Archives: Journal

So what does one do after a busy weekend taking part and then volunteering at the Ottawa Race Weekend? By buying a new toy, of course. That’s exactly what I did after spending most of the day volunteering at the Ottawa Race Weekend Marathon half-way mark. After spending about 8 hours handing out water and gatorade to all those brave enough to tackle a marathon I decided to finally buy my new bike....

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a more ridiculous case of litigiousness than a judge suing his former dry cleaner for $67 million for a lost pair of pants (SCO v IBM comes pretty close). How insane is that? I had heard of this case before and I had a good laugh at some of the headlines it generated. CNN had another good one today with Judge aims to have pants suit ironed out...

I know I can’t deny it, I’m a running junkie. I just love the sport and ya’ll know it. And as many of you are well aware I crossed another milestone a few weeks back by taking part in the Ottawa Race Weekend a 5th time, this year running the ING Half-Marathon. I’d love to say that much work went into practicing for this race but the truth is I slacked quite a bit. Often...

With EclipseCon out of the way I took the opportunity to do some R&R and visit San Francisco (yes, another vacation). Why San Francisco? Well it’s only a 45 minute train ride from Santa Clara and from what I had heard it’s an amazing place to visit. Plus, my plane ticket was already paid for so why waste it on just a conference? So Friday morning I woke up early and went over to IHOP...

Success, I’ve survived my first EcliseCon. The last couple of days have been a wirlwind but I’ll try to capture a bit of everything that has happened. Please forgive me if I can’t remember everyone’s name. I’ve met a hell of a lot of people and unless I got your business card I’ll have a hard time remembering your name. Day two of course started with the Scott Adams keynote. For those of you who...

The first day of EclipseCon was a lot quieter then our pre-conference day. No travelling meant no issues with planes or airports which made me pretty happy. All and all the day was pretty busy and although the night before was very short I managed to make it to all four of my tutorials. After a short 10 minute walk from the hotel to the convention centre I picked up my goodies bag and badge...

So begins the great Californian adventure. Day 0 of EclipseCon 2007 started with a relatively early morning to make sure I had everything ready and hadn’t forgotten anything the night before. The morning started with a quick breakfast and a short drive to Ottawa International Airport (YOW). We arrived at the airport few minutes before 10:00am EST, about 30 minutes ahead of schedule which is always a good thing. The airport was quite empty, except...

Yes the rumors are true, I’m moving from Barrhaven to the downtown Market area once I’m back from California. This is not a dream, I’m finally leaving the boonies and joining the young and hip downtown area with a nice little place just off of King Edward. I’ll be a little farther away from work than my place right now but I’ll be much closer to the market, the Running Room (yay Sunday practices), my...

California, here we come….no I’m not talking about the OC, I’m talking about my trip to EclipseCon and my subsequent vacation to San Francisco. The plan is to spend 5 days in Santa Clara for EclipseCon and the take the CalTrain to San Francisco for some R&R. In Santa Clara I’ll spend most of my time attending talks and tutorials but I’m hoping I can make a trip to 1 Infinite Loop to check out...

The extended deadline for application has passed and the results are in. Looks like I’ll be making two presentations at this year’s EclipseCon conference in Santa Clara, CA. This is going to be a great for networking and a fantastic opportunity for career advanced. Needless to say, I’m excited. The first presentation is a short talk on Multi-platform development with CDT. This will be a quick rundown of multi-platform development using using our Eclipse+CDT development...

What have I been up to these days that I’ve been too busy to blog? I’m sure you’ve been asking yourself that question. What could he possibly be doing that he can’t keep up with his blog? Turns out the answer to that question is a little of everything. I’ve been working my usual 40+ hours a week and I’m still lovin’ it. I’ve also picked up yoga at work. Yes, you heard me right....

Tis the season and I just couldn’t resist it. I had to go out and get some new toys to go with the new laptop. I figured I’ve been a good boy this year so I deserve to treat myself a little. Santa was certainly generous this year….hehe So what did I get? A new mouse and a new monitor. I know, all computer-related stuff but I AM a computer engineer. It’s what I...

As some of you might already have noticed I’ve done some minor tweaks to the web site to spruce things even if just a little. I haven’t had a chance to sit down and do a whole new design so I just wanted to shake things up a little. I toyed with the idea of increasing the font size but I didn’t like how it looked so I went back to an 11px font. You’ll...

What could be better than ending a crazy work with than watching the Sens host the New York Rangers at the Scotiabank Place. Well, I’ll tell you. It’s watching the entire game from the IBM box at the 100-level. Needless to say, I’m very excited. I’ve worked some seriously long hours this week so I was very happy to receive a ticket to the game from Jeff. I’m happy to report that all the long...

No, this is not the name of the next James Bond movie. Although, I guess China is the next big, scary enemy. Or is it North Korea? I can’t keep track of all the enemies that the leaders of the civilized world (read USA) make these days. But this is a conversation for another time. What I’m talking about now is a little piece of electronics which has just left China. Ok, that doesn’t...

This month’s Canadian Business magazine has published a pretty interesting article on campus recruiting in Canada, which some of you might be interested in. The article focuses on a survey which polled 30,000 university and college students across Canada and asked their thoughts on what they want in a company and where they would ultimately want to work. So what’s the top organization to work for, according to Canadian students? None other than IBM, of...

Everyone knows how much I love running. There’s a pretty good chance that I’ve tried to get you to come running with me, I can’t help it. I really enjoy running with my friends, regardless of whether or not they’re “runners”. For this reason I was really upset when Gabriel Sherman wrote on Slate that he wished only the elite runners should be allowed to do marathons: Today, the great majority of marathon runners set...

Today I was doing some more of my mandatory online training at work and I found some of the stuff on the trustworthiness unit quite interesting. I’m not sure how it is out there in the rest of the corporate world but IBM takes things like trustworthiness, commitment, adaptability very seriously. I think it speaks volumes as to what the corporate culture at IBM is like when something like this is part of every employee’s...

In the spirit of keeping up with my tradition of making updates to Technicalworx on long-weekends I’ve decided to finally bite the bullet and implement live archive browsing. Now you can browse the post archive directly from the archives page, how awesome is that? Technicalworx just keeps getting better and better, hehe. Live Archive Browsing I first introduced the idea of adding a live archive over a year ago in my State of the Worx...

A couple of days ago, during my daily web reading, I came a across an interesting article at Signal vs. Noise that got me thinking about how we each measure our own success. The subject has been on the back of my mind since graduation, a few months ago, but I haven’t really sat down and thought about it until now. While Jason was talking about how to Define your own success in terms of...

What an exciting day! For those who haven’t been paying attention, today was my first day of full-time, regular work for Big Blue and we already started big. Lots of stuff to do in the office to get all my accounts ready but I already got assigned some key projects, yay. The work I’ll be doing for the next couple of months involves a lot of Eclipse tooling, but it’s different from what I was...

Today I wrapped up my third week of training with a nice morning run and some hill repeats. Although I got up pretty early to get ready it was already so hot out that you could boil the proverbial egg. To air on the side of caution I scaled down my plans and went with a slower pace. The Workout After a few minutes of stretching I headed out on a 2.5 km warm up...

So what does one do on a lazy Sunday afternoon? I’ll tell you what one does, one creates a new interface for the quote database here at Technicalworx. Well, at least that’s what I did in the afternoon. For those of you who were around before the Movable Type switch, you’ll remember there was a way to browse all the quotes from the database by author name. This all went away when I moved from...

We’ve all taken at least one of those silly Internet quizzes (don’t lie now) and when Superman Returns came out a superhero personality quiz started making the rounds. Being bored I decided to take it and the results were very apropos. So what superhero are you? You are Superman. You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others. Superman   80% Robin   72% Spider-Man   70% The Flash   55% Green...

This has been in the works for quite a while but now it’s pretty much a done deal. As of the end of the month I’ll be an IBMer once again. I’ll be signing all the official papers in a day or so but I’ve already accepted the verbal offer last week so all that’s left to do is start working. I’m really looking forward to it as I’ll be going back to the same...

After a lengthy break for Ottawa Bluesfest, we now return to our regularly scheduled program. You all know how much I love running and I haven’t blogged about it in a while so today that’s what we’re going to cover. Summer is in full swing here in Ottawa and my back is mostly healed so a couple of weeks ago I started running again. Problem is, running shoes should be replaced after 600-700 km, meaning...

I haven’t written anything about dance in a while so I think it’s time for another one of those posts. I actually meant to write this yesterday but the day was a little busy and it slipped my mind. As some of you already know, I’ve been taking latin and ballroom intermediate and I’m having a blast. We’ve been expanding our repertoire and we even learned a new dance, the Foxtrot. We were a little...

It’s been 10 years, 6 hours, and 10 minutes but it seems like it was just yesterday. An entire decade has gone by in a flash but believe it or not, that’s how long we’ve been in Canada. It’s been quite a ride and we’ve enjoyed every moment of it. It was definitely worth it. As much as I love the homeland, I don’t think there is another place I rather be than where I...

This is not a mistake in my part, nor is it a joke. That’s right boys and girls, Apple and Nike have just announced a partnership to tune your run. They’re coming out with a Nike+iPod Sports kit that will connect a pedometer in your shoes to an iPod nano to give you real-time data about your run. How cool is that? The beauty of it all is that it’s very simple and cheap to...

Stanley Cup fever has taken over everywhere. Believe or not even Ottawa, the city that fun forgot, is in on the party. Little flags everywhere you turn. You can’t even walk downtown without running into a jersey-clad Sens fan every few minutes. It’s nuts. I might not have my jersey yet but I’ve been doing my part. Don’t think for one minute that I let exams get in the way of me watching the fantastic...

So the dreaded day is finally here….queue the suspense music. That’s right boys and girls, today we get to demo our Computer Engineering Design Project, aka Hockey Playing Robots. The big question is, will it actually play hockey?? Fret not, dear fans because all is well. Things have really come together in the last three days so I think we’ll be ok. The last two weeks were pretty stressful. Things stopped working (damn faulty wires)...

I’m here today to leave my avid readers a quick note and to dispel the exaggerated rumours of my web demise. I have not abandoned my blog, it’s just that I’ve been sucked into the ever-growing black-hole of school work. The end is near (in a good way) and work is just pilling up at the speed of light, but I shall endure. Work on the project is coming along and hopefully all will be...

Looks like I haven’t been paying attention to the university’s sessional dates because I had forgotten it was time to post the schedule for final exams. Now you can imagine my surprise when I just happen to be poking around InfoWeb and I find out about it. Unlike last semester, my final exam schedule is not good at all. I finish the second last day, which happens to be a Saturday, and I have a...

If you’re wondering what happened to me over the last week, feat not for I’m still alive. As you can probably guess it’s midterm season so I’ve been trying my best to study (haha). I’ve already written 3 of my 4 midterms and frankly I’m a little weary of all the studying. As interesting as CMOS VLSI Design is to me, I just needed a break so here I am. Not much has been happening...

Last night was swing night again and it was a lot of fun. For those of you with your mind in the gutter, I don’t mean that kind of swing. I mean swing, as in the dance from the 20s and 30s. As some of you already know, I started swing dancing in the summer with a friend but since school started I haven’t had time to go out to the Ottawa Swing Society dances...

Well it looks like Stephen has tagged me on the Four Things meme that’s been going around the blogosphere. All the cool people are doing it so why not, right? I know some people hate these things but I actually enjoy them. I take it as a chance to get to know the people behind the blog. If you don’t like memes then you better move to the next post. If you like them do...

I’m sure you are all sitting there wondering what these two things could possibly have in common. Gabe must have gone off his rockers. Hockey and robots, that’s nonsense. Well a couple of weeks ago we got assigned our final year project and my group is going to be working on exactly that, hockey-playing robots. How cool is that? Things are moving at a pretty slow pace right now but we expect to have the...

What exactly is comment phobia (aka commentophobia, it’s a word now!!) and what’s behind it? It’s a strange phenomenon and there is very little research behind it. Maybe my friends in psych would like to take a stab at it. All jokes aside, I’m actually intrigued as to why none of my friends, or the visitors to this site (or my Flickr photostream for that matter), ever leave comments. Ok that’s not always true. Tuee...

My life as an undergrad student is coming to an end soon and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about grad programs. Depending on what you’re studying a Masters is just a given. You can’t do much in industry if you don’t get at least one. Although the computing field is not at the point that Masters is absolutely necessary, this seems to be the direction we’re heading on. A lot of the most interesting...

Having good development tools is absolutely crucial when working on a large project, but they can also be very helpful for smaller university projects. So I have to ask, why are we not exposed to more of these tools during software engineering courses? When I think back to my first year of university I’m amazed at how little I knew of the tools I could’ve be using. I got into programming at a pretty early...

As most of you can guess, school is consuming a good chunk of my time these days. Definitely feels a little strange to be on campus every day, in and out of Marion and SITE all the time. And what are these quizzes and midterms everyone keeps talking about? I had almost forgotten the madness that is midterm week (or weeks as the case may be). This week is absolutely packed with stuff to do....

Life as an undergraduate student is coming to an end soon and it’s now time to look into what’s next. Note that I said undergraduate because I expect to be coming back in a few years for a Masters degree (maybe two). For now I’ll busy myself with the task of finding a suitable job. Of course my first choice is really to go back to IBM. I can’t express how much I enjoyed working...

My new glasses finally arrived this week and they’re pimpin’. It took almost two weeks for them to arrive from Toronto but it was worth the wait. The sunglasses were a different story. They were ready in 2 hours and I’ve been wearing them for the past two weeks. My eyes are still getting used to the new prescription though. After 5 years of having the same lenses the little guys are struggling to adapt...

That’s right boys and girls, yours truly is back on campus. Feels a bit strange being back and walking to lectures. I was so disoriented the first day that it took me a while to find one of my lecture rooms. I miss coming into the office early in the morning and getting right to work. On the plus side my classes are pretty interesting and I’m actually going to lectures. I’m looking forward to...

In the spirt of blogging more often I’ve decided to write a little about my adventures searching for new eyewear yesterday. Please be advised that I’m not responsible for any side-effects ensuing from the reading of this entry (bad joke, haha). If I were to ask any of you how long I’ve been wearing the same glasses you’ll probably tell me, “as long as I remember”. And guess what, I can’t remember either. My best...

You may have noticed that over the last few weeks the frequency at which I post has decreased. The reason for that is not because I’ve been too busy or because I don’t have anything to say. The real reason is that I’m reluctant to write just anything down. It seems that I’m not alone. Dan Cederholm contemplated the same thing on his latest post, A Weblog Entry About Weblog Entries. In the beginning weblogs...

You heard me right, Laurenpalooza. Lauren is home for the weekend, after spending the last three months in Caledonia doing research, so we went out with her to enjoy a bit of civilization. First off we went to Heart & Crown to have dinner with Kevin, who earlier in the day completed his first triathlon. Way to go Kev! After quenching our thirst and satiating our appetite a bunch of us headed down to Eighteen...

I just finished reading D. Keith Robinson's Things I've Learned From Blogging and I realized that I forgot about Technicalworx's birthday. It's hard to believe that my little web site just turned three years old this past Wednesday, woah! Three years is almost a lifetime in Internet-time...

I’ve got the summer bug, but it’s not what you are thinking. Somehow I managed to catch a heck of a cold right in the middle of summer. I suspect it has something to do with the heat+rain+AC+heat+AC that was part of Canada Day. The side-effect of is that I’ve been away from the computer for most of the week (I don’t want to spread these germs all over my laptop, you know). Not much...

The past few weeks have seen a constant stream of small updates as I work my way through the list of features outlined on the State of the Worx. In the last few days there have been lots of minor tweaks to the stylesheets, culminating with the nice diagonal background you see right now. It’s amazing how a little change can make such a big difference in readability. The big news for the day is...

Today we celebrate the birth of our nation, but unlike everyone else we don’t call it Independence Day. That makes it sound like there was a big fight and that’s not very Canadian. We don’t like to ruffle too many feathers. Plus, Canadians always have to be different, eh? To celebrate we shall all gather around the big igloo downtown, wearing our toques and chanting “aboot”. All kidding aside, we will make our way downtown...

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention to the big red circle on your calendar, yesterday marked the start of this year’s Ottawa Jazz Festival (Bluesfest to come in two weeks). I’ve been anxiously awaiting for this since the beginning of the year and excitement is at an all-time high. This Sunday will mark the start of what will surely be the most intense concert-going month ever. Two festival, three tickets, $170 (Canadian...

Over the last couple of years Google has certainly become a household name. Everyone out there uses it to search the web. So great is Google’s success that it’s been verbalized. If you want to find something on the Internet, you Google it. The guys and gals at Google Labs have not let the success get to their heads though. Every few months there is something new coming out of Mountain View. In the last...

It seems like it was just yesterday that I embarked in a new adventure; that I jumped head first into cyberspace to join the blogosphere. That was August 2001. Since then Technicalworx has grown and evolved, though at a slower pace then the rest of the blogosphere. Things here were looking a little dated and quite frankly, boring. Some change was needed so I decided to shake things up. Now it’s time to discuss what...

To sum things up, we have changes a’coming. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been working on some usability improvements to this site. Some things are getting shuffled around, some are going away, some are going to show up soon enough. The core of the update consists of re-organization on the back-end and that is now complete. According to the W3C Validator all the pages are again fully compliant so all is well in design-land. Before...

Yes, coffee, the drink of the gods. You all know I just can’t resists a nice cup of coffee. I’m from Brazil, it is in my blood (literally and figuratively). Everyone who knows me also knows that I can’t resist those little quizzes. So for all the coffee lovers out there, I present you with the What kind of coffee are you? quiz. And while we’re at it, we might as well start a new...

Nine years ago today an Air Canada flight landed at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. In that flight there was a small family from Brazil. After a ten hour flight from Guarulhos International Airport they had finally arrived. Today they celebrate, in true Brazilian fashion, with a BBQ. Hooray!!...

As most of you already know, yesterday was D-Day. Yesterday I ran the National Capital Marathon. What an experience! The day started pretty early. I woke up at 3:00am to have a nice breakfast and promptly returned to bed. I didn’t get much sleep after that so I got out of bed by 5:00am and we were out of the house around 6:00am. After I picked up my number and my racing chip I stretched...

There hasn’t been very much going on here for the past month but that’s because there is quite a few things in the works. I’ll spare you the usual excuse involving time. Some of you might have noticed a bit of downtime last Saturday, which was caused by my stupidity. What happened was that I had decided to update my version of Apache without reading all the documentation. It turns out that there was an...

When we are kids we all dream of being an astronaut, or a tennis player, or a firefighter, or a scientist. Then we grow up and we dream of working for the big names. If you are in international business it might be the EU. If you are in finance it might be FINTRAC or a big investment firm. And if you are in computers your list will likely include Big Blue. For me that...

It seems like this is the beginning of a new craze. It all started last Monday night when Google added satellite photos to Google Maps, and now everyone seems to be doing it. Not wanting to be outdone I jumped on the bandwagon with my Google Maps Flickr Set. Some of you (I’m thinking Lauren and Shan) might be interested in Dave Shea’s recent post, aptly name Google Maps and Accountability. Others might want to...

Just a quick update on the whole school debacle. As some of you already know, I’m going back to school in September after a long co-op term at IBM so I’ve been trying to figure out my courses. Sounds pretty easy, you check the course schedules against the courses you have to take and go online to register once the registrations period starts. Now that would just be too easy....

As some of you may have noticed, this place has been neglected of late so I’m here to rectify that. If you’re wondering, life hasn’t been so busy that there was no time to update Technicalworx. It was just that I was a little too lazy to do it. It does take quite a bit of work, you know? So what’s new? Well you’re in for quite a treat as this weekend was very exciting....

Yesterday I mentioned that I had treated myself to a new toy but I didn’t really say anything about it, so here we go… Well, the product literature tells me that the Garmin Forerunner 301 is a GPS-enabled personal trainer and heart rate monitor, which just screams of marketing buzzword syndrome. In my opinion the 301 is going to be just another tool to help me keep up with the marathon training schedule. With it...

As the little kids in the Glebe so eloquently put it, “It’s a race or something”. In fact, it was not really a race, but I’m sure it seemed like one for anyone in the Glebe. It’s not every day that you see droves of runners go by your house. What prompted these crazy runners to get up at such an ungodly hour to run in the cold? To that question there is only one...

This afternoon I had my first long run and I feel great. The schedule called for 13 km at a pace around 5:30 min/km, so after much procrastination that’s what I did. Sounds like a lot, I know. I didn’t think I’d be able to keep that pace for such a long distance but it was actually pretty good. The first half was pretty brutal but after I got it through my head that I...

I’m now one step closer to running at the 2005 Canadian Marathon Championships in Ottawa. Huzah!! What am I thinking??? What kind of question is that? Clearly, I’m not thinking at all. Running is so addictive, it makes you do crazy things. For example, running a full marathon when you never ran anything longer than 15 km. True, I’ve been running since high school but it’s been a while since I’ve competed and I’m way...

It seems that quite a few people who come and visit Technicalworx are not aware that I’ve moved my photo gallery to Flickr. A lot of you’ve had the pleasure of hear me rant about how good Flickr is so I’ll spare you this time. As for everyone else, go check it out. Ok so back to my photo gallery. Being the lazy person that I am I decided that I would buy a Flickr...

Not that kind of mail. I mean real mail, you know, the kind that Canada Post magically delivers to your mailbox. Well imagine my surprise when I saw an Amazon box outside when I got home from work. That’s right, Amazon delivered my books and my Lord of the Rings Trilogy an entire week ahead of schedule. I guess Santa Claus has finally finished his conversion to a digital deliver system, hooray!! I can’t tell...

Pippin looked from the shelter of Gandalf’s cloak. He wondered if he was awake or still sleeping, still in the swift-moving dream in which he had been wrapped so long since the great ride began. The dark world was rushing by and the wind sang loudly in his ears… That’s right boys and girls, this Tuesday will see the release of the final installment of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy in its extended edition...

Ok I confess, I’m a sucker for these things. It all started with D. Keith Robinson’s Page 23 Blog Entry a while back. Page 23 was soon followed by 23rd Post, which I had the chance to partake in with my own Post 23. Now it’s Shannon’s turn with her book mash-up. Ok, so Lauren told me: Take five random books off your bookshelf Book #1 — first sentence Book #2 — last sentence on...

And it changes again!!! Not many of you might have noticed this since the temp header was only online for a few hours but we have a new header. If you ask me, I like the new one much better. While I’m at it I’d like to thank Stefan D’Alessandro for allowing me to use his beautiful wallpaper to make the Technicalworx v3.0 header. He didn’t have to do this but his permission is very...

All of you might be wondering what’s with the new look all of a sudden. I know I’ve mentioned that I was working on a new design but I wasn’t planning on unveiling it yet, but fate would not have it that way. Who finishes a design before uploading to the world, right? So what gives? Well, in my eagerness to upload a file to the server I overwrote my main stylesheet with the dev...

That’s right boys and girls, it’s finally here. Late last night Apple launched the iTunes Music Store for Canada. iTMS Canada had been announced by none other than Steve Jobs in October and was scheduled for a November 17 launch. Due to reason yet unknown Apple missed its self-imposed deadline of launching the store by the end of November. It is unclear if the launch is official but iTMS Canada was silently activated sometime around...

Oh how time flies when you’re having fun. I know I haven’t said much about what I’ve been doing for the past few months but I’ll try to do it soon. Just can’t be late for work today. In any case, for those of you who haven’t noticed it’s almost December already (w00 h00, Christmas time) and the month is coming to an end. Now you ask, what does this have to do with anything???...

Yes, you’ve heard me right. iPod Socks are now on sale at the Apple Store. Steve Jobs was not joking when he announced them late last month. Who needs a fancy iPod case when you can have iPod Socks??? Multiple colours of iPod socks at that. Still think I’m joking? Well this is what Apple has to say about this product: Forgive us if we’re stating the obvious, but here’s how it works: Just slide...

Ok, I admit that I got caught up in the mood to change things here and I started a redesign. I’m getting a bit bored with this design and I think it’s time for a change. I’m not thinking anything too drastic since I don’t really want to change the underlaying code. It’s probably going to be more of a visual thing. The three biggest changes will be: The removal of the location bar in...

No, your eyes do not deceive you. I have indeed made small changes to the web site. Nothing too big this time around, just bringing some colour back to the main page. I’ve also gone back to work on the comments for new entries. There is still something that’s not working quite right so it’s not ready for prime time yet. You will also notice that I’ve updated the About page with more recent information...

Despite what one might infer from the activity on this blog (or lack thereof) I can assure you that I am in fact alive and well. I’ve been busy, to say the least. Yes, I know it’s a lame excuse to say that I was just too busy to post here but it is true. To appease the blogging gods I shall post this photo from my Flickr account for all to see....

As some of you are well aware I’m an avid runner. Ok, ok…..I used to be an avid runner but I’m getting back to it. It’s been far too long since I’ve participated in a race, or since I’ve practiced on a regular basis. Well, now that’s a thing of the past. Over the past few weeks I’ve been slowly easing into a new training regimen in preparation for the 2006 Boston Marathon (and perhaps...

In my never-ending quest to learn more about usability and general user interface design I came across a nice study of the effects of white space in reading online text (by way of Binary Bonsai). The study compared students’ reading performance with four different white space layouts and concluded that a text with margins and optimal leading provided the best results. Now if you’ve ever opened a book this will seem pretty obvious; however, not...

Well today I came across a very interesting article on the New York Times. The gist of it is that customers are no longer impressed by a company’s ability to provide them with bargains. Now that doesn’t mean the we don’t want bargains, it just means that bargains won’t guarantee customer satisfaction. I must say that I agree with it, and I’ve always agreed with it. You get what you pay for, right?...

I can no longer contain my excitement over my new job at the IBM Ottawa Software Lab. If I may….who’s your daddy? Ok now with that out of the way lets get back to IBM. For those of you who don’t know everything about IBM (and who does?), the Ottawa Lab is one of IBM’s many R&D labs around the world which focuses on e-business on demand. Who here hasn’t seem IBM’s On Demand Television...

Oh the sacrilege, why won’t you think of the children!!! Yes, I know what some of you are thinking but I have indeed moved to MovableType 3.0, if only out of curiosity. There has been a lot of hoopla in the past week about the new licensing options put forth by Six Apart, but things seem to have quieted down....

As promised almost two weeks ago I have posted some pictures of my new Unböring IKEA bookshelves. This is just to keep up with recent trends in home improvement posts. I don’t want to be left out, you know. Also new in the Photo Gallery are the new SITE photos. This should come as no surprise as I’m very interested in architecture and I just can’t keep myself from photographing interesting buildings. For the benefit...

I swear that there is a method to my madness!!! If one of you were to enter my room right now you’d think I’m crazy. I kid you not. I have books all over my bed and piles of papers neatly organized all over my floor (I know, the perfectionist in me took over). What am I doing, you ask? Why writing my co-op work-term report, of course. Well, I should say procrastinating right now...

The month is coming to an end and unfortunately so is my co-op term at the Communications Research Centre. This means that it’s not only time to go back to school but also that we have to start worrying about our next placements. So what’s next for this budding, young computer engineer?? I really can’t say yet....

Keith told me: Go into your blog’s archives. Find your 23rd post (or closest to). Find the fifth sentence (or closest to). Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions. Much like Ryan I missed the last round with the books and everything (you probably know what I’m talking about. If not, just look at these). Luckly this time around I read Keith’s page at work and I figured I’d...

No, your eyes do not deceive you. Technicalworx.com has indeed changed, if ever so slightly. This is the sneak peak I promised a while ago. This layout has been on the dev page for quite a while being refined but now it’s complete enough to make an appearance here. That and too many people have been complaining that I haven’t done anything in the last month or so. To do this I had to cut...

Frankly, I don’t know it myself. It seems like an ethernity since the last time I posted. It’s amazing how fast time goes by when you’re busy. There is way too much to say, but then again not enough. The weather here in our little corner of the world has just gone insane. Last week it was so hot that I ditched my jacket and today there is snow outside. I can swear that I...

“A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.” As you can probably tell from the quote I’m going to be changing things on the server tonight so the web site might just be a little out of whack for a few hours. I’ve finally decided to rebuild the computer powering Technicalworx since Gentoo Linux v2004.0 has finally been released. Plus, it’s time to get some of the...

I know I’ve been talking a lot about iPods but I couldn’t help but laugh while reading the Scotsman’s article on the Apple v Apple lawsuit. For those of you who are not aware of the details, Apple Corp (Beatles record label) is suing Apple Computer for allegedly breaching the terms of a previous agreements between the two companies. At the root of the issue is Apple Computer’s iTunes Music Store (iTMS) and the iPod....

As you probably guessed by the lack of activity here my iPod was delivered by FedEx yesterday….w00 h00. Well they came by my house on Tuesday but to my dismay it was right in the middle of the day so there was nobody home. Now as some of you know, I have my Italian Cinema class on Wednesday nights so I didn’t get to see it until 11:30pm, when I actually got home. That’s when...

Nowadays it seems as if everyone either has an MP3 player or is looking to get one, and I’m happy to say that I’m part of the latter group. I’ve been doing my research for the past few months, reading spec sheets and articles on just about every media player that comes out and I’m happy to announce that I’ve settled on the iPod. Now I might be slightly biased, ok maybe more than just...

Ok I know I said you’d have to wait until I got home to post more links but I lied. I mean, I’d never do such a thing. I swear. As I mentioned below, I’ve been reading a lot of web design stuff. As I meandered my way around the web I came across Dave Shea’s Friday Challange at Mezzoblue and it got me thinking. This was exactly what I was looking for in the...

I’m about to go crazy, I swear. Every time I have to design some sort of web site it’s the same story and this past week hasn’t been any different. It all comes down to IE being a PITA to develop for. Ok, a little background is probably in order. About a week ago I took on the task of designing a web site for a local, non-profit organization (pro bono of course) and as...

I should warn you that if you’re not at all interested in how computers work or what all the latest buzzwords (like SIMD, or OOO) are all about, you should probably skip this post. Having said that, I’d recommend reading on. You never know what you might learn....

I think I’ve finally finished the new site design…w00 h00. I’ve been tweaking the CSS files here and there, making the final changes to the administrative section of the page, and I think I’m happy with the way things are right now. I’ve also taken the time to make a new logo today, yay. I’ve been using the same old logo for a while and it was time to get something new going. As you...

Some of you have been complaining that the Photo Gallery is acting weird (as in pictures are showing smaller then they should be). The issue is not with the my design or anything to do with the web site/server and as such there is nothing I can do on my side of things. Having said that, I’ve been able to track the problem down to Internet Explorer’s auto-resize “feature”. This means that to avoid the...

As you can see very well the site has a brand new look, w00 h00. The redesign took two days of work spread over a week and I’m quite happy with it. As I said before, I managed to get most things to work on Internet Explorer and that’s a good thing. Look for a new logo soon. I’m just too lazy to do it right now as it actually requires quite a bit of...

Those of you who have been reading my journal have known that I was working on a new design for the web site. I’ve been done since yesterday but I was away all day today and that’s why things haven’t been updated yet. I don’t want to do this right now for fear of screwing it up as I’m falling asleep already. You won’t have to wait long though. I’m planning on having the new...

I’m sure most of you haven’t noticed but technicalworx.com is no longer going offline every night. First of all, the reason for this happening before was that my web server was in my room and it turns out that I can’t sleep properly with all the fans going. The easy answer would mean moving the computer to the basement but until recently that was not possible as the server was also my desktop. Now that...

As all of you are well aware, I’ve been doing coop interviews for the past three weeks and it has caused utter chaos in my life but that’s no more. I actually made my decision last night and the results were out today.For those of you wondering, I won’t be going to Belgium (I know, I know….we can discuss that another time) but instead I’ll be working at the Communications Research Centre (CRC) in the...

I’ll make this update short and sweet. Since I was feeling a little under the weather today I decided to stay home and relax, meaning I had some time to play around with the web site a little. I’ve made small cosmetic changes to the layout which will probably go unnoticed. Expect small changes here and there as I get bored of a few things. I’m trying to come up with a new logo and...

I know it took me a while but frosh pictures are now up in the Photo Gallery. As you can tell I did not upload all the pictures because quite frankly there is just too many of them. How many you ask? At last count I had 850 pictures from the whole week, 450 of which came from my camera and the rest form a selection of cameras (including Jacquie’s and Emily’s). Over the weekend...

As promised, I’ve just uploaded pictures from the IEEE Leadership Conference which I attended in London, Ontario this past weekend. This was a two day conference attended by chairs and vice-chairs of all student branches in Canada as well as their branch councilors and representatives from IEEE Canada. To tell you the truth the actual workshops were a bit boring as we were the hosting university last year and I was in attendance. Nevertheless, I...

It’s been almost a month since I posted something here but rest assured, I was not shipped to Siberia. The past two weeks have been pretty crazy so it will take me a few days to adjust and get things back on track. First of all, frosh week (or welcome week as the administration wants us to call it now) was absolutely amazing. Seven crazy days of partying that could only be put together by...

Unfortunately we experienced a connection outage for most of the day today as a result of a problem with the router. The connection ot Magma was lost just before noon and because I was at work there was no way for me to restart it. To add to the problem my DNS provider was offline when I got home so it took a few hours to get the DNS entry updated and the site back...

I think it’s about time to post another update on the state of the nation. I’ve reorganized everything on the web server and I’ve started to separate production and development branches to keep things from break while I test new features. Nothing should be different for this site but you’ll notice that the alumni site now contains only a small message. This is due to the fact that all the dev content was moved to...

Ohhhh, my vacation is already over. It was very short lived (9 days to be exact) but my job is picking up. Yesterday was my first day and it was very slow but today I was busy for most of the day. Things will move slowly with regards to the alumni site until I get used to my new schedule (it’s very early so give me a break here). Brian will be back later in...

I had a bit of time today so I went about fixing a few small glitches on the web site that were bothering me. Most of these were alignment glitches that most of you probably did not notice but why not fix them, right? There are still a few things that do not show up properly on IE but there is nothing I can do about that. Microsoft has decided that it does not need...

I was bored today so I added just over 100 new quotes to the database. It now holds a total of 310 quotes from various sources and authors. There are some really funny ones and some that probably won’t make any sense to you but they do to me….hehe. If any of you come across any good quotes don’t be shy about sending them my way. I’ll make a mention of it on the news...

I just got a call from Claire from Transport Canada and it’s confirmed. I start working for TC May 5, 2003 at 8:30 sharp. It’s kinda funny that I have no idea how much I’ll be making. Didn’t want to ask that in the interview cause they were already grilling me way too much. I expect to have lunch with all of you with cushy government jobs, you hear me?...

Well I registered today for my fall and winter courses and it was pretty quick and painless since I was logged on as soon as registration started and got it done quickly. The system was a bit slow but I had no other problems. I did decide to take Classical Studies instead of Sociology because I was told the Socio class was way too much work and that’s not what I was looking for. I...

Hehehe….I was cleaning up stuff on my computer today when I came upon my old MySQL log. To my surprise the log was complete from the day I started the database. As you perhaps have noticed that allowed me to reconstruct the database with all the previously lost entries. It did take a few hours to comb through the 130Mb log and pick them but I managed to do it. Now I should’ve been doing...

First of all, as you can see I managed to recreate some of the news that was lost using old screenshots but that’s all I can do. The rest is lost for ever. You’ll also notice that I’ve put up a tentative schedule for next fall as registration starts next Wednesday for 3rd years. I’m pretty happy with how the schedule turned out but I fear that the Faculty of Engineering will moves classes around...

Well as you probably have noticed the server has been down for two days and now we’re missing content from January on. The reason for that is because I was stupid and stopped making backups of the database. Of course, as soon as I stop the backup my disk goes crazy and I loose almost all my files. There is not much I can do now other then restore the last backup and keep making...

I just came back from my program coordinator’s office and she told me that my Circuits prof has sent my deferred mark in already. You’ll recall that I did not pass the course because I felt sick during the exam and Dr. Payeur would not help me but the admnistation let me write the deferred anyways. As you all know I was locked up for most of reading week studying but all the work has...