Jan. 4th, 2015

Home again

Jan. 4th, 2015 01:10 pm
plonq: (Braiiiins)
We are home again from a short, but pleasant visit with my brother and his wife up in Edmonton.

I have heard nothing but bad about the city from co-workers who have either lived or visited there. It had seemed like a pleasant enough place when [livejournal.com profile] atara and I passed through there a few years ago, and our recent stay did nothing to dispel that impression. While it is hard to properly judge a northern city in the winter, the climate is no worse than what we have here, and the city appears to have all the amenities of a modern city, while still retaining some of the charm of its prairie roots. It also had a plethora of good hiking and cycling areas that are rather scarce in Winnipeg.

Though my brother and sister-in-law are not window shoppers by nature (she lacks the patience, and my brother is very targeted in his shopping - get in, get what you are after and get out) we convinced him to take us up to The Mall™ We spent about a couple of hours browsing, and grabbed a mediocre dinner in its food district before meandering over to the MS store where I picked up a Surface (my Christmas present).

I have been on the market for awhile to replace my ageing Dell laptop, and I have used [livejournal.com profile] atara's Surface enough time to conclude that it would meet my needs nicely. It's light, portable, has good battery life, and is compatible with all my stuff.

On a down note, after a couple of weeks away from work, I have to start turning my attention to my employer again and remote into my work desktop so that I can start wading through some courses on our intranet site. I need to complete a few hours of course work before I head off for training in the morning. Fun.
plonq: (Comparatively Miffed Mood)
Tomorrow is my first day of training to become a certified car inspector. I don't know what all that will entail, but my suspicion is that it will involve general labour - lifting and hauling, with the occasional pause to hit things with a hammer if they are frozen or stuck.

I had a whole raft of on-line training I had to take in advance of the physical training, and I dealt with the bulk of that today. Our horrible self-training system is now tied in with our even worse career development and self-assessment system. One of the fun features of that system is that it arbitrarily times out and dumps you if it does not detect any activity for what seems to be a random span of time varying from 10 to 20 minutes.

Unfortunately, the training system is an outside module that it launches, so it cannot tell if you are active or not when you are using a training module. Some of the training modules ran for over forty minutes, so I sometimes got kicked out in the middle of a module two or three times before I could complete it. After that, it seemed to be random as to whether or not it credited me with the completed module or not. I had to relaunch some of them four times before I finally got credit for them. Fortunately you could skip ahead in the modules after you completed them the first time.

I was going to try doing that "picture a day" project again this year, but things were a little crazy over the first few days of the month, and I never got around to starting. With the disruption in my schedule over the next couple of weeks, it is unlikely I will get off the ground with it.

This is one of the pictures I shot while visiting with my brother up in Edmonton. I call this one "Cold Day; Hot Tea".
Cold Day; Hot Tea

I have another version of this picture that I did not convert to black and white. I am torn as to which one I like better.

April 2024

S M T W T F S
 123456
78910111213
14 151617181920
21222324252627
282930    

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 30th, 2025 10:00 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios