I've finally started on typing up the journal from our trip to Italy!! I'm not going to publish it until it's done but I thought people would like to know that it is at least started. There seemed to be no end of things preventing me from working on it, but I think most of those are gone now.
My new NAS (network attached storage) is working out pretty well. All of my photos and stuff are on it and I hope to one day re-rip all my music and get that on there too. It comes with a built in BitTorrent client which has worked pretty well so far (although just today it crashed for some reason). If I ever get a fancy new TV and a PS3 the NAS will make a really awesome media server.
Just before starting to write this post I was doing a bit of minor maintenance on this site and I noticed an irregularity in the number of comments I have on some older blog posts. It turns out I've received a little bit of comment spam! Crazy. Comment spam is pretty common on blogs that use standard blogging software because it is easy to target a lot of blogs with an automated script. But for my blog someone would have had to find it and then look at it in order to make a bot able to spam me with comments. Kinda strange and totally not worth the effort. I'm going to make a small modification to the comment stuff and see if I get any more. If I do I'll have to close down the comments feature until I think of some way to deter the spammers. I do collect minimal data (IP address) from commenters and it looks like the spam originates from Russia (with love?).
Yesterday was the first central region Tour de Bloc bouldering competition of the 2009-2010 season, held at Climber's Rock in Burlington. Myself and a bunch of the people I regularly climb with competed in the recreational division in the morning. It was lots of fun and I managed to come in sixth out of maybe thirty competitors. After we finished climbing in the morning, the real competitors climbed in the afternoon. We spent the time going to see the new Christmas Carol movie in 3D (it was ok) and then returned in the evening to watch the finals. As usual, the finals were amazing. I think the women's set of final problems was too hard as none of the competitors managed to complete more than one or two of the four. The men's problems were set at a better level.
Today we took it pretty easy as I am sore basically everywhere and can't move too much. Kim did make apple crisp though and it was yummy.
Other things that have happened recently include: a 24 hour trip to London to open and pick up all of our wedding presents; my birthday supper at Trimurti with Matt, Chris and John; Jeremy's birthday party at Second City and Fionn MacCools (where I ALMOST lost my man bag AND camera!!); and (hopefully) the partial resurrection of wing night, starting this Tuesday.
