Blog: Articles from June 2006

I got some training today as I started my job. First I had to bike to the Art Gallery, which is located on the college campus. The ride was okay, although I hate crossing the busier streets because I‘m paranoid about being hit by a car. After I got to the gallery, I changed from my shorts into dress pants and a dress shirt (and some dress shoes) to start off at work. I filled out the form and then it was off to the races.

Lots of stuff goes on, and I have varied responsibilities. It was a lot to take in the first day, but I think I’ll like the job. My co-workers are nice and friendly.

There’s a lot of security concerns, it being an art gallery, and particularly this summer because the Norval Morrisseau exhibition is part of the National Collection, in Ottawa, so there is pressure on us from them to make thing everything is secure. Whenever there are visitors inside the galleries, an attendant needs to be in the gallery just to observe and make sure that no one touches the artwork or such. So there’s a lot of standing involved.

At the front desk, attendants have to work the cash register for admission and gift shop and such, as well as answer phone calls. Then at the end of the day we have to do a cash summary from the register and walk around the gallery for an “outgoing check”. All and all, while it takes a lot of energy, I think it’ll be a good job, and I’m glad that I got it.

Not much else to say, eh. Superman Returns comes out tomorrow, although I don’t know when I’ll be able to go see it. GST drops 1% on Saturday, which is both nifty and weird. Canada Day on Saturday too.

So it’s official, InvisionFree has corrupted me .

Not in any sort of bad way, I assure you, but in the sneaky and insidious Pavlovian way. If I were a dog with a bell, I would salivate. In this case, it’s signatures at other message boards (InvisionFree or no). I’m so used to the 550x150 pixel limit on signatures at the support board (and removing those that are above it) that whenever I go to a board and see signatures that are above that, I react instinctively and try to remove them.

So if you’re walking by an Internet cafe and you see a crazy tall guy pressing frantically at his sig removal marklet (and abusing his mouse in the process), yelling, “Agggh, the signatures are over the limit!”, that’s me.

That is all.

One more exam to go. My French exam today was very easy, and I found out that I did quite well on both Math and Chemistry! Just Computer Science is left.

On the last day of classes, I asked Mr. Dubyk, my math/Computer Science teacher, where he got the nifty cover bag for his laptop. It’s essentially a cover into which you slide the laptop and then velcro the top closed with two straps. I was intrigued because it looked durable and easy to carry. My laptop bag is bulky, and its strap just broke recently, so I’m thinking that I’ll buy a backpack (especially if I’m going to ride my bike more) and just carry my laptop in there amongst other things. A cover to keep my laptop clean would help though, so I asked him from where he got the bag, and he said that is wife made it—then he offered to have her make me one!

Just goes to show that karma works quite well—if you do good things for people, they do good things for you, and sometimes you get your own little laptop bag out of the deal. He gave it to me this morning when I ran into him and asked for my math mark:

In a different vein, I just got an email from A Small Orange. The server that hosts my site will be moved to their AtlantaNAP datacentre on Wednesday, which means some downtime:

Next Wednesday, June 28th at 8PM EST…we’ll be physically moving the servers your site is currently located on. The allocated time is one (1) hour and the specific servers to be moved are Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke, and Charlie along with 3 dedicated servers. They will all be moved to our new datacenter cage in AtlantaNAP. It takes approximately 15-20 minutes to physically drive between the two facilities, but there is also time needed to turn off the servers properly, package them up, unpackage them, and plug everything back in. We don’t expect to take the full hour, but are allocating it just in case.

So in case you can’t get to my site on Wednesday for an hour or two, that’s why.

One exam down, a few left to go. Math was all right, although very hard. One or two questions in particular frustrated me, but I’ll let it go.

I was an idiot and deleted my blog tables because I was poking the wrong database. Luckily, I have a backup from last week. I still lost a few posts though.

Basically the only important thing I need to say is that I got the job at the art gallery. And I’ve rediscovered the wonders of Treasure Mountain and Cross-Country Canada for DOS.

You must be getting tired of my recounts of baseball games by now. I’ll say this, however: it was a great game. Final score 5-0 for our team, and everything was fun to watch. Our fielding was much improved; I‘m particularly impressed with Oney Guillen, the second baseman. In the first few games, he tripped and fumbled and dropped and let things by that he should have easily fielded. He seemed on the ball tonight (pun intended).

I even managed to remember my camera and take some photos of the team and such. I’ll try and take more over the season. My dad and I are even contemplating a road trip to go watch some of the Border Cats’ away games later this season.

My French oral presentation went…okay. I could have done better, but I think I did reasonably well. Now I just have to finish that essay. Then I have no more work to do in my classes (except a culminating activity in chemistry maybe). Eight days.

Went to tonight’s Border Cats game! It was excellent. Final score was 7-4 for the Cats, and the game itself was fun to watch. The first few innings were slow, and the Lacrosse Loggers were up by 4. But we scored several times and were tied by the eighth. The bottom of the eighth was amazing: stolen bases, errors on the part of the other team, the type of runs that make you cheer because they’re so improbable and extraordinary!

The Snowbirds were flying tonight too, and I regret forgetting to take my camera along—they flew quite low, and I probably could have caught a few good photos. Oh well. I’ll take some photos of the next baseball game if I can remember my camera.

It was also graduation night for Westgate. Congratulations to those of my friends who graduated and good luck on your future endeavors. I’m going to still be in school for another year, toiling away.

My French presentation is tomorrow. I was supposed to go Friday, second last, but I switched with my friend because she had to play in the band at grad tonight and had to go first tomorrow. I don’t mind, although apparently my teacher forgot to book the projector, which means that I probably won’t be able to accompany my presentation with my slideshow. It’s not a big deal, but she likes visual aids and it probably would have made my presentation more interesting. Oh well. C’est la vie, non? I should probably work on that essay before I go to bed.

Me!

I’m not a graphics artist by any measure of the word. However, since no one was kind enough to make me emoticons for my scripts, I had to do it myself. And they actually turned out rather well.

Now I need to clean up the CSS tomorrow and write some documentation. I hope to ship it as v1.1 Beta sometime this weekend, so keep your eyes out (and legs, and such, unless you‘re in a moving vehicle, in which case all body parts should be kept inside the vehicle at all times).

To whet your appetite, I’ll leave you with a shiny link to the test book. You can “sign” it in that I let you see the signature form, but I’ve banned all IP addresses from signing.

Ten days. I finished my slide show to accompany my oral report in French, and now I just have to write an essay. We get out early tomorrow, so I can probably start it then.

Went to the first Border Cats home game tonight. It was…not what I had expected. Everything started great, but things quickly went downhill. We had reasonable pitching but some poor fielding, and worst of all, no offence whatsoever—I think we got about one or two hits. By the bottom of the sixth, the score was 8-0 in favour of the Rochester Honkers. It was getting cold and late, so my dad and I left.

Eleven days left. I finished my oral report for French—I present on Friday, second last—and now I want to make a PowerPoint presentation to go with it (in fact I’ll probably use OpenOffice.org Impress, because it impresses me so much ) for visual aids. This report is the oral component of my exam! Then I have to write an essay; I hope to start that tomorrow and get a good thesis and introduction down.

Only 12 more days of school left!

I can’t believe I’m counting down, but I‘m just that ready for school to finish. Things are going so slowly. The only class in which I really do much work anymore is French anyway, so I’m ready for things to end. This week should be easy, but next week I have a lot of extra-curricular activities going on, including a Black Light production and the school’s Outsiders production—on the same day!

Baseball game tomorrow. First one of the season.

Vanilla Guestbook goes nicely. This weekend’s goal was to skin it. I will give you guys a preview of it quite soon—it is not the world’s best skin, but it is okay. (Think of it as incentive to customize it for your site ). I’m just finalizing a few features and then it needs documentation and smilies! Which means that if you can make smilies, please send me an e-mail or otherwise contact me! I would be much obliged, because graphics aren’t my strong suit.

I tried updating to Dapper today. It did not go so well.

You know how I keep talking about my computer overheating? Well, the problem is avoidable in Windows. In Kubuntu, my computer overheats within minutes. So I still tried upgrading, but unfortunately, it overheated. I tried it from just the command line, but it still overheated—in the middle of depackaging the files I finally managed to download.

Now I have segmentation fault errors when I try to boot into Kubuntu. :/ So I think I’ll just wait for the Dapper CDs that I ordered and do a clean install…I don’t have anything important on there anyway, so I might as well start fresh.

Yesterday we bought fertilizer and topsoil for our big garden and spread it around in preparation for planting. We’ve decided to plant lettuce, carrots, and I think sunflowers. Note to self: get more topsoil next time; four bags is not enough. And we need more peat moss.

Ubuntu 6.06, the “Dapper Drake”, is coming out today! It’s already available on many mirrors, although I’m waiting for one in Canada before I actually upgrade. I will probably do it sometime tonight. While I still fear that my computer will overheat and such, perhaps Dapper will hold some improvements in that area and others.