Below is a post I wrote last night after having taken a sleeping pill. I’ve been known to be a bit loopy after I take one but I have never actually witnessed it. Since I don’t drink alcohol, I can only assume that this is about as close to what I would be like if I were to drink.

People who have seen me write know that I am usually very meticulous on spelling and grammar so to read this back to myself I can actually see the effects of sleep drugs on my writing skills. I swear that this is not made up and is the exact text I found in my “Drafts” folder this morning.

Read on to see how it affected me.

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As I type this into my computer, the clock reads 12:00AM so that technical means that it’s not Sunday anymore and is actually Monday. Oh well, at this hour I should be glad I can even type. Truth is, I can’t sleep so I popped a Zopiclone and am waiting for it to kick in so I can get a good night’s sleep. It’s a prescription sleep medication and it does have odd side affects on my so it’s very possible that the end of this blog posting my not make much sense what so ever. Do they ever?

I’m on a bit of a Felicia Day kick lately. Saw her first on the Dr Horrible Sing A Long blog that Hosford introduced me to way back and have heard her name mentioned many times since then. When I started watching Eureka and she came on again I remembered her from before. Seems kid of oddballish to me which I suppose is her appeal to geeks such as myself. Turns out she’s one of the few who has actually been working somewhat on internet video stuff and almost making a living at it. I find this incredibly interesting because I enjoy seeing how the media world right now is in the midst of a transformation. TV has always been a big hobby of mine so seeing it transformed into something online only is definitely interesting to me. I’d be curious to see if the one actual TV show idea I have would work as a Youtube type video. You didn’t know I write stuff like that?

Ya, it turns out that along with writing mediocre books about the meaning of life, our origins, and how are actions are dictated, I actually have come up with several ideas for different moves and TV shows. One of them in a blatant rip off off my own staggered attempts at romance and what it finally took to find the right person. Story’s been done 10000s of times but I think I have a unique perception of how us geeks out there are interpreted by the women we pursue.

Yup. I am already starting to fight the effects of the Z drug as my spelling is getting hard and I find it harder to read the screen.

My other TV show and may movie thing is ore about a guy who can answer the question of anyone he mettes. Thet asking him a simply questiuon, and until they finish asking the wquyestuoin, is mine knows the asnwweer. And an not a small one, but a detail one. Any question ever conceived can be answered byt this individual. However, questions he asks himself, he has no clue about. Nothing. No rush of knowedge or interest just a black screen in his head. He’s stuck in a vurtuyal prizon that cannot answer the question of whjy he can’t answer his own question. Everything in his head is pure balack when he can’t absnwer

He can tell a man he;s going to die in one hour without even blinking an eye. He can tell a woman her husband is in his offie sleeping with his secretary right now and if she gets their and interruprs her, her friend won’t get pregnant.

Then one day, a man comes in and asks a quesiotn abnout what guy and he looks at him, and his head is pitchblack. Doesn’t recognize the man but knows he must know something about his gift cuz no else has ever been able to do that. Game is on…

So since the odds of me ever getting anything written, I throw these ideas out there. These ideas ARE mine so if I turn around and see that movies and show have been made that look exactly like mine, expect to be sued.

The one movie I spent time thinking about is actually in some ways a combination of The Abyss. and Star Trek First Contact.

So at the end of the Star Trek movie, Picard orders an evacuation ship and people are jumping ship left and right. They were told to go to Gravet island (I think) where they would live out a life out of north america s way. The plan would be for them to come to earth  even though they are supposed to stay clear of letting others know of their knowledge of the future.

So what not make that talksw aboutthat. An race of humans who crass here, find a setllement and live a normal life and growa nd expend and justenjoytthemselves.

Makes sense until some new oceanogilist discovers a partially in tackjed ship they intend toi putt up, When they get the part ups, they find a ship’s manefest and it says the cruw is foeme eqartht bnut thee’sd way this cruew could have this kid iof technicoolgy =until many year frinm now. Noi trace of this peoplea re anyway so the searhc begins.

Where are they.

Turnts out one of the screens they get o=workin of thre ship has a set of coordinates on it that go out into the ocean. No charts or maps can see it, but our explorers interest doesn’t waiver. He wants to go. So what does it?

Two years ago, I started Cache Up NB as a place for geocaching in NB to thrive. It was meant to be a news and information site that would be driven by the community. Today, it continues to grow in ways I never expected it to. Recently I saw some ramblings from a cacher who just didn’t get it. It made me reflect on what I chose to do with Cache Up NB.

In the world of geocaching, many states/provinces create associations that are made up of local geocachers who share a common interest and live in relatively close proximity. British Columbia Geocaching Association, Ontario Geocaching Association, Georgia Geocacher’s Association, Atlantic Canada Geocaching Association, Maritime Geocaching Association. I think you get the point.

As part of a CUNB side project last year, I had to do a lot of research about Canadian geocaching associations. I learned very quickly that all of the websites were cut from the same cloth. You get to the main site, have some generic information about caching, maybe some news updates, links, and a forum. The forums always had the most activity because people were always “talking” in there about whatever was going on. This “typical” geocaching site is pretty much the standard across the board. Almost every one of these types of sites follows the same set of rules and the site basically becomes dead while the forum is where the activity is.

When I was coming up with the concept of Cache Up NB, the last thing I wanted to do was to simply just become another association with the same sort of typical links and forums that you always see. In fact, I didn’t want it to be an association at all. I wanted it to be different somehow. Anyone who knows me knows that I am very adamant about trying to be original and steer clear of what everyone else does. My first geocaching event wasn’t a potluck, or a breakfast, it was the Race For Cache. I have always been someone who likes to go against the grain because it shows that you aren’t afraid to be different.

In coming up with a concept for CUNB, I actually decided to use Slashdot as a model. This tech site has been around for years and is more or less a blog style site where the news items are posted, and people comment on those items. It’s not a forum but the community itself still exists through the comments. Anyone can submit items/news and the folks who run Slashdot decide what gets posted and what doesn’t. This format seemed to be very different from the typical “forum” sites I had seen so this is the format I went with.

At first, there was a bit of a resistance because people weren’t used to seeing a “geocaching” site laid out like that. But as time went on, people got the jist of how it worked and for the most part, it’s gone over quite well. 3300+ comments thus far proves that the community is interested in what goes on there. We’ve even done polls on the site to see if folks wanted a forum and the response has always been a resounding “NO!”. We even put a forum up for a short period of time and no one used it. Hence, it seems perfectly clear to me that the audience we have isn’t really that interested in a forum.

Recently, a cacher who is not a fan of CUNB chose to go on a long rant about how “awful” our site was because he “can’t even find the forums”. Now, this particular individual was upset about something unrelated to the layout of our site, and is not someone who has spent much time on there. Regardless, them being upset about their inability to find a forum that didn’t exist showed me that even in the smaller realm of geocachers, there are still people who seem to think that because things have traditionally been done one way, they should always be done that way. Why not just be like everyone else so that we all look and act exactly the same and nothing will ever be different and original? Let’s just conform and be the same all the way across so that even people who are educated and should know better won’t have to think at all about what they are looking at. If that were the case, a sport like geocaching would never have been created.

Going against the grain, doing something different, trying to innovate and be unique is what makes the world diverse and interesting. If everyone was the same the world would be a pretty boring place.

So what exactly am I trying to say? I’m saying that I am proud of the fact that I chose to go against the grain in many of the endeavours I’ve taken on. Although I’ve had some misses, by far and large my choices to do something different instead of the same have proven successful. My mother-in-law’s favorite Christmas gifts are the ones I give her because they are always very different. My first geocaching event has turned into a yearly event that saw 150+ people attend last year and it even made the local paper. My wedding proposal to Tamara has put several other women to tears in how “romantic and sweet” it was since it wasn’t just the same old “take her to a restaurant and propose”. I successfully launched a magazine called “Vibrating Anal Jizz” (yes, I kid you not. That was the actual name) which ran for five years and reached as far as Australia in it’s readership. And last but not least, I launched and continue to manage Cache Up NB which has become the main contact for geocaching in the province of NB. Enough that municipal, and provincial governments now work with CUNB to coordinate geocaching projects in the province. All of these have been unconventional in their execution and they’ve thrived.

So those out there who would gripe about things you don’t understand, or throw insults because things aren’t the same as everything else, take a look around you. The world is made up of people who go against the grain. The ones who choose to be like everyone else are the ones who are left behind and forgotten. I’m more than happy to continue to be “different” and “unique” while others gripe about the fact they don’t like something because it’s not the same as everything else.

It’s been four or so months since I last wrote anything on here. Since then, Facebook has stopped allowing the import of blog entries to Notes so the odds of anyone actually reading this now are far less than it was at one time. Regardless, it’s almost 12:30 in the morning and I have to go to work tomorrow but can’t sleep.

Having learned my lessons about blogging about my job, I none the less am going to go on a bit of a rant without getting into specifics. Thusly, it allows me to vent without getting myself, nor anyone else, into trouble.

Today, I had a bad day. I don’t know if anyone else at my work noticed, but it was a bad day. If I did my job right, hopefully very few people noticed how truly awful of a day I had. But it doesn’t change the fact that in six years of working in that building, I truly feel like today was the worst.

This week I’m giving training. Of all the things I do in my job, giving training is the one I enjoy the most. I enjoy it so much that I could actually do it full time if given the right opportunity and the right money. But since my job is more of a technical nature, I don’t get the chance to give training as much as I used to. So when the chance comes up, I jump at it because not only do I enjoy so much, it happens to be something I am extremely good at.

I’m not one to talk myself up, but I know that this is a skill I am really good at as I have heard it said to me over and over again. It’s one of the things I just know I am good at and happen to love doing. Despite being good at something, and really enjoying something, we all have days where it just feels like no matter what you do, nothing is going right. It’s kind of been like that this week with my training. I had put a lot of time and effort into building the right type of training environment to try and reduce any “technical difficulties” but it seems that despite that, I encountered far more than I wanted to see. And it wasn’t just in the technical areas that trouble surfaced.

Even the best teacher can struggle to give a good training class when the tools provided are not adequate enough to provide a quality training session. The last time I did this particular type of training, I was using a different, how best to describe it while being vague at the same time, “toolbox”. Let’s just say that for this class, I’m using a toolbox which has all the tools and materials for building a kitchen table. The toolbox I had the last time worked very well. All the tools were there, batteries were charged, and seemed relatively new. The “drill” got stuck a few times, but it always worked exactly as it was supposed to after banging on it a little bit. In general, that toolbox worked really good but it wasn’t a toolbox we owned. It was one we were sort of borrowing.

This time around, I’m using a different toolbox. A custom made toolbox specific for the type of job I’m training folks on. The toolbox has basically the same tools but made by a different company. This time around, the drill I got to use is made specifically for the exact job I am doing, unlike the previous drill. You would think that this would make it a better tool. When the drill works, it works fantastic. FAR better than the one from the old toolbox. But when it doesn’t work, there’s no manual to tell me why it stopped working, there’s no display or lights or anything on the drill to tell me there’s a problem. It just doesn’t drill anything. I stand there, scratching my head, trying to understand why this doesn’t work. I flip a bunch of switches, turn some knobs, maybe even unplug the drill and plug it back in again and pray that a combination of all of this somehow fixes the issue. Today, somehow I did manage to get everyone’s drill to work, but now I’m looking at the rest of my week and wondering if the drill, and anything else from the toolbox, is going to give me the same problem.

So as you can imagine, when trying to use this toolbox and the main tool doesn’t work, and you have no idea why, nor any real good means to troubleshoot it, it becomes increasingly difficult to try and teach your students how to use it. When you have a fairly large class of students, and more than half of them are experiencing all similar issues, it’s really difficult to try and move the class forward and continue on with building the table. Everyone wants to learn and see how to build the table, but when the tools don’t work the way you want them to, or need them to, the difficulty increases exponentially.

To add fuel to the fire, some of the folks who came to the table building class don’t really know anything about the tools, the table, or even how to hold a drill. Nice people, but from what I can see, they are not the best folks for trying to learn how to build this table with this set of tools. Also add to the fact that after a couple of days of training where most of the class has half the table built, they’ve only drilled a couple of holes in one piece of wood. It concerns me greatly that these students may not get their table completed by the end of the training. In most cases, students who don’t wish to do the work, I really could care less about. That might sound a bit harsh, but the reality is that if you are paying to be in a class for a specific reason, and you choose to do other things other than what you’re being trained on, I’m not going to give you much sympathy about “not understanding” anything. However, these specific students are new to the world of table building and need to learn how. I am eager to teach, but not eager to overuse my time on things they should be paying attention to.

With the toolbox not working as it is supposed to, and some of the students drifting off doing wood sculptures instead of building tables, it made my day today quite miserable. I came home, I hung out with the kids and the wife, and at one point I could feel the stress throughout my whole body. My hands were shaking and I was just SO pissed about my day. I asked Tamara to put the kids to bed. I came into my office, and literally just read emails, chatting on gTalk a bit, downloaded some stuff, and then rejoined sanity inside. I think at that point I was fine. But then when I went to bed, I laid there wide awake thinking about tomorrow. To solve that, half a pill of Zopiclone and I’ll be out shortly. I can feel the effects now so this post will end shortly.

In summary, I had a mother-frakkin horrible day. I’m not looking forward to tomorrow but I also know that I only have two days left and this will be done. I’m going to get up tomorrow, start a new day, and convince myself that it will be FAR better than today (since this was the worst in 6 years I think) and MAKE my day better.

Oh, and as I guess I should add this is that for 1) I didn’t actually have a toolbox and drill issues. It’s a metaphor. and 2) The above post reflects my own personal opinion of my rather crappy day and situation and in no way implies a view or opinion of my employer.

Now that this is all done, I can go to bed.