Shout-out to Kansas

I understand that the jury took less than an hour to find "pro-life" Scott Raeder guilty of murdering someone in cold blood after years of low-level terrorism. Now, if only that mouth-breathing thug Phil Kline and the mouthpiece of the anti-choice Al Qaeda (a.k.a. Operation Rescue) could be tried and convicted as collaborators, I'd call the justice complete.

I've said it before, but I don't think it can be stressed enough: If these douchebags would give a tenth of the hyperventilating to the children who die of malnourishment, disease, genocide, disaster, abuse, etc., we could have a productive discussion. But to them the abstract of a fetus or a happy middle class white baby on a billboard is all that matters. It might be more productive trying to have a rational discussion with a rabid pit-bull in heat.

Big ups to the prosecutors in this case for the immediate accomplishment and also for demonstrating that the entire state hasn't in fact gone over to the Religious Reich.

Really, PHP, really?!?!?!?!

If I want to use an HTML <SELECT> drop-down list that allows the user to select multiple items, PHP requires that its name end with a pair of square brackets, []. Otherwise, PHP only recognizes the last selected item. Wow, even Microsoft's much-maligned "classic" ASP can do better than that.

I guess I'm just stunned by the arrogance of a language that required programmers to change standard HTML naming conventions to process REQUEST data. That the naming conventions will mostly likely break any JavaScript references to the <SELECT> list is even more stupefying.

Documents in Montreal

FedEx came through, and the package representing much collective effort (on my part and Dearest's) was delivered--so far as I know--without incident. I'm annoyed with the paralegal for not replying to Tuesday night's email asking him to skim the list of enclosed documents had any red flags. Will nag tonight. On to finding something else to fret about, be it a screw-up on my/our part or a particularly crabby CIC agent reviewing our app. & documentation or whatever...

Second milestone (hopefully) reached

Two pounds of paper in a FedEx envelope, sixty-four bucks on my credit card, and a guilty twinge of my conscience over the carbon footprint of overnighting something to Montreal, all before my first cup of coffee. Hopefully, that's all that's needed to convince the CIC folks that they should let us in as productive members of Canadian society.

No red carpet required--nay, nary even a butler to open the door while the valet parks the car. Just pretty-please-with-organic-fair-trade-chocolate-sauce-on-top no more having to take off in the middle of the day to stand in front of desks or counters. No more freakout moments of "Oh, $#!+--we were supposed to have that notarized!" No more digging through boxes to find documents that have no relevance to our day-to-day existence. No more being told that we'll have to pay handsome fees for 6-8 week waits. And for love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, no more gut-dropping moments when we realize that some faceless bureaucracy has dropped the ball.

But most importantly, I just hope that we have, in fact, dotted all "i"s and crossed all "t"s. After the package--His Noodliness willing--lands on the paralegal's desk tomorrow morning, the second round of waiting begins. I'm not particularly good at waiting, but given the choice between waiting and scrambling...yeah.