Another busy (and fruitful) week

March 26, 2006 by paul
Filed under: Uncategorized

Last Sunday wasn’t too busy – we watched the Malaysian Grand Prix.

Monday started (as most of my Mondays do) with following up people from the previous week: the PMP training course, a couple of recruiters and a company who were interested in my résumé. Once that was all done, I headed over to Andy’s for a few hours of Halo

Tuesday I had a second interview with a publishing company. The job sounds interesting (albeit a slight diversion from what I’ve done in the past) and I think the interview with the VPs went pretty well.

I’d arranged with my ex-boss to meet up for lunch on Wednesday so after chasing up more agencies I headed downtown. Bob’s currently working on the “Local Host Secretariat” for the 2006 International AIDS Conference which is in Toronto in August.

After lunch I saw my doctor about my (lack of) toenail. Basically he said just to leave it alone. (More here.) I played badminton as usual and didn’t have any problems with it.

It was a friend’s birthday on Thursday so, after spending the morning playing telephone tag with some more agencies, Andy picked me up and we went shopping – he wanted to buy her a laptop, so I went along as “technical advisor”. (I didn’t post about it at the time because I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.) Our first stop was at Tiger Direct‘s store in Etobicoke – we were surprised they only had refurbished laptops, which wasn’t what we wanted. Next stop: College and Spadina – Toronto’s “PC district”. We started at the western end of the stores, at Canada Computers. They had quite a selection on their website so we had a look at a few in our target price/specification range. One stood out (an Acer 1692WLMi) and we asked them to put it aside. We looked in a few of the smaller stores but didn’t really find anything even close, and finally ended up in a larger place with Apple and IBM machines. (The Apple hardware is definitely pretty, but we needed a Windows-compatible notebook.) So after playing with quite a few shiny toys at the different stores, we ended up back at Canada Computers and Andy bought the Acer and a wireless router (Linksys WRT54G). Time was pressing now, so we nipped back to Andy’s and I turned on the security on both the router and laptop before heading home.

I had another interview on Friday – this one was with a software development company in Thornhill. Andy very kindly offered (well, more like insisted!) on giving me a lift up there and then hung around to give me a lift home! I think the interview went quite well, and it sounds like they have a few project management positions to fill. They’re beginning to use some “agile” PM techniques which could be really interesting … although the person who interviewed me said that the way I described my previous experience sounded like I’d been using a lot of the techniques already! She also hinted that I’d probably get a call in the next couple of days to arrange a second interview.

Yesterday started earlier than expected (7am shouldn’t exist at weekends!) but I made some more changes to this blog’s layout and then decided it was time to “release it“. Every time I open my blog I like this layout more and more, so I’m planning on making it the default layout in the next few days … unless anyone spots any issues with it.

I got an email telling me the PMP course is cancelled (lack of numbers) and the next one is in June! I might look at other courses, but if either of the current job prospects pan out then I don’t need it (PMP certification) right now, which means I can leave it until we can better afford to do it!

We headed over to Andy’s mid-afternoon and I investigated a problem with the laptop – it was dropping/losing the wireless network connection after about 8 minutes. I checked out the laptop’s and router’s settings and couldn’t see any problem, but a quick Google search revealed the cause – apparently it’s a common problem but fortunately there was an easy fix (tweak four parameters on the router) and the laptop seemed happy again.

After a few nibbles we caught a cab downtown and went for dinner at Superior Restaurant at Yonge & Dundas. (The pasta special had a good spicy kick to it!)

So there you go – quite a busy week for me. The plan for today is to put together invitations for our birthday get-together to give to people we can’t email, and to call my mum to wish her a happy Mother’s Day. Oh, and try to make some progress on Far Cry.