Nice to be back amonst IT geeks. The Darth Vader Urinal

About 5 or 6 months ago I switched positions at my place of work., I went from Project Management/ Development/ Database Monkey stuff to our Server Support Infrastructure section. Basically from Software Dev to Hardware/OS Support of Windows Servers (years ago I did both at the same time but then they consolidated and siloed everything). It's been a  great move, the people on my team are very cool and although I worked here for over a year about 11 years ago, I'd forgotten what it was like to be surrounded by hard-core IT junkies. I went from being one of the only people in my old division voiding the warranties of all my electronic devices to a whole division full of people doing it. And it's obvious mostly through the humour that gets put on display.

Case in point. When our urinals are busted, the cleaning staff tapes garbage bags around them so people don't use them, flush them, and flood the place with unpleasant liquids. Now I had never made the connection that affixing said garbage bag to the urinal looks a bit like the Dark Lord of the Sith's cape, but someone on my floor did. They printed out a Darth Vader head shot and little electronic doohickey from the front of his armor and pasted it on the "black-bagged" urinal. Then a quote appeared. The quote gets changed almost every other day.

I love working here! (no jokes about us having too much time on our hands, we work hard., fast, and efficient, with tons of stress factors and you need to do stuff like this to laugh once and awhile).

Free HP Bladecenter training for gophers

I was on an HP course a few weeks ago, learning about their blade-center hardware and software. It was a pretty intense course, we got to rip apart the blade enclosures, physically and virtually, and try just about any weird thing we wanted to simulate failures (which, I might add, is pretty hard to do with the modular design of the HP's, since they bought out all that great Proliant technology from Compaq years ago). The course was held out in Kanada at a recently purchased big empty building surrounded by green space. I saw deer and geese and gophers all over the place. There was a huge window at the back of the class and looking through it I noticed a fairly big gopher hole right on the edge of the building.

 At one point, I was going through a lab and I heard a "kathunk" sound. I turned around and there was this gopher with his nose right up against the glass. I looked at him and he looked over at me and then turned his attention to the board at the front. he was looking at the instructor. This gopher was getting free training man! Usually rodents don't understand the "invisible force-field protecting me from the scary humans" concept of glass, but this guy was wise to it. He was not bothered in the least, (maybe it was like television for him). If he does this every day, he can come and work on my team man!

iPad2 Fedex World Tour

Some shippers love to send stuff away from you before eventually swinging it back in your direction. I ordered an iPad2 a few weeks back and was excited when I started getting Fedex emails. They shipped it to MISSISSAUGA, ON, CANADA, 5 hours away from my house just to tease me before carting it off to OAKLAND, CA, USA and then MEMPHIS, TN, USA. Probably the moon next. I found this great thread entitled "WTF is Fedex retarded?" that seems to do a good job explaining why. This guy's stuff also went to Alaska and he was pissed that it had been subjected to -40 temperatures and most likely manhandled by clumsy guys in parkas.

GelaSkin skins for Ipad2

I ordered an iPad 2 online a few weeks back, not wanting to stand in line at the Apple store at 5:00am. Oddly enough I know people who got their hands on some Saturday after the Friday 5:00pm launch, but their don't have "Say hello to my little friend" engraved on the back!! As it turns out I'm probably gonna cover that up as I stumbled across some very cool skins for iPad2 on a site by a company called Gelaskin that lets you do up your own! This is one I made from an existing Fractal.
What you get is a back skin and a front border frame skin and then you use wallpaper on your desktop to complete the image. The site is in Toronto and the iPad2 ones go for $29.95 CDN. Check some of the professional ones out!