Hosed
Today was a astonishingly beautiful day. I spent most of it outside on the deck with my laptop trying to debug HAL. At one point, my mother decided to remove all the window blinds in the house and hose them down to remove dust. All was well until the garden hose was used for the first time. There were at least four places where water was shooting out of it. It's amazing what winter can do to rubber.

The whole evening was spent trying to make graduation certificates for my brother's Grade Six graduation ceremony. I got suckered into doing this, because when I was graduating from Grade Six back in 1994, I made the certificates, and I figured I could just reuse the same file. Well, I still had the file, but recent versions of CorelDRAW wouldn't import it. The additional catch was that they want all the names printed automatically, whereas ten years ago one of the teachers with calligraphy skills had put them in herself. This last point is what caused me pains. After messing around for several hours, I ended up recreating my work in WordPerfect, with various bits exported from CorelDRAW as EPS form, and using database merging from the Windows Address Book, which is populated by importing CSV text with all the names of students. It's an ugly hack, but it works. I did manage to reuse my Georges Vanier School logo scan from 1994. I never thought I would be using that scan ten years later!