Who wants to live in a World where those warnings are necessary?

It looks like the latest adventures with our server broke my blog. As I’m editing this, I’m doing it blind because the WordPress editor is showing me white characters on white background (edit: I’m now writing this in Word and will paste it in WordPress after – duh!) and all my toolbars are nowhere to be found of maybe they are just invisible. I can’t upload/insert any image.

Things are not looking great.

Hopefully I’ll be back soon. Take care!

That’s what four score and seven years ago means, right? Actually I don’t think anyone knows what that means*, so let’s just say it means about a couple of months.

What have I been up to since my last serious post?

Other than getting an awesome new car, it’s been pretty much all work all the time. Between installing patches, trying to fix our DEV environment and installing more patches, nights turned to days, turned to weeks and months and here we are. Saying that I’m tired is the understatement of the year. Well, until something even more tiring happens I guess.

It’s not all bad at work though. We’re making progress towards our new version, and we’re actually getting a new employee on May 1st that will help us promote our stuff. Speaking of stuff, I also got my hands on an awesome MacBook Air and a new iPad, so yay for technology! Now if the new iPhone could come out soon that would really help me – my 3GS is starting to act up…

Family-wise, I don’t know. Between the week-end tournaments at the four corners of the province and having to cancel a few family events because of work, it all seems a big blur. Audacious son broke a front tooth off which required root canal, CutieDaughter is having hearing issues so we spent a lot of time running around going from clinic to clinic to specialist… It’s just tiring. Oh, CutieDaughter went to Guatemala and came back.

I still managed to get some “me time”, and I started playing golf again after a two-year hiatus. My first nine holes turned out to be a five holes – sun was setting and I was soooo tired after all that climbing up and down the hills, and you should’ve seen me walk around the next day… Actually you should’ve heard me walk around the next day. It sounded exactly like this:`

“Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow… Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow.”

But the second time around was much better. Went to drive balls a few times, and I’m looking into changing some of my clubs.

So yeah, not much to report. Maybe I’ll have to resurrect the Batman & Joker strips to fill some void.

What have YOU been up to?

*Of course I know it means 87 years, but I wasn’t going to wait  86 years and 10 more moths before posting.

Definitely a weird day at work. 

A – admincv1.saea.uottawa.ca – Main admin site for my job.

B – behind.blackboard.com - resources for my job.

C – cyberpresse.ca – News.

D – demonoid.me – A torrent website

E – awkwardlyawesome.net – Sheila’s website!

F – facebook.com – Duh.

G – gmail.com – That’s email.

H – help.blackboard.com – more resources for my job

I – i-am-bored.com – lunchtime fun

J – t.co/j5JKZKea – a link to this picture I used in a photoshop thing.

K – kia.ca – I just bought a new car.

L – lesombre.ca – Yay me!

M – maps.google.ca – Looks like I’m afraid to get lost.

N – netflix.ca – more lunchtime fun.

O – vistadev.cc.uottawa.ca – our DEV environment.

P – picasaweb.google.com – my old pictures site (I’m moving everything to Flickr… Slowly).

Q – A Google search result with a lot of “q” in the url. Yes, it’s job-related.

R – radioparadise.com – Nice way to have different music playing while working.

S – sto.ca – the bus website.

T – thechive.com – Keep on Chiving!

U – uottawa.ca – Where I work.

V – vista4.uottawa.ca – Our PROD environment.

W – www.facebook.com – I Facebook a lot.

X – xe.com – Currency exchange.

Y – youtube.com – It’s YouTube.

Z – zazzle.com – link to my Zazzle store.

The lamp was placed behind the door, so when I opened the door I busted the shade.

A Dr. Pepper cap was left on my desk.

It looks like my headset attempted suicide.

Sigh. All right, I’ll focus on the positive instead.

Only 10 hours before I pick up the new car. W00t! 

This is a brain.

I need your help. 

I have a lot of questions, I’m facing a lot of challenges – mainly work-related – and I’m thinking that crowdsourcing is the way to go. Except I don’t want to just post questions and challenges on line and wait for random people to answer and offer suggestions. If I wanted insane answers I’d just go to Yahoo answers. I don’t want to email a bunch of people hoping a couple of them will reply (I don’t want to annoy people who don’t want to be involved).

I want to form a brain trust.

I’m looking for all kinds of individuals. I want people working in different fields. I want people of all ages. I want people of different backgrounds. I do not want to exclude anyone. If all goes well, I’m hoping to reach a critical mass of around 25 people. 

Your task – should you decide to join – will be to receive and read emails from me and reply with whatever you think is appropriate. Of course, I will return the favor and do the same with any an all questions you may have about challenges you’re facing in your field of work or life in general. I have not worked out the technical aspect of this project yet. Should this be done through a mailing list, a blog where we can all post, some other means of communication? I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.

Honestly, who wouldn’t want to have 24 other brains at their disposal? If you’re interested, send me an email and we’ll start the conversation.

I need your help, and I hope you can use mine. 

If you can’t see the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM0QjIaykRI

• Time. I can’t believe it’s been over 4,500 hours since my last bullet post - That’s over six months for those of you still using the Imperial system. Wait that doesn’t make sense, but it does offer me the perfect segue to show you this graphic I saw on line:

I did not make that graphic. Don’t be hatin’, Usians.

• Freak. Someone called me a freak because when I plan a drive from my house to some place, my guesstimate allows for time to have to wait for some red lights, and the traffic expected at that specific time of day. I don’t go online to look at traffic patterns or calculate the exact amount of traffic lights on the planned route or anything like that, I just base my guesstimate on close locations I drove to in the past and stuff like that. I normally don’t have a problem being called a freak, but if the person calling me a freak guesstimates that he’ll hit all green lights and face no traffic at all, then I object. Seriously, who’s a freak now?

• Deodorant. Call me a freak if you will, but I strongly believe in the use of deodorant. I also believe in the “don’t fix it if it’s not broken” saying, so when it comes to deodorant it means sticking with something that works. Ever so often, I break this rule and try some new stuff, in this case I was sucked into the whole Dove Men +Care line of products, like the above deodorant. This deodorant is great; it smells good and not too strong, it doesn’t irritate my armpits and offers a powerful protection – it says so on the label. However, it does destroy all my black t-shirts by making the underarms white and stiff, even after multiple washes. It looks like I’ll have to buy new t-shirts and revert to my previous deodorant of choice. UNLESS I CAN FIND SOME SORT OF MIRACLE PRODUCT TO CLEAN MY T-SHIRTS!!!!!

• Valentine Day. Yesterday was Valentine Day. Did you do anything special? Like I don’t know, eat some delicious cupcakes?

Yum!

• Essence. As I’m contemplating getting a new car… Well that is not true. I am getting a new car. I’m contemplating getting a hybrid car or not. I did some complex calculations (Excel! W00t!!!), and it looks like I would save around 210$ a year on gas by getting a hybrid. Let’s assume I’ll keep the car for 7 years, this means savings of 1,470$. But a hybrid would cost me 4,650$ more (before taxes and all that jazz), so it looks like I’ll have to keep the hybrid for 22 years and 2 months just to break even… That puts me in the same car until one short month to my 63rd birthday, and I think we all know that this is not happening. On top of that, I didn’t factor the electricity cost. I did not factor that the hybrid is actually less car for more money (smaller tires, smaller brakes, fixed rear seats, etc.). I have a hard time going hybrid, even if part of me (and by part of me I mean LovelyWife) thinks it’s the “right” thing to do. Thoughts?

In pure Call of Cthulhu tradition, I’ll keep the last bullet for myself for when the madness finally comes.

Grrr-rrrrrr. Hullo.

Of course, after seeing her astonishing results, I had to try it for myself.

It’s like they took my airport game and made it into a website.

If you want to find your doppelgänger, head over there. Make sure you share your uncanny results!