I moved my blog to a new server this weekend. Because the IP address changed I had to update the DNS records for gordon.dewis.ca. Whenever you do this sort of thing, it can take a while for the new information to propagate across the Internet. The records have been out there for a while now so people should be connecting to the new server, but I can see from the logs there are still a few people connecting to the old server. (They seem to be mostly ‘bots, so it’s not the end of the world.)

There are often problems when you switch servers. The most annoying one so far occurred in the wee hours of the morning when the network adapter decided to “forget” that it was supposed to be listening to the IP address, so my blog “disappeared” for a little while today. That problem has been resolved (no pun intended!), so it shouldn’t happen again.

I hope.

I’ve been working on a summary of 2009 for a while, but version 1.0 just did not come together the way I wanted, so I’ve abandoned it in favour of version 2.0.  Hopefully this one works out a bit better.

2009 was a busy year for me on a number of different fronts.

Blogging

According to my calculations, I posted 116 entries to my blog in 2009.

The Great OC Transpo Bus Strike provided almost limitless things to write about and generated a lot of traffic for my blog.  I almost had a bunch of buttons with my anti-ATU logo made so that I could hand them out to people. Fortunately, the union more or less saw the light and returned to work just before they were legislated back by Parliament.

I wrote about dragon boating, chasing weather balloons (and here), Rogers’ decision to remove WPBS from their lineup and their subsequent decision to not remove it and celebrity deaths. Climbing, photography and the weather also featured among the things I wrote about.

The year ended with a couple of entries about the pirate radio station run by Jayhaed Saadé, a fourteen-year old spoiled brat in Greely. After being presented with not one, but two, cease-and-desist orders from Industry Canada, he pulled the plug on his illegal radio station, put the equipment into “third party storage” and posted an apology on his website. However, within a few days, he was back on the air and the apology was removed from his site. He’s back in the news as a result of being back on the air, but the media coverage is not as flattering and fellow amateur radio bloggers Bob and Darin have both written about him. (Bob is even quoted in the Ottawa Citizen on this matter.) Sooner or later, Industry Canada is going to confiscate the $80,000 worth of equipment and probably levy some pretty stiff fines, too.

Travel

When I think about the travelling I did in 2009, I find myself thinking about the trips I took for work. I went to Montreal in February for a couple of days to observe focus group testing and then headed straight to Toronto for the weekend to visit my relatives. During the summer, I headed up to the cottage a few times. October saw work take me to Sturgeon Falls, Sherbrooke, Halifax and Winnipeg. The first two were just before and after Thanksgiving, while the last two were in the same week. I was able to head to Halifax a couple of days early and had a great time visiting Peggy’s Cove while I was there. In early November, I ended up in northern New York state while chasing an amateur radio weather balloon. The last trip of the year was to Mississauga for Christmas with my relatives.

Work

It was a busy year at work, too. My first survey report was release in February and I had a couple of other articles published, too. I also did a fair bit of travel, with the five trips I mentioned above. Most of the trips were to monitor telephone interviews for my survey – I was the person who was “monitoring this call for quality purposes”. (It’s not quite as creepy as it sounds.)

Play

But 2009 wasn’t all work (even though it felt like that at times), I had some fun, too. I steered the Singapore Slings at three dragonboat festivals last summer and I’m looking forward to the upcoming season. I went climbing at the climbing gym about once a week and went climbing in the Gatineaus a few times, too.

I logged 55 geocaches in 2009 and went to two Go And Get ‘Em events. I hid my first geocache in about 3 years for the fall GAG.

April saw me replace my faithful 2002 Tracker with a 2009 Hyundai Santa Fe. Up to then, I had been a dyed-in-the-wool GM owner, but with all the chaos in the North American auto industry, and the fact that the GM vehicle in the same class just didn’t compare, led me to stray from the flock and look at Hyundai. I don’t think I’ll be back any time soon.

ARRL Field Day 2009 was held at the end of June and the Manotick Amateur Radio Group set up a station at Long Island Marine. I headed down on Friday and operated one of the radios for most of the weekend. The weather was great and a good time was had by all.

I went to a couple of days of the Bluesfest last summer and saw KISS in concert for the first time. Though I wouldn’t classify myself as a die-hard KISS fan, I have to admit that the show was pretty impressive. I even posted a few pictures online, too.

Speaking of music, I also took part in Ring To The World, a biennial handbell festival that was held at Carleton University in June. I had the privilege of playing some amazing music conducted by some top-notch conductors, who just happened to have composed the pieces we were playing. Lots of fun and I’m looking forward to the next one.

Looking ahead to 2010

There are lots of things I’d like to do in 2010. I’ve already committed to steering for the Singapore Slings, which can’t come soon enough. Climbing in the Gatineaus (and elsewhere) more often is definitely on the list. It would be nice to do a little more geocaching. I got out golfing quite a few times last summer and I recently got a new set of hybrid irons, so I’m really looking forward to get out more often in the upcoming year.

I’ve been wanting to visit my friends Rob and Yuki in the UK for a couple of years now. There’s a geocaching mega-event being held in Scotland at the end of July, so I might just combine the two and visit them in Cambridge before going to the mega-event. Time will tell… 🙂

So, what are you looking forward to in 2010?

A good friend of mine who has been dis’ing bloggers, and blogging in general, for years has come over to the dark side. You’ll find a link to his new blog, A Moment in Exmortis’s Mind, in the rightside column and also on my Ottawa Blogroll page.

Be sure to go and harass him. Lots.
— Smakendahed of Random Ogre Thoughts

WordPress 2.8.4 has been released. While most releases are important, this one is particularly important. It addresses a security vulnerability that was discovered yesterday. The vulnerability allows a very specially crafted URL could allow a malicious individual to bypass a security check to verify a user requested password reset. It only affects the first account without a key in the database, which is usually the admin account. The owner of the account would receive an email with the new password, so the attacker wouldn’t gain access, unless they had access to the email associated with the account in question, but it’s still annoying.

WordPress 2.8.3 has been released. It addresses a couple of things missed when a privilege escalation issue was fixed in 2.8.1. Applying the upgrade was a simple matter of a precautionary backup of the database (always backup your database when doing an upgrade just in case) and clicking the upgrade link in the administration panel.

WordPress 2.8.2 was released a couple of days ago. It resolves an XSS vulnerability. Comment author URLs were not fully sanitized so they could redirect you from the admin panel to somewhere else if a malicious commenter was persistent.

As usual, the upgrade was quick and painless and consisted of backing up the database and clicking the upgrade link.

WordPress 2.8.1 has been released. The changes includes some bug fixes and tightening up of the security for the some of the administration pages for some plugins. There are a bunch of other changes, too, which you can read about on the WordPress Dev Blog.

Upgrading consisted of backing up the database for good luck and clicking the upgrade link in the admin panel.