angeni101

Wrote most of this earlier, but forgot to post.. so... Happy Canada Day and now 4th of July too. ;)

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Had a great day out in the sun on Canada Day, though, walking around, enjoying the company and the crazy activities of the day. Had some fun picking up free stuff from various people:

- "real fake money" (actually religious propaganda, but the guy was amusing)
- paper towels
- sushi (fresh rolled tamago with sesame seeds on the outside for me!)
- drugs (allergy medication, sadly)
- olympic temporary tattoos and stickers
- apple slice with caramel sauce
- lichee soda
- cookie
- glow in the dark rubber bracelet
- steering wheel shaped keychain

Watched an entertaining busker who had us all clapping for... a rubber chicken on a (very small) bike. He hid in the crowd, got us all cheering, and the entertainment was then in watching the reactions of people walking by who peeked into the circle and saw what we were all cheering for. It was actually pretty hilarious, some of those expressions. :)

I also enjoyed the busker who was just running a shouted-out Canadian trivia game. When we tired of being in the sun, we amused ourselves in the art gallery for a bit (all the museums are free on Canada Day!), and did the usual picnic after picking up a variety of foods in the market.

The fireworks were... unusual this year. For the past few years, we've been watching from Major's Hill Park so that our tax dollars can keep us entertained right up until the fireworks. (We used to sit by the river, which offered a better view of the fireworks but meant a long wait after dinner before the show started.) Anyhow, this year, they decided to add some bonus pyrotechnics to the show -- shooting smaller fireworks off the stage and over the crowd. I'm still torn on how I feel about that -- I kept expecting to get smacked in the nose with unexploded firework ends, but at the same time it kinda made up for the odd fireworks you can't quite see because the stage is in the way.

Overall, a beautiful day, and a lot of fun! I have pictures, but also a day-job. You understand. ;)

Grendel has fleas badly. He's passed them on to both the cat and the chihuahua. We're bug bombing our house next week when our roommates aren't home and taking all the animals to get flea baths/dips at vet tomorrow morning.

My question is this: would a flea collar repel fleas between tomorrow's baths/dips and Sunday when we can bomb the house? We're going to put them on Advantage and Heartgard tomorrow too. I used to use Revolution, but it didn't work so great.

Are there any cons to using flea collars? My mother-in-law uses them on her dog and he's got weird skin problems around the neck and I'm not sure if that's just the brand, her dog, or something else.

Any help is appreciated! I hate fleas!

I've been lurking for a while here... Now that I finally own a big dog, I'd like to introduce you to Grendel. :)

He is a 4 month old Brazilian Mastiff. He's easily one of the prettiest, sweetest, most loyal dogs I've ever owned. This is what I've surmised from the last 11 hours that I've spent with him.

He adores me. I'm not sure why, maybe becuase I bonded with him on the 3 hour drive home. Maybe he just likes women. Either way, it's kind of cute that he follows me around. :]

I'm a very happy lady today. My chihuahua on the other hand, not so much.

( pictures. )

Things my dog has been called by strangers on the street:

Greyhound
Italian Greyhound
Longhaired Greyhound
Irish Wolfhound
Afghan (x10000000)
Collie
Goat
Pony
Horse
Anteater
Luckdragon
"practically a couch"

This could be due to stupid people, or people who think they're funny and original, but I think maybe it's he's so good at doing impressions:

( awesome impressions here )

Last night I spent at least two whole whole discussing with my sis about the manga I am currently doing concept pictures for. After These two rabid hours of frantic think, OMG, awesome, does that work, etc. I came home at 2AM and started drawing to get at least *one* of my ideas down onto paper. I then felt sick, lay down and couldnt sleep. then i had another flash of inspiration and started drawing at 6 AM. Then I fell asleep. When i woke up, I looked at it and tried doing MORE drawing in efforts to at least undo and use productively the madness of the previous night! The results, (Critique me people!):

One of the previous Pages also, to get more of a feel for what I'm working on:

It's too hot for actual baking in my apartment, so I went with a non-baking recipe we used to do when I was a kid.

I need to work on better ways to photograph this stuff. Perhaps a brighter light, and definitely fancier dishes. But the important part is that they're tasty, right?

I resorted to drizzling chocolate rather than dipping on the last few, just for variety (and because I didn't want to heat more chocolate).

I think the dipped ones look like they'd make great little acorns if I could figure out a good way to put texture on the top. I'm thinking they should be partially chilled and then I could use a piece of netting, but this particular milk chocolate might not hold that super well.

I should also try figuring out a good way to immerse them completely in chocolate so I had completely covered little balls. Or maybe next time I'll dip them in runny icing and roll them in sprinkles? We used to do coconut when I was littler, but I don't have any on hand at home. Crushed peanuts nuts work too, but again, none on hand.

Still thinking about possibilities, clearly. :)

Work proceeds apace. Realised I have to rethink a strategy I was trying out, but I may have some interesting insights as a result of seeing where the idea failed. Ah, research!

And now, pictures I took yesterday after the storm!

A random photo taken as I rode to litazia's place for games and company.

I took two others -- well, I took more than that, but these were the ones that I thought might be interesting to other people.

If you've got a chance, please look at my mailman site redesign and see if it's working on your browser setup. Bonus points if you want to tell me if the content is better. I can't take credit for much of it, but since I'll likely be to blame if it sucks, I'd love editing/reorganizing suggestions. :)

This is a candidate to replace the current Mailman website.

It's using the colours from the original website. Or you can check out a page with a gray menu instead of a beige one. warthog9 likes it better. :)

Hi all! Advice time.Bailey walks funny because of his dysplasia and his hind leg toenails are always ground down. Well, I guess now his outside toenails are too short because when we went outside yesterday, they started to bleed. It happened again today. I will call the vet in the a.m., but has this happened to anyone? DOn't usually even trim those back nails. Any advice? Will post some pics soon, as we just went to Maine!

In the past while, i've produced and presented two papers that actually might be interesting to readers of this blog. I'm summarizing them here so that they don't get lost in the sea of personal updates:

Content Provider Conflict on the Modern Web

[HTML and PDF]

It's very possible for content providers (eg - ad servers, video providers, blog quizzes, whatever) to be messing with each other when they're included on the same page. And since a lot of content providers compete in other spheres (eg - you might include google ads and flickr photos, but yahoo (who owns flickr) and google are competitors) they have incentives to mess with each other. We're doing ourselves a disservice if we assume that known content providers should be treated as completely trustworthy. And yet, it is common for security solutions to build in whitelisting of common content providers.

SOMA: Mutual Approval for Included Content in Web Pages

[HTML and PDF]

Web browsers grab content from a lot of places to make up a page, and this ability to grab content from anywhere without any checks can lead to badness: information leaked out of the browser, more extensive cross site scripting, etc. We realised that if we just asked the browser to check "is it okay to talk to this site?" by making sure both the original page and the external content provider want to talk to each other, we could stop a lot of classes of attack, and could do all of this without popping stupid dialogs up at the user -- the "can i talk to you?" information is set by site admins.

I'm very biased, of course, but I think our paper is one of the most feasible web security solutions out there because of the thought we've put into the usability both for users (who don't need to care) and the site admins (who have to set tiny policy files that are mostly just lists of allowed domains). And we're not alone in thinking this is a good idea: some folk at Mozilla are talking about implementing something that is strangely similar. We're chatting with them to try to make sure they choose wisely when deciding how to do things. ;)

So, I got back to Ottawa at the beginning of June, then promptly left again:

Symposium on Information Assurance at the New York State Cyber Security Conference

I presented our paper entitled Conflict Provider Conflict on the Modern Web. That's an HTML link, although the PDF is also available on my website. Summary to follow.

The presentation went over quite well in that crowd -- lots of nods, smiles, and insightful questions. Again, I have a pile more photos than those that have gone up, but here's some, mostly of my supervisor's 2-year old daughter, who is incredibly cute and smart and fun to interact with. :) My other photos are largely of the strange public art around the Albany city core. I do so love weird public art. :)

Train ride from Albany, NY to Montréal

On the way home, I took the train from Albany back to Montréal, which was kinda amazing. Via Rail in Canada is lovely, but fairly pricey for what you get even with student discounts. However, my 8h train ride from Albany to Montréal cost under $40, and not only was the train comfy and the scenery through the Adirondacks beautiful, but they also have this fantastics Trails & Rails program where a nice gentleman named George came on from their National Park Service and gave us nice long talk about the history of the area, including lots of neat stories about settlers and battles as well as talking about how the canals were built and how shipping in the region changed with the advent of rail and so on. All just up in the snack car, for free. I'm sure I've paid more than $38 for that kind of tour in other cities, and this time it was just included as part of my train ride! it was a great surprise, and I highly recommend the ride to anyone who wants a scenic and low-stress way to get down into new york or up into Canada.

Montréal

I met up with kenky in Montréal and we managed to meet up with sfllaw and his sweetie for dinner. Sadly we were both a bit too wiped out to make it out to a party after we'd eaten! We spent the next day wandering around the biodome and botanical gardens before coming back to Ottawa a bit later than intended (although I still made it to my parents' place in time to give dad a birthday present!).



[My pictures of the Biodome and Botanical gardens]

Susan's graduation



I already talked about this. :)

[Graduation Photos here]

Westfest

The concerts were great, and I experimented with using twitter to liveblog them. The downside to this is that you wind up only blogging the so-so, bad ones or just slow/quiet ones, because you're too busy enjoying the good ones to say as much.

I took a whole lot of pictures of this wonderful lady and her adorable dog:


She managed to get in touch with me after the show (I gave her a MOO card so she could find my pictures) and she loved the pictures and was thrilled that I included instructions on how to get the big copies so she can get prints made for herself. That pretty much made my day. :)

Westfest Pictures here although I have more that haven't been uploaded yet.

Presentation at school

Presented our tech report to the industry folk who've been paying me for the past year. They seemed interested and asked a lot of useful questions.

I've got an HTML copy of the SOMA paper here if you prefer. Summary to follow.

This weekend: so much stuff!

Friday: had MBL over here for chatting and catching up (since I hadn't seen most of them in over a month)

Saturday:
(a) Went to the local Can't Stop the Serenity Screening. I have pictures; they're coming, although not super interesting (just a few crowd shots outside).

(b) Went to litazia's place for game night. Took more pictures while they were playing the Order of the Stick game. They're more interesting, if dark. Good times chatting and catching up a bit with people. Hadn't seen most of them in even longer than I'd seen the MBL folk!

(c) Came home in time to catch the last of the zone12 party. Again, hadn't seen anyone in a month, so it was good to catch up. Was too busy playing rock band to take photos. :)

Sunday: Went to the dragon boat festival to see Charlie Sohmer followed by The Arrogant Worms. Both are terrific live shows so we had a good time! And I didn't watch a single dragon boat race heat, which both amuses me and is slightly sad (usually I catch a few, but it was a busy weekend!). Hung out with my family afterwards and took more photos. Shocker there. ;)

Up next

A quiet week of work (hopefully) followed by a busy Canada Day weekend with a lot of parties lined up! And then we're into July, and John's coming for OLS. :)

It's been kinda crazy in me-land since the beginning of May. To summarize:

Beginning of May:
Google Anita Borg Scholarship Retreat

I was a finalist in the competition, which meant I got to go to the retreat and google will be helping pay my tuition this fall. I got to meet a truely amazing bunch of other women, as well as a few google folk. They really went all-out to put down the red carpet for us, starting with the nicest hotel I've ever stayed in, continuing with great food, interesting tech sessions, and even song and dance on a boat cruise at the end. My only regret is that we didn't have more time together! I would have loved to get to know the other girls more, although we've been communicating by email both before and after the retreat.

[My Anita Borg photos are on flickr.]

First week of May:
Games Mini-Course (for boys)

The moment I came back from the retreat I was thrust into teaching nearly a dozen boys for a week. The universities here do "Enrichment mini-courses" aimed at late elementary and high school students (most of the students we had were in gr 8, which makes them around 14 yrs old) where they get to come to the university for a week to do... something. So a friend of mine at the university had set up a computer science/gaming course aimed just at girls. But due to a mix-up, she wound up with boys in her girls-only course, and with some wrangling she convinced the powers that be to open up a second course so that she could have the girls-only course as planned, and a pair of us wound up teaching the boys who signed up for the girls course.

Aside from one unfortunate incident (more gross than anything else) I think it went pretty well, and our boys definitely had fun making games in gamemaker. It was pretty exhausting, though.

Mothers day weekend:
There may have been an incident involving Spiders.



The rest of May:
California & Iowa

I flew out to San Jose to spend more time with my boyfriend, who sadly lives very far away from me. It was a bit of a whirlwind at the beginning: I flew into California, lost my luggage in LA, got it back during the one day I was there before flying to Iowa for the wedding...



The benefit of me going to the wedding in Iowa was that I got a chance to meet John's family. They seem like great folk, and hopefully they didn't find me too scary. :) Plus the wedding itself was lovely, and I got to meet more people who I'd only heard about.

[John has his and my photos combined on his website plus here's us dancing in the official photos]

I got back just in time to meet with some people about Mailman stuff -- I'll talk more about that when the paperwork goes through, but let's say that it's always awesome to get to do these things in person, and I'm glad I was in the area for this!

Then I spent the next couple of weeks hanging around California, doing touristy things like the Monterey Bay Aquarium (where John got us through a 45min+ lineup by using his cell phone to order tickets online ;) ), or the wine tour a gang of us went on (that I have piles of photos from that I still haven't processed), or even the last day where we just spent some time shooting photos in the rose garden. :) I have a *lot* of photos to share, but I haven't gotten back to them yet. Plus there was just lots of time hanging out with friends. John has good friends. ;) And I even managed to get some work done that wasn't open-source related, prepping my presentation...

Because you see, after I came back from California, I got less than 24hrs in Ottawa before I was on to the next thing!