A late afternoon in the woods behind the farm is a great place for a winter picnic. Some hotdogs and marshmallows, throw in a few lawn chairs and a fire and you have a picnic. Noah doesn't normally wear a helmet but he was waiting for his dad to take him out on the snowmobile. He reminded of a cross between that famous Sasquach video and Kenny of Southpark in that final shot.

It's been while since I've updated anything on this site. Here are a couple of pictures that were taken last weekend. Lauren is looking forward to Christmas and I think is on Santa's nice list.

Never a huge fan of the defacto standard microblog Twitter because the community was so centralized, when it really didn't have to be. It felt like the early days of AOL and Compuserve. The Internet is distributed and decentralised and this application is clearly not. With the reliability issues that Twitter was was having, something was bound to happen. Enter Laconica/StatusNet - distributed open microblogging. Still in development but it gives you the opportunity to run your own community and subscribe to others on other servers.

The Virtual Drive has registered the domain name vdrive.ca and has started a new StatusNet server. Also check out the new site which is our new tech blog location that is under test.

To learn more about microblogging check out Wikipedia.

A few photos shot in front of a church in Kurtzville ON. We just attended a parade and were taking a few picture before we left. Lauren was really serious for some of these pictures and seemed to play to the camera a little.

Yesterday Lauren's citizenship paperwork arrived in the mail granting her full Canadian citizenship. We had applied for it a few months after we arrived home. It was much less involved than he immigration paperwork that we filled out before we left for China.

Bill C-14, which received Royal Accent on June 22, 2007, amended the Citizenship Act so that children adopted abroad by Canadians could get Canadian citizenship without first having to become permanent residents and thus avoiding the usual immigration process. The amendment represents an important move to end the differential treatment of adopted children vs. children born to Canadians.

A foreign-born adopted child would acquire Canadian citizenship as soon as the adoption is finalized, as long as the parents have applied for citizenship in the child's name before they leave Canada. More information can be found here on the C-14 citizenship billl.

Our American neighbo(u)rs have a similar system already in place under their Child Citizenship Act of 2000.