Bought some new clothes yesterday. Two tops. I also found out last night that I have the same cira shoes as Andrew. Sucky.

This weekend sucked more ass than a gay prostitute. I didn't end up doing anything on Friday night (wasn't until Saturday did I find out that Gord was pissed at me, so he decided not to answer his phone or return my voice messages). I ended up just sitting at home watching a few episodes of the Sopranos.

Yesterday was alright.. spent the day with Mark. Had lunch at Chinook, repaired our surfboards, played a little America's Army. Did some shopping at the mall. I got "Catch Me If You Can" on DVD and some of the aforementioned clothes. I was all reved up to go to Andrews place for some fun. My mood changed as soon as everyone was being a dick to me. It started when Kara thought it was a good idea to ride Andrews bike into my leg (on purpose). Then Gord told me why he was pissed at me. He seem to be in an ass holy mood all night. I dont know what happened to him that day, but he was doing other retarded things that he doesn't normally do.

On Thursday night a bunch of us were at Courtney/Abras place. We were swimming in her pool (I have pics). Nobody indicated to me that they wanted to go to the bar after. I really didn't want to go at the start either. I ended up going anyways. Gord was pissed that I didn't tell him I was going that to him I purposely deceived him.

So yeah.. that combined with the fact that as soon as I had a glass of Gin and Sprite, my stomach was doing backflips. I was just about to jet when Arden called Marks cell phone (nobody ever calls mine). I decided to hang around for Arden so that I could drive him and Chelsea home. They came, had a drink then we left.

NO! Gord.. we didn't go to the bar after. (but then again, you probably wont believe me anyways).

I'm getting really frustrated with my friends lately. Apparently, only *they* know when i'm telling the truth or not. It angers me to no end when they try to get me to admit to something they think is the truth, but not. Also, the "after the fact" repair job they try to do by using the "oh, we were just joking around" excuse. Bull shit. A lot of people use that excuse. It's no longer a joke when everyone thinks you are serious.




What to do today.. Everyone is still sleeping. I think I might just spend the day in the city.. Checking out condos. I am going to have to drop Mark's surfboard off at his house today too. Hmm.. I could also play some game cube too! Also have to take care of more InfiniteLoop stuff (billing, new accounts, etc..)

Might go paint balling again.. sometime in late October. Also going Hang Gliding September 6th. Can't wait!

I logged in to my Ad Admin interface to see how much money I made. For the month of August. I made $13.13 USD. Not to shabby at all. I guess somebody out there is clicking on those ads :)

This weekend was pretty good. It involved everything from "micro-yacks" to getting some sun, to shooting eachother with 200ft/s paint balls. It was great!

Paintballing was awesome, I spent so much money though - but definitely worth every penny. It was great to be able to sneak up on Mark, Gord, Arden, or Andrew and pop a cap in their asses. Something we are going to do again next year. Outdoor (and especially for 8 hours) is so much better than indoor (so I heard). Most everyone was complaining about sore legs today and yesterday.

Friday night the gang got drunk at Heathers place (pics are up). Mark forced me to do a shot of something (was it Jack Daniels?). I knew I couldn't take it, but I did it anyways. An hour after.. I found my self yacking in her back yard. The funny thing is.. it was only a small "blegh!" and exactly 1 ounce (the amount exact amount of liquid in the shot) came up. w00t.

It was an overall good weekend.

This week i'm "acting manager" for the platform admins. The funny thing is though.. i'm the only one left on the team. Derek (who i'm filling in for) is on vacation. Kyle, he got hit by a car, is out for a few days. Then there is just myself and Rob. Rob had yesterday off. I haven't been able to get to the project i'm supposed to be working on. Mainly because i'm doing the jobs of two people this week. Hopefully kyle will be in tomorrow to lighten the load.

It's emails like this (from my boss) that just adds to the many reasons why I love my job.

Hello All,



Over the past days, CBC.ca's excellent coverage of last week's power outages has been praised far and wide, including by the President, Tony Burman, Jennifer McGuire and Esther Enkin.



I'd like to add my thanks for the great efforts (I've just returned from vacation; but I was reading all the useful information online from abroad!)



A few highlights of our coverage:



- The site never went down, not even for a second.

- Despite the extremely difficult conditions, News Online and our Toronto and Ottawa journalists offered thorough and comprehensive coverage: up-to-the-minute news, detailed survival information, context and history, a minute-by-minute timeline of events, fabulous photographs, and forums enabling people to share their personal stories.

- On Thursday, Online Services and Production and Operations successfully rebuilt the homepage on the fly, stripping away the standard promotional material to highlight breaking news.

- By Friday morning, Digital Archives had pulled together a feature offering the sights and sounds of the Great Northeastern Blackout of 1965: a great example of how the archives can add depth and context to what's in the news.



And best of all, the audience was with us throughout: traffic tripled over normal, which was particularly impressive given that Ontario had no power and therefore no ability to go online.



I also want to thank our colleagues in IT for supporting our efforts.



Again, thanks to everyone who worked such long hours, especially those of you who were looking after family and friends at the same time. Your dedication is much appreciated. It's what makes CBC.ca the best and most dependable online destination in the country.



Sincerely,



Claude

Will update on the weekend (with photos of course) tomorrow.

Everything in the big smoke (Toronto for you non local folk) seems to be coming back to normal shortly. It was a pretty interesting event. Here is my point of view.

~4:15pm Thursday


I was talking to my co-workers at work when the power out out. Initial reaction from most of us was just frustration with any work we hadn't saved on our computers. About 10 seconds later the emergency power came back on. The first thing I noticed that CBC Newsworld which normally plays on the TV here was showing a CBC Newsworld Splashscreen. Naturally the first thing I checked was to see if cbc.ca was up and running. It was.

I wouldn't say chaos ensued. More like hightening activity. Everyone knew what to do.

~5:00pm Thursday


I headed up to the 4th floor to the news room to help them out. I was surprised to see that they only had limited power.

There are "essential services" located throughout the building. These areas of the building are on the emergency generators. The rest of the building was dark. The news room only had about 10-15 workstations running. They were scrambling to get things done, get something posted on the internet. Most of the writers headed outside with digital cameras to take some pictures.

Routing on the internet seemed to be unaffected. However some local NAPs seemed to be down. My servers were still up, however traffic was not being routed to them properly.

~9:00pm Thursday


Derek and I decided to raid his apartment for food and other food that might go bad in his Fridge. We took a look at the city from the 11th floor of his apartment. Pretty dark. Most of the buildings in the area had emergency lighting.

~11:30pm Thursday


Power was restored to our building (its on the same grid as the hospitals). By this time we were watching Pirates of the Carribean. I was tired for working non-stop for the previous 16 hours or so.




~1:30am Friday


Home Time! We finally found a cab that was willing to drive up to Aurora. It was an erie drive. The city was dark. People were lining up at gas stations trying to get gas. Traffic was really light. People wern't really outside. Thank god the moon was out.. it added a lot of light.

~8:00am Friday


I woke up.. Couldn't really sleep. Parents were up doing their thing there really wasn't anything for me to do so I decided to come into work early (9am instead of 11am).

Things today are pretty calm. Some traffic lights in the city are working. People are just chilling at beaches or the restaurants that do have power.

So why am I at work? The CBC is part of the emergency broadcast system. Radio and TV and just recently our website (cbc.ca) is considered to be an essential service. This means that Canada is relying on us to deliver emergency broadcasts and messgages to the population. Since my job is to ensure that cbc.ca does stay up (we are seeing waay more traffic than normal) I was asked to come into work. I don't know how late i'm going to be at work. We have a meeting at 2pm so hopefully I can head back home after that.

This has to be quick as I really need to get some sleep. It's been an amazing week and I really wish I can go into further details in this post :(

Wakestock was amazing. Pictures are online of course. Some of you with Kazaa Lite installed might have trouble seeing them though. I'm taking the "it's your problem, not mine" stand on this one though. Good luck!

Tomorrow I'm seeing Ben Folds and Tori Amos with Mark, Kara, Andrew, Bryna, and Gord. The president of CBC is also taking a tour of cbc.ca. So I need to be at work extra early for that :(

More pics tomorrow :D

It's been one of those weeks. I have no ambition to do any work. Been coming in late to work, tired. I really shouldn't have taken all that time off on the weekend. My insides are being twisted as I wait to hear back from Google to see if I got the job or not. Come Friday evening, if I dont hear anything back, I am going to email them.

I got tossed onto a project (Configuring/Installing JBoss and Tomcat 4) where I don't really have much idea as to what I am doing. I told my Manager this.. he doesn't seem to care... just as long as I get it done in 2 weeks. I've been staring a t word for 3 hours trying to figure out what to write for a project definition. I've been doing other work instead work that needs to get done, and that i'd rather do. I don't know how long I can put this JBoss project off for.

I went on a date yesterday with someone I met on Lava Life. Overall I think it went well. We had dinner then I gave her a tour of where I work. The only reason why I did that was because she was interested in Journalism and when I asked her if she would be interested she said yes. I had a good time. Things aren't going to progress much after that though. It's her birthday next week (I got an invite to go to The Joker) so I might show up.

I'm not looking forward to going to wakestock this weekend. Mark left last night, Gord left today for wasaga beach. I might only end up spending one night there (instead of two). I'm bringing my camera, so I hope to take a whole lot of pics. Partying and drinking and such is not appealing to me right now.

I've been in a really odd mood lately. Tired. Maybe I'm depressed? Lonley? Possibly a combination of all three. I'm sure once I get closure with Google things will look up (regardless of the outcome).

I finally put the rafting pictures online. There are two. One is a group photo of all of us in the 6 person raft. The other is just a cropped version of the same photo, with just me in it. You can see both of them in the photo album. Gord: I'm still waiting to get your pics as well. Speaking of pictures

I bought a new digital camera. My old one died, so on thursday I picked up a Canon PowerShot A70 from Henries for $500. From my intial testing, i've found that low light photos suck ass. Grainy and full of noise. This is the first camera i've had where I can adjust the ISO.. I had it cranked up to 600 when taking the pics, which could be why there is so much noise. 3X optical zoom (the 10x ones were still too expensive). For the full specs, check out the canon website.

The third server in the InfiniteLoop family will hopefully be installed this week. It's the dedicated database server. It has the latest version of PostgreSQL and MySQL installed on it. I'm hoping with having MySQL installed, I will be able to accommodate more users. I still need to move the webserver to the new co-location place.. still not sure how i'm going to do that.

There is probably going to be a new website layout soon. New design is in my brain, just need to convert it to HTML.

It's August! 1.5 Months until my Birthday. 1 Month until school starts again. Yup, my Java classes I was supposed to be taking 4 months ago are finally "in session" this september. I have this small feeling inside me that its going to be a tough class. I really hate programming :/

Google update! The second interview went great and we discussed salary and job roles. This new position is working in the data centre. I would be replacing faulty hardware and installing new machines in the cluster. It's definitely hands on, I was assured it wasn't a repetitive job. I typical day would go like this: Head into the main campus read e-mail take care of some paper work, have lunch. After lunch head to the various data centres in the area and repair the machines. I am having some trouble with getting sponsorship though. Since it's a three month contract, Google wont sponsor me for a TN visa. If i'm hired full time, they will take care of the renewal of the Visa each year. So I need to find someone to sponsor me for the visa. The visa only costs $50 and I can get it at the airport/boarder, but I need someone to sponsor me.

Didn't end up going to Virginia Beach this weekend for various reasons. Work on Thursday, crappy weather in VB, no waves. Still had a good long weekend though. Went to Penstones trailer with Mark on Friday. On Saturday did a little shopping. Got Kelly Slaters Pro Surfing for the Game Cube. It's an awesome game! Arden and I were playing it for 4 hours last night until 2am. I also got a poster that I want mounted. It's snowboarding related. Sunday I took care of some InfiniteLoop stuff, some paperwork, site redesign.

Today i'm going to clean my room and have my 3rd and I hope final interview with Google. Six (!) people are going to call me, each with a 30 min interview. Insane eh?