I returned from my “baby vacation” yesterday to find a suspicious yellow envelope on my desk. I say “suspicious” because typically, no one sends me mail that’s not of the "e" variety, so I consider any envelope left on my desk, yellow or otherwise, to be suspicious. Upon inspection, the envelope appeared to have been sent by the International Webmasters Association, which helped to abate my suspicions somewhat as I am familiar with that organization. The Tribune has in fact recently signed me up as a member to gain access to some training courses.

I opened the envelope to see what goodies lay awaiting me inside, and found a green cardboard folder containing this:

It’s a certificate declaring me “duly qualified and accepted” into the IWA, which is great, especially considering that my only qualification as far as the IWA is concerned is that the cheque for the membership fee cleared. I intend to frame the certificate and hang it on the wall of my cubicle next to my printouts of funny headlines from the newspaper – that’s how proud I am of this honour.

Imagine my delight to then find tucked behind the certificate a letter bearing this:

That’s right, not only am I “duly qualified,” I am a card carrying member of the IWA. If that’s not $50 well spent, I don’t know what is.

Anyway, on to business.

In my absence, it seems things went relatively smoothly. Sally, Larissa and Kim made some updates to the Web sites while Joe and Chrissy engaged in a stirring debate over whether or not Muppets suck. Sally did manage to break the caption contest, but only briefly. Uncharacteristically, I’m not giving her too hard a time over it. It meant that I got to claw back a few hours of vacation time, since I had to work from home to fix it, and I’ll take all the time I can get.

So far this week, I’ve made a few small changes to the community site. Photographs uploaded will no longer automatically be promoted to the front page, since they already appear right at the top of the page. Pat and I have started an all new Grudge Match on whether Paul or John was the better Beatle (hint: John). Also, I’ve made a Grudge Match block on the right hand rail as a form of shameless self-promotion.

The rest of the week is likely to be spent digging around in database infrastructures, which is about as fun and interesting as it sounds, so I won't be boring you with any details.