Andrée’s Blog/ProjectLe blog/projet d’Andrée

My dear wife Andrée has started her own blog on which she posts her own news and thoughts and also publishes all of the digital scapbooking layouts that she creates. As you’ll see if you follow the link, she is quite talented. If you would like to get your own scapbooking page done, just drop her a note.
Mon épouse Andrée à commencé son propre blog sur lequel elle poste des propres nouvelle et public les mises en pages de scrapbooking digital qu’elle crée. Comme vous pouvez le voir si vous suivez le lien, elle a beaucoup de talent. Si vous aimeriez faire faire vos propres pages de scrapbooking, envoyez-lui un petit mot.

Évelyne’s first birthdayLe premier anniversaire d’Évelyne

Today marks Évelyne’s first birthday. We celebrated a few days in advance with the family on Thanksgiving Monday but today is the actual day. You can see some pictures of her eating her birthday cake in our new photo album. Her presents includes a lot of nice books, a bit of clothing, a box of legos and an activity table. We also got her the Cinderella DVD after the fact.
Évelyne célèbre sa première fête aujourd’hui. Nous avons célébré quelques jours en avance avec la famille lors du lundi de l’action de grâce mais sa vraie date de naissance est aujourd’hui. Vous pouvez voir des photos de la petite en train de manger son gâteau de fête dans notre nouvel album photo. Elle a reçu comme cadeaux beaucoup de beaux livres, un peu de vêtements, une boîte de legos et une table d’activités. Nous lui avons également donné le DVD de Cendrillon après sa fête.

Blogging on a beautiful summer day

Another long time without any posts… Things were a bit nuts for the last month and a half. Andrée foot healed well and she got her cast off last week. So she had it for a total of 5 weeks. This encumbrance really put a hold on a lot of the projects that we planned to do around the house.

We were in Chicago in mid-July for a reunion of about 15 mothers and their babies born in October 2004. About 6 dads also participated to the event. It was a lot of fun. We went to visit the Chicago Aquarium, the Navy Pier and had a nice, relaxing picnic at a park near our hotel.

There is not much else happening these days. I’ve started watching the first season of Battlestar Galactica at my wife’s urging and must say it is a very enjoyable series. I’ve only seen the mini-series and first two episodes of the season so far so it will still be a bit before I can chat about it.

The house is coming together

We have now been in the new house for four weeks. Although Andrée’s accident has put a few things behind, we’re still making good progress in getting the house in shape and where we want it to be. We have moved the last few boxes that we had left in our old apartment.

We were also able to get a ramp for our main staircase between the main floor and second floor. One of the previous owners had removed and discarded the ramp, probably to make it a bit roomier. However, with a small child who’s starting to climb everywhere, the ramp is a necessity. Looking at our neighbor’s backyard, we saw that they had a ramp that is exactly the same style as other ramps in our house. We asked them they would be willing to sell it and they just gave it to us, not believing that it was missing in our house. After some good scrubbing and spray paint, it’s looking great on our staircase.

The week off that I took to help around the house was productive. Andrée got her real cast on Tuesday and we got the house babyproofed enough so that the first floor is pretty safe for Évelyne. Back to the office tomorrow after being away for two weeks.

I have just finished a review for MacGyver Season 2 that will probably be posted this week on uneporte.net. Next on my list is Les Aimants, a french comedy written and directed by Yves P. Pelletier.

Post-Move News

I know it’s been a while since I last posted. We moved to our new house in Laval three weeks ago. The move went pretty well, although the overbearing heat in the following week and the change of scenery did give Évelyne a hard time for about 5 days.

I was then off to Ottawa last week to give a training class at a customer site. During that week, Andrée dropped off Évelyne at her mother’s place to get some work done around the house. What was supposed to be a highly productive day ground to a halt quickly as she missed a step and broke a bone on the side of her right foot. She will be getting a cast tomorrow that she will have to probably have to keep for 6 weeks or more.

So life continues to be quite busy but at least things are moving in the right direction with the house and life in general. The next post should sooner that the last one.

The boxes are taking over

One week left, to the day, before we move into our first house. Andrée and I just spend the week-end packing and making boxes. We’re both very excited with the thought of moving soon. The appartment has just gotten too small over time, especially after Évelyne’s arrival. I probably won’t be able to post much in the next week or two.

What’s happening these days

I know, I know, I have not posted in a while. Life is quite busy these days. Évelyne is now 6 1/2 months old. She started crawling this week-end and is saying her first syllables. We are slowly packing up everything for the move that will happen in early June. For updated pictures of Évelyne, check out our photo album.

On the work front, the office almost seems like a combat zone with all of the construction work currently happening to move all employees together on one part of the floor. I am also going to be travelling to Brazil in the next few weeks.

I’m still writing regularly for uneporte.net. My latest published review was for the cartoon Tintin. Next up will be Apollo 13 in the next few days.

In short, everything is doing well, things are just very busy on all sides.

UnePorte.net mentioned on Radio-Canada.ca

The technology section of the Radio-Canada.ca web site has a nice little article on UnePorte.net, the french DVD review web site that I write for. It’s not that long but does talk about the depth of our reviews and the fact that the staff is all volunteers who dedicate a lot of time to get good reviews out there.

Speaking of DVD reviews, my latest one has been posted this morning for The Grid, a TV mini-series about a group of investigation agency agents working together to prevent a new wave of terrorism.

Getting rid of spyware

I spent Thursday night remotely working on a computer belonging to a friend of my wife’s, riddled with spyware, trojans and viruses. The first problem seen was that Internet Explorer would not work at all. When starting it, it would simply display a page saying that the page request could not be found. Classic behaviour of spyware.

My first step was to send her a copy of Mozilla Firefox, my favorite reliable browser from the Mozilla foundation. With this, I was then able to access the internet again. I then went on to download Ad-Aware SE, a good spyware killer. I started running a scan using it. A few second after starting the scan, a dialog showed up, saying that the computer would be shutting in 60 seconds, as requested through an RPC call from a service on the system. I was not sure what to do at first and the machine rebooted.

After some research on the web (and two or three reboots trying different things out), I found that the shutdown command probably came from the pest I was trying to remove, which might be the MS Blaster worm or other known worms. I also found that it was possible to stop the shutdown of the computer during the countdown by running the command:

shutdown.exe -a

You can run this command from the Start | Run menu or by creating a simple batch file. Once the shutdown was aborted, I was able to run Ad-Aware and remove most of the problems. I then ran a scan with Spybot Search & Destroy and got rid of the rest of the problems. Finally, a good scan from AVG Anti-Virus caught some last remaining problems and the machine was clean and ready to go.

I learned something with this darn shutdown command that I won’t forget.

The good old pocket knife goes USB

Victorinox, makers of the Swiss Army pocket knifes, have started making a new knife that will certainly appeal to the technologically inclined. It’s a knife that contains a USB key as one of its attachments. The memory can be 64 MB, 128 MB or even 256 MB. The shell of the knife will keep the key solidly in place. I’ve thought USB keys were quite nice for a while but this one wins in terms of coolness.