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It has been over a month since my last post, summer vacation has since started and is very relaxing. I’ve started taking Jujitsu, although I’ve only been to a handful of classes so far. It’s really fun but I am sore all over. Next month I leave for a two month internship in Washington, D.C. It’s an extremely exciting opportunity, I look forward to going. There will be lots of pictures (I have been ordered to take many on pain of death).

In other news, we bought a four year old Russian Tortoise named Voltaire. A reptile vet has given him a clean bill of health and he seems happy – he’s active and curious, checking out his enclosure and readily poking around new places when we let him out to explore. I have taken several pictures and even made a couple of videos, which you can see on my YouTube channel. The pictures, as always, are available in the gallery. Here are some of my favourites:

We haven’t built an enclosure for him in the backyard yet, so right now it’s just a pile of lawn furniture! When he got tired outside in the backyard, he crawled into my slipper and fell asleep. Here is a video:

Nick

So for the past few months I have been putting together a new desktop computer for myself. I finally got the last component which was, strangely, the case. You can see pictures of it here in the gallery. The specifications:

• Cooler Master HAF 932 Full Tower case
• EVGA X58 SLI LE motherboard
• Intel Core i7 920 CPU
• Corsair 3x2GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM
• EVGA GeForce GTS 250 with 1GB DDR3 video card
• 1TB Western Digital HDD

Nick

The gallery is back up.

Nick

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So a few weeks ago my mom was doing some banking and needed her signature on a form witnessed. President’s Choice is an online bank, but they told her the form could be witnessed by management at any CIBC branch. She went there but the assistant manager refused to do it. Witnessing a signature is a very simple process – you’re just confirming that you watched someone sign their own name to a form. It takes less than a minute. Yet they spent ages arguing because the assistant manager refused to believe that PC Financial is in any way affiliated with CIBC. My mom eventually left and paid a lawyer $50 to stand there while she signed the form. She called the bank later, and the manager backed up his assistant about the (non-) relationship with PC Financial. We were left with no other option than to write this letter:

Attention to Mr. Eranga Goonetilleke

CC: CIBC Customer Care & CIBC/President’s Choice Ombudsman

Following our telephone conversation on Wednesday January 6, 2009, I am forwarding you the legal documents printed from the CIBC and PC Financial websites.

According to you CIBC does not represent or have an affiliation to President’s Choice Financial. This is of great concern to me because it is not true and I am banking with President’s Choice. You told me on the phone that CIBC does not make a difference between (as per your example) TD Bank or President’s Choice. I was told the same on Monday January 4, 2009 by your assistant manager.

When I went to your branch I had a legal paper (form 487) from CIBC. I needed someone to witness my signature. At the bottom of the form it is clearly indicated that it can be witnessed by a Branch Officer and I was told the same by President’s Choice. Neither you nor your assistant manager (Miss Jay) recognized the legal document as one of your own. On the phone you kept repeating that President’s Choice has nothing to do with CIBC. You were not even aware that CDIC would combine assets from BOTH CIBC and President’s Choice up to $100,000.00 because President’s Choice is a trademark of CIBC. This is upsetting to me because you cannot accurately council me about my investments if you do not know that.

You and your assistant manager kept telling me that you had contacted your legal department. This is hard to believe. I am sure they are aware of the arrangement with President’s Choice. Below is a link to the President’s Choice Legal Stuff section of their website, which contains numerous references to CIBC. There is also a link to the CIBC’s Deposit Insurance Information page which repeatedly refers to President’s Choice. Paper copies of these web pages have been sent to Mr. Goonetilleke.

• http://www.banking.pcfinancial.ca/a/legal/dailyBanking.page (accessed 01-06-10)
• http://www.cibc.com/ca/cibc-and-you/to-our-customers/dep-reg-info.html (accessed 01-06-10)

Unfortunately I will not do business with CIBC as I do not have faith in your ability to handle my assets.

Sincerely,

-contact information-

I hand delivered a copy of this letter to the manager, who did not recognize me (I was never at the bank). A few days later we were contacted by the Ombudsman, who was incredulous and not very apologetic. They informed us that the manager would be informed of the relationship between the two, but they honestly didn’t seem to believe he wasn’t aware of it. A few days after that, we were called once again. Apparently the manager had forwarded the documents to them and they were sincerely sorry. My mom is even supposed to get a $50 credit for the lawyer fee…

Nick

I made some changes to the update process, which worked fine for a while. Naturally it failed catastrophically in the middle of exams. It also dragged the main site down with it, although that was fixed by severing the wordpress+gallery link. I don’t have time to deal with another project right now so the gallery is down until further notice.

[EDIT] The gallery has been erased as the problem could not be repaired with simple tinkering. No pictures have been lost (remember: always keep a fresh backup!). I’ve decided to wait until Gallery 3 comes out, which should be fairly soon.

Nick

This is a walkthrough for the executives of ISSA, to help them use WordPress. Let’s start with the basics, logging in and setting up your profile:

Your username is your first initial plus your last name. My name is Nicholas Guindon, my username is nguindon. Your password should have been emailed to you, if you do not know it ask me and I will send it to you again. Now that you are logged in you must change your password, and you should also enter some information about yourself:

That only needs to be done once. So now that you have a new password and such, you want to know how to post something on the website. It’s easy:

CREATING A NEW POST

Now that you have written and published this post, it appears on the site like this:

If you click on the title you’ll be able to read just that post, leave a comment and read any comments other people may have written:

CREATING A NEW PAGE

Those posts are great, but only the newest ones show up on the front page. What if you have something important that you want to keep easily accessible? For example information about the club. That sort of thing should go on a Page, which is just like making a post but it stays on the top banner forever:

That’s it!

ADVANCED FEATURES: “MORE TAG”

What do you do if your post is really long or full of pictures, and it’s making the front page look cluttered? Simple, you need to cut that post so that the front page looks like this instead:

When you’re writing a post and you start thinking it’s too long, click this button:

ADVANCED FEATURES: INSERTING ONE OR MORE PICTURES

Let’s say you’re writing about an upcoming event and you want to include the poster in your post, as an attachment. Here’s what you do:

Now you have a picture in your post.

OTHER FEATURES: GRAVATARS

You may have noticed that when I post a comment, there is a little picture beside my name:

If you want one too, go to the Gravatar website and sign up for one.

Nick

I’m making some extensive changes to the gallery, so it is currently down. [EDIT] Everything is back up now.

Nick