work – Whatsittwoya

Office Lounge

During recent employment in the HVAC industry, the company I was working for had a slow period during the spring which resulted in not much work coming in through the front door. I happen to be a carpenter, so I was asked if I would mind building office walls for the company to make up the time (and get a full 40 for the week instead of sit at home).

Sure, why not… It had been some time since I had worked, having spent the first 4 months of the year at NAIT getting a gasfitting ticket, and now, finally employed in the field, I still needed another 300 or so hours to complete the apprenticeship portion of the ticket. I could care less if it was doing HVAC or stapling flyers, I wanted the ticket finished and on the wall – so yes. I’ll do that. Read more “Office Lounge” →

At Home

Rack attack!!

Yes, here comes the tale of the inevitable, the essential, and long awaited upgrade of our home network to relative industry standard.

After many years, and unceremonious additions of a gigabit switch and router, I’ve finally gathered the needed ingredients for a substantial upgrade across the majority of the network. Now, I didn’t get stupid about it by sticking in 10GBE switches and the like, but rather I cast an eye towards future proofing the setup for the next ten years or so.

The first on the list was an upgrade to my current NAS, a Synology DS212+, which had served me well (pun intended) for a decade. It began life here with 2TB drives, which soon filled up and were replaced with 2 – 6TB drives. These were installed without protection as JBOD (just a bunch of discs), were approaching capacity, and beginning to throw minor errors in their health check, so I knew time was running out. Also, as I learned, I had begun to call on it for much more over the year (eg. this site) and while the DS212+ was great for serving video, it was only ‘able’ to do everything else. Read more “Rack attack!!” →

At Home

Everywhere a Sign

My neighbor enlisted me to build the sign for his storefront. Rather unusual as far a projects go, it didn’t seem beyond my ability in any way, so I went ahead with it. The cost of regularly sourcing a business sign is high, as is everything business related, so given the current market conditions, this seemed like a nice way to give a leg up in an otherwise difficult area.

The logo is rather simple, or so it looks at first. What he wanted was the letters cut out and mounted to the surface so that all the lettering was raised 3/4″. Most commercial signs have letters 2 or 3 inches tall, or greater, but this is the budget option. For this I needed the sign printed out, and after a preliminary look at getting it done here, I handed the task back to him to wrestle with, and after a few days he supplied me with two rolls of lettering from a 36″ printer he had just bought.

Better him than me, because those printers are a fortune and, if not used regularly, will plug up and encounter all sorts of maintenance problems the cheap desktop printers just don’t have. I’d have gone to a print shop myself, but whatever.

Although there are only three colours here, the first thing I noticed was the black background, which is problematic at best, and in general, just a pain in the ass to work with. At first, he wanted to use flat black, which I argued strongly against, as that is just what a chalk board is made of.

At Home

Charger Boards

In the last week all my orders from China have arrived. According to the tracking #’s, all of them actually arrived in Canada in early May, but were delivered within the last three days of their extended delivery times due to the so called ‘pandemic’. Today is August 1st. Politics is the more likely reason for the delay, but I digress.

Two of those orders were 10 battery holders, and 10 battery TP4056 charger boards for 18650 batteries, which are the type you find in laptop batteries when you take them apart. You can do all sorts of things with these batteries, but only once you have a way to recharge them.

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.