Go to Wikipedia. Type in your birthday (only month and day) and write down 3 events, 2 births and 1 holiday then tag 5 people.

My birthday is August 13th.

Events:

• 3114 BC – According to the Lounsbury correlation, the Maya calendar starts.
• 1913 – Invention of stainless steel by Harry Brearley.
• 1942 – Walt Disney’s fifth animated feature, Bambi, premieres. (This is the very first movie I ever saw in a movie theatre.)

Births:

• 1803 – Vladimir Odoevsky, Russian philosopher and writer (d. 1869)
• 1860 – Annie Oakley, American sharpshooter (d. 1926)
• 1899 – Alfred Hitchcock, English film director (d. 1980)
• 1926 – Fidel Castro, Cuban revolutionary and politician
• 1941 – Erin Fleming, Canadian actress (d. 2003)
• 1949 – Bobby Clarke, Canadian ice hockey player
• 1966 – Shayne Corson, Canadian ice hockey player
• 1975 – Marty Turco, Canadian ice hockey player

Holiday:

• International Lefthanders Day.

Okay, so I cheated with the births.  In honour of meme’s I’m allowed to have this variation.

The days are too short.  I cannot keep up with the intensity of some blogs that I’ve read.  In order to keep up with my own, I’m going to be making some adjustments.  Obviously I missed a few days last week.  I’ve got to work a bit harder at getting in my post per day.  I might have to cut out some of the week.  I’ve already decided to skip weekends.  We’ll see how it goes.  If I can’t make the time for one puny little post per day during 5 days of the week then perhaps I should give up the blogging thing.  We will have to see.

My car is in horrible shape.  At least I think it is.  It sounds bad.  I’ve got to get my mechanic to tell me for sure how bad it is.  Why can’t cars just work?

Okay my title is probably more exciting that this post. Every Monday morning is garbage day. Lately, probably because of residential expansion, the recycling truck doesn’t come as early as it used to. This of course has created a laziness in my wanting to get the recycling out early which today has resulted in getting into work later than anticipated.

Being in a new job will probably hamper my blogging efforts so please be patient if my blogs seem short to start.

Okay, this Friday five is a celebration of my return to blog! Why have I been away? I’ve recently changed jobs and now am working for a new company. Here are five things to remember when switching jobs:

1. Make sure you have a copy of any personal documents. Once you leave, that’s it.
2. If you are subscribed to some favourite mailing lists, make sure you switch those lists to an alternative email address. (I missed one of mine.)
3. Take personal stuff home over the last month. I don’t know about you but I love to collect. After I’ve been working at a place for several years, I just pull up my chair to my pile of stuff. When I left, I discovered this thing that had been lost under all my stuff that I hadn’t seen in quite a while which is actually quite surprising when you consider how large it is. I think most people call it a desk.
4. Make sure you clean up your space. Remember, someone else is going to be going through that area that you once considered private. What they find will leave an impression of who you were. This goes for your digital area as well.
5. What ever you do, don’t burn your bridges. As much as you might hate working at your previous job, a little bit of political work can help you out in the future. For instance, I didn’t burn my bridges with a company two jobs ago and the interview process for this company was interested in talking with my former bosses. So I was confidently able to go to my employer from two jobs ago and ask for a reference without concern that I was going to get burned.

Thanks for reading.

Today is one of thosed messed up days where all my thoughts are all over the place. Sometimes you have days like this where it is difficult to focus on any one thing. Is this because there are too many things going on in my life?

Thirteen Things about my jumbled thoughts Ping Pong – I’ve been in this ping pong tournament at work where the organizer has left on maternaty leave. I’ve filled in with continuing to organize the rest of the tournament. WoW – Been give the love to my favourite MMORPG, World of Warcraft. Laptop – Recently bought a new laptop for my wife. She really deserves it. It’s to help her do more of her own writing. I’m the acting network administrator for our household so I still need to do some configuring for her. Petition – I’ve been recently going door to door in my neighbourhood looking for community support for getting our public school expanded from only JK – grade 6 to include grade’s 7 & 8 so that when my kids get to those grades, they won’t be walking a couple of km to get to school. Blog – It’s work to make sure you are keeping up with your blog. I’ve made a personal goal of writing one entry each day with the exception of weekends and holidays. (Those are for my family.) Writing – This has really been making a home on the back burner. I spend a little bit of each day at least considering another aspect of my story. Editing – Each day I try to get through one chapter of editing on my wife’s story. Sleeping – Yeah I’m having to work hard at making sure I get enough sleep. I get caught up in things too easily. I need to either have more alarms telling me when to move on to the next thing or have to watch the clock better. Linux – This seems to aways be changing. I’ve been spending some time trying to make sure my SuSE 10.1 box gets updated. I’ve been following IPodLinux waiting for the final release for 5.5G products. Damn Small Linux has changes periodically that I want to follow. And then there is always the lookout for interesting things that people are doing with the distributions. IPod – So much music, so little time. I have ripped most of my CDs to my IPod. Now I just need to sit down and create some of my favourite playlists. House – There are so many projects around my house. I think I’ll save that for another thirteen list. (Maybe I’ll have to use several lists.) Yard – It’s spring again and that means I’ll be going out and working on the outside of the house too. This too can be it’s only thirteen list. Co-workers – I seem to spend a lot of my time helping out my fellow staff. I seem to be the goto person for a lot of the technologies that we use at the office. Okay, that is it for now. Keep up the smiles Links to other Thursday Thirteens! Marcia – Poems I’ve Yet to Write Gabrielle – Happy Garlic Day (leave your link in comments, I’ll add you here!)

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

Okay, I used to wonder if dreams were really a visit to parallel worlds.  My dreams were always about locations that didn’t exist in the real world.  They were imaginary locations that I’d never visited, seen, or read about.  I used to get them on a regular basis.

Recently however, I have been doing some heavy gaming online and as a result I’ve found that my dreams are taking shape with certain aspects of the game.  Here are some examples:  In my dreams I’m starting to become concerned with how much space I have to carry stuff.  The other day I had a dream in which I was trying to figure out if this one rectangular bar that I found would stack.  In some of my dreams, I can see the names of everyone in the dream hovering above them.  In another dream, I was being attacked by something and wasn’t concerned since I knew that I could heal since I could tell how much damage I was taking and knew I could heal before I died.

Okay, so this to me is proof that dreams are mearly a process by which your brain is sorting out the events of the day and possibly trying to make sense of the information.

Okay, not really how many do you need but rather how many is it reasonable to work with.  My first character was a druid.  Granted, not easy as a starting character but I think I have the hang of it now and I’m very happy with the druid.  I’d been doing a lot of soloing and small pickup groups.  In the pickup groups I’ve filled both tank and healing roles.  Heck, I’ve even covered both.  I’m now at lvl 43.  My wife got into the game and she and I both started mages.  We quested together and stuck together and lvl’d together up to lvl 17.  While this was great fun, it didn’t leave my wife with a character with which she could lvl on her own when I wasn’t available.  So she started up a second character, a hunter.  She worked on the hunter for a while and then when I got on, I returned to my druid.  Well several times I’ve heard her getting frustrated by some mob that is beating up on her in a cave so I came over with my druid and flattened the cave so that she could finish her quest.  Ever since, I’ve been spending a lot of time assisting her buy either hanging around and keeping her alive or plain flattening the mob that are attacking her.  Her hunter is now at lvl 18 and I’m not making any progress with my druid.  I don’t mind too much because it’s fun to help out and see her lvl but I’m starting to wonder if I should start up another character and catch up to her so that we can quest together again.  I figure I could work at a priest.  I don’t know if I can catch her.  Especially since a priest is so squishy.

So, do I

1. Stick with the druid and wait until she has lvl’d up to my size.
2. Get my mage out and convince her that we don’t need to keep the mages together anymore.
3. Start a priest and race to catchup to her.

I’ve been doing the Thursday Thirteen and following it for a while now so I’ve been inspired to start a Friday Five. Not too big of a list. Hopefully something interesting to read. This morning I almost lost a contact lens that was irritating me so I’ve decided to create a small list of things not to do as a contact lens wearer.

1. Don’t take one of your contacts out when you are outside in the wind in the early dawn. I needed to readjust one of my contacts this early morning while I was waiting for the bus. As soon as I had removed it I realized my mistake. For those of you out there who are new to contacts, you will probably understand immediately. Those who have been wearing them for a while could make this mistake. Of course, those that don’t wear contacts might not get it. When I first started to wear contacts it took me roughly 45 minutes per contact to get them in. The eye has a wonderful defense mechanism to remove crap from hurting your eye. It tears. Believe it or not, a flood of tears makes it difficult to put a contact in. Another defense the eye has to prevent crap from getting into your eye is a reflexive blink. This too makes it difficult to put a contact in. Typically in putting a contact in, I balance the contact on the end of a finger and gently place an eye drop into the contact to maintain it’s softness (contacts can start to dry out in several seconds) and to assist in the getting it to “stick” to my eye when placing it in instead of it sticking to my finger. The contact needs to be placed carefully and quickly onto the eye and then gentle blinking will allow for excessive moisture to be removed and the contact will slide nicely into place. Okay, now lets return to the issue. Removing a contact is a last resort. Doing it outside is desparate. Doing it without any eye drops is asking for trouble. Doing it in the wind is idiotic both because the wind will excellerate the already short number of seconds it takes to dry out a contact and because it will make balancing a feather-light contact on the end of your finger impossible. Performing any kind of contact manipulation at dusk is foolish since you will never be able to find it if you drop it. Okay enough said.
2. Don’t eat hot & spicy wings when your contacts are bothering you. If your contacts are bothering you, you will need to make adjustments and we all know the badness of jalepeneos and rubbing your eyes.
3. Don’t wear your contacts to bed. Ugg. It’s happened to me when I’ve fallen asleep watching T.V. When you sleep, you don’t blink so much. Blinking is a neccessary way of spreading your eyeball lubricant around. Sleeping with your contacts on will result in your contacts sticking to your eyeball in the morning. It is possible to “detach” the contact from your eye and get the blinking going but I’d recommend avoiding this in the first place.
4. Don’t put your contacts in over an open sink. Typically in the bathroom there is a nice mirror hanging just above the sink. Until you become proficient at putting your contacts in, you will probably want a mirror for assistance. If you lean over the sink to get a closer look in the mirror and your contact falls, say goodbye to your contact.
5. Don’t use spit or saliva to lubricate your contacts. Bleck! Your mouth is loaded with bacteria that you need to keep your mouth healthy but your eyeballs don’t need this type of bacteria. Your eye balls are very sensitive and should never be exposed to this sort of stuff. Use proper eye drops or if available, your own tears.

Okay, so that is my Friday Five. Hope you liked it. Later I might even try to put it in some sort of format.

(note: Please read disclaimer at bottom of this message.)

Warning!

It has come to my attention that there is a virus that is spreading at an alarming rate through out the global networks. This virus infects the host computer and starts to take over the resources of the computer. A sizable chunk of hard drive space is consumed initially although the observed rate of consumption drops down to almost a trickle, most likely to avoid detection. This virus will utilize a sizable amount of RAM including dipping into the RAM from your video card. If you have a video card which shares your core RAM, it will take a larger chunk of your core RAM. At times it will reduce the available CPU power leaving you still operable but at significantly less power.

The virus tends to stay dorment until certain executable files are run. At that time, it loads its self into memory and then will call out to one of several handling servers across the world. The virus is advanced enough to grab extra files from one of the servers and morph it’s capabilities so it is impossible to tell exactly how far it has advanced by the time you read this. While active in memory, the virus remains in almost continual communication with one of the servers relaying various bits of information that it gathers from both your keyboard and your mouse movements back and forth.

The virus spreads through very clever social engineering in which the victim acquires and installs the virus without realizing the full impact of their actions. Once installed, the actions recorded from the keyboard and mouse movements are then leveraged in the next social engineering invasion.

It is rumoured that over 8 million systems around the world have been affected already.

On the good side, it appear that the virus is not destructive and there are no accounts of the virus destroying existing files on the system. The makers of the virus have also not taken extremes to hide the virus and have left it mostly contained to a single folder. It is uncertain at this time what reprecussions will reveil themselves if any attempts are made to delete the folder. No known anti-virus tools at the time of this writing are currently capable of either detecting or removing this virus. It has been thought though that one of the virus creators may have left some removal scripts embedded in the virus. If you are looking for these scripts or want to attempt to remove the virus by removing the folder you are on your own. As I am writing this warning, I am noticing that I’m experiencing the symptoms of this virus.

Oh… wait…. the virus is launching a warning. I have to go now… I just saw a Horde Shaman attacking Sentinel Hill in Westfall! Must engage in PVP!….

(Disclaimer: This is not a serious alert. It is at best a reasonable attempt at humour and should not be taken seriously. World of Warcraft is an online gamming product created by Blizzard Entertainment.)