Pender’s Fabulous Journal of Random Stuff and Things!!!!

I renamed the blog since it no longer has anything to do with hollywood whatsoever, since like, we’s brokt up and all. Doubt this’ll be the permanent name. Will maybe change the url but keep this one as a redirect to the new one, whenever it’s made.

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Fallout 3

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General

— Pender @ 10:28:06

Looking forward to this coming out!

Planet Fallout

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Open Letter to Anyone Who Finds This Blog

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General

— Pender @ 19:38:40

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

That is all.

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New J0rb!

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General

— Pender @ 13:27:20

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

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Someone Hire Me! even though I’m a jerk.. Part Deux

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— Pender @ 11:13:08

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?

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“NO SLEEP FOR YOU” says the sleep nazi pill

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— Pender @ 15:44:47

I found this article on New Scientist from last year. It’s quite interesting, talking about sleep and pills that make you asleep or awake. Mostly I found it interesting because there’s some magic pill you can take that lets you feel like you got a full night’s sleep in 4 hours.

SO MUCH to do, so little time. Between a hectic work schedule and a thriving social life, Yves (not his real name), a 31- year-old software developer from Seattle, often doesn’t have time for a full night’s sleep. So he swallows something to make sure he doesn’t need one. “If I take a dose just before I go to bed, I can wake up after 4 or 5 hours and feel refreshed,” he says. “The alarm goes off and I’m like, let’s go!”

Yves is talking about modafinil, a stimulant that since its launch seven years ago has acquired a near-mythical reputation for wiring you awake without the jitters, euphoria and eventual crash that come after caffeine or amphetamines. Yves has been popping modafinil on and off for the past three years and says it is “tremendously useful”. “I find I can be very productive at work,” he says. “I’m more organised and more motivated. And it means I can go out partying on a Friday night and still go skiing early on Saturday morning.”

I’m just thinking about how many MORE games I could play during the course of a day if I didn’t have to sleep for so long! Lately I’ve been sleeping for 10-12 hours a day and wake up still tired. Not quite sure why, maybe just catching up from all those sleep deprived nights playing WoW (which I quit last week).

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Stupid Things I Think About

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— Pender @ 17:53:22

Hollywood’s in Saint John visiting her momma and sister and various assorted other relatives and non-relatives, which gives me lots of time to think. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is fires. I’ve recently become a little paranoid of house fires, no real reason for it, I just think it would be freakin’ awful to lose everything we have.

So I checked it out, fire needs 3 things: oxygen, heat and a combustible source (such as wood, propaine, humans or cats). So my thinking is that if you get rid of oxygen, you get rid of the fire. Similar to how a fire extinguisher works, it’s this stuff you spray out that’s really cold and sucks up all the oxygen. That’s great, for small fires, what if you have a fire that’s already engulfed a room? You dump truckloads of water into the room.. Great, so now you have all your stuff burnt AND waterlogged.

So I’ve been working on a mechanism to put out house fires by sucking all the oxygen out of the building. It’s similar in concept to how a computer runs, you have this CPU that’s generating all this massive amount of heat, so you throw a heatsink on it, and a fan on top of that that blows air away from it, then you have fans all around the perimeter of your case shooting all the air in the case out (except 1 intake fan). In relation to a house, one way I was thinking about was somehow getting a blue tarp like thing (something a little less flammable than a normal blue tarp) around the building, then sucking the air out of the tarp with a few large fans around the perimeter. The problem I see with this is getting a tarp that is non-flammable enough to be able to put onto a burning house. Also getting the entire thing onto the house super fast (aside from using rockets) would be difficult.

So my latest evil fire suppressing idea is to get portable fans, one for each window. The fans are are sitting on the ground attached to a tube with a square window sized attachment. A person would put the window attachment over the window (it would have something on it to break the window) and this would let the fans suck the air out of the house.

Fire Idear

Of course, you’d have to guarantee that there are no humans or other living creatures that you want to keep living running around inside your house, like rats or cockroaches.

Obviously fans aren’t high-tech enough, we’d have to use some sort of pump that would suck the air out of the house within seconds, rather than minutes. With no oxygen the fires should die quickly, and sucking all the air out would also get rid of most of the heat.

Now don’t go stealin’ me wonderful idear!

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Driving Nutbags

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General

— Pender @ 10:39:35

Since moving to lower sackville/halifax I’ve encountered a lot of crazed drivers. This morning I met the worst one yet. Allow me to regale you with a tale of madness.

Driving home from the gym at about 9am there was a truck stopped on the road with his indicators on to turn left into tim hortons. At this part of the road there is an extra paved shoulder so that cars aren’t stuck behind these people trying to get into tim hortons, so I went around the truck because I saw there was oncoming traffic and he wasn’t making a motion to go. Well there was this SUV coming out of the tim hortons parking lot, and he wasn’t waiting for any damn traffic to pass. He pulls out fast and almost rams into me as I was coming around the truck, I breaked and made sure he wasn’t going to hit me then I continued on. Well mr. coming out of tim hortons silver SUV was now FURIOUS with me! He was driving eratically, he accelerated and I thought he was going to ram me but he stopped inches away from my bumper, and he was weaving back and forth on the road as if he was going to pass me.. I continued on doing 50 in the 50 zone, and really was sort of expecting him to pass me cause I was clearly not going fast enough. We come to an intersection where I turn left and he continued straight, and he passed me and glared at me and mouthed something (not sure what it was, but it was probably not polite). As he was driving away I gave him the finger (he was a good 2 car lengths ahead of me when I did this, so he must have been watching me in his mirror). Mr. coming out of tim hortons silver SUV sees this and immediately breaks and pulls into a shop and turns around, I continued down my road and went home, backing into my driveway. I saw mr. tim hortons truck drive down my street with his head over his steering wheel looking for the evil, evil me, but I don’t think he saw me. I went into the house and a few moments later I saw him stopping and going in front of the house, I guess he was deliberating killing me and Hollywood and the cats and blowing up the entire evil neighbourhood with a propaine bomb. He didn’t stay long, I guess he had another stalking he had to get to.

So if we’re murdered in the next few days it was probably mr. coming out of tim hortons silver SUV, that killed us.

I shouldn’t have come right home, I should have just driven around for 20 mins or so. ugh

I’m soooooo glad I moved to Canada’s Detroit.

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Pender’s Fabulous Journal of Random Stuff and Things!!!!

2009/3/9

Site Moving

2009/2/2

Ties That Strangle

2009/2/1

Site Rename

2008/10/22

Fallout 3

2008/1/29

Open Letter to Anyone Who Finds This Blog

2007/9/14

New J0rb!

2007/8/28

Someone Hire Me! even though I’m a jerk.. Part Deux

2007/3/20

“NO SLEEP FOR YOU” says the sleep nazi pill

2007/3/18

Stupid Things I Think About

2007/3/5

Driving Nutbags

November 2009
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