory sheets for all of our belongings. The CBSA guards did open our U-haul to take a look, sheets in hand, but closed it when they saw the huge pile of household stuff filling every nook and cranny.

  • Wild Flower Explorations

    I'm continuing my exploration of the wild flowers around the Tanana River dike road trails south of the Fairbanks airport. I'm using the field guide "Wild Flowers of the Yukon, Alaska & Northwestern Canada (3rd ed.) by Trelawny.

    [...]

    Yesterday (2026-06-15) I invested quite a bit of time trying to identify a small plant with little white flowers, amidst some rocks along a gravel path near the river, but never came to a conclusion. It is a short (young?) green plant, about 2-3 inches tall, with small, white, five petaled flowers in a star arrangement. The flowers have green receptacles and white (anthers?), and are about 1 cm in diameter. The leaves are oblong, with acute tips, and about 1.5 cm long. The stems are very thin and reddish in color. The leaves are opposite (in pairs) on the stem, with each pair rotated 90 degrees from the previous. The general pattern of the flowers is there is one stem with leaves on it, having an older flower, and a branch off of that, which in turn has two small branches with one younger flower on each (no leaves). The plant has some similarities to "Tuberous Spring Beauty" (purslane) , as well as Brooklime, and the flowers resemble wild strawberry flowers, but with thinner petals.

  • burdocks

    you're tangled in me
    somewhere 
    like burdocks in my hair
    as a child running wild
    you're just less painful
    and more welcome
    you I want to keep
    

  • traveler

    I met a traveler once. We were watching a busker perform on the street. He was singing Yesterday by The Beatles, I believe. I'd asked the traveler for the names a few songs before this. However, during this particular song, I realized the sorrow that hid beneath the surface. I brushed it off for the time being as she seemed to be enjoying the song, even with her slightly foggy eyes at this point. Then we listened to some more songs and made a few comments between them. The busker's set ended. At that point, we got to talk a bit more. The traveler turned out to be Canadian, traveling across the UK to find some solace and family. A radio host, having lost her mother two years ago, resorted to alcohol, and was now trying to fix it all. And then I understood the painful smile she carried around. The baggage that she carried alongside her luggage. Such a different life.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Microslop

    Recently I found out that someone has a vendetta against MS, for good reason. He had pointed out a vulnerability and instead of paying him for the bug bounty, he was threatened and intimidated, supposedly had his "life ruined." I can't verify the veracity of his life being ruined, but I wouldn't put it past MS to be absolute pricks to people exposing bad or malicious code.

    What makes this different is, based on some assumptions, that he exposed backdoors that MS was going to exploit itself, or rather allow government agencies to do so. That's where I get extremely angry. Not only is this guy doing good work exposing vulnerabilities. For his sin of doing his bounty hunting job, he gets ignored at best, threatened and harassed on- and offline. He was looking out for the common man and MS is so lost that they've destroyed any goodwill I had for them remaining. This is not the company that Bill G. built.

  • It's still kind of boring

    I guess it's become a recurring thought. I don't have a lot going on at work. I'm just kind of bored really. I've been doing mostly review related stuff and while I have been doing a bit of innovation as far as improving our workflow, it's still pretty boring. Editing metadata in XML Notepad sure beats the Duck, but it's still tedious and boring, and slow.