I can only hope that I made such a good impression in my first interview that it can overcome the horrible experience I just had. I really enjoy interviews where I am one on one with the person I am talking to. I don't do so well with the two on one interviews. That was how this interview went. See, I have certain deficiencies that cause me to be easily distracted. Like one person doing something whe I am trying to think up an answer or listen to a question. I am fairly certain that this interview I had today was meant, at least in part, to test that. Needless to say, I would be surprised if I got a call back, even though there are a few who think that they should automatically call me back at this stage.
September 2005 Archives
The Bears on Broadway, an amazing fundraiser for CancerCare Manitoba, wherein a variety of companies across the province donate a large amount of money to have a Manitoba artist create a uniquely painted or decorated cement bear which is placed along the main business street in Winnipeg, Broadway, is nearly coming to a close. At the end of October, correlating with the end of the Polar Bear migration up near Churchill, the Bears will be removed from their current places of residence, and moved to their permanent homes. I am really hoping I can get some decent pictures of all the 60 or so bears in the collection. Be sure to check out the Gallery for the results!
Just a quick update to let you all know that I apparently made a good enough impression with the people at Shaw that I got a second interview coming up in a few days. I will definitely let you all know how it goes as soon as I can.
Well, I have had worse interviews and I have had better. I think I did very well on the testing they had me go through, and I think I did well on the interview portion of the process. Time will tell if I was able to impress enough in order to earn myself a job, which would undoubtedly be an upgrade from the current.. position I hold at Home Depot. While the weather has been kind to me thus far, I have little hope at this point of things staying as mild as we find them now in the city that has repeatedly earned it's nickname of Winterpeg.
I am very excited by the news I got today another interview with Shaw Cablesystems. You all may recall that last year I was on what I felt was the edge of being hired by Shaw when a former coworker who I agreed to use as a reference decided to tell them some rather unsavory information about me, which caused them to not even bother to call me back. It has been a year and a half, and I hope that I can still impress them with my technical knowledge and phone skills like I did last time, without the hassle of the issues that arose last time. I will definitely let you all know how it goes when I get back form my interview.
Friends are good things to have. After I expressed on my show and in game that my headset was no longer useable for doing a radio show, and also that I was going to have issues paying to play WoW once my current game time expires, I was pleasantly surprised to hear from a few friends who offered to fix the issue for me. A friend named Calinthor from the Stormseekers on Argent Dawn in game was kind enough to send me a 60 day game card for WoW. Another couple I know, Lelia and Ven, were kind enough to both send me a new headset and cover several months of game time. I want to send my deepest thanks to them all for their generosity and kindness. None of you had to do this, and it means a lot to me that you did.
As I wrote back 11 days ago, this blog is a direct result of September 11, 2001. This blog can be attributed to that day, Dave Whiner and Doc Searls, and my desire for a better, easier way to inform those who come to my sites for information, news, and my views. After 4 year and over 4000 posts, I find this site to be a great way for me to express myself, to meet new and interesting people, and keep in touch with friends I have made through this site. I want to thank you all for your patience, your loyalty, and your visits. You all make this site worth updating, and are what make me go back and catch up whenever I have time.
I am happy, nay overjoyed to announce that this coming Wednesday I will be doing my regular Wednesday show, Know Your Role, at it's new home on MMO Radio, though at a slightly different time than normal. As you may have read, I got fired from WoW Radio for wanting them to follow the law, and do things right, but now I have been invited to join the staff of MMO Radio, and will be doing my normal 2 shows a week there. I will be doing Tuesdays and Wednesdays, very similar to what I was doing on the old station, except a little different in times.
My Tuesday music show, Partying with the Paladin, will be 12-3 PM EST on Tuesdays, and my Wednesday show, Know Your Role, will be on 9 PM to 12 midnight EST. I hope that you all will tune in to my show, and give me your feedback. With the changes between the two, I might be a bit in getting used to the move, but I promise I will give you the shows you deserve as quickly as I can. As for archiving, I will have to talk with the people at MMO Radio to see where they are thinking on the matter, and will get back to you as soon as I can in this very place, and on my shows.
Sadly, my time in WoW has expired. I hope this doesn't last long, but either way it will give me a chance to catch up on other things, and maybe even catch up eventually here on Geek Blog.
I need help. I am a World of Warcraft addict, and my time is about to run out. I ask that if you can, please click the donate link on the side and allow me a chance to keep playing WoW, to keep doing my radio show, to keep helping build the WoW community.
It is said that all good things must come to an end. Well, an overall good thing has come to an end for me, at least in one respect. I have been involved with WoW Radio since it's owner posted on the WoW forums back almost a year ago now. I had already found myself addicted to WoW, and found the idea of radio about it and for it's players would be an awesome idea, be it talk or music. The station launched around mid October, and was a near immediate hit. We crushed competitor after competitor, and my show, and the station's audience, grew quickly.
I moved my show to an RP fan base after I gave in and began to play on the RP servers exclusively. Well, a few hours ago, I got pulled into Team Speak, and was informed I was fired. The reasons were many, most of which I consider to be Bullshit, especially the information I received after that they would never allow me to Blizzcon, because the owner was afraid of me ruining the carefully cultivated reputation with Blizzard, and that from the beginning of the process, many got the impression that there was no other possible resolution. Alas, I am not done, keep tuned here for more info.
As always, the WPG Photo meetup was a good one, with plenty of good talk, and great ideas passed around. I grow more jealous and envious of those with decent cameras ever meeting, as I see the shots they can do, and wonder if there will come a day when I will take shots like that. Renee at Kave Coffee Lounge, Broadway and Hargrave in downtown Winnipeg, is a gracious and kind host, often taking time from his work to sit and talk photography with the group.
Some heavy duty testing of changing things here and there in the MT install found me the problem. When I first began installing MT on Mindstorm's server, it was told to me repeatedly that I did not need to set permissions on the folders I made in the install. On the current server, though, this does not appear to be the case, at least not when I am using php files. This, it seems, was the problem. After I started working with folder permissions, it wasn't long before I found the problem, the monthly folders. A quick addition to my 6A trouble ticket came back with the proper config option to set the folders right, and the warning I should delete the folder and rebuild to ensure the settings were correct. Unfortunately I had a slight oversight in that I forgot to change the 2.1 installs location to the Temp folder, and when I got hit by comment spammers over night, the 2.2 install got overwritten, and thus I had to delete and rebuild again. Now that that's been done, and I have done some extensive testing, I am happy to say it's all working perfectly, and smoothly. Geek Blog is back in business. Welcome.
Those who have been here awhile have heard the story. Those who have not, or who are new, are in for a little education. The thing is, the story of the founding of Geek Blog is connected completely with the events of 4 years ago. I had the day off from the post secondary institution I attended then, due to a MUUG meeting, so I slept in. I woke up, hit the shower, all your normal wake up routines. At the time I had cable, but my TV was almost entirely on CMT, unless there was a TechTV show on I was planning to watch. I turned on the TV when I got to the computer(yes, my computer has always been in my living room since the first place I lived alone in) and began enjoying the music videos.
I opened up my notepad, posting on my site then, in a Daynotes type journal I kept, and uploaded the post. I then proceeded to check my email. I scrolled through a few, deleting spam here and there, and came across one that I thought at first was spam, but I took a second look at it. I had signed up for a trial of Coffee Cup software about 2 or 3 weeks before, and had apparently been added to their mailing database. This email turned out to be from the President of Coffee Cup Software, and it told of his anger at the attacks on his country, and went on to encourage relief for the area.
Being that I had not heard of the events yet, I was highly confused by this information, and unsure what this person was talking about. I read it over and over, trying to make some sense of the words. After about 2 minutes, I gave up and decided that if any country had been attacked, it would be on CNN, so I flipped to the station that was the center of the new that day. Just as I tuned in, they were cutting from what looked like a fireball to New York, where the first tower to fall was just beginning to crumble. A book I read recently said that there is a habit in the mind to try to avoid seeing the truth, especially if what is there is too hard to accept. I had such a moment.
I thought 'it's gotta be special effects. Then I saw CNN showing people jumping from the hole in the side of the last remaining tower, and my blood went cold. No one would jump from such a tall building, facing certain death instead of the possible long ans painful death of being trapped under tonnes of debris. I knew then that this was no movie, no special effects. I watched with rapt attention for the next few minutes, absorbing the situation, the facts, the info that had come out, and so on.
I then began to update my journal, which was very difficult as I had to open up notepad, and write, then code, then FTP. It became very cumbersome, and hard to update often enough. It seemed that before I was done FTPing the first bit of info, I was forced to write a new one and begin FTPing it. Once the two towers had fallen, the word had come on the other two planes, the one to hit the Pentagon and the one to crash in Pennsylvania. As the news of the day began to dwindle into repeating stuff I already knew, I began to check out other sites. A few of the Daynote gang had updated their sites, some with highly inflammatory words, others with shock, concern, and sadness. I was surprised very little with the words I saw, and who they came from.
Shortly before this day, in fact less than a week, one of the Daynoters had led me to a couple of sites where the writings of Dave Winer and Doc Searls could be found. These were guys who were infinitely smarter than me, and could write like the professionals they were. I was awed by them, and bookmarked them right away. They were, you could say, my doorway into the Blogging world. I saw how quickly, how easily their sites were updated. They had a well honed collection of sites and contacts, many of whom they were able to tap for information.
11 days after September 11th, I signed up for a Blogger account, and began Blogging at a sub folder of my web site at the time. That led, eventually, to Geek Blog 2.3, the site you see before you. 4 years and over 4000 posts later(discounting the 4 months I lost) and this has been the most interesting, rewarding, and educational experience I have ever had. Sadly, it is also a site, an endeavour, that will for as long as it is around will be connected undeniably to a tragic, earth shaking event in the worlds history. Geek Blog is one of those few good things that have come from that day, those events. I raise a glass to those lost, to those who survived, to those who have been affected.
Well, the only thing I have figured out at this point is that if I want you all to be able to comment and stuff, I need to go in and set the permissions manually for each individual archive page. For 3600+ posts, that is a lot of work. Therefore, I am going to temporary enable this on the last 3 months of posts, which is to say all the posts on the front page, and then will continue to work with Six Apart to figure out what needs to be done to get this permanently fixed. I know it's a permissions issue, as that's the problem with 90% of 500 Server errors, I just need to figure out what's needed, and what's being done currently. I hope you all like the look behind the new 3.2 default template. I will, of course, try to customize it over time and make it more Geek Blog, than Six Apart. In the meantime, I have a tonne of draft posts to catch up on, and these permissions problems to work out. I also need to get some pictures edited and posted on DWP, and am back to work, so I have less free time than I had before. Wish me luck.
Welcome. It's been a bit since I posted, but life has, as often happens in the blog world, gotten in the way. I have a fresh install of Movable Type 3.2, and thus a new look for it. I have had a lot of looks for this blog, and a lot of messages. The news these days talks about the Hurricanes, and the devastation in New Orleans. I have been more concerned, myself, with knees, my back, and other sundry parts of my body. My body is really rejecting this whole manual labour thing, but until another opportunity arises, I have no choice, especially staring down about $5000 in debt, not including my parents. Yeah, it's selfish, but I have a lot of problems of my own, without having to worry about others.
The people there will be getting money from several levels of government(finally). The world is sending money and help. The only thing I have is knees that scream in pain after a very short time and feet that beg often for me to stop hurting them. But, yeah, here's the new look. It's the default MT 3.2 template, and hopefully this will help me in the whole spam evasion deal, cause I am getting sick of having so many spam comments and trackbacks to remove. I had to spend a good 2 hours in the other MT install removing spam junk. I hope you like. I hope to post the draft stuff soon.
I know about the error messages, working on it. Sorry.
