I'm home from Montreal, and currently waiting for the bulk of this trip's pictures to upload to my Flickr.  Once that happens, they'll be available right here, and I'll probably throw up another post with some of my favourite shots.

This was my second trip to Montreal.  The first one was in August for Under Pressure 2009, and I loved it.  I had to head back to Ontario before all the pieces were done on the final day of UP, so one of the main things I wanted to do this time was go back and get pictures of the finished work to go with my work in progress pics.  It was a cold afternoon when I went to get pictures this time around, but I got some decent ones so Mission Accomplished I suppose.

On the last trip I spent a lot of time at Under Pressure events and hanging out in the general area of rue Ste-Catherine, which I really liked.  On this trip I had more time and less of an agenda.  With the help of Aloqa and a little bit of planning ahead with my friend Eric (who I was traveling with this time around), we spent a lot of time kicking around various different parts of Montreal that I didn't check out in the summer, and hitting an endless string of great bars, restaurants and cafes, never ending up anywhere very touristy.  None of the art galleries we passed by seemed to be open, which was unfortunate but there's always next time.

Both times that I've been to Montreal I've come home super excited about making another trip back there.  Montreal is definitely my kind of city.  There's music, micro-breweries, cafes and art everywhere, I always run into friendly locals, and it seems like every major gripe I have with Cambridge has some completely positive counterpart in Montreal.

There's probably not-so-great things about Montreal that just haven't come up for me in the time I've spent there, and a big city doesn't have to do very much to highlight how much of a backwater ghetto Cambridge is, but I tend to enjoy my time spent in Montreal even more than I enjoy my time spent in Toronto.

I'm starting to think I've spent far too much time in Cambridge, but I'm not at a point where I'm ready to move 6 hours away so for right now Montreal will remain my road-trip destination of choice.  If it feels like I cut this post off early, it's because I'm pretty sure I did.  It's late and I'm tired though, so that's all I've got to say for right now.

Tags: Montreal, Travel

Right now it's just about 12:30pm, the day before I bail to Montreal for 4 days courtesy of a random phone call from a friend of mine asking me to team up with him for a cardboard boat building contest.

Not only did the boat contest spawn this beautiful specimen of nautical engineering, it also won us a trip to Montreal for New Year's!

For now though, this is basically my life.

It started an hour or so ago, with one simple idea:  "Hey, I should set up Twitter updates on hqas.com so I can easily post stuff right from my phone to the site during my trip!".

That has developed into finding out that I didn't have curl installed on the server, which seems like a pretty big oversight because I really like curl and have used it on things I've written in the past. Apparently not on things I've tried to run on the server I guess.

Either way, what should've been a simple 'apt-get install' operation has ended with me finding out a bunch of other stuff needed updating, and now apt is a confused mess.

Good times.

And of course, now I'm on the case and really want this whole mess fixed, but I also have to do some running around to pick up a few last minute things today, get packed for the trip, and I'd really like to remote in to work and fix a couple bugs.  I think the plan for now is to get apt back to a usable state, and then do everything else.  This is the sort of thing that will bug me for the whole trip if I don't get it dealt with. In the future I guess I'll have to be more on top of keeping things up to date on the server.

Tags: debian, linux, twitter, apt, Montreal, mess

Recently a particularly self-righteous and judgmental person decided it was their place to provide me with entirely unsolicited life and career advice, with absolutely no context on either my life or the career I'm getting started in.

Initially, and I think completely justifiably, I was pretty offended.  I still am, but in addition to making me mad, the whole thing got me thinking.  Going from running a skateshop to being a software developer is a pretty big change, and I guess it's possible that some people might not see why I have decided to go from hanging out and talking about skating all day to sitting at a desk and writing code.

So here we go:  this is why I went back to school to become a software developer, and some of what I love about it.

I wanted to do something that impacts a larger audience than I could impact by selling boards.  I am currently in the middle of a 16 month co-op term writing software with a great company called Desire2Learn and I'm doing exactly that.  I spend all day working on software that gets used by hundreds of thousands of people, and I love every minute of it.

I wanted to do something that pushes my brain in a different way than running the shop.  Writing software definitely does that.  It's like a limitless mental playground and I get to bounce all over the place.  Creating entirely new programs, improving existing code, implementing libraries written by other people, fixing bugs... it all comes down to solving puzzles and flexing my creativity and logic at the same time, in ways that nothing else allows me to do.

This is somewhat similar to my earlier statement about impacting a larger audience, but more about the actual way my job works:  I'm really enjoying working on a project that is bigger than what I wanted to do with HQ.  HQ always came down to me and a small circle of friends helping to make things happen.  It was a lot of fun, but now I'm finding it really satisfying to work in an environment where, off the top of my head, there are 5 other teams made up of developers, designers, and Program and Project Managers, not to mention everyone else in the company, and the work getting done depends on all of us pulling together.  There's no way we could do what we're doing in any reasonable amount of time with just 4 or 5 people, and being one of the people involved in taking things from a design scribbled in dry-erase marker to a functional, tested, innovative piece of software feels really really good.

I think maybe people from outside the world of software development have a misunderstanding of the environment that we software devs work in.  I don't quietly sit in a cubicle all day, dressed like someone from an IBM ad and going to meetings with Bill Lumberg.  I wear my normal every day clothes to work (i.e. printed t-shirts, jeans, skate shoes), work at my desk with my headphones cranked, and when I do have meetings, they're meetings with a bunch of other smart, competent, passionate people who are as excited as I am about what we're doing.  Some days I even skate to work.  The software industry, at least as I've seen it so far, isn't made up of stale, boring corporate drones.  It's full of people coming up with new ideas and technologies, and new ways of using and interacting with existing technologies.

The point I'm trying to get to in all of this is that regardless of what I used to do, I am very happy with what I'm doing now, and what looks to one uninformed person like someone being cooped up in an office, may actually be that person doing something they truly enjoy and feel great about, which I most certainly do about my career change from skateshop guy to software developer.

After taking way too long off of riding my bike due to weather, time, and other excuses that mostly just amount to being lazy and wussing out of going for rides, tonight brings 2 very important lessons:

1)  Cycling gear is expensive, and unfortunately there's always something else you need.  Tonight I bought some really nice not-quite-shorts-not-quite-pants to wear, thus negating my "waa it's too cold to ride this morning" excuse.  Don't worry, they're not spandex.  They're actually quite baggy, and the pant-legs stop just shy of the front gear danger zone.  

2)  Cycling is absolutely worth every drop of sweat you put into it, especially in an area that's just all around really nice to look at like the outskirts of Cambrige.  I guess that's one thing this stupid town has going for it.  I wish I'd been riding with a good camera, but all in all I'm just really glad I had my cell-phone camera so I could get this shot while catching my breath: