From Journeyman to Master

Chinese will build escalator on Everest is my favourite one this year. It actually got me at first.

Driveway

Road in front of the house

This last one is our new kicking ass office

So Hans Reiser is guilty after all. I don’t know what to say. But I won’t stop using ReiserFS on the server where I keep all my precious files. I hope he’ll have a chance to keep contributing to the open source community during his 15 years to life time in jail (it’s not like he has anything else to do). The most interesting part of the whole thing is that he left so many obvious evidences (the car, the blood and the murder books) but he hid the body so well that the police wasn’t able to find it without his help even though it’s buried less than half a mile from where Reiser lives!

Here is a picture of a beautiful rainbow in my backyard. Here are two pictures from our trip to Portland.

Just some updates about us in Seattle:

• We finally settled down on a house with a view of Puget Sound. We are taking possession at the end of this month.
• The job at Big Fish Games is getting better and better. It’s more intense than the days at CGI (I don’t think I’ll ever find a workplace more laid back than CGI). But I don’t really feel it because the domain is more interesting, the technology is cutting edge and I’m working with a great team.
• I’m loving my new Blackberry Pearl.
• And yes, if you haven’t found out from Facebook, I’m going to be a father in September!

It’s been a long time since I last wrote something. Well, I’ve been really busy. After two rounds of phone screen and a one day onsite interview, I got an offer from Big Fish Games, a startup company based in Seattle. Yes, that’s right. I’m gonna move to Seattle. Surprised?

There are two most popular reactions to the news: “Why Seattle?” or “Cool, you are going to develop games.” Warmer weather, better job, better food, lower cost of living and closer to Vancouver are all among the reasons why we decided moving to Seattle. But I’m not gonna be a game developer (thank God I don’t want to either). Instead I’m going to work on the platform to support the website, e-commerce and so on. Anyway, the company looks really promising. The technology they are using is pretty cutting edge. My last day at PAS will be November 9th. I will telecommute for a month or so before we make the final move in December.

That’s it. It’s official now. I might talk about the intense interviews I’ve had during my job searching in Seattle later.

I’ve uploaded some of the pictures from my two and a half weeks vacation to my Picasa Web Album. There are five albums: Toronto, Montreal, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and Lake O’Hara.

About a month ago, the Spanish company, FON, was giving away 2000 free wireless routers across Canada. In case you don’t know, FON is the company that claims to have the largest WiFi community in the world. To get the free router all you need to do is joining their community and sharing a little bit of your bandwith with other people. I signed up for one just for fun (it’s a free router, right?). Got the router this Monday. It turned to be a very cute little thing (that’s not my hand by the way).

Small as it is, it has a very unique feature: two SSIDs. One unsecured for public access and one secured with WPA for private access. Very thoughtful. You can also specify how much bandwidth you want to share. If you go to their website, you can see where all the registered routers are including yourself. The following screen cap shows where I am. Well, it’s about a couple of blocks off but close enough. The big green circle is supposed to show the coverage and last activity and the little orange dot is where I live.

• Seven steps to remarkable customer service from Joel on Software. The best article I’ve ever read about customer service, which I, as a developer, don’t really care before.
• So Beautiful, So Disturbing. So what if Vista was a woman? Really funny.

This is year 2007. If for some unfortunate reason you are still using IE viewing this site, you will be welcomed by a page with a top section showing the latest post and a two column lower section with an awfully long left column. Well, the fact is that IE is always the worst when it comes to follow the standard. I’ve tried view the page in Firefox, Safari and even Opera (wow, has it been 6 or 7 years since the last time I used Opera?). They looked identical. So I have no intention to change the page to display correctly in IE. For more information on this issue, please take a look at the Acid2 Broswer Test.