The ArcterJournal

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.

Been doing a lot of "Strobist" stuff lately, the shot to the right is of the beautiful Terra-Jean whom I had the honor of shooting a couple of weekends ago at a meetup.com gathering of photographers, led by Chris Pike. Great time was had and I got some great shots if you hit that image's link and wander in and out of the flickr stream. I'm fairly proud of this shot as well of my coworker Cory, not because it's a great lit image (not that it's bad), but that it's all mine, in execution and gear.

Today is also a day I'm not at work because I get to get a tooth taken out. Sucky thing is it's a fairly prominent tooth, broken in grade 3 in a fall on the playground which has apparently decided to finally die and give me some issues. I would really rather not do this, if for no other reason than that it's my tooth dammit, but looking at myself in the mirror this morning that tooth is clearly grey and different than the others around it, so I don't feel as bad.

Well, it took it's time, but it's finally here (at least for a bit). We were sitting watching the new (and excellent) Sherlock BBC series when we looked out the window and what appeared to be snowballs were falling from the sky. Turns out it was just snow in huge flakes though. Grabbed my Pentax and took a few shots (here). Glad I have the weather sealing because the big flakes had a lot of water in them. Nothing special, but wanted to record that the snow (finally) arrived. Course, I have a feeling it'll be gone by tomorrow morning, no matter what the weather report says!

So it was the power supply, and I didn't have to resort to spending a ton of money (well, yet anyway).  After installing the new power supply, and finding the solution to my next problem (the system running super-slow with 4 1G sticks of RAM) - installing a BIOS update, everything is back to normal now.  I've got 64bit Windows 7 running well, am busily re-installing all my apps and copying data around, and have installd VMWare and have Ubuntu installed to hopefully check the feasibility of using that as an alternative to a second physical machine on the floor.

Oh, and Merry Christmas to my 3 readers :)