Hollywood and Pender’s Fabulous Journal of Stuff We Done!!!!

Any of you a stirling engine expert? I want to make a bicycle that uses the temperature differences at the points of contact with the bike that would help propell the bike. Like, the temperature differences between your ass and the seat, your hands and the handlebars and the friction caused at the points of rotation. The more effort you put into moving the bike, the more of a temperature difference you create and the more help you get to move it. If it offered a lot of help then it would propell you faster, then the ambient temperature would be lower due to the wind and you’d be getting warmer from effort, causing a greater temperature difference and even more help. If we could all ride a bicycle around using half the effort it takes now that goes twice as fast, we wouldn’t need cars, we could ride a bike 80km/h to work and the only energy it would require is an apple.

Some caveats is that it has to be small enough to fit unobtrusively on a bicycle frame, weigh almost nothing, be super cheap and easy to construct and require almost no maintenance.

Yes, I’m the fail at updating this site.

That is all.

I did a search for “energy from salt water” and found this story about a guy who subjected salt water to radio waves and it made the water burn. I wonder how much energy it takes to make the radio waves. If it’s less than the output of the heat from the burning process, potentially it’d be free energy (more energy output than what you put in). I would think that the energy from a test tube getting to 3000 degrees would be more energy than it takes to output radio waves. Although they say it’s unlikely as a cheap source of energy, I still think it’s neato and I would invest all my life savings into this technology, if I had any (life, or savings).

Here’s the story from National Geographic.

Here’s a youtube video of the burninating water.

This is pretty funny, even if you don’t play the game it’d be ok.
http://www.nextlevelarcade.com/play/games/World-of-Warcraft-raid-leader-goes-totally-apeshit

At work, I checked a lotto ticket and it failed to win so I threw it in the garbage. The garbage cleaner guy (who looks like one of those creepy serial killer types) picked it up out of the garbage, looked at it for a while, saw that I hadn’t circled all the numbers on a single line, and threw it back into the garbage. Tomorrow if I don’t win I’m gonna circle them all on one line and see if he puts it into his pocket and just walks away.. or runs.

Today is my last day at Keane, on monday I start at CGI. Yay! Although it’s still not in Newfoundland, boo.

Good thing too, I was sent this news release by a buddy today:
Lots of Bad stuff with Keane

I had a couple of interviews at a company in newfoundland but I guess they hate me, cause I ain’t hired yet. It seemed like a good job and I was actually quite interested in it after talking to the owners of the company. Bummer that nothing came of it.

I had another meet/greet/technical interview with a different company in newfoundland, but I won’t hear back from them for probably a week. The job sounds good, but challenging with like 8 different technologies all mish-mashed into one. I’m usually the one that gets stuck with these weird applications wherever I go, so I’d probably get really good at it really fast.

A couple of weeks ago I was called by a local company (not in newfoundland) and basically went through the meet ‘n greet interview with the recruiter. The job sounds really good, it’s all development work (which is what I’m looking for) and it’s at the same company as me buddy gimpenstein. The recruiter called back and has set up a technical interview with the tech lead on wednesday. Sounds like a java application, but my role would be the unix/oracle backend guy. Sounds like fun, I had a couple of roles like that during my stead at Oao. They talked about maybe hiring me for contract work, paying me lots more, for 6 month contracts. If I’m the only backend guy I’d totally love to be contract, obviously they couldn’t get rid of me if I was the only one working that role. Would be awesome.

The stressfulest part about it all is that two companies are considering me for jobs simultaneously. If I get hired on with the local one, I don’t want the one in newfoundland to also want to hire me 3 days later. So really my biggest concern is: what happens if I say I’ll go to this other local company, but I get another job offer 3 days later, can I just say “nah, changed my mind” without any fallout, other than maybe a bad experience for the recruiters at the local company? I mean, this other company in newfoundland, where I want to go, pays decently and has the best benefits I’ve ever heard of in the industry (and they’d pay 100% of what it costs to get me there). So I’d definitely go there.

Either way I ain’t staying with my current job. So what do I do? Hold out with my current job and hope for the newfoundland thing, or go to the other local company, and if I get the newfoundland job just quit there right away?

I just went on Shoutcast and noticed that in the Genre dropdown there is a new option: emo. I can’t actually connect to any of the stations at work, but I figure that’s ok, cause it would just make for a really emotional day at work. I just think it’s funny that whinerbitching is a genre. When I get home I’ll have to give it a good listen, for the purposes of comedy.

Ok, so that last post was sorta.. harsh. I’ve been rather angry lately. We’ve got no money and we’re wasting away in this crappy mini-Detroit city. I really don’t like it here. However my main problem with my life is my job, I can’t stand it.

Last week I worked an INSANELY stressful 80 hour week. I was so stressed that by Thursday I started feeling sick, then by Saturday I was really, really sick. Didn’t stop me from having to put in 16 hours overtime on the weekend though! The company’s policy is that if you work overtime you’re paid 1.5x your salary per hour, except our team. On our team we have to take time off at 1:1, except that everyone’s so stressed that if someone takes time off it makes it exponentially worse for everyone else on the team. I have so much time built up that I get bitched at to take time off, then I get bitched at if I take time off. Another problem is that they come to me and say “we need this massive code change by tomorrow”, so I work my ass off and try to get it done (with no supplied test files of course, just stuff I have to cobble together myself) and manage to get it in the next day. Surprise, surprise there were bugs in it. Normally this isn’t really a problem when an insane request like that is made and there’s a bug, but on this team it’s like the sky is falling! About 6 levels of management are asking why it happend. Gee, I dunno, maybe cause you kept it under your hat for the last month that this other team was making a massive code change and that it would be installed tomorrow and has a giant impact on our system. But really it’s my fault for introducing a bug. Bad me.. bad.

I’ve submitted resumes to various companies in Newfoundland over the last month or so. No real bites yet or anything substantial. I hope they don’t find my blog, they’d just think I’m an asshole who likes to cry about the company he works for and swear at the government.

Pulling up the weeds in my weed garden (leaving nothing but dirt) is rough. For some reason the entire front lawn is almost completely weeds (we bought the house like that not knowing what a pain in the ass it is to fix). Today I de-weeded it for 3 hours and I’m maybe 1/4 to 1/3 done. I need to look up proper de-weeding technique because I found that often the damned weeds would break away from their roots, which I know means that the stupid weed will grow back (which they learned from starfish, weeds of the sea). I did read that de-weeding after rain is a good time to do it because the ground isn’t as hard so the weeds don’t break off as much. Nice.

I know Halifax has some stupid rule about no pesticides or some bullshit like that so I started investigating some handy dandy tools (other than screwdriver) to help make the job easier. I found the following: Infra-Weeder Dandy-Destroyer That’s EXACTLY what I need, a propane powered weed burninator. That’s definitely going on the xmas wishlist. Nothing says lawncare like a tool that burns your weeds at 1000 degrees celcius.

I’ll outline my (lack of) technique and all you wonderful readers, both of ya, can give me pointers.
1. I have about a foot long screwdriver that I jam into the ground near the weed. Sometimes I put it in at an angle toward the weed and sometimes I just jam it straight down.
2. Start tugging at the weed then either start wiggling the screwdriver, or trying to leverage the weed up a bit with the screwdriver.
3. Pull until it either it comes out whole, partially or breaks off completely making me dig more with the screwdriver.

I have about a 10% success rate in pulling the entire damn weed up without it breaking off. Sometimes it breaks right at the joint between the greens and the root, which means I get to tug at the root some more and get maybe another 2 inches. Sometimes the screwdriver breaks the root I think and cuts it off at about the halfway point. So what’s the best way to do this?

The worst part about it is that when you’re de-weeding your garden it’s called “weeding the garden”.. Man that sucks.