Another thing I like…

After the mini-rant in my last post about the mess that Vivaldi’s sync engine made out of the notes, bookmarks, and saved passwords I had sprinkled about my various devices, I set out to finally do something about it, lest I get called a whinger.

First I logged out of ‘sync’ on all the Vivaldi installs I could find, – dual boot machines, and mobile — both stable and snapshot versions — and purged all but one completely. I then, with careful discrimination, went over the remaining install to be used as a base to rebuild the others from. However…. upon signing into sync again, my shortcuts, notes, saved logins and passwords were once again polluted!

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At Home

Of the things I like..

Vivaldi Browser:

A browser for our friends.

I first heard about Vivaldi browser through a chat board several years ago. I really can’t remember exactly, but someone put up a link, I gave it a try, and I was immediately confused… The myriad of configuration options, the new and unheard of features, the entirely different layout… It was overwhelming, but not enough to dissuade me.

At the time I was interested in other browsers simply because Firefox – whom I had been using for many years – was beginning to incorporate changes I just didn’t like which were annoying enough to me to cause me to look. Regardless of specifics, they were turning up the ‘suck’, right around the time Vivaldi browser came out.

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At Home

The Switch-over

My home network has evolved over time, in fits and spurts, into the less than simple cabling adventure that exists throughout the house today. Mine is mostly hard-wired, as I prefer the reliability of cabled networks, wherever possible, over the slew of wireless devices, of various capabilities and drawbacks, sprinkled about the corners of most living arrangements.

Pulling the cable from room to room and arranging it in a way that doesn’t offend the eye takes a degree of effort and foresight, which develops only as hindsight, so what you see tucked unobtrusively into the ceiling tiles in my basement, has been done, and re-done, then done again, with each effort to better results. There is lots to learn, not the least of which is how to build a professional looking cable, of which there are only now a few.

As the network grew, I eventually came up against the hard wall of capacity. What started with the 4 ports on the back of my router, and became 4 + 8 with a Netgear switch, are now all full, and replaced with a 24 port D-Link switch. The problem, of course, was how to shoe-horn that into the space without having to completely renovate the entire project from scratch.

At Home

Why I No Longer Work for Pratts

A little while ago, about a month and a half, I took a job with Pratts Food Service loading their trucks at the Pizza 73 warehouse on 137th Ave. They load in Calgary, ship to Edmonton via semi, where they “cross-dock” with Pizza 73, breaking it into routes and delivering it in 5 ton body-jobs to Edmonton and area.

I loaded trucks for two weeks, long enough to say “this had better lead to something else soon… ” when a driving job came available as one of their drivers found a better job.

For a variety of reasons I wanted to try something different other than construction, and this certainly fit that role. Food service is recession proof and they seemed to be growing, so job security was what I had in mind. Additionally, the job was less than 10 minutes from my home, and while the pay wasn’t very good, $22/hr, I didn’t care at first. The job was simple – drive a 5 ton and deliver food. Boy, was I naive.

The first problem was the lack of training. Being the new guy, I was given the downtown route – busy, congested, with lots of little nooks and crannies difficult to get in and out of, and road closures all over the place. To ready me for this I spent a week and a day with the driver doing that route, covered less than a quarter of the stops within it, and was then thrown to the wolves.

At Home

The Laundry Room Re-Visited

It’s been quite a while…. but I’ve returned to finish the job in the basement.

One of the nagging complaints about it was the still un-tiled portion of the laundry room, which was under the water tank and to the base of the furnace. It was one of those jobs that annoyed me every time I thought about it because tiling that portion of the floor was the easy part of the job.

Really, it was. I probably could have done this a long time ago (definitely), but a thousand bad excuses prevented me from doing so. Poor little me didn’t want to go without hot water for even a day (which was actually the extent of it), and I knew I’d have to turn off the gas to the tank… so I should wait until summer so the furnace isn’t needed, right? Read more “The Laundry Room Re-Visited” →