minimal resilience

i'm not going to discuss chemical toilets at temperatures around -20. i'll briefly mention a weird minute or two when some bright spark scaled and opened up a fire extinguisher right next to us and damn that's nasty. but that was it for the downers:
the dance floor was massive and packed with happy bouncy people and it's the first time i've been glad to not have personal space.
it was that ideal vibe with powerful minimal backing beats; for those of you who know what i'm talking about when i say "good party", igloofest is really special!!!

although at that temperature, it *is* kinda tough to know if the smile frozen on your face is figurative or literal.

---wednesday:

apocalypse dreaming, driving with ripley while under attack

and on the third day he accessed the mac. lo! it was a mess and it tattled a tale of moonlighter's bad svn usage. i'd have it out with him the next day, explaining to him in what i felt was in no uncertain terms that when you do a dirty, panicked and hurried change you should still make a branch for it in the svn: i'm beginning to believe that -someone and i have developed the best best practices for svn that exist. perhaps i should publish them.

i booked a cheap (cheaper than bus tickets) motel in saint sauveur for the weekend, so we're good to go!

when the supermarket self service works it's fantastic. when it doesn't, it's not only uncomfortable because there are people waiting and there's nobody else to point fingers at, but because you have to go and wait in another queue which you could have breezed through earlier :(

vmware workstation is an absolute pleasure to work with. switching between a 32 bit and 64 bit ubuntu machine is so comfortable and the installation assistance so smooth that i actually enjoyed the experience!

a moonlighter positive: apparently the presence effect works over skype, too.

---there was some unpleasantness in the office, and only later i'd discover what had happened.

one of the guys got fired, and this is in a small office where everyone's really close. the guy in particular is, to use aota's word, a gentlemen; decent, friendly, clearly the kind of person you can trust. the thing is, we had an executive visiting from the states who's come from american corporate culture (and, not to mention the specific company by name, from one of the most notoriously back-stabbing corporate cultures in america). after the guy had been informed he was to leave, and while he was (virtually) packing his bags, the executive took it upon himself to harass and bully him while "keeping an eye on him".

wtf?! it's a start-up, the kind of culture in which communication and a sense of value need to be fostered, one in which you keep in touch even with those who've left. even if you don't give a shit about the employees as people, which you should, it's bad business to demotivate everyone.

what was rule no. 1? oh, yeah: don't be an asshole.

---thought on the way home: all the snow's gone. winter's gonna have to start all over again.

pg prepared a big dinner, after which i was full and exhausted and i called the night early.

---thursday:

i had lots of weird dreams, the end of which being landing on a beach with the tide going crazy and finding myself trapped between a polar bear and a lion.

another late start - it's harder and harder to get up these days.

the cold wind in my eyes
does nothing to chill the warmth
of a bright blue and white morning
crunching beneath my feet

the new guy uses a lot of paper, gets lost on his virtual desktop and yesterday we discovered that he's been connected to the wrong network which explains all of his access issues.
*sigh*

i also discovered that macs need restarting too. i don't know what that's about. my day was interesting and mostly successful, my mind was all over the place in that style known as "organized chaos". i was quite proud of myself when i left.

define irony: thinking about how the multitasking truism doesn't seem to apply to me and walking straight past the station i was headed for.

poetry is when you make perfect sense
and it's completely incomprehensible
or
is it the other way around?

---i'm really pleased i made the first igloofest. there're still two days of this one and four more weekends to go, but we're off snowboarding this weekend and one of the next two we're going to visit the family in toronto and niagara.

decisions, decisions.

---holy crap - the dude who outsourced his job to china? what an asshole. what a genius!

i've been hearing great things about tesla, and elon musk is my hero anyway. but i hadn't heard about tesla's free solar charging stations. to quote overclocker:
if i was the type of person that drives a $65,000 car and lives in California... there would be no second thoughts about this