Sunday, July 31, 2005
Hot time in the city
Summer has arrived with a vengeance here. We've have been staying away from the heat and sun and tried to stay cool inside. I have no real idea how hot it got, but in was very warm in the sun. I think we overworked our air conditioner and had to turn it off for a while so it could get warmed up (frozen ice inside the unit was causing it to perform very poorly). Let's hope it will be back to its cold producing peak by bedtime tonight.

Looks like we used over 30 tapes overnight once again. If that keeps up I will have to go and put even more tapes in the robot sometime tomorrow. I hope things slow down so I don't have to. Another one of our robots used up all its free tapes, but since it is in a locked office 100 miles from here it will have to wait until the office staff comes back before that can be fixed. Unfortunately, it would appear that the full backup for that server is now larger than the number of tapes in that small robot. Fortunately for me I'm on vacation next week so I won't have to deal with that. Over to you Elaine!

Someone mentioned stargazing yesterday. I also have not done it in a while. It would appear we as a civilization have become blase about the world around us and we no longer notice the beauty that surrounds us. Every once in a while it invades our consciousness and we are awed by it - well at least I am.

Well that's all I have for tonight - Good night all!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 9:02 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Saturday, July 30, 2005
Tapes are like candy
Well at least that what it looks like judging from the number of tapes that were used for the backups last night. There were over 30 free tapes in the robot last night and when I checked this morning there were none left. None! I had never seen that many tape used in one night. So I went and put another 88 tapes in the robot. Hopefully this will last until the rest of the long weekend.

I tried to go to the bank today. With Interac I don't usually have to go into a bank but today I did. I needed to get a bank draft but the bank was closed. This is the BC Day weekend and the banks are closed Saturday, Sunday, and Monday! I was going to say I don't remember banks being closed for three days in a row, but since the advent of Interac I have not had much cause to go to the bank but once a month on average. I therefore don't know much about bank closures.

Otherwise a pretty quiet day. I did a couple of loads of laundry so I won't have to do that later in the week - which I have off. I don't currently have any specific plans for the week except to take it easy and spend some quality time with my wife. There will probably be a lot of time spent at the computer as well but I think everyone is expecting that.

Well I don't have anything else to say so I bid you Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 9:41 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Friday, July 29, 2005
Anyone seen my temper?
I lost my temper at work this morning. We were already a little miffed about one of the group leaders at work deciding that all backup errors should be cause to open incidents in our Incident Monitoring System. As if we needed any more work having to close those alerts. Well then come to find out that he sent another email saying that the backup group was not interested in backup monitoring. Well it made it sound like we don't care about what happen to the hundreds of backups we run every night. That's when I lost it. I stormed to his office and asked, no told him, to come see me when he had a minute. Since he was following me to my desk I told him to go sit his butt down in the meeting room and that we'd be right there. I went and got my co-worker who got our manager and with the four of us in the room I proceeded to tell him what I thought of his idea. He did have some valid points, but at that time I was not interested in listening to them; all I wanted to do was to tell him what I thought of his comments. Anyway, I stormed out of the room and went back to my desk. I think things were set in motion that will alleviate some of the problems that were laid bare in that meeting so that's good, but I do regret losing my temper as I think I could I made my feelings known without being so rude to the guy. Oh well, I guess we all have days like that.

I spent most of the morning, except when I was fuming about the subject above, working on the problem from the night before. We were lucky however in that it was a slow backup night and we were able to get most of the backups successfully run even though we were down to half the number of drives we normally use (3 instead of 6). Other servers also had problems as a direct result of the drive problem this media server was having. We finally got all the drives recognized; turns out that the persistent bindings we thought were in use actually were not and that was our problem. Once we got the persistent bindings to take effects all the drives came back as they were before. All of this had to be done because we were moving three large servers to this robot and we needed the extra drive capacity.

My wife and I got taken out to dinner by our daughters to Boston Pizza. A great time was had by all and the food was as good as usual. We got seated in a booth this time instead of table as they had a couple of large groups that had taken all the tables. Surprisingly, the booth was a very spacious one - contrary to every other restaurant we have been to. So although we were leery about being put in the booth it turned out very well.

I must be just clued out. It turns out my older daughter has friends coming over to stay the weekend at the house and I somehow managed to not find out about it until today - and they're coming tomorrow. I obviously live in my own little world and anything that does not directly involve me just gets ignored. Maybe I should get them to write it in the blogs B-)

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:16 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Jinxed
I should have known that as soon as I mentioned how well we were doing for change windows the whole thing would go to pot. As I mentioned yesterday, we added 9 new tape drives to one of our robots. We ran out of time so we rebooted the server early this afternoon so that it could see the new drives. This all went well, and we even got some backups going and they mounted on the drives (we have not yet defined the new drives in the backup software). Anyway, I checked this evening and all but 3 of the drives (there were 15 to being with) are now in a DOWN state. It would appear that the bindings we are trying to do in the Host Bus Adapter card are not working. Not much I can do tonight with all the backups currently running - but I know what I will be doing tomorrow.

On the family side of things, my son finally started his own blog yesterday; so now all my kids have their own blogs. The cool thing about this is that now I don't have to talk to them - all I have to do to find out how they feel is go and read their blog (and if you believe that I have a bridge I am trying to get rid of). But it is great to be able to refer to their blogs to get a little window into their lives. Just as they can get a very small window into mine by reading this blog. Of course they probably think that all I do is work since that what I mostly talk about :)

I guess that's all for tonight. Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 9:50 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Yet another change window
Dare I say we are getting the hang of successful change windows? I will probably live to regret it, but for the last couple of weeks our change windows have not caused us any grief. This week we did not get everything done that we were hoping to do - maybe that is why everything went so well. We will have to complete the task in the morning as it is but one small step in a great list of steps that must be taken before next week. Of course that means that the schedule is very tight and we cannot wait until the next change window to complete the task.

Another uneventful day at home. Since my youngest daughter has started her full time job where she works from 6am to 2:30pm, we have had many more dinners (suppers?) where all the members of the family still living at home are at the table (Hi Brian!). Which makes for fun times and good times.

Well not much else to say so I will sign off...

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:23 PM | Permalink | 1 comments
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
More goes wrong
While the work I did yesterday seemed to have solved most of the problems we were having another problem reared its ugly head during the evening. Two of our disk staging units went offline causing quite a few backups to fail. It would appear that the SATA unit where the two filesystems were located ended up in a hung state that needed a power cycle of the unit to clear the problem. The units are back online for tonight's backups and we will see tomorrow morning if the problem re-occurred.

On the home front, it was great to be able to talk to my son over MSN early this evening. It had been a while since I had talked to him, and even longer since I had seen him (we were able to get a video session going). He looked good and seems to be enjoying himself despite being a little bored as a temp job he is doing.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:09 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Monday, July 25, 2005
A restart seems to have worked
As I mentioned yesterday, a fair amount of work was waiting for me because of the problems we were having with our media servers. It was even worse than I expected with two of the media servers having lost connectivity with the robot control host. Those servers needed the Netbackup software restarted before they would communicate again. And in the afternoon, I restarted the robot control host as it too was very confused as to what was or was not mounted in the tape drives. I had a look at the media servers before coming to bed and it would appear that things are back to normal. We will know for sure tomorrow.

On the home front, I spend most of my time at home finishing the latest Harry Potter which I have now completed. To say that I was surprised by the turn of events would be an understatement - but you are not going to get details about it here. If you want to know, do yourself a favour and read the book. Of course that gave my wife and daughters an opportunity to grab the downstairs computers so I had to go upstairs to get online. Woe is me - yeah right!

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:17 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Sunday, July 24, 2005
Plenty to do tomorrow
It was my turn to check backups this weekend and I'm sorry to say that not everything went smoothly. Somehow, one of our media servers is grabbing more tape drives than it is allowed to and it thinks that tapes are mounted in drives when they actually are not. I fear that only a restart of the media server will fix the problem, but of course because of the number of backups we have running on weekends it was not possible to do it then.

Another uneventful day today. Of course, since I spent most of it reading, a lot could have happened and I would not have noticed. I am just over the halfway mark of the latest Harry Potter book and hopefully will be able to finish it tomorrow (although work might interfere :) ). I am not going to discuss the book here so I don't take anything away from those people who have not yet read it.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:16 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Saturday, July 23, 2005
I know how a sloth feels
Today I did very little. Well very little in terms of physical exercise. I spent most of my day finishing "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" so I could get started on the latest Harry Potter book. So my nose was in the book all of today and part of the evening. The rest of the evening was spent picking songs for the singsong at church tomorrow. You can read about how that went in my other blog: Christian Life and Work.

As to why I have two blogs: I decided to try out Blogger, and created an account - well actually I tried creating an account as it turned out I had created an account on Blogger before and never used it. So I created a blog, only to find out that I had also created one here before. So here I was with two blogs and I decided to make use of both of them. Who knows how long that will last....

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:53 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Friday, July 22, 2005
Full moon last night
First I should say that my building was not picketed this morning, so I was able to go to work. There's a rumour going around that the TWU and BCGEU have an arrangement whereby the TWU will not picket sites where both unions have employees. Works for me if that is true.

I do support the Telus employees though. As a matter of fact, if you want to know that you could to help the Telus employees, there is a website, www.anotherwrongnumber.com, which has been set up by the employees where you can find out what you can do to help.

And now about the full moon title. Well let's just say that the backup servers at the office behaved very strangely last night: one server mysteriously "forgot" to mount a tape so a few backups just sat idle all night and had to be killed in the morning, another server just did not submit the backup jobs to the queue until 5 hours after the backup window closed! Talk about your confused servers. And there is no indication anywhere of anything having gone wrong. Hence we are blaming the problem on the full moon last night. It's either that or Murphy....

Good afternoon!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 2:10 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Free day off
If you're an active union member, you are not going to like what I will be saying next.

The employees of Telus, members of the Telecommunication Workers Union (TWU), have gone on strike because their employer has decided to impose a settlement on their employees after 4 years of bargaining. I am not against them going on strike. What I am against is that it is very possible that the TWU will be picketing the building where I work tomorrow as they have offices in the building. And, because I am a member of the British Columbia Government Employees Union (BCGEU), I cannot cross their picket line. Which would mean that I would lose pay for something that is not my fight. It is one thing to go on strike over something you had control over, it is another entirely to forced off your work by something you had absolutely nothing to say about.

And don't get me started on the fact that the BCGEU got added to the contract that my employer cannot take measures against me if I avail myself of the right to refuse to cross the picket line, but if I decide not to avail myself of that right the union can take measures against me.

Okay, I have had my chance to vent. Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:31 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Uneventful change window
A pretty quiet day. We installed security patches on half of our backup servers and that went well. The whole thing was done by just after 3pm - so we still had an hour to do stuff if we had wanted. If only all our change windows were that uneventful.

We were supposed to do more, but the equipment we bought did not all arrive on time. We ended up missing one box which somehow found its way to Toronto, over 2000 miles away! Wonder how that happened. In any case, now we will have to re-schedule the installation as it is the first step in a long list of tasks that need to be done.

Oh well, enough for today. Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:38 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Two weblogs
As someone who is always complaining that he has nothing to say, it is certainly odd to be filling out two weblogs at the same time. You can reach the other by clicking on "Christian Life and Work" on the right under links. If you read today's entry in the other weblog, you will see that I am wondering why I have separate weblogs for Christian and secular happenings. After all, it is all part of me.

I have to think about what I want to do about it. I think it will probably end up that I will only fill out one weblog - the other one. After all, God is central in my life and I am giving the wrong impression by segregating the two.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:38 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Monday, July 18, 2005
Mostly uneventful
Ahh, Monday. Back to work after a weekend that was much too short. The only good thing was that I did not have to worry at all about backups and the office as it was my co-worker's turn to monitor the backups. Not to worry though, the problems were waiting for me to get back to work. When I got to the office, I found out that one of our main backup robots had decided to take a good part of the night off. Fortunately for me, I had dealt with that problem before so it only took about 15 minutes to get things back in order again. We will have to investigate this problem as this is the second time that it has reared its ugly head. The rest of the work day was anti-climatic after that.

On the home front, it has finally gotten to be hot enough to put the window air conditioner up. Not that I'm complaining that we went this long without it, but it is nice to see that the summer weather has finally arrived, hopefully to stay. Also, it is the second night in a row that my wife and I are the only ones in the house; my daughters are house-sitting for the parents of a friend of theirs so are spending the night there. I guess this is what the future will look like - just the two of us here. It has not been just the two of us for over 20 years so it will take some getting used to.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:09 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Jigsaw Detective
I don't have much to talk about tonight. I spent most of today doing one of two things: either reading "Order of the Phoenix" of playing "Jigsaw Detective" on Pogo. Okay so that doesn't include going to church and driving my daughters back and forth to their work and/or house sitting.

I like doing jigsaw puzzles so doing online is a lot easier than using real puzzles pieces. It was curious then to find out that I had not completed the June case (Jigsaw Detective has a new case every month). I have therefore spent most of the evening finishing the June case and starting on the July case. And that is the main reason why I am so late making this entry.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 12:00 AM | Permalink | 0 comments
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Harry Potter
Unless you have been living in complete isolation for quite a while, you will know that today was the day the latest Harry Potter book came out: "Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince". As we (meaning my family) are all fans of Harry Potter we bought the book today and I started reading it. It did not take long before I realized that I did not remember enough of the previous book in the series, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix", to read the new book. So I am now re-reading "Order of the Phoenix" before tackling the new book. I have read the first 4 chapters already and I must say I find it easier to read this time around. I had a hard time getting into the book the last time as Harry is in his rebellious teen years and was angry most of the time. I guess the fact that I know a little bit of what is going on makes it easier to handle the tantrums.

Well I better go to bed - gotta keep fresh if I want to remember what I'm reading.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 12:59 AM | Permalink | 0 comments
Saturday, July 16, 2005
Fool me twice, shame on me
Last night was the second time I have checked the weather forecast on the weather channel of the TV and that the forecast turned out to be wrong. I checked before going to bed to see what the weather was going to be like on Friday, and there was no rain on the forecast. Well, it rained most of the day. My fault for trusting them. As the saying goes: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!" I guess it is going to be watching the local news for weather from now on. No more Weather Network.

Work was work (deep is it not). There were no emergencies to deal with so it was an enjoyable day. It was made even better because I got to have lunch with my wife. She came to pick me up and we went to the food court of the local Mall and had a great time.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 1:36 AM | Permalink | 0 comments
Thursday, July 14, 2005
I took a break today
Okay, so that's not such a big deal. But I usually work all the way through from morning to late afternoon without break. I don't usually take the morning and afternoon breaks as I usually always have something to do. I will also usually eat my lunch at my desk so I can keep working while I'm eating.

Well for some reason today, I just needed take a break. So after eating my lunch (at my desk), I went for a walk. While I had not planned it, I ended up where my youngest daughter works. I had a nice, short, conversation with her before making my way back to the office. I think the break did me some good as I was less sleepy in the afternoon. I guess I will have to make it a habit.

I guess all in all it was a pretty uneventful day.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:24 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Plenty of nuttin'
No, I'm not talking about "Porgy and Bess". The plenty of nothing I have is the material with which to fill this blog entry. The saner people would just skip making an entry for the day, but I am worried that if I start not making entries I will go back to only making entries once in a blue moon. So you're stuck reading plenty of nothing so I can keep the routine of writing a blog alive.

I guess a short entry is okay though.... Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:16 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
New template
All you thousands of regular visitors (yeah, right!) will have noticed that I changed the template of my blog today. The previous one had some cosmetic irregularities that I just did not like. And like a good present day consumer, instead of trying to fix the problem I just changed the template. Lets see how long this one lasts.

Not a busy day today, although we made some decisions at work which I hope will make things run more smoothly. We always had trouble with the weekend backups not fitting in the backup windows and having to be rerun manually. So we decided to change the window during the weekend so that the full backups would have all weekend to run. This will hopefully make for better response for the backups through the weekends.

I was also pretty proud of myself that I actually remembered to renew my prescription today after I just used the last pill. I usually forget so maybe there is hope for me after all.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 8:51 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Monday, July 11, 2005
I don't need the stress
Today was a pretty good day, except for the 90 minutes when we thought that we had lost one of our backup tapes. There isn't enough space in our tape robots to hold all the tapes that contain data, so some of the tapes are stored out of the robot in racks. Although we try to take out the tapes we feel are less likely to be required, every once in a while someone has a request that can only be serviced with the tapes on the rack. Today was one of those days. The only problem was that one of the tapes was missing.

Which of course got me to wondering if one tape was all that we were missing. So I built a list of all the tapes that are on the racks to see how many of them were missing. Fortunately for us, in the process of trying to find out how many tapes were missing, the missing tape was found. And it turns out that we do have all the tapes we are supposed to have.

I can do without that stress.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:21 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
How about that weather forecast
I read somewhere that weather forecaster was the only job where you could be consistently wrong and still keep your job. I wanted to say because before I left for work this morning, I checked the weather forecast to see if I needed to bring an umbrella with me. The forecast called for overcast skies, but no rain accumulation - so no umbrella. I started walking to the bus stop, and it started sprinkling... Fortunately, there is a large tree at the bus stop and I was able to wait for the bus under the tree. Got on the bus and made my way to the transfer area. It was raining a little harder there. Fortunately for me once again, there is a covered bus shelter at that bus stop so I could stay dry while I watched the rain fall. Got on the second bus and, by the time I made it to my destination, it had stopped raining so I was able to walk to the office without getting wet. As soon as I sat down at my desk, the sun came out.

I am sure you noticed that I experienced all kinds of weather while on my way to the office, but the forecast of "overcast skies" did not cover any of them....

In any case, on with my day. You have a good one!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 9:01 AM | Permalink | 0 comments
Sunday, July 10, 2005
Another weekend over
Is it just me or does time seem to go faster the older you get? The weekend seemed to have gone in the blink of an eye. I was going to do more, but I just ran out of time. And also, for some unknown reason, I was in a bad mood for part of the day. I cannot really say why I was in a bad mood, but it took a while to pass.

I also was supposed to check the backups at work, but I never even gave it a thought until about 7pm. Fortunately for me, nothing untoward happened so the fact that I didn't have a look until the next day's backup had started did not really cause any problems.

A big accomplishment (not really) is that I figured out how to put my picture on my blog. The hard part was not putting it in Blogger, the hard part was finding it on the computer at home and then uploading it to the web, Flickr in this case, so I could point to it from my profile. You have to get your sense of accomplishment any way you can get it....

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:39 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Visitor from far away
Today we had my youngest daughter's friend from Russia spend the day. When my daughter went to Russia on a class trip earlier this year, she was billeted for the first part of the trip with a Russian family. For the next three weeks or so, some of the students with whom the local kids were billeted have come to Canada for a visit. They are staying with people they have billeted in the past. The girl my daughter stayed with came over for the day as her billet had to go to work for the day and she had nowhere to go. It was certainly a delight to have her around. She is an inquisitive, bright young woman and she marvels at anything new she comes in contact with. She brought with her pictures of her and her family and it was great to get to know the members of her family. I should mention here that my daughter had forgotten to take pictures of them when she was there so it was a bonus to get pictures of them.

Otherwise a pretty quiet day, spent mostly in getting everything ready for church tomorrow. And speaking of that, I should probably go to bed so that I am not tired when I go to church.

Goodnight everyone!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 12:00 AM | Permalink | 0 comments
Friday, July 08, 2005
Early returns are great!
My older daughter was away on training all week and was supposed to come back around 11pm today (Friday Jul.8). Imagine my surprize to find out that she managed to catch an express bus and she was back in town by 5pm! It was great to be able to spend the evening with her and the rest of the family and be able to catch up on everything that has been happening to her and to the rest of the family. It has been a great evening!

Well the greatness of the evening was somewhat tempered by the fact that we found out when we got home that our cat had thrown up on our bed so a "good" time was had while changing all the sheets. We know it was an accident but she won't be able to have accidents in our room anymore as she is persona non grata in our room from now on.

The rest of the day was not bad. The day at the office was actually pretty good: no problems surfaced that we could not deal with and we actually solved a couple of minor problems. A good day anyway I look at it. I spend part of the day chatting with some of the guys at the office; something I had not done in a while. It is definitely something I should do more often because I enjoyed myself. I am pretty much a loner so I have to kind of force myself to engage in a conversation. Pretty much the same thing as always: I don't really know what to talk about. I watch my wife socialize and I just cannot fathom how she does it. It looks so easy to her but to me I just cannot seem to get the hang of it.

Allright, enough for tonight. Goodnight everyone!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:26 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Thursday, July 07, 2005
Yet another quiet day
This is another one of those days where there isn't much to talk about. Probably the only thing of note is that I got to take the car to work today as my wife had to stay home because we had the building manager come looking at our upstairs potty as it was leaking. So I got to drive my younger daughter home after her shift at work. That gave me a nice break in the middle of the afternoon and a quicker way home after my day at the office.

I guess I should say that since I have been getting more sleep I feel much better during the day. So I guess I cannot complain about having to vacate the living room as it benefits me as well. That means I should not have been that whiny about it yesterday since it is doing me some good.

Guess I better close as I have a chapter of a book to read before going to bed.

Goodnight!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:16 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Evicted from my own living room
A couple of days ago, my youngest daugher badly sprained her ankle. While her ankle is getting better, she is not up to navigating stairs just yet. So she has been sleeping in the living room instead of her room which is in the basement. And since she gets up really early to get to work by 6am, she has to go to sleep early as well. Which of course means that we have to vacate the living room by 10pm. Now, for someone who usually stays up until almost midnight every night and that spends most of that time on the computer, not being able to stay on the computer past 10pm puts a little cramp in my style.

Now, before you start feeling sorry for me (assuming that you were going to in the first place), I should say that coincidentally last week end I bought a wireless card for an old laptop that had been retired from the office. So, I am writing this while sitting up in bed on that laptop. I guess I cannot really complain since I am still online, but it is not the same.

Ummmm, I think I just come off as a crybaby. But hey, I have a routine that I like to follow and making changes to it is not my forte. So there.

I am glad however, that being able to avoid going up and down stairs is giving my daughter the opportunity to heal faster. I will grin and bear it - with just a little whining here.

Pretty quiet day at work today. Let's just say that if there ever is a good day to be sick, yesterday was it. A lot of our backups failed, and then they spent most of the day trying to figure out why. I'm just glad I missed all of it.

Those of you who follow my entries (Hello? Anyone there?) will know by now that Wednesdays are the days where we make changes to our backup servers. It would appear that today's changes went smoothly (knock on wood) as all the backups appeared to start on time. I guess we'll know for sure in the morning. They're not paying me to be on call so I am not checking until my regular work hours. So there!

Wow, a lot of whining today. I wonder what brought that on....

Oh well, goodnight all!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:15 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Not the best way to get a day off
I got the day off today; not because I wanted a day off, but because I got up to take a shower and my body said "There is no way you're feeling well enough to go to work today". So I stayed up long enough to send an email to the office telling them I would not be in and went back to bed. I then slept for another 5 hours. I had been nursing somewhat of a cold - runny nose and somewhat of a sore throat - but I had been able to mostly ignore it. I guess my body decided that I had ignored it long enough. I sure hope I gave my bode enough sleep - I am planning to go to work tomorrow. Just to be on the safe side I am going to get more sleep than usual....

So it was a pretty slow day all around since I slept through a good part of it. I'm looking to be more productive tomorrow. I did get the main PowerPoint presentation for church ready for next Sunday's service so the day was not a complete loss.

Goodnight!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 9:00 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
I could be a little clearer
It occurred to me that the title of my previous entry was never explained. I guess I must have switched train of thought in between the time I typed the title and when I started typing the text of the entry. Anyway, what this was supposed to mean is that this will be the third weblog/blog site I am trying. I started at LiveJournal as it is where my daughter has her blog, then moved to Spymac when I remembered that it has a Weblog area and I was going there for the gigabyte of email anyway. And now Blogger: I use Google Mail more and more, and I have just started using Google groups for a committee at church so I figured I would give Blogger a go. BTW, there are links to my previous blogs in the Link area on the right.

I should have been in bed already, so this is going to have to be very short.

Till next time, goodbye!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 12:00 AM | Permalink | 0 comments
Sunday, July 03, 2005
And this makes three
Okay, so I'm trying out this new blog thing. I'm always willing to try out a new offering (for me anyway) to see if it is better than what I am using now. I am currently using the Weblog utility on Spymac (the link to my weblog is listed on the side) and I just wanted to see if this is any easier.

Onto today's log then. I spent all of the last part of last night as well as a couple of hours this morning getting the PowerPoint presentations ready for this morning's church service. I am happy to say that, besides a few spelling errors, the presentations looked good and were well received. Since this was the first time that we went this route, there are obviously changes that will need to be made so that the presentation is easier to see; mostly just changing the colour of the text to a brighter colour. It also did not help that we were using a sheet as the screen - which of course meant that the image was not very bright. Apparently however, it would appear that one of the members (how do you refer to people that attend church in a discipleship model?) is going to buy a screen for us. Wow is all I can say.

Not much else has happened today - I must confess I have been on the computer most of the afternoon and I cannot really say what I have been doing. Okay, I read my mail and I have been fiddling around with Blogger. But all afternoon?

Okay, enough for now. Let's see how this looks....
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 4:52 PM | Permalink | 0 comments