Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

Last week March 15-17 I was in Saskatoon at a library and schools IT conference. I posted pictures the other day.

I started off on Wednesday by driving into the city in the work vehicle, with my boss as the passenger. We arrived on time in the city, and headed down a side street that had probably never been plowed and had deep icy ruts, I managed to not-so-gracefully send the Vibe into a fishtail of doom that sent our rear end careening in a clockwise twirl at almost 40km/h, until I steered it with white knuckles and my foot firmly next to the brake, into an uphill driveway with a Ford car in it. The only casulty was my pride, and a snowbank that wasn’t made of ice thank goodness, as I brought the car to a stop nearly 270 degrees later, a good meter or more from the Ford, and with a slighly cleaner driver side door where it’d brushed the snowbank next to the driveway. After restarting the car which I think had stalled, I continued more carefully down the side-street-of-doom until parking at the destination a few houses away.

The Ford owner left his driveway as I pulled out of the parking spot at our first destination - he was probably trying to get the heck away from me, although more likely he missed the entire ordeal and never knew how close his back bumper was to extinction. Oh the tales your car could tell, eh?

Anyway, we had lunch at A&W; I had a combo with a chocolate shake I could barely get through the straw so I drank most of it the old fashioned way instead, and onion rings that were better than they used to be. We parked at the hotel and walked a few blocks through the bitter cold to the first of the meetings at the main library where I learned how to use M0n0wall and pfSense then I went out to O’Sheas and met some of Ashley’s friends while I nursed my one ceasar of the night. I’m a big drinker if you didn’t know, I tend to have about 2 or 3 drinks, a month. I still prefer straight Clamato juice to a ceasar with vodka.

Panago pizza was supper, and This is Wonderland played its last episode ever, and it was a fun night to start the conference trip. I had a bed with a controller on it to make it more firm or soft. What will they think of next?
The next morning I went down for breakfast, and after a keynote speech about Happy Slapping [cyber bullying for those who aren't in the-know] and txt-messaging without pressing Send, cause “That costs $0.25″, there was a chance to walk around the booths of vendors and get a card punched to enter a draw after the conference. Last year I acquired a fantastic pen as a promotional giveaway from Sophos that has a blue LED flashlight built in, which is super cool, and there were stress-brain-balls from the You’re IT planners too. This year Sophos had no pens, but did give away stress balls, and another booth had Ubuntu 5.10 CDs which were fun. I have that OS on my computer as a backup to Windows if I want to play in Linux for a bit. I’ll eventually convert to Linux when it has compatible video conferencing with MSN.

Lunch rolled around and I wondered who’d be the entertainer since last year it was Theresa Sokyrka from Canadian Idol. It was Mark and Lee a comedy improv duo who I think I’ve seen on TV before. They were pretty funny, and I bought a couple of their books of humour while they were offering them for sale there. Then door prize draws began, and I announced that I’d win something. I did, about 4 draws later: an iPod Shuffle. It sure beat last year’s prize which was just a CD flip-case for 10 CDs.