Phasor Burn

IMG_7900.JPG, originally uploaded by stalman.

Brother Jimbob, get your shotgun; there’s gonna be a weddin’

Calgary has finally joined the first world and has a city operated recycling pickup program.

The first pickup was 2009-04-23 :

We’ve been recycling our paper products for years now, but the pain of loading up the car to go to the dropoff point meant we let it pile up and pile up and pile up… until it really was a pain.

Now the recycle pickup comes to us, and we only need to load up the special bin and place it at the end of the driveway.

Bonus points that this new system also takes way more types of items than the standalone dropoff points used to. We’ll be doing the tin cans and plastics as well now. Good stuff.

Update 2009-04-30

Recycle week 2 :

Seems the garbage gorillas do not understand that they can not put the empty garbage barrels right next to the recycle bins waiting for pick up.

The recycle truck mechanism needs several feet clearance on either side of the bins. Idjits.

[ . . . ] if Oracle can truly provide that end-to-end experience, there will be a tremendous need for engineers that not only understand UNIX or even Solaris, but understand DTrace and ZFS and ILOM and LDOMs and xVM and Crossbow and Zones and SPARC and Cluster and on and on. The value will come from those individuals who not just understand a given Sun technology but rather a complete integrated stack view.

Oracle’s going to follow up product offerings with support and consulting… but we all know that only goes so far, the rest of us will need to go the distance.

[ . . . ]

A wise and dear friend of mine today asked me: “Where does your allegiance lie: with Sun or with Solaris?” That’s a question each of us has to re-evaluate very carefully.

Full article here

My allegiance lies with . . . Solaris. Solid product, great future.

Sun itself… goodbye endless layers of management and triple-thinking inability to focus and execute on product direction, sales, etc.

I’m an sporadic sufferer of Imposter Syndrome.

I just don’t ‘get’ how I could be paid for the level of work I am doing… isn’t this something anybody with half a clue could do if they were to just pay attention and think things through, perform educated guesses to arrive at unique new solutions, constantly research things to try and improve what they perceive as great walloping huge holes in their knowledge….

Jump head first into unknown waters and try to not think about if the water is only 12 inches deep, full of pointy sharp things, hungry swiming things with tentacles/beaks/teeth, or simply choppy stormy waters far at sea without the help of any artificial floatation device?

Yes I have made mistakes, and still do (but less frequently).

Experience is what you get when you make mistakes and then learn from them. Mistakes without learning is no good, we all know that.

Experience is what people pay you the big bucks for.

Being stuck in a rut doing the same old same old leaves less room for learning opportunities, especially those that can be sandboxed into “this is a new project, not going into production soon and we need to figure stuff out… lets try all sorts of interesting things and see what breaks, what works” types of projects.

Challenge the Imposter. Break out of the rut.

Find some way of creating a sandboxed new project to experiment in. Even if it isn’t an officially sanctioned project.

You’ll be better served to have had the experimentation done ahead of time to give you that virtual pair of water wings which make you seem super smart for bringing on the ship that sailed without lifeboats . . .

It’s easier than you think to come up with the bit of spare time or hardware or whatever.

The major hurdle is imposter syndrome and the time vortex it generates in self doubting nothing-will-ever-change thinking.

This is the battle I forget I am waging, all too often.

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I can’t help but indulge in a bit of schadenfreude when I see something like this.

“Seeking competent employee” is listed as the opportunity (opportunity for the employer, not for the employee!). Then there is one of the responsibilities of the position being inconsistently formatted, highlighted in bold . . . “Backup Planning”

One doesn’t need to read too much between the lines here, to deduce what must have happened.

“There are two kinds of paranoia: Total, and insufficient. I am both, because if you think you are sufficiently paranoid, you’re not.”
- Guildenstern, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Oh and yes the economy has slowed down but there will always be opportunities. Just fewer of them.

Employers are also not hiring anyone that can only breath and chew gum at the same time, just to get a warm body in the chair.

I like to keep my finger on the pulse of the job market for my kind of skills, it helps to raise my view out of the day to day trenches, see what is going on beyond the urine steam clouds I am producing whilst pissing on yet another fire at work.

Yes, there are apparently worse places to be.

Better ones too. Nice to be aware of that.

What is the cost of living difference between Calgary and Regina? Nah, too far from the mountains.