and things went downhill from there

I was just on the mend from my first cold of the year and I seem to be coming down with a new one. My suspicion is that this new cold is one that atara brought home from work last week - though it may be my earlier one coming back for a final hurrah.

FADE IN:

EXT. SPRAWLING CAMPUS WITH AN ASPHALT 'X' CROSSING GREEN SPACE BETWEEN BUILDINGS.

Two female students are walking together, both carrying books. Scene starts in mid-conversation.



A large, beige and green transformer crashes to the turf to the right of the two students, transforming just before her feet touch the ground. She lands in a three-point crouch, holding herself up with her right hand. As she stands, her grey and red backpack transforms and leaps to the ground.



JESSICA turns her back on the other three, walking away with both of her hands raised to shoulder-level with both of her middle fingers erect.



ANODE has her hands on her hips and shakes her head as she watches JESSICA depart.



ASHLEY has her arms crossed, and has her chin low as she glares at the departing girl's back.



FADE OUT.

TRANSFORMERS LOGO SPLASH ON BLACK SCREEN.

OPENING VOCAL BAR FROM TRANSFORMERS THEME.

FADE OUT.

I braved cold and traffic to try and do some Christmas shopping this evening. We're not doing a very ambitious Christmas, so I only had a few things on my list for atara.

After my first couple of stops though, I began to suspect that I may have left my shopping until too late in the season. Each store was like that cheese shop in the famous Monty Python sketch.

"Sorry, we're fresh out of those. Oh my, it looks like we had a run on those too."

Even so, I managed to come away from the ordeal with a couple of items to put under the tree. Right now all we have under the tree at any given time is cats.



There is an ugly rumour circulating at work just now about how they plan to handle training in the new year. There is talk about them shipping anyone who is in progress out to Calgary and hold them there until they are qualified engineers or conductors, whether that takes seven weeks or twenty. I guess we'll find out in January.

I have heard the expression "dog days of summer", but with our weather the past couple of days, I think this weather is more appropriate to sled dogs. We had a destructive cold font move in on Saturday, and yesterday's daytime high tied the lowest on record for that date. This morning we woke to brisk winds and single-digit temperatures.

The expertise that has kept me employed in my current position harks back to my extensive business knowledge, and my ability to translate business requests into useful reports. When my reporting group got pulled back into IT, the first thing they decided was that we were spending too much time doing reporting and problem solving for the business, so they put a moratorium on that work and assigned us all to projects.

I am currently on two different projects. On the first project, they assigned me the task of establishing reporting standards and procedures for the new scorecard - something way outside of my usual realm of expertise. I sent something half-assed off to my boss last week and am waiting to hear back from him.

In the other one (which, thankfully, is currently winding down) they sent me off to do target-mapping of data. I don't have the proper tools for that, so what I ended up doing was looking at existing data names in a current report and trying to cross-match them against schemas in MS Access.

During one of our daily conference calls, the project manager and developer were puzzling over some duplication of cars on the report. I tried without success to get the car number from them a few times before I finally managed to snag it from a screen they were sharing in IM. I quickly ran an independent query of my own and immediately spotted the problem.

They were puzzling over why they had a duplicate report for the car, each showing at a the same location with a different time, and in a different time zone. I finally managed to get them to listen to me by all-but yelling into the phone.

"Now listen up - the second event is invalid. The first was the valid event that we need to keep, the second was reported improperly. The station where the events took place is at a time zone boundary. When the first - proper - event was reported, the car was moving eastbound, so the event was reported in eastern time. The second - improper - event was reported as a westbound move, so it was reported in central time. That's the way it works at the boundary stations. The second event was misreported, and is wrong. Ignore the second event. Keep the first event."

They considered what I said, then went right back to puzzling over the events as if I had never spoken, so I just muted my phone and browsed Reddit while they worked. Eventually somebody from Operations showed up at their meeting room, and they showed him what was happening on the report they were designing for him.

He said, "The second event is wrong; this why the business rules we gave you told you to keep the *first* event in cases like this."

Well, what do I know? I'm just the guy with 27 years of business knowledge.

Even when I took this shot, I detected a bit of shutter lag and I feared it would be blurry.

It was. I ran a couple of passes of sharpening over it, which ultimately gave it a somewhat surreal look. I liked the feel of the picture, if not the actual look, so I decided to push the processing a couple of steps further to give it a "captured by a security camera" appearance. IMO that works better with the slightly off-focus, over-processed effects in the shot.

Even though it is on the wane, the H1N1 hysteria continues...

"You’ve been identified as a [our company] employee critical to maintaining our business in the event of a wide spread outbreak of influenza..."

Except that I have not.

The message goes on to outline how they will be holding special, mandatory town hall meetings for all of the critical management and specialist personal outlining their strategy of distributing Tamiflu® to those individuals in the event of a flu outbreak. The only reason I knew about the message is because a couple of the other managers in the office asked me why I hadn't been included in the distribution list, and one of them forwarded me the original message.

I'm not really upset about being excluded, in fact it's nice to know that I am not considered critical. I will bring this up the next time they try to turn down a vacation request because of an important project.

The traffic guy on the radio this morning launched into a rant about a subject that has been a sore point with me ever since I moved here. Every year when the temperatures begin to drop, the traffic lights around town start malfunctioning. Either they will get stuck red one direction and either green or yellow the other, or they will simply go dark for fifteen to thirty seconds at a time.
( We live in a cold climate. )

One would expect that since the city has been situated here for well over a century, somebody might have come up with a way to upgrade our traffic control system so that it does not fail every time the mercury drops, but it seems like every time we get into the double digits, the switches freeze. A large part of the problem is that some of the switch boxes that control the lights here have been in operation since the 1940s. That would also explain why they are constantly, woefully out of sync.

They are affected by the rain as well. Not like it ever rains here. Oh wait, it rains here all the time.

On another annoying front, we got a call from our bank's security department last night. Apparently my ATM card got caught by one of those skimmers that are rampant in this town. When I stopped at the bank today they couldn't tell me where it got scanned, or how long ago it happened. The girl at the bank said that it probably got skimmed months ago, and either the bank had finally got around to identifying my card as being potentially at risk since it was used in the same machine at the same time as others that had been used fraudulently, or somebody (probably in Quebec, since that's our resident criminal hotbed for card and phone fraud) had tried using my card and PIN and it had been flagged.

We keep pretty close tabs on all of our card activity, and we haven't seen anything that caught our attention, so I am thinking it is probably more like the former explanation. In any event, I have a new PIN, and a new card coming to me in the mail. It has the same number as my old card, but this is one of the new cards with the embedded security chip.

The tinfoil hat person in me wonders if this was just a ruse on the bank's part to foist one of their chipped cards on me. They are being pretty aggressive about trying to get those out there. Easier for the black hats in government to track you with one of those.

Or it might just be a case where I need to start paying cash for my porn.

I picked a bad day to forget to plug in the car...