v9.0 - Simon Says

Morning folks,

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How is everyone this fine Wednesday morning? Myself, I''m tired, happy and excitied about today''s musing. Sit back, relax, get yourself a coffee and lets BRING IT!!

{slurp}I've been slacking on the musings of late. I noticed over the past month I''ve missed 4 days of musings. Of course, I have had good reasons for missing them, it still is no excuse for not getting one out and abandoning my writings. I''ll be watching this closely in the future and make sure I have enough content and information to write about over the next few months.

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Today marks my 81st Musing!! I was going to say 80th, but that was v8.9 and I totally forgot about it. :) Today is also my Daughter''s birthday! It was 3 years ago today our lives were blessed with a beautiful baby girl who has brought us so much love, laughs and pure frustration. Kids are great and I hate to think of how fast these years have gone by already. Seems like it takes forever for your birthday to come around when you''re a kid; then you become an adult and they seem to whip by so fast we have issues remember exactly how old we are. I barely remember being a kid these days, seems like it was a different person all together.

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So the title of today''s musing was all Katie''s idea. Last night we decided we would actually start moving into this new place. Yes, we have already moved everything from the old place, we just hadn''t really "moved in" yet. We started hanging pictures and pulling misc stuff out of misc boxes and placing them around the house. After all, it is the misc stuff around the house that makes a house a home.

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So we spent the better part of three hours hanging pictures and unpacking misc boxes of things. Hanging pictures seemed to go fairly well and we actually had enough wall space to hang everything and make it look good at the same time. Some beautiful people on the walls now. Good thing there are only a couple pictures of me up. ;)

After we were done (not finished, just done), we decided to play a little game with the kids. Yes you guessed it, we played Simon Says. I''m not sure where the kids learned this game, but both of them knew how to play it and knew how to trick you into doing something Simon didn''t say. We all took turns playing Simon and sometimes we played teams where Katie and I would be the actors and our Kids were the Simons. It was a lot of fun, and Katie, who is a self proclaimed pro at this game, was even bested by our son who pulled a fast one on us both and caught us both without saying Simon Says. Of course he was giddy with excitement because HE beat Mom and Dad and won the game.

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Anyone know of any UNIX/Linux Admin or Web Development jobs? Yes, I think I''m going to be firing up the old resume again. This time I''m actually going to be very serious about it. By the way, Congratulations to Katie on getting a new job yesterday. She is working at my most favorite place in the world, Tim Horton''s. Oddly enough, the slurps in my musings are due to the wonderful Extra Large Double Double from Tim''s.

I spent a great deal of time yesterday late afternoon talking with my brother-in-law about work; specifically the BS we are putting up with here. He is in a good and bad place at the moment. Bad in that he isn''t working and bringing any money in, and good in that he can be kinda picky and get himself a good paying job. The IT industry is fairly huge here in Calgary due to the Oil & Gas companies making Calgary their base of operations. We have support agreements in place for every single major Oil & Gas company in the city and we are looking to grow that business a little bit locally as well as North American wide.

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Myself, I am looking to stick with the same job (for now) but I want to move to a different company. I don''t want to bore you all with the details about this place any longer. Let me just say it sucks and is about to get a whole lot worse. I know of at least one person who is pretty much got himself a job somewhere else and is really hoping to get it so he can get the hell out of here. If he leaves, I can see at least one more leaving because he will be directly impacted with a LOT more work load if person 1 leaves. This will cause a ripple effect in the team and I foresee a minimum of 3 people leaving (myself included) quickly after the first person does. Our Senior Management team was in town last week to do some training here. They stopped by our cube farm to meet us and give us the warm and fluffies. Basically, Blah Blah Blah, we think you guys are doing great things, blah blah blah, we want to grow the business, blah blah blah, we want to work you harder and pay you less, blah blah blah. Typical upper management bull shit that makes peons like me groan and assume the fetal position as I rock back and forth in my cubical.

My job is great, my employer SUCKS!

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Anyway my friends, I must make haste and get some work done. Remember to drop by my new and improved musing website, now with its own hostname: http://musings.fiendz.net

I''ve been working hard on getting this site up and running so I can share my musings with the world. If you know of anyone who you think would like to receive my musings, tell them to drop by the website and click on the ''sign up for musings'' link. I will be making some changes to the sign-up pages as well as including an unsubsribe link to the bottom of my musings in the near future. Thanks for reading and all your support. You guys and gals are the absolute best!

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Cheers,

Al