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Quick followup to the previous entry before bed: had a lab (sorry.. “practical”. Physics professors are touchy) tonight on rotational motion. Having made myself familiar with the material for the sake of the test, I actually felt like I was remotely knowledgeable about the physics that govern the motion of bicycle wheels and yo-yos. Maybe a little hazy on the particulars, but I successfully argued a point about stationary vs. moving frames of references to a stubborn lab practical partner, and so well that I could expand on the TA’s explanation of it! Hoo-ray fer lerning!
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Well hey, what a difference not having a total crap day at work can make…
What’s that you say? You need context? Oh, very well.
I just wrote the second “midterm” for my first-year physics class tonight. It’s that I’m taking purely because Dalhousie requires two terms of “pure” science classes, with lab components, and I thought taking another stab at physics would be interesting. Also, because I couldn’t find anything else that U of T offered that looked really appealing/was tranferable back to Dalhousie for credit as those sciences.1
And, admittedly, it has been interesting. In a very “Chinese”2 way of defining interesting. I was hoping for Physics for Idiots. What I very nearly got was Physics 1 for Future Physics Majors (I think that one is another course, but what I took isn’t the easy physics). So, I’ve been learning a great deal of foundational physics, and it’s been very conventionally interesting. I’ve been casually interested in physics for a long time, so there are certain properties that I’ve taught myself. What I didn’t have was any of the basis, such as the math behind angular/rotational motion, oscillations momentum, and all that foolishness. And I’ve been trying to learn it, while taking three others courses, and working full time.
That’s the part where it gets hard. My previous “midterm” was something that, the morning of, I felt absolutely ready for. I woke up thinking about vector math. Then I had the Worst Day Ever at the office that day, and completely blanked when I sat down to the exam. Tonight, I’d had a good weekend to prepare, went in, sat down, and didn’t really have any trouble! Sure, I couldn’t just rhyme off the answers straight off the top of my head, but I always had a sense of knowing how to solve it. And everything got solved. I feel good about it (though I think I used the wrong unit for one question; whoops!).
So, yeah. What a difference!
Also, my database class that I’ve been bitching about since query optimisation showed up in the curriculum… got assignment 3 back, and I’m batting 3 for 3, and I have no idea how. I’m astounded. I’m not trying to brag; I never get marks this good. I’m acing it. Now I just have to write #4 and do the damned final.
I will get this degree finished, one way or another. And if these marks are any indication, I’m going to wind up smoking my correspondence classes!
1 I didn’t realise this when I signed up for my unnecessary psychology course, but by “science class with lab component”, the Registrar’s office actually meant “two of these twenty-odd specific course codes”. Would’ve saved me a heap of trouble and money, and I wouldn’t have to take the damn physics class now!
2“May you live in interesting times” is supposedly a Chinese curse. No one can prove it, though. Hence the quotes.
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Brief items of interest since I last wrote:
- I got married. Clear, based on timestamps of previous and current posts. Honeymooned in Paris. I highly recommend going there, should the opportunity ever come up. Some photos are on Picasa, but only about a tenth, at most, of the total pictures taken. Will be linking once the album’s complete. The ceremony was beautiful, Anne was (is!) beautiful, and the reception was an amazing party.
- Started taking a pair of classes at the University of Toronto. Admittedly, having some trouble sorting my schedule to keep up with assignments for these two and my correspondence classes, but it’s been a long since I’ve been a student, and taking full-time classes and working a full-time job at the same time is difficult. Particularly when you just got married and would love to be able to spend some time with your wife!
- I’m still getting used to calling Anne my wife. It’s getting less unusual with time, and I don’t have to check myself from saying/typing/thinking “girlfriend” very often—hardly at all—but it’s still odd to hear myself say “my wife”.
- Also, writing a CMS for a colleague of Anne’s, to support a website for a line of lipbalm she’s developed. Why developing from scratch? Because I don’t know of any other products that incorporate full backup as a matter of course. I’ve been working on a CMS for a while now, and this has allowed me to concentrate the effort on doing it properly, instead of hacking in features as I need them.
- The newly redesigned CIBC website launched Thursday morning; you may have noticed. I’ve been working on the redesign project for the past…three months, I think. Long time, at any rate. I created the accessibility support features that you can get at with the controls at the bottom, and I’m really quite proud of that.
That’s really all I can think off the top of my head. Anne and I are in Kingston for Thanksgiving (since my parents live in Alberta, and we live in Toronto), and it’s always good and relaxing to come up here and visit with my in-laws (I know, I know…I get along well with my in-laws and always have).
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, how on Earth are you?
It occurs to me that I open far, far too many LiveJournal posts like that. I’d stop doing it, if only I could remember to post consistently in the first place. I wouldn’t have to constantly apologise for the lack of posts.
So, I’m not apologising. I’ve had things going on that have kept me away keeping this thing up to date. How I have the time to do so tonight is, upon proper consideration, a little unusual. I should have even less time this week than any other, barring next.
The simple reason for that, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned this fact at least once before… I’m getting married this coming weekend. This Saturday. In, quite seriously, fewer than five days. Approximately 113 hours, by my estimation.
That’s not much time. And there are still things that need sorting out; I keep forgetting that I’m supposed to dance with my mother at the reception, and that I need to choose a song for that dance. I want to pick something by The Beatles, but they’ve got a pretty extensive song catalogue, and my knowledge of it’s pretty embarrassingly limited… particularly when I consider that my mom’s preferences, when it comes to The Beatles, extended only about as far as the release of Rubber Soul.
That’s “the big news” in this part of the world. We’re going to take a trip to Paris for our honeymoon, and we’ve got a small stack of guidebooks full of ideas, and everyone we’ve spoken to has been to Paris has told us, “Oh, well, you have to go here, and here, and here when you’re there.” Looks like touring Paris (and Versailles—can’t properly appreciate France if all you see is one city, and if you’re going to go anywhere nearish to Paris, it might as well be where numerous kings of France held their government!) is going to be something of a full-time job!
So, yes, I’m excited about that. I’ve never left this continent, so it’s going to be exciting to be somewhere with some Goddamn history. Seriously, what’s the oldest thing you can find in North America.. four hundred years? Maybe? Paris has existed as a permanent settlement since 500 AD, for crying out loud, and you can still find bits and pieces of the original structures! I’m excited to experience a place where there are existing buildings older than the oldest things on an entire continent. Construction began on Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris in 1163—and it’s not even the oldest church in the city! I find I’m getting more and more interested in history, the older I get. I wonder why…
That’s really all the big happenings there are, these days, to report on. I’m going to back to school this week to finally finish my degree… should be interesting. I haven’t been in a classroom in nearly three years, and one of the classes I’ll be taking is first-year physics (albeit the evening class, so it might actually be more heavily populated by older students like me). Like I said, should be interesting, and hopefully not in a may-you-live-in-interesting-times kind of way.
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I fail to understand how David Ahenakew could possibly maintain a mental distinction between “I don’t hate the Jews” and “I hate what they do to people.” I really do. I don’t see how these two thoughts can possibly cohabit in the same consciousness without a huge headache caused by the weight of the cognitive dissonance. It’s like saying, “I don’t hate cancer, but I hate what it does to people.” I don’t see how you could hate what an entire group of people, en masse, “do to people,” (and we’ll leave the retarded Jew-conspiracy-theory factor out of it) without, as a direct result, hating that group of people. He has gone on the public record referring to Jews as a disease, for fuck’s sake. It’s not even that he’s a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is one thing. This is outright religious discrimination. What he said was a shade shy of an attempt to incite violence. It didn’t quite cross that line to become an overt attempt, but holy shit, is it ever close. He all but said that the Holocaust was a good idea. Damn good thing he was stripped of the Order of Canada… but I have to ask: why was he only fined $1000?! Never mind the fact that the fine was turned over on appeal, why such a low figure?! It’s a hell of a dent for most people, sure, but not much of an incentive to shut your mouth, now is it? Jesus.
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Romeo and Juliet moved into the theatre yesterday, and the set has almost completely been built. It was surprisingly quick; we managed to completely load the truck at the rehearsal space, then unload it at the theatre, in about an hour. The balcony platform was mounted to eight-foot four-by-fours and set into position in about as long (which was fun to do, let me tell you). The majority of cast had been rehearsing for most of the afternoon, and after the rehearsal, I had a chance to see how far along the set was… the balcony was secured, most of the flats were up and the big double doors upstage were just being hung on the frame and mounted to the walls. This is going to be a great show. Yesterday was my first exposure to the room itself, and it’s going to be a great show. It’s hard to get a proper feel for the room from the rehearsal space, but now that I’ve seen it… wow. Folks in the front couple of rows are going to be damn near in the danger zone during the fights—especially Romeo and Tybalt’s… for reasons you’ll have to discover by actually coming to the show! I must admit, I was a little… surprised by the size of it. Maybe I was spoiled by working in the Imperial, but, honestly, my first thought was, “that’s it?” Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the room. It’s a great room, very well designed. It’s black-box, as seems to be the popular thing in Toronto… it’s just that it’s smaller than I was expecting. I cut my teeth on a six-hundred-ten-seat hall; the Scarborough Village Theatre seats not much more than two hundred. Makes my job easier, I’ll say that for it. Now I don’t have to try to throw to row T from the back of a forty-three-foot-deep stage. I’ve got row F, at worst. Sight lines are way better, too; I don't have to worry about facing out here, because unless you’re facing backwards, at the upstage limits, there’s a lot of people can see your face. It’s a whole different way of working, that I’m admittedly not experienced with, but it’s going to rock. You can really work the room. I’m excited to start working in the space on Thursday. The group I’m working with is a great group; I actually feel like I’ve become a part of a larger community of actors. The last time I was onstage, I almost felt like an interloper… there were cliques, and a lot of the cast had been in most of the company’s previous shows. Scarborough Players has been much more welcoming; I hope there’s something I can audition for next season. I’d considered auditioning for the next show, but I don’t think I can afford the time, especially if I’m going to be trying to take an evening physics class at U of T… We’ll see, eh? I certainly don’t want this to be the last show I do with this group; they’re a lot of fun!
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This past weekend passed in what is probably the best way possible: spent all day with Anne wandering around The Annex, had a great dinner at an awesome restaurant in Bedford Park, and then yesterday got back into the swing of things with a full-afternoon, super-physical rehearsal for Romeo and Juliet that left me absolutely bushed, but pleasantly so.
I often forget how many cool little shops are along Bloor West between Spadina and Bathurst. Never mind BMV Books (which is an awesome store, but not little by any stretch of the imagination); I’m talking about the incense shop run by the little Indian woman who’ll give you a discount when you pay in cash and always has a wide stock of scents. I’m talking about Outer Layer, where you can pick up all sorts of hilarious, functional and just plain cool things, for use anywhere in the house: double-side sucker pads for the shower shaped like hands, to keep your stuff if you’re out of shelf space; dry-erase beermats so that you can mark your territory; all manner of snarky and/or kitschy fridge magnets and greeting cards (e.g. “I love not camping”, “I found Jesus—he was behind the couch”)… lots of fun stuff. I’m regularly tempted to buy, well, everything, despite the fact that I know perfectly well that I’d never use most of it.
There’s also a really cool comics shop down there; I believe it’s called Labyrinth. It’s been a while since I’ve been in, but it’s a far cry from most other comics shops I’ve been in. It’s clean, well-lit, they sell prints by local artists, and the staff are gregarious and outgoing with customers. Anne and I picked a couple of them up one time; one’s of a pair of dragons, staring each other down from within these little fenced in areas, and it’s titled The Neighbours; the other was a mother dragon giving her baby dragon a bath in San Francisco Bay, and the little one’s using various boats and commuter jets as bath toys—we sent that to my nephew as a present.
Dinner on Saturday night was at a fairly new restaurant called Locavore, a block and a bit north of Lawrence Avenue, on Avenue Road. In a word, it was fantastic. Locavore’s thing is that the ingredients are from local sources whenever possible—in some situations, you have to use imports, like if you need a really good olive oil—, and that everything’s made on-site; even the butter! They say that they adhere to the “small-plate” concept, which I will admit, made me think for a bit that the prices were a little steep for what I was getting…until I had my first bite, and especially until I realised about a half hour after we’d finished eating that I was just precisely full. You know how sometimes you feel pretty full when you’re about three quarters of the way through the entrée, and because you know there’s not enough left to make bringing it home worth it, you stuff the rest of it down your throat? Yeah, that doesn’t happen here.
And besides—to get food of the calibre delivered by Locavore, at any other restaurant’s portion sizes, you can, and should, expect to pay twice the price. I got pork belly, and it was, without exaggeration, the best pork I’ve ever eaten. Tender, juicy, full of flavour (the soubise sauce was amazing, too), and just the tiniest bit of crispiness at the very edges of the grain of the meat…if it had been on any longer, it would have been overdone; any shorter, and it wouldn’t have been done enough. Came with some mixed greens, tossed with a dressing similar to a lemon poppyseed dressing, but again, way better than anything else, and a poached egg on a little pancake of potato…I’m running out of words to describe the taste. Everything I had was great, including the wine (a Riesling from Ontario called 20 Bees; an unusually sweet white wine—most whites I’ve had have been dry); the focaccia was phenomenal, and the desserts we ordered perfectly hit the spot. Their crème brulée and cheesecake defy description.
The staff was quite friendly, trading jokes with each other and with the patrons, and quick to let you know if the kitchen’s run out of something, and what a good replacement is. They ran out of the lamb just before we arrived, and offered a replacement of…something, I didn’t understand what it was (it sounded like “elchy”, but Google’s failing me on what it might be…elk, maybe?), but our waiter was quick to let another couple, who had ordered the lamb, know. I’ve heard of people complaining when their waiter makes a couple of friendly jokes through the night, but I’m not one of them. I prefer when my waiter makes me smile, because part of any waiter’s job is to make your night a good one, and see to it that when you leave the restaurant, you do so with a smile on your face. If I didn’t want the person taking my order to have any meaningful kind of interaction with me, I’d go to a fast food joint.
All in all, after an appetiser, two entrees, two desserts, two glasses of wine, a glass of beer for myself, taxes and healthy tip as reward for good service and great food… $85. And, like I said, half an hour later, I realised that I’d eaten precisely the right amount of food, which made me feel even more so that it was $85 well spent. If ever you’re wondering what kind of difference local food can make, go to Locavore. Their specific menu changes from day to day, depending on what’s on the market, but they always keep the entrées within fish, beef, chicken, duck, lamb and pork. I hope the next time I go, the chef’s got a good cut of beef.
My rehearsal yesterday, though, was madness. We started off rehearsing all the fights (except the Romeo/Paris fight at the end of the show; Paris wasn’t called yesterday), which was cool because I got a chance to see the fights in Act III, but also quite good because it’s been quite some time since I’ve had a chance to go over my own fight in the first scene. The choreography came back pretty quickly, and some of the rough edges are smoothing themselves out, but we got to introduce the props, which necessitated a small adjustment to the choreography to keep the fight properly downstage.
I don’t want to say too much about it, because I don’t want to give away all the awesome stuff that’s going to happen, but I will say this: when these are brought up to speed, it’s going to be phenomenal. Particularly the Tybalt/Mercutio fight. One slip, and Mercutio’s actually going to be bleeding.
In other kind of nifty news, I found two things over the weekend that I’ve been looking for for quite a while that had previously been proving rather elusive: a “Today” insert for my planner, and a step-by-step walkthrough, with videos available, of the full 108-move long form tai chi.
Yeah, those actually aren’t related to each other in any way, apart from the coincidence in tracking them both down within thirty-six hours of one another.
The planner thing is something I discovered not too long after starting at CIBC…I’ve always had a sort of fascination with DayTimer and Franklin Covey planners. Maybe not “always” in the strictest definition of the word, but ever since I was first exposed to it. I’m an informational packrat, and I’m also really aware of my own disorganisaiton with respect to getting things done. I tried, long ago, making myself TODO lists…but I’d always lose the lists! I’ve tried buying planners, but that only ever lasted a couple of weeks at best, because I’d forget to look at it. It’s working better this time around, because I’m keeping it open at work, and trying to remember to look at it at least once when I get home—even if it’s just before I go to bed, to go over what I did and didn’t do today.
I think part of the reason it’s working better this time around is because I’m doing it with the resources available at D*I*Y Planner. Instead of purchasing a planner that somebody else has made, I found my old Five Star binder from Grade Seven (which is still in great Goddamn shape, I might add), printed off a bunch of day and week planner pages, dated them starting 8 February (the night I printed them), and started writing things down in it. Instead of sinking money into it, I’m sinking time into it…so there’s a much better motivation to keep up with it. If I’d bought one and never got around to using it properly, well, that’d be a pain because then I”d have wasted that money…but this way, if I give up, I’ve wasted a lot of my own time, which I hate doing; it’s the programmer in me.
So I’ve been looking, as a result, for other planner pages on that site to add in to increase my use of the binder. The fact that I'm using letter-size (or “Folio”, in planner terminology) pages does somewhat restrict what I use out of the box, since most people use a “Classic” page, which is a 5.5”x8.5” page, but D*I*Y Planner is also kind enough to provide a page template, so that I can make my own. If there’s something I can’t find in Folio size, but is available in Classic, with a decent bit of work, I can refactor it for my uses…or create entirely new designs based on what I need! The ultimate result is, well, a planner that I’m much more likely to keep using, because I have a vested interest in it. I’ve run off a small stack of Contacts pages so that I have available detailed information about the people I regularly, or even just occasionally, need to get in touch with, and I'm considering what other kind of pages I might need. So far, my use of the planner is pretty light, but it’s been only four weeks, so apart from Contacts and note pages (which wouldn't work especially well yet anyway, for a couple of reasons), I haven’t really started pushing the edges of what I need this thing to be able to do. I am getting more of my “you know, I really need to do this” things done, if for no other reason than because it’s such a pain in the ass to rewrite the task for each day that I forget to do it.
Maybe that’s the whole reason that paper planners are so effective—you annoy yourself into getting stuff done, because writing it out every day because you didn’t do it yesterday is a wonderfully effective reminder that you’re not doing what you mean to do.
Either way, as long as I wind up getting myself better organised, I’m happy. I’ve been debating whether or not I want to print out a Romeo and Juliet script so that I can put my blocking, choreography and characterisation notes on the opposite pages, but then I ask if, four and a half weeks to opening night it’s entirely worth it… the debate’s still open.
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Welp, so much for keeping this thing up to date; I see I’ve been up to my old tricks again.
I have to admit, it’s kind of hard to keep coming back with something halfway intelligent to say. I don’t so much want to use this (as I once did) as a running colour commentary on my own life; I want to write things of substance. Yeah, sure, make announcements about what I’m doing, but I also want to ruminate on those things, instead of just a litany of “I did this, and this, and this”… if for no other reason than my routine doesn’t vary a whole hell of a lot. It would get boring, fast, not just to read, but also to write.
Then again, it would be better than what I’m putting out now, which is a whole lot of nothing.
Let’s see… I’m currently working for the bank that financed my education, doing somewhat similar work to what I was doing at Rogers, just without the point-and-drool interface, and with some pretty damn sophisticated technologies based on current Web standards… but it’s still, I have to admit, a little unfulfilling. I’d like to be creating, rather than inserting Tab A into Slot B, but, hey, I’ve only been working there six weeks, so maybe it’s something I have to wait for.
It’ll feel like a long wait, though, if that’s the case. And when I get home, even if I just spent the majority of the afternoon reading Usenet because there’s no work available for me to do, more often than not I find it hard to want to engage my brain in the kind of deep thought required for programming. Maybe it’s a sort of computer burnout, after eight-ish hours of staring at one, and maybe it’s just because at home I don’t ever really feel like I can get into that zone… I don’t know; I haven’t it much thought. It’s just a little disappointing, I guess.
However, I signed up the other for a fourth-year database classes through Athabasca University, which starts in April, and I promised Dalhousie would be done by July, so maybe that will help me get my programming mojo back at home. Just eleven credits to go, and I finally get my Bachelor degree!
On the plus side, there’s something about this job that I feel is really helping me get my act otherwise together (if my home-computer-based activities have been getting woefully neglected). Change is coming, slowly but surely.
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At some point in the recent past—I don’t quite recall the date, but I haven’t yet mentioned it here—I auditioned for a performance of Romeo and Juliet, and got, well, a few parts! Not anything exceptionally major, but it’s going to be a lot of fun, for one very simple reason:
The swordfights are being professionally choreographed.
With real swords.
Oh, they’re not sharp, or anything, but with just a little bit of effort, they could be, but for the kind of fighting that we’ll be doing, they don’t really need to be sharp to cause some serious injury. Especially the finer rapiers that Mercutio and Tybalt will be using—particularly Tybalt, devoté of the Italian school that he is. If you don’t dodge or parry, and you get hit with the point, you are going to bleed.
There are two very important things that I’ve learned so far, from just the first rehearsal. First, stage swordfighting is fun. Everything’s done at distance and off lines, so only if the person who’s supposed to be parrying screws something up, does anybody really stand to get hurt (and then, they’ve done it to themselves). Second, I wouldn’t have lasted a Goddamn minute in Shakespeare’s day.
The fight choreographer asked right off the bat if anyone was lefthanded. I am, and I said so, but I qualified it with the statement that I use my right arm for most things, which is also true. Nevertheless, he gave all his instructions with the qualifier that I should mirror him, so I did (because choreography, especially fight choreography, is an environment where you do what you’re told, and how you’re told to do it, because if you don’t, you can seriously injure yourself), and two things happened by the end of the rehearsal. First, I discovered that it now feels a little unnatural to hold a sword in my right hand. I like this, because I’ve been trying over the last… five and a half years, I think, to do more activities lefthanded, and so far, all I’ve got is handwriting and using a mouse (which I can do ambidextrously). Second, my arm got really tired. You don’t really think about it when you watch people fight with swords, because they do it so well, but those things are heavy bastards, especially the “servant’s sword” that I’ll be using, primarily because my characters really only show up in one scene each. They’re all plebeian members of the house of Capulet. As was the style at the time (historically), they naturally would have been armed (with an onion on their belts, which was the style at the time), but Old Capulet wouldn’t exactly have shelled out for those weapons. So they aren’t as finely made; they’re a little clunkier; a little slower… they’re four or five pounds of solid steel. That gets a little heavy after a while—by the end of an hour, it felt a little more like eight to ten pounds.
The point is, though, considering that everyone in the 16th century was armed, as a matter of course, and no one was especially shy about drawing their weapons—or someone else’s blood—and I’m having trouble keeping a sword up and ready to parry for an hour… if I was magically spirited back four hundred years, I wouldn’t live for a month.
So I clearly need to get myself into far better shape than I’m in for this show. To a certain extent, practice with the swords will improve my strength and dexterity in that arm, but I don’t want to just rely on once-weekly rehearsals to do it; I feel I need to be actively working to improve things on my own time.
Still… Goddamn, this is going to be a lot of fun!
I also learned to fall and how not to fall onstage, in order to not seriously injure myself. My knees will be spared, with continuing practice, but it still needs some work, or I’m going to end up bruising my ribs and my middle spine.
Ahh well. I’m looking forward to getting into the real choreography. Hopefully we’ll be able to make the audience wince, and think somebody’s actually been seriously hurt… without actually hitting them!
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Okay, so, the long-overdue update.
When we last left our hero, there was some kind of evidence that I was gainfully employed. That changed at the end of October, when I got laid off from my enjoyable, albeit stressful and somewhat-less-than-lucrative PHP programming job in downtown Toronto. I was supposed to start a new job at TELUS at the beginning of December, but that didn’t quite materialise; instead, there was a series of delays, all of which were unfortunately quite believable, based on my prior experience working for another telco, but each of which revealed a gradually more-and-more disconcerting impression of the higher management in place at TELUS.
I’m not going to get into the details, or my suspicions of what the business structure is like there, but I will say this: if ever I’m a hiring manager for any company, I intend to make it abundantly clear to my superiors that once a new hire has accepted an offer of employment, and agreed upon a starting date, then the only person who has the authority to change that date is the new hire—accounting, of course, for particularly exceptional circumstances. Say, the sudden bankruptcy of the company or the spontaneous failure on the part of the working environment to exist. All equipment required for the job should be acquired on the day the position opens, and the software environment that the new employee will use will be frozen on the day the offer is made. No exceptions, substitutions, exchanges or refunds, called it, stamped it, no erasies.
I do have a new job coming up, though, and not at TELUS. I got an offer at CIBC to work on their main website and some of the UI elements of their ATMs, and considering it was better money and location than the TELUS gig—and most importantly, not a project to be delayed, but a proper position—I jumped on it. I start this coming Wednesday, the 14th. TELUS has lost out because they just couldn’t commit to a date. I just hope and pray that the same thing won’t happen at CIBC… but, for the reasons outlined above, it doesn’t seem likely to fall through. Fingers crossed!
In the interim, I tried to do some part-time freelance work, from home, for a guy in Richmond Hill. Again, no details (mainly due to NDA), but I will say this: when you hire a programmer, show some respect for your programmer’s experience and expertise, and pay for the work. Guy still owes me $750.
( Typical Christmas/New Year stuff after the jump… )
So there you have it, the standard Giant Post To Make Up For A Long Gap In Posting. They’re always a little embarrassing to write, but hey, you have to be able to laugh at yourself, right?
Right.
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Wow, I'm clearly just awesome at keeping this thing up-to-date, aren't I?
Oh, wait.
Well, rest assured, I'm not dead. Just lazy as ever. There isn't really any other explanation.
However, I should also put this thing down and try to sleep. See what I can do about a real update in the morning.
Ta!
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Here’s a fun recipe for failure: come to depend on one specific service for basically everything you do, with nothing available for backup.
I should have learned this lesson some time ago.
I’m not sure what happened today, but Google’s been on the blink, pretty much ever since I got up. Pings came back without issue, but for extended periods throughout the day, I couldn’t get at it. Not with Firefox, not with Thunderbird. Google was just…gone. Google.com, Google.ca, Google.co.uk. No amount of searching on (shudder) Yahoo revealed anything. Slashdot hasn’t even mentioned it.
Not having email was a minor pain in the ass. Not having access to this neat little timesheet service I have as a Google Gadget was what was really chapping my ass today.
I wonder if it’s time I bought myself a domain again, and actually remembered to keep it online this time, so this doesn’t have to be a problem again.
Also, does anyone know of something good for tracking timesheet data in GNOME?
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| 2008-09-29 15:43 |
| (no subject) |
| Public |
| Smashing Pumpkins - Bring the Light |
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Smashing Pumpkins’ latest record, Zeitgeist, bothers me. Not in a huge way; it’s not like it’s a bad record. It pops up every once in a while when I’m listening to MeeMix, and it’s good music. Billy might be kind of a blowhard as of late, but he does write good music.
It’s just the Smashing Pumpkins label that bugs me. Not one song I’ve heard from Zeitgeist feels like a Smashing Pumpkins song. It doesn’t. It’s consistently somewhere between Zwan and… I’m not sure, maybe Mellon Collie-era Pumpkins. It doesn’t feel sufficiently Pumpkiny for me to fit that label.
Hell, Mary, Star of the Sea felt more like a Pumpkins record than Zeitgeist does. And that’s probably a bad thing, I think.
Billy and Jimmy are an excellent songwriting team. I just wish they’d make up their damn minds about what they want to call themselves.
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Dear Prime Minister Harper,
If it’s not too much to ask, would you mind waiting until after you’ve called an election to start your campaign? I know you did it the last time around, but it made you look like a massive douchebag then, and a repeat offense isn’t making you look any better.
Giving yourself a head start in a race that’s supposed to be democratic is the hallmark of being a complete prick, not someone who ought to be leading the country.
You make me ashamed to have been born in, and live in, this country. I would sooner vote for Ralph Nader.
Sincerely,
Matthew Coe
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The MySpace Developer Platform is terrible and in all ways awful, and deserves to die a horrible, flaming death.
If I meet this Tom asshat, I am going to hit him.
That is all.
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Okay, take two at actually keeping this thing vaguely close to being “regularly updates”… Unfortunately, I still don’t feel like there’s really a whole hell of a lot to say. Maybe I just never know what’s of interest to the people who read this thing, because at this point, I’m more interested in writing for readers, rather than writing for myself.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) anne_t_social reminded me the other day that she’d taken a surf through the archives of this journal and read some of the ridiculous crap I wrote when I was sixteen and seventeen. I’d like, on one hand, to just remove that stuff from the servers and pretend I never wrote it, but on the other hand, I wrote it; I should be willing to accept the consequences of my actions, and I haven't liked going back and redacting posts for a while, ever since a messy, messy, messy breakup in first year.
Maybe writing for readers is the wrong approach to take. It probably is. I don’t know; maybe I’m just never certain about what’s appropriate to write about. I’m never sure what of my work life is kosher to write about, or my home life. Never sure what Anne’s comfortable with me talking about… also, I never really know who’s reading this who I don’t need finding out about certain things… and there’s probably some people who read this who actively don’t want to know about various things.
Wow, I think I just made my life sound a hell of a lot more sordid and seamy than it really is. Ultimately, I go to work, I come home, I watch TV with Anne and go to bed, and repeat this cycle five days a week. I’m also finding myself getting rapidly more and more tired with every successive word and, for one reason or another, I really have no inclination to reread that last paragraph to make sure it makes any kind of sense.
It could say “gabba gabba hey” right in the middle, and I wouldn’t really care.
One last note: for any women out there who are reading this, and live in the Greater Toronto Area, and to whom I haven’t already mentioned this, I encourage you to check out the Facebook page my company recently launched: Women’s Wisdom—Proudly Presented by femMED. I worked my ass off on that page! :-)
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So, clearly as lazy as I am about updating my operating system, I’m about as lazy about updating my journal. Yeah, shit’s happened since the last time I wrote something here...
Let’s see, where to start? Well, for starts, I changed jobs. I got laid off from The Evil Empire and started working at a small ad company, writing applications for Facebook. That was a hell of a gear change, and one that was altogether welcome. I felt like I was languishing at my last job, babysitting their website and knowing, almost for a fact, that my opinion didn’t matter. That’s the problem over there: all the decision-making authority is concentrated at the top, and if someone at the bottom wants to actually get something done, they almost certainly need to get at least two vice presidents interested in it.
Needless to say, I had no creative input. Yes, I feel they shot themselves in the foot letting me go when they did, but given the culture there, had I not left in the way that I did, I probably would never have left.
So now, while I’m making less money in my new position, I’m doing something I enjoy much more. As I said, I’m now writing Facebook applications, and when one gets published that I did a significant amount of work on (which, honestly, is Any Day Now), I’ll try to remember to let you know. At the very least, I’ll smack anyone who I think might be interested on Facebook.
Let’s see, what else? The church where anne_t_social and I will be getting married in a little over a year was recently assigned a new priest by the diocese, so now we have a new priest to get to know. All we know about him is that he’s Nigerian and he comes from a family of nine. Looks like we’ll have to make time to meet him and get to know him. The outgoing priest let him know that we’re expecting to be married in that church next September, so it’s not as though he’ll be completely surprised or anything, but still…
By the way, on that note, congratulations are due to lynsey on her recent engagement. I’ll tell you this much, I’ve been engaged for coming on a year and a half now, and I’m still not used to the word “fiancée”. I’ve adapted to telling people I’ll be getting married in a little over a year, but still. In all honestly, I’ve found myself outright thinking of her as my wife—as in, when I lose track of her in the supermarket, my first thought tends to be, “Hmmm, I”ve misplaced my wife.” I guess the good thing is that that doesn’t feel weird at all to me (since “fiancée” does, a little), so once that day comes and goes, I shouldn’t have any problems adjusting.
Actually, apart from the job change, I can’t think of a great deal that’s change. Our apartment is really, completely, clean for the first time since we moved in (hurray for finally getting a downstairs locker!), so I guess we’ll see how long this can be kept up. Work has provided me with a less-new, more-awesome notebook computer, with a much larger screen, on which to write my software (and upon which I’ve written this journal entry)&hellip. Toronto is sticky and gross and humid in the summer, it’s pretty ridiculous. I showered only hours ago, and from simply sitting around in the apartment, I already need another. But we have friends (and I have work) in the city, so it’s not like we can leave any time soon.
I should head to bed; I’ve had a hard time both falling and staying asleep the past few days and this isn’t helping. But I bet trying to sleep any sooner after drinking a Hurricane (a proper one, you know, that has two fingers of rum in it) just wouldn’t be at all pleasant…
At any rate, I should be off… Hopefully, I can get back into the writing-regularly-in-this-thing game.
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Oh, wow, am I ever glad that I’m pretty lazy about keeping my Ubuntu install up-to-date with the latest version. I managed to remain unaffected by the vulnerability, because the change was checked in after OpenSSL got frozen into 6.06 LTS. So, you know, until I see something from Ubuntu that says, “we’ve patched the vulnerability in the Hardy Heron install that we’re shipping”, I’m just going to sit tight and be happy with what I’ve got. It might be a little flaky about making DNS requests on bootup, but that’s a small price to pay for knowing my copy of OpenSSL works properly. Huzzah!
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So, I’ve been keeping up with a few teams in the playoffs this year (specifically, Detroit, Montreal, Pittsburgh and Calgary), and I’m a little curious as to what game it was that Montreal’s goalie was watching! Seriously. Kid pretty much just watched a couple of pucks go right past him, dumped the puck in front of a Boston player when he was probably seven feet from the net.
5-1 for Boston, bringing the series to 3-2 for Montreal, and I am not at all surprised. The Montreal lines have been delivering a pretty offense the last couple of games, but at least in the last game they kept up a strong defense.
They keep this up and Boston’s going to advance to the conference semifinals. And I really can’t say that Montreal won’t have had it coming.
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geeky
accomplished
excited
rageoholic
contemplative
determined
frustrated
embarrassed
nerdy
disappointed