On Sept. 1, 2009 I decided to retire from full time work after more than 32 years or service. Though I worked at the same location over most of that time period the company changed from Ontario Hydro to Ontario Power Generation and now it is Kinectrics.

At this point I have many options (of things to do) which include, in no particular order and certainly not limited to:

• Home renovations e.g. en-suite bathroom, kitchen, wall-to-wall carpeting -> hardwood flooring
• Professional Engineering work on a contractual basis
• Quality Assurance inspection work in my areas of QA expertise ISO9000, Z299.x, ISO 17025
• Gardening and pruning, either my own or by contract.
• Implement the recommendations of the Home Energy Audit. The furnace, AC and hot water heater have been replaced with more energy efficient alternatives.
• Take time to read the paper.
• Walk the dog.
• Continue to run 5 to 10 km several times per week.
• Update this blog a little more regularly.
• Continue singing in choirs.

According to the PEO I can’t use consulting or consultant and engineer in my job title unless I have a specific license so I’ll represent myself as an Associate on my website.

Jim Service, P. Eng.

I was writing a macro to create an Index tab and couldn't find anything directly related to iterating through the Sheets collection. You can't hyperlink to a Chart tab nor does it have a Cells() method so the index entry processing needs to be different. Anyway, this code extract works for me. YKMV

  Dim mySht as Object

  For Each mySht In Application.Sheets
    If mySht.Type = xlWorksheet Then
      ' Process a Worksheet tab
    Else
      ' Process a Chart tab
    End If
  Next mySht

Once I switched from slip-on boots to my walking shoes, the tops of my feet got sore again with the occasional shooting pains in the night. I finally looked up my problem on the Internet and found, duh!, that my shoes were probably laced too tight. I was directed to Shoe Lacing Methods and today I tried a variation of bow tie lacing. So far so good though it does take a couple of days for the pain to go away.

Now I know why the safety toe shoes at work don’t bother me: the two side flaps meet over the tongue when the shoes lace up making a “roof” over my foot; whereas, with my walking shoes the side flaps don’t cover the tongue so that the laces go over the tongue and press down on the top of my feet. With the “bow tie” lacing, hopefully, I can move that pressure away.

I read about map my run and tried it. There was a lot of registering involved and the UI over Google maps seemed to move the map around too much as I moved the cursor to do a route.

I mentioned the site to a friend and she suggested Gmaps Pedometer. This site is much simpler: you plot a route, save it and it returns a URL. Just the simplicity I need to find out how far I walked my dog or to lay out a 5k lunchtime jog.

My immediate boss said a $500k contract is on the verge of being signed and the major resource (person) to work on it is me.

His boss, our manager, says I’m currently not meeting my(?) billability target. So, do I a) beat the bushes for some billable work and say I’m not available for the big contract b) send him that quote from Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind c) roll my eyes and say “whatever” d) ask him if that was a rhetorical email e) retire and say enough of this nonsense or f) none of the above?

(?) - I was handed a sheet of paper with my billability percentage target. That is a decree from on high.

I guess it had to happen sooner or later…I joined Facebook. Facebook disallowed Service. First I used Ecivres, then changed it to Serçice then I noticed my son had the right name so I sent an email got the correct last name.

I have “connected” with a couple of cousins that I haven’t seen since they were little kids.

Come on over and be my friend. )

The door springs broke on the old dishwasher and the door is so heavy that one side bracket cracked the side of the door. We bought a new one since this old one has lasted over twenty years.

I uncrated the new Maytag model and put it in the space where the old one was. Two problems: the hot water fitting is in a different place so that I either have to cut the copper pipe or, my preference, use a stainless steel flexible line. I note that there is already a union in that pipe so I must have lengthened it when I installed the old dishwasher.

The other problem is that the sound deadening package of plastic and rubber flanges require an opening of just 24 inches. I’ll have to do some shimming of the opening and the kick plate area.

I guess I’ll be washing dishes in the sink for a few more days more.

I use rsync on my Unix boxes to archive or update directories on different host machines. Recently I have started using it to synchronize directories between my Windows boxes at work and at home (through the VPN) via the SAN drives. This works quite well, especially for files such as large Word documents as the format just seems to include new stuff in chunks so that the rsync algorithm need only update the changes. Using the -z compression switch also helps to speed the transfer.

I include a short file I’ll call rsync.sh. I run bash in cygwin and paste in the appropriate line. I keep the -n switch so that no action will take place initially and I’ll recognize whether the list of files to be transferred looks correct.

# remove -n to do the operation
# home to work
rsync -n -Cavz --stats /cygdrive/c/home/jservice/work/DIR /cygdrive/h/network/
# work to home
rsync -n -Cavz --stats /cygdrive/h/network/DIR /cygdrive/c/home/jservice/work/
# network to desktop
rsync -n -Cavz --stats /cygdrive/h/network/DIR /cygdrive/d/work/
# desktop to network
rsync -n -Cavz --stats /cygdrive/d/work/DIR /cygdrive/h/network/

They have been pruning, hacking, and / or trimming the shrubs and small trees that grow along the path between our backyards. Some of those piles of brush have been sitting there since January. I called the city about it on Tuesday. Then I asked one of the parks workers about it yesterday when I happened to see them while walking the dog. Lo and behold all that brush has been removed. Finally! Now if they would do something about all the litter that collected in the brush over the last couple of months I would be ecstatic.

It must have been a good vacation— I have been back at work for three days and I want another one.

Though I did take a picture or two of the leaning tower of Pisa. How about one from the top of that bell tower?