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!

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!

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!

Being an Adult… Round 2

So it’s been a while since I wrote anything, but that is because school work in the last few weeks was killer.  However that work is done now, successfully I might add, and now it’s time to re-join the world of adults and work for a living instead of hanging out with friends and doing school work.

I will really miss school.  It was such a great experience and opportunity to be able to go to school again. Sitting in class and making friends and jokes most of the time, except this time around I did my work and got good marks and hopefully helped a few people along the way.  Being able to go back and do college over again was really a great chance to see how far I had come as a person.

The fist time through school I did far too much goofing off and not enough work.  This time I had fun, and more fun because I wasn’t shy and quiet and such.  I was able to put to use so many of the things I had learned elsewhere to use both in my work and in the classroom to make friends and entertain.

I finished classes last Thursday, and I have had three interviews already, one of them was a job right on the spot!  That’s a pretty quick turnaround time I’d say especially since neither of my last two placements where in a child care setting.

The people and the faculty at Fleming really made the last two years enjoyable, I’m so glad I got to be a kid again and go to college!