I did quick 2 week visit to Canada.
I spent some time with our son and daughter-in-law, visited many dear friends and places in the city and nature, worked for couple of days in the office and met new colleagues and even met current my boss for the first time in 3D. I must say, he is taller than in Zoom :-D
I also visited our ex-cat with her new human servants and as expected, Lucy duly ignored me. Oh, well - cats.
This Sunday, as every first Sunday in month we had regular Bytown Mac User Group meeting at usual place - Patty Bolands Pub at the Market. It was great meeting because we had many newcomers - both to the group as well as to the platform, including very fresh Mac switch - a happy owner of 24 hours old Macbook Pro.
The presentations were very suited for the audience of newcomers, especially Katheryne's demo on customizing the Mac. She was kind enough to send the links to the talk (the mailing list). I think that the links are very useful for wider audience than just the ByMUG folks, so I will repost them here ... withour her permission, but in here very own words :-)
Last week I attended one day event organized by Microsoft named Heroes Happens Here. It is series of introduction targeting new products: Windows Server 2008 (not out yet) SQL Server 2008 (not out yet) and Visual Studio 2008 (out and well).
I do not do much Microsoft development these days - my world is currently rather unevenly divided between Java (about 70 %), Web-ish technologies (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, some Ruby) and OS-X (Objective C) which I am trying to squeeze in and get finally started. But Microsoft is such important platform that one must pay attention what is going on.
Guess what are three most useful tools without which no proper Ottawa household can exist ? Snow shovel, snow pusher and car window ice scratcher. If the number was 4, the next would be snowblower. Up to yesterday, our family was in safe position being equipped with several shovels, four or five scratchers and one pusher.
Then disaster stroke: my son broke the pusher while moving away few cube meters of snow we removed from the roof. In case you do not understand - removing snow from roof is another favorite winter leisure time activity in Ottawa: almost everybody is doing it. Not that it would be so much fun, but because of the dreadful consequences - avoid it and you may end up like this guy.
The wild ride is over and the city gets back to normal. I wish we had won the Cup, but - Ducks were playing pretty good and found what worked on our team. Thanks, Alfie and the Sens - for all the great moments. You were fantastic. There will be another season in few months and another chance to bring the cup home.
On the positive side - it is good to have 2-3 more free evenings a week, now - when there is again nothing on the TV :-). Time to start catching up with neglected podcasts, blogs and feeds.
Thanks to exploring the Google calendar (when playing with public calendars related to Ottawa) I found the Ottawa Mac User group's calendar and discovered that
a) they exist
b) they hold monthly meetings in nice Irish pub at the Market The group is actually named Bytown Mac User's group, for the reasons explained on the Web site or here.
So I decided to go there. I thought - what the heck, worst thing that can happen that I will have a glass of Guinness at the pub I never visited before, which is not a bad thing at all. And besides, the Rideau Chapters store is very close (the plan B). It turned out pretty well, though - meeting was interesting. The group is fairly small (I believe somewhere about 10-15 people) but nice, friendly, dedicated and interesting. It sort of reflects the Mac representation in the market. Unlike when attending Microsoft users events, where almost everybody is by profession tied to the software development of IT business, here larger percentage of people did something non-primarily computer related for living - like creative writing, art, video processing. Again - it represents well the real world situation. Not too many people that actually do software development (other than Web design) but there was one guy who is exploring the same path as I am looking for: Objective C and Cocoa development.
As I mentioned yesterday, my expectations regarding Office 2007 were fairly low. I am not a big fan of office application suites and for most of my editing I am using either on-line tools (like Google docs or Writeboard) or Open Office. True, neither of them has the smoothness and fine polish of Microsoft Office 2003, neither has all of it's features, but - let's face it - I barely use maybe 10-20% of Word or Excel capabilities anyway. For which reason, I am not willing to pay premium just for improved user comfort.
Today was a big day in Ottawa Microsoft community. The Congress Centre was hosting large event - simultaneous launch of Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange server 2007. Because I have almost registered about two months ago, I attended the event. The "almost" means that I tried to register right after receiving MSDN Flash email, but many people must have been faster - I was put on waiting list on two of the 3 tracks (Developers and IT Pros) and before I could even try to register for the third track (Business), everything crashed, Web site hang and I have never heard back from them, nor received any email. Until yesterday, when an automated voice reminder service managed to catch me by phone in underground garage under Brookstreet Hotel, and delivered first part of reminder - telling me that I was registered to attend something ... Too bad it did not tell me to what, when and where did I registered, before it broke off and I lost the signal. But I deducted that the only reason to call me would be a reminder of the Launch and after logging on to My Events, voila - the ticket was there. So I went. It was a tough decision, whether to sacrifice full work day and possibly evening ping-pong at Igor's - but - what the heck. Microsoft does not produce new releases that often so going away once in 5 years should be OK. And now I am glad I did go.