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February 3, 2008 - 12:14 PM  I was looking through an old memory card (my phone, actually) and found this picture. I'm not sure if I posted it on the site in the past but I thought it was kind of funny. I call it "Eating A Light Snack" - for obvious reasons. Ok, I can hear you groan from here. But still - come on. What have you come to expect from me if not terrible jokes like this? And if you laughed, then you too have shared in my enjoyment of the image.  Bo, Maddy, and I went swimming yesterday with Tanya and Kaitlyn. I can't believe how far Kaitlyn has come with her swimming. Her and Maddy were a pair of fishes in the pool, jumping in off the sides, running off the diving board, having a wonderful time. One of the lifeguards was telling us they are closing down soon for three months to do some fairly extensive renovations, which will include several new waterslides and the creation of a larger hot tub (where the kids area is now.) Rumour has it the new hot tub might even be bigger than Southland's! That would be awesome. Horray for hot tubs! Apparently the staple blue slide is staying though. I would be quite disappointed if they took it out. Oh ya, and Tanya almost got kicked out of the pool for pushing me in. I was walking along the side of the diving tank when all of a sudden I got a nudge from the dry side. At first I thought I could compensate but I was so close to the wet side, that is, the water, that I discovered that there would be no way to shift my weight back towards the dry side and entering the wet side would be inevitable. Being that I was somewhat near to the diving board end, I thought I might be able to avoid falling in the water by jumping for the end of the pool, but alas — it was too far and I landed in the water but so close to the edge that the upper part of my body ended up on the ledge, outside the pool. This drew quite a bit of attention from nearby pool patrons, and also from the diving tank lifeguard whom I pleaded with to evict Tanya from the pool for her careless act of violence. Lucky for her, he let her off with a warning, but I have a cut on the bottom of my foot now where it hit the underwater ledge and sliced my walking appendage open. Swine.  Working up at the airport has been an interesting experience, with a great portion of that being due to the characters I work with up there. Rarely a dull moment at the airport...  February 3, 2008 - 9:25 PM  Perspective... is everything. Alone one can at most see any given image from one side only, perhaps getting a glimpse of the other sides through the interpretation of others. But due to the limited nature of our three-dimensional existance - we will never be able to see every side of an object at the same time. "But what if you use mirrors?" one might argue. You are then seeing a reflection of an object, usually somewhat skewed in the process. A mirror image is not the same as actually seeing an object directly. Try reading text through a mirror if you don't believe me! It can give a reasonable resemblance of whatever is reflected in it, but by it's very nature a mirror distorts the image. I realized one day many years ago that I will never see the back of my own head. How absurd! you might be thinking. Hear me out. It is true that I might see pictures of the back of my head, I might see it with the use of two or more mirrors, I might record it using a video camera and play back the images and see a representation of the back of my head, but with my own eyes it is physically impossible for me to view it directly. Ok, point taken — so what? What does this have to do with anything? The image you see above inspired me to compose the text you read now in relation to the similarity in nature of viewing an image, as seen above, and seeing an issue. Throughout our lives we are all going to be faced with various issues, and invariably these issues will have many sides. By very nature of our limited perspective we shall never be able to see all the sides of any given issue. We will see the side which is presented to us, and perhaps with the help of others explaining what the issue looks like from their respective perspectives, we can gain a better understanding of what the issue looks like on the whole, but as Corrie Ten Boom wrote in her famous novel The Hiding Place, "It is impossible for someone who is warm to understand someone who is cold." My thought for the day. February 9, 2008 1:45 PM Notice Working on the web server, things will act wierd for a while. -- John I think I must have stumbled upon a filesystem bug. I'm currently downloading and installing some updates which may (and hopefully will) fix the problem. Basically what is happening is that my web server runs as user / group nobody:nobody. In my web server's filesystem, I have created a group 'web' that 'nobody' is a member of. Therefore, I can assign an owner of (me, usually) with read/write permissions on the files I own, and make the web group read-only so that the web server can access the files but not change them. This works on files, but apparently not on directories. I did a test where I created a file called 'test.php', owned by cube:web with permissions rw-r----. (user can read/write, group can read, others get nothing.) The web server happily reads this file. This is what I would expect. So then I created a folder called test and gave it the same owners and permissions (plus execute, of course), and placed the test.php file inside it. Guess what? I get permission denied errors unless 'others' have r-x permissions on it. (Presumably so the 'nobody' user can get at it. But since nobody is already a member of web and has access via group memebership, this should not matter. Arrgh! As far as I know, folders and files are treated the same in terms of permissions under linux, so this should not be happening. We'll see if the updates fix anything. February 10, 2008 - 2:45 AM  Last week there was a mysterious beep in our office at the airport that eluded all capture. None the less, there was a valiant effort put forth by Derek and Bottomly, who searched the office high and low for days on end. Derek pulled out every electronic device he could find one at a time and listened to it intently trying to determine if it was emitting the beeping noise while Bottomley searched his shelves and drawers, convinced the beep was coming from some sort of listening device planted in our office.    Sadly, the source of the beep was never found, but it did provide hours of aggravation for those searching for it and hours of amusement for those of us who knew where and what it was.    In an attempt at cutting down on my $400 / month electric bill, I've shut down my 30 hard drive array and replaced it with this box, a D-Link DNS-323 network attached storage device. With two 500 gig hard drives in Raid 1, this tiny device not only provides more storage space and consumes a fraction of the electricity, but it also provides full redundancy and email reports should one of the drives fail. Time will tell if the move was a good one or not, but I was outside watching (and videotaping) the electric meter when Bo pulled the plug on the array, and after analyzing the video, the wheel that spins in proportion to the amount of electricity your house is consuming increased the time it took to spin from 30 camera frames to 51 - an increase of 170%. That means that almost half of the electricity the house was using at that moment was consumed by that array. I've noticed too, while that cold storage room has been maintaining 20 - 23 degrees Celcius, last time I checked it had dropped to 15 degrees. I think it's a safe bet we will see a significant decline in the amount of electricity used this month, even though we've been plugging vehicles in and running the furnace fan motor more.  Despite having a pounding headache all afternoon I gussied myself up and made an appearance at Barb's 40th birthday party. Rusty took a good 45 minutes of convincing before he would start, but once his mind had been made up he roared to life and that crazy middle heater continues to amaze me as it quickly warmed the inside of the vehicle. Of course, by this time I was freezing. My toes were hurting they were so numb. I don't think I took my jacket off the whole time I was there but it seemed by the time I got there the party was already winding down. Still I got to hang out with Barb and the kids for a bit. Her birthday of course was back in December, but with all the commotion of Christmas and New Years they postponed the celebration until now.    That's quite a nice shine Ed's got going there. February 11, 2008 - 12:28 AM  This evening I finally got around to fixing this old laptop I have been saving for Maddy. It's an old 286 machine, which runs at 12 Mhz and has a 40 meg (yes, meg) hard drive. The screen is technically VGA, even though it is black and white. Still, it has WordPerfect 5.1 on it, Print Master Plus, a Calendar / planning program, some graphic suite and some games. I think she'll have some fun with it, and even if it gets wrecked, it's not exactly a loss. The first PC Compatible computer I had was not much different than this, except it wasn't a laptop. I figure it got me off on the right foot...      February 11, 2008 - 10:15 PM A funny thing happened to me today, I went to get the oil changed in my company truck this afternoon at the Mr. Lube over on 32nd Ave (the one closer to Deerfoot, not the one closer to 36th.) The oil change was uneventful, the attendant topped up the fluids and everything was good, so I was sitting there signing the paperwork when *boof!* A snowball smokes me right in the forehead! I was a little startled by this, obviously, and the attendant was shocked and appalled - because the person who'd thrown the snowball was another EMPLOYEE! I'm not sure who or what he was trying to hit, but whatever it was - he missed, and hit my head! Needless to say, the guy was most appologetic, and quickly came and gave me a bunch of discount coupons. I thought it was funny, and with the temperature sitting about 3 degrees outside it was actually quite refreshing. Still, not something you expect to recieve with your oil change! February 12, 2008 - 10:14 PM  Most of today's working time was spent doing lift traning at United Rentals. It seems to be the trend, after using Skyjack's and Genie lifts for (how many?) years now, I finally get trained on them. The course consists of two parts, the first being theory work done out of a textbook in class. Once that's done, the second part consists of hands on practice on real lifts with 'exercises to determine competency'  For the first part with the Skyjacks, there was two points on the ceiling we all had to 'inspect.' One was a ceiling fan above the open area, the other was a beam above some racking that required you to slide the platform to extend out over the rack. Very easy, done it a hundred times while working at Sylvania changing lights. Some clown thought it would be funny to write his name in the dust on the ceiling fan.  Ok, it was kind of funny. The second exercise involved practice using an articulated arm lift, the big blue one Eldon is seen operating above. For this bit of practice, the first person to volunteer had to place a pylon somewhere up in the ceiling. Everyone after him then had to retrieve the pylon and move it somewhere else in the rafters for the next student to retrieve. Of course, this was barely a task for the lift we were using as I think it was rated for a platform height of 60 feet and we were barely taking it to 40. Still, it was a fun little game. The last time I used an articulated arm was at the Sears in Southcenter to fix some lights in the third floor ceiling above the doors at the south entrance. I think it was the south entrance. That's the second time Pat and I have gone up there and worked on those fixtures.  This is what the ground looked like from the platform at the height we were working at. If I'm not mistaken the ceiling was right about the 65 foot mark.  Here's a view of that entrance from the outside for perspective. Because of the vestibule in the middle, it would have been impossible to reach all the lights with scaffolding. Those lifts sure are handy when you need them! (And did I mention a lot of fun to operate?) All the more now that I am trained and certified! February 13, 2008 - 6:23 PM  When I went to go to work this morning, there was a whole bunch of new-fallen snow that must have come with great windforce because it was swept into great drifts all across the yard. The sidewalk that runs parallel to the front of the house, for example, was practically clear. The sideway that runs perpendicular to the front of the house however, had a nicely arched drift sitting atop it requiring large leaping steps or wet, soggy, snowfeet. Very lovely to look at though. Despite all the cold, high heating bills and slippery roads, winter is quite a beautiful time of year. I really wish Kristi was here to share some of these moments with me. I guess I can wait 9 more days...  Kris and I walked down to Mac's this morning to buy some big bottles of water. When we approached the counter, there was nary an employee nor fellow customer in sight, and a wad of at least a half dozen twenty dollar bills sitting on the stool behind an open counter. I looked at Kris, we looked around, there was nobody in sight. Is this some sort of honesty test? I wondered aloud. A few moments later the associate returned to his post behind the counter, but what a lot of trust to leave money lying out like that!  February 20, 2008 - 9:52 PM  Well, just when I was starting to think I had run out of things to write about on my web site, I came home from work this afternoon and almost immediately upon entering my little suite here I could hear the electrical groaning of an electromagnetic coil being driven at full power trying to move part of a motor unsuccessfully. After a few short seconds of high current draw, the thermal protector cut the power to the device and it shut off to cool down. What does all this mean to you? (And me, ultimately...) - The compressor in my fridge died today. And without a compressor, a fridge is merely a big, insulated box with a light that turns on whenever you open the door. SO, does anyone have a spare fridge in their basements or garages that they would be willing to part with for cheap? If so, let me know as I am now actively seeking either a replacement (or I might see how much it would cost to get mine fixed. It has been a good fridge, keeps things really cold...) That aside, we also had a lunar eclipse this evening. It was *just* starting as we arrived at the Leisure Center for our evening swim, and by the time we got out it was practically in the shadows. Unfortunately, by the time I got home, got my camera out and set up it had alread begun to pass, as you can see in the pictures. Still - very neat to see. February 24, 2008 - 9:10 AM Here are some pictures from my weekend.      BACK to Journal Index |