2:30 AM in Vegas… (and it’s raining!)

It’s 2:30 am in Las Vegas.  I just got back to my hotel room.  It’s raining.

It’s been an interesting few days here in Las Vegas.  Work has sent me here since Wednesday to attend an internal development program of sorts to help prepare us for future senior roles in the company.  It’s pretty cool that the company is willing to invest the money to send us here to do this and great that the senior management can take the time out of their schedules to spend the time here for some 1 on 1 interaction with them. 

We had various exercises to work on that were real problems that the company would face (sales models, HR issues, products issues and financial decisions).  Pretty humbling experience in all as in many ways I think these are things most employees take for granted from day to day as you don’t really deal with them in any intimate fashion given your role.

Good eating, a night out to see the magicians Penn and Teller and interesting social company from our offices from all around the world was a welcome bonus.

This is my second time to Las Vegas.  It’s a pretty weird and surreal place.  Sort of a Disneyland for adults.  Even though this is my second time here I am still trying to work out what to make of it all.  We had a good night out tonight (hence the late hour of this posting) and this time we went to “Old Vegas” and hung out in a dodgy casino and drank and gambled (what else would one do?).

Vegas is a microcosim all into itself.  It has it’s own pulse and energy that is unique.  You can easily spend time just walking around the shops and the strip people watching and you’ll see all walks of life and people of every socio-economic statuses.  There is some serious money in this town…. too bad none of it is mine (except what I’ve donated at the poker tables).  $100 gone in 20 minutes playing poker… and I think I’m a reasonably competent player!  Ouch!  I won $140 on a slot machine later that evening so I don’t feel too bad

The shopping is a world unto itself.  They have all sorts of higher end shops that have all sorts of interesing good for sale at astronomical prices (I looked at a Versace belt and it had a price tag of $530 USD…. ouch!!). 

We found this fantastic bar around the corner from the Flamingos casino that has CHEAP drinks.  A round for 8 people (that I purchased after peer pressure from my $140 slot machine win…. tip… if you win at something never tell anyone!) cost only $16.  A gin & tonic in a bar at Ceasar’s Palace cost $11.50.  You do the math…

All in all a good couple of days.  It will be good to get back home to see my girlfriend, pets and get on with some work.  The get together here has certainly given me some motivation and the chance to hang out with the CEO and divisional leaders has certainly given me some ideas on how to proceed in my job (I generated a few leads worth chasing from talking with people from other offices).

Bleh, it’s 2:43 now.  I should probably check facebook for pointless apps I’ve been invited to add, check my mail and and go to bed.  I’ll probably do some shopping tomorrow for gifts and the like and I’ll be flying back in the evening and won’t be getting home until Monday at around 2 in the morning.

Now for bed…

Ads, what were they thinking?

Take a close look at the ad below.  I snapped this pic on my camera phone at a train station during my daily commute to work.  The topic itself is a serious one but whoever took the photo on the add clearly wasn’t thinking.  If you check out the angle fo the car with respect to the roads in the intersection it looks like the driver WENT for the pedestrian (the car is pointing towards a corner of the intersection).  I don’t know what kind of attention this driver was paying when he was trying to get up on the sidewalk!  Kind of funny in a messed up way.

80s Cultural Education…

At the ripe old age of 37 I have finally seen the film “Ferris Beuller’s Day Off”. 

Apparently I am culturally deprived for not having seen this as it is (so I’ve been told) one of the definitive films of my generation.  I also suspect it would have been better if I was still 16.   My girlfriend has taken it upon herself to educate me with all of the 80s culture I missed out on.

I did find Ferris’s easily malleable mate (Cameron was it?) quite entertaining…

Any other ‘classic’ films I’m missing out on here people can suggest?

End of year update…

I guess this is a good opportunity to recap the holidays and point out the years highlights such as they were.  This is probably more geared towards the friends who I have not kept in touch with for a variety of reasons and as a new years resolution perhaps vowing to be better with the email for my overseas friends is a good place to start  

2007 certainly had many ups and downs.  The end of the year was pretty good for the most part as downtime from work and time with family and friends is always something to value and look forward to.  Christmas dinner (#2!) at my parents place was excellent as always.  Nothing beats home cooking and the seemingly limitless supply of booze to go with it.  Unfortunately my other half could not join us in Calgary this time as our poorly sugar glider needed her medicine and we felt it best if one of us stayed home to make sure she got it properly.  Fortunately she seems to have recovered somewhat and, while not at 100%, seems to be more active and makes those happy clicking sounds when we spend time with her which is excellent.

We went to another Turkey dinner on the Saturday with a couple of friends of ours (one of which has his birthday around that time) which was also enjoyable and tasty as per usual.  You go out and have a good time with your friends during the holidays and it makes you wonder why you don’t make the effort to do it more regularly the rest of the year!

Anyway, on with what I’ve been up to the rest of the year.

Highpoints

• We picked up two baby sugar gliders to add to our household.  They’ve been alot of fun and have bonded with us in a big way.  Awesome pets.
• Work has got more interesting.  I’ve been tasked with looking after a company that the company I currently work at aquired towards the beginning of 2007.  I am looking forward to the challenge of trying to get it into a profitable state so we can take it forward.  I’m getting increasingly annoyed with C# however… bring back the days of C where I could do whatever I like and the compiler lets you get away with it!  This Nazi-Fascist-Like management of everything you do is really doing my head in.
• Girlfriend is awesome as usual and we celebrated our 3rd anniversary this year.  She even did some of my Xmas shopping for me at West Edmonton Mall whilst I was at work.  Now *THAT’S* taking one for the team!
• I’ve had a chance to get to know some of my friends a bit better.  Some of them are like family and always there to help when times get tough (like flooding for example… thanks Don!)
• I’ve started to get into this blogging thing a bit more.  I enjoy reading some of my friend’s blogs too; it’s a good way to keep up with what they are getting up to.  Hopefully I can stay disciplined enough to keep posting!
• The darts team I was on won the championship!  I closed out the winning game!  Yay!
• I’ve started playing football again which is good.  Too bad my skills aren’t.
• We had a good summer camping vacation for a week down in Brooks and managed to avoid the tornadoes… outings included golf, Tyrell Museum and general badland sightseeing.  My brother came out and camped with us for a night as did one of my co-workers (who is no longer at the company I’m at which is a bad point).
• Got in touch with a friend I have not seen since my PhD days at the University of Leeds AND it turns out she was at the end of her employment contract AND she was looking for work AND happend to have a PhD in EXACTLY the area that we were looking to hire in.  She starts in a few weeks (coming over from the Netherlands).  Is that a coincidence or what?  If I’m really lucky she will bring me a nice bottle of single malt when she arrives.

Lowpoints

• One of our two original sugar gliders died (Jazzberry).  This was pretty hard to take as I am quite fond of all my gliders and wish they were immortal!!!  My girlfriend’s Guinea Pig also had to be put down which was quite sad (although she did live to a very ripe old age for a GP!).
• 2nd Flood in our basement in 11 months did a pretty good job of trashing the lot.  I’m a bit worried about what my insurance coverage will be like come renewal time as insurance companies don’t like unlucky people.  Fortunately I had good friends to help bail me out (literally) of this emergency before the restoration folks arrived (see high-points above).  This really sucks as it will be months before the basement is in any sort of usable state again.  We had pretty much just finished re-decorating it after the last flood when this one hit.
• I don’t seem to be playing my guitar as often as I’d like.  With my workload increasing that hasn’t helped but I do miss it sometimes and would like to get my ass in gear enough to start picking it up again!  I’ll always suck at it if I don’t practice.
• I’m not keeping in touch with friends overseas enough.  Alot of the crises over the last few months haven’t helped.
• I’ll be getting rid of the hot tub in my basement which I’m pretty choked about.  It was one of the selling points of the house for me in the first place.  With it’s age and the fact it needs more patching up I feel like I am really pushing my luck keeping it in my basement given the events over the last year.  On the plus side I can always get another one in the yard and I’d prefer it outside anyway to be honest…
• Still a smoker.  I am always beating myself up over this one and continually vow to myself to quit but never seem to manage to do it.  Dumbest thing I ever started doing in my life no question but I do enjoy it (the smoking).  Is that messed up or what?
• Garage door chain went today but I guess technically that’s a 2008 issue…

Well that’s a pretty exhaustive list!  The good looks like it outweighs the bad overall.

As an added humour point I’ve just noticed that the wordpress spell checker does not seem to like the words “blog” or “blogging” (or wordpress!).  Ironic isn’t it?

Xmas Dinner #1

The holiday season is well and truly here.  Xmas dinner #1 was last night.  I am well and truly stuffed (bleh) but it can’t be helped.  All dietary conservatism goes out the window…  With things like egg-nog freely available there is simply no way to resist.

It’s always good to hang out with your friends.  Often you will spend more time with people you don’t spend the time you should with throughout the year.  It makes you thankful for the friends and the life you do lead.  Things could be much worse despite the crises that seem to be entering our lives at the moment (See last couple of postings and add our Furnace quitting on us to the list).

Other activities included cards (rummy, but I don’t play), various weird WII games along with their creepy avatars (It’s a neat concept but I’m not 100% sold on the Nintendo WII just yet) and Trivial Pursuit.  Trivial pursuit is especially pointless for me due to my complete lack of pop-culture knowledge (I guess it was the 90’s edition, apparently I was completely AWOL during that time; additionally I learned that having notseen Grease is apparently a bad thing if not completely shocking!).  It was still fun though as it’s the company you are after really.

A chance for a bit of escapism from your every day life!  Roll on Christmas!

Crisis? What Crisis?

Meh!

The crises seem to keep piling up.  There are several.  One of which I alluded to in my last posting (that of the not-so-well sugar glider Taz).  This in of itself is pretty depressing because when small animals get ill it usually progresses very quickly one way or the other.  So far she’s holding out well but still is not her old self.

Last month I also had the fun of experiencing my basement flood for the second time in 11 months.  My insurance company is going to love that.  Insurance companies generally don’t like unlucky people.  Both floods were caused by the stupid humidifier in the basement.  Different causes but both involved the failure of a 50 cent part that would result in $15K+ worth of damage (carpet gone, drywall, etc).  Insurance companies generally don’t like unlucky people. 

The restoration guy who turned up to sort out the flood the second time was the same person I dealt with first time around.  He even turned up with a map of my basement “from the last time” which was kind of funny.  Ironically the renovations and repairs from the flood first time around were just nearing completion when the second one hit (and the second one did more damage than the first!).

To complicate matters further I have a hot tub in my basement.  It was one the reasons I bought the house in the first place as it was kind of a neat feature that I did enjoy although I did not use it all that much.  It’s been sat in my basement empty since the first flood and I’ve only tried to fill it and get it working again recently.  I discovered it had a small leak and had a hot tub type person look at it and fix it.  Now that I’ve watched him repair the problem I’m pretty confident I could do it myself as it looked pretty straight forward.  We got it filled and started the pump/jets going to test it and it looked pretty good.  About 15 minutes later I noticed a small leak in the pump unit, and then another small leak by one of the jets around the back.  I assessed these problems and I could probably fix it but given:

1.  I’ve had 2 floods in 11 months
2. The hot tub is probably pushing 20 years old (including mostly original parts)

I’ve had to think long and hard about this and I have decided to get rid of it out of my basement.  I’m pretty choked about that as it was one of my favourite features in my house but I feel like I am REALLY tempting fate keeping it around and thought best to be rid.  I could fix the problems I have found *SO FAR* but who is to say there won’t be more and given the age of the unit I can’t say it’s all that unlikely.  Sad   It’s a shame but I just don’t trust it down there as I am a little paranoid about anything with water in the house at the moment.  On the plus side this will enable me to take a wall out of the basement and I’ll have room for a pool table and it will open up the basement as a whole so that is a pretty decent consolation prize   Hopefully the restoration people can start work soon so I can get my basement back in order and my girlfriend can get her office back!!  Right now she’s setup her computer in the living room on the dining room table which makes dinners an affair best done on the couch with TV trays.  So there is a hot tub going to a good home cheap if anyone is interested.  It is fully functioning, I just don’t want it in my basement.  If someone was so inclined there is nothing stopping them from setting it up in their yard if they wanted to build some housing around it!!!

And now for some obligatory cuteness (also if you were wondering what the hell a sugar glider looks like!).  Here is one of our Gliders Taz in her snuggle house (that’s a photo of her next to me whilst I was writing this).

and one of our babies (Tate) in my shirt pocket

The art of blogging…

Two of the hardest things I find about blogging are:

1. Finding something interesting to say.
2. Finding the time to put it into some sort of coherent fashion to post.

Like most people I have opinions on a variety of things.  Some things are best left unshared and others can be interesting catalysts for discussion.  Most of my posts so far have just been amusing or useful things I have found on the net that I thought were worth mentioning.  I don’t really discuss much about what I think or feel or what goes on in my world.  Reading about how people blog and what makes a successful one usually involves having a personal element involved which keeps your readers interested and gives your blog a more personal touch.  I’m not expecting to become the next big hot blog that gets a mention on the radio or on a news website.  This is more a personal thing for me and a bit of a hobby I am trying to explore and I’ve generally been somewhat an introvert most of my life so perhaps this will give me a successful way of expressing myself that I have not previously tried. 

I’ve found a good blogging time for actually putting my thoughts into writing and getting it posted.  So that’s one of the two issues potentially dealt with if I can keep it up.  We have three sugar gliders that require playtime in the evenings and I’ve taken to bringing my laptop into our “glider proof” (if there is such a thing) room and using this as my blogging and misc net surfing time in the evenings when it’s my turn to feed and play with them.  Using the wireless network to tune in to our iTunes jukebox machine in the living room which supplies the atmosphere   We’ve recently got two baby sugar gliders and they are cute as hell and very curious.  They seem to like running over my keyboard but are not really heavy enough to type yet (unless they jump on it off my head!).  Maybe if things get slow I’ll have them post for me.

Finding interesting things to talk about may be more difficult.  As I’ve mentioned in previous postings I generally listen to a lot of BBC podcasts which always give me food for thought (for example the forbidden lego book in a previous posting came from a mention of it on such a podcast).  The political and documentary ones in particular make me think and can cause a range of emotions in me (the story they did on Burma awhile back was especially sad).  I am a total internet news junkie!  Maybe I’ll try to put what I make of it all into words.  The web has loads of interesting things and developments that are worthy topics of discussion.  All the Web 2.0 sites out there (user defined/driven content) such as Facebook have caused quite a stir and, yes, I am on facebook I’m afraid to say.  It’s not quite as addictive as it was when I first started but I do check it daily!

For now I should go pay attention to our older grumpy glider Taz!  She’s sulking in her cage and probably needs some coaxing to get her out.  I don’t think she is all that well at the moment; she’s gained weight and is sometimes a bit lethargic.  Vet has looked at her and reckons her liver may be a bit dodgy and she’s somewhat constipated so I’m giving her the equivalent of Glider-Ex-Lax.  I hope she gets a bit perkier soon; I miss her bratty self.

(as an aside, speaking of technology, with my little word processor I use I’ve just had to add “Facebook” and “podcast” as allowable words, lol).

Lego for the rest of us!

I was listening to a BBC news podcast on the way to work and they did a review of a book called “Forbidden Lego”.  Lego for the rest of us!  Apparently these were plans for lego sets/building instructions that were canned for various reasons… the fact they were viewed as dangerous being one of them.

 This ex-Lego engineer (why would anyone be an ex-Lego engineer… that sounds like one of the most fun jobs on the planet) has published a book with some of these “forbidden” plans for you to try.  Looks like fun!  This book is in the top 500 sellers list on Amazon.

I looked up the book on the net when I got into work and the page even has a you tube video demonstrating the fully automatic lego gun you can create…  Click the picture to follow the link

Dell joins the war on terror!

I was looking up the specs for the CDRW drive on my work Dell laptop.  I found a Dell support site that gives the information I was looking for.  Fortunately, for our safety, they also had an interesting clause at the bottom regarding “export” regulations.  It reads as follows:

“Customer acknowledges that these Products, which may include technology and software, are subject to the customs and export control laws and regulations of the United States (” U.S.”) and may also be subject to the customs and export laws and regulations of the country in which the Products are manufactured and/or received. Customer agrees to abide by those laws and regulations. Further, under U.S. law, the Products may not be sold, leased or otherwise transferred to restricted end-users or to restricted countries. In addition, the Products may not be sold, leased or otherwise transferred to, or utilized by an end-user engaged in activities related to weapons of mass destruction, including without limitation, activities related to the design, development, production or use of nuclear weapons, materials, or facilities, missiles or the support of missile projects, and chemical or biological weapons.”

I’ll sleep much better at night now knowing my CDROM won’t be used in the design, development, production of nuclear weapons, WMD, etc.

You can see the original site here. 

How to configure your facebook account…

I found this great blog posting that describes how to setup your security settings on Facebook.  Even better it shows you how to block invites from applications so you don’t get bombarded with 50,000 $#(*$# invites to pirates, ninjas or whatever other annoying app seems to be the flavour of the month (I have to confess a tendancy to send invites for some apps that give you a bonus for doing this <shame>).

You can find it at : http://internetducttape.com/2007/07/23/howto-configure-facebook-application-privacy/