Leaving IBM

I'm thinking of bringing back this blog. I know that nobody read it in the past, but now that Google Buzz is out, I have followers! Now a few people will have to actively ignore me. Maybe I'll even start dumping this stuff on Facebook again.

So the news of the year is that I'm finally leaving IBM. When I joined Big Blue 6 years ago in Winnipeg I would never have guessed that I'd stay for this long, but it's been a pretty good ride I guess. Because of this job I got to live in Winnipeg, leave Winnipeg, live in Ottawa, and meet a bunch of other really cool developers. Still the time has come to try something else and when an opportunity to work for RIM presented itself, I decided to take the leap. Can't wait to start the new job.

Twitter sucks

I resisted Twitter for a long time. I just didn't get it and I thought it would go away. It so far has proved me wrong since it hasn't gone away. A lot of people seem to like it too, so I finally broke down and tried it. After about a month, I still don't get it and I want out. Conveniently Twitter provides a link to delete your account on the settings page. Great! Bye-bye Twitter! I clicked the link, and got this.

Twitter sucks!

The jackets make the team

I have a new curling team this year. Last year was fun, but everyone on that team was really going in a different direction with their curling lives so the team fell apart at the end of the season. This forced me to take matters into my own hands and put together a team of my own. Ian, Ken, and Holly are all great curlers, but more importantly they're all fun to have around.

We've been getting along great and winning despite some terrible ice and some questionable skipping by yours truly. By my calculations, our matching team jackets earn us 2 points per game (they're very initimidating), but the terrible ice at City View Curling Club costs us three points per game. We finished the first round of our season tonight with a record of 4 wins and 2 ties. That's good enough to make us the winners of the first round and we'll be moving up the the "A" division starting next week.

Three cheers for me (uh, I mean us). Hip-hip Hooray! Hip-hip...

Rainy Day.

I'm looking for good ways to kill my time today. It's really raining and apparently isn't going to stop anytime soon. I had planned on making my way over to Gatineau Park to go for a walk and spend some time outside, but due to the weather, indoor activity would be preferable.
I've already signed up for Twitter today, and played with it a bit. I've resisted up until this point because I thought it would eventually go away once people got bored with it. It's been around long enough that I'm willing to concede that I may have missed out on something. We'll see how it goes. I think it's probably much better if you are using on an iPhone or Blackberry rather than a desktop.
I'm considering working on my web site. I started to make a site for myself in the summer, but got no where. I told myself it was more of a winter project, but the truth is I'm just lazy.
Should have scheduled practice with the curling team for today instead of tomorrow. Now I'm stuck watching a bug walk across my ceiling, just a few inches out of my reach.

Winnipeg 2008

Lynn and I went to Winnipeg last week for her friend Jen's wedding. I've only been back twice since I moved away and the last trip was at Christmas 2006 so I was due for another visit. We got in late on Thursday night. On Friday we drove by Lynn's old house to see how the garden had been maintained (it hadn't) then we stopped at the Winnipeg IBM office to see the old debug team, who are now the Debug, Ant, PDE-UI and API Tools team. Apparently Winnipeg is similar to India in that all the crap that nobody else maintains gets dumped on them, however unlike India, resources aren't cheap so three guys have to do all the work themselves.
In the afternoon, Lynn and I went out for lunch with her parents then met Ian for dinner and played some pool. Lynn, Ian and I all won a few games, but the final game (for the "Champion of the World" title) came down to a tight match between Ian and I and sadly Ian won - this time.
Saturday was wedding day. Weddings always suck, but this one was in a church with no air conditioning and the reception featured a phenomenal number of line dances, including the chicken dance played twice in a row. I don't know why, don't ask me.
Have you ever noticed that people never look like they're having fun when they're doing one of those stupid line dances? They look focused for the first half of the song, probably because they don't know what's coming next, then they look bored for the second half.
On Sunday we sat around and I gave out a free Trivial Pursuit lessons. :-)

$3 Dollar Turnip

Lynn and I went over to the Lansdowne Farmers Market this morning to have a look around and to go for a walk down along the canal. We already had strawberries at home and Lynn has put a moratorium on buying plants for the garden (anything we can get for free is ok), so there was no obvious reason to go at all. Still it's a fun thing to do, and since you're there, you've got to buy something... Today we met some crazy people selling rare turnips that were meant to be eaten like apples! No cooking required (and since we wanted to eat it right away, no cleaning either!). We took our single three dollar turnip, found a bench beside the canal and took turns biting pieces off of it. The tourist's on cruise boat that went buy didn't seem to notice the crazy people chowing down on raw turnip. We brought the leaves home and fed them to the bunnies. If you spend $3 on one stupid turnip, you want to be sure you use all of it at least.

See the photo at the of my blog (http://iamkevb.blogspot.com/).

Ribfest 2008

Lynn, Hanita, Felipe and I went to the Ribfest on Spark Street tonight. It was raining so we just picked up our food and brought it back to our place. We had to walk the whole street and carefully consider our options. We took into account, the number of trophies, the number of signs, the length of the line (long being good in this case since nobody waits for bad ribs) and in the end decided to go with last years winners. We were a little disappointed. Maybe rainy weather is not optimal rib weather, but the ribs were a little dry. We'll try another stand next time.

Update: Lynn and I were downtown today so we took a picture of the ribfest goings on (and ate some more meat). There was another guy there (who appeared to be carrying a load in pants) and was taking A LOT of pictures of some poor girl grilling ribs. He was probably from a local paper or website because he asked her for her name and stuff and he didn't look like he was trying to pick the meat lady.