I’m slowly posting photos of our travels on Flickr, but at this stage they’re about two weeks behind us. Stay tuned.

Before our week in Montreal, there was the cottage, which was four days of lakeside bliss with long-missed friends. After the lights finally came on, everything went perfectly up until the last hour before we all left, when Chris walked through a screen door and his girlfriend Lou dropped her car keys in the lake. My best guess is that they didn’t want to leave, and were doing their best to delay the inevitable.And before the cottage, there was my week at OSCON in Portland. I blogged the nitty gritties of that in detail at SitePoint, but in general it was an astonishing gathering of talent. Attendees routinely sat in sessions coding some personal project or other, or participating in the conference “back channel” on IRC. At one point during the final day, I walked into a men’s room behind a fellow toting an open laptop who proceeded to stand at a urinal and continue to surf the web with the laptop in his free hand.

The whole thing had me feeling like a bit of a fraud at times. Although I do contribute to a few open source projects in my spare time, the average developer wandering the halls at OSCON was a lot closer to code in his or her day-to-day work. It was a privilege to get to meet so many of them.

For those who worry about such things, our trip from Portland to Ottawa was relatively straightforward (as the smiling faces in these photos atest). We were nearly re-routed due to one of our aircraft breaking down and being replaced by a smaller one (which would have pocketed us an easy US$200), but in the end we flew as planned, and arrived on schedule.

Hopefully our flights tomorrow will go as smoothly. Again, lots more on Jess’s travel blog.

Correction, the electricity just came back on! (So much for my ultimate demonstration of geekery.)

Far from the cushy summer retreat by a lake that my friends from Montreal expected, we have had no light, no running water, no refrigeration, and to top things off, the propane on the barbeque ran out in the middle of cooking our first meal.

Today, after steeling our resolve and making a run to town for bottled water, propane and ice, we relaxed into the unwashed experience and made our first group trip out to the island for the year… only to be chased from the island by hordes of feasting blackflies.

But now the electricity is back, and Marty has already made popcorn. Things are looking up.

Including Canadian artists such as Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, Chantal Kreviazuk, Sum 41, Broken Social Scene, Stars, Raine Maida of Our Lady Peace, Dave Bidini of Rheostatics, Billy Talent, John K. Sampson of Weakerthans, Sloan, Andrew Cash, Bob Wiseman, a co-founder of Blue Rodeo, and of course the Barenaked Ladies, the CMCC aims to promote changes to music copyright law that will “protect artists and consumers, not restrictive technologies.”

I’m actually surprised this didn’t happen sooner. It’s great to finally see some artists from major labels speaking out against prosecution of MP3 file sharers and the tightening of controls over media that threatens to drive away paying fans.

As a great fan of the Barenaked Ladies, Sarah McLachlan, Chantal Kreviazuk, Our Lady Peace and Blue Rodeo, it’s especially heartening to see so many of my favourite artists working to free their music so that I can continue to support them and enjoy their work a paying fan for years to come.

NETGEAR is of course a well-known manufacturer of network hardware, including wireless routers. I suspect that neighbours of my parents’ simply have their home network (and associated Internet connection) sitting wide open without any security. If that’s their informed choice, then great. If not, well I hope it’s an old router, because there’s no reason current wireless networking hardware should allow inexperienced users to expose their networks like this.

Mom, if you wanted to be a good neighbour, you could probably stroll around the block with your laptop and get a good idea of which house was hosting the network you are connecting to based on signal strength. A note in the mailbox advising the occupants to configure their network more securely would certainly qualify as your good turn for the day.

The podcast makes great listening while driving too, but for the continual frustration of not being able to stop and note down the artists I want to check out later. Re-listening to the episodes at work is allowing me to do just that.

First on my list to check out is Christine Fellows, whose track Vertebrae really tugs at my insides.