Stouffville, Ontario Canada (647) 962-1997 gwstudios@rogers.com M-F 8:30am - 2:30pm & 8:00pm - 11:00pm

Author: greatwallstudios

Married, Graphic Designer, enjoy playing the electric guitar, model building, wood working and sculpting.

RPA developer, you should hire one for your company asap.

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Automate those mundane tasks asap, get your people focused on customer service or big picture thinking. Free yourselves from simple data entry, and hire an RPA Dev now! Do it. Get it done. Get your people focused on those money making tasks, not toiling away on invoices, amending contacts or mailing lists. Get you a BluePrism, or UIPath, or Microsoft Flow, now called Power Automate, dev tech to kick your business into high gear. Do it!

That’s my business oriented rant for today. I usually steer clear of tech trends, but it’s big over seas where your companies have been outsourcing to for decades. It’s making it’s way here, so get infront of it. See what RPA Developers can do for you and your businesses.

Automate the mundane, focus on the bigger picture.

“I was in a cocoon, now I’m a beautiful butterfly.” ~ Post Malone: Hot Ones First We Feast.

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And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. I think, compared to last weekend, this one should be a whole lot quieter. Far less physical activity, that’s for sure. Have some family things to sort out, so I may not be too engaged with the blog come Saturday/Sunday. No biggie. I’m not certain anyone besides me visits every single day anyway. I don’t bring it out of people like that. No biggie. I’m not famous, or a voice of a generation. Just some dude keeping his streak going for just a little bit longer. Taking by the moment, as the days progress.

I’m willing to bet that at least 75% of my current “followers” are bots or junk accounts. It’s weird how some innocuous blog entry will just randomly go on a run of likes and gathering new followers. But the post in question is never anything worth while. Not a short story, not a wood working of sculpting post, nor a think piece about tragedy or anything meaningful. Plus many followers share the same avatar image, or are about passive income, crypto, or some internet money making scheme. It’s all very weird and strange.

I managed to finish and hand off the two newel posts for my FIL. I got the kitchen window screen fitted (kind of), and I have yet to cut the hinge slots. Still feeling a bit of trepidation about committing to that step. So close to finishing though. So close! I will do it. I’m happy that come the fall I’ll be able to have that door open to the breeze like I have dreamed of since we moved her in 2009. Baby steps! Measure three times, just to be certain.

I hate to say it, you hate to see it, but it’s probably true.

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This will be controversial and unpleasant but it needs to be said. We do too good a job in north american society of shielding the average Joe in the population from the grisly truth behind what an AR-15 does to a human body. I think that lots of people believe that those kids from Uvalde in Texas from the other day are lying in a morgue with little round weeping bullet holes, and not the truth, that they were pulped and unrecognizable. So the ideal vision of our Angel’s asleep with tiny wounds let’s us walk away and forget about it. But if you plastered every newspaper with one savage, graphic, horrific view of the hideous truth, the gun lobby would struggle to maintain their vise grip on US politics.

It is horrific. It is happening. It’s happening to children, on what seems like every third day, just about. The movement to ban high capacity magazines and to reduce the availability of higher powered military grade weapons needs a new, upfront tack. Various media outlets hide the true nature of the details, because they are so horrific. So we can picture something less terrifying in our minds, and allow ourselves to just do nothing about it.

To make a real change, a few apple carts will need to be overturned. Why do people think there are so many vets with PTSD? They’ve seen the reality and it fundamentally changed their whole lives. But those of us shielded from the truth allow it to continue, until your asked to give a DNA sample to help find your kids remains because they’re just grisly matter now. Not an identifiable human being.

Guns have a place, and a use. Just not assault style rifles in average Joe’s hands.

I personally like to target shoot with a 30-06. I do so whenever I go to Las Vegas. It packs a punch, but can only hold five bullets at once before you have to reload it, and you have to manually pull back on the bolt to load it. Great fun. But that’s not when John Q Nutcase the caucasian killer has when he goes to a school to kick things off. That, while deadly, would give the majority a chance to flee, or to attack during reloading. Not that that is much better, but these fish in a barrel situations are untenable. It’s vile and cowardly. You wanna feel like a man, go start a fist fight with the person(s) you actually have beef with, not a grade school full of little kids.

Yeah so, in a few days time when this becomes relevant again, I’ll just relink to it, in perpetuity.

What could be more fun than gibberish?

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Not a whole lot, I’ll tell you that, now, for free. It has been a busy couple of says. My shoulders are feeling the pain from it all. Carrying debris around homes and lifting trunk chunks into trailers is busy work. Tiring for this middle aged man. Whoo boy! But what a work out. Speaking of which, started push ups again, which are boring and tedious, but my back has really been feeling it these last few days. Still haven’t gotten up the desire to go for a run. My knees and ankles implored me not to, so I heeded their call for calm.

In the shop I am almost done the two newel post caps for my FIL. Done in Cedar with some trim tacked around the outside, and a nice round over on the top. Looks like it’ll end up 8.5×8.5×2 inches high. Had to break out my hand planes for these rustic fellas. Smell great when you work it too. I opted to attach the mitered trim with Brad nails and not pin nails. They aren’t going anywhere. Especially since I used glue as well. Should be rock solid. Three coats of thick oil based primer, top and bottom, and they can go to their new home.

Then I need to tackle my hinges and finish of this screen door for good! Makes me nervous to cut into them and the frame on the house. Hard to fix if I fuck it up. Oh well. Maybe tomorrow I’ll pluck up the courage to measure it all again, and lay things out. Perhaps I’ll get the itch to start cutting, chopping and chisel my way through the task. Stranger things have happened.

The inclement weather kind of robbed us of a long weekend. The 26+ hour power outage didn’t help much either. Could be worse though. By 9:00pm Monday night we had all of our residential clean up done. I’ll take that as a win. At some point this weekend I crossed over 160 days of writing every single day. Might have been with the short contract killer story I roughed out. I think I could pretty that up some, but I like the bones of the story. My time constraints made it a bit rushed, but the spine is in there, hard & fast.

That was a long, long weekend.

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Spent cutting, and hauling brush, climbing ladders and assessing damages to rooves, and other buildings/structures.

My hands and arms are exhausted, and I feel like I could sleep for 24 hrs straight and still wake up bone weary. I can’t imagine how others, whom were harder hit are keeping up. Weather calls for rain tomorrow, and possibly for a few days in a row.

Our house clean up was minor, my in-laws house was more involved, as they lost fencing, a shed, and three trees plus numerous limbs. We also helped a neighbor, and then I got up on a farm hands roof, and found a limb had harpooned his roof, leaving a white onion sized puncture in the top of his roof. We cleared his downed brush as well. Three full to over flowing dump trailers worth of debris.

They called it a derecho, that stretched 800Km, from London Ontario, all the way to Montreal, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.

Yesterday we started clean up.

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Others were hit far worse than us, but parts of the farm could take weeks to clear up all of the snapped or downed trees. Limbing and felling the ruined trees will take a very long time just due to the sheer number of dangerously leaning trees covering our trails and walking paths.

As far as the actual physical farm buildings I’m not sure, as I’m not privy to that part of the business. Could be insurance, Parks Canada, the Conservation People or private contractors, or even us charged with fixing the damage and making the property safe again. No idea.

I have heard the term Derecho in relation the the 800 km line of wind storm that stretched from London to Montreal, doing various amounts of damage, and even weak tornados along the leading edges of the wind driven event. I hear that it’s a pretty rare event here. So that’s fun.

The sound of chainsaws, wood chippers and sirens has been pretty consistent since Saturday afternoon was the storm passed over us. Our home had minor branches come down on the front port, door over hang. But 12 minutes further south the farm was struck hard, and twenty minutes north east Uxbridge had some devastating destruction as well. My folks in Ottawa had close to 20+ trees come down on their street and lost roof shingles in the process.

My life as a contract killer.

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Image Credit: Thomas Dubois

It started in the early winter of 2199. I was working sixteen hour shifts piloting my cab-barge over Sante Feyokyo ferrying people around the vast sprawl of the newest metropolis in the midwest. The ash that falls like snow in mid February makes you feel every subzero degree of the blistering and cutting winds. Especially in the open are cab-barges that became the go to cheap transport options for the working class and those just above destitute. I pulled my waxed canvas coat tight around my face, the harsh material of the collar grazing my rough cheeks.

I was hauling empty bread crates by the tonne over a thirty mile stretch between eleven pm and five am. I’d had a few calls to let actual people hop onboard with the crates to double dip on fares when my phone chimed. I was worried it was my guild calling me on my double dipped fares but it was a private number on the line. As I pulled up to the sixty fourth floor dock I heard a woman exclaim “No way! I’m not getting on that thing, it’s a death trap!” But her date, or companion told her just how expensive a covered cab would be, and she balked and squeezed onboard with the icy, ash covered black bread trays stacked twenty five high across the deck of the barge. I indicated with my chin that they should hold onto the crate tie downs and not move around once we were on our way. With a swell like a rising tide, we bumped off the dock and floated out along the dark high rises, and the vivid neon advertisements. I used my gravity paddle to steer us around the traffic buoys, and out onto the main traffic thoroughfare. The insistent drone of the advertising jingles slowly drowned out by the engine hum, and the whipping winds full of ash.

The phone was quiet while I tagged their chips to pay for transit when the phone line crackled. A message appeared then slowly faded away. Then I recieved nine more messages, from the FBI, CIA, INTERPOL, NMPD, and various other agencies requesting I terminate both guests on my cab-barge. The last message was an invoice, paid to me for six thousand dollars. Looking around the cab-barge I couldn’t really see the companion riders I was hauling. But every so often when we hit an air stream, or heat swell I could see the tension pulling on the line, from the riders holding on for dear life. So I untied the tie downs, and hit the gas into an eddy, and watched the lines spill out and a barely audible gasp escape from the falling riders.

I slowed down and crawled around the front of the dark barge to re-secure my empty bread crates as I floated four hundred feet in the cold night air, and toggled over to my banking app on my phone and watched the funds deposit from INTERPOL.

From that day forward I continued on as a cab-barge hauler, and executed anyone that the various agencies paid me to.

Phew! That was a mad scramble…

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But now it’s time for something a little different. I’ve been tasked with building two new replacement newel posts for my FIL. The current ones have rotten over the two decades since they were installed, so I’m hoping that the two new Cedar ones I’m making as replacements hold up just as long or longer. I will prime them in thick white oil based exterior paint, so I hope that helps.

My conundrum is that I have two slightly different pieces of trim, enough to do one newel post cap each. Do I do them in similar but not the same trim (which I have on hand, and is therefore free) or do I go buy a full length so they both match, but it’ll cost me money to do so. Hmm. The problem with being cheap/frugal is you gotta be ok with things being eclectic, or slightly off and not at all matchy-matchy. It’s for an exterior entrance that nobody ever uses, so I think I can get away with it. The Cedar I bought for a Christmas gift for my BIL where in I didn’t need all 8 lengths, just seven of them to complete my signage gifts. So the cost was sunk in another project. I think I have answered my own question.

My wrist is aflame from yesterdays mad rush of 182 images, with an additional 74 this morning. I am done on my end, awaiting review and any change orders or additional requests. Glad for the work. It made Friday fly by without any fuss. Our holiday plans changed on us by way of “The ‘Vid” so we are searching for a way to remedy that in the near future. Oh well.

Still no new progress on my childrens book. I might shelve it for the time being. Mind you, I still have five more weeks of school days in which to pick it back up before schools out for summer and my minions are home full time for 9 weeks. Then I will get very little done by way of hobbies. But I will accomplish paid work, don’t you worry about that. I think I have one or two reports coming for the summer and one more for the fall. Not terrible, not great. I hope for more than that. Or some extra can labels, t-shirts & apparel, retail signage, catalogue work or build from the ground up branding/packaging work in the alcoholic beverage space.

Though, maybe I should stop chasing the nostalgia of my alcoholic beverage packaging days. Rose coloured glasses and all that jazz. I once had the opportunity to build, from scratch a proprietary glass bottle, and it was looking amazing, but the job was put on hold during a personnel issue inside the brewery/distillery and I never got to see the design go to market. We had built a series of eight flavoured cans too for a Mimosa project, well ahead of the curve, but that got stopped too. Much to my chagrin. It was good work on my part, and that of the brand team. I was very upset to see it go nowhere.