17 Dec 2006
I’m sure everyone is well aware of the storms that have been hitting the west coast of Canada but the past couple weeks have been particularly bad.
We’ve been without power at work a few times in the past couple of weeks (not so good for a technology company) and there’s a lot of trees down around town. My parents have been without power for 3 days now but I guess that’s the price you pay for living in a green area. Luckily I live in a fairly well-connected (power-wise) part of town that isn’t that prone to power loss even if the rest of the city is.
The good thing about snowy conditions is 4×4’n. We went out the other day about an hour up Vancouver Island and quickly ran into a lot of snow and downed trees. Fortunately there was a land cruiser with a winch powerful enough to move things out of the way. Pretty fun day, definitely a benefit of living on the island.
Who knows how long this is going to last, I suspect it’ll clear up soon and reports are calling for rain throughout the next wee. No white Christmas or birthday for me.
13 Dec 2006
- Wii
- XBox
- XBox 360
- PS2
- iPod (to replace my on-again off-again Creative Zen Micro)
Finally decided to cash in some credit card points for Futureshop gift certificates and have yet to decide what to buy.
I’ve already got the Plasma TV (and La-z Boy recliner) so I’m covered on that front. I did buy a Game Cube at it’s launch but never really played it. It’s because of this that I’m weary of buying yet another console particularly something like a PS3. Although I am thinking it might be nice to mod an original xbox or perhaps pickup Katamari ‘Garbage Ball’ Damacy for the PS2.
11 Dec 2006
A couple weeks ago I organized our first hack day which proved to be extremely well received by everyone involved.
The event was loosely based on what Yahoo! has been doing for awhile now but our developers didn’t really start until 8 or 9 in the morning and we cut coding off at 4 in the afternoon. We’re a smallish team (14-odd developers) but had been wanting to run a hack day for many months now. Despite only 7 or 8 hours of development, the creativity was unbelievable which in turn proved to be quite the shocker for some in the organization. Although not a goal by any means (and almost something that was discouraged) it also didn’t hurt that much of what was created could be worked back into either the product or the development process.
We had everything ranging from a java applet backed by a python web application to the addition of a perl interpreter in the popular eggdrop irc bot to a RoR mash-up of JIRA, del.icio.us, FishEye, Confluence and Salesforce and everything in between.
Looking into the future the company is planning on running events like these every quarter. It’s a good breakup to the regular product development cycle and gives everyone an opportunity to step outside the regular development mold and open a few eyes at the same time.
At this time, I’d like to say a special thanks to JetBrains for their donation of a personal IntelliJ IDEA license. The lucky winner sure was pleased!