I got it from Jen, who got it from Andrea, who got it from…

Stolen from Jen’s Journal

1: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says:
“Because layout managers have generally been poorly documented and a proper…” – Core Java Foundation Classes. Yeah, I’m at work.

2: Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?
The admission wrist bands from my trip to Oshkosh last year.

3: What is the last thing you watched on TV?:
The first three hours of “Gulliver’s Travels”.

4: WITHOUT LOOKING, guess what the time is:
2:30

5: Now look at the clock, what is the actual time?
3:06

6: With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?
Great Big Sea: Yarmouth Town. If that doesn’t count because it’s coming from my computer, then I’ll answer “a succession of annoying thumps”.

7: When did you last step outside? what were you doing?
This morning when I drove to work.

8: Before you came to this website, what did you look at?
Vicki’s friends page. Since I haven’t found a RSS aggregator that works through the company web proxy, I use her friends page while I’m at work, and NetNewsWireLite when I’m at home.

9: What are you wearing?
Checked flannel shirt and jeans. Lumberjack clothes, you might say.

10: Did you dream last night?
Not that I can remember.

11: When did you last laugh?
While eating lunch with my cow orkers.

12: What is on the walls of the room you are in?
Two Rick Thistle posters (one showing a Spitfire, the other showing a float plane), last year’s Despair Inc calendar, a white board, a modern aeronautical chart, a 1945 aeronautical chart, and two diagrams that attempt to explain our hideously complex problem report and resolution system.

13: Seen anything weird lately?
Well, it snowed over the weekend. That’s pretty damn weird.

14: What do you think of this quiz?
Well, I wasted all this time doing it, so I must have liked it.

15: What is the last film you saw?
On TV? I tried to watch Bulworth. In a real theatre? Don’t remember. Possibly Starsky and Hutch.

16: If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?
An airplane. Probably a Murphy Moose.

17: Tell me something about you that I don’t know:
Even though I’m mostly contemptuous of the whole “art scene” thing, I’m feeling more and more like I wish I had some creative outlet other than computer programming.

18: If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?
I’d like people to think about the long term and global consequences of their actions.

19: Do you like to dance?
Even before I got bad knees, I didn’t like formal dancing. I did that “jump up and down like an idiot” stuff, though. I was good at it, too.

20: George Bush: is he a power-crazy nutcase or some one who is finally doing something that has needed to be done for years?
I think he’s evil and has no conscience and is doing everything he does for monetary or religious reasons.

21: Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?
Her name is Liane.

21: Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him?
Not sure. I know we had some names picked out back then, but I’ve forgotten them.

22: Would you ever consider living abroad?
I am living abroad.

Beech Starship

A while ago I wrote about the sad demise of the Beech Starship. Raytheon decided that it was too expensive to support them, so gave all the existing owners a King Air in trade, and parked them in the desert, probably never to fly again.

But this week’s AvWeb NewsWire has a short article about how some people are keeping their Starships alive. One of the people using his Starship works for Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, and uses it as a chase plane there. Since Burt Rutan built the prototype Starship, I suppose he’s got the best chance of anybody of keeping it running.

Oh, that was a mistake

I tried watching Bulworth, which I’d Tivo’ed off of VH1. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a movie on VH1 before, and I don’t think I will again. They bleep everything. And not just real swear words, but stuff you hear on network TV all the time, like “God damn”. And not just a nice blanking out of the word, or a simple “bleep”, but what sounds like the beep they use for Emergency Broadcast System tests (before they went to the modem-tone noise they use now). Most of the movie sounded like a Western Union telegraph office.

I think I’m going to have to join Netflicks just so I can get movies like this.

Bad Job Experiences, Number 3 in a Series

After I left the Ontario Ministry of Transportation and Communications, I moved to Ottawa to work for GeoVision, which was a small company that had recently been spun off of SHL (SystemHouse). I was hired as part of a big expansion as they went from 25 people to 50. GeoVision made a Geographic Information System (GIS), and it was probably the most capable one out there, although it was a bit slow.
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