mike [at] marsman [dot] ca

obviously i haven’t posted anything here in quite some time. come find me over here, here or here if you must.

i’m sure i’ll have something interesting to say again at some point.

woof.

My XBox has been making some weird noises lately.. unfortunately I think it’s days are numbered. I was an early XBox purchaser (ie: paid the exorbitant $600′ish pricetag on initial launch) but have since made good use of it with a modchip+xbmc on the xbox frontend, mythtv recordings and torrents shared over NFS on the remote backend. Over the last two years, it has been on almost daily - kudos to the MSFT folks for putting together a solid platform - but, like I said, I’ve heard some HDD noises that make me worry…

I bought a Nintendo Wii a while back with the intention of mod’ing it to do the same, but the Wii Hacking State of the Union hasn’t realized itself the way I’d hoped it would. There’s very little available for the Wii (more like GameCube homebrew) - but even if the Wii-hacking scene was flourishing, the fact that the Wii doesn’t do HD output probably was an early nail in it’s coffin.

The AppleTV scene, on the other hand, has progressed very nicely. It looks like NitoTV will accomplish almost all of what XBMC currently does on my XBox - or at least all of what I really used it for (MPlayer on the AppleTV). So, tonight I placed an AppleTV order. Over the holiday weekend, I saw a RFD thread about AppleTV price mark downs - $229 for a refurb model. That price point makes for good news, since the first thing I’m going to do is disassemble it upon arrival and void my warranty ;)

Feel like learning more about running custom apps on the AppleTV? Check out the awesome wiki over on awkwardTV - and a really great wiki page about the exact setup that I’m looking to accomplish.

I’m all ready to geek out on this thing when it gets here!

For the last two years, I’ve participated in CIBC Run for the Cure, along with Ally’s family. Breast cancer has touched them pretty closely - Ally’s mom was diagnosed a few years back. Two years of chemo treatments can be really hard on a person (and a family) - but it can help someone survive (like Ally’s mom) when diagnosed early. If you’ve ever wondered why I sometimes wear a pink ribbon bracelet, now you know…

Should you feel in the mood to donate to the cause, feel free to do so by sponsoring me for the run this weekend.

How could you say no to these eyes?

(ok - so some people aren’t dog people)

We’re off to Port Elgin for a couple of days, get the ‘yaks in once more and enjoy the last bit of summer sun and sand. It’s hard to believe that August has come to a close already!

overall, a very good conference.

allen and crew, you did a fantastic job putting this on! i wonder if this is a result of any of your 20% time?

i like to think of myself as a “good news is no news, no news is bad news, bad news is good news” kind of person. i won’t focus here on the good things about the conference (of which there were many). for me, the highlights of gtac were,

• meeting lots of interesting people (from all over the world) and discussing similar challenges that we’re facing (i snuck in some agile-culture conversations where i could, didn’t focus on testing alone)
• patrick copeland’s keynote presentation (imho, the this was best talk of the conference and worth the trip itself) - a favorite quote from this preso, regarding google’s culture: “if people don’t think they have the power to solve their problems, they won’t even *think* about how to solve them”
• talking to various googlers themselves, understanding a little better about how the google culture works (and i think it does work)
• being able to peek into the google offices to see how they’re setup, as well as some fantastic food in the google cafeteria!

kudos on pulling off a great conference! on the other hand, there were some lowlights as well. i’ll get a little more verbose now…

• the number of people that checked out during the presentations staggered me. one of the things that i’ve tried to do at work is “be present” in whatever conversation/meeting/work i’m engaging myself in (learned this from FiSH). i’d guess that about one quarter (or more) of the room was busy on their laptops most of the time, not paying much attention to what was going on. sure, maybe the quality of presentations (see next point) was hit and miss, but if you’re at something like this you should actually be there and engaged in what’s going on. (i refused to bring my laptop to the conference for this very reason, afraid i might distract myself with it)
• higher quality talks. the talks themselves were hit and miss. i understand that the folks talking probably haven’t done this much in public before - let alone on youtube for the world to see! frankly, i’d probably get a little jittery under these conditions as well, so i can fully excuse that scenario. that said, some of the talks just didn’t capture the audience - there were several that i think suffered from this (but maybe it was just me). i noticed one guy falling asleep during a talk - his head slowly and hypnotically nodding back and forth as he caught himself falling in and out of consciousness. ok, maybe this is a caveat of doing the conference as a single track, you can’t please all of the people all of the time. more likely, i think google could do a better job of screening the presenters for intriguing and interesting talks. why not have speaker candidates prepare a 10 minute youtube submission in advance, so that you know exactly what you’re getting? you could even put together a system that would let the invitees vote on what talks they’d like to see, based on these submissions.
• innovate the format. i think posting the talks on youtube is a great first start, but what about live streaming next time? use some 20% time and hook together a system that allows for live streaming, live document sharing, live chat. this really seems like a natural coming together of youtube, gtalk and google docs/apps. this would allow those of us that are unable to attend next years conference a way to participate remotely. you could take some Q&A after the talk from both youtube submissions and live IM’s sent from gtalk
• more collaboration - use open space! i’m not sure where i first read about open space, but i think it’s a great idea for any kind of conference, formalizing the water-cooler like discussions. allen suggested at one point that we write what we were interested in talking about on our name tags. while that was a good first step at bringing people with common interests together (the open mike on day two was an improvement), i think the openspace format would do a much better job at this. have folks create a list of topics they’re interested in talking about and allow everyone to vote on what they’d like to discuss/see discussed (similar to how you did for the lightening talks), break the room out into several break-out sections so that these groups can gather and set their own agenda. having discussions during the breaks and while mingling works but has it’s limitations - open space allows an actual discussion of many like minded folks to take place in an organized way. the notes from each session could be dumped into a shared online document for reference by everyone. i didn’t attend agile open northwest, but i followed their wiki notes online. i could see others doing the same in future GTACs.

next year the conference is going to be held in Hyderabad, which means i’m more than likely not going to be attending. i do, however, have plans to try and convince a couple of people at work to prepare some talks for submission - i think we’ve done a lot of innovative things at work that are really worth sharing!

but right now it’s about getting back to the real world. today was my recovery day from the 13 hour drive home … my first day back to work is tomorrow, and i think it’s going to be an interesting one!

i had to stop by the 24hr apple store on 5th ave while we were in nyc and play with an iphone.

…notice the website i’m browsing…

ok, i admit it - i’m a geek. does this really surprise you?

Since I’m at a conference for work (well not officially “for work” yet, as I’m currently unapproved to expense the cost - i just think it’s that useful, so i went anyways! remember i’m a just do it kind of guy…) I thought I’d post some updates here to share with y’all. I’ll update the info at work with more when I’ve fully digested.

We finally checked in to the hotel about 24hrs after leaving home. Ally came with me as she has a cousin that lives in Brooklyn and will be able to keep herself busy while I’m at the conference. We left around 4:30 yesterday, arrived in Syracuse for the night around 10pm, left around 8:00 this morning - with a couple of stops along the way - and arrived at the hotel around 5pm! Having a GPS has proven priceless… I’ll never get rid of it! A highlight of the day was when I slipped the guy at the counter a $20 as we checked in and inquired if there was any kind of upgrade possible. He asked if the bill was for him (I responded, “of course!”), he nodded his head, we chatted a bit while he typed away, and now I’m sitting on the 47th floor looking out on times square - $20 well spent!

From google-nyc-trip

The GTAC folks had a little soirée in the lobby restaurant tonight.. I dropped by and mingled for about 45mins. I met a couple of profs, some folks from overseas, a really interesting group of people! There was one conversation I had that really intrigued me, though… it was about an office with a situation that was eerily similar to ours, in how they struggled in going agile - and frighteningly different from ours, in how they have become successful at it.

Tomorrow is another day! The conference starts early and ends late - after about 10 hours in the car over the last day and a bit, it’s time for some sleep. Here’s to hoping I get a better night’s sleep tonight than I did last night!

to lolcats.

Have you been following the lolcat phenomenon at all? The first time I saw a lolcat I thought the whole thing was stupid. But there is something slightly addictive to them. If I’m looking to hit up a blog with something that I know will make me smile, I just browse on over to icanhascheezburger. Tonight I stumbled across the above image and literally laughed out loud.

“picardcat only sees four lights” I think to myself.

Oh, that pic just made my night :)

but apparently the summer isn’t so much for my blogging. and i’ve got a lot that i could talk about - updates on the “two weekend” bathroom reno, my positive experience with moo (and the corresponding negative one with paypal), going to hot august nights at the grand (the philosopher kings, leahey, the jim cuddy band), my fascination with fastcompany, getting hooked on season one of ugly betty (who’d have thought!), why i love honda, my new kayak, another trip to NYC (conference @ google) and reviews on the slummy place that i’m sure to be staying at (sadly, i’m paying out of pocket to go which means staying on the cheap - it’ll be OK as long as there are no cockroaches!) as well as what i think of the iphone (i MUST see one while in NYC), even my recent job change at work.

i guess i just have to find my motivation to do something about it. sadly, i just don’t have it in me right now.

like a work buddy of mine, Jamie Noble. jamie is on his 5th bicycle tour around a great lake - this time it’s around Lake Superior. that’s one mighty long bike ride!

so just for kicks, i decided to throw together a mashup of his locations and tour logs for this trip… available here (sadly it’s too much of a pain in the ass to post inline). this was surprisingly easy, with the help of the googlemapsapi blog and a couple of useful posts. this is just another reason for me to be so enamored by google… they keep producing cool stuff like this!

keep it up, Jamie… and keep that bear spray handy!

edit: duh, just use an iframe silly!