I'm blown away right now thinking about all the stuff I've done since my last update a couple months ago. Highlights include my road trip to San Francisco and Sasquatch music festival with Andrew, visiting with Alan and Unni in Stockholm and Prague, motorcycling through northern Spain with Chelsea, countless beach and BBQ days with Aydin and my Vancouver pals, camping trips on the island and to Weaver lake, and finally riding across B.C. to arrive at my new home in Edmonton.
Our apartment here is sweet. Chels has really hooked it up with some nice furniture. There's a pretty good gym in the building that I expect I'll be taking full advantage of. There's also a shopping plaza right next to us with a Save-On Foods and a bunch of restaurants. And apparently there's a pool just around the corner which I've yet to check out. I'm about a 10 minute walk from work and if I get really lazy in the winter I can even take the subway.
The office here is really nice too. Everyone seems friendly. There's a food court at the bottom of the building which makes lunch a no-brainer and I've got a big cubicle and a new PC.
I bought a Samsung Galaxy Android phone today through Bell so I've finally jumped on the smartphone bandwagon. Apparently this model just came out today. It's an iPhone imitator. I like it so far. I also signed up for a 3 year contract on a promo plan that gives me unlimited long distance and texts to 10 people of my choosing -- perfect!
I'm liking Edmonton so far. I'm excited to get onto a self-development spree again. I want to learn sign language, contribute to some more open source software projects, continue with my French and Spanish learning, do some motorcycle maintenance, rock climbing, and volunteering for an adult literacy program, and hopefully I'll do a lot more reading too.
Chelsea and I went over to Victoria last weekend for her graduation ceremony. I skipped the actual graduation and just visited with our pals all weekend. Had a great time. Nothing beats the feeling of hopping on the motorcycle and riding to the ferries on a sunny Thursday afternoon with a long weekend lying ahead.
Now I'm back in the office trying to dust off my JavaScript skills, listening to My Morning Jacket, and reading some past journal entries that I wrote to myself after the olympics, new year's, and an epic November. Once in a while I'll write myself these private emails with a detailed account of what I've been doing and what I've been thinking about. Going back and reading them is always a treat and writing them helps me sort my thoughts out and get a feeling of assurance and organization when I'm anxious or scattered. I highly recommend it. Being a fast typist definitely helps.
I've been listening to music through youtube videos lately. They recently introduced a 'Disco' button that will give you more info about the artist you're listening to and generate a list of songs by them and other similar artists that you can then start cycling through. It's great for discovering new music and hearing stuff from your favourite bands that you haven't heard before. I found this guy, for instance, while listening to Nick Drake:
Got my motorbike out of the shop today. I had its 24,000km service done and got new tires put on that are more suited to street riding than dirt riding. Now it's ready to go for my upcoming road trip to San Francisco, Vegas, Salt Lake City, and Sasquatch. I rode it around town all day and it felt great being out in the sun! I've noticed though that it has a bit of an issue starting up and I have to give it a flick of gas and some choke. Will have to get that sorted out.
I took it to Richmond Motor Sport. They told me a service would cost about $250-$300 when I originally inquired in the shop. When I booked my appointment on the phone I was told it'd be about $500 for the full 24,000km service. When I got the bill it was $907.80, with the tires accounting for $280. They charged $425 for labour which I suspect was a bit steep. They also neglected to call me and let me know that they didn't receive a part in time for my appointment before I woke up early last Saturday morning and got Chelsea to drive me out to their store in far east Richmond. I'll probably take it to a Kawasaki dealership next time. Well, actually, I'm probably going to try to sell it in July rather than bring it to Edmonton.
I also picked up my new laptop today. It shipped on time and booted up fine. I have to give the win to Tiger over Dell, who shipped late and had an awful outsourced customer service line with long hold times. I'll have to reserve full judgement on the laptop itself until later of course but so far so good. And at 1/3 the price of my previous laptop I'm feeling much better about this purchase overall.
We are trying to get organized at work right now by lining up our various projects for the year, drafting agreements, determining scope and reviewing our resources. Today we met up pretty much all day with our new project manager who has joined us from the Western regional team in Edmonton.
We have three major projects that we're looking at right now. All of them were supposed to have had significant work done on them last fiscal year that turned out to not be as significant as we would have liked. So we're playing a little bit of catch up now and need to show some quick progress.
The projects are:
Trainsim: A standalone desktop application used to model trains and train tracks. Written in FORTRAN, this software is a true relic of the past century. We'll be porting it into Windows and giving the user interface a facelift.
Regional Extranet: Our region's presence on the inter-departmental government network. Since we are the Canadian government's back office, this site is particularly important for us to present ourselves to our clients (i.e. other government departments).
AIP Reporting: Our department has been funded to renew the country's infrastructure and lead us all out of recession. Projects funded by this special two year program are being closely scrutinized because the public naturally wants to see results from these highly publicized stimulus packages. Our team is developing scripts to extract data out of an unfriendly enterprise management system so that we can better visualize and report on these projects.
So today we all got together in a boardroom and had a group knowledge transfer session as Lois and Arash walked us through the painstaking process of teasing spreadsheets out of SIGMA, the unfriendly enterprise management system, which is now owned by SAP. Sorry, I couldn't really find anything about it on the Internet to link to for some reason. We also reviewed the current state of the Extranet site and came up with a list of outstanding items that need to be finished by the end of this month. We'll assign and prioritize them tomorrow. We also started thinking about our "technology roadmap" and what sort of tools we'd like to rally around for the next while, and Mike gave us a rundown of Sharepoint which they've been using in Edmonton. I liked getting together and talking tech. We used to do it more often. I'll be pushing for it through weekly group sharing sessions and regular pair programming.
I was doing some research yesterday to get a feel for what kind of tools are out there that I could use to build a really sweet government org chart. I am picturing something a bit like ancestry.com's family tree viewer.
I started looking at what's going on with visualization in the browser these days. I found these HTML canvas demos and Raphael JS looks like a sweet library for working with SVG. I might start playing with it to build my own org chart solution. Also caught wind of WebGL which sounds really cool. I am going to download a nightly FireFox build so I can check it out.
I picked up a bunch of new blog subscriptions today after going on a bit of a reading spree. The overarching subject of interest was Canadian government technology policy. The enthusiasm for change and openness within the public service is palpable. It's still early stages but so many people are talking about web 2.0 and transparency, thinking about it, and advocating for it, that I'm excited to see what develops in the coming months.
I think it's ironic that a lot of the communication and discussion around this topic is being carried out behind the government firewall on GCPedia and other forums where it's not visible to the public.
We have a formal classification system for information that allows us to designate certain sensitive documents as protected, so why not move GCPedia onto the Internet where it can benefit from public input and collaboration? I'm pretty sure nothing on there that I've seen is sensitive or really needs to be for government eyes only. Unfortunately there is still a strongly entrenched culture of secrecy and censorship within government that seems to be ingrained in many public servants. We're slowly getting there though, and I think inevitably we will move towards an environment where all knowledge is free.
To get there, we need to take some steps:
Stop restricting public servant's access to the Internet at work. This blatant censorship is outrageous and dated!
All public servants should be mandated to use only open source software and open data formats.
All government works and derivatives should belong to the public (i.e. crown copyright should be abolished).
All government data and communications should be made available to the public.
On a separate but related note, I have an idea in mind for a web application that would model the entire government org chart, displaying all public servants in a hierarchical tree that could be navigated interactively and would let you drill down and explore different branches and organizations. You'd be able to see every public servant's contact info, their position title, the description of their job and the competencies they are required to have. You'd be able to see the length of time they'd been in their position and their history in the public service, along with their bio and photo.
Each public servant would have a professional blog and status feed that they could update optionally. You'd be able to see a listing of all projects they are working on.
For each project you'd see the project budget and dates, the key contacts and authorities, the breakdown of spending, the number of contractors, the project location, etc. All projects would be plotted on a map and you'd be able to filter on a number of key criteria like dates, budget, and industry/type. There would also be a listing of all government contracts and purchases and a list of all government staffing, internal and external. There would also be records of all employee travel, training expenses, and equipment purchases. There would be reports on employee time reporting so you can see where they've billed their time to and there would be delinquency reports, cost overruns, overtime reports and all sorts of other metrics that the public could use to hold their public service accountable.
Fortunately, most of these pieces already exist, at least internally. The trick is putting them all together into one unified application with a killer user interface. The other trick will be getting approval to open it all to the public. The technology is there, the data is there. Now we just need a game plan.
So my daily updates initiative failed after day one. Oh well, guess I'll settle for "regular updates" and leave it at that. Today I visited with friends and family so there was lots of sitting around shootin' the breeze. Did a little bit of Spain planning just now. That's about it.
There have been a few times in the last while where I've sat down and started typing something out only to abandon it within minutes. I guess I have a tendency to feel that my posts should be substantial or meaningful in some way. Well, to break out of that block I'm going to try to hold myself to posting once a day for the next while. It'll be boring, stream of consciousness type stuff at first. You know, personal ramblings that no one likes to waste their time reading. So, "sorry in advance" to those few people who are actually subscribed to this thing and any newcomers who are just here to see what I'm all about.
I do hope to eventually start posting technical content and maybe some articles on Canadian government life and issues. I have to thank Ben Nadel for the inspiration to start putting out regular updates. I used to follow his blog regularly back when I was still into ColdFusion and stumbled upon it again today while googling something. The guy is admirably persistent! He's been posting helpful technical tidbits and personal updates for years on end with astonishing regularity.
I've been spending a lot of time perusing open source projects online at a very shallow level. I know that writing code is infinitely more instructive than reading it, especially when you're just skimming and not taking the time to really understand anything, but at least I've exposed myself to some of what's out there. In fact, I spend a lot of time just marveling at people's ability to churn out code and continuously develop themselves. I also like to pop over to the Arxiv once in a while to see what some of the more clever people in the world are working on.
Anyways, now that I've started typing I seem to have no problem thinking of topics I'd like to cover. In fact I guess I'm going to need to narrow down and pick a starting point for my next post. Here are a few possible subjects:
Open source software policies and open data/transparency in the Canadian government
Personal projects and contracting
Technical things I'd like to explore: node.js, erlang, rails 3, html 5, mobile development
Projects at work
Motorcycles
Project/business ideas
While I'm at it, here are some things I'd like to add to this website:
I've been gearing up for my move back to Vancouver, selling off most of our furniture on craigslist. Rental prices there are pretty scary because of the olympics so I'm glad Chelsea's parents have offered to put me up for the month. Med school residency match date is March 8th so that's when we'll find out whether we'll be staying in Vancouver or moving to either Edmonton, Calgary, Kingston, or Ottawa. I'm still not really sure which of those I'd actually prefer. I guess I'd give a slight edge to Vancouver or Ottawa and would put Kingston at the bottom of my list (sorry Kingston).
I'm going to miss Victoria. We had so many good times here with good friends. Life goes on though. I'm excited to get back to my friends and family on the mainland and the vibrant Vancouver office.
This last month has been a whirlwind of awesomeness. I chalk it up to having good friends. It's nice to have a little bit of a break for now though because I think the later half of December is going to be another wild ride.
Unfortunately I've been having so much fun that I've been neglecting certain things. I need to get my finances back into ship shape first off. And I could probably spend a little more time sharpening the saw with my technical skills and focusing on more intellectual pursuits.
On the plus side, I've been hitting the YMCA pretty frequently and have been packing lunches and eating dinners at home a lot more than usual (thanks mainly to Chelsea), so that's a win.
Richard signed his motorbike into my name last night so I'm now the proud new owner of a Kawasaki KLR650. This is the first vehicle I've ever owned! The excitement really just hit me today after flipping through the owner's manual. I have to wait until Spring though to ride it. And I still need to get my license...
I arrived back in Victoria on Sunday. It feels like I've come home. It's funny how your perception of what's home can change over time. My good friend Aydinsky Smith is coming over next week, so I'm looking forward to that.
I haven't been taking very good care of myself lately so I'm going to try to go on a health kick for the next little while. Some goals: Eat out way less, cut out Diet Coke and McDonalds breakfasts, get more fruits and vegetables, ramp up on the swimming and work-outs. Pretty cliché stuff I guess, but there's nothing wrong with that.
I signed up at the YMCA yesterday, so that should help with the exercise. I'm going to start eating a big breakfast to help me eat out less. I think I'll try making smoothies and granola. I'd also like to get up earlier in general so I can start hitting the pool before work.
I want to flex my mind muscle a bit more too. I'll do this by reading more books but also reading them more critically. Maybe I'll try making notes as I read, or at least questioning what I've read and why it's interesting or uninteresting, how it applies to my life, etc. I've been inspired by watching YouTube videos of Richard Feynman speaking. He has a curious way of looking at the world and explaining things that just makes everything seem so obvious. I read his semi-autobiography Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! back in college and highly recommend it.
I'd like to try a Yoga class while I'm over here too, as well as resume my French and Spanish studies, get my motorcycle license, get my finances in order, and continue improving my programming skills and making contributions to open-source software.
I've been living in Vancouver since mid August now. I can definitely feel a difference in the energy and liveliness of the city that was missing in Victoria. Things have been "go go go" since I got here and it feels good to be busy. Work especially has really seemed to pick up since the summertime. I attribute it mainly to being in the presence of my awesome co-workers. We have several projects on the go right now and a few more in the works, and it sounds like we're going to be growing our team which is exciting.
This week I made my first foray into the world of open source software development by submitting a patch for Redmine, the project management software that we use at work. Specifically, I worked on Feature #1406 which allows people to use redmine's repository browser to view branches in their git repositories. You can see it in action here.
I've also installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my computer at work and have not logged into Windows all week, even at home. There have been a few issues: Not being able to use Outlook for email, ColdFusion becoming case-sensitive, graphics card driver issues on my laptop, and no SQL server client. I'm making due though and I'm sure I'll work through all of the problems eventually.
I've added titles to my posts so this is starting to feel more like a real blog now. It seems Google Finance has changed the layout of their site slightly, breaking my Stocks page in the process. The good news is that I've discovered they have an actual API that I should be using anyways, so I'll have that fixed in a few days hopefully.
I signed up for an account at Good Reads today (thanks Lois)! So I'll eventually be upgrading my Lists page to pull from there. I'll need to find a similar service for movies. I'm sure there's got to be one out there. Maybe I'll outsource this blog to an external service too and this whole site can just be a giant mashup.
I'm stoked for the French Open. Have my fingers crossed for yet another epic Fed-Nadal showdown. I'm rooting for my main man Fed of course. I figure with his recent victory in the Madrid Masters his chances are actually half decent.
After a month or so of falling off the fitness bandwagon, I'm back on yet again. I have a gentleman's wager with my friend John "Button" Hill that will take us racing up the notoriously punishing grouse grind on June 21.
What else? Conversational French started up for the summer, so I'm going once a week. My fair-weather tennis season has begun. I started reading A Passage to India by E.M. Forster and am liking it so far. Stuck Ubuntu on my laptop and am playing with VM's. My ultimate goal is to ween myself off Microsoft tech once and for all. Then I can work with Lois to push open source within government. The ideal would be to have every technology in our development stack and our servers be open source. I'd say give us two years, but we'll see, I guess. First I've got to get out of this furiously boring documentation that I'm stuck on and back to where I belong, in Vim, programming! I've recently turned down no less than 6 job offers in the last few weeks so that I could keep doing what I love, so I'd better get back to it soon.
I went to Vegas last weekend -- that was a blast. I was in Parksville for work the week before and that was really nice too. Summer's here as far as I'm concerned!
I noticed this site was running slowly the other day after I installed a Beekeeping Blog on my server for Dan. I figured out the culprit was not the connection to the server, but the fact that Rails and Apache seemed to be hogging all the memory. So, after some serious geeking out these past couple of days, I've switched to nginx which passes off to Phusion Passenger for this site and a standalone php-fcgi for the Wordpress site. I'm happy to report that things seem to be running much faster now.
I signed up for the Vancouver Sun Run a couple weeks ago and have started to train for it. This is the first race I've entered since elementary school. My goal is to run it in under 45 minutes.
I'm back onto my language learning kick again. I'm taking an evening French course at UVIC twice a week and have been listening to podcasts at Learn French By Podcast. Last night I discovered this great site, meetup.com, that lets you find casual interest groups in your area. There is a Spanish group that meets up at a coffee house on Tuesdays so I'm going to swing by tonight and see what it's like.
I stayed up to watch the men's tennis final of the Australian Open on the weekend from 12:00am to 5:30am. It was a great game but I was rooting for Federer. I can't see him winning the French but hopefully he does well at Wimbledon and the U.S. open.
Next weekend I'm going to Mt. Baker with a load of friends. It should be out of control.
I'd like to start maintaining separate personal and professional blogs so that people only interested in one or the other don't have to read through posts they don't care about. I'm sorry if this applies to you right now!
The regional AMITOS teams have been trying to kick-start collaboration efforts for a long time. Most of our effort so far has been focused on standardizing our programming languages and development environments so we can mix and match developers across teams. The idea is that if we all have the same skillsets, we won't have to spend as much time learning to be productive on other region's projects.
There are so many differences between the teams, though, that unifying on a set of technologies is going to be tough. What I think we need to do first is lay down some groundwork for more frequent communication and exchange amongst the regions. If we start talking and sharing more, the
standards will come with time.
For now, I've identified three tools that we've been having success with in the Pacific region that I'd love to see us all rally around to improve regional communications.
Tool #1: IRC
In recent years a new wave of technologists have started using IRC for quick and dirty communication. There are well-populated channels dedicated to pretty much every major piece of software and web technology. Developers hang out in these channels to discuss the tools they use and pose questions and problems to their colleagues. We’ve gotten on board and started idling in #amitos on irc.freenode.net. Now we no longer clog up each other's inboxes with disruptive, distracting emails or inane back-and-forths.
Tool #2: Blogs
One day I'd like to see an aggregated feed of blogs written by AMITOS employees with all of our ideas and day-to-day programming tidbits shared and recorded for posterity. Blogs are a great way to collect your thoughts and formulate them into intelligible communications that can benefit the group.
Tool #3: GitHub
For the uninitiated, Git is a distributed version control system that is taking the open source world by storm and is poised to dethrone Subversion as the most popular VCS on the block. GitHub is social software that links up developers and projects by tracking their Git repositories and the relations between them. With Git and GitHub, we hope to revolutionize our development workflow by adopting practices from the world of open source software development.
Things are heating up at work and, after a bit of a personal dry spell in December, I'm back in action. We've got some new blood in the form of two co-op students who joined us this week from SFU. We also have a pretty well-defined lineup of projects to take us through to the end of the government's fiscal year: March 31.
I've been assigned to carry out feature upgrades on four existing projects. They are as follows:
One: A billing application for the Esquimalt Graving Dock. Administrative clerks at the dock use this application to record all the charges incurred by their clients. The application produces progress reports and invoices for clients and reports on revenue and usage for management. They've been using this application for the past year alongside its antiquated predecessor. Once this latest set of feature upgrades is completed the intention is to abandon the old system for good.
Two: The human resources staffing application. This tool is used to keep track of all the job positions that are planned to be filled within PWGSC in our region. Before a person is hired to fill a government position, a fairly involved and rigorous staffing process is carried out to make sure that they meet the job requirements and that the hiring process is fair to all applicants. The application keeps track of the progress and status of these processes and provides overviews for human resources staff and management. It's also used as an employee tool for people to discover what opportunities are planned or underway within the department. The upgrades I'll be carrying out will make the system faster and easier to use for the human resources staff that have to enter in all the data. We also hope to prep the application for its eventual nationwide usage. My partner in crime Arash has been assigned to work on this one with me.
Three: A real estate project management tool. Staff members of the Real Property branch have been using this application for years to keep track of their government real estate projects. They've requested some improvements to the app that will allow it to keep track of more information for each project and allow the users of the app to access the information more efficiently. I'll be overseeing this project but most of the technical work will be carried out by Shila and Alice, our most hardened veteran and greenest co-op, respectively.
Four: Our department's regional corporate intranet site. This is the homepage for a majority of the seven hundred odd people working for PWGSC in British Columbia and the Yukon. It's the main source of internal news, documents, information and tools for employees. Last year we undertook a major overhaul of the site to reorganize the pages, revamp the interface and redo the technical infrastructure. The next round of changes will be focused around the implementation of a custom-written content management system that Lois has been heading up so far. Right now, all content updates are sent via email request to be carried out by our small web group (re: João). We want to give designated web publishers the ability to update their own content through the website itself, in the spirit of other collaborative websites like Wikipedia.
This website has just been moved to its new home at Slicehost
which is basically DiY hosting for nerds. So far I've been hugely impressed with their plans, their control panel,
their technical articles, and their overall philosophy.
Before Slicehost I was running my site off an old computer in my living room. Now $20 a month means no more
turning the website off at night and when I'm on vacation. It also means a much faster connection and a more
powerful server.
With the move to new hardware I've also changed my server software configuration and am now using the Phusion Passenger mod_rails module for Apache instead of
an nginx/thin cluster setup. All the hype about mod_rails was justified -- the thing was a breeze to get running.
I've started using git in place of subversion for managing the source code of this site and a few other projects. The code can be freely accessed by anyone at github.
My stocks page is back in action and has some improvements. It should appeal to anyone who enjoys looking at red numbers. I've also started working on a new page where I intend to showcase my team and our projects at work.
I'm planning to start blogging more about my work and technology. Some topics I want to cover: Current projects, development environment, Ruby on Rails and ColdFusion, government life, hurdles facing web 2.0 adoption within government.
My new computer arrived on Thursday. It's a Dell XPS M1330. My first laptop. Pretty slick! I have it hooked up to my monitor, keyboard and mouse so it feels like I'm using a regular PC at home. The peripherals are all connected through a KVM switch so I can easily switch them all over to my linux server with the press of a button.
I've been watching a lot of cartoons at Weebl's Stuff this weekend. They're pretty bizarre but quite addicting.
Last week I spent a lot of time on project planning and estimation at work to figure out a plan that will take us through to March 31, the end of the government's fiscal year. There are a lot of projects coming up so our little team is going to be very busy for the next few months. I want to start a tech blog to record our day-to-day conundrums.
I'm just coming off of a great labour day long weekend in Victoria filled with friends and activities. Today I finished watching The Long Way Round and have since been cleaning up this website and reading The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. It's proving to be a bit dry and intellectual for my tastes so far but I'll give it a chance.
I just arrived back in Victoria after spending the last three weeks in Vancouver and the two weeks before that in Guatemala and Honduras. The trip was fantastic. Antigua was picturesque and we had lots of fun trying to muddle our way around without knowing any Spanish.
Honduras was an experience I'll never forget. My Spanish improved a lot while I was there thanks to five hours a day of one-on-one instruction. I hope I can keep it up. We kept ourselves busy in the afternoons and weekends with various activities. Highlights include a hike up a volcano to within touching distance of an actively flowing lava stream, horseback rides through mountainous jungle, salsa dancing, fine dining in a Spanish Hacienda, visiting some really fascinating and well-preserved Mayan ruins, trips to natural hot springs and an exotic bird sanctuary, and just roaming around and lounging out in the quaint Spanish town of Copan. Oh, and last but not least, enjoying the many conversations and authentic cuisine of our host and Copan's most famous cocinera: Tina Ramirez!
Back in Vancouver I've been working in the downtown office with my pals and making the most of the great summer weather while it lasts. We did a camping trip to Ross Lake near Hope that was filled with adventure and good times. Other than that it's just been lots of beach, BBQs, tennis, and general partying.
It's nice to be back to the quiet and comfort of our place in Victoria now. I'm looking forward to an exciting year ahead because our good friends Richard and Amy are moving over here. I'm enrolled in a French course for September that runs Monday/Wednesday from 7-9pm. I also want to learn how to sail and pick up my motorcycle license. Of course I'll also continue to work on my Spanish, improve my tennis game, and try to make a dent in my ever-growing reading list.
I've been in Vancouver for the past week or so. The weather has been great for the most part and I've just been staying active and catching up with friends. I caught the Wimbledon men's tennis final on Sunday morning -- what an epic match! I'm going to miss tennis while I'm away.
I seem to have picked the busiest time of the year to take off on vacation from work. Things are hectic now as we are faced with hard deadlines in August for our two most high profile applications. We've brought in a couple of former co-op students to help lighten the workload a bit so there are going to be five of us youngsters working together this summer which should be fun. I leave in two days so I'm just scrambling now to tie up loose ends and delegate my work to other people. I get the sense that some people are going into panic mode already so it should be interesting to see how chaotic things are when I get back.
Chelsea has been in Fort St. James this month on her rural practicum and I've been over in Vancouver quite a lot trying to get into summer mode despite the less than stellar weather we've been having. This weekend I played some tennis, basketball, football, and hiked the grouse grind (my time was 46:45).
I finished reading The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway and got part-way through the Golden Compass but someone put a hold on it at the library so I had to return it before I finished. I picked up the Communist Manifesto on a whim so we'll see how that goes.
At work we have a new project to create a 'state of the art' website to showcase our department's involvement in the 2010 Olympic Games. Should be fun if I can get started on it before I take off for Honduras.
It's official: I'm going to Honduras. Specifically, I'm going to this school. It's near the border to Guatemala so we'll fly into Guatemala City and then visit Antigua for a few days before bussing to Copán.
I'm fortunate to have some extremely impressive co-workers right now who are helping me with my language skills. In fact, now that I think about it, almost everyone in my office is either tri- or quad-lingual. Our new receptionist Claire happens to be a teacher for the Government's official French training courses so she's been having little conversations with me every time I walk by and has been giving me some vocab and grammar lessons. I've also got Ewa, the previous receptionist, speaking Spanish to me. I'm starting to get the two languages mixed up a bit but at the same time it's interesting to see how many of the words have common roots.
On the financial front I've made a new purchase: TORO Venture Inc., a U.S. small-cap oil exploration company. It's quite a departure from my other Canadian blue-chips with their high dividend payouts. We'll see if this risky manoeuvre pays off!
Tennis lessons have been going well. They're twice a week and consist of a variety of drills and activities designed to focus on a specific aspect of my game like serving, ground strokes, doubles strategy, etc. I've purchased a new Wilson K-Four racket so Roger Federer better watch his back.
I've recently registered watchmeprogram.com where I plan to create a site that programmers can use to schedule or join in on pair programming sessions. Recordings (screencasts) of the sessions will be made available on the website afterwards and may be automatically tied to a source code repository or project management system. The sessions could cover a single feature or module of a project or they might belong to a series which follows the progression of a project over time. You'll be able to rank the recordings based on their instructional value and level of understanding required. I came up with the idea in the shower a few days ago after reading this article earlier in the day.
Things are starting to get a bit hectic at work. We have more than we can handle right now and there's a lot more coming soon. It's all good though, I'm happy to be busy.
Outside of work I've been teaching myself Spanish from an audio book that I took out from the library. It's going well. I think as long as I continue to practice a little bit every day then by the time July rolls around I'll be able to handle myself just fine in Guatemala.
I signed up for tennis lessons recently and was supposed to have my first one yesterday but we got rained out so it will be tomorrow instead if the weather cooperates. I'm hoping to finally be able to compete with Chelsea by the time I finish in June.
As far as movies go I've been on a bit of a Jack Nicholson kick lately. I watched Five Easy Pieces and The Passenger. Both were good but if I had to recommend just one it would be Five Easy Pieces.
I've been reading about investing and personal finance quite a bit lately and have recently made my first stock purchases. I've created a Finances page on this site where I'll be posting my stocks and keeping track of their performance. I've also made a few other changes like adding in some generic images to liven up the pages a bit and creating this What's New section that you're reading right now.
As far as work and life goes, well, I picked up my class 6 learner's license this week so I'm now authorized to ride a motorcycle under the supervision of a more experienced rider. Also I've been slowly (very slowly!) working my way through the original Spanish version of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez in the hopes of picking up some Spanish. Mom and I have been talking about doing some sort of trip to Central or South America next fall so being able to speak the language should come in handy.
For the last three days I've been in Vancouver catching up with my team at work and visiting with friends and family. I spent most of today in transit but when I finally got home I played some tennis with Chelsea and we watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall which I thought was pretty funny.
My travel plans are really starting to solidify now. It's looking like I'll be going to Quetzaltenango, Guatemala with Chelsea from about July 7 to July 27 and to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico with mom from October 20 to November 6. I'm also hoping to attend the Sasquatch Music Festival over May long weekend.
In the past couple of weeks I've been geeking out quite a bit. I purchased a used computer and put Ubuntu Linux on it and have been experimenting with some different technologies: thin (a mongrel alternative), nginx (an apache alternative), merb (a rails alternative), git (a subversion alternative).
