Sirius is looking for a Senior Business Analyst.

Senior Business Analyst
The Senior Business Analyst is responsible for operational and development tasks with a focus on leading projects through the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). All aspects of SDLC will be included, from Business Requirements and Design Specifications to Testing and Implementation.

The Senior Business Analyst will:
• Manage multiple projects in a dynamic environment, including the establishment and documentation of project timelines.
• Document user requirements identifying what changes (additions/deletions) are required, functional specifications and business solutions.
• Communicate with the application development staff to co-ordinate and develop detailed functional specifications and flow charts for program creation or enhancements.
• Provide solution specifications which improve productivity, reduce costs and enhance customer service.
• Manage and conduct unit testing of program code once the application has been developed to verify business requirements.
• Co-ordinate integration, systems & user acceptance testing of the application solutions ensuring zero defect level.
• Create flow and entity relationship diagrams for easy training on new and/or existing applications.
• Provide support for problems or errors with the applications in the production environment.

If you have a Bachelors degree in engineering, sciences or equivalent, and a minimum of 5 years experience and/or training in business process analysis and mapping, you may be ideal for this role. In addition you must have a high level of detail orientation to be able to identify business and technical issues; creative project management skills including the management of priorities; excellent analytical ability; strong interpersonal and team-building skills; an inquisitive mind and the ability to dig for information; a high level of professionalism and leadership; strong planning and organizing ability; strong verbal and written communication skills; and the ability to work well in a team setting. You must have an advanced knowledge of MS Word, Excel, Project and working knowledge of Power Point, Access, Visio and Outlook and knowledge of other hardware and software applications is an asset.

If you want to work for a dynamic, growth oriented company, please direct a covering letter and resume to the e-mail address below or by fax at (416) 513-7489. Sirius Canada is committed to equity in employment and programming.

Please note: We thank all applicants. However, only those selected for an interview will be contacted. No placement agencies or telephone calls, please.
Email: applications@siriuscanada.ca

Since I’ve started looking for another work contract, I’ve been stumbling upon interesting jobs that might be interesting to my readers. I’ll be posting them as I find them:

First up, now that CP24 is part of CTV, it looks like their trying to beef up their website (which needs a lot of work). They are looking for a Web Producer (News) – CP24 which I attribute more to a Web Developer, specifically for front end technologies such as HTML, CSS, etc.

Position: Web Producer (News) – CP24
Reference Number: KA-066
Location: Toronto – 299 Queen Street
Salary: Commensurate with qualifications and experience
Hours of Work: 40 hours per week. Shift work including week-ends and nights

Responsibilities:

• We are currently seeking a Front End web developer to develop and maintain the CP24.com website. Responsibilities include:
• Supporting and assisting in web design projects for the news team.
• Creating, repurposing and editing content for CP24.com including advertising, program news, links, photos, web banners, newsletters, contests and other dynamic content
• Track and analyze web statistics.
• Working with management to define and evolve product vision.
• Other duties as assigned.

Qualifications:

• 4+ years hands-on web development experience using HTML, CSS, XML, Java Scripts, Flash and Photoshop.
• 2+ years experience with a CMS and graphic design
• Excellent design and analytical skills, with the ability to transform concepts into working models and product solutions
• Highly organized, self-motivated and creative. Able to handle multiple tasks and maintain creativity in a high-pressure, deadline oriented environment.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills; ability to work well individually and/or in a team.
• Self motivated and strives for excellence.
• Capable of meeting tight timelines.
• Able to work with minimal supervision.
• Possess an undergraduate degree in a Computer Science or similar discipline from a recognized post-secondary institution.

Application Deadline: August 28, 2008.

From CNN:

‘Can’t we be friends?’ Mending a broken heart

By Michel Vincent Miller

(OPRAH.com) — A young man I know, still in love with his girlfriend, tried to go along with her plea to remain friends after she told him that she wanted the freedom to see other men.

A couple of months later, she invited him to her birthday party. In the course of the evening, while searching for a bathroom, he saw her through an open bedroom door passionately kissing another man. Feeling deeply hurt and angry, he later confronted her, whereupon she retorted, “But we said we’d be friends.”

The girlfriend’s response seems lacking in empathy and concern — traits we usually associate with friendship — but one wonders whether the young man wasn’t setting himself up for a fall in the first place.

“Can’t we be friends?” It’s an old refrain, ready-made for the one who wants out of a relationship to deliver to the one who doesn’t. Frank Sinatra gave it a permanent place in popular culture with the song “Can’t We Be Friends?” (”This is how the story ends / She’s gonna turn me down and say / Can’t we be just friends?”) Sinatra, who never backed away from melancholy (at least in his music), understood a thing or two about mourning. Oprah:com: Stuck in the past? How to move on

And mourning is the theme that matters here. Trying to be friends immediately following a breakup tends to prevent the rejected partner (and maybe both partners) from mourning the death of romantic love — from accepting its finality by suffering it all the way through.

As painful as this can be, it ultimately performs an essential function. Behind the tears, mourning has silent work to do: It binds up the torn places where love was and gives them a chance to heal.

This is crucial because falling in love carries us beyond our customary limits of self-expression into territory that puts our sense of self at risk. Two people in love place much of themselves in each other’s hands for safekeeping; that kind of interdependence is why the loss of an intimate partner entails the depressing experience of being left behind with a diminished sense of your own existence.

Grieving the end of a relationship is a gradual process of extracting the “I” from a vanishing “we.” It provides a way — the only way — to retrieve what you invested in a lover or spouse who has departed. Mourning is like casting a line into dark waters and trying to reel in those parts of yourself that you surrendered to the relationship before they, too, disappear.

Although friendship just after the split may offer temporary relief, it blocks the slow but necessary passage from loss to restoration of independence. Oprah:com: Meet women who started over and found their true calling

A number of years ago, I saw a patient who felt that her sex life was essentially over because she had suddenly been left by the man with whom she had experienced her first grand erotic passion. She did everything she could to win him back — calling, sending gifts, even promising to change anything about herself that wasn’t satisfying to him — all to no avail.

It took extensive work (and many tears) before she was able to see that the unparalleled sexiness she attributed to him was in fact the power of her own sexual desire. At this point, his image began to lose its magnetism for her.

What her experience suggests is that if you give in to mourning, unsettling though it may be, it will eventually finish its work. Only then do you again become free to fully inhabit your present life and turn from a sorrowing fixation on the past to the exciting unknown of the future.

All human development entails suffering losses that need to be grieved. At every stage of life, we are propelled beyond familiarity and security into a new situation: A baby’s first steps mean that she will soon leave behind the comforting security of being carried. A young adult going off to college feels the thrill of freedom but has to contend with homesickness. For all the important gains, there are also losses that bring up anxiety and sadness. Grief might be thought of as the growing pain of human development.

A child’s love is really no different from dependence, and that equation haunts us to some degree all our lives. The residues of early dependence in all our intimacies play a large part in making the loss of love so hard to bear. Yet we all go through such loss, leaving behind a trail of casualties — outdated selves, broken promises, lovers we realize we chose for the wrong reasons. Mourning these helps change what can seem like failures into wisdom.

In learning how to grieve our losses, it doesn’t help that American culture, with its emphasis on romantic love and happy endings, isn’t very hospitable to mourning. But when we enter into the deeper and more difficult stretches of loving, Hollywood can’t shield us from the truth: All love stories come to an end, even those that last a lifetime. When loss hits us hard, it can be difficult to know what to do with it or even how to bear it. Many people in grief turn to antidepressants, which may reduce the pain but don’t necessarily provide much by way of self-discovery.

Mourning teaches us how to accept the end of love and helps us start the process of feeling whole again. True, the self you get back is never quite the same as the self you relinquished to your relationship; although wounds can heal, they leave scar tissue. But there’s more to gain than just surviving the breakup; there’s also the possibility of becoming more than you were, more able to undertake the experience of love in its moments of sadness as well as joy. As with any art or skill, the only way grieving can be learned is through practice — whether we like it or not.

By Michel Vincent Miller, Ph.D, from “O, The Oprah Magazine,” July 2008

The book, When Good People Have Affairs by Mira Kirshenbaum outlines 17 reasons why people have affairs. The Independent summarized these reasons in an article titled, What Kind of Adulterer Are You?

Break out into selfhood

Kirshenbaum writes: “For a long time there are forces in your life that have opposed your being yourself, expressing yourself.

The affair is the best way you knew how to stand up for who you are.” Virginia Woolf’s husband, Leonard Woolf, is reckoned to have been more of a guardian than a lover. She broke out into a torrid affair with Vita Sackville-West, on whom she based the novel Orlando.

Accidental

Kirshenbaum writes: “You weren’t looking for it … but you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Vivienne Haigh-Wood married the poet T S Eliot weeks after they met. He later confessed: “To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.” But she does not seem to have intended to betray him quite so soon. It was just that Bertrand Russell happened to drop by.

Sexual panic

Kirshenbaum writes: “You feel your sexual powers are waning and in a kind of panic, you have an affair to prove you’re still as sexually able as you were.” The career of John Prescott was, outwardly, a story of success, the former ship’s waiter who rose to be Deputy Prime Minister, but he never got over his sense of inferiority. In his sixties, he seduced Tracey Temple, a civil servant 26 years his junior.

Let’s kill this relationship (and see if it comes back to life)

Kirshenbaum writes: “The idea is that once an affair is discovered it will deliver a blow that will either kill your relationship or make it stronger.”

No sooner had Napoleon Bonaparte married Josephine than he was off to war, when rumours surfaced that she was having an affair. When he returned to France, she never cheated on him again.

Mid-marriage crisis

Kirshenbaum writes: “Without time and attention marriages get stale or feel full of problems, so … you have an affair.”

David and Victoria Beckham have done well to stay together. Plenty of women would not mind a turn with the footballer, and one or two claim to have had that experience. “No one said marriage was going to be easy,” Victoria admitted.

Trading up

Kirshenbaum writes: “You’ve moved ahead in life but your spouse has stayed behind. Having an affair is your way of being with someone you think better matches your circumstances.”

Horatio Nelson was an unknown young seaman when he met and married the widow, Frances Nisbet, who already had a son. Eleven years later, in 1798, he was a national hero, after winning the Battle of the Nile, and took up with Lady Emma Hamilton. Their affair was a national scandal, and the birth of their child had to be kept secret.

Heating up your marriage

Kirshenbaum writes: “Unconsciously, you’re hoping that the affair itself or your spouse finding out about it will make things more passionate…” In 1907, President Woodrow Wilson’s wife, Ellen, was suffering depression when Wilson met Mary Hulbert. Whether they had an affair is disputed, but the friendship caused Ellen pain. He introduced her to Ellen; the women shopped together, and the marriage revived.

I just needed to indulge myself

Kirshenbaum writes: “It may not be noble, but the fact is that you’ve been working so hard that an affair is the best way you know how to give yourself some pleasure.”

Poor Monica Lewinsky is fated to be remembered for the rest of her life for the misjudgement she made at 21, as an intern in the White House, by allowing herself to be the latest in the line of women to reward Bill Clinton for all his hard work. “He talked about it as though I had laid it all out there for the taking. I was the buffet and he just couldn’t resist the dessert,” she said in her book on the affair, ghosted by Andrew Morton.

Ejector seat

Kirshenbaum writes: “You want out of your marriage but you’re afraid to just quit, so you’re hoping that an affair will end things for you - either your spouse will kick you out or your lover will give you the courage to quit.”

“There were three of us in this marriage,” Diana , Princess of Wales, complained. Indeed there were. Prince Charles seems to have her married out of a sense of duty rather than love. A telephone conversation with Camilla Parker Bowles, as she then was, was taped and broadcast, no one knows who by. “The trouble is I need you several times a week … Oh. God, I’ll just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier!” he proclaimed.

See if

Kirshenbaum writes: “You’re in a see-if affair if your motive is to see if what you’ve been missing in your marriage can be gotten with someone else and, if so, does it make as much of a difference as you’d thought.”

When Ryan Phillippe appeared opposite Abbie Cornish in Stop-Loss, this year’s blockbuster about the Iraq war, their professional association blossomed into romance, causing the gossip writers to observe that she looked exactly like a younger version of Reese Witherspoon, Phillippe’s estranged wife. Their marriage has ended. He is certainly not the only man to find solace in a woman who looks like his first love.

Distraction

Kirshenbaum writes: “Things are hard, frustrating, confusing in your life, and an affair is a way to distract yourself from all these difficulties by creating a kind of oasis of romance.”

David Lloyd George was a great one for creating oases of romance after he left his simpler life behind in Walesto enter the world of high politics. His greatest love was Frances Stevenson, “my darling pussy”, who became his second wife.

Surrogate therapy

Kirshenbaum writes: “You need help of some sort - maybe boosting your self-esteem - and an affair is your way of getting it.”

The Austrian writer Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch had an unexciting marriage which did not suit his unusual emotional needs, so he signed a contract with his mistress Fanny Pistor Bogdanoff, making him her slave for six months, on conditions that she wore fur as often as possible particularly when she was of a mind to wield the whip. Hence the term “masochist”.

Do I still have it?

Kirshenbaum writes: “You are getting older, your marriage is stale, and you wonder if you still can attract someone, get them to fall in love with you, and carry on a passionate affair.”

Pablo Picasso married Olga Khokhlova in 1918, and was legally still married to her when she died in 1955, but did not let that cramp his style. He also had two children by Françoise Gilot, who left him in 1953, when he was 71. His drawings show that he now feared he had become a hideous old man, yet he managed an affair with 24-year-old Geneviève Laporte, who, in old age, made a fortune from the pictures he drew of her.

Having experiences I missed out on

Kirshenbaum writes: “You weren’t in many relationships before you got married and now you feel there are experiences that are important to you that you missed out on …”

In 1984, the newly elected Tory MP Edwina Currie, began an affair with John Major, then a party whip. It lasted for four years. They were both married. “Politicians admire the element of the devious in each other,” Currie explained.

Revenge

Kirshenbaum writes: “You’re furious at your spouse for some way he or she hurt you, and you’re having an affair as a way to get back, even if your spouse never learns about the affair.”

Being abandoned by her husband, King Edward II, during a campaign against Robert the Bruce was bad enough - Queen Isabella, daughter of the King of France, narrowly missed being a prisoner of the Scots - but what she really could not stand was his homosexual lovers. So she took up with Roger Mortimer, raised an army, and overthrew the king.

Mid-life crisis

Kirshenbaum writes: “These are rare because true mid-life crises are rare. What people think of as this can be explained by one of the others, such as the surrogate therapy or the mid-marriage-crisis affair.”

John Profumo was 25 when he was elected to Parliament, and was the youngest of the Conservative MPs who brought down Neville Chamberlain. But by 46, he was still only a middle ranking minister when he and his wife met Christine Keeler, then 20. After a few torrid weeks, he ended their affair. Unfortunately, for him, she could not keep a secret.

Unmet needs

Kirshenbaum writes: “Whatever it is you need, you’re not getting it from your partner. An affair is your way of getting those needs met.”

Catherine the Great was an innocent German princess when she was sent to Russia to marry Grand Duke Peter, heir to the throne. He was a disaster as a husband, and as a tsar. She loved sex and needed to produce an heir. Having had Peter murdered, she took uncounted lovers, the most famous of whom was Grigori Potemkin, reputedly endowed with more than just a first-class brain.

Blaine’s been a pretty active photoblogger for quite a while. Many of his shots have been in BlogTO. His site, Photo-Persistance, won one of the Canadian Blog Awards.

Mike’s been a good friend of mine for years. We met at a racing event sponsored by Audi so it’s only fair that I use his Audi R10 picture to show off his talent.

Mike’s photoblog has many car events, outdoor shoots including some great lightening pictures, and recently quite a few portraits.

Walter Lai Designs

My friend Walter just compiled his photoblog. I really like this pic that I displayed here. I like Walter even though he uses Canon SLR’s. :)

Walter’s shots are usually of biking, dancing and some pretty good portraits.

In Canada when your bank has a dormant account that is over 10 years old, it turns it over to the Bank of Canada. The BoC lists all the dormant accounts and allows the original owners to claim them.

Search for unclaimed balances on their website, you may have money that you don’t know about. On CityNews they found that former mayors Barbara Hall and Mel Lastman had unclaimed balances.

1. Make sure the tire pressure on your car is at the recommended level.

2. Drive like grandma. Light acceleration, lots of coasting.

These work. Seriously.

Gapminder World is a cool website the combines a large number of statistical information. It’s a pretty cool way to see how Canada stacks up against other countries in terms of large aggregate data like Life Expectancy, Income, etc.