Fun

Today, July 28th, 2023, is System Administrator Appreciation Day. A day I didn’t know existed until now but has been around since 2000.

It was during one of my first paid technical positions that I realized that sys admins, and other support staff including non-technical, can be a thankless job. A job where your only interactions with others is when something goes wrong.

During university I had a summer job as a Systems Analyst Trainee at TELUS Advertising Services (TAS). TAS was division of TELUS that created the phone books, both white (residential) and yellow (businesses) pages. I did typical IT tasks at the time such as setting up new computers with token ring network cards and helping staff issues such as accessing email. Also lots of printer issues.

Saturday MP (i.e. Chris and Ada) are taking some time off over the holidays to visit with family, friends, and spending a day not changing out of our pyjamas and playing games all day.  We will be back to our regularly scheduled programming on January 2nd, 2019.

Happy holidays and all the best in 2019!

P.S. - My daughter wanted a record player for Christmas.  I know, everything old is new again.  Lucky for my daughter she got the above old timey looking record player as an early Christmas gift when her Aunt and family where visiting this weekend.  Not only does it play records but is also plays tapes, CDs, radio, and Bluetooth.  Now we just need to get some records.

I’m on optimist and generally think things will work out for the best.  I like to say:

The future is awesome!

That said it’s easy to forget how awesome individual days can be.  How many small but amazing things occur each day that we gloss over.  Our day is 99% good and 1% bad but we focus on that one minor bad moment.

Think about your conversations at the end of the day.  Does it focus on the negatives of the day?  That boozo that cut me off in traffic.  The Internet was down for 5 minutes.  I had to stay at work 10 minutes late.  Etc.

[caption id=“attachment_1522” align=“alignright” width=“300”] Gift wrapping skill is inversely correlated to software development skills.[/caption]

This morning I made my last shopping trip before Christmas, at least I hope it’s my last trip.

Pro tip: the Costco near us officially opens at 10am but if you show up at 9:45ish they will let you in.  At least they let me in.  Then you can run, grab the salmon, and get out before the hoards descend.

Saturday MP is a small family business and like your local family run restaurant the entire family is involved in some way.  Currently it’s mostly me working at Saturday MP but Ada helps with some book keeping and in the past was a consultant.  Our daughter also used to clean the basement office and shred papers.

Also, like your local family restaurant, when we take a vacation the entire business closes.  Well, mostly closes, we can still be reached virtually but please expect delays in our response.  Thank you for your patience and we look forward to serving you when we get back to the basement on November 27th.