Programming, Poker, and Politics. Just Another voice in the electronic wilderness
January 13, 2011 at 4:12 am
I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker! The WBCOOP is a free online Poker tournament open to all Bloggers, so register on WBCOOP to play.
Registration code: XXXXXX 612721
Categories: Poker
July 26, 2010 at 12:53 pm
Dear Lenovo Technical Support,
If you direct a customer with a valid warranty to a local certified Lenovo service center instead of doing the ship-to-depot do-si-do, you should also inform the customer the service center is going to charge $90.00 to work on their laptop so said customer is fully informed of the consequences of their decision.
Grumpily surprised,
Lenovo User
Categories: Computing
April 29, 2010 at 9:31 am
My wife received her approved application for a Canadian work visa yesterday. We are one step closer to Calgary! Now I just need to find a job myself. 
Categories: Personal
April 28, 2010 at 1:59 pm
I unpacked a Dell T5500 today that I needed to install a GTX 285 GPU-capable graphics card in for one of my professors only to find that the card’s extra power connections interfered with the fold-down hard drive tray.
Dell’s case designs have been getting better and better over the years, but it looked like they’d shot themselves in the foot trying to make the T5500 case smaller. I figured I could eliminate the fold out hard drive tray completely by putting the drive in the slot for the floppy drive. After removing the hard drive from the tray, a very easy screw-less operation, I found that the section of the drive tray interfering with the GTX 285 could be removed! Dell was more clever with their design than I thought. I put the drive in the other section of the hard drive tray, unscrewed the conflicting part, and the drive tray folded down into place perfectly, leaving the full-size double-width GTX 285 card clear with the power connectors easily reachable.
Thank you, Dell, for thinking ahead!
Categories: Computing
March 1, 2010 at 5:47 pm
Friday, I found a very nice looking job lead on Workopolis for a Red Hat system administrator position with knowledge of Drupal or EC2 a plus. Brilliant! My skills fit those requirements like a glove. Friday night, I wrote a cover letter and prepared to submit said letter and resume to the recruiter only to find out the recruiter’s registration-required website accepts only Canadian address information. Last night, on a whim, I tried a Google search using select terms related to the job and found the actual job listing by the hiring company! Tonite, I’ll rewrite the cover letter and submit directly to the company instead of using a recruiter. Yahtzee!
February 23, 2010 at 8:32 pm
Well, it seems my time in North Carolina is coming to a close. My fiance, B, has accepted a 3-year postdoctoral position at the University of Calgary in Calgary, AB, and I’ve been job hunting for a while now. I have several job leads and we hope I’ll secure a position in time for us to relocate together at the end of May.
This move is quite bittersweet for me. I’ve spent almost all my adult life in NC, really love it here. I have a great job at Duke University with benefits that are out of this world and almost all of my friends are in NC. Leaving it all is really quite scary when I let myself think about it.
It’s also very exciting! The opportunity to go someplace and start a new life with my sweetie makes my heart race in anticipation! I can’t wait for it! It only took one marriage and 3 long-term relationships, but I’ve finally found the person I’m meant to be with and now I get to travel far away and have a new adventure with her! What a grand idea!
Categories: Personal
February 7, 2010 at 10:18 am
Our cablemodem has been crapping out on us periodically. It would just stop working and we’d have to unplug its power and plug it back in to get it running again. This didn’t happen very often so it wasn’t an urgent matter. Yesterday, I had to run errands in Durham anyay, so I took the cablemodem with me and swapped it for a “new” one at the Durham Time Warner Cable office. Of course, “new” doesn’t mean new. It really means “another one”.
I plugged in the replacement modem and it didn’t work; it couldn’t lock onto the cable signal. Of course, the TWC office was closed by the time I realized I had a bad modem. I went through two levels of local support and two levels of national RoadRunner support on the phone before they decided to send a tech out. Fortunately, I got me an appointment between 9AM and 11AM today. I thought I’d be offline until Monday morning.
The tech called me at 8:20AM this morning, arrived at 8:35AM, checked the signal on the cable, and then replaced the “new” modem with another which immediately came online. He spent more time outside getting the replacement modem than in my apartment.
Gotta love TWC for giving me a bad modem after the customer service rep in the office bragged that they always test their equipment before giving it out. Shame on them.
February 3, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Ya know, it’s really the small things in life that make me feel good about myself. The big wins that make you feel like Superman for a day come so rarely, for me, that I can’t rely on them to keep my outlook positive.
For example, I prefer New Balance shoes and have worn them exclusively for the last several years, but I loathe the laces that come with them. Until I started putting an extra granny knot in the loops, they would come untied within 20 or 30 minutes of my putting my shoes on. The extra knot adds time to putting my shoes on, and taking them off. Ugh. Last week, I read a post in my RSS reader about using a reef knot instead of a granny knot to tie your shoes. The reef knot is self-tightening and will not come untied, while a granny knot will slip very easily. I watched the enclosed video and compared the knots on my shoes to the video and couldn’t see a difference. Yet, my shoes come untied rapidly unless I put the extra knot in the loops. Then I realized I was doing something different! The reef knot uses a single wrap of the laces at the beginning, and I always used a double wrap to keep the laces snug while I complete the knot. I immediately retied them with a single wrap in the knot and my shoes stayed tied all day long! Such a simple change and suddenly an annoyance in my life evaporates. Here’s a really fast way to tie your shoes and make sure you get a reef knot every time.
Today, I found a set of keys dangling from the door lock on the gate mechanism of the parking lot I use at work. I grabbed them, called parking service, and let them know I’d found the keys. They asked me to bring them to their main office and I said I would. During lunch, I dropped them off and the folks there were very appreciative. The guy who lost them was out frantically searching a very large campus. Their appreciation really made my day.
It’s the small things in life that keep you going.
Categories: Personal
January 29, 2010 at 11:22 pm
Finally, avoided all the suck outs to “cash” in the World Blogger Championship Of Online Poker event #6, the mixed game. I went out in 141st place and won a $11 tournament signup ticket for the Pokerstars Spring Championship of Online Poker.
Events #1 – #5 all went the same way. I chipped up early, got into the top 100, then ran into a monster that stole away all my chips. KK vs QQ and the villian goes 4 cards to a flush, etc. Finally making the cash was nice.
Categories: Poker
January 7, 2010 at 10:49 pm
I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker! PokerStars.com is the home of Free Online Poker Games, bloggers can play for free in the exclusive WBCOOP tournament, register here to play: WBCOOP
Registration code: 896782
Categories: Miscellaneous
http://rambles.bearcircle.net /
