Back to Life.

Actually I've been back in Quebec for several days now, but they seem to have disappeared rather quickly.

The Stoney Creek trip went generally well, by which I mean we opened on Tuesday morning at 8am as the Corporation wanted us to. The nine days that I was down there simply were not enough to complete the task before me. Worse, my time demands made some unfair demands on the 'normal' process of transitioning an old store to a new one; for instance, I diverted several of the people who should normally be moving stock over to the new building to spend 2 days moving technology and office furniture which could normally have been left to last. Having to get back to school dictated that I had to get stuff going asap.

So, the store is up and running and all of the various office PCs and the lan that connects them (along with associated web server, mail server, remote access, etc) are running and should remain in good shape until I can finish the job in December when I plan to spend two weeks in Southern Ontario.

Part of the problem is that we wanted all of the new technology for this store; the old store contained a glut of long-expired and unsupported technology that the previous owner should have replaced years ago, but didn't want to invest the money. His office looked like something out of an Austin Powers movie -- that should tell you something. If the technology move was just to take all the old stuff and put it in the new store it would have been simple, alas, that was not the case. But in the end, all of the new technology puts us ahead of the curve defined by the average of Canadian Tire stores; everything is crisp, clean, new and fast.

Some very basic (and uncorrected) pictures are available in my Flickr account.

So now I don't have to work through any more 15 hour days, but that said, I've signed up to be an 'on-call' web developer for the university bringing my official job count to 3+research+classes. Should be fun right?