The Last Saskatchewan Pirate
The Jolly Roger on the River Saskatchewan
Today (Sept 19) is International Talk Like a Pirate Day!
ARRRRR!
It also happens to be the 10th anniversary of Talk Like A Pirate Day! Arrrr!
A few years ago, when I told the kids about it, they surprised me with my very own Jolly Roger. It came complete with sails made from mini Saskatchewan flags. I laughed so hard because it totally reminded me of the song The Last Saskatchewan Pirate by the Arrogant Worms, a bar band from Regina a musical comedy group from Kingston, ON1. The best part is, they’d never heard of that song before!
‘An it’s a heave-ho, high-ho, coming down the Plains
Stealing wheat and barley and all the other grains
And it’s a ho-hey, high-hey, farmers bar your doors
When you see the Jolly Roger on Regina’s mighty shores.
Arr!
It was a lovely bit of serendipity, so I bought and downloaded the song from iTunes to show to my daughter. She got a real kick out of it. I highly recommend it to everyone, actually.
SONG LINK:
http://tinysong.com/GGti
LYRICS LINK:
http://tinyurl.com/skpirate (also autoplays the song in background)
Today is also Pirates’ Day in Booty Bay, Stranglethorn. That’s World of Warcraft for the uninitiated. ;) Unfortunately, I just wasted what little time I had posting this instead of logging in so I won’t have time to head over there this morning. Will have to wait until after work. *sigh*
I mean … ARRRRRRGH! :P
Today is also something else … something much more important and much more serious … but that will also have to wait until after work. Until then, mateys!
NOTE:
1: Thank you to Jenn Croome (@ChiefWormfan) for correcting me. The Worms are from Kingston, not Regina. Which is funny … as a kid, I moved from Kingston to Regina. (I lived in Ontario when I was real little when my dad was going to Queens.)
IT Summit 12
I had a lot of fun at this year’s IT Summit put up by Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation. I’m told most years the summit can be geared more toward the educational resource side of things, but this year, I got lucky and they decided to make it all about IT. It was all about incorporating IT into classrooms (and keeping it out when appropriate lol), supporting school networks, network security in an educational institution, and planned expansion and upgrades to the Saskatchewan school networks, both mainstream and non (the non being the Christian school system and on-reserve school system).
I got to hang with other techs who support schools, see some great presentations, pick up some sweet swag, and I came to a very important conclusion about my own personal career goals.
Busy as that proverbial beaver …
Man, it has been crazy busy lately. The biggest project on my plate at the moment is the Saskatchewan 2012 First Nation Winter Games. Battlefords Agency Tribal Chiefs (my employers) are hosting the games this year in Saskatoon. Normally, IT wouldn’t be a big part of a sports … thing. But BATC is doing a lot of innovative stuff this time around that involves our little geeksquad.
For example, we’re planning on live streaming a few of the games. We’re also doing online registration of the athletes. So … as I’m sure you can imagine, it’s taking up a lot of our time. Not to mention we still have to do all our regular jobs like making sure the school servers are up, the school computers work, the chiefs’ computers and laptops work, the office computers are running well, etc.
PLUS … our latest project is Deep Freeze on the school computers. Let me tell you guys, DF, in its latest incarnation, is a thing of beauty. I mean, really. Especially if you use the Enterprise version, which is what we have. I looove it like there’s no tomorrow.
Add the LogMeIn software to that, and Sharon is a happy geek. :D
And with that, I’ve noticed how late it’s getting and I really need to get up early tomorrow. It’s actually Reading Week. My kids have the week off so I’ve offered their fathers visiting time with them. I’m not happy with it, because I miss my kids, but I suppose kids should bond with their other parents. And perhaps my boy will see his other mom when he’s there on the rez too. Get the whole family experience.
In any case, it’s a lot of driving for me and driving makes me tired. :P So with that, I bid thee adieu.
*hack, cough, wheeeeeeeze*
First cold of 2012.
I’ve been sent home twice in as many weeks for coming into work sick. Wheeeee. I thought I could do it, but nope.
Soup, tea, copious hours of Netflix and perhaps a touch of World of Warcraft for me today. Hopefully I’ll feel better tomorrow, because I have to be at work to attend a video conference. Maybe some lipstick and a pretty hat will cover the scary mess that is me at the moment. :P
And perhaps later, I’ll post more about the awesome changes that have gone over the past week at work, and possible changes coming over the next few months.
Or not. We’ll see. Depends on whether or not I take a nap. *cough*
Ubuntu
I finally got sick of my laptop taking 8-10 minutes to start up, and then taking another 5 minutes to start any program, and THEN crashing. Too many programs installed, the operating system was too old, and just had too much stuff.
So, rather than attempting to uninstall tons of crap (which I doubt I could manage, since it took so long to even boot), or re-install XP I decided to upgrade my operating system (OS) to something new. Unfortunately, I am broke and could not afford Windows 7, not to mention I doubt this old beast of a laptop had the hardware that could run it anymore. I mean, originally it could, but I don’t know anymore. lol The kids have taken it to hell and back.
Since Windows was out of the question, and obviously an Apple OS wasn’t an option (hahahaha), I decided to check out some Linux distributions. After doing a wee bit of research (not a lot mind you), I decided to go with Ubuntu. Mostly because it’s fairly well known as an OS that’s easiest to use for non-programming users, or users who aren’t really tech-savvy. And while my kids are pretty well-versed in computers, they’re still kids. Same goes for my sister. She’s becoming more comfortable with computers, but to be honest, she’s still not the most able of users. :) At least she’s using the Playbook we got for Christmas. Haha
Anyhoot. So I installed Ubuntu. I used a USB stick to boot from and Pendrivelinux to create the bootable USB. Once the bootable USB was created and the Ubuntu ISO was loaded on, I stuck it in a USB port and booted up my laptop. The great thing about this was that I got to try out Ubuntu before installing it.
That’s right, I was able to run the entire OS from the USB stick without changing a single thing on my actual harddrive or affecting my current OS, which at the time was XP.
Which was cool, but as it turns out, unnecessary since I fell in love. lol I ended up installing Ubuntu for realzies!
And yes, I am typing this blog post from my laptop that actually works now, and it takes less than 30 seconds to boot now. Whee! Loves it! There a few glitches here and there, but nothing compared to the horror that this laptop was before. So … no real complaints.
I’d still rather have Win 7, but I’m cheap, and in the end, I’m still happy. :D
CREEHAWK 