The ArcterJournal

I'm not sure if it's the weather or some sort of subtle hint that they want food and would like me to go and get fish for them, but the cats brought in a total of 6 worms into the house overnight (and based on the odd dirt at the top of the stairs, possibly more that were either eaten or hidden somewhere).

Just a random shot from Instagram of my desk at work.

Long long time no type. Lately I’ve been blogging a bit on my photography site and naval gazing on twitter and mucking around a bit on Google+. Lately the one interesting thing is I’ve somehow managed to get featured in two videos. Yup, you can see my ugly mug by going to…

http://www.scorpionsoft.com/levelplatforms and watching the video. Ignoring the techie bits at the start and end, I play and evil and disgruntled worker fired from my job and wrecking havoc on my company. My buddy Dana was apparently looking for someone old and bitter to play the part and thought of me! I’m… honoured I guess. It was fun to play for sure, lights and cameras and microphones all around, me with lines on the screen, repeating the lines, drinking the beer, typing, more beer, rinse and repeat. I’m really impressed with the final product, awesome work by Dana and his crew (especially for what he had to work with!).

The second is embedded below, it’s a promo video for MVP Workshops, the photography group in Vancouver that I hang out with. Chris runs the meetups and got Winston Wong did a great video of what goes on at the workshops. Short story, great fun. I’m sadly not the star in this one, but it’s fun and you get a few glimpses of me in “fun mode”.

Metro Vancouver Photography Workshops Promotional Clip from Winston Wong on Vimeo.

A couple of days ago I got a text from my wife saying something about "kitten" and "barn" and "abandoned". Cutting a long story short, so yea, we got another kitten. She was abandoned (as best we can figure) at the barn (theory being a dumped kitten turns into a barn cat, probably makes those responsible sleep better at night). She burrowed into A's shoulder and neck and purred her little brains out before she got a chance to even *see* the kitten.

As the difference in work and effort between 5 cats and 6 is only 20% compared to the 100% difference between 0 and 1 cats, or even 33% if you were to go from 3 to 4 cats. Of course, by that theory the amount of work to get more cats approaches 0, meaning that life will get easier the more cats I have! Well, that's my justification anyway. Here are some more pictures!

*sigh*

So Corny is at the vet again.  This time he was panting and drooling yesterday, so A took him to the vet, who gave him an anti-inflammatory shot and some antibiotics and he was ok. The vet figured it was an allergic reaction to a flea bite (or something like that). This morning though he was panting and listless again, so I took him down this morning before work (gotta love the flexibility of the new job!). The doctor said he didn't like the sound of his breathing... Doc took him in for the day for blood tests, x-rays, and other expensive things.

When I called he said it was (basically) that he was constipated, which was causing pain, which caused the shallow breathing, so they're keeping him overnight to make sure the laxatives work (fun for the cat I'm sure). Sounds like after he poops his little brains out he should be ok and good to come home. We'll find out tomorrow. Unfortunately of course it's all expensive, $95 for x-rays, $150 for blood work, $200 for putting him on fluids, etc, etc, etc. Just when I thought that money was getting better. I anticipate that as soon as I recover financially from this then suddenly my car will get sick :(

Fingers crossed this is just a(nother) one time things with this cat. Again.

Sorry but I'm sick of deleting 30 comments a day from some Chinese guy trying to spam about headphones or some crap like that, and considering I don't get enough actual comments (or traffic that isn't spam) to worry about it, you know you can just send me an email or something.

Bah, stupid internet.

Yea, yea, dead blog that has only 3 readers.   Not completely dead, I've been feeling more guilty as time goes on and I don't update, or at least point to where I am actually doing stuff.  Basically now that I've been working at Left of the Dot and my commute went down by about 2 hours a day I've been able to ramp up my photography business (well, "business" not in the terms of making any money, more "business" in the sense of taking up extra time (and being damn fun)). So you can go over and check out the Bailward Photography.com site and see the site, or check out the Bailward Photography Blog to see various pictures of mostly cute young ladies (hopefully) nicely lit up and posed. I'm trying to create a bit more "real content" there in terms of capturing what I've been doing in moving from amateur photographer to slightly-above amateur photographer.

I've also been (kinda) active over on twitter if you want to check me out at @alanbailward. Not much of interest there for the most part, but random tweets about photography and related things.

If you're interested in hiring me of course, or paying me gobs of money to take pictures of you, your family, friends, or more young ladies, feel free to let me know :)

Other than that, changing jobs, and having a horrible trip to Edmonton involving moving a horribly disorganized person up there, 32 hours in the hospital (don't ask), and breaking the truck we were driving back in on the Coquihalla, in a no cell service area at 1am, things have been pretty much status quo.

So hit the new blog, I will update here if anything interesting, it'll come here, eventually.

Ok, now I feel better.

Well, this morning marked the second day, and start of the first "real" week of work at my new job at Left of the Dot.  So far so good, though not without some griping and minor failures on my part.  The latter mostly came this morning.  See, right now I have no shower (another long story there for another post) so my brilliant plan has been to wake up in the morning the same time I did for the old job (with the earlier starting time), go to the gym (yay fitness), shower there, then catch the later train out and show up in the office at the required time, everything happy happy.

So this morning I got into a panic at the gym seeing that I was majorly late, and raced like a maniac to shower and get home, then back down to the train station just in time to catch the train, only to realize (after some time I'm ashamed to admit) that I had taken the train in that I did normally, which got me into Vancouver an hour and a half earlier than I need to.  I guess my brain is so programmed to be at the train station at a certain time that it needs some serious re-training to get my timing down with the new schedule.

The rest of it is good so far.  There was the "getting to know you" and "here's how stuff works" day, and now we're getting to the point that myself and the two other newbies are able to start looking at how to get some actual work done.  Exciting and new.

Hows this for a blast from the past:

All comments: help@counter.li.org

Your record was created: 1999-04-23 05:07:09
Person info last modified: 2006-03-12 08:33:53

//PERSON
name: Alan
usage: Home, work
started: 1998
homepage: http://arcterex.net/blog/

//MACHINE 52939
cpu: Pentium 75
# Interpreted as Pentium/75
disk: 2000
memory: 48
network: Ethernet
source: debian.org
distribution: Debian
country: CA
accounts: 3
users: 1
purpose: WWW server, File server
# Interpreted as File server, WWW server
sysclass: workstation
mailer: smail, Smail 3.2.0.102


[Some entries highlighted for interest]

Wow, P75 with 48mb of RAM and a 2G hard drive, that's some smoking machine. Course, that 1999 entry was created a good 5 years after I started using Linux.

Two starkly different experiences with customer service today.