Monday, May 30, 2011

It Took a Year

So a year ago during the amazing playoff run the Canadiens had I posted a video up on youtube that featured a hardly audible clip of a song that was playing during a break in the game.  I didn’t know what the song was but it sounded pretty catchy and I wanted to be able to find out what it was a get it.

Not exactly high quality, especially the sound what with guys talking over top of it and everything.

I was messing around on the computer yesterday and went to my user page for youtube and noticed that there were three comments so I checked them out.  One was a comment on this video, added a year ago!  How this had gone unnoticed by me for this long I don’t know, but it had and it contained the answer to my question “A song at almost every Canadiens game.. what is it??”

Finally, I know and while I don’t understand any of it besides a few words here and there, it IS catchy.

It’s Les Cowboys Fringants - Ti Cul!

My day has been made.

Thank you internet for eventually knowing everything!

Saturday, May 28, 2011

I Hate When…

People park in front of my house.  It bugs me and I can’t really exactly tell you why.  Something about some car in front of my house just unsettles me, even if it is my own because we’ve moved cars to the other person can take their car in the morning.

I see the car out there and I go “Who’s that?  Are they coming to my house?  Why didn’t they park in front of whoever’s house it is that they are visiting?  How long is it going to be there?”

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It’s especially annoying when the car parked has blocked me from getting out.  This happened the other day where the car on the street half covered my driveway space and there was no way that I could have gotten out.  I wasn’t going anywhere for hours. But I felt inclined to check on the status of this street parked car every twenty minutes or so.  Is it still there? Why did this idiot park half in front of my driveway when there is a whole street to park on?

It drove me crazy for the whole two or three hours that the person was parked there.  When they finally left I felt so relieved that I would be able to get out of my driveway.  I then continued to play games for another couple hours before I had to go anywhere.

I’m not certain if I am that neurotic about anything else, Are you? Comment below!  And <shameless plug>don’t forget to click a couple ads! </end shameless plug>

Friday, May 27, 2011

Putting On Weight

As anyone who has read most of this blog would know, I spent a lot of time last year losing weight, “bad” weight.  It’s been talked about a few times.

Now I’m putting on weight, “good” weight and actually have been since about October.  My lowest weight was about 150 pounds! Yikes! And now I weigh about 164 give or take depending on the day.  Still a far cry from what I used to weigh and all the clothes I bought when I weighed 150 or so still fit perfectly (though the shoulders are a little tight in some of them), so the weight I have put on has been in the right areas and through the building of muscle.  Fantastic.

But it is really a struggle to be ok with gaining weight when one has gone to such great lengths to lose so much weight and so every now and then I feel the need to measure my fitness progress in a way that leaves weight out of the equation really.

Once I had met with Jodi last summer there was a standard sheet she had to track the goals and progress of someone that was under her tutelage it measured weight, skinfolds and that type of thing but for fitness it has pushups, crunchies and a standing high jump.  In February we decided that after having done 5 of those sheets I think that we had maxed out what that sheet could tell us and I asked her to devise some other sort of test to gauge my fitness progress.

She invented an obstacle course that involved doing laps around the gym while getting over a chest height wall, going up and down stairs, pushups, medicine ball smashes, burpees and dragging a fireman dummy.  All of this was done after going as long as my legs could carry me during the dreaded beep test! 

We first did this set of tests in March, I completed level 8 of the beep test and the course took me 6:47.66.  Which is not bad, but we also only had the one set of data.  We just did the test again this past week and I completed level 9.5 on the beep test and did the course in 5:54.62.  which added over a minute of running to the beep test and shaved over a minute off the course time!  Pretty impressive.

We also talked to one of the other trainers at the gym about what a good body fat percentage is for someone who is like me (short and over 30) and his “ummm… *this number*” was much higher than what mine is and when Jodi showed him the other measurements we had taken that day he said he was a bit jealous of a few of them.

So I’m in shape, but even still being ok with putting on weight is a hard thing to do.  I’ve been told by a few people though, most notably Amber and Jodi, that I was too thin last summer and where I’m at now is much, much better.  I do agree with that at least.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Lunchtime Entertainment

I love my samsung phone. It's a Galaxy S, I can pretty much do anything with it. I got it almost a year ago now. I'm able to blog with it here at work just by sending an email to my blog.

If I am having my lunch alone here often this might become a typical thing because they only get a couple of channels out here and each day that I have been here Oprah has been on, yuck.

This is a far cry from the entertainment at lunch while I was at CIP when Damion and I would watch series of shows like The Tick, Family Guy, My Name is Earl or the IT crowd, hilarious shows that made the day so much more enjoyable.

I do this now in the mornings before I head off to work, watching The Big Bang Theory. But I think that with the power of my phone I might bring some shows to work to entertain myself at work.

I realize just now, that working in a field dominated by women, my lunch hours will never be as great as those spent at CIP, watching cartoons.

Sent from Samsung mobile

Monday, May 23, 2011

Oranges

So I go get sushi a lot now a days and the whole experience is something that warrants it’s own blog post, but for the moment I want to focus on the oranges.

We go to Matsu Sushi on Hunter St. here in Peterborough and it’s the kind of place that goes the extra mile to make the experience a great one.  Part of it is an included “dessert” of an orange gloriously cut up so that you just eat it with a toothpick and no mess.

I recently had a cold and part of my solution was to get some oranges.  I was about to peel it like most people would normally do, and get orange stuff all under my fingernails and crap when I thought ‘I should eat this orange like a civilized person, and some barbarian.’

Out came the knife!

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Peel!

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Cut into pieces.

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Eat.

Yum! And none of that stupid pith ruining your orange deliciousness!

Friday, May 20, 2011

No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater... than central air.

Summer is coming and summer and I do not get along very well.  I do not like the heat, I’d rather wear three sweaters and two coats than swelter in the summer sun.  It’s not that I don’t like the activities of summer, or the wardrobes of summer, and I have discovered that sweating through a workout is great.  However when you sweat just by standing there because it’s so bloody hot, that is not my cup of tea.

That is why I am thankful for man’s greatest invention.  Air Conditioning.

Since I have moved into my current house I’ve had AC (as it’s called) in the bedroom and there is no way I could revert back to a non-air conditioned sleeping chambers.  If there is one thing worse than being too hot while your awake and doing things, it’s being too hot while you try to sleep!

Back when I shared an apartment with a few guys while I went to school we had an upstairs of a house, it was a great place due to the people and the video games, but it was like an oven all summer long.  Most of the time it was hotter inside than it was outside.  It was hot enough that it was fairly common practice to take a cold shower then go lay in bed in front of a fan and try to fall asleep before you dried off and got too hot again.

It’s supposed to be another killer summer here in Ontario, and I’m just glad I have air conditioning in a couple rooms to make it bearable.  How do you deal with the heat? Anything more creative than staying inside and having AC?  Comment below!

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Just One More Time

This is a little phrase I sometimes say to myself when playing games that is unbelievable false and yet I continue to believe it every time I play.  It's the type of thing that comes up when a game has a short challenge and a high score possibility. 

For instance I was playing a challenge map on Batman: Arkham Asylum last night (which is a wicked awesome games by the way, if you own a XBox 360, PS3 or a computer that can handle it buy the game!) and playing one of the challenges where you take on four rounds of bad guys in a fight, and after about the third time through and not setting a new high score (that requires almost perfection to achieve) I said to myself, out loud of course “One more time!`I then proceeded to play the same challenge about ten more times sometimes resetting about half way through when I knew I wouldn't beat my old score.

This brings to mind a poster I used to have in my office when I worked at Computer Installations Plus titled ‘Everything I needed to know I learned from Tetris”

Tetris is of course another of those games where the “One more time” line gets spoken.  But it’s about persistence, when you know you can do something all it takes is the right combination of events and trying to make it happen.  In life you might do this but the results take  a long time to see in some cases, with a game you get instant feedback on how well you did with a score, I think that’s what drives this “One more time” thing for me.

I know a number of people that have a similar fascination with beating their high water marks at different things and as long as that persistence is applied to other things in life as well it can be a very good thing.  If you persist you can achieve that which you are going for, be it a high score in a game, a high mark on a test and even some things that have a less tangible result like better relationships or acknowledgement of what you do.

By the way, I eventually did beat my old score and achieved the 455th rank in the world! Go me!

Thursday, May 5, 2011

3 Resumes, 3 Interviews, 3 Jobs

I have graduated college for the second time in my life now.  Many years ago it was for computer support and I had a middling first career as a support tech.  It may not have been glamorous, but I met a lot of good people and had a pile of fun along the way. (In fact Damion and I just took a trip to Ajax together just for the fun of it while he picked up a couple of computers).

On April 21st I had my last day of college for the second time. With a 90% average and being requested to speak to people who are either still students or now my peers and colleagues on a few occasions I’d say this trip through the ever mixed up hallways of Fleming was much more successful.

What has really driven home this point for me though is my success at landing both interviews and jobs.  Before I had even graduated college I had two interviews set up for the following week, and the day after my last day I had three interviews.  At each of these interviews I was asked similar style questions but even on the first the answers just rolled out of my mouth like I knew what I was talking about.  This is something that never happened with me for computer job interviews, even after having been in the field for almost seven years!

It is exciting to have your ideas and knowledge put to a test, where it’s not for marks and you don’t know exactly what answers the testers are looking for (much different from school), and coming out on the other side of that test with the approval of these people who have been in their field of work for years.

All the positions I interviewed for are for supply work, which doesn’t pay the bills quite as well as full time work at the moment but I think it’s a good move to make.  I’ll get to see many centres, many styles of teaching and guiding and setup. It will be like continuing education but getting paid for it.

In my computer career, especially at the end my resume to interview ratio was probably about 5:1, though my interviews to jobs were still high, they were not the types of jobs that I really was looking for in the end and so I turned down many after seeing what they were all about.  So far as an ECE I purposefully put out 3 resumes, I got 3 interviews and landed 3 jobs all in less than a week!