Dec 25
We would never know about Quaterdeck if our hostess at Three Thistles hadn’t told us. It’s right after a little turn off at Summerville on the Lighthouse Route. The restaurant has a dinning room and also a covered deck that extends into the water. We chose the deck. It was really nice to have your meal while listening to the waves hitting the shore. I ordered A “Taste of Nova Scotia” which consists of a trio of smoked, peppered and maple salmon. Julia ordered the calamari. They are both listed as starters. But the volume was enough for lunch. The trio of salmon was simply amazing. The calamari was also the best I’ve had. The best part was that each one of them cost about $10. Check out the pictures for the presentation.
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Dec 08
If you want a romantic dinner while enjoying the night view of Elliott Bay in a waterfront setting, 67 is the place to go. It’s located in the Edgewater Hotel, Seattle. The price is definitely not cheap (no entree under $30 just to give you an idea). But it’s worth it for the environment. Besides, when we were there, they had a three course tasting menu for $30 each person. So it wasn’t too bad. I would rate it at the same level as River Cafe in Calgary if not higher.
Nov 27
Hey, Agile programming was mentioned on Dilbert.
Nov 15
I was chatting with Vlad the other day. We were talking about his food blog, which has given me very good information at quite a few occasions. That’s when I though maybe I should write about the food I had at various places as well. Especially after the trip to the eastern provinces. We didn’t try anything special in Toronto. So I guess I’ll start from Hard Rock Cafe in Niagara Falls.
The only thing I can say is that it was BAD. Really really bad. The only reason we went there was because I’ve never been to a Hard Rock Cafe before. I’ll never get into one again. The food was nothing special. I think I ordered a burger and my wife order a club sandwich or something like that. It was typical bad bar food. I can easily list half a dozen places where you can get a much more decent burger in Calgary. There was no price on the drink menu. I thought it was kind of odd because that’s something I would expect from the chef special from a French restaurant.
Anyway, stay away from it if you happen to be in Niagara Falls. It was not worth it even with all the guitars on the wall. I don’t know how Eric Clapton liked it. It must be different in London.
Nov 12
So I started telecommuting for Big Fish Games today. Of course, I do it through VPN, which means I now have a US IP address. I fired up Pandora the minute I realized that fact. It’s back and works even better. The recommendations rarely miss. I guess this will offset the weird feeling I’ve been having after watching Sicko last night.
Oct 31
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.
Aug 30
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.
Jul 17
I’m sick of Collective Code Ownership. I’m sick of it not because it’s a bad practice. It reduces knowledge specialization. Everybody knows the majority of the code base. The project won’t just fold if the chief architect left. But it has been misused as an umbrella for incompetent developers. To apply this practice, Agile teams usually share one source control account (this, of course, is also because of pair programming and swapping). But when a bug happens, it’s really nice to know who made the change. It’s not that we want to finger pointing. We just want to know the business and technical reasons behind the change. That’s why we leave our names in the comment when checking in at my current project. We didn’t enforce this at my previous project. Things didn’t go out of control because we only had 6 developers. After I left the project, the remaining lead developer suggested leaving names in the comment. The one developer who everybody knew made the most mistakes totally freaked out. I guess that was enough to demonstrate how good an excuse CCO is for the incompetent ones.
Sometimes I do feel like finger pointing. Why? Because I’ve had enough! I don’t mean I’m perfect. I make mistakes too. But I don’t make mistakes EVERY SINGLE DAY! Most of my mistakes were made because I missed a test or I misunderstood the business requirement. Not because I wrote crap code! But thanks to Collective Code Ownership, people who can’t stand dumping more crap on an already pretty high pile of crap ended up cleaning up somebody else’s mess. It’s good for the project, I guess. It’s definitely not good for the mental health of the cleaners. So if you find I’ve gone psycho in a couple of weeks, this post explains why.
Jul 13
I always do a bad job explaining to people what REST is. Partly because I myself still doesn’t have a crystal idea either. But this explanation is so easy to understand that even your wife (or husband) can get it. It was written in 2004. I guess that shows how “new” REST is.
Jun 13
I’m just ripping Joe Satriani’s ground breaking Surfing with the alien album. Then I suddenly realized the cover art is actually the Silver Surfer from Fantastic Four. Quite a cool discovery. 
