Easter

Bunny Butt!!!!!

Rabbit hanging out in my back yard Thursday morning, just in time for easter.

A pair of Black-capped Chicadees

Ever since the mis-identification all I see is black-capped chickadee's in bois the liesse.

One pissed off wife is all it takes

I've written about this before and I really feel sorry for the poor British woman who's in jail in Abu Dhabi at the moment for having dinner alone with a married man.  I hope that she doesn't end up spending several years in a Dubai jail before being deported. 

The sad part is that unless someone lodges a complaint it's unlikely you will be arrested for having dinner with someone or even drinking wine without a license. But once someone complains they are obliged to apply the law. I'm hoping they do modernize some of their laws.

Good site for bird identification

Most of the birds I run into around the woods, or around my house can be found here.  It helped me figure out the difference between the black-capped Chickadee and the white-breasted nuthatch.

Misidentified

Last week when I put up photos of the birds in Bois de Liesse, I had originally thought that a white-breasted nuthatch was a black-capped chickadee.  I've put photos of them side by side, they are different. What is amusing is that after mislabelling that bird, the only birds I have run across since have been black-capped chickadees :)

Black-Capped Chickadee

White-breasted Nuthatch

Black capped Chickadees

This feller flew around me a few times before settling near me in the ground. These are the closest bird photo's I've taken since I've been walking along the creek in Bois de Liesse.

Good news yesterday.

When I post, I usually talk about bad things. Today I'm going to talk about good things. I've had to help my boss with employee evaluations for my team and he also went through my evaluation.

I was amazed going on 21 years in this company, that I'm still seen as a great asset.  My boss said he wished he had several people as productive as I am and as gifted to find the problems with the things we test. He also said he wished he had more people with initiative who can work without supervision.

The things that had me amused, he said he can always count on me for doing things right the first time. Also that I'm very well organized. That's when I blurted out during our meeting that I had ADHD and he looked at me stunned, and said "Well then, you do very very well for yourself" :)

The 2 criticisms he had 1) The fact that I can be moody [But he added that I am far less moody then when he first started being my manager] 2) I don't embrace new things. It takes me a while to come around.  This is not new and is so related to ADHD.

Sadly it didn't amount to anything bigger then a 2% raise. [Most people got between 1-2% ] But if all I cared about was $$$ I would have left there a long time ago!

Walking on Ile aux Chats

Accessible from 5th avenue in Roxboro you can go take a walk on Ile aux chats, or Roxboro Island, depending on your map.

Birds of Bois de Liesse

downy woodpecker

 

 downy woodpecker

Mallards

White-breasted Nuthatch

Pileated Woodpecker

Pileated Woodpecker

Bois de Liesse

Now I remember why I don't hang out much in that park. 

Because the park keepers tend to be assholes. I lived 3 years on the edge of the park and sometimes I'd walk home through the park [could save a fair amount of time] but if it was past 11 pm and the park keepers saw me I'd get chased out because the park is closed from 11pm to 6am

Today I was told off for walking next to the ski trail. I wasn't actually walking in the trails that the skis made but next to it. I wasn't destroying the trails but I got told I wasn't allowed to walk there. 

THERE ARE NO FUCKING SIGNS THAT SAYS YOU CANNOT WALK ON THE SKI TRAILS. 

It ruined by walk, and the asshole was chain smoking.

It's been 26 years

It was 26 years ago today, that experienced childbirth for the first time. It was a long non-typical experience and when it was all over, it was 4:45 am at dawn on a Saturday, the first day of spring!

I still love the imagery the fact that my first born was born on the first day of spring at dawn. How's that for a first :)

Red footed Booby....

Bois de Liesse just before Spring....

So true....

Woodpecker

Walked in the forest and saw a woodpecker today. Despite taking half a dozen pictures I did not manage to get a really good one. This is the best.

Sinful pleasures.

Lately I've been enjoying dipping sauce for both my veggies and my eggs made out of mayonnaise and hot sauce :)

If I'm not making much I put a teaspoon of hot sauce, about 4 teaspoons of mayo. I grind some dried garlic and onions and put a touch of thyme. Mix everything, and voila yummy dipping sauce :) 

Cold sores

Apparently my stress levels haven't gone down, as I woke up this morning with a large festering cold sore on the edge of my right nostril. It's leaking and swelled up. Will not be pretty later today. And I didn't even blow my nose, like wtf? 

I have an intern that is really pissing me off. Other then the fact he pulled a fast one last week - he left at noon on Friday, didn't ask for permission, just said goodbye to colleagues near his desk and left at lunch time!  He also tried to put overtime on his  timesheet which despite fact interns cannot do overtime.  He's also ignored my direct orders and not run the tests I asked him to run, to debug a problem he found and I didn't want engineers to waste their time on.   I asked him to run a script overnight at 4:30 pm. Despite not leaving before 6pm he didn't manage to ask or run the test I asked him overnight.   Not to outdo himself, he did it again last night. Two days in a row. 

Sadly this poor intern is now in my cross hairs. I'm a great boss for people with motivation,and initiative, I give you a lot of latitude to do your thing.  Don't do something to blow my trust. Once it's blown I trust nothing you do or say. This student has managed to make it there with his mistakes the past 2 weeks. What did he did because his mid-term evaluation was good that it was a reason to start being a moron? Does he not realize that he's also getting evaluated at the end and I will not forget how he disobeyed direct instructions.

Wind8w and the corporate world

Windows 8 comes with 15 built in metro applications. Including Mail, which still goes to my hotmail and not the new Web Outlook, though I updated, and Messenger, which uses my MSN messenger contact list.  Aren't they killing Messenger and going with Skype?   That's neither here or there.  The Microsoft store, from which these Metro apps can be bought or updated is not proxy friendly or even proxy aware. As it goes, all 15 of those metro applications need updating already!

So how the heck do they expect these to get updated in a corporate environment? I was asked to test metro apps but I had to use my direct connect. I could not by-pass the proxy. The IT guy spent part of the afternoon in my test lab,  after having configured to open  my sub-net  to all accesses to the Microsoft store. He followed the instructions Microsoft had for IT professionals. It did not work at all.  And they can't open my subnet to everything, that's not secure!

This is really not going to deploy in large companies until it becomes more backwards compatible. Also all those metro apps that all run full screen? In the PC world we don't have just 1 display. Sometimes we even have 16 displays.  Running full screen doesn't seen all that intuitive.  Found an interesting article for running metro apps in windowed mode instead of being full screen all the time.

The Store in Windows 8 is poorly designed. There's no search that I could find. I could hate being on some tablet and have to go through pages and pages of tiles to find the app I want to install? In one category there is already close to 6000 apps. You can sort them by their price or if they are free.  But you can't search. We had to use a browser and then it found the app and launched the store and installed.

Even with open access to internet having metro apps install is slow process and you might have to kill the store over and over, because it seems once an app fails to install, it is in a weird state and until you restart the store app, it is stuck in no man's land.

Bois de Liesse at the end of Winter.

Cabin fever prevails

I think most people I know have cabin fever. Between the fact we haven't seen the sun for weeks, except maybe this Friday and Saturday, briefly, it's been snowing every day almost since the beginning of the year.

I love snow but this year I did not get enough sun during this winter.

Ok... Blogger is pissing me off. I'm sitting here typing and every couple of minutes it tells me

"We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request.When reporting this error to Blogger Support or on the Blogger Help Group, please:

• Describe what you were doing when you got this error.
• Provide the following error code.

bX-f4i3as This information will help us to track down your specific problem and fix it! We apologize for the inconvenience."

I'm not doing anything! Thank-you blogger for hijacking my entry, my thoughts and what I was going to write by your spam. Did I really need to be thrown this message while I was typing half a dozen times in less then 5 minutes?

Thank-you blogger for derailing my thoughts this morning.

roasted seaweed

Stumbled upon this gem at Costco. Yum... 

Train Bridge to Ile Bigras

Two wolves

Why bother having more then 1 employee?

I'm not sure what's up with the internship programs at the Universities, but none of them seem to understand that companies are not run by 1 person and that they have HR departments. For some reason the minute they cannot reach a person in HR, they call me. Like I work for HR?

I work in software quality assurance. Perhaps next time they call I will discuss about them the bugs I'm currently working on. I mean they call me to discuss stuff that is not part of my job description and then they are surprised that I don't want to talk to them. 

I get interns. I interview them, train them, work with them. I am not responsible for the hiring process or answering anything that is the perview of a HR department. I cannot even decide how many interns I am getting. That is all chosen by other people. 

So next time you can't reach someone in a company are you going to call the entire company and talk to everyone? It seems like the people who work at internships programs in Universities do. 

If I have to deal with the 10 universities that I might hire students from and take all their phone calls  and emails that would take up to 50% of my time. And it's not part of my job description. I'm not sure why they don't understand that. 

Next time one of them calls I will discuss in great depth whatever problem I'm having in QA at that point. When they tell me that's not part of their job, I'll tell them "Well I thought you called to discuss my QA issues, why else would someone call someone in QA? "

New Canadian

As of Wednesday this past week my Lebanese husband is now a Canadian. Hurray!

Also I haven't written it specifically but we have parted ways in 2012.  We did not make it to our 5th anniversary and there was a lot of pain at the end. However we're now in 2013 moving on and at least I know that we will go back to being good friends.  And I know I've done everything I can to help him find his way :)  I think what I miss the most since he left me is getting updates on how his mom is doing. But I'm a big girl I can contact her myself :)