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Week/Weekend Recap

I’m being quickly reminded at how busy I was last summer now that I’m living with Renata.  We are out, doing a lot of stuff, often.  Days go by so quickly because we’re all so busy.

Like any week last summer, this week (and this whole month really) has been awfully hectic.  So a recap of my busy week:

-I got a contract job to do Renata’s sister’s website.  She’s a real estate agent, and needs a site real quick.  I decided to do it in Drupal (www.drupal.org) to get used to and practice using it, as I’m going to use it for some other project ideas I have in mind.  My “free” time at home is spent on this… and it’s a slow project as I’m really not all that free all the time.

-Ultimate frisbee!  We had a practice last Sunday, Renata had a game on Wednesday (in which she broke her finger catching a really hard and powerful throw), and we had our game on Friday.  We lost this week 11-3.  We actually played really well, despite our loss. We were getting creamed in the first half but adapted and kept it 2-2 for the second half.  For a team of newbies vs. a bunch of veterans I thought we did really well, especially considering we utilized zone defense/offense… something that half our team had never heard about until now.

- Saturday I went to Brittania Bay to celebrate my 4! birthday (4 factorial for you noobs… or, 24 for regular people).  I brought a portable grill and fed everyone some pseudo-meat (hot dogs) for lunch.  Unfortunately Renata accidentally packed in veggie dogs in the cooler instead of “real” meat dogs.  It was nice to be out in the sun and to see everyone again.

- Saturday night was BBQ + Settler’s of Catan night.  We had some people over from our Ultimate team and had some tasty BBQ.  It was a really fun night, and I ended up winning after a long 3 hour game of Settler’s.  Go me!

- Sunday I got a chance to veg and play around with the new video card I bought.  I got a Geforce 8600 GTS (overclocked :-D) so that I could LAN it up this coming weekend.  Sunday was mostly veg day, and we ended up going for Pho and hanging out with Esther, who I haven’t seen in a year.  It was nice to see her again.

Work’s going well right now, and I’m starting to contribute to the code base whereever I can, but I’m still in the learning curve phase, so it’ll take me a little more to be a full on “developer” here.  Otherwise, work’s been fairly enjoyable.

Here’s to hoping life gets a little less hectic

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New Blog, New Open Source Contributor, New Income, and New Season!

My close buddy Mylore has a new blog at http://mylore.homelinux.com/wordpress/ Congrats to him for filling in my lowly blog roll and for joining the blogging craze (well, a little late on the bandwagon jump which makes him cool!). Also, Mylore just landed himself a job in Edmonton, so congrats again!

My first week of work was interesting and fun. Some of the perks about working at WayPoint is that it’s really close to home, only 9 km’s away. This means that the morning commute is short and sweet, and it’s a really nice distance for biking in that it won’t totally kill all my time. It’s just the right distance to give me some sort of cardio work when I’m all lazy.

One of my first tasks at work is to contribute to an open source project. One of the tools we use is open source, and we needed a feature implemented on it to smooth things out. No one knows Java at work, and so I was naturally the one to be put on it. So after a few days of wrestling with things, I wrote a patch and it got submitted and accepted. My very first open source contribution. This brings me to new levels of geek! It’s a really cool project, check it out at www.GeoServer.org.

Other than actual work itself, the guys at work are pretty funny. We’ve got a fooseball table, and they’re all ridiculously good at it. Throughout the day you’ll often here screaming and the ball slamming against the table. What’s nice too is that the lunchroom has a bunch of LCD TV’s everywhere and a PS2. The NetFlix office was once there, so they had some perks for their employees. There’s also a gym and shower and all that jazz, so I can now work out without paying crazy membership fees (not like I’ll work out anyways…). I also got paid today, marking my first bit of income in almost a year! Hooray for pulling myself out of student poverty.

Finally, I am completely exhausted today after a 2 hour game of Ultimate. Our first game of the season and we managed to win it! The Buddha Bellies will out-karma you! Seriously though, I’m in the worst shape I’ve been in a long while. Running on the field was brutal. I have no speed or endurance at the moment, and it was a real eye-opener for me to get on my bike and workout in preparation for the gruelling backpacking trip we have in a month. My ass is so kicked for it.

Life’s good at the moment

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!Bum

So I’m no longer an unemployed bum, I’m now an employed bum!

The last two weeks have been pretty busy, even for being all unemployed and such. I’ve been settling in and tidying around the house and looking for work at the same time.

I landed a job with WayPoint (www.waypointinfo.com), a small GIS company nearby. They just started up a 3 years ago, but they seem to be on the cutting edge in terms of technology and ideas.

It took me a little muddling and thinking to decide which way I’d go with my career. Some friends at Stats Can had offered to get me into the government, but it’d only be a temporary position with the hopes of getting me in full time at the end of my term. I also don’t think I’m ready to enter the government yet. I’m still young and my career has just begun, I figure I should give the private sector a try since I’ve never really had any experience in it.

At the same time, WayPoint, as mentioned earlier, will challenge me and push me to learn and adopt new technologies. I’m in the turbulent and fast moving business of software, and it really hurts me if I I don’t keep up with the times. It is all too easy to get locked into one language, one methodology, or one way of doing things and then realize that that mode of thinking has become archaic and outdated in only a span of a couple of years.

I hope that my new job will allow me to grow and lead me to a better position and give me more mobility in the years to come. Unfortunately/fortunately continuous improvement and learning is a necessity to advance in my business, and I hope I can do that here.

Having said that, I may eat my words in the next couple of years when I realize that I’m sick of getting yanked around my companies.  The government will probably be the best fit for me then.  Maybe… we’ll see what will happen.

Anyhow, I have to head to work in the next 15 minutes, so I hope I do well for my first day!

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Safe and Sound

I have arrived in Ottawa safe and sound.

Packing and leaving was a little disheartening, as it’s so hard to say goodbye to my family. I’m always the stone in the family to keep everyone sane. I’m sure they’ll be just fine without me, but I’m really close to my family in a lot of ways.

My flight for once happened without any delays or hitches. Toronto international didn’t give me any delays! This is usually not the case, so I was happy that everything went so smoothly. The only thing that really sucked was that my bike cost me $100 to pack on the plane as an “extra” piece of luggage. Air Canada sucks for that, but since I have been building frequent flyer points, they’ve locked me in. Damn you Air Canada and your diabolical point scheme!

I was really excited to see Renata again, and we connected just as though I haven’t been gone. Of course, I’ll still have to settle in, but I don’t think that’ll take too long.

On more good news, I have 4 job interviews lined up! Two with Statistics Canada (each from a separate division), one with Ajilon, and another with a really cool company called WavePoint which I have tomorrow. Hopefully things will pan out and I’ll be picked up by someone. Please? Anyone?

My marks for this term are up, and as I had predicted a month ago on a blog post, I hit some pretty decent marks.  I didn’t get the 4.0 average that I dreamt about at the beginning of the term (that dream was shot down quite quickly when I realized that Dr. Ghali would put us through the math ringer for one of my courses).  However, I did get A-’s for both my graphics and numerical computing courses, and a B+ for my Tibetan Buddhism course.  All of which I’m very happy for, and it’s a strong finish for me anyways.

Other than that, I’m tired from the flight and I’m lacking a ton of sleep as I haven’t gotten used to this time zone yet. I had to wake up at 6 AM this morning to help Renata get her car to be serviced… that’d be 4 AM back home. I believe it’s about time for a nap… ah, the joy of being unemployed.

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