Salamush! Do the Fandango

also...sitting here working, waiting for the exterminator i was getting hungry
and i was craving cheese and maybe meat. and then i was craving cheese wrapped in meat...this isn't so abnormal for me, i like that as a brief snack. (slice of cheese with a piece of ham wrapped around it...mmmm)

then all of a sudden i was craving cheese and meat and bread.
sounds like a sandwich. but i wasn't craving anything else and realized i was actually craving a dry sandwich.
i've had them before, you know when you get no choice or whatever and haven't minded them....first documented case of my craving one.

i'm eating one.
man was i every right. it's filling my craving all over the place.

sorry, this might seem a little vague and out there. i like sending you stream of consciousness things though. i like the notion that you're getting to know me better all the time. even if it might terrify you.

ok...i'm not one for baby pics. taking them or looking at them but we went to visit jennylee and paleblueshift's baby and i was handed my camera by the wife and told to make myself useful. so i took a few.


given that there's a picture out there in jennylee's lj with the baby on a loaf of french bread, this is perhaps believable as a literal image. but still pretty cute none-the-less.

( and a few more behind the cut...but not too many )

so yesterday as my wife was playing mario kart on the wii our television went spoink, poof, sizzle and spork.

then it died.

and when i turned it on again my receiver started flicking its little light saying it had had to institute surge protection.

this didn't make me too sad...cause the TV was 10 years old and only a run of the mill 29 inch CRT.

we have also been talking about getting a new flat panel tv for over a year now. it was on deck for our big present to each other this xmas.

so we went tv shopping yesterday. cause living without tv is like living without underwear. sure it can be done but it makes you quite a bit less comfortable and why would you do it if you didn't have to?

i'm not a screen hog...part of the reason that i have been fairly content with my 29" for so long and so i wasn't looking for a 65" tv or anything like that. but when you go to the LCD or Plasma wide screens you have to be a little careful or you get something that sounds larger but you walk home with something that's actually smaller for your tv or tv dvd watching. i took a look at this site and they had some pretty logical things to say. really, if you're looking at a widescreen tv, a useful way of thinking about what your TV shows are going to look like on the new screen is to look at the height of the units. so my 29 inch is equivalent to a 35 inch widescreen, for no loss of my tv show viewing pleasure.

well we scaled up a little bit, and bought a 42 inch 1080p LCD. J's eyes really glowed at this 52" we saw but i just didn't want to spend another thousand more. it's this one. it's pretty.

for those wondering...j didn't win the race.

i will admit that was my score on my fourth play though.
on my first play my rank was about 215000

( and probably the best score i'll ever get...if i ever play again )

i'm in the process of hiring a Jr QA and an intermediate QA person for my team at my company.
anyone know anyone they'd like to reccommend?

postings are over here:

ummm, erg! i can't see a good way to link to the specific postings.

ok, go here http://www.bctechnology.com
click on careers
click on search
use the company drop down to find photochannel networks

so i'm working on some photos i took while in calgary a couple of weeks ago visiting the brother and family. i'm sure that soon there will be a bigger post with all sorts of pictures taken during this trip.

but for now, i'm completely taken by this picture. it was just a rose sitting in a bud vase on their table. it was taken with my new lens, my macro lens...have i mentioned yet how much i love my new lens? how i'd marry it if i wasn't already taken?

so my wife has been having an ongoing dialogue with some otters.
we don't normally see otters too much, given that we live pretty close to the center of vancouver...you know a city. we also don't live anywhere near any streams of any sort let alone rivers.

this is why when she first found an otter crying out behind our house she assumed it was a sea-otter. but more than a few phone calls with assorted wildlife groups ended with her believing that they were river otters. and having seen the photos she took on yet another foray into otterdom i have to agree with them.

so these guys are living in the little woodsy nook right behind our apt building where there are tracks. photos by the girl.


originally she went to find the animal making the noise these guys were making armed with a leash and some dog treats. she'd though that it was a hurt puppy. instead it was just these guys hungry waiting for their mom to come back.

( and a couple of others )

Arthur Schopenhauer
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."

i like this quote.
i also like the fact that this once again clearly ties insanity to genius. after all, target's no one else can see might very well be 6 foot invisible rabbits.

the problem with the enlightened man in today's society is believing enough in placebo's for them still to work.

(my thought. i love it)

that's what we are. in the past few days we've cemented a number of travel plans.

- next weekend we're going to spokane to see friends and my cousin who's in town for a wedding.

- in june we're going to calgary to see the nieces and use up the credits from when west jet screwed up last sept.

- in august we've booked a couple of days in a resort in the okanagan. we did this to make sure we would use up enough of our time share points this year to not waste any.

- in nov we're going to maztlan for 8 days. by adding the 8th day, we made it such that the above wastage scenario would not occur and more.

these are the first two times we'll have used our points and they're really quite exciting.
8 nights in mazatlan at a 4 star resort for $135. can't beat that. (we won't talk about the costs to get the time share, we've decided instead that with interest and other fees and stuff we're just paying $10 000 per night to stay in kelowna and then we never have to worry about amortizing our costs ever again)

so i really like singer jim croce, always have.
one of my favorites of his is 'bad bad leroy brown.'
recently i've been hearing it more from sinatra...a version i just don't think of as as good.
well the song just came on and i decide to use the internet to figure out who did the song to see if my loyalty to the croce version was at least to the song's originator.

not only did i find out it was a croce song, i also learned that they're making a movie of it.
weird.

details

hoobey doobey doo. life seems to be passing you by. not you the readers but my journal.
i haven't been writing much in you of late since i got the new job. there's some reasons for that. for one i'm at work all day and while we have access to pretty much wherever we want on the internet there i'm not to the point where i can throw up a quick post there or anything like that yet. in fact i'm not even opening places like LJ and Facebook at all there. and my evenings just haven't settled out much yet to the point where i'm on LJ much.

so the job, you might want to hear a bit about it.
i'm enjoying it, for the most part. don't get me wrong, if i won the lottery on friday, it's not like i'd be staying or anything like that. but so far i really like the people. i'm slowly integrating some ideas i have for ironing out our process in QA to where it's being more rational and reasonable with some good planning. that's one of the cool, challenging and slightly frightening parts of it...one of the reasons i'm there is to get, grow and make better the QA dept. in reality it's what i've done everywhere i've been but it's really never been anything i've been hired for. things have been a little insane so far, we have a mojor, big life-or-death of the company type project that's late for production and we've been dropping tons of time into it even though it's still early for QA to be in there...which means we'll have to duplicate a lot of our work later but you do what you have to go get a good product out.
but so far i've managed to keep my hours pretty reasonable. this week i worked from 11-1 on wed and 10-2 on thurs but those weren't such hardships and were required (that's at night btw) too keep moving. i haven't kept my brain in mgr mode for this long ever before. when you're an employee it's easier to transition back and forth from 'good for the company' to 'good for me' mode a lot easier than when they're paying you to be a mgr. at least that's how i see it.

today was a grand old day.
we dropped out car off at our mechanic at 9 because our aerial had broken off and we wanted to make sure we had radio for our roadtrip in a couple of weeks to spokane.

from the mechanic we walked to brunch with bebby. it was a good lunch, i like paul's omelettery. i had an omelette. it's all circular really. from there we headed to blood services where bebby and i blood for the greater good. yay blood. we met and talked to a rather unique guy. he is a film processor in a studio lab. we had an, um, discussion about shooting digital vs analog. he was definitely at teh special end of the spectrum. it was really hard to talk to him. his speach was normal except for some interesting pauses in it. and he was really abrassive in his dismission (new word?) of all things digital. he was also one of those photographers that intimidates me. i'm just not interested enough to read about about dozens of types of cameras and remember model numbers and stuff like that. when i meet a big camera photo buff they almost always are way more conversent about stuff like that. for instance i still don't know what the minolta 9000 was or how incredible it was for him to use one.

ok fine. i just read about it. it's an cool camera that's a little interesting and maybe i'll remember about it now. but to have read about it just because i like reading such things, way out of my interest zone. maybe some day i'll be less about the photo and more about the equipment but i'll tell you what...i don't remember what model my original olympus manual was even though i really do love that thing. my favourite manual, is a pentax, that's about as much as i can tell you. i don't even remember what brand my good 35 mm automaic is right now. damn it, i do want to know though, i'm going to go and check...right, it's a yashica. and my original olympus was an olympus-s, and my pentax is a pentax asahi spotmatic f. ask me in the morning, i won't remember any of that. i remember the stories of where they came from a lot more than the details of their specs.

anyways, i don't remember his email and likely wouldn't write him anyways...although maybe. who knows.

after blood we ended up at city square mall so i could pick up a parcel there from purolator and J and Bebby shopped until they dropped and bought some clothes. oh the fun we had.

that was enough. we'd talked about taking bebby's and our dogs out to an off-leash park but it had rained all day and we were tuckered so we just went home.
lunch and a nap woke us up at 5-ish and J came back in from the obligatory asi-walk and said, 'it's super beautiful outside' so we called up bebby, and headed out a really nice dog park near the fraser waaaaaaaaay down south at the bottom of vancouver. it was a very nice park...you can see it here
it was heaps of fun and there may be forthcoming photos. well, there are, but they may come forth slower or faster depending upon how long i remain concentrated.

then we split up again and j and i came home and watched adaptation.

it was a grand saturday.

anyone reading this been to the othello tunnels just outside hope?
wondering if it would be appropriate to take our dog with us on leash.
the internet is currently failing me in this respect

Lucy is not based upon me.

my love affair with Britannica hadn't been killed by the DVD version of their collection i bought...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/18/encyclopedia-britannica-now-free-for-bloggers/

few who might have any interest at all at reading about a different theory of project timeline estimation - evidence based scheduling.

i found it quite interesting as an approach. getting the buy-in for the time entry parts on a regular basis may be a little tough
they claim to maybe use it at my new work but as far as i can tell it is just something someone espoused once.

but it's a little surreal to me that often when i go out of my office's back door i can hear red robinson's voice booming from his office that has a door right there as well. he has a very recognizable voice to me and i keep looking around for the TV or something that he might be on.

for those of you who haven't been around BC most of your life, this probably won't mean anything to you.

something i forgot to mention.
if you're a person with a guidebook for vancouver, you've definitely got my neighbourhood in it. not only are we right at the edge of chinatown...the gates are in front of the parking compound for my building, we're also right across from the world's thinnest building.

so as it turns out, i was lucky.
how were you lucky, you might ask...well i was lucky in that i didn't have to have my first day jitters today, my first day.

yesterday as i was on my way downtown to meet with my recruiter and sign my offer and then have a nice lunch and a movie on my last day of freedom i got a call from the recruiter. the new employers were asking if i could come in in the late afternoon and get a handover from the going-out guy. well that could only be considered an investement in the ease of my future.

and in addition i got to see if they really meant it about the shorts since that's what i was wearing on my trip downtown.

well i managed to get all my things done, including the movie, so that was cool.
and i spent 2 hours at the new job place, not even working there and already spending past 6. and that's where the afformentioned jitters came from. not the going in but rather the huge amount of information dumped in my general direction. and truly realizing that aside from handling mentoring and task and project leading as i had in the past that this job was also going to include actual people management. i've done a bunch of leading but it's never been really up to me before to be responsible for people's performance reviews and disciplinging them. i came home mildly terrified and buried in it all.

but today was much better. i got to dig into some of the stuff i'm goign to be responsible for and think about long term planning and what i can do to make it better and realized that i really do know how to do this stuff and...yeah. so it'll be challenging for sure but it wasn't so scary today. although just being there and learning learning learning all day sure had me beat after i was there for only 8.5 hours.

oh, i guess i haven't really told you what the job is.
i am the new QA Manager for a company called photochannel networks.
they are a...well, i think they almost qualify as a medium sized company at this point in their lifecycle. they're kind of an internet company with some brick and mortar ties.

their core business is running the software front and back ends for business that do photo printing. where you can order prints or photo gifts online, or at a kiosk in the store. basically it's a way for you to get hard copies of your photos nice and easily. rather than all of these businesses needing to build sites themselves we take care of it all for them.

the corporate site is here - www.photochannel.com
and example of their stuff - easypix - shoppers' site

they really do do a lot of these guys too. well over half the drug store chains i've ever heard of, wallmart, costco and others.

So there was a bunch of stuff that attracted me to this job.
1) QA Manager with title and responsibility. it's good to keep moving up in your field. although i had that title at the last place but really was only lead to the people i worked with in test.
2) they deal with photos. it's not photography but it's connected that to have your job connected to your passion, that's really cool.
3) they deal with kiosks, something that i had from the last job that they liked about me for this one.
4) it's pretty laid back. still a pretty young crowd. still feels a bit startup. dogs are allowed at work on occasion as long as they don't fight with the CTO's dog. they don't have a problem with my wearing shorts to work.
5) gives me another area of my expertise to flex and learn in. internet testing hasn't really been my core before, just peripheral.
6) it's walking distance from my home. a nice walk, mostly along the sea wall. not short, about 45 minutes but a very nice walk.
7) it's across the street from my favourite theatre in town.

so anyways, yeah, i'm pretty happy that this came along.
i'm a little sad that it took 4 months, especially when i heard that they were doing their own search before they ended up with my recruiter but we apparently never hooked up. but all's well that ends well.

on the other hand, working 8 or more hours a day...gosh...i sure got used to not having to put in that much effort.

so on thursday on a whim i ended up on one of my recruiter's websites.
i don't normaly troll them very much but things had been so slow for postings in the past 3 weeks that i was going to go and take a peek around.

there was a job that sounded interesting so i popped off an email to my recruiter contact at that place. after a number of email exchanges, with my interest growing every single email i ended up with an interview on friday at 3 pm.

i'm not going to tell you about the acutual place until i've signed the offer tomorrow, cause of some weird internal jinxing fear.

the interview seemed to go pretty well. it's a pretty laid back atmosphere, almost chaotic but it's entirely facinating to me. it's location is prime for me, by which i mean one bus ride and next door to a theatre. and there's some other pluses i'll talk about later. there was some interesting stuff like i wasn't allowed to wear a tie to the interview because it would likely count against me and there would only ever be one interview so i would get it or i wouldn't. i was also qualified up down and sideways for this particular job so that looked good as well.

so at the end of the interview they told me they had one more guy to do monday morning and i would find out monday whether i was getting the job or not.

i'm telling you it was a looooooooooooooooong weekend.
we stopped counting at 11, i think, the number of times i would randomly turn to my wife and say, 'i want this job' because i really did. not only becuase i'd been out of work for 4 months and really feeling it but this job really did speak to me on a number of levels. there was a bit of lost sleep due to nerves which is really really strange for me and a bunch of emotional turmoil tied up with the notion of getting it or not.

today was worse. it was after 5 when i got the call.
and my recruiter guy starts with a discussion about the movie we went to on friday after the interview and drew it out a bit before they told me they were offering the job.

so tomorrow i sign the offer.
wed i start.

i may not see home for the rest of april as they have a huge project coming online at the end of the month but whatever. it's all fun.

more details when i feel great to give them.

so quite a while ago i was in a book store and i came across a series of books by an author i have liked in the past. i had thought that in the distant past i had read the first 4 books in a series and all of a sudden i was seeing that he'd written 4 more in the series.

the author is Jack L. Chalker and the series is the 'well of souls' series. fairly generic sci-fi

anyways the bookstore had only 7 of the 8 books so i bought all 7 with the hopes of picking up the 8th new or something like that.

fast forward at least a couple of years. the books have moved around on my shelves a bit, moved from my last place to this one i believe even. they definately had a heap of dust on them when i looked at them today.

i had been looking at them recently as i looked for more books to read, this unemployment thing has had me reading a bunch. today, as the girl and i were going out to buy her some new shoes, in a direction that takes me by a good used book store, i decided to figure out which book i needed in the series and see if the book store had a copy. turns out it was the first book in the series...kind of an important one, no wonder i never started reading them.

so i actually end up trying 2 different book stores. no luck at either, although i do determine that while i have read some chalker in the past, i haven't actually read any of this series so jumping in at book 2 is going to be a little tough.

after we come home, and i take a nice long nap, i decide to see what amazon can do for me.
after looking at the wrong book, which only comes as cheap as $9, i go and double check the title of the one i'm looking for and realize my mistake. i come back and re-check. there's a copy of this book available for 9 cents. as in pennies, 9 of them. there was another for 39 cents and then they keep going up. used of course. all but the last one in the list are from used book stores in the states, which isn't optimal. of course the one from canada, ontario, is $22.

but i'm still married to a handy american with handy american relatives and can wait for stuff to get shipped. so i purchase it.

my head was realing with the wow-ness of it all. 9 cents. who has these sorts of quests fullfilled for only 9 cents? when there's a book you absolutely need, isn't it normally the $22 solution that presents itself as the best one?

my head came back to earth a big when it came time to actually pay for the book...cause shipping's not cheap on books. with shipping and handling the purchase came to $8.08. no, really, that's 7.99 shipping and handling and 9 cents for the book. no tax on used books in washington state...where the used book store is. which is also good, cause so are the in-laws, so the shipping won't take very long probably.

it's still cheaper that it would have been new, although more than the $5 which was the most i paid for any other volume in the series.

another plus of the entire excursion was i found 3 other books i wanted/needed from rex stout at the bookstore while i was there.