Posts filed under 'Highlights'
We went off to Mysore Palace to see some cultural icons of India. You’re not allowed to wear shoes in many areas including the palace and the many temples, so we walked around with a guide barefoot and listening. We hopped on an elephant for a short ride around the palace grounds which was a fun silly thing and then headed off to a group of local temples up on a high mountain. There is a lot of begging and constant payment for services (no matter how insignifcant) that really is tough to deal with if you happen to be a Canadian (as we’re not really used to the pressure sell). I felt bad for the guy who was taking us around the site because he was just shelling out the money constantly (pay to keep our shoes, pay to get a coconut, pay to break the coconut open, pay to bless the coconut, pay to be blessed, pay to have a kid tell us the capital city of Canada). In the end, I ended up donating money too, but I made the mistake of not paying attention to what I was giving the temple monks and instead of 50Rp (about $1.50), I gave them €50 (about $75.00) by accident. But you can’t blame me, if you compare them, they look very similar in colour. In the end, I should get massive karmic blessings for such a donation. The day rounded out by a return home and me feeling like complete crap (either because of too much sun or because my stomach was finally succumbing); luckily the internet had started working again (it had stopped earlier in the week for me) and I quickly checked mail and went to bed.
December 16th, 2006
Damn! Yet another year goes by and I miss starting the tradition around the Yule Lads. I want to get started with this (especially when we have kids) so that it can be a fun (albeit zany) part of the holidays. For those of you who don’t know, Iceland has 13 Santas and a Yuletide Cat that will eat your children.
December 13th, 2006
I went out and picked up a slingbox today. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a device that hooks into your audio/video system and allows you to stream the video feed remotely over the network. It was more difficult to setup than I thought (had to look up instructions on the internet for getting my airport express working), especially since you need to connect to the slingbox via local LAN before you can configure it to be accessed remotely. Once I did all that (about 2h of fiddling), it worked perfectly and I can now stream video (from our TV and PVR) from anywhere in the world provided the bandwidth is fast enough. I definitely recommend getting one of these, especially if you travel a lot.
December 4th, 2006
Not sure if people have seen this before, the first is done by Jonathan Dietrich representing me at play (done just recently) and the second was done by James Storm representing me at work (years and years ago; colourized by Mike Leatham). I think both of them do a good job of capturing the stereotypical me. It is kind of fun to imagine what your daily life might look like as a South Park or Simpsons episode.
November 27th, 2006
Tonight was the annual holiday party! Karen got a new dress and had her hair all redone and looked absolutely stunning! I put a tie on and trimmed some beard and at least looked somewhat acceptable beside her. There were a ton of people there this year and just personal friends alone would have taken up two tables (had they all shown up), let alone all my work friends and co-workers. Kirk (my EVP) sat at our table with his wife Peregrine which was fun because we got to talk more in a causal atmosphere and others who don’t know him too well got to see him outside of an office context. All in all, the party was reasonably good (Karen and I had a few martinis which were fantastic) and it’s always a nice excuse to dress up and get together with lots of people we know. We left at about 11pm only because the music wasn’t really doing anything to get us to want to dance. Hope the rest of the guys all a good time as well, I’ll have to bug them in the office on Monday.
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November 25th, 2006
Landed in Ottawa today and went promptly to the British High Commission. First thing was being questioned heavily by the main gate guard, but once he heard what I was doing and whom I was meeting it was through security (leaving belongings behind). Waited to turn in my UKM application form along with showing Mom’s expired UK passport, full birth certificate, my full birth certificate and my passport. Whole process took about 15 minutes once the person showed up (Claire McKeown) and in about 3 months apparently I’ll likely be a citizen of Britian.
November 23rd, 2006
Apparently I do a reasonably good job. Did some talking today, got the company ~$300K and fixed some problems. That makes me happy and I’m glad that both the company and customers think I’m useful. After a long day of meetings between many companies, partners and staff, we went off to the dinner and rodeo. We arrived and they had a huge rodeo ring that we all filed into and sat down with our drinks. The entertainment started normally enough, the bull riding, rope tricks, mexican rodeo percision horse-work, but then it got a bit weirder. First up, audience members had to capture a calf and stick a large pair of underwear on it’s back end. The general trend there was one person got dirty while the other two watched. Then (as a co-worker put it, “a moment from Lord of the Flies“) two other groups had to milk a goat and drink the warm milk. It was very disturbing seeing 6 drunk people decend on a poor helpless goat and go to work on it for 2 minutes. Not what I would call entertainment at all.
November 16th, 2006
Fed up with the mouse problem (there were at least three running around the living room last night while Karen, Mary, Alan, Jasmine and I were sitting there) and not having much success with the traditional snap traps, I went to Home Depot today and bought some electronic traps that Karen researched on the internet. All I can say is they are *SO* much better than the regular traps because they are essentially a capacitor that stores a lethal charge that hits the mouse when they go for the bait. Since I bought them, we’ve gotten two mice in about five hours. Mouse problem should be under control in about two days.
November 11th, 2006
We had Mary, Alan and Jasmine over tonight. Karen suggested that we play dress-up and shoot a little movie that Jasmine would make up. We had a great time, I was the dragon pirate, Karen was the maiden and queen’s maid, Jasmine was the squire princess, Mary was the Queen and Alan was the rodeo cowboy (complete with bull). It was cute and Jasmine had a good time giving direction to the rest of us actors.
November 10th, 2006
So I had two minor episodes today where I got a bit teary (both when talking to people) — just overwhelmed I suppose and since today was a very bad day, it pushed me over the edge. The grind seems to be wearing me down slowly… I will need to look at what I’ve got available to me for help and use the support structure that I have… just no time, no time. 
November 7th, 2006
Tonight was the KWIF ToTE 25th anniversary alumni show. Again, I was really lucky and got to play (Steve Hutton decided to perform and I had to balance the sides). I was amazed on how well the groups worked together and I think overall we did a pretty good show (given how rusty I should be). It was a very nice reunion of the “legacy” players and good to reconnect with all of them. Karen and Bernie as they hosted showed the audience many years of t-shirts from ToTE (each of them were wearing about seven of them, removing one at the beginning of each segment) - the funniest thing though was Bernie taking off one of his shirts and a cloud of dust billowing out… 25 years indeed. Hope to be there for the 50th anniversary.
November 4th, 2006
Hmmm… seems that Oracle just bought Stellent. That’s interesting - wonder what it means for friends that work at Stellent?
November 2nd, 2006
No, not the play, the jet company. Flying to Tallahassee this week and Kirk chartered a jet because there are 6-7 of us going. Which means (a) we get to fly direct, not connecting through all manner of airports to get there and (b) we can set our own schedule of when we are going and returning (which is fantastic). Looking forward to that trip but sadly I can’t get used to it as it is far from the normal state of affairs.
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October 30th, 2006
Karen and I went downtown for some more walking on the Royal Mile. We headed down to the Queen’s palace at the bottom of the Canongate and ventured up into the park towards Arthur’s seat. Arthur’s seat is the largest hill surrounding Edinburgh and provides a very beautiful view. Lots of windy and wet stone pathways and some difficult climbing, but it was nice to spend two hours outside and doing some walking on a beautiful Scottish day. At the end of the walk we were really wiped out, we headed back to the hotel and ate dinner and packed up early to make sure that we were set to go early on tomorrow. We tried and tried to watch the recorded episode of Lost I had but it was difficult to download and the internet stopped working. Since we didn’t have normal TV to watch, Karen and I got hooked on “so you think you’re a beauty technician” reality TV show where people get very crazy beauty procedures done (a BC&S). It’s been a very fun time in Edinburgh these past couple of days; Karen and I could definitely live here in Scotland, it’s a very nice place.
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October 28th, 2006
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