Ottawa Weekend

I was planning on going back to Belleville this weekend, since it looked like it could be the last weekend I had free before Christmas. Just a quick trip home to get my parents up to date on recent happenings, reconnect and maybe relax a little. When I mentioned this to my mom earlier in the week, she came back and asked if I wanted to go to Ottawa.

My sister (the one that lives in Ottawa) was going to be on her own this weekend and wanted my mom to come visit. So since I was coming too, I might as well come along, since I hadn’t seen her since her wedding.

It also gave me the opportunity to meet up with Ottawa friends again. I don’t do that nearly enough. Ottawa’s pretty far away and all.

It was very nice seeing people. I went with Bill to see Body of Lies. Which I think is a really good movie, but definitely not the feel good movie of the year. I liked that it managed to turn American jingoism on its ear, but did it in a way that wasn’t just rabidly anti-American. The Americans are still the good guys (for some definition of “good”). They’re just powerful but ineffectual good guys. On that level, it worked for me. On the level of feeling a bit queasy at the time, I probably didn’t need the torture scenes.

**\[[WikiLinks]] update:** I’m working on it, in bits and pieces here and there. I really only started working on it in earnest on the train to Ottawa, so I think I’m making good progress. I’ve had a few breakthroughs in figuring out how the whole WordPress plug-in architecture works. I have a plug-in that actually does something, which is good. I got my regular expression sorted out. I’m now changing how I was seeing if a page exists so that it doesn’t hit the database quite as much. I figured lots of database hits would probably be bad.