resistance to persistence

This weekend is moving day. Not for me, but for my fiancee. The wedding is soon and she’s moving in. I just realized last night that it was my last night of living on my own, hopefully for the rest of my life. I’ll never be living alone ever again. I’m interested to see how my living habits change. I predict I’m going to have to become less of a night owl. We have somewhat opposite schedules. She has to get up early to drive to her job, so she gets up much earlier than I could even think about waking up at. Working at the typical software company, I’m thankful that my hours are pretty relaxed and most people aren’t at work until around 9:30 or 10. I think I’ll probably end up going to bed earlier and getting up earlier, which might be a smart move now that fall/winter is on the way and I hate leaving work in pitch black. Just makes the days seem so short.

Hopefully she doesn’t have much problems adjusting to an admitted anal-retentive neat freak. We’ve had this discussion many times and I’ve been working hard to curb my standard retentive impulses. I’m sure they’ll dull over time and hopefully she’ll adjust a bit closer to my ways as I move towards hers and we’ll level out with a nice balance.

The Pragmatic Programmers have a powerpoint slideshow about ways to keep your job. As software developers, there are a few impending problems with trying to stay in this profession. i) constantly changing environment with new languages, etc ii)overseas outsourcing. The last one scares the heck outta me and this powerpoint has some suggestions on how to minimize your risk.

If you think you’re not getting paid enough and are poor, check out where you rank in the world. Go to globalrichlist.com, punch your salary into this site and you’ll see where you are relative to the world’s population. Scary to see that even if you think you’re not doing so well, you might just be in the top 1% of the world’s richest. Read about it at Wired. Here’s a scary fact - “The world’s 225 richest people now have a combined wealth of $1 trillion. That’s equal to the combined annual income of the world’s 2.5 billionpoorests people”.

My camera (Fuji Finepix 3800) has finally arrived! It took a while to get here (about 40 days) but it’s finally here. I bought it on eBay and the first one that was shipped was lost somewhere along the way and never showed up. Luckily I bought insurance from the seller and after 30 days, he claimed the loss with USPS and shipped me another one.

I had been eyeing this camera for a while, but felt the price was still too high. Local shops were selling it for $650 CDN (I see it’s just come down to 599 now). I bid on this from a closeout sale on all factory sealed never used units. After converting to US greenbacks and paying for shipping, it cost me $525 CDN. Saved me over $220. Well worth the wait, I’ll say.

I wanted a digital camera to help me develop my film photography skills. With my Nikon SLR, I can’t afford to take as many photos as I’d like to learn to take better photos - it’s so expensive to develop rolls and rolls of film. I need to be able to experiment with shots to see what works and what doesn’t. I would love to get a digital SLR, but they’re way too expensive and I already have a SLR. The FinePix 3800 has some decent manual settings and a great 6x zoom so this will hopefully give me some of the feel of a SLR, without paying the big price.

I went for a walk to the Distillery district and shot about 60 photos. Interested to see what turned out well. Eventually the good stuff will turn up on photos.blainekendall.com.

MSN Messenger comes preinstalled on WinXP. For those who don’t use MSN at all or use different software for IM, MSN stays there taking up memory and tray space. I’ve seen lots of convoluted ways to remove it, but this one is the easiest. Remember to shut down Outlook, Outlook Express and exit MSN Messenger from the system tray before doing this easy step.