andypaxo.net

Work

This week I have been loaned to the IT department (seeing as the rest of my department (software development not IT) ) have gone off on their hols).

As such, I have taken on a few of the small projects that have yet to be taken care of in the web and IT departments. This doesn’t make them any less valuable, mind you, there just are always more projects that need doing than there is time to do them in.

So I have been fixing and polishing up bits on the Wycliffe Canada website, and writing a little program to keep an eye on the temperature of our server room so that we know if it is likely to catch on fire (which is never a good thing).

Oh, and also adding a bit of ‘flavor’ to the Wycliffe website’s error messages.

Error 9012: Something has gone terribly wrong with Andy!

Stampede

Last week was Calgary’s “Stampede” week. Which of course meant lots of stampeding around, or something like that… Anyway, We (the international students group) spent the weekend taking it all in – or as much of it as possible – it’s a huge event.

Let me just show you some photos:

Parades!

Dancing horses!

Dancing people!

And fairgrounds, and military exhibitions, and all sorts of stuff. Most of which involves hundreds of horses – I guess that’s why they call it Stampede.

Another week, another adventure… last weekend was the ‘Focus’ international student outreach group’s annual ‘wilderness camping’ expedition. Twenty six of us from all corners of the world headed off to the Blue Bronna Wilderness Camp for the long weekend. It’s easy to find – just head South out of Calgary, and about thirty to forty minutes after leaving all civilisation, you’re there!

Despite the somewhat scary prospect (for me anyway) of being immersed in unnatural quantities of nature, the trip was brilliant fun, and great for really getting to know everyone in the group. It was a non-stop weekend including climbing up rock faces (and abseiling back down again), horse riding, hiking in the mountains, archery, singing Christian songs round the camp fire (not your usual Sunday service), and an introduction to Cantonese, Korean, Japanese…

The accommodation was… functional.

Just in case you think it’s all fun and games, I am working hard too. I’m now transitioning from the One Laptop Per Child project over to the main software project which everyone else in the software department is working on various parts of it. I realise that the last two blog posts have just been about weekend fun, but the photos are better.