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Whew, a tiring weekend last week was, and yet it was quite interesting. At work, last week was pretty good; I managed to talk to a couple of people regarding .NET development projects. I also am working on a Cognos Impromptu project for a client. He’s seen the prototype and says that he’s impressed with it. So, I’m learning new things as I go, and am starting to enjoy my work even more now. The only thing I can say I’m not happy with is how much taxes are taken out of my pay every 2 weeks
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On Friday night, I met a buddy of mine, Davidandnbsp;from high school. We went to HS back in Wollongong, Australia and have kept in touch since. He also visited me 7 years ago when I was in Hawaii. He’s in Montreal right now and visited Toronto for the weekend. I picked him up at the airport and had dinner and caught up on lots of stuff. That was kinda nice.
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On Saturday I took my wife and son to a shopping mall in the morning, and went to a friend’s house far in the East end for a cell group meeting and BBQ. Surprisingly it only took 40 minutes, since there wasn’t really any heavy traffic anywhere. Lots of good food, had a great time with friends.
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Sunday, after coming back from Church, we managed to get a decent nap in the afternoon. I met Dave again in the evening for some dinner (he was leaving Sunday night) and more reminiscing of old times
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This weekend has been a mixed week. I’m pretty happy with work since I’m getting really comfortable with Cognos Impromptu, and making progress learning new things. As well, I’m having a bit of time improving my .NET skills, testing out Remoting and Threading. Maybe I’ll be able to go for my MCAD.NET after all in the near future. The only sad thing is my wife and son might be heading back to Indonesia for a couple of months in October, for her brother’s wedding. I can’t go because I just started work, so it’ll be kinda lonely if they do go. Well, my wife deserves a vacation after all she’s been through, taking care of our kid all day, and generally feeling very tired every day. I’ll still miss them a lot though.
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Well, that was my week and a bit. Hope to post some more soon.

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Argh.. what’s up with the weather in Toronto? 2 days ago it was hot, yesterday was cold, and today it’s hot again? No wonder people get sick so easily with a climate like this.

I was fine when I woke up yesterday, then went to the train station, parked and walked to the train. It was quite chilly and I didn’t have a jacket on. When I got on the train, I started getting a stuffy nose and sneezing. By the time I got to the office, I had a sore throat and knew that I was going to get a cold.

To make matters worse, when I got back home in the evening, my son had a cough and a runny nose, and didn’t sleep well at night. I ended up sleeping less than 3 hours, and had to call in sick to take my son to the doctor. And guess what? Our son’s doctor is away till Friday !!! grrr… Have to take him to a walk in clinic this evening.

Not a good day all in all, gonna take as much rest as I can.

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We finally sold the house, after a few weeks on the market. The price was on the lower end of the market for this area, but considering we don’t want any other hassles, it’s an OK deal. Now off to deal with the lawyers, fun fun fun

But it’d be great to finally move in to our new condominium. My wife went for an inspection last week, and found it to be quite small. It’ll take some getting used to, moving from a house with lots of space, to a condo unit with limited space, but it’s a nice unit and we’ll enjoy living there I think.

Now we also have to start thinking of what goods we are going to take there, and which ones we’re gonna put up for the garage sale. Hopefully we can have the sale before the end of this month, to clear up everything from this house.

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Ok, due to a spur of the moment, I actually went to Ebay and bought myself 5 invites to Google’s Gmail. After trying it for a bit, I find that it still has some delays here and there when performing operations, but it looks that it has lots of interesting features, like the conversations, labels and stars.
I’m still gonna keep trying out the different features, but it looks good so far.

On another note, Spymac also has lots of cool features, such as free hosting, blogging, forums etc. And one thing I just noticed is the “auto preview” feature (the one where you hover your mouse over the subject in Inbox, and it shows you the message). I totally enjoyed that feature, and wished that Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail would do the same thing. Maybe in the future.

So, it seems like all the big names are joining in giving us lots of free webspace. I guess it’s partly because storage space is becoming so cheap nowadays, and also partly competition between these companies. I can only say: “competition rules !!!”

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I went to an orientation yesterday, specific to the people who were accepted to the IandIT (Information and Information Technology) stream. The first speaker of the day was actually the CIO of Ontario, Greg Georgeff, which was kinda cool. After all, how many CIO’s of large corporations take their time to meet and talk to the new recruits? He seemed like a visionary, and knows where he’s taking the IT initiative in Ontario Government. Considering he’s leading the IT department of an organization comparable to a huge private organization (then again, which private organization has 60, 000+ employees), it was quite fulfilling to have him meet and talk to a group of 20 of us.

I found out that there will be plenty of opportunities to move around within the government, experience different facets of IT and even business, and really grow up. I find this fascinating, as it is almost impossible to do the same thing in a private corporate world.

It’s also great to know that the Ontario government is one of the leaders in e-government, utilizing technology in almost every facet of service, and it uses leading edge technology in its implementation.

There will be a showcase of how the government of Ontario uses all these technologies within their scope of work at Showcase Ontario 2004. It will be great, as there will be lots of workshops, labs and conferences featuring many of the technologies that we use / apply. So, come up and register, it’s free for us government employees, not sure about the public, but I can assure you it’s gonna be a great showcase event.

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