Dishwasher

My dishwasher is murderous scum. This past Saturday, upon returning home from a magical adventure through the land of the frosh (slang for freshman), I was notified by one of my house-mates that the dishwasher needed to be run. This being student housing, the dishwasher isn’t actually attached to any pipes in the wall. To run the dishwasher, one must first answer these riddles three:

1. If an oxidized piece of tellurium is to a leather coat from the 1960’s, then what is to a slightly narcissistic, sociopathic young adult with a Napoleon Complex?
2. If the red button makes the water leave, what makes the water stay?
3. As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. The seven wives had seven sacks, the seven sacks had seven cats, and the seven cats had seven kits. Kits, cats, sacks, and wives, how many were going to St. Ives?

After trying the second riddle of the three first and failing miserably, I became drenched in hot tap water. Having made the grave mistake of turning the dishwasher on before completing the riddles three, the pump started to try to pull water through the valve, which was assumed to be attached to a water source. It was not attached to a water source. It was sitting at the bottom of the sink sideways, spraying tap water all over the place. The water pump was now pulling air which, as you might imagine, angered the almighty god of chaos and war, Apophis. Apophis descended from Duat with a score to settle, and commanded the dishwasher of doom to heat up and make angry noises until I unplugged it. Still soaked and not thinking straight, I reached for the plug with dripping wet hands. I don’t quite remember what happened next, all I know is there was a bang, a buzzing feeling in my arms and legs, and a rapid change in my location relative to the plug. At least the angry noises stopped and Apophis returned to the hole from whence he came.

Angry noises and warm pumps now dealt with, I stood up. I turned off the tap, and moved Dishwasher of Doom back to its resting place near the stairs. Still dazed and confused by my encounter with Apophis, I retired to my room, where I would change out of my warm and soaked clothes and decide that I will never try to use the dishwasher again.

I have had an idea…

I need to get some stickers printed which read ‘Voice Activated! Just say “Paper towel, please!”‘ and stick them on paper towel dispensers everywhere.

One screen to rule them all, One screen to find them, One screen to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

‘Twas the night before the sixth, when all through the house,
Not a person was stirring, not even a mouse.
My clothing was hung in the closet with care,
In hopes that the wrinkles would ne’er be there.

The Simon was nestled in Aaron’s old bed,
While visions of computer screens danced in his head.
And Windows in its ‘kerchief, and it in its cap,
Had just halted their drives, for a nice comfy nap.

When out in the shaft there arose such a clatter,
It sprang from its rest to see what was the matter.
Away to the screen it flew like a flash,
Tore open the pixels, and threw up a hash.

The screen lighting bring the mirror-filled room,
Gave the luster of news, to the quite empty room.
When, what to its wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature crash, and a message so clear.

With a little old driver, so deathly and slow,
It knew in the moment it was time to go.
More horrid than zombies, and viruses too,
What happened to it? I haven’t a clue.

 

Of the three elevators I use on a daily basis, there’s one that seems to control the rest. Two of them crash all the time. If computer (it) 1 crashes, both the other two do as well. If computer 2 crashes, the other two are fine.

The elevators also frequently make this horrible sound of two pieces of metal crashing together. It’s alarming every time it happens.

The poem only kind of makes sense to me, but whatever. Take from it what you will. The moral of the story is that sometimes Linux crashes, and with it takes the elevators. I think it may have something to do with Dexter.

On the topic of Dexter, it’s been acting up again. It works when I want it to, but also sometimes when I most definitely don’t want it to. It just turns on on its own sometimes. I’ll be sitting in the bathroom, definitely on my own, and it’ll just randomly turn on for a split second. Not sure why. Might be being controlled by it.

Compost.

Here at LoyaltyOne, we take great pride in damn near everything from our cafeteria being compostable. The forks, plates, napkins, spoons, knives, you name it. Odds are it goes in the compost bin. I think it’s great that we do that. We’re producing less waste this way. The real issue comes from what bins they give us at our desks. Sitting beside me I have a blue recycling bin approximately the size of a smallish desktop computer with a tiny little black garbage bin hanging off the side of it. Both of these bins have fairies which come by and empty them daily for me and it’s great. I don’t have a compost bin. Both of my bins are clearly labelled “Recycling” and “Garbage”, so I can’t put my compost in either of them. Why, pray tell, do I not have a compost bin? If you’re going to give me all this stuff that goes in the compost, would it not also make sense to give me a bin for it?

I also don’t have a little plastic cover for my cubicle name tag, so the piece of paper falls out occasionally.

I don’t reread these before I post them, so have fun.

For the following statement, the singular shall include the plural and the plural shall include the singular, and “or” is inclusive, functioning the same way as the logical OR operator.

I hereby dismiss any and all liability for any and all errors in the above text. “Error” includes a grammatical error of any kind, a sentence which does not make sense (“sentence” includes a sentence which is grammatically correct or a sentence which is grammatically incorrect), a sentence which is misleading, or any other kind of sentence which any party reading the above text deems to be nonsensical, confusing, or erroneous in any way.

The Right-hand Side Sink

Over the past month or so that I’ve been here, I noticed that the sink on the right in the washroom on my floor, let’s call it Dexter, doesn’t work. Dexter has never worked. Not since my first day here. I assumed that Dexter had simply not been fully assembled yet, seeing as my floor is a recent addition to LoyaltyOne’s cubicle space (it used to be used for conferences only). I went about my days using the sink on the left, let’s call it Sinister, without much of a care in the world for Dexter. For a week, as you all know, I was the only one on this floor. During that week I had been given no reason to believe that Dexter would ever work. Over the following weeks, people began to trickle onto my floor. At first there was maybe a dozen of us. Now there’s more — almost two dozen. We’re all still very quiet, though. Usually the only sound is the clickity clack of people typing and clicking away at their day’s work. Of course, as the 12^th floor population increased, so did the odds of me using the bathroom at the same time as somebody else. This did and does not bother me. It does, however, bring me to how I learned Dexter’s secret. Dexter does, in fact, work. Dexter works very well – if not better than Sinister. I realized this when I went to wash my hands after lunch the other day and found that somebody else was there doing just the same, but using Dexter. I thought no more of it than “Oh! Isn’t that nice. Maintenance has gone and made Dexter work.” Later that day I tried to use Dexter, only to find that it didn’t work. Dexter wouldn’t work for me. I thought that maybe the water to the sinks was off, so I tried Sinister. Sinister, being the consistent sink that it is, worked without a hiccup. I figured that maybe Dexter had broken again. Later that same day and several times in the following couple of days I saw Dexter working just fine for others, yet it never worked for me. I have determined that Dexter is a discriminatory sink and must be eliminated. I’m not yet sure how I’m going to eliminate it, but it must be done for the greater good.

Greetings from the 12th floor of 438 University Avenue

It’s been a rather long while since I’ve posted up here and I’m sorry about that. This is a terrible excuse, but the entire Roman Empire tried to sell me vacuum cleaners and it really made it hard for me to post.

I’m just starting my second week here at LoyaltyOne (the people who run Air Miles). I’m working as an SQA Analyst (Software testing) for the summer. This means I’m going to spend my summer making sure the upgrades and new features and such for the Air Miles website and program work. If nobody did my job, everything would be a horrible, fiery mess of angry customers, broken software, and error messages that were wrong. It’s not a terribly exciting or glamorous job, but I like it and it’s paying me well so I can’t really complain.

Hope you’re all enjoying this wonderfully warm weather…

End of term concert

This evening I played my trumpet in the concert held at the end of every term by the University of Waterloo Concert Band Club. It was a lot of fun! We played Amparito Roca, Perthshire Majesty, Kaze No Mai, and Puszta. Next year I’ll be playing my bass guitar for the club. I’m very excited!

I’ve found a summer job!

I found out at 16:00 on Monday, sorry I haven’t gotten around to posting it up here. I’ve been fairly busy with paperwork and such. I’ll be working with LoyaltyOne (the people responsible for Air Miles) at their office at University & Dundas in Toronto. They’re right on top of St. Patrick Station, they have a subsidized cafeteria (yay cheap/free lunch!), a fitness centre, a games room, and some other things I’ve probably forgotten about. I have no idea where I’ll be living yet, but there was an old offer from Uncle Sandy to stay with him for a few months (I’ve sent him an email to which he has yet to reply) that I’d like to take up. My work term is from May 9th to August 30th.

Some updates

Over the last week or so there have been lots of changes to my job application statuses — you can see them on my job application statuses page. To summarize the interesting part, I’ve gotten two more interviews, one of which was today and the other of which is tomorrow afternoon. The one today was for a web development job with my school’s Co-Op Career Centre, and the one tomorrow is for a QA position with a company called Sugar CRM located in Cupertino, California.

I’ll find out on Friday at 16:00 if I got any job offers. Seeing as it’s fairly difficult to get a job on your first co-op term, I’m just going to take whatever I get if I get only one offer. If I get multiple offers, I’ll obviously weigh the options. If I take a job at the University, I get to live in one place for a full year (I have two consecutive school terms right after this co-op term). If I take a job in Toronto (Loyalty One), I can live with my Uncle in North York and commute down every day. If I take a job in Cupertino, I have to move myself all the way down to California for four months. That said, California is really nice and I want to go. Not to mention that the American employers tend to pay considerably better than the Canadian employers.

On a different but not unrelated note, I found out the other day that starting salaries at big companies for computer science graduates is around $90,000 per year, plus shares in the company. I get this information from my friend, Matthew, who is graduating this term and has been flying all over North America for job interviews. He’s had one with Google and one with Arista Networks, both of which gave him offers. I don’t remember what Arista’s starting salary was, but Google’s was $95,000 plus 135 shares in the company (Arista’s was a little less than that, but more shares).

Updates

I have made some small updates to both the Course Schedule page and the Job Application Status page. On the Course Schedule page, I updated the first work term section to reflect my current job search progress, and I update the Job Application Status page to reflect some recent responses from a couple of companies.