Stair climbing.

We have a small gym in the basement of the building I work in and yesterday I went down there after work and lifted some weights and did some misc. exercises. Afterwards, walking up the stairs from the basement, I figured I would keep going and see how many flights I could climb. I managed to get to the top of the staircase. It was 23 stories and it took me about 15 minutes. I thought I was going at a reasonable clip but I would stop to catch my breath every few stories. Going up I thought if I needed to I could take the elevator down but I walked it.

Each floor seemed like between 15 and 20 feet. So that means it was something around 345-460 feet. Not bad. My legs felt slightly rubbery at the end of it, but not too messed up and I felt OK today. My calves felt stretched but not painful. (Hopefully pain won't kick in tomorrow.)

Since I am hoping to do some hiking this summer, maybe I'll do this some more and get my body into better shape for that shit. When I go hiking I always recall that the main differences between walking on a hill or mountain and the street are:
1. Mountains go up and down
2. Asphalt gives you better traction than dirt
3. Roads are flat, when hiking you have to jump around on rock piles.

Who made better videos, the 80's or the 90's?

I am checking out this Fark thread right now - who made better videos, the 80's or the 90's. (I don't have much of an opinion. I would just point out that MTV doesn't really play videos anymore and there was a period in the late 80's where everything seemed to be BonJovi, Poison, Warrant, Guns and Roses, Motley Crue, etc. That was probably the worst point (I hope.))

Anyway, its fun reading and you can check out some youtube gems in the list.

This week at work.

I got that help thing up and running at work. It was pretty difficult. There is this tool they have that is supposed to do all the work creating and integrating the help files. I tried using it and it messed me up. It's source control took over my main project and I had to uninstall it and clean out a couple entries in the registry and then reinstall the project just to get back to square one. Took almost all of Tuesday. Wed, I finally got it working OK in the afternoon.

The thing is though, when you haven't done something like this, you don't really know how long it's going to take and how hard it'll be until you get it done the first time. Even if it turns out to be very easy in retrospect. With this particular tool, I am the only one on the team who has done anything with it in about 2 years.

I would say, that it's been my experience, that you spend a lot more time than you'd expect, or that people generally let on, grappling with some tool/interface/bs. As opposed to the more constructive, obviously useful stuff you'd originally imagined.

The Godfather.

They have been showing this on Bravo or the Movie channel or whatever recently and I have caught a little bit. Man, this has to be the most overrated movie ever. Al Pacino has no range, all the characters are flat, it's humorless, cheesy music is blaring the whole time, the photography looks like a wine commercial, etc.
The book wasn't no good neither.

Nice Little Story.

Here is a fun little story - Guts by Chuck Palahniuk. It's a quick read and it's not for the squeamish.

1/20/09

I saw a bumper sticker with the date 1/20/09 on it today. The bumper sticker also said 'End of an Error'. Agreed. I am also looking forward to the last day that George Bush is in office. (Thank god for the amendment capping terms at 2, btw.)

When I was in Fort Collins a couple of weeks ago, I saw a bumper sticker that just said 'Impeach' on it stuck on a No Uturn sign on College and Laurel. I was kind of amused. Then at Avogadro's Number, the restaurant just a couple of blocks away, they had a bunch of these bumper stickers on the counter and they were selling them for a dollar a piece.

You know what? I don't think people like the job President Bush is doing. Including, apparently, most Republicans.

Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy.

Learn Something New Everyday.

I was listening to Talk Of The Nation Science Friday on my iPod today and they were talking about drug resistant Tuberculosis. They had a Dr. from National Jewish Hospital in Denver where that one guy who's been in the news recently cause he had been flying around the world with a case of it is being treated.

One thing they explained that I didn't know before was why National Jewish is such a big leader in pulmonary disease treatment. After all, that guy was from Atalanta, why send him here. The Dr. explained that they used to believe in sanatorium treatment and that mountain air and sunshine would help cure TB. Hence the Front Range of Colorado had many sanatorium and the pulmonary specialty came from that.

Katie's Notebook.

Why television news anchors get any credit for being able to read and wear a suit is beyond me. They make millions of bucks a year for what, reading the news? What a joke.

A couple of months ago Katie Couric did this on air reminiscence about getting her first library card. Except, it turns out that the story was copied largely from another person's remembrance in the Wall Street Journal and it wasn't Katie who wrote it, it was some 'producer' who got axed for it. The thing I want to know is why someone is else writing what is supposed to be Katie's personal view/recollections? I know politicians have speech writers, I didn't know 'journalists' did. Guess I am behind the times, cause this didn't seem to bother CBS.

Last week at work.

Finished a relatively small project I had been working on last week. It was a new page with a few fields that needed to be verified and this info would be sent to a report. The trick was that the new page was an already existing page but it was totally unlike most of our other pages so I was happy that I was able to get everything working the way it should. (Though one of the test cases failed cause the text on my page didn't exactly match what the test case showed. Think that may be a test case defect but the business analyst is out for a few days.)

Spent 12 hours at work on Tuesday, making sure that the new code was ready to go to test Thursday. Ran into the Director of I.T. on Wednesday and he asked how it was going and I told him that it went relatively smoothly and he goes 'Good. It shouldn't be that hard.' Like he knows. This guy will say stuff like 'A report should take 3 days to do - at most', then spend months trying to fix one.

The thing is this new project still needs is a RoboHelp page, explaining how to use the page. But, it turns out, we don't have RoboHelp installed on any of our servers so I installed it on mine then tried to figure out how to use it. Like everything at work this is harder than you might think. (I'm sure boss man would wonder why it's not the same as writing a word doc.) For one thing, we already have a bunch of help docs, but they aren't in a 'project' file that the system needs and also, our pages are registered in the database in several places. So I have to figure out how to create the help file, add another component to the original page linking to the help file (and I want it to look just like the other pages in this regard even though it's built totally different), register the new file without throwing all other help pages off, and while I am doing that, the tickets in my help desk queue collect dust.

Sunday Hike.

I went up to Fort Collins for a hike on Sunday. Rico and I went to Horsetooth and did a 6 mile loop to the top of the southern tooth and back. It was a warm, sunny day and it didn't seem particularly crowded. (Fear of crowds is why we didn't go to Eldorado Canyon by Boulder, that place probably would have been packed.) Good hike all in all. Got slightly sunburnt but not badly and was somewhat stiff, but not painfully. Might be that I should get out a little more though..

Immigration Reform Bill.

For the moment the proposed immigration reform bill has stalled. Don't know if it will pass eventually, but I definitely had some problems with it. Here is a quote from Bernie Sanders on the Ars Technica web site:
"According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over the next decade, 2 million jobs will be created in mathematics, engineering, computer science, and physical science. That equates to about 200,000 jobs a year times 10 equals 2 million jobs," said Sanders on the Senate floor in May. "Under this legislation, the number of H-1B visas would increase to as many as 180,000 a year. That means virtually every job, about 90 percent that will be created in the high-tech sector over the next 10 years, could conceivably be taken by a H-1B visa holder."

One of the things I was hoping for when I got a Computer Science degree was that my job skills would be in high demand. I go to all the trouble to get marketable, and they act like they can't get enough people in the US to do this. One, that's bullshit, two, just pay more and people will do whatever you need.

Bernie Sanders, the Independent/Socialist Vermont Senator pointed this out nicely here. He noted that Wal Mart will have tens of thousands of people applying when they open a new store in an area, and then still claim that they have a labor shortage. Right.

Vancouver

I went to Vancouver for the Memorial Day weekend. It was a nice trip. Hadn't been out of Colorado in a while and Vancouver seemed like an interesting, large, foreign, but not too far away cause I don't want to fly for like 13 hours or something, place.

Misc facts about Vancouver - It's a little over 100 years old, has one of the largest ports in North America, has the 2nd largest Chinatown in North America after San Francisco, is located on a small peninsula, and (party for that reason) has one of the highest population densities of any city in North America.

It was green. It was cloudy. The weather was mild, you might want a light jacket but didn't really need one. There were nice, gentle breezes coming off the water.

Canada is an English speaking country. It has Queen Elizabeth II on some $. The money there is dollars and 1 US dollar is worth 1.06 Canadian. Vancouver is going to have the 2010 Winter Olympics (well someplace in the area is, but I think they are calling it the Vancouver Olympics). It is interesting to note that books cost more in Canada. If you check the back of a book sold in the US, you can see, for example $7.95, $10.95 CAN. I don't know why that is.

The newspapers there had an article about a woman who was sent to Seattle for specialized neonatal care, an issue which caused some concern about the Canadian health care system and it's capacity. The papers also talked about The Police being in town, opening up their new reunion tour there. (IMHO The Police had a few good songs but were kind of lame and Sting is truly lame.)

I didn't hear anyone say 'aboot' or talk like that. The TV shows were largely the same ones you get in the US, but they had their own versions of some of them.

They have government run liquor stores, though they seem to have private ones also. Marijuana is illegal there but it's not much of a crime supposedly and I did get a few whiffs of it walking around town.

Here is the photo album on picasa: Vancouver.