and things went downhill from there

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".


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.