Author: Paul Tomblin

I hate to admit it but…

Much as I bitch and moan about my new job, I have to say that in spite of the extra work involved and the constant worrying about stains, I love the look and feel of a good dress shirt, especially those Joseph and Feiss no-iron ones. Dress pants I’m not so enamoured of, mostly because they feel tight around my thighs when I’m sitting down. And dress shoes should vanish off the face of the earth. Immediately.

I remember when I was at Gandalf I dressed up most of the time, except when I was either feeling pissed off about something, in which case I couldn’t be bothered to make the effort, or when I was anticipating spending time in the lab rewiring networks or upgrading computers. And that was with riding my bike to work in the morning, showering and changing there, and going for a long ride after work. My shirt and pants for the day were folded into a MountainSmiths backpack that I’d bought for doing the Silver Courier du Bois in the Canadian Ski Marathon, so they probably weren’t as unwrinkled as they should have been. Or as uncontaminated by ski wax.

Even *I* recognize this as overuse of the passive voice

I’ve been yelled at by English teachers, co-op work term report markers, and Microsoft Word for overuse of passive voice. Mostly I look at the sentence or paragraph they’re yelling about and say “what? I don’t see what’s wrong with it”. But even I recognize this as too much.

From a job ad on Monster.com:

System design, based on the requirements and the development of diagrams along with implementation of the computer language will be part of this Software Development position. Determining testing requirements followed by unit and regression testing will be performed in this role.

Corporate Culture

The culture here is in most ways much more stolid and constrained that at any other place I’ve worked at. The dress code is strict, the hours you can work are tightly controlled, etc. Maybe it’s the lack of other outlets, but one thing that’s curious here are how it seems like every day there is some excuse to have a pot-luck pile of food at somebody’s cubicle. Usually it’s a birthday, today it’s some student finishing his work-term and going back to school. It’s very odd. And fattening.

WANT!

Oh man, it’s too bad my pay just went down a big chunk and I’ve had to swear off the impulse purchases. Because I just got my hands on my first G1 phone, and I like it. A lot. Not as sweet as a iPhone, but I love the keyboard and the fact that it has cut and paste. Unfortunately T-Mobile’s 3G network is pretty sparse compared to AT&T’s. And there aren’t as many cool apps for the G1 phone. Maybe that’s the incentive I need to wait for version 2 of the phone. Yeah, that’s it. I’m not stuck with my outmoded and obsolete Treo, I’m waiting for version 2.