I was out for a short hike with a friend on the weekend and experienced a couple of interesting coincidences.

We are very often told about the importance of backing up your data. Like most people, I've relied on 20 years of experience which tells me that hard drives are very reliable and rarely fail. In fact, I've never seen a hardware failure in a drive during those twenty years. Until now.

I’ve been in South Africa for almost a week, and am currently in Stellenbosch (near Capetown).  We will be returning to Capetown tomorrow and staying there a couple of days before moving on to Johannesburg.  I have had little time to write anything, and internet access where I am staying is prohibitively expensive.

The purpose of the visit is to attend a conference on globalization, and to meet with unions and social movements from South Africa and other parts of southern Africa.  The conference has been very interesting and enlightening.  Participants represent labour unions and other social movements from many countries in southern Africa, and I’ve learned a great deal about issues here.

Learning about the South African experience has been especially interesting.  There is great dissatisfaction with the ANC (African National Congress) government of Thabo Mbeki, which has become very neo-liberal in its orientation.  Those who looked to the ANC to work to resolve the socio-economic issues left in the wake of apartheid have been left to feel deserted, but have no other political alternatives.  Instead, there has been a tremendous rise of new social movements, many based on specific issues and/or communities.

Listening to the stories of the people involved with these movements has been very emotional, and the energy they bring to the issues is awe-inspiring.  I’ll write more about some of these stories when I get back to Canada.

I’m on a trip to South Africa and Mozambique, though London, England. The trip is in part related to my work but is also in part a holiday.  I thought I’d try to write something for the blog as often as possible about the trip. I am unlikely to have good internet access throughout the trip, so I’ll backdate posts as I’m able to make them.

Tonight I’m in London, England.  It has been a long day, leaving home at 3am and crossing 5 time zones before arriving here around 9pm local time. After a meeting with people from a union in the UK tomorrow and some sightseeing, I’ll be on an 11 hour overnight flight to Capetown South Africa.

On a recent trip to Eastern Ontario I had dinner at the Smiling Wilderness Family Restaurant. I know, I know, the name doesn't sound promising. But if you find yourself around Napanee, Ontario give it a try - it is terrific.

I've just spent some time looking at the stats for hits to this site, and discovered a few things I think are interesting.

1. A page which links to a comment about comments is consistently in the top 5 most hit pages.  Go figure.  Oh, hold on, what does that say about the rest of the content?!  By the way, I do check for comments again - thank you Akismet.
2. A shocking number of people get here because they have typed something like "stealing cable" into a search engine. I'm guessing they leave pretty quickly when they get a post that agrees it is stealing instead of one telling them how to do it.
3. A fair number of people who searched things like "small zoos" or "bad zoos" are probably happier to find this post about them.
4. Whatever competing browsers are saying, the overwhelming majority of visitors to the site use Internet Explorer.  On the other hand, the number of people using Opera doubled between February and March.
5. While most of the days which have a spike in activity are days I posted something to the blog, there are also random days that see big spikes in activity without an apparent reason.

Oh, and I learned one other thing. All these stats actually tell me very little.

I've been moving this site around from host to host the last couple of months. The first move was about cost - I found a much less expensive alternative in PDQ Networks. However, this turned out to be a terrible idea.

PDQ's servers, in the 2 months I used them, were constantly either ridiculously slow or down. Indeed, during the second month, the site was down at least 11% of the time (I say at least because it was certainly more than that, but I'm not always aware it is down).  Even for a personal site, no one could tolerate that level of instability. Belatedly, I did some research on PDQ (one review is here), and found out that the problems I experienced are typical.

So, I guess that old maxim is true - you get what you pay for. I'm with a new - more expensive and better-researched - host, and the site should now be very reliable.

It has taken me more time than I expected, but everything is now up and running again on the new server. Please leave a comment if you see anything odd.

I've just upgraded WordPress to version 2.0 (from 1.5.2). If you notice any problems with the site, I'd be grateful for a comment to this post to let me know.

As a result of my job, I come by a fair number of invitations to events which tend to be billed as “Holiday” celebrations these days. We used to call them Christmas events, be they parties, receptions, or what-have-you. This seems to me to take political correctness a little too far. It has nothing to do with religion (as many of my previous posts will attest) – I am, at best, an agnostic. I have great respect for the multicultural society in which I live – indeed, it is one of the things about Canada I truly love. And I believe we ought all to be respectful of the diverse views of the various religious faiths found in Canada. But that doesn’t mean Christmas isn’t, well, Christmas.

I’m not a Christian. I don’t believe in Jesus Christ as the savior and all that. But I do celebrate Christmas, and the holiday period is the Christmas break to me. Maybe it is because I was told it was called Christmas when I was young; or maybe it is because it is labeled Christmas on the calendar. Now I don’t celebrate the same thing as Christians do on December 25 – for me, it means something very different. But I do celebrate it.

I suppose what I really mean is that Christmas is just the name of a day to me – like Labour Day, or Boxing Day, etc. Surely I can wish someone a Merry Christmas and mean just that – enjoy December 25, whatever it is to you – religious holiday, day to celebrate family, or just a day free from work (well, for most of us).

Now, on the other hand, if Christians were making the argument that they have some special claim to the name Christmas, then that might be an argument worth think about. But they’re not, and so I won’t.

Oh, and it is a bit early, but Merry Christmas. So there. Comment if you don’t like it!