McMullenWeb.com

Shopping

I hate shopping!

I should clarify that statement, I hate shopping for clothes. Just the idea of it puts me into a bad mood. I end up wearing my clothes to a thread before I can bring my self around to going to a clothing store.

Any other type of shopping I embrace. I can spend hours in a book store, electronics store, hardware store, kitchen utensiles store, food store, almost any store but clothing.

When I started working my present job almost three years ago I realized I had to dress a little neater. Most of the men wore suits and the women wore casual office attire. I actually made the attempt to dress up a bit, nice slacks, silk shirt but I often found myself crawling around under a desk looking up a computer hook up or something to that sort and I gave up on that.

I ended up going to Zellers and found a brand of pants that suited my style and needs, pleated, a little roomy, big pockets, wash and wear and made of a natural (or mostly natural) fiber. I bought one pair in dark blue and one pair in black, the black ones I could use for concerts. I also bought a couple of shirts.

I just rotated the combination of these things through the week. I'm sure in the office they could tell the day of the week by what I was wearing. When those started to wear out I marched myself to Zellers again and bought the same thing and added a couple of more shirts. Voila!, instant wardrobe for the next year.

Fast forward to this year. Late spring/early summer was the time to go and buy new pants as these were starting to get a frayed but there were always other things to go shopping for or other things to spend money on.

Finally I decided I had to go. Friday was perfect because I was in a relatively good mood. We had just finished a Flash presentation that we had been working on all week long for a big presentation next week in Quebec City. We showed it to the office on Friday afternoon and it went over really well (I would put it up here but it is a 6 meg file and not really meant for web consumption). Plus it was piss pouring rain so traffic was a nightmare so I figured I may as well stay on the West Island and wait it all out.

First I went to Zellers. Horrors!! They no longer had the pants! Maybe they were just out of them, they had other products in the same line. I went to another Zellers that is on the route home. None there either! I wandered into the mall. I went from store to store and only found clothing for nymphetes 2 sizes smaller and 30 years younger than me.

In desparation I staggered into the Bay. Begrudgingly I tried on pants and put pants back. I finally found a couple of pair that will sort of do. Interestingly enough I found most of my clothes in the petite section. I would not consider myself petite, I am 5'6" and around 135 pounds but the clothes from that section just fit me better plus it was on sale!

So $218.25 later I now own 4 pairs of pants, 2 shirts and a pullover. That should keep the clothes police at bay for a while. Now the trick will be to actually start wearing them. I have, at times, bought new clothes then not actually wear them for another year.

Als Lose!

Well, it had the makings of a great party, we even had our own Grey Cup:

(ok, so I didn't have time to put all of the foil on it)

Put up lots of decorations, set up the pixel projector, had lots of food and beer and a bunch of friends:

But alas it was not to be. Although the Als had a great 2nd quarter and were down by a field goal at the half (only because of a Keith Stokes fumble), they were completely flat in the second half and the Eskimos beat them 34 to 22.

This sums up the game:

Mark taking out his frustration on Anthony Calvillo:

On to Ottawa next year!

Ta Da!!

I made it, 9 hours and 34 minutes with no food or water! The water was the hardest part but I overcame. I spent most of the day working on a Flash movie so that kept me really occupied.

Around lunch time was a bit hard, was really feeling hungry for about a half hour but that abated. No headache either which was the other thing I was worried about.

I don't know I would want to do it for a whole month but it was an interesting experiment for one day. You realize little habits you have. I was waiting for the elevator this morning when I started to raise a finger to my mouth in order to chew off a piece of skin. Nope, not supposed to ingest anything, arghh!

But I did it!

Will Power

One of the women in the office, Karima, is Islamic. Therefore she is fasting during the day as it is now Ramadan. We were talking about it the other week and she casually issued a bit of a challenge, why don't you try try fasting one day.

I though, yeah, I could try that. I just had to find a day when I didn't have other things that day or evening. That was actually problematic. I have been very busy lately with all of the Remembrance Day activities and football games.

The end of Ramadan is coming up and I am running out of time so today is the day. I just managed to squeeze in my breakfast before sunrise. Now it's 10 very long hours til I not just eat again but drink anything!

Now the eating thing I can do no sweat, I do that sort of thing all the time when I get really involved incomputer stuff but I am usually chugging back tons of water while I'm doing it. I always have a cup of water bedside me at work. I guess you could say I am a water junkie. I don't drink coffee (can't stand the taste) and hardly ever drink sodas but water is my vise.

The real test will be around lunchtime when I normally would eat my lunch. That will be the true test. Luckily I don't always partake in hte feeding frenzy that takes place all the time in my office. For some reason all of the leftovers from meetings end up in my space. So right now there is a box of Tim Horton muffins from yesterday and a couple of bags of chips from the bosses birthday pot luck lunch on Wensday. There is still a jar of leftover Holloween candy in the back.

Not a place if you want to loose weight! I have worked there for almost 3 years now. In the first 2 and 1/2 years I put on 15 pounds and was the heaviest I have ever been. Most of it was the result of backing off on exercise since I started this computer stuff (starting in Jan 2000 when I started the web course) and all the crap that floats around the office.

In July I decided enough was enough and while I have not managed to reintroduce any degree of exercise back into my life I have managed to loose those 15 pounds by just following a sort of modified Atkins idea of low carb, high protein and just saying no to the office junk. I do not deny myself all bad stuff I just don't waste the opportunities to eat those things. Rather than being a normal activity to munch I do it selectively so it becomes special.

Anyway, off to work and to see if I can actually do without water all day, that's what this actually comes down to.

Mixed Blessings

I tend to think I am a bit of a technologue but some days....

I had a concert this afternoon with the 438 Squadron Bnad out at the Vets Hospital in Ste Anne de Bellevue. I set up my minidisc to record the concert. Now timings were very important for today as I had the concert at 2 and the Alouettes playoff game at the Big Owe at 4. The concert was supposed to be 1 hour. Everything is all set up, we are waiting for the hall to finish filling up. I start the recorder at 2 on the dot and there is 80 minutes of time on the disc. We actually start at about 10 after.

Play the cocert and we get to near the end. It is already about 12 after. I am gewtting stressed for two reasons. First it's after 3, concert is supposed to end at 3 and I am supposed to be across town in an hour. Second, it's getting close to the end of the disc. Before we play the last piece I decide to change discs. I am getting more stressed, can't open box holding blank discs and Mark is almost done talking about next piece. I fumble, put old disc back in, hit record, stop it then insert new one. Pit of my stomach says I screwed it up. Concert finishes, I could have left the first disc in there would have been enough time.

Rush out of there, hop in car. Quickly pop tape in and sure enough, erased the whole concert except for last piece on second disc. Damn.

Rush home, get there at 4, grab stuff for game and take off arriving at the stadium near the end of the 1st quarter. Settle into my seat. not a bad seat. 60,000 fans in a tight game. In the third quarter I jumped and I dropped my radio pulling a wire out of the headphones. So much for the radio.

At the very end of the game after the Als stopped an Argo drive that sealed the game I jumped again and this time the camera went flying. I picked it up and tried to take another picture but the CF card was missing. Never did find it. Searched all the rows by me, no sign. The was a joint gap nearby and got the security guys to lead me down below in case it fell down there. Absolutely no sign of it, very strange. So I might have had some pics to put up but now no. Also lost the really cute picture of Ben and the pumpkin. Sigh...

Anyway, the Als won 30 to 26 over the Argos so we can now have out Grey Cup party since we are not going out west again this year. Sandra asked if I could get the projector from work. No problemo.

I met up with the others after the game and we went to McCleans Pub on Peel to munch and watch the Western playoff. Unfortunately Edmonton won so it will be a rematch of last years Grey Cup.

Another Try

Ok, that didn't work but I noticed that the box did not stay unchecked so I unchecked it again then saved it and rebuilt it so the template main page now says no under rebuild.

We'll see how it works this time.

Still no, arghhh!

Once more with the edit of this entry.

No it's still not working. I have to get ready for the concert so I'll work this out later this week..............

Just a Test

I run another blog for the home page of this site. I actually just have some hard coding in the template. I find that my page keeps reverting back to the first paragraph displaying only. I go in and open the template, the test is there so I just rebuild the template and it shows find.

Well, this morning it did it again. I just finished adding an entry on this page a rebuilt the page. Maybe there is a correlation. I went back to the front page blog, rebuilt it and noticed a box that says something about auto rebuilding the page so I unchecked.

So this entry is to see if I ad another entry the home page will stay as it's supposed to.

Extreme Ironing

Do my usual Sunday morning activity, laundry and CBS Sunday Morning when on came a Bill Geist segment on Extreme Ironing.

What a hoot! Checked out the website. They have one of those counter of who's online. During the broadcast of this segment there were 22, at the end I refreshed and there 191. I tried refreshing a couple more times before the site came back up again and there were 287. Now there is 313. Shows you the power of the television. From 22 to 313 in about 6 minutes.

Anyway, check out the site, it's hilarious. Check out the Gallery and the World Championships 2002 and Rowenta Trophy 2003 Winners.

Enjoy

Baby Steps

I managed yeasterday to fit a Movable Type weblog within the framework of a PostNuke site!

Found the info in the PostNuke forum for maling a loader.php page that allows you to insert other pages within PostNuke. There are several ways to do this but this may work out well for inserting the Westisland Info pages into the experimental site. Have to find a way to insert the theme idea in these pages also. For now the inserted Movable Type page is picking up it's own CSS page.

A nice site (not to mention fun) to see this in action is Feline Folies that is using both a Movable Type weblog for the News section and Gray Matter weblog for Mr. Furless' Scratchings.

Yesterday I downloaded a modified a version of YellowPHP. I will check this out compared to original as the modified version has disabled the muli-lingual aspects and the multiple table functionality. I think these are thing I may want.

Slowly but surely will try to enact different modules.

PHP and CMS

Well, I rushed out and grabbed the Visual Quick Start book PHP amd MySQL. I have yet to actually open it because then I got excited about PHP and Content Management Systems. I found a neat site, opensourceCMS that has samples of most of the PHP based CMS programs out there that are opensource and free.

I ended up downloading two of the more popular ones, PHPNuke and PostNuke with PostNuke being the one I installed.

Wow! I think we can make it do almost everything we do with the Westisland.ca Portal except maybe the MyWeb section. I spent most of yesterday checking out sites, modules and such and there is some pretty neat stuff out there you can do with it. I will still have to get my fingers dirty with PHP and we will have to do some additional programming to run the site in both languages but I think it is doable.

I will have to remember to mark down some of the more exciting sites I see that replicate sections of our portal.