Dave’s Personal Blog

I thought I should let everyone know that, although things will never be”back to normal”, I’m feeling great.

I’ve been back to work for almost 2 weeks. The diabetes is under control and my blood glucose level is where they should be. Getting used to the new routine of finger pricks and injections hasn’t been an issue, which was a very pleasant surprise. Dietary changes weren’t overly onerous… just the portion management being the biggest change.So, all in all, things are going well. I’ve even started learning Mac/iPhone development and Spanish.

Dave

I came close to death last week. Such a thing gives one pause to think…

Life is too fragile to waste on bland food, bad music, cheap wine, weak coffee, unpleasant women, undue rushing about, and poorly written software.

… I’m just sayin’, is all.

Carpe Diem

Steve Jobs isn’t the only one who can quote Dylan.

… speaking of Steve Jobs and changin’ times… I may be bumping into Mr. Jobs at the local Cupertino Starbucks before long…

Next month I’m heading to California… Silicon Valley to be specific.

After over 3 years of saying “I’m not interested” to Google, I’ve accepted their offer of a position. I’m not sure how public I can be yet about what exactly I’ll be doing… but it will leverage my experience and expertise in Agile Development, TDD, Ruby, Rails, and RSpec.

This change is not without some sacrifices, but we think it’s the right move at this time. One downside is having to end my association with Obtiva… which I have greatly enjoyed. They’re great people and great to work with.

One benefit is that I won’t be having to focus so much on billable hours to cover the bills anymore… so there should be more time for things like RSpec and writing.

I’m in New York doing some teaching this week. I’ve been before but usually only for day trips… once for an overnight. This is the first time I’m here for several days at a time. Tonight the weather was nice enough to get out for a walk after class. It’s such a blend on the streets. I’ve grown myopic living in rural Atlantic Canada where everyone pretty much looks the same. I sat this evening at the window counter of a burger place (corner of 6th Ave and W 32nd St) facing out on W 32nd. I like watching people, so this was a great way to spend a meal. Pretty much no two people who went by had the same shade of skin (maybe a slight exaggeration.. but not by much). And my hotel is in the middle of “KoreaTown“. Home is going to seem somewhat blander.

I’ve been doing some work with Obtiva for a while. It’s been a good experience for everyone involved, and so we’ve decided to take the relationship to the next level.

I’m happy to announce that I’m now part of the Obtiva team, doing project work and training (primarily Ruby and Rails based).

Here’s wishing everyone a Happy New Year.

The last year had some high points (hanging out in Chicago with Aslak Hellesoy & David Chelimsky, making the switch to working remotely from home full time and so having more time with Nancy and the boys, making the switch to fulltime Rails, rediscovering my Nintendo fanboyness), but also some serious suckage (mainly having to do with cash flow and a skank of an ex-wife).

Have a good year, everyone.

We all have Nintendo DS Lites now. One of the cool features of the DS is built-in wifi and internet gaming. The one gotcha is that it’s slow wifi, and with limited configurability. We want to play around with the wifi features, but don’t want to slow down or open up our in house network(s). So Nancy grabbed one of the spare WAPs and went about setting it up in the living-room exclusively for gaming use. How geeky is that. That makes 4 wifi networks in the house (the other 3 are due to a combination of the size of the house (not big.. just long) and the lame reception of my powerbook).

Now, Nancy is not one to do a half hearted job… especially when network cables are involved. Here she is installing the WAP. FYI that’s a 12 foot ladder.	And here’s a shot of the cluster of WAPs/antennas.

Update: The Netgear didn’t work out… so we used the Airport Extreme we had leftover.. it worked fine and we’re gaming online. See you on the WFC.

Nancy’s been at it again. From her blog:

The mouse that scrolled…: “Roar is not quite it… it really is the mouse that scrolled.

As long as I can remember, I have been a trackball user. I like my trackball. I try other mice but always seem to gravitate back to using the trackball. I have a wireless Logitech trackball that I really like, but for some reason, the scrolling wasn’t working. For this reason, I had sadly tucked it away and used my wired trackball - also by Logitech.

While rummaging in the office yesterday, I re-discovered my cordless trackball and thought I’d give it another go. I downloaded the special ‘Logitech Command Center’ (LCC) for OS X and tried tweaking the trackball settings. Everything seemed to work - except for scrolling!

At first I thought it was something to do with OS X, but the click part of the wheel worked fine, and the LCC was recognizing that it did, in fact, have a scroll wheel. I took it apart and cleaned the wheel, the spokes, etc. - still nothing. UGH. I took my corded trackball apart and had a look inside, it looked pretty much the same, and scrolling worked on that one… so… I came up with a brilliant plan.

Looks like it’s time to take it apart…

Read the rest on Nancy’s blog.

Tuesday morning my laptop died.. no not my Powerbook.. that would have completely unexpected… the Windows ThinkPad I use for my current client… courtesy of said client. It just wouldn’t boot. Something about an unmountable drive.. bluescreen but it didn’t stay in place long enough to read before it valiantly, yet futilely, tried to boot again.

Not good. I wasn’t heading back to Chicago & the client for almost a week. Was I dead in the water? Could I not work for the week?

Well.. Nancy to the rescue! It took most of the day, but she eventually found some bad sectors, blocked them out, etc and got the thing to boot again. No data loss.. nothing acting odd. It’s been behaving itself all week so far.

So we had 4G iPod cradles from my earlier iPod (one came with the iPod, then I got a stereo connect kit). So when we got 5G iPods they sort of fit.. then we got hardshell cases to prevent scratching.. and the cradles no longer fit.

Not to be defeated by this, nancy just spent the evening sawing, Dremeling, and carving to make the necessary adjustments (aka hacks) to the cradles to make them fit once more.

She took some pics and expect she’ll be blogging about the process.