20030529:
Today my dad went back home to Fort McMurray. His visit was very nice. Last night we went to Francois and Brenda's wedding. We all had a great time. The highlight of the evening was my visit with Francois' sister's boyfriend's family. They seemed a little lonely so I got Astor (the boyfriend) to introduce me. His sister is very remarkable: she has MS, but has been in remission for six years. She is writing an autobiography which I will be very interested to read when it is finished.
We spent the majority of the afternoon and evening with Chris and Jeanne. We looked at houses in a new development and had a BBQ dinner together. As usual, our conversation was great. At the grocery store we found some great deals on Lego so I got 4 sets.
Earlier in the afternoon we met with our landlords to discuss buying our house from them. It was a very nice visit. I served my special tea (Top Tea from India, a pinch of freshly ground Cardamom, and 15ml of rose water).
20030528:
Here's a link to some research about the Bowen Technique. I had some Bowen treatements a couple of years ago. They didn't fix my problems, but they had a very strong effect on me nevertheless. Every treatment, I would fall fast asleep, almost instantly. Jeanne, who is starting Bowen training soon, believes it may have been ineffective because so much of my health was crippled by my diet (allergies, asthma, etc.).
David-John sent me this link to an article about Hackers and Painters. We also discussed today, over ICQ, the merits and failings of the Rosetta Stone courses I am so excited about. In summary, he pointed out that:
20030526:
Last night Chris and Jeanne came by. They didn't mean to stay. We ended up chatting for about five hours. We talked about a lot of things including some stuff about them buying a house, the Baha'i community here in Markham, working together, health... the usual :-) After they left, Melanie and I fantasized about living in a very large house with them. We looked up homes for sale on mls, we talked about doing a custom home, and we concluded that at least for now, we couldn't do it. Maybe in a few years...
Melanie really needs to update her joyous homes web site with some tips about what makes for a good floor plan.
This afternoon, dad arrived after attending the Baha'i National Convention in Montreal. As usual, there are many excellent stories from the event. Dad likened it to a reflection meeting. He shared with us (Chris, Jeanne, Zaynab, Melanie and I) the "Building Momentum" video.
20030524:
Well, I'm back home. Last night I gave a talk on the significance of the Bab's revelation to the Irfan and Iman meeting that Chris and Jeanne have every week. It was well received, and in fact I think it was one of my better presentations. I prepared for about an hour and a half before going over. Jeanne introduced me very nicely. I took about 40 minutes to do the talk, which included a few minutes of getting other participants to read certain quotes from the writings of the Bab.
Melanie and I had a very good conversation today about our goals. We have decided that we would be happy living in the house we are currently in for quite some time. We called our landlord and asked them about buying it. They are going to think about it and get back to us. As well, we decided to look into making some money off of real estate, either through investment or income properties. We have much research to do on that. Finally, we talked about an interesting option for working with Asim that I have been thinking about. I'll leave off describing that one here until I actually talk with him about it :-)
This evening, I took my bicycle out for the first time in many many months. The tires were completely flat. Melanie, the kids and I went for a nice bike ride through our neighborhood. Melanie in particular pointed out many of the nicely landscaped houses. She is starting to feel a desperate gardening urge.
20030521:
This evening I helped dad do some stuff with his new web site berteigart.com. He also set up a small feeder site, and he will soon be doing an online journal thingy too.
Here's a couple of interesting sites: one by Kasreyn, a K5'er, and another by a guy named "Mil". Both are kinda harsh, but both are thought provoking and sometimes extremely funny.
I wrote an interesting comment about art and software development on K5 a couple of days ago. Here it is:
Art, Creativity and Programming
I am the oddball in my family: I am the only one who does not work in the fine arts as my primary work. My father is a painter, my mother is a playwright and dramatic director, my brother is a musician and screen writer. And what am I? I'm a programmer.
Because I have this incredibly talented family, all working in the fine arts, I happen to know quite a bit about art. I know that art is a discipline that has a history, a theoretical foundation, a self-critical mechanism, and, most importantly, a practice (go see any artist's web pages, or go to any art gallery, or performance, or etc.). I know that art is a creative endeavor. Artists work in many different mediums. Finally, art is experienced by an audience.
What about programming is different from art?
In my opinion, not very much, if anything. In fact, I think that programmers tend to embody the stereotypical temperment and working habits of artists. Working in short, intense, incredibly productive periods, followed by longer periods of very little activity is typical of many artists and many programmers.
Art and programming are also similar in that those who practice the discipline all have their own personal approach, they all have varying levels of talent, and they all are at varying levels of accomplishment. The unknown programmer who is hidden deep inside some corporate structure and who works for a buck with little joy and who follows the "designer's" instructions as closely as possible, is very similar to the unknown graphic artist in similar circumstances. They are both exercising the discipline in a very limited form. But that does not detract from the fact that at their broadest, the disciplines of art and programming are very, very similar.
My article, The Software Construction Analogy is Broken discusses these things a little bit.
In a sense, my above comments are unfinished because I assume that the reader is familiar with software creation. Here are the analogous statements about software (these did not show up on K5):
Software creation is a discipline that has a history, a theoretical foundation, a self-critical mechanism, and most importantly, a practice (and see here, here, here, etc.). I know that developing software is a creative endeavor. Programmers work in many different mediums (or programming environments). Finally software is experienced (and sometimes even appreciated) by an audience, the users.
I am starting to believe that there are many good analogies and metaphors to software creation. The construction one is poor, but I think that the art one is good, and there are several mentioned in the comments to the article I wrote. (Speaking of which, someone contacted me and asked if he could put a translation of it on an Italian engineering and project management website. I'll be certain to post a link when that happens.) The Agile Alliance web site has many good articles linked about software creation and several of them deal with analogies.
For what it's worth, my diet is going well. I have avoided carbohydrates very well for two and a half weeks. Once Melanie finishes her time with it, in another one and a half weeks, I think she will be able to start eating more carbs. I will try to go at least one more week. I am going to be going to get MCAD training (Microsoft Certified Application Developer) in .NET and C#. I'm quite excited about it. I haven't done any training for quite some time. At the end of the seven day intensive course, I should also have passed the certification exams and actually be a certified MCAD. I'll put a running review of the training up on here as it goes.
For what it is worth, there is an Agile/XP users group in Toronto. I just joined their email list.
20030519:
I seem to always end up writing here after midnight...
So earlier (on the 18th), dad and I went to the opening of the Dia:Beacon art gallery/museum. It is a very impressive space, an old box printing factory, converted into a naturally lit installation art museum. I was very impressed by some of the pieces there. I will probably write more about this later...
20030518:
I finally got around to seeing the Matrix Reloaded... went with my dad, Kristine, Celine, Charlie and Laura. I really enjoyed it. Partly I really liked the fight scenes, partly I really liked the story. However, there were a couple things that I could have done without: the orgy scene was completely useless. I really liked the ending. It was a cliff-hanger, but not in a really bad way. I will be just fine waiting for the next one to see what happens :-)
I've been using the Rosetta Stone Arabic course for a few days now, and I am still totally blown away by it. Mind you, I have only gone through a very very small fraction of the material. I'm trying to work it so that I don't go to the next lesson until I get 100% on the one I am working on. That way, I know that I know the material.
Today I helped Chris with the Markham Baha'i community newsletter calendar. I also went into Manhattan to get some groceries and other things at the Whole Foods there.
20030516:
Well, its just after midnight so really I would be writing here about the 15th.
Here's a funny thing you can do: Download the Internet. And related to that is a good set of online tutorials including XML Schema which I need to go over before bed, and .NET stuff which I need to start researching.
I wish I could take a vacation just to work!!! I'm super busy and lots of guest are arriving starting in the morning...
20030514:
Yikes! Long gap in the writing! Oh well, this one will make up for it!
In recent news: I bought the Rosetta Stone Arabic Level I and II package off of Amazon.com. I received it today and I have spent about 1.5 hours with it now. It is fabulous!!! Basically, it works by giving you images and words together and you have to match them up. As you go along, it presents new material with new images in such a way that you can always figure out what the new material means. At no point are you ever given a translation!!! You are only ever given words (written and/or voice) in the language you are learning and images to associate with those words. The first lesson starts out with boy, girl, man, woman, dog, cat, airplane, car, ball, elephant, horse, with/and, on, under, in (and maybe a few others that I forget). The thing that is really exciting is that you immediately start being able to recognize the words. I can't recommend this highly enough. It's costly though... but if you want to learn a language (e.g. French, Mandarin Chinese, German, Russian, Spanish, etc.)... don't even bother with anything else! I've tried many of the various language learning packages, and for that matter, real live college courses, and this blows them all away. They have a downloadable demo that you can install and run to see what I mean (caveat: the demo has some features not yet available in the CD's but I have been assured that the cost of upgrading is only a few dollars). The "Explorer" package is the same as the full package but it only has two units of eleven lessons each worth of material instead of the full eight units of ninety-two lessons total in the Level I package or the 118 lessons in the Level II package. Unfortunately Amazon.ca does not offer software yet. The Amazon.com prices are lower than the prices on the Rosetta Stone web site.
I had a very busy weekend just past. On Friday, I went for a job interview. Basically, a guy called me up and so I said, sure! Interview are fun :-) It went very well, and he wants me to come back to meet more people, but I'm going to nix it: basically, they can't come close to paying me enough to break my current very good relationship with Solution Architects. Nevertheless, the interview was very interesting because I realized a couple of things: 1) I consider myself to be very near to the top of my field in ability and I lack only reputation, 2) I really do want to get to the top of the field of software gurus, 3) to do that I have to be very strategic.
On Saturday, I had an external affairs committee meeting in the morning and then in the afternoon ran a bunch of errands with Alexei and the kids (so that we were out of Melanie's hair during the study circle she holds). We ended up doing a huge amount of driving to find a particular kind of boot that Alexei needed for tree-planting. The kids were incredibly patient with the driving. We stopped at the Chinese bakery and got some buns. We also stopped at a Chapters for about fifteen minutes. Chris and Jeanne came by for the devotional gathering and stayed after Lex and the kids and I left the house. After dinner, Melanie and I watched "Monsoon Wedding" (US$, CA$). I really enjoyed it, although at first I found it quite hard to understand the actors' accents.
On Sunday, I was at an interfaith gathering all afternoon. It was very interesting and I met some really cool people. Christian and I volunteered the Baha'i community to host the next gathering in September, hopefully at the Baha'i center downtown. That evening Melanie and I watched "Some Kind of Wonderful" (US$, CA$). Touching movie.
And on Monday, I spent most of the day dealing with financial and administrative stuff - trying to catch up on my life. This included submitting a mortgage assumption application to RBC in order to remove my dad from the title to our Elmvale house. I also spent a bit of time packing. This was made interesting by the need to bring some stuff down here to Jersey City for the impending visit of my dad, Kristine (Melanie's sister) and her cousing Celine. We're going to go see the new Matrix movie together. Oh, and also on Monday, Melanie and the kids and I watched about some of "Anne of Green Gables".
My diet has been going well. I haven't cheated in any substantial way (I sometimes eat things that I later realize have some carbs in them e.g. meatballs). I've become completely addicted to baby carrots and nut butter such as almond butter, cashew butter, hazelnut butter and macadamia nut butter.
20030508:
Very interesting article comparing programming and painting (artistically).
20030507:
Here's a really funny little ASCII cartoon.
Here's a very interesting statement about human rights in Iraq that mentions the Baha'i Faith.
Today I had a terrible headache all day (I've still got it even now at 9pm) so I didn't go in to work.
I have finished reading another of Raymond E. Feist's novels. They are very entertaining, and the writing is pretty good. However, all the ones I have read so far are pretty much coming-of-age stories. If you like that sort of thing, this is a link to the first one in the series: "Magician: Apprentice" on amazon .com and .ca.
20030506:
It's just barely the 6th. I just went to see X-Men 2. It was pretty cool, but the story seemed weak, probably because there was no one central character. It is more like a soap opera.
Earlier (really on the 5th) I went to a restaurant in Hoboken run by a Baha'i woman. The restaurant is called "Gobi Grill" and it is at 746 Park Avenue. It is a Mongolian BBQ style place. I went with Shamim and we spent most of the time talking about the Baha'i community and teaching. We also spent a little time talking about physics and cosmology.
20030505:
Back to Jersey City in a few hours...
I got a new video card in order to support a dual monitor configuration. It has a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 w/ 128MB RAM. It's nice and it runs Quake III Arena noticably better than my GeForce 2 w/ 64MB RAM.
I've got my home network set up a little better, but I still need to do some stuff. At least now my workstations aren't directly exposed to the hostile world :-)
I'm going to revise my "Analysis of Technologies" paper and see if I can get it published on Kuro5hin.
20030503:
I am in the process of setting up my Redhat Linux 8.0 machine to run as a gateway/firewall between my internal and external networks. It is a tough process. I did it successfully on another machine so I just have to re-learn what I did the other time. Should be easy except that it's 1:35am and I've got lots to do tomorrow! Right now I'm having this strange problem where all my startup services are taking forever to start (on the order of a couple minutes each)... GACK!
Earlier, the Markham Baha'i community had a very nice 12th day of Ridvan celebration at the Rawhani residence. It was a little hard because of the diet and the presence of a large quantity of really amazing Persian rice dishes. Fortunately there was a large amount of Gormeh Sabzi too!
20030502:
A few days ago I submitted the link to my "Software Construction Analogy is Broken" paper to the Agile Alliance articles reviewer. He put a link to it in the "New Articles" and "General" sections.
I'm back home for the weekend. Today I am starting to follow exactly the same diet as Melanie is on: absolutely zero sugars and carbohydrates. Basically, this means that only meat and vegetables are allowed. This extreme is only for the short term - another 4 weeks or so. The diet includes some pretty serious suplements. It's going to be very tough for me - I'm a total carb junkie! Melanie has already been doing it for almost two weeks. So this morning for breakfast: bacon and eggs. I expect to eat a lot of fish.
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