The other day I opened a fresh bottle of water and had a few sips. After putting it on the table and conversing with a co-worker, one hand knocked the full bottle over emptying a lot of water directly onto my laptop keyboard!! In a panic I decided to lift the laptop to make the water fall off onto the desk. All that did was make the computer turn off :( I immediately unplugged it, took the battery out and wiped it dry. Then I removed the hard drive. My boss has an identical laptop which conveniently has blue screen of death problems while booting so he lent it to me. I put my hard drive in and was able to continue working.

After waiting 24 hours I put my hard drive back into the computer and turned it on. It worked! Luckily a bit of water didn't cause any permanent damage and I'm back to normal again.

At home I'm having a real nightmare with my Sun Ultra 24's network interface which is built onto the motherboard. The computer shipped with Solaris 10 08/07 which is a solid server OS but outdated for desktop use. I used it for a couple weeks and the networking features worked well. I formatted and installed Solaris Express 01/08 and used it for a couple weeks. Networking in it also worked well. One day I decided to check out the "Sun xVM Hipervisor" GRUB boot menu item. It booted my regular Solaris but with no networking support. I rebooted back into my regular GRUB boot menu item and still no networking. Over the last week or two I've formatted and re-installed the OS, tried different versions of Solaris, and even Ubuntu Linux. Every time the installer tells me that the network card was not detected so it doesn't configure it. There's not even a link light on. Sun support won't help much because they only support Solaris 10, not Solaris Express. They helped me reset the bios using a jumper because I think the on-board network interface is disabled even though the bios says it is not. That didn't make a difference. Right now I'm installing Solaris 10 so that I can get some help from them.

One support person said they might send me a new motherboard. That may sound like a good solution but I'm pretty certain it will only happen again because I had this exact problem last year on a home built computer that had an ASUS motherboard with onboard network. It worked fine in Solaris 10 for a while and one day the network interface just disappeared. No link lights, and even after formatting the network interface was no longer available. I thought a recent lightning storm ruined it, but many months later when I installed Linux it worked again! Too bad installing Linux on my ultra 24 doesn't have the same result. I've also read about other people having this problem on their laptops, and other computers that have onboard network interfaces. I think Solaris has some magic bit of code that turns off the network interface on motherboards. Now that I think about it, both Sun's motherboard and my ASUS motherboard use nvidia chipset for the network interface. Since Sun doesn't know what the problem is I doubt it will be fixed any time soon. I may have to resort to installing a PCI network card like I did in my home built computer last year. What a nightmare.

Today is my 8th anniversary of employment at IJW! I didn't think I'd be there this long, but then again I never really thought about how long I'd be there for. It turns out the company is around 10 years old now. That is quite an accomplishment for Doug, the owner of the company.

Today we had a cake after lunch. Normally they wouldn't get a cake but I think they picked up on my hints... Any excuse to have a cake :)

Also my boss brought a Fortune magazine to my desk and showed me the ad for Hyatt Web Check-In; a product I wrote. Well, I wrote the web based user interface and the back end services that interface with the kiosk servers at each of the sites. I am very pleased about the success of this product and to see my work advertised. I'm going to have the ad cut out and plaqued. This is the first time I've mentioned the name of a client or product on my blog.. I don't think there's any harm mentioning this one.

The day after I started working at IJW, google was started! It's google's 8th birthday tomorrow.

Yesterday Graeme from work got married. Bruce, Doug, Mike and I (all from IJW) went. It was kind of funny to see how small Graeme's family was compared to the massive church filling family of his new wife Jennifer. In the past month or so they bought a house, got married, and Jen got her first job in the industry she has trained for. Congratulations!

Lately I've been feeling a lot more stress than usual. We've got a project that never ends and new features have been requested weekly for over a year. A large number of new features or changes, and some big ones are supposed to be done by January, but I'm also going to be pulled off to work on 2 other projects very soon which will take up most of the time until then. Plus I'm feeling a bit stressed about preparing for this course I'm taking in January so I don't look like an idiot/newbie taking an advanced level course in a language I have no experience with.

Today I was at a client's for a 1 hour meeting, then a second 1 hour meeting which stretched to take my full day. There was a great buffet for lunch, but also I was trying to demo something and I swear not one thing I tried for over an hour worked. I got so stressed out my nose started bleeding. It turns out my data import program couldn't find data it needed to properly link new data which caused problems, and also I had an old version of a client program talking to the newer version of the server. The versions are not 100% compatible. That's not the first time my nose has started bleeding under stress. It happend 2-3 times this year. I know I have higher than normal blood pressure and it runs in the family. I might need to consider blood pressure medication like my Grandpa takes. I'm only 23!

Yesterday, Sep 26 was my 7th year anniversary at IJW. Looking back, a lot has happened in my life both professionally and personally. Hopefully I'll be able to stay for another 7.

I just read on slashdot that Sep 27 is google's 7th year anniversary. That means the day after I started work at IJW, google was founded. That's so neat!

In other news, James from BC is in town for 3 weeks. His wife has family in Alliston and they came to visit for Thanksgiving. Also, I think my mom will be going to Jamaica for Thanksgiving to get married.