Today I find out that the week after the vacation cottage, I have 3 days of all day meetings up at Kirk’s (my EVPs) cottage in the Muskokas. Well, it is better than flying to Germany to sit in the same kind of meetings in a board room (not nearly as scenic). Don’t know what to expect as I’ve never been privy to these kind of discussions, hopefully I can add some value and not be too much of an idiot.
Add comment June 12th, 2006
Yay! Shae found a last minute deal on a cottage during the week of the 19th and the four of us are going to spend some time up North (although my vacation request hasn’t been approved yet). Should be fun, although all this vacation is really starting to interfere with my work life — perhaps that’s not a bad thing and will get me back in balance a bit. Being that I will be away from the internet (i.e. warcraft), I will probably try to spend the time writing (among the other cottage kind of activities) and it will be nice to have some quiet time to do so away from people.
Add comment June 11th, 2006
Ok - so I’m new to it, but at first glance, it provides nothing that doesn’t exist already in other languages. Perhaps it has some value in built in AJAX, but seriously, if you know what you’re doing with javascript, that part is somewhat trivial. Also, I don’t need yet ANOTHER language that does the same thing as ASP, JSP, Perl, PHP, Python – I mean seriously, especially one with as crappy a syntax as Ruby. Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m biased, but Ruby and Rails seems like a good idea in a world that doesn’t have J2EE application servers overflowing the dumpster bin. Just giving me another record abstraction for SELECT * FROM TABLE(x) doesn’t do anything to make my life easier, it only provides marginal improvement over what I’m doing now in a completely different language construct.
That was my first day looking at Ruby — maybe in the next while I’ll find some secret major value there or it will actually turn my programming life around and make every task trivial…
… but I highly doubt it.
Add comment June 9th, 2006
Every year, C. Edward Stewart does an independent film. And when I say independent, I mean independent, and so it has been for the last 5 summers. Even though they have been through varying degrees of quality, you must give him kudos for actually doing it, unlike so many others who merely talk about doing it for years. He has consistently gotten a final product every year, and in doing so, he has gotten markedly better at making films. I purchased all his DVDs, because I feel that we should support each other in this film community and that such tenacity should not go unrewarded.
Last year, I decided it was time I should help out, given that I have some unique skills to the area. It was very fun to be helping out as a worker rather than having to worry about the higher level details of the production as usually happens when our group of friends do a project. Now, it’s that time again — Craig is ramping up to start shooting his next film “Atlantis” this month and I’m involved again for the fight sequences (a fairly light commitment on my part, which is perfect). I must say, I’m looking forward to seeing the end product in the fall. If you want to get involved, you should probably look at the FBN Multimedia website for more details.
3 comments June 9th, 2006
John and Jude just bought a new house (taking possession end of August) in uptown Waterloo. It looks really nice and I can’t wait to see it in person. Congratulations to them!! It should be a very nice home for Clara to grow up in.
You can view the location in town here.
1 comment June 8th, 2006
Ryan and Kim had their baby yesterday! Everything went swimmingly apparently and mom and baby are in good health. 7lbs, 13oz - 22″ long and arrived at 9:56am on the 5th. Ryan was very amped up last night because he logged into Warcraft to tell us all about it. /cheer Dunnogh
Add comment June 6th, 2006
There is a fun party game out there called Eat Poop You Cat or Paper Telephone. This game is a drawing game in which people alternatively write captions and draw pictures while only being allowed to see the immediately preceding information. This leads to mutations in what was originally intended and often are gut-bustingly funny. A long time ago, I tried my hand at some PHP on my website to see if I could implement a tool to make game coordination in these modern times. I recently went back to that to try to complete it and over the weekend got it up and working. So, I’m trying it out with a few friends (don’t be surprised if you see one) to try to iron out any issues left remaining.
If you want to start a new EPYC, email me and I’ll send you the link.
4 comments June 5th, 2006
Well, just a matter of time and finally on Friday night (early Sat. morning) Whispers of Mutiny along with a few of us Shiny defeated the end-boss of Molten Core (Ragnaros). It was a long time, considering I have been playing with them for many many months and remember when it used to take 7 hours to get to the first bridge. Friday’s run was quite a rough one (lots of healing problems), but it all ended on a high note as Ragnaros finally was beaten (I’m the bear on the left).
Add comment June 3rd, 2006
It’s back again but sadly we will not be. Last year in the summer we got a team of 10 people together to do this fun contest. Essentially you drive to Toronto on a Friday night to get a bag with 5 eccentric things in it, drive back to Waterloo, film a short movie incorporating those things on Saturday and then drop it all off on Sunday afternoon. It may sound easy, but it’s not… Lots of writing, shooting and reshooting (bad camera settings), 4am editing, chafing at audio setup and sound mixing went into it. It requires smart people to pull it off and we had some really good teamwork with very complimentary skills.
Sadly (but also “yay!”) 4 of the previous team will be watching Lord of the Rings the Musical on the Saturday; You can’t really miss a day as the teams are seriously time constrained to begin with.
If you can rangle up reliable people, it’s a great fun — and the only way to get better at doing films is by practice. You can register for their contest on the Toronto Film Challenge website.
Our submission last year was called “Plum Scared“. (11mb WMV9 download)
Add comment June 1st, 2006
