surprise identity

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So I’m at a late supper with a couple of friends from college, K & A, and somewhere along in the conversation the idea of mixed ethnic origins comes up, as it sometimes does.

I asked K what if he and his wife have chosen a name for their new child arriving in Sept / Oct this year.  (S)he will have two names – an English first name and a Korean middle name.  “You can have two last names, too, if you want,” A says.  “Passports from each country will have that nation’s family name.” Well how do you know this?  I never knew that.

Later, we were talking about jobs, living in other countries (A wants to study in Germany after college here).  A family ancestor was the USA.  I suggested getting his Green Card, like me.  It was then that he confessed that he already has dual citizenship.  “What?  Where?  Seriously?”

So it was sometime around then that he confessed.  As it turns out, the only other white guy (i.e. “Caucasian Canadian”) in the group spills the beans about not actually being a white guy.  Yup, he’s half white Canadian and half Taiwanese.  He speaks Mandarin and grew up in Taiwan and Canada.  Taiwanese Mom & Canadian Dad.

I was 90% surprised.  Why?  I knew since I met him that he’d had an accent.  Not a regional dialect, not a 2nd-generation ethnic accent, but a first-hand mixed-origin accent, like 5~10%.  I could never pin it on any region outside the general area of Asia, never down to one country.

He’d kept it a secret all this time because, I gather, he likes to surprise people and also, I think, finds it a cause of disruption of normal interaction.  He only tells those he has known for a while.  He told K & C (Koreans) but never me!  So I said during supper that I’m actually the only white guy in the group – a minority.  A reminded me that I am mistaken – that I’m half Korean, too.

Right.  Almost forgot, being around all these white people.  Haha!

I feel honoured that I’m counted among this trusted friends.

(By the way – I’m not Caucasian.  I’m white.  Caucasians come from the Caucasus region in Eastern Europe / Western Asia.  Look it up.  And yes, I eat crackers.)

Kia damage at mall

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I was at Centre Village Mall last Friday doing a CANstruction installation when mall security came around asking who owns a brown Kia.  Uh oh.  Now what?  Someone hit my car in the parking lot.  I went out and found a guy standing there waiting for me and my car’s front end sitting on the ground.  He backed into the stall next to mine, hit my car, decided to move forward, and pulled off the front end.  We talked with mall security and a witness from Save-On Foods then drove to what he thought was the accident reporting place.  Just as everyone had said, it’d moved to downtown to the main police station.  We went there, spent an hour reporting.  Police took pictures.  So now I’m waiting for his insurance company, Cooperators, to contact me to arrange repairs.

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balance at Tim Horton’s

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So I’m at Tim’s having a bowl of chili and a decaf, thinking about what just happened.

I asked the woman at the till to get me a balance on some cards.  “You don’t remember what you have?  Really?” she asked in a childish voice.  WTH?  Why ask me this?  “All of them?  Well how many cards do you have?”  WTH again.  “I’ve only got three,” I say to her.  She scans the first one and asks, “Do you see the balance?  Can you remember that?”  <Ahem>  When she was done, I asked her, “You think I have a short memory, eh?  I’ve got dozens of cards for everything.  No, I have no idea what the balance is.”  I was going to ask her if she could remember my order, but I was too polite.  I now think I should have.

There is a balance between formal politeness and familiar friendliness.  She broke that balance.

Mark found mark

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My instructor Mark from a year ago found my final exam!  He gave me a zero for the final in his steel construction class because he could not find it.  Long story short – I put my work in one pile and the exam paper in the other on his desk.  I asked, and he looked twice before, but he said he couldn’t find it.  Finally, a few days ago, I asked him if taking his current class will erase my old mark.  He said it wouldn’t but that he’d look again for it.  “I remember now that you took the exam with the other section group,” he said, and that he’d look for the exam again.  He found it, graded it, and submitted the grade and documentation to the registrar’s office.  I’m waiting to hear back to confirm that my mark has changed.  I will get a B- in that class.

feeling iffy and mouldy

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Feeling a bit iffy this past week.  With the cold snap, getting down to -32°C (-26°F), condensation collected on two walls in my room.  With my bed pushed up against the walls and the storage area under (in) the bed full of stuff, no heat got back there, and this condensation collected, froze, collected more, and eventually grew mould on the bottom 6 inches of the walls.  I was headachy and hacking away for the good part of a week.  I happened to notice a little pool of water at the head of my bed.  Oh crap, where’s this coming from?  I pulled the bed back and found a black mouldy surprise.  It’s pretty much cleaned up now, but I’m still a bit achy.

EDDT and Earthships

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I have yet to attend Environmental Systems class.  I’ve had two days of classes at the college in the EDDT course so far, with Process Design II, the designing of pressure vessels and their connections; Applied Research, the second class in a series including statistics that builds toward a final presentation to peers and instructors; Architectural Design III, actually the fourth in a series of residential and commercial architecture training; and Civil Design and Drafting, a continuation of topographic, mapping, drainage, landscaping, and all things considered in developing land for habitation, industry, or business.  It’s the weekend now, and I’m looking forward to next week to see what the environmental class has to offer.

I woke up this morning to an Earthship blog from New Zealand as a result of somewhat randomly clicking links online.  YouTube – Healthy Homes – Te Timatanga Earthship New Zealand  Also, Earthship NZ  I also saw an Earthship created here in Southern Alberta.  Alberta’s First Earthship  If I am to go in any direction that I choose, this would be it – sustainable building.

One of my instructors hit on something I lack – confidence.  He wrote on the board a list of characteristics a cook and a chef might have.  I spouted off the first characteristic – creativity vs. following.  It seems odd that I would be the first to offer an entry to his list, which in fact takes leadership, because I seriously lack the confidence needed in planning, creating, building, etc.  (I offered another, which he moved to the top of the list – communication.  I do have that, being an English teacher.)

So this is a personal skill I must work on during this last term in school – confidence in leadership.

now serving

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The server is now … serving again.  It crashed a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been trying to find a way to bring it back.

Disk failure.  An ongoing issue, I guess.  My HDDs are kind of old.
For a while, Windows could boot.  So I tried to clone it before it was too late.  It couldn’t clone because of disk errors.
I tried ‘chkdsk’ (part of Windows).  It fixed many errors.  After many reboots, many ‘chkdsk’s, and many cloning attempts, it eventually just wouldn’t boot.
I tried booting a cloned disk.  No go.  The clone didn’t take because it couldn’t complete the cloning process … because of disk errors.
I tried reinstating an image.  The image was no where to be found.
I eventually created a new Windows install on another disk and used it to read the old one so as to fix disk errors.  The new system could read the old disk.
Then, the new disk began making noise.  Drat.
So, another new install, this time on a RAID-1 disk array.  But then I couldn’t read my 3TB drive.  It only read 768GB.
At Caleb’s recommendation, I used Ubuntu Desktop to see if it could read the 3TB.  It couldn’t.  Old RAID system, I guess.
I tried to get the 3TB going in Windows again.  In this process, I lost my secondary backups on the 3TB drive.  Drat again.
New Windows install – Basic MBR disk again.  There’s the 3TB!  But no data.
Research – to find a way to copy my old MySQL database, inetpub webs, and everything else I need to resurrect the old webs.
It’s been a long time coming, but most webs are back up and running again.  Father’s web, lesjohnston.ca, is not yet working.  <sigh>  But I’ll stop here.

Headache from black mould in my house again.  I will leave the server be for now.

vodka, in English

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My view:
Silent Sam: 5/10
Absolute: 6/10
Smirnoff: 9/10
So I thought I’d do some research.

I just readed an artical on vodka.  I reconize alot of the brans onit.  Ones better then the other according to the righter.

Top 10 Vodkas In The World

Then it occurred to me that one shouldn’t trust a writer who writes so poorly.  Perhaps after they quit drinking, go back to school, figure out how to use the spell-check on their computer, or hire a proofreader, maybe I’d complete reading their article.

Seriously – alot?  I need a drink.

performance issues

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This entry is about my little Fujitsu Lifebook P7120.  It sits on my wooden IKEA storage shelf above my printers and surround-sound and plays study jazz on YouTube while I study at my desk.  It’s ten years old now.

It’s really too slow for anything else but play music in this age of apps running through the web.  I bought it used way back when and have had it ever since.

It’s gone through some transplants – new main board (a.k.a. motherboard) and power switch.  Also, an upgrade in memory (a whopping 1.5 GB), a solid-state drive, and a new battery.

I did the Windows Experience Index as a test.  Here are the results.