Earlier this month, Kathy and I went to Hawaii for 8 days. We stayed in Waikiki Beach in Honolulu on the island of Oahu. For the first half of the trip, we rented a Jeep and did a lot of sightseeing, including visiting the Dole Plantation, Hanauma Bay and driving most of the north shore of the island. We also climbed Diamond Head, a volcanic crater at the east end of Waikiki. For much of the 20th century, it was a military command post with fire battery control stations defending Honolulu.

We also did some geocaching and spent the last half of the trip on Waikiki beach in front of the Hale Koa hotel. Some of the highlights included going parasailing and taking a ride on one of the Atlantis submarines.

I took a fair number of pictures which I haven’t put online yet.

After just shy of three years in the Survey Operations Division at Statistics Canada, I am moving on to the Environmental Accounts and Statistics Division at STC as part of a program called Corporate Assignments.  Basically, people can move around in the agency to broaden their knowledge and experience through temporary assignments.

My coworkers took me out for lunch on Wednesday and said some very nice things about me and I received phone calls from most of the regional tech support people that I’ve gotten to know quite well over the last three years.  Though I won’t miss the negative stress of the job, I will most certainly miss the people.  Fortunately, I won’t be that far away from them and I may get to deal with some of them in my new job as one of their clients.  And, being a temporary assignment, there’s a good chance I’ll be back in Survey Operations in a year (unless my assignment becomes a deployment). (more…)

Lately, the amount of blog spam I’ve been getting has been quite low.  But, it will return in the not too distant future because that’s the way it works.  I’ve decided to implement a more active method of combating it in the form of Bad Behaviour, something I read about in someone else’s blog.

A new version of the blogging software I use, WordPress 2.0.1, was released a few hours ago.  As with previous upgrades, the upgrade procedure was painless and took just under 10 minutes.  It fixes a number of bugs, but none that I’ve encountered. 🙂