A week of work

Ok I have now done six days of work at my new place and it has made me very happy.

The people there are very receptive to having new team members join. It is a small enough organization that I will eventually get to know everyone there. It is great and filled with many learning opportunities which is what drove me there in the first place.

Naturally there is a down side to every place that you work. So far the one I have found is it seems that there are boxes of doughnuts at every turn. This is a test of will to see how long I can hold out without over indulging myself. The company really knows how to keep T.H. in business.

I can see a lot of things that I can do at the company both as my hired role of Network Administrator and as System Administrator. Some will take some convincing while I hope others will be much easier but I won't know until I try. It is times like this I wish I payed more attention to what Luc was doing in years gone by.

The best I can say is I'm happy to work there and I can see a me spending a long time there. Previous posts I had held always had an iffy feel about them but not here. I'm happy and I think I will stay awhile.

The Monday Post

Ok as promised here is the Monday post.

As you all know I have been working at finding a job for the past couple of months. I can now say that I have found one. As of 4:30 today I signed a offer of employment and am now working at TotalLine Transportation.

Some of the finer points are still up in the air but from now on I'll be working from 8:30 to 17:00 at a good job. The people there are great from the ones that I met and and I'm sure that I will enjoy it as there is plenty of learning opportunities there.

Oh and it is still Monday so if anyone was saying anything about "Where is the post?" remember I never promised a time.

The Nerd Handbook

The Nerd Handbook was posted on Digg today. Naturally this is some kind of fluff material that is closer to humor for wild thoughts. Not this piece though. Some of it struck close to home. I can also think of a few people this could apply to as well for understanding .... at least if I left my 'Cave'.

How religion failed my friends

A little while ago I was walking along with my wife and a couple of friends and they were discussing the changes that were happening at their church.

Now let's start off with the fact that I don't care that much for religion and I excluded myself from this conversation and was more of just an observer. Anyway I observed the following.

Over the years through faithful service my friends have been having the feeling of being pushed out of their church as things have changed. These reasons are long and complex but the summary is that after trying hard to keep the better parts of the weekly services in they are now being dropped by the current clergy. This results in less of a role for the choir and a borderline insult to choir as well.

I don't hear many people saying that these are good changes. If church is for the masses then this is a failure of the church as they are no longer working for the masses but a select number of individuals who, frankly, may not be around for much longer.

Coming posts

I have been a little on the lazy side for posting I know but I have thought up of three more posts I just have to get around to them.
1) How religion failed my friends
2) Management's spin on bad ideas
3) (I actually forget)

Anyway I will work on posting them when I have a chance this is more of a reminder of what I want to post on.

And everyone thought....

That my cat was crazy.

Working

I found this on Digg. It is someone's blog about working or the lack of. I'm surprised to read a story like this because it shows that there are people out there that are happy doing nothing. In essence getting a free pay cheque. I find this troubling because I like to work and actually feel that I earn something. I enjoy creating things to make my life and other's lives easier in the field. I strive to make everyone's life this easy. Until then there is far too much work to do for everyone and free rides like this shouldn't be allowed.

That is just my opinion and I'll stick to it.

Youtube

Just saw the chess master Gerry Kasparov kill Bill Maher in a live interview. This was an entertaining interview. Gerry puts on a good show.

Employment news

Well it seems that two more job positions have slipped from my grasp. The first one I don't fault really though. It started off as an System Administrator role but then mutated into a development role. I have some tendencies for development but nothing near what they had in mind. Oh well.

As for the other role I was up for it seems that I was not selected as the candidate but not given a reason why I was over looked. I have asked why but the question seems to have gone into limbo. I don't hold my breath for a response as it is a large company but I do hope I get some kind of answer.

So here I am still unemployed and still looking.

New toy

Now here is something that I would like. mccoe64g8mpr-03a

Job hunting

Just a quick update since I haven't posted in a while. I'm still looking for a job and things are going about as normal as one can expect. Just heard back and I didn't get the job at both Rogers and the Zoo.

I'm not surprised about either really. Rogers is a Linux/Unix/AIX show while I'm a Windows Administrator and the Zoo changed what they wanted to be more of a development role rather than an administrative role. I'm still staying positive as good things come to those that wait.

Anyone looking for a Windows System Administrator with junior skills in Network Administration, Visual Basic development?

Sharing the joy

This ranks right up there with semi-conductors.

Par!

WooHoo. We hit par with the US dollar!

Anyone up for some shopping in the US?

Back home

After what seems like a month of being a way we have finally returned. Everything seems normal for the time being and everything is good. Now there is still the issue of dealing with space. Space for all the wedding gifts that we didn't get around to packing away before we left. Finding space on the network for the near 30 gigs of photos we took while we were away. Finding space in the calendar to just sit back and relax.

Photos will be posted but as Bubbles said it will take time. There are many photos that need to be stitched together so they will take a while but they will come eventually.

Greetings from Italy!

Ha I'm in Italy and having fun. Been here a few hours already and had some real pizza while my new wife has had some real seafood.

Yummy. Pictures to follow on our return.

Honeymoon

Be back after Greece and Italy.

HP LaserJet 2600N

If one more person asks "Is it too late to change my wedding RSVP?" I'm going to scream and hunt them down and hurt them.

To parody Homer Simpson:
I have a colour printer, that is good.
It has a problem printing on some card stock paper, that is bad.
It connect directly to the network so no print server is required, that is good.
It is now not receiving data across the network for printing, that is bad.
The printer is far faster than the ink jet we have, that is good.
For the wedding we have used about $600 worth of toner, that is bad.
It cost less in ink that the ink jet we have for the wedding, that is good.
This is the end of my post, that is bad.

I'm glad

Harry Potter has a sense of humor.

Harry Potter

Almost done the book. I should be able to finish it in the next night or two.

Harry Potter guesses

Seeing that it is only a few days away from release I thought I would get everyone's opinion on what they think of the next book. Any guesses?

Here are mine:

Most of the Weasleys well be dead by the end of the book

Current standing members of the order of the Phoenix will also be dead with the exceptions of Lupin and Alastor Moody

Ron and Hermione will be a couple during most of the book but Hermione will sacrifice herself for Ron

Harry will loose all his magical powers in the final confrontation

There are my opening guesses for the book. Anyone else want to post theirs?

The past week

Well here is a quick update for the past week. I have:

Had two interviews

Had the car serviced for it's 100 000 km checkup

Celebrated a couple of birthdays

Celebrated Canada's birthday

Aside from that life has been routine and just trying to keep up on all the wedding things. Due process is taking time but that is fine as it currently is spreading out all the expenses to something that can be managed.

Fireworks and sunset

Here are some photos from the weekend. Hope everyone enjoys!

Fireworks: Small / Large

Sunset: Small / Large

Favorite photo is dsc07296.jpg in the fireworks group.

Finally figuring it out

Ok so for a long time now people have been asking "What can I do to help with the wedding?" because:

It's a wedding and intended to be a huge event

My brother and wife threw their's together in four months

There is a lot to do

For an equally long time I have been saying "Nothing everything is under control" because:

We have been arranging this for the better part of two years now

Mostly it is just contacting the responsible people and getting them to "make it happen"

Two years is a lot of time to get everything in motion for the most part

We are generally not that picky about the way things are done, if things are just off electric blue we won't panic

We have lots of friends actually taking care of various aspects of the wedding and we all casually talk about it

So really for all those that think they should be doing "more". There is already enough more going around it is just so thin that no one really sees it. Ha. I guess that is the way it should be. However, for those who really want more wait until the last two days because then there will be enough more to go around.

Oh in case it hasn't been mentioned yet for all you happy groomsmen out there. You are also bouncers/security enforcement for the wedding .... just in case :)

Job interview

As I'm sure may of you know I was in a job interview yesterday for the OSSA. They are a great company and their work is very impressive. The thing that I found most surprising is that they are only 80 people. Out of everything they do I would expect a larger company to be able to do so much.

I thought the interview went great and everything went well. At the end of the interview I asked when everything would be settled for the job. To my surprise I found that they were going to be making a decision that night to who would move on to the next phase of the interview process. After leaving I was thinking how great it would be to hear Nicole call up and say "Great we would like to have you in next Monday for the technical review!". I was a little surprised when the call was "Thanks for coming and we think that you had some great skills but we don't think you would be a very good fit."

Damn job hunting.

Surprise!

Well there was a big surprise wedding shower that happened yesterday. I would like to thank everyone that came from out of town to join in. I was really surprised at the turn out!

Thanks to everyone who made the surprise party such an event!

The 100th post!

Yea I have finally hit the 100 post mark!

Now I didn't intend this to happen but here is a question. As you may know I'm on Facebook. Now it seems that my previous previous employer found me there. Now I wouldn't have a problem but it is the Director of IT that found me which I particularly don't like. Here is the question is it better to just leave the friend request hanging or should I reject it?

Job hunting

Funny thing job hunting. You can spend weeks trying to get a job, then when out of the blue something comes along that you are perfect for they say "I'm sorry you aren't senior enough." To say I'm a little miffed over this is being nice. So now comes the fun of trying to make myself senior enough.

On the off note I was planning on getting a quick job at Staples, just to fill time, since it is close and the staff like me but, I was told that I would get a call last week and I never got one. Oh well that avenue is closed. I think the problem was that I had too much experience.

Have I commented that I hate job hunting?

Two tragedies from last week

Ok two things went horribly wrong last week. The first I posted about which was probably the bigger of the two. As a recap I'll just say that StarCraft 2 was announced. The other is that I can't find my copy of Brood War for StarCraft 1!

I know these are trivial matters compared to the larger world but right now I want to play Brood War!

Ow

I just spent most of yesterday wandering around town delivering invitations to various households. My legs are sore from all the walking even though I did make good use of the local transit. *sigh*

In other news the cat attacked me yet again this morning. Insane beast.

New computer research

Darn. Safe to say that old Dolphin can't run it. FTPServ doesn't stand a chance and Mugatroid will be underpowered as it had a hard time with just the website. Good to know this won't come out for a year or so. Give me some time to get a good computer together.

Wedding stuff

Ahhhh! So much wedding stuff. We have done the registry thing and got the wedding invitations setup. All is good! So much left to do though. I'm working on it a little at a time.

A little humor. I could see a couple of people doing that. One more for the smokers out there.

Links ....

Technical Support:
Ah the good old days when I had to call Bell for support. This best demonstrates how it works.

Which Family Guy Character Are You?
Surprisingly I'm both Brian and Lois.

New Point of Contact:
Facebook

Conference reprise

Ok the conference is now over and everyone is tired and wants to sleep. On the good side I did sleep for a stupid long time last night and I'm feeling better this morning. I'm sitting in the SO's office right now figuring out what to do next.

Conference was good and lots of new ideas came out that should hopefully make next year an easier year to manage from the Scoring perspective. For the most part it was a flawless year except for a few awards that were causing issues at the very end which made everyone stay up later than anyone wanted to.

A few stats for people:

Lines of Code:

Scoring: 534

Reporting: 1597

Post Web Registration: 1141

Number of Records:

.... of Participants: 478

.... of Staff: 99

.... of Events: 98

.... of Results: 1239

Other stats:

.... of hours writing last minute reports: more than 12

.... movies watched: 0

.... of pizzas ordered: 2

Until next year folks enjoy the time off for next years preperation!

Conference

Ah! back to the joys of conference for this year. Anyway things are quite normal now that we have our happy rooms of 831* so we don't have to go walking around to just do our work.

Well since I'm here I don't think I'll be doing a lot of talking so have fun everyone!

Oh ya photos and video to follow. I hope.

Last day of work

So I have finished my last day working at CGI under contract. I have to admit that working with those people was a good experience. The team, approximately 20, is a really friendly group that works well together. They joke around and act more as a bunch of friends than co-workers. This made for a really comfortable atmosphere that I enjoyed going to every day.

Since I was contract the only overtime I had to deal with was when a specific issue needed to be solved by the end of the day. I think the worst day was 3 hours overtime. There is something to be said about working in a 24x7 environment then changing to a 9 to 5er job. Somehow it doesn't seem like enough work gets done in a day and I should be at home writing e-mails or other support events.

The good news is it seems that my team leader, Dave, really enjoyed having me there and thought I would make a good addition to the team. The bad news is that they don't have any openings right now. The good news is that they are working on that and trying to create an opening for some new team members. The bad news is that they don't know when that will be. The good news is that I will be given first dibs on the position.

Ok good news comes out on top. I guess that is great then right?

That which I thought would never pass....

You know how you are young and you always think that your parents will be around forever? You grow up and you realize that this isn't true but somehow some of your innocence is then lost. Well our family has had a cottage for as long as I can remember. I always thought that it would be part of the family. Even when there was fighting between the family members I always thought that it would be around. Sadly this isn't the case.

It was decided about a week and a half ago that the cottage will be sold. It has been on the auction block for a while and it was finally purchased. The owner takes possession of it next week if I have my timing right. So the previous weekend we went up and took what we thought we needed. Everyone is having their turn to clear out the cottage. Anything left will go to the new owner.

Anyway here are a few pictures of the old cottage. It was nice while we had it and I didn't visit it as often as I should but now it will really be missed. Here are a few photos that we took with the Alpha.

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3

Picture 4

Driving to work

Makes me feel like this. I'm getting to the point of just wanting to ram my car into that stupid BMW/Lexus SUV that keeps cutting me off just before I get off the highway!

Maybe I should get some stress relief.

Punctuation

The great thing about typing everything out is that I can actually proof things before actually committing them to paper/message. Now I have noticed that lately I have had random punctuation creeping into my typing. I have been getting ? in places where . should be like wise random ! have been showing up.

I need a vacation. Thank goodness in 3 weeks I'll have at least two weeks off.

Morning funnies

When I walked into work I saw the funnies thing. The building I'm at we have a concourse level where everyone parks outside and then we go up to the ground level for all important things. Well on the retaining wall between the lower concourse level and the actual ground floor there were a "silly goose". He was staring at the building which is mirrored and complaining highly at the goose that he saw in the building. As geese do he was very loud about it too. Very funny seeing the goose get all bent out of shape about his reflection.

I found this at Worse Than Failure today. Best search string for Google ever. "how to hook up a hose to a kitchen sink". The best is the "Did you mean:" section.

Oh the toaster oven of doom in the office has been taken away :(

Bell the stupid

Ok LF dropped us a line a couple of days ago about an outstanding modem charge after canceling our account in APRIL!

Well there was a minor bandwidth charge back in December and there was no comment about about hardware costs. Anyway we got a message from a collection agency about a charge of ~$84 outstanding on our account.

So I call the agency to find out what is going wrong. They are just out to collect the $$ so they don't know any of the real details. So I call the dreaded Bell. I start talking to someone at One-Bill billing. "I'm sorry you need Sympatico billing. Please hold on." (Transfer to Sympatico billing). There was a quick discussion about what was going on and then the person confirmed that the modem was returned in January. Excellent! Bill has now been zeroed and we owe Bell nothing. Again. For the third time since April.

Call agency back again and say all is good and you should hear from Bell about this soon. They have confirmed that the modem was returned in January and all is good. This is when the abilities of Bell far exceeded what they have previously done.

-=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=-
Me: They have confirmed that the modem was returned back in January and that the value of the bill has been reduced to zero in reflection of that.

Agency: Well that is odd why would they have done that? If the reason for the charge was fixed in January why did they send this notice to me in February?

Me: Because Bell is a wonderful company that is highly orderly and stands at the peak of customer service.

Agency: I detect a little sarcasm.
-=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=-

Anyway the conversation continued happily and all is good once again with the world with Bell fixing their problems .... Again .... For the 10 ^ 8 th time. I hope it stays that way.

I'll be calling the agency in 30 days to confirm that all is good.

Phantom of the Opera

Well went and saw Phantom last night and it was great! The seats we had were good seats but naturally they came at a bit of a cost.

The show was good and the guy that played the Phantom did a great job. I would cite his name but I don't have the booklet with me here at work. Anyway the story and presentation was as great this time as it was the first time I saw it.

I have to say that there were two minor flaws with it though.

1) Raoul didn't provide a very emotional performance. Though from what I gather he is getting better.

2) One of the stage props has squeaky wheels which destroyed the "suspension of disbelief" during the second act.

Still that aside it was a great performance and I'm glad we went.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Just found a new trailer today. Funniest point:
>Barbossa "Thar's not been a gathering like this in our life time."
>Sparrow "And I owe them all money."

Check out the trailer.

Bored

Ok so right now I have a mess of things on my plate. Conference related issues need to be resolved before too long. This is more work than I feel up to doing. I have already done some of the simpler stuff but the real functionality tests still need to be done.

Really I'm just tired. I blame my lack of sleep.

Something else that makes me bored is my job. I just don't do enough there. I'm better than what I'm doing. *sigh* At least they pay me well enough so it doesn't bother me all the time. I guess just I'm feeling a little down about being in a job that doesn't seem to have any forward potential.

Installing Ubuntu Part 2

Ok so one defective disk can can really screw up an install.

The coolest thing about installing Ubuntu is that you can load up Firefox while installing it on a second desktop. So while Ubuntu was installing I was browsing Digg while the install occurred.

Post install I was politely told that I had 138 updates pending download. So now I wait for my 226.3 megs.

Installing Ubuntu Part 1

Ok I started an install of Ubuntu last night. I figured I would let it install all night. I think it froze because it was still at 23% done just like when I went to bed last night.

Tonight will be take 2.

Things to look forward to....

This.

Anyone notice I don't write medium length posts. They are either super long or ultra short?

Lately....

I just took the Stupid Tester and came up with this:

I think I have been passively cheating though because I have been working on a bunch of random stuff that seemed to be in this test. Oh well. Being 4% stupid isn't that bad. Especially considering that 95% of those that took the test are below me :)

Other things in the news .... It turns out that BNL just released a new album that is freely available for download from here".

Well back to work to tell my fellow admins on the weirdness that occurs when downloading PDF files.

Weather

Ok so last night trying to get home was interesting. I left the office at 15:30 to pick up the SO from her office. A nice little 15 minute drive .... Well at least until the weather decided to make driving stupidly slow. I got to her office at 17:00. Now in all fairness I did take a wrong turn which prolonged the drive by about an extra 30 minutes by my guess. Oh well.

Now came the fun part. Getting to the gas station before running out of gas. I should have done this in the morning but I wasn't thinking too clearly.

We stopped by a Sunoco for gas but it was out of gas :( It seems that the fuel shortage caused by Esso's refinery created a more global shortage than I thought of. Darn.

So we continue heading home in hopes of finding a gas station before running out of gas. We did. Oddly enough it was a Esso. I filled the tank at a whopping $36 and went inside to get some dinner. Normally this would have taken about 10 minutes to make it this far down the road. Nope not because of the weather this time. Almost an hour later we managed it *sigh*

We continued home and stopped in a Chinese place for food at 19:00. Again this drive should have taken us about 20 minutes. Ate while the snow stopped. All was looking up again. Until we got outside and realized that the snow had stopped because the freezing rain had started. *sigh* Looks like it will be a longer drive home. We got home at about 20:00. All this from a drive that only should have taken an hour tops, not 4.5 hours.

Now I'm staying home by advice of both the fire and police department because the roads are so bad.

Smooth moves

This is funny yet so wrong. After playing on a Wii and the "Smooth Moves" game I actually understand this comic. However the general idea is correct.

In the game you are introduced to the Wiimote in a few different ways. The first is "The Remote Control" is pretty much like that, you hold the Wiimote like a remote control. Later you find things like "The Waiter" where you hold it like in the illustrated graphic. "The elephant" where you hold it against your nose like a trunk. It all kind of adds to the game. A great idea if you ask me.

However leave it to someone to find the twisted way of looking at it.

Stupid work things

I'm not referring to anything that would be Dilbertian. I'm talking about just dumb things. I was wandering around the office today because the helpdesk system crashed, yet again, and I had some time to kill. Well it seems that the floor here has two little kitchens. That is fine because it is a decently populated floor. The stupid thing is that one kitchen has a toaster, that works, and the one close to me has a toaster oven that is a safety hazard.

The toaster oven can't be on while the door is closed. One must keep the oven door open so the trip switch will be in the off state. Needless to say I think this is a fire hazard as it is stupid to have to use the toaster oven open for it to work. *sigh*

Back to staring at my helpdesk screen waiting for it to come back online. *yawn* I already did everything else today that was on my hit list
- Renew license plates
- Figure out parking ticket issue
- Setup DVD burns to get stuff off FTPServ's hard drives
- Play fun games

Kids

If I have kids they will be like this

Weird things

Ok first on Friday I finally took the dive. I have always wondered what happens when you ask for an "Extra Strong Hot Water" from a coffee machine. Guess what? It cancels your Extra Strong and just gives you hot water. How uneventful.

On a stranger note .... The SO and I were discussing about our tear ducts last night and found that both of us have an uneven share of tears come out of our right eye. Has anyone else noticed this? Or is it really that our left tear ducts are underused?

Humor: In case of terrorist attack

Just follow these helpful signs and you will be safe. This ranks up there with the "If you see a flash duck and cover" kind of thing back from the cold war.

It seems that for this world to live the same life style as I'm living right now we need 3.8 Earths. My ideal life though bumps that up to 8.6. Anyway how is your lifestyle?

Mafia feeling....

I have the feeling that I should be posting. Anyone interested if I start posting again? It is kind of like the mafia, once you are in you can't leave as it will just drag you right back again.

End Post

I have been considering this for a little while and I have made up my mind. This will be my last post.

On that note .... "later folks".

This just in....

Five seconds ago the "The Man" said that our contracts were extended until the end of April!

GTI 3 answer and 4 question

Well you have all asked for it. Here is the answer for GTI3. So the answer is a Uranium PU-36 Corn Fish! Sorry about the little hacks out of the image but it seems that I left lots of address related stuff on the picture so I cut it out.

Here is the next GTI:

This one is really undefined but you can all get it. If you haven't seen this you need to have your head examined :P When the new month comes I'll post the answer and the next question. I'll make it every two weeks the images.

Since this is the third post in the day can I say that I have unleashed the "Fully-Post-A-Matic"?

GTI Change

I decided to change the answer for the GTI to offsite links. Even having gobs of bandwidth made it difficult to get the entire page in good time and I want to be nice to my Dad who is on dialup. Anyway I made the changes retroactively for future consistency. The images still come from the same place so really it was just changing the HTML to be "A HREF=" lines from "IMG SRC" lines.

Something I haven't thought about is how long should I post the images before providing the answers. What sounds good? One week? Two? A month?

Funny

I stumbled across this when reading a Slashdot article about age in IT and if it actually impacts your employability (is that even a word??). The topic changed to how much of a problem it is to have a family in IT. The feeling in one thread was that "If you have family you can't work 18 hours a day and thus aren't any good to the company." The comments got to the point at citing someone's boss. It is a good picture and I think of a few people like it :P

Guess That Image 2 and 3

Ok here is the answer.

And here is the next image....



Let the guesses fly!