Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Went to a movie
I forgot to mention in my previous entry that we (the whole family) went to see X-Men: The Last Stand. I don't know that I would have called it a great movie, but I was surprised when we got to the end that we were already there; time just flew. To me that is a great indication of how much I liked the movie that I was engrossed in it enough to not notice how much time had passed. If you have seen the previous X-Men movies I would highly recommend that you go see this one.

I did not feel great today, I had a headache most of the day. It did go away by the end of the afternoon so I wonder if maybe it was because I had not eaten anything for breakfast. I will have to make a point to eat something tomorrow morning to see if that makes any difference.

I added a printer to my old laptop today, the one on which I mentioned installing Xubuntu. It is a little more convoluted than I would like, since Xfce (the windowing environment used by Xubuntu) does not have a utility to add a printer. Fortunately for me, I had already added that same printer on my Linux desktop (running KDE under PCLinuxOS) which helped me to know how to format the URi for the printer (Windows printer under SAMBA). And after making a small change to the /etc/group file (adding cupsys to the shadow group) and restarting cupsd, I was able to add the printer using CUPS by going to http://localhost:631 (localhost is the local machine you are on for those new to Unix).

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:42 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Tranquility
This has been a very nice Sunday. I did go to church this morning, and then my older daughter took all of us to lunch at Cafe Mexico (Muchas Gracias!). The only downer is that my older daughter's boyfriend was not feeling well and could not come for lunch.

I also spent some time finishing the installation of Xubuntu on the old laptop we have here. This was not without its frustrating moments (more like hours) as I was not able to get the Desktop CD for Xubuntu would not complete the installation on the hard drive. I had to use the regular Ubuntu Desktop CD for the installation, and then install the xubuntu-desktop package to get the laptop to be set up the way I wanted it to be. I am hoping that it will work well; the distribution of Linux that I had installed on the laptop previously was pretty much abandoned by the company that had put it out.

Well I am going to go back to enjoying the day. Good bye!


powered by performancing firefox

 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 6:41 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Friday, May 26, 2006
Quiet evening
This evening was quiet in the sense that I did not have to go to any meetings. We did go out for a good part of the evening but it was enjoyable as there was no pressure. Well there was a short time where there was some concern since I could not find my cell phone, but it just turned out that I had left it at home. I must confess however that I have no idea why I had taken my phone out of its holster since I did not get any calls or text messages while I was home. That one is destined to remain a mystery.

I must confess that there is not much for me to say, I just wanted to get back into the habit of daily posting.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:58 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Still around

Well I have not posted in a few days. Sometimes lately I have not felt like doing anything, so I have pretty much just vegetated in front of a computer fooling myself that what I was doing was actually worthwhile. Now it is not that I am no longer feeling that way, but rather because the guilt has overtaken the "slothness" that I am posting tonight.

My younger daughter took us out for dinner tonight and we had a great supper. I was also supposed to go to choir practice, but it was cancelled. So a great evening all around.

Not much else to say, except maybe that the workstation refresh at the office now has an official date for me: June 5th. I can therefore start looking forward to having a new machine on my desk that I can spend some time setting up the way I like it. And of course that means installing Linux on it. The only thing I have not yet decided is whether or not I will leave Windows installed and add Linux or if I will just blow away the Windows installation. I guess it will all depend on how I feel on the 5th. The workstation refresh certainly was past due as I have better machines at home than I do on my desk at the office; and that has never happened before.

Good night!

 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:10 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Monday, May 22, 2006
Who knew
I knew I had a fair amount of printed music lying around the house - mostly on the piano bench, but it was not until I was sorting it all out that I found out how much I really had. Not only that, but at least half of the music I had I am sure I had at least two copies of the music. So now the music is mostly put away in a binder I bought today just for that purpose; I only have a few pieces of music left lying around. I should be able to finish that off tomorrow. I also have a lot of printed lyrics that can be used to make transparencies for overhead projectors; and that does not include all the ones that I have kept in my music book. Sheesh! I have just realized that I have even more music in the music bag I use for the choir - I guess I get to tackle that mess later in the week.

I was able to sleep in this morning since it was Victoria Day today - a statutory holiday here in British Columbia (and most of the rest of Canada as well). So I got a much needed three day weekend. I could get used to those. Now I am feeling down, mostly I am sure because I have to go back to work tomorrow to all the complaints about failed backups. Unfortunately for me, backups is one of those areas where only perfection will do. Trying to be perfect all the time takes it toll; which is probably because most of the time we have to settle for the old "good enough for government work".

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:51 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Sunday, May 21, 2006
I got started
The good news is that the piano bench is now devoid of any stuff; the bad news is that the stuff is now on the dining room table in three piles: discard, music, other. By far the biggest pile is the music pile, and that is what I had suspected. The plan is really to sort the music alphabetically and put in a binder for easy retrieval. The sorting and putting in the binder part will happen Monday.

The morning was for getting ready for and going to church. Pretty much the rest of the day was spent on the computers just trying new distributions to see if they could handle my old laptop with the Linksys PCMCIA wireless card. The only one (so far) that has made it easy to use that wireless card is DamnSmallLinux which is the smallest Linux distribution I have seen. It is spartan and utilitarian but can be run on low end machines. It did not recognize my wireless card - none of them did - but it was extremely simple to set up; something I was not able to do with the other distributions - even if they had the required software (which some of them did not).

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:57 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Getting closer to practicing
The main (but I will not go as far as to say the only) reason for me not practicing the piano is that I have a bunch of papers and stuff on the piano bench. Yes, I am not practicing because I do not want to spend the time to sort out what is on the piano bench and put it in their rightful places. Pretty bad, yes I know. So the Todo list for tomorrow includes (at the top) tackling the mess on the piano bench. Stay tuned for an update on that grandiose project (right!).

A good portion of today was spent getting stuff ready for tomorrow's church service. But I did go around and run some errands; one of them was paying the rental for the mixing console we are using at church. That gave me an excuse to go in the acoustic guitar room and try out some guitars. My wife was with me and I was going to show her the guitar I had found the last time I was there (I guess one month ago, when I paid the rent); unfortunately, it was nowhere to be found. I guess I was not the only one to find that it sounded great. Oh well, I guess since I was not going to buy it anytime soon (if at all) it is just as well someone else gave it a good home.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:59 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Continued research
I do not have a whole lot to talk about as I have spent most of the time at the computer just looking some more at new sites and new offerings on the web. The latest thing I have found is an online notebook offered by Google. The Google Notebook allows you to save information so it can be re-used later. So for example, if you are searching for information and cannot make use of it right away, you can just save it in your notebook and retrieve it later.

I spent a good part of the evening at the church for our weekly choir practice. I am enjoying our new choir director and it is fun to go to choir now. The only bad thing is that now I am singing a lot more tenor whereas I used to sing bass most of the time. I am going to have to practice singing more so I can be more comfortable spending so much time in my higher range.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:20 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
A whole lotta nuttin
That is what I have got to say today. This is one of those days where I make an entry, not because I have anything to say, but because I do not want to get out of the habit of sitting down in front of the computer and putting down my thoughts in my blog. I am not worried about getting out of the habit of sitting down in front of the computer since I am basically in front of a computer all the time. It is finding time to make an entry that is worrisome; after all I can waste time like no other while sitting at the computer.

Another thing I was doing Sunday night that kept me up until 3am was working on one of the badges on Pogo. I did not manage to finish it then, but I did manage to finish this evening with less than an hour to spare. I have not been playing there much lately, mostly because I have been spending quite a bit of time just looking at new websites to see if I would be interested in using them. I have found a few, but many others I just never remained interested in them to keep returning. For example, I must have my calendar (or at least parts of it) on about 5 different sites. But the only one that I have kept returning to is Google Calendar - mostly because I already use Google Mail. I do use CalendarHub to keep track of the standby schedule, but I would guess I could do it using Google's Calendar if I were willing to spend the time.

Ummmm, looks like the whole lotta nuttin turned into a fair amount of sumthin. Go figure...

Good night!

 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:29 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Monday, May 15, 2006
Color me stupid
So I did not go to work on Monday and it is entirely my fault. I got interested in episodes of Startgate Atlantis we were watching on DVD and I stayed up until 3am. Needless to say I was in no shape to go to work Monday morning. I woke up around 10am long enough to send a message to the office to let them know I would not be coming in, and then went back to sleep until 1:30pm.

I spent most of the time I was up to update the packages on my wife's old laptop. I get to play with it now that she has a new one. Not that I could not have used it before, but now I do not have to worry about messing things up and her not being able to use it.

Let's see if I can get to bed before midnight and actually show up for work on Tuesday. Paraphrasing somebody's saying, it is okay to make mistakes as long as you learn from them.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:58 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Friday, May 12, 2006
Not much to talk about
Well today was a day where nothing interesting happened. Well except for one thing: my wife and I went out for dinner at the Keg steakhouse. We do not usually treat ourselves to such a place, but since Mother's Day is coming up and my wife really wanted a good steak... I am happy to say that the Keg did no disappoint and her steak (and my prime rib) were excellent. We had tried to go last week, but could not as there was a 45 minute wait before getting a table. We had not made reservations (then) as they did not use to take reservations, but they do now and we did reserve for this week.

We are hiring another person for the backup team. They have been asking me about questions to ask the applicants. I did not know I was high enough on the totem pole to warrant being asked about questions. Oh well... I guess it had to happen at some point.

The weekend could not have arrived at a better time because I have stupidly been going to bed after midnight every evening this last week and I am feeling it right now. The only reason I am still up is to make my journal entries. Mission half accomplished (one down, one to go).

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:59 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Choir is fun
Something occurred to me when I was at choir tonight; we are doing stuff that we just hated doing with previous Music Directors, but somehow we enjoy doing them with Brooke. And by that I mean we go through every verse of every hymn that will be sung in the Sunday service. I think that is because with previous Directors it was always the same hymn, sung the same way; so why practice it? But because Brooke has not been exposed to any of the church music all the hymns are new to him and he gives them his own twist which makes them new all over again.

At work we have retained the service of a Veritas consultant to help us solve some persistent problems that we had not been able to solve, even by opening problem cases with Veritas. The guy that was sent was great, but unfortunately after being here for only 2 days he has had to return home to take care of some family problems. Veritas has sent another consultant, and while this is setting us back somewhat the first consultant has recommends the new consultant highly as they have worked together before.

There was not much time for dinner tonight as my older daughter was getting off work at 6:30pm and I was at the office until 6pm (making sure we would not run out of tapes overnight). So my wife and younger daughter came to pick us up and we went to the Mayfair Mall food court for dinner. My wife and I had Mexican food and my daughters New York Fries. Everyone seemed to enjoy their meal - I know I certainly did mine.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:58 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
The best laid plans
When I woke up about an hour late this morning I decided that I should stay home for the morning and just go in to work in the afternoon for our weekly change window. I sent a text message to one of my co-workers to let her know I would not be in until the afternoon. The plan I had in mind when I did that was to sleep a little more and then get up and get ready for the meeting I had in the evening: I had to be ready to sing for about 15 minutes and I had nothing finalized. What really happened is that I slept until 11:30, then had to get up to take a shower and basically go straight to work. So much for the best laid plans.

The meeting did not last very long - well actually I was able to leave early. So for the first time this week I was able to spend the evening with my family. I certainly enjoyed it.

yummy, spaghetti and meatballs. We tried a new method for cooking the pasta - unfortunately that did not work out too well; but the spaghetti was still very good thanks to the great sauce.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:48 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Another busy meeting night
Let's get the food out of the way first. we had pork souvlaki for dinner; another great dinner from my better half. I don't get to take some to work, but only because we ate it all!

This was another night were I did not have much time at home: I got home just before 6pm and left just after 7pm for a meeting at church. The church meeting lasted until 10pm - and really it could have lasted longer - we tabled some of the items for the next meeting.

Work was work - although the meeting I went to at the end of the day was at least interesting. I ended with more work, but at least this work will potentially improve things for one of our customers who has been having trouble getting backups completed on time.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:55 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Monday, May 08, 2006
No enthusiasm
I think it is safe to say that today was not one of my best days at the office. Not because of anything that happened there, but rather because I could not muster any enthusiasm for the job I was doing. As I mentioned to my family, today was a "Who the H*** cares!" kind of day. I probably would have accomplished almost as much by just staying home. Enough said about that.

Home on the other hand was very pleasant, at least for the short time I spent there. I had a meeting at church tonight that took most of the evening which left me with little quality time with my family. Dinner was great once again: Fish (snapper) and chips. I am looking forward to my fish sandwich on cheese bread tomorrow. Yummy...

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:58 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Friday, May 05, 2006
A decent laptop
I have received my signing bonus and have made my big purchase: a new laptop. It is a Compaq Presario V2610CA ( data sheet ) that we bought from FutureShop. Interestingly enough, that same laptop was advertised by two different stores in town, both for the same price, but at one store you had to use mail-in rebates to get the low price. So I was able to buy a very nice laptop and a wireless optical mouse for less than a thousand dollars.

As much as I wanted to get home early today (to play with the new laptop obviously), I had to work late. We had to add a lot of blank tapes to our tape robots to ensure that we would not run out of tapes during the weekend. To add to the fun, someone started a restore and we did not have all of the needed tapes in the robot (our robots are too small to hold all of our tapes). So, since our backup program does not usually use all of the tapes is says it will need, I decided to only put the tapes that were actually needed back in the robot while still trying to put new tapes in our other robot. I did have some moderate success with that method, since I ended up only putting about 20 of the 40 tapes that were supposedly needed. But it took us over 2.5 hours to eject all the tapes, put new tapes in, figure out which tapes were needed for the restore, and make enough room in the robot to hold all of the tapes needed for the restore.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:58 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Thursdays mean less time at home
I have probably mentioned before that, since I have choir practice on Thursdays, I do not get to spend much time at home on those evenings. And I pretty much spent the time that I was at home on the computer. I did get some stuff accomplished so it was not a total waste of time.

I don't know if I have mentioned it before, but since I work for the provincial government and my union ratified the contract in time I get to receive a signing bonus. And I am somewhat excited because my next pay cheque has the bonus on it. Of course because of my tax bracket and all the other deductions taken I will only get to see half of the bonus; but hey, it's all free money since 6 months ago nobody was getting a bonus.

Well I better go to bed; tomorrow we get to go and spend some of that bonus on a new laptop for the family.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:58 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Success!
We did run into a few snags during the hardware move that took place today, but in the end the move was completed within the allotted time. I went to work 1.5 hours earlier than I have been lately so that we could get an early start and it is starting to show as my eyelids are getting heavy. There were some interesting moments, for example the moving truck that came to pick up the tape robot was not tall enough to put the robot into the box. They ended up moving the robot on the lift gate of the truck! Gasps of horror were heard when that story was recounted. All in all a successful move.

The church meeting I mentioned in yesterday's entry was canceled as it was very close to the next scheduled meeting - it had been moved to tonight because of Easter Monday (the day the meeting was originally supposed to take place) and vacation from the facilitator. I think that turns out to be good as I do not know how focused I would have been tonight.

The fact that I was tired messed up my appetite as I only had 3 slices of pizza tonight - I usually have at least 4. Actually, I normally maintain that there is no off switch for me as far as pizza is concerned; as long as I am close to pizza I will eat. Which is why I think that tiredness had a lot to do with the reduction of my appetite. The pieces I had were very good.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:22 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Prioritize
The word in the title is obviously one that I should become more familiar with and actually apply to my life. I say that because I wasted a good portion of the evening looking around the Dell Canada website as I am looking at buying a laptop for the family (well it is really for my wife, but let's assume it is for the family). I say "wasted" because all of the deals/coupons that are currently in effect at Dell are no longer going to be valid when I can actually buy the laptop.

My wife had an allergic reaction to some dried pineapple she ate and took something for it that made her sleepy so she was upstairs in bed most of the evening. Even though I spent the evening at home I did not spend much of it with her. My time on the computer certainly did not suffer. She did prepare a very good dinner before going to bed though; I have packaged the leftovers so I can take them for lunch later this week.

Tomorrow is the big move I mentioned being postponed last week. I have to get to the office earlier than usual so I should really be sleeping rather than typing. I have a meeting tomorrow night at church so I certainly hope that everything will proceed smoothly.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:40 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Monday, May 01, 2006
Too much to read
So here it is after 10:30pm and I have not accomplished half of what I had planned to do. And I think I am going to blame the fact that I have a new home page, Netvibes , which allows you to keep track of many different things you are interested in all on one web page. On the plus side, it makes it really easy to keep up with things since they are all on the same page. On the minus side, it is very easy to get sidetracked since there is a lot more information at your fingertips just begging for you to read it. And that is what is causing me trouble.

Since talking chords with the music director at my church, I have been wanting to start practicing the piano again. This was 4 days ago, and of course I have yet to even touch the piano. I did spend an hour listening to a piano course (Pattern Piano and Keyboard) that I bought last year. So I guess I could say I am making some progress towards playing the piano again - very slowly unfortunately.

We had open faced tacos for dinner and I overate again. Yummy!

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:44 PM | Permalink | 0 comments