Got back from Toronto yesterday night, and right back to work today (sadly).

Had a really good time in TO though. Cousin's wedding went very well, had tons of fun with my crazy cousins, met more relatives for the first time, etc. -- a good 'ol time all in all.

Phew! Finally going to get a chance to leave behind the madness known as my daily routine (wake up, eat, go to work, go home, eat, sleep & repeat), at least for a little while. It's vacation time!

Going to Toronto, mainly to attend a wedding and visit family. I've already been to Toronto a fair bit in the past few years, so the novelty is starting to wear off a little. Even so, it should still be a very good time. The main thing is it's time to relax, be with family, and simply have an overall good time. I'd take that any day.

Uhhgg. Had a cold/runny nose all day today. Just in time for my weekend too. Why is it I can't get sick during the work week? Decided not to use a paid sick day today, because it would have been pretty much pointless leaving a couple hours early on the last day of my work week. The people I report to are also quite incompetent at managing us, so why not suffer the few hours and save paid sick time off for a full day off sometime?

I should seriously use more paid sick days though. Last year I foolishly gave up all 5 of my paid sick days and got squat in return.

The moral of the story is, unless you want to be stupid like me and give up 40 hours of paid time off, there IS an incentive to get sick. Oh, there's another lesson here too... there's no point trying to prove that you're dedicated to your job, because your incompetent managers will not notice anyway.

So why not a new blog template? Better than the customized makeshift one I previously had... so when you haven't posted anything new for while, just change up the template to keep things fresh... works for me.

Seriously though, I call myself a web developer yet I can't be bothered to make my own blog template. Guess I do too much of it at work already that I'm actually getting to the point of being sick and tired of it. Sad.

Hhhmm. No posts for a while. My predictions about this were true... scary!

Of course the big local story today; snow in May -- a fair bit too (25+ cm), and more supposedly more coming tomorrow in the form of wet snow, ice pellets and/or rain. Bleah.

Dinner at North Garden (again) yesterday. Delicious as usual.

WinXP on a 2.53 Ghz P4 gets kind of boring after a while... so this weekend, I have decided to try some fun retro computing project: setup a network connection for my old 8088 PC XT running DOS to Linux and/or other Windows-based PCs using PLIP or serial connection.

Ended up scavenging 128 Kb of SRAM cache chips out of an unused 486 and putting it into one of the older machines I still use. Funny how I ended up nowhere close accomplishing my original objectives... at least I now have a "souped up 586" if that's any consolation. Yeah -- memories of 1994 are coming back to me now. I'll try again with the 8088 some other time; then I can relive 1988!

Dinner with family & relatives today at North Garden (being my family's Chinese restaurant of choice for the past few years). We mostly always order the same dishes, but it's still good.

Happy May Day. Canada needs more statutory holidays. May day being an international holiday for the working class, I wonder why this isn't the case in North America? In my perfect world, there should be a stat holiday at least once a month or more... I mean 12 days out of 365/year isn't unreasonable is it? In Canada and the U.S., there are only an average of 6-8 stat holidays per year, compared to Asia & Europe, where there are 10-14. How about some holidays in January, February, March and June, eh?

The way I see it, a more relaxed population is a less stressed and productive society. Also it's a fact that holiday celebrations will get people out spending & pumping money back into the economy. Maybe it has to do with lack of North American culture/celebratory spirit...

Ahhh. Day off.

I'll tell ya, there's nothing more I look forward to all week than the end of Thursday and Fridays & Saturdays. I know it's at the expense of having to go to back to work on Sunday, but I'd rather work a weekend day anyway.

People say I'm crazy, but I actually find it quite surprising why more people (who don't have to worry about school and/or church) don't choose to work on weekends and do the traditional M-F/9-5. Most things are closed on weekends anyway. Less people bug you at work, it's quieter, you get to work at your own pace and actually get stuff done that you'll have an easier time during the rest of the week. Psychologically, it would seem to be shorter work week too.

I take that back.. this template is so ugly, but I'm too lazy to make something better. Give me a break... It's a BLOG.

Heheh, that last posting really messed up the aesthetics and spoiled an otherwise perfectly good page. Gonna keep it though... 'doing it because I can, not because I should.

Isn't amateur HTML funny??
Didn't the style police ban this kind of stuff from the Internet in 1996?

Client peoples are currently visiting at work. Good thing I'm only working 3 weekdays this week. Attended a nice 1.5 hrs long paid "motivational" lecture/presentation that was "mandatory" according to my boss's boss's boss.

Not that it was a bad thing -- free hot dogs, drinks, snax, sweets, coffee, and junky loots (pen, notepad, propaganda mousepad). Saw previews of fun new commercials that they will be airing in the U.S. that were actually not too bad. They even said they'll be giving everyone attending a free full featured compact DVD player at a later date. Obviously those cheapo ones, but hey it's a DVD player. Actually not sure if I'll get one since the lecture was actually targeted to the customer reps, and I'm just a lowly Programmer... we shall see.

Ya, let's see how long this lasts...