The second day was long, but I gleaned a lot of good info from it. I was in the developer part of the seminar — 1 of 2 attending that, so I was able to get a lot of my own questions answered, and even learned a little Visual Basic just from watching.

On the way back we decided to visit Bruce and Brandon Lee’s final resting place. We walked around the cemetary for the better part of an hour before we finally found someone who could show us. I, personally, would prefer to be cremated if I die (crackle crackle crackle), but those were some nice headstones.
While I was not 30 feet from their graves and headed the wrong way, a very insistent crow cawed at me from a tree branch, as if trying to tell me I was going the wrong way.

On the way back we hit rush hour. Luckily I was enjoying driving our rented PT Cruiser anyway.
When I got back to the office I found that my paycheque had not been left on my desk like it had with the other guys, and there was nobody at home to come pick me up! Luckily Mellissa must have also called home, figured out that something was wrong, and came to pick me up. I collapsed into my bed a little after getting home.

Mood:

Luckily, the border guard wasn’t a jerk. Once he saw our drivers licenses and we mentioned we were going down for a software seminar he just waved us through. I was afraid we might get stuck explaining that, even though we were going down for business purposes, we weren’t going to do work.

The hotel had free wireless Internet access, so the work laptop was out of its case within 5 minutes of check-in. Not bad speeds, either.

The introductory part of the seminar was fine. We were 3 of 12 attending. The people from GO Sofware were nice, and they kept everything concise and not too boring. Then they took a bunch of us out for dinner at Wild Ginger, although it took 1 1/2 hours just to get to the freaking entree!

Afterwards, we went to GameWorks, which it turns out was just 2 1/2 blocks from the hotel! Unfortunately, I recognized a lot of the games from the last time I was there, which was almost 10 years ago, and lots of the multiplayer games were damaged. It has definitely gone downhill.

Mood:

I’m off to Seattle for a couple days to attend a software seminar. Should be back Friday night. In the meantime my computer will be (gasp) turned off!

Mood:

Today they asked me to clean out my desk…

…to move upstairs, with a raise!
You should have seen Mellissa’s face when I delivered that first sentence, deadpan.

My job is now more geared toward training and testing, so less direct customer interaction, which after over a year of that, is just fine with me.

Mood:

The emergency cel phone schedule got changed — this is my last week with it! Woohoo!

Mood:

Happy New Year!

This morning I was woken at 8am by the work cel phone. “You have 8 new messages”…GAH!
Luckily they were all from the same guy…whew!

Mood:

Last night my kid poked me in the eye, knocking my second-to-last contact lens to the ground. This morning my eye was still tender when I put in the last replacement so I took it back out to see if rinsing some more would help, when it fell into the sink, promply folded over and glued its edges together due to the dry air. I had to wear my glasses, and I was pissed.

For those of you who have never seen me in my glasses, let me say that I wasn’t as embarassed by them until Harry Potter got popular. Get it? They’re almost 15 years old, and rounded. Ugh. I HATE my glasses.

This happened just as I had to drive to Squamish to install a computer system. My old glasses have a weak prescription and don’t protect my eyes from sunlight. I was keeping an eye out (heh) all the way from Abbotsford to Squamish for someplace that I could buy contacts.

Finally, I reached my destination, resigned to my fate of looking like a bespectacled geek as I introduced myself. Just as I pulled up, what did I see right across the street? An optic store! Woohoo! They were even nice enough to sell me my contacts without a prescription on hand.

I will be going to get new glasses soon. Any suggestions for frame types?

Mood:

So, hypothetical situation:

Let’s say a guy who is on emergency support with a cel phone takes a half-hour to drive home after work. Because it’s warm out he has his window open on the highway. That, combined with his tunes, causes him to not hear the cel phone ringing every 5 minutes for the entire trip. The manager of a franchise of a certain (hypothetical) Canada-wide pizza chain was calling with an emergency and had to wait over a half-hour for a callback, and he was pissed.

So, I’m having a good evening.

Hypothetically, of course.

Mood:

My job requires that I carry a cell phone around on the weekends and evenings one week out of three. I get paid a small bonus for this but it’s a crap shoot as to whether I’ll have a quiet evening or not. It’s really frustrating sometimes when I get call after call, and especially when it’s hardware failures that I can’t do anything about until I get back into the office.

In addition, I have to keep the phone on until midnight, and I have to get up at 6:30am in order to be at work by 8.

All work and no play make Jim something something.