Head Tale

My Five Favourite Nationalistic Holidays
1. Robbie Burns Day
2. St. Patrick's Day
3. Cinco De Mayo
4. St. George's Day (tied with Guy Fawkes Day)
5. Not really an “ethnic” holiday but I always thought the February
“Family Day” in Alberta was a good idea.  Canada needs a couple
more national statutory holidays to make it an even dozen – I think one in February (especially) and one in June would be perfect. 

Correction of the Day
Even though I said in one of my first posts that I would not
apologise for (nor correct) spelling, grammar and other factual errors,
I did notice that I recently referred to the people of Quebec as “French”.  I do believe the more appropriate form is “french”
as they are, in the world of capitalized words, “Canadians”. 
Oops.  Western bias shining through (and yes, Quinn – to me,
“Saskatchewan” is a western, rather than central province, in both
relative and absolute terms.  I know people in the Maritimes hate
it when anyone refers to Ontario/Quebec as “east” but didn't realise
the same thing applied to left-coasters who hear Alberta/Saskatchewan
referred to as “West”!)

Referrer Logs
Speaking of referring (nice segue, eh?)…

One of the cool features of this blog software is that I can see the search terms that got people to my site.  My favourite one?  I'm the number two hit on the Internet when you search Google for: Shanty Town Mexico Dump Pictures!

The referrer logs also led me to a couple links to my site that I hadn't seen before:

Open Source News

Library student launches OA journal for library students
LIS student Jason Hammond has wonthe
Spirit of Librarianship Award from his school for a raft of good
deeds, one of which was helping to “initiate a new open-access online
journal for LIS students, called Cantilever.” I can't find a web site
for Cantilever yet, but will blog it when I can. Meantime,
congratulations to Jason and best wishes for the new journal.

(Apparently he's a student at the University of Western Ontario Faculty of Information and Media Studies, but I'm not sure.)

Update (5/1/06). Jason Hammond did not create Cantilever.
That honor goes to David Jackson. Hammond works on it with Jackson,
Linda Bussiere, and Sabina Jane Iseli-Otto, all students at U of
Western Ontario.

April 4th, 2006

Rachael & Gord
A highlight of our Montreal trip was getting to have a beer  with Rachael Van Fossen
Wednesday afternoon.  Rachael was the co-Executive Director at the
SPG when I started (she actually interviewed me and may have made the
call on hiring me as I think Brenda was away at the time). 
Rachael's doing amazingly well – teaching, doing her MFA, working on a
couple different contracts as well.  Plus she recently won a
teaching award that was based on student nominations. 
Congratulations Rachael! 

Later that evening, we were able to catch up with her partner, Gord
Fisch, who was hosting an Irish jam at a nearby pub.  Gord played
in an awesome Celtic band in Regina and is now running a web hosting
company called EcoHosting.net which
has a unique business plan where they give back 20% of any fees to a
charity of the client's choice.  Very cool!  If you're
interested in progressive companies and business principles, check them
out! 

Flames Lose In First Round of NHL Playoffs To A Team Named After An Emilio Estevez Movie
In a weird way, this is probably the best thing that could've happened
as it means I'll be a lot less distracted by hockey play-offs for the
next month and a half with my favourite out of the running.  Who's
my favourite now?  Buffalo or Ottawa I guess.

Classmate of the Day: I haven't
bumped into her yet since we just got back from Montreal tonight. 
But Christina Winter and her husband were moving into our building
(same floor even!) at the start of May so that should help make for a
fun and cool summer (plus it doubles the Saskatchwan quotient of the
8th floor – always a good thing!)