December 2007

I have to say that I have been using the new Office offering from Microsoft and I am not particularly impressed. Functionally, they seem quite capable, and add a number of new features to the older versions, at least I would hope. The main complaint that I have is that the interface seems to have fundamentally changed.
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Well, I'm not going to take long with this because it is Saturday evening and I'm at work. Long story short, no Internet at home now because I moved. I live beside the pool above. I was supposed to get Internet today, but my ISP — Logic Communications — had some "technical difficulties" and now I have to wait until Monday. Not the end of the world, but it seemed to me that they just forgot to process my form and it was almost the end of the day.

However, I guess that is OK, because I also rented a scooter today and I plan to explore this tiny island a bit more tomorrow. Hopefully. And now without Internet at home, there is no excuse. Photos will follow once I get the Internet rolling at home.

I did manage to take in the Bermuda Christmas Boat Parade tonight which is why I'm in town... well that and renting the scooter and supposedly picking up my wireless modem. But I ran into some co-workers and had an early dinner and then caught the first part of the boat parade. Now to leave town before everyone else tries to as well. Cheers.

And once again, I have ventured into work in order to keep people up to date on my life for some reason. Perhaps it is related to my need to check in with the world outside Bermuda now that I have a full appreciation for just how small it is. Today was my day of the scooter, at least my first day, I can't say how many more there will be in the future.
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Thanks to a relatively expensive combination of Logic broadband Internet and a cellular-based wireless service from M3 Wireless called easyConnect, I am now online in my quaint little pool house. I was pleased at how easy it was to setup, which almost made up for the fact that I didn't receive it on Saturday.

The past four days or so without Internet at home kind of reminded me of my term in Greece when I would make runs to the Internet café — usually Bits and Bytes — or later to the university. Only this time I was going into work. What a slave to the Internet I am. It is a weird addiction too, because I don't really need to be actively using it, I just need to know that it is there. If I want to know what is on television every night this week or if I want to learn about the local flora of northern Guatemala, I want to be able to do that immediately and from the comfort of my own home. Or yard.

I've been waiting a long time, and while I'm not sure if I'll use the service at this point, TV shows are now available to Canadian iTunes Music Store users. I'm not sure what the selection is like, but I'm going to find out.

It happened almost a week ago now. I was having dinner with a couple of co-workers last Saturday in a restaurant in Hamilton. It was the same night as the boat parade I mentioned in an earlier post. We were just chatting and waiting for our food when Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones walked by in front of the window on Washington Lane. A few people might have turned around and looked (like me) but most people seemed unfazed. I guess they have a house here in Bermuda and people are used to seeing them.

This post has a double purpose, the first of which is to mention that I have taken a couple of steps towards thwarting the occasional comment spam I receive. I have received more comment spam here in the past couple months than I ever did at EuropeAdventure.ca I think. But then again, maybe I was filtering there too and I just don't remember doing it. Basically I have been getting long comments full of links to various sites of questionable provenance and containing quite a few other keywords which aren't exactly age appropriate. Not that I try to pass this off as a family site, but I really don't want to offend anyone... too badly. Anyway, I have added some filters which will silently categorize comments as spam and then I can review them to see if there are any false positives and likely just expunge them all in one fell swoop.

The other note I wanted to make was that I saw "I Am Legend" last night with some co-workers. It was the first time I've been to the theatre here in Bermuda. It wasn't exactly a convenient location, but like the other couple of theatres here, it was only a single screen affair. The movie itself was good. It showed a lot of potential, but I think it fell a tad short. Literally. It was only an hour and a half and could have been more. Kind of left me feeling a bit unsatisfied. YMMV.

There really isn't much more to say. And this is a cold day here in Hamilton. I was one of the few people on the bus this morning without a jacket. Perhaps if people knew what my alternative was, they might not stare at the brave soul without a coat. But the nice thing about it being five degrees cooler than yesterday was I wasn't sweating by the time I got to the bus stop, even though I left the house later.

Thursdays at work are busy days. As such, my WorkPace breaks sometimes get missed. I realize that they are there for a reason, reducing my RSI pain, but sometimes I just need to get something done. If you ignore any breaks, then your notification icon buddy gets progressively more angry. This face is what you get with a 43% compliance. I have only gone as low as 27%, so I'm not sure what would happen if you ignore him completely all day. The number beside him (5) indicates my work level. I think it measures some combination of my keystrokes and mouse usage to determine that... somehow.

Every year for my whole life, I have spent Christmas at home with my family. In the past six or seven years that would mean coming home during "Christmas break" at school. School wasn't always in the same spot, but I always had some time to make it back home. This, however, is my first year that I have to take actual vacation time off work to make the trip home. It would be easier of course if I weren't in a different country, but I am.

I was recently speaking with one of my colleagues at work who is originally from Singapore. He was asking me about my Christmas traditions, at least in regards to how I valued them in my life and whether I always spend Christmas with my family. I told him that yes, it was a very important time for me to spend at home with my family, and that it would take some sort of natural disaster to keep me from being at home at least for a couple days around Christmas. For him, he feels the same way about Chinese New Year. Which makes sense to me now because I knew that he had two weeks booked off from the 1st to the 15th of February.

And so, tomorrow I will be flying home, back to Canada to spend a week or so with my family. Now all I have to do is mentally and/or physically prepare for the drastic change in temperature that accompanies that flight.

Happy holidays everyone!

I had a request to have the current temperatures from Bermuda, where I am living now, and Halifax, where I used to live, on my site. You can find them on my sidebar on the left under my photo sets. At this point all I have is the current temperature updated every hour on the hour. That is likely all I will display since for the Bermuda weather I’m doing a bit of screen scraping and we all know that is a bit delicate.