Camping in David Thompson Country

We took the kids and went camping with some friends of ours and their kids over the weekend at David Thompson Resort, on the Thompson Valley Parkway west of Rocky Mountain House on the weekend. The resort is located in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, in beautiful scenery next to a large reservoir with unbelievable blue water. We tented, as usual, this being the fourth time we’ve used the “Taj MaTent” that Jennifer bought. The campground is not especially tent-friendly, being pretty rocky, and mostly designed for trailers and RVs, but there are a few good tent sites and we got a couple of them.

Windows XP SP2 Blows Up Kids Computer

My kids have an eMachines Celeron 1.8 GHz machine for playing kids games on. It came bundled with Windows XP Home and a bunch of crap that I expect nobody is ever interested in like AOL and stuff like that. They’ve had it for a year and a half, and it was getting a little flaky, but nothing too major. Occaisionally it would go to sleep and not wake up without a power off, stuff like that. Now XP Service Pack 2 has installed itself, and those little flaky problems have grown a bit.

Boring Day in the Lab

Today is a day for building basic workstations and servers in the lab in preparation for the next batch of testing and hacking. This part’s boring, which is why I like to spend the least possible time on it. Hence, imaging software and scripted installations are my friend.

The lab needs a better name than “The Lab”. Any suggestions?

First New Search Engine

As I blogged previously, we’ve decided to do a preliminary rollout of our new internal search infrastructure in Calgary, to index and search the closed project data. I’ve been doing pilot installs in the lab to make sure I don’t run into any snags.

Back to School Shopping Ritual

Well, I participated in the annual Back to School clothes shopping event last night, with my dad and Mack. Mack’s going into kindergarten, so its his first year of school, but he’s been in preschool, so this isn’t totally new to him. Emily went too, with her mom and Grandma. It’s a funny thing, getting the kids ready to head off to school. I always remember being excited to get back in the fall, to start new classes, learn new things, get new pencils and erasers. I don’t remember the clothes shopping too much, but since my early schooling took place in the seventies, maybe not remembering the clothes I wore to school is a good thing (velour track jackets and bell bottom cords).

“Just a Geek” and Inspiration

I’ve just been listening to Wil Wheaton’s interview on Comptuer America, where he talks about his second book “Just a Geek“. I periodically read Wil’s weblog and it was interesting to read his weblog posting about his interview before I actually listened to the interview. He essentially reviewed his own interview, candidly assessing his own on-air performance. The guy’s frank and open, and funny and insightful. He was my main inspiration to start a weblog of my own, in fact, and take all the little electronic notes I always write to myself and publish them to the world. Anyways, after reading the things people have posted about the book on other weblogs, and hearing this interview, I’ve definitely added this book to my “to-read list” as another potential source of inspiration in what has already been an inspiring few weeks.

3D Golf Tournament Lots of Fun

The tournament, which was smaller than in past years with about 8 foursomes, was great fun. Despite a threatening dark sky in the morning, the day turned sunny and the weather was beautiful (if a bit prematurely fall-like). My team, a bunch of duffers, managed to finish second in the not-very-heated Texas Scramble competition at two under, and I even got to write my name on the longest drive competition card, though it was blown away by Mike from 3D a few foursomes behind us. 3D did a good job of hosting the event, and included their nice touches of giving out a framed photo of each foursome to each tournament participant, and of showing a slide show of highlights of the game that Judy from 3D and Belinda from HP went around shooting throughout the game. I’m not sure why, but for some reason the picture of me shooting the ball into the lake off the first tee kept reappearing during the slide show, but other than that it was great.

They also gave out bags of loot which included nice 3D Computers / HP golf shirts, and a nice mug, and a cool little techno-toy that’s neat and useful for my geek gadgets in the truck. It’s a little pad about 125 mm by 75 mm, made of some bizarre sticky-gelly substance. You stick it on your dashboard, and then perch your cell phone or Palm handheld, or sunglasses or whatever on it, and then proceed to drive madly while the aforementioned gadget sits happily unmoving on the dash. Cool.

Off to the 3D Computers Golf Tournament

Ed, Stuart and I are off to the 3D Computers Golf Tournament at The Ranch golf club this afternoon. The weather’s crap, and it will probably rain, but I’ve had so few opportunities to golf this year that I plan to play through whatever weather we get. 3D’s tournament has been fun in the past, and I’m sure today will be no excption. 3D Computers is our corporate VAR.

Initial Search Piloting Done

Preliminary piloting on the Novell Search Engine is finished, and I am sure that it will do what we need it to do. We are able to perform indexing on distributed machines and consolidate our indices to a centralized search server, and push configuration changes out from a primary machine. The search cluster machines also don’t need to be part of the same eDirectory tree, so that works out well for our environment. Now, lacking a formal definition of what exactly the user community wants to be able to search, we’re faced with where to go next.

Alberta Summer Swimming Provincials

Well, the season’s over for Emily and Mack in Summer Swimming. The ASSA provincials just ended today, there’s a team dinner and playtime at Reds tonight, and then were done for Emily and Mack’s first ever season of competitive swimming.