Lake Louise, Alberta, Canadian Rockies

My Dad finally came to visit. For the first time he left the confines of the British Isles and came to North America. He and I walked around Vancouver and then cycled the same route to make sure we didn’t miss any photo opportunities. He described it as a photographers paradise and knowing of only one other city in the world that came close, namely Hong Kong. We then made the 2 day long drive up into the Canadian Rockies where we were both astonded by the scenery. Having been to New Zealand also, I can actually say the Rockies out ranked it. One of the truly most breathtaking places on Earth. We we returned to Vancouver I arranged that Dad have a float plane lesson and myself and Victoria tagged along. Dad was nearly speechless with the scenery! I feel that this has really motivated me to learn to fly myself and maybe something I’ll do in my sabbatical next year. We managed to pack in quite a few things into the 10 days he was here, including going to the shooting range where we fired a whole box of .44 Magnum rounds. Boom!

Dad Dirty Harry .44 Magnum

Victoria and I went to LA to go to her friends wedding. Was the first time for me in California. LA is the land of the car and the palm tree. You REALLY need a car to get around. The weather was in the mid-20s in October which was awesome. LA is urban sprawl much like London, stretching for miles. I was kinda wondering if I would ever want to live there, but the size and scale of the place is quite off putting, but who knows. Nothing really comes to close to Vancouver really lets face it.

Victoria and me by the Hollywood Sign, California

As you may remember in my last post I announced that I was knocking the booze on the head. We it’s been about 4 months now and I haven’t touched a drop. It was quite difficult at first as socially it means that you can’t really find much interest in hanging around while people get drunk. I’ve realized the pub is actually quite a boring place to be if you spend all night there. I’m getting better at this now. It’s not as easy as doing something else as I first pointed out, but no drinking shouldn’t mean being anti-social. I am kind of dreading going back to England however where I doubt people will be as kind as they are in Canada. Maybe it will really show who my freinds really.

Me in New York, near the Statue of Liberty

We also went to New York for a holiday with Victorias family. I hadn’t been to New York since 1994, so quite a bit had changed. The twin tower site is still just a great big hole in the ground. Lots of contruction going on, but supposedly it’s been that way for a while. Went to see a broadway musical “Rock of Ages”, which was awesome and hockey game at Madison Square Garden. Saw a really old mate from Havant College days who is now doing a PHD in Bio Chemisty at Rockefeller University. Cheeky bugger went to Harvard despite putting it down as his second choice. New York is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there. Dirty noisy, much like London again. And people are really rude. Never have I actually been asked for a tip! We tipped in a resturant only for the server to bring it back and say, 15% please! Unbeliveable! Anyways despite a lot of bad customer service (they say England is bad), we had a pretty nice time.

In other more sobering news. The project I was on at work got semi-canned and I was put in job limbo for 24 hours, not knowing if I was going to be able to keep my job. This was a very scary moment indeed, but luckily everything turned out for the better and I was welcomed back with open arms on my old franchise. The previous project totally folded in the last week and now everyone is looking for work internally. This has meant that they’ve laid of some people from my old franchise to balance the numbers. This has been a roller coaster of a ride with everyone is at the mercy of the share price. I’ve finally turned 2 years employed in Canada so I can apply for my permanent residency, which makes me feel slightly safer. But this is certainly the most unsecure I’ve ever felt at a company.

In other news; I passed my BC driving test. So yes watch out of it you’re on the roads of British Columbia as I’m now loose! Took a few lessons to bring me up to test standard in BC, as I think I’d picked up some bad habits in the years I’ve been driving in the UK.

Victoria is learning to be a PADI rescue diver. As I write this she’s off finishing her training in the cold merky waters somewhere. *brrr*

We’ve booked our Vacation to Thailand for New Year. So we’ve just got our tickets which is quite exciting. They were expensive as hell and came at the same time as my job news, as sods law would have it, luckily that turned out fine for now. We’ve got ourselves booked in a 4 day liveboard out there which should be just what the doctor ordered. The actual New years party is going to be “a full moon party” on one of the Island out there. These full moon parties sound like huge all night raves on an island. What have I got myself in for!

Yes on the 3rd of May 2009, I finished my first half Marathon. My time was about 2 hours 20mins, which is quite slow. But includes 15mins of waiting in the lineup for the bathroom stalls, so really it was more like 2hours. Would you believe they only had two stalls?! There was about 6000 people I think that ran. Maybe that 4 pints of water before I started wasn’t such a good idea.

Would I do it again? Well maybe… but I now I know I can do it I feel like trying something else. Maybe a full marathon, maybe a triathalon. Maybe just some cycling. Whatever I chose I’m impressed that I have started down the road of doing fitty things.

Victoria my better half also did the half Marathon and quite enjoyed herself. Maybe we can find something else we can do together. I also have a friend in the UK that has been inspired by what I’ve been doing and is also doing a half marathon. He suggested maybe doing a full together next year. So that’s a possibility. Maybe in New York or Chicago.

I managed to get free entrance into another half marathon in June here in Vancouver. I haven’t signed up yet, but its tempting.

Frankly it’s also nice to get my Sundays back again. And it’s now BBQ season and I write this as I’m sat on our balcony over looking false creek and it’s lovely and sunny.  So I think a little relapse into burnt food and bright red suntans is in order.

Ok I know, I’m probably fighting a losing battle here. As the likes of Vim and Emacs run on every platform known to man and they are very extenible. Everyone loves to hate M$ etc.

To give you a  bit of background; I used emacs for 14 months while working exclusively on HP Spark / Dec alpha machines in good old fashion UNIX. I wrote a few Lisp scripts for emacs, but nothing special. I did learn to love it and I found using VS afterwards almost like playing with a toy. No developer worth anything would ever consider using VS. You’d be laughed at by any level of unix / level programmer and quite rightly so.

Anyway, that was 8 years ago and things have changed. I still do a lot of C++ development, but I also do .NET languages such as C#.

Now the reason I can’t leave VS is ultimately Visual-Assist. I love it! To be without it I now feel disabled as a programmer.

Visual-Assist for all that don’t know is essentially ‘intelisense’ on steroids. It’s made by WholeTomatoe software and it’s fantastic.

I often sit there being asked by my trendy friends where various code lives. They’ll have a class name, and simply want to look up the definition. I’d forgotten how brilliant Visual assist is with symbols. ALT+G on a symbol and it jumps straight to the code definition. Watching my Vim buddies work… well it’s regular expression followed by, calling grep or something like that. Vim doesn’t do any symbol parsing or anything, so if you’re looking for horribly generic fuction like Update(), you’d have a hell of a time finding it.

This having the symbols correctly parsed is so handy for refactoring too. Want to rename a class, no problem. It correctly scopes all changes so it’s infinitely better than a blind and brutal a reg-exp. Change a functions params? Visual Assist will change all calls to this and replace them correctly.

I have become so reliant on it, it shapes my want to learn other languages. Looking up APIs is a waste of time and is frankly tedious.

So is this a bad thing? Have I become simply lazy in my reliance on this tool? Or has my productivity increased so much that anything else seems like a waste? Maybe so.

Now I know I’ll be told that there exists a VIM plugin for visual studio, so I can have the best of both worlds. Well perhaps… But I guess that’s not my point. My point is without realising it, I’ve become so reliant on a tool that I can’t contunue without it. I draw a parrallel with mobile phones here as I belive it’s a good analogy.

Do you remember all your phone numbers now? No? Well of course mobiles phones remember them all for you. Has that made you worse as a telphonist? Perhaps? Would you feel crippled if you were faced with a phone with no numbers? Or have you accepted that it’s a the future and embrace being lazy and use the phones memory. Well I believe this is exactly the same as learning an API back to front. Relying on the compiler to find your syntax errors is simply way too old school now.

Anyway, I hope this generates some discussion. Please let me know your feelings on the matter I will be quite interested to hear peoples oppinions.

Why on earth does someone bring a baby on a plane? It’s not really going enjoy the trip, so why the douche have you dragged the poor little bugger with you. Aren’t there baby kennels that you check the little sods in with? It seems to be that everywhere I sit on any airline, bar the really budget ones (perhaps people are too scared to take their kids on them), there are screaming kids near by.

Now my theory. And I may have ripped this off from a comedy skit I saw. Since all the terror attacks, various things have been banned from airlines. Liquids for example. Shoes are even taken off and scanned these days. If someone gets caught with a “suspect baby”, then all the airlines will ban babies from the flights and we’ll all be happy.

People putting their seat back!!!

Ok. I find this the height of rudeness. I don’t give a monkeys if the seat goes back, check with the person behind you at the least. I’ve normally got my laptop on the table and end up eating the screen when some ignoramus in the front feels the need to recline. Damn them, damn them all.

Baggage claim!

Ok. I’m normally first there and last to leave. Why is always my bag that gets lost? Fallen off the conveyor and left at destination are two of my recent favorites. I wonder how many bags get lost every day? Boxes with fragile written down the side slide down the carousel and plonk into one another. Is this normal? I’m I the only one that’s horrified by this?

Firstly I’ve just finished work on Need for Speed Undercover.  It was my first game here in Canada and I think I’m quite proud of my part; the Audio.  This was my main excuse for not blogging as we have been very busy for months finalling the game.  Anyway it’s all done now… you should all run out and buy it of course

I have a met a lovely girl named Victoria. She has been keeping me on the straight and narrow.  She’s 28, gorgeous, clever and fit as a fiddle.  Would you believe I’m considering running for a Triathlon? She did one back in March and thinks I can do it easy. In triathlon terms it’s nothing (400k, 11k, 5k).  But for me it’s a challenge. The cycling and swimming parts I think I’ll be fine, but running is my weakest link. I run like a cross between a chicken and giraffe. Think I gave up illusions of grandeur after the egg and spoon race age 3. Trust me it’s not a pleasant site. A visit to the treadmill is in order.

We went to Seattle for Thanksgiving and cooked a Chicken. Well we cheated a little and bought a cooked Chicken, but we did the rest. Seattle is actually really nice and you can certainly get a lot more for your money down there in terms of Condos. Didn’t get to see Microsoft, but there’s always next time.

Also visited Toronto the other day for the first time. Saw Niagara, truly amazing to see. The town around it however is very much like a Blackpool / cheap Las Vegas however. Very Americanized. All you can eat buffets and Casinos at every turn. The area around it, Niagara on the Lake, is much nicer. Known for it’s Ice Wine (very sweet desert wine), there’s loads of Wineries near by that give you tasting tours. I recommend this to everyone Went up the CN tower too. It’s not the tallest structure in the world anymore, but it’s still damn tall.  147 stories I think. Try standing on the glass floor at the top with a hangover.

Ohh! Nearly forgot to mention. Went diving, for the first time in nearly a year. Victoria had done her PADI open water course so we could go together. We went to a place called Porteau Cove, which is near Squamish here in BC. Beautiful place surrounded by mountains. Anyway, was fully expecting Victoria to hate it and me to love it, but as it happens the complete opposite happened. I couldn’t equalize, had too much weight and had absolutely banging headache when I was finished. Victoria one the other hand was a complete natural. The whole incident has put me off a little bit, but not to be defeatist I’ll give it another go soon, to make sure I’m not really that crap.

Anyway, that’s a Whistle-stop tour of what I’ve been up to the last few weeks.

Hope to have some more post for you all soon.

The idea of these pages is to simply brain dump many of the things I’m currently thinking about or involved with. That will range from all things programming related, scuba diving, mountain biking, flying, firearms and whatever else I’m up to at the time.

Hopefully some of it will be of interest to others.

Jimmy