Peeps

No this isn’t a Bon Jovi reference. I’m more than halfway through the pregnancy now and each day brings something. Mainly the little one is now kicking harder every once in a while and the tummy is getting bigger and bigger. And every so often there’s a minor panic that I will have to go through labour in December.

Sorry no belly pics yet. They’re trapped on the SLR.

The nesting instinct is kicking in, but right now the room is Brendon’s office and we still need to find out if it’ll be a boy or girl. That will happen next weekend. So instead of buying furnishings Im buying clothes.

Today we stopped into baby Gap after tea (yeah I can finally stomach tea again). And oh I’m in trouble if it’s a girl. The boy clothes are cute, but Gap has an American in Paris line this year that is way too chic and cute. I may be buying pieces for next fall. But as I was fawning over the clothes, Brendon was laughing at me. He was getting a kick out of me being the typical girl and said that it was like I was dressing a doll.

In the end I got the cutest little white faux shearling lined fleece sack with a hood with little tiny bear ears. I expect I’ll get a bit of use out of it the winter. And I got a discount which made it even better. Too bad I didn’t know the sex yet otherwise I could have gotten the discount on more stuff. Oh well maybe next time.

I imagine what Rackspace gets out of this is, that if successful, they will at least have some sort of leverage with Amazon. Amazon is a machine. Amazon executes to perfection and they release new features at a relentless pace with no signs of slowing down. They don't leave much of a door open for others to get into the game. With a real open cloud alternative it might allow a lot of people to play in the cloud space that would have been squeezed out before.

What Amazon can't match is the open cloud's capability of simultaneous supporting applications that can run seamlessly in a private cloud hosted in a corporate datacenter, in local development and test clouds, and in a full featured public cloud.

via highscalability.com

OpenStack is the first development in the cloud space that hints at a future where there actually are more than half a dozen big platform / cloud providers (aka Hosting Apocalypse).

What does Rackspace get out of it? Well, they don't get obliterated and/or don't have to try and be a VAR on top of someone else's stack. This open source approach allows them a chance at controlling their own destiny.

What are other large hosting / data center providers doing? Nothing much - riding out the end of shared hosting and getting sold to by VMWare, from what I can see.

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I've wanted to share riding with both my kids for a while now. I saw Elliot have a great time when we got him his first pedal bike and that brought lots of smiles to my face.

Today we went for a nice ride along the Lochside Trail. We find a section that was pretty flat which was important since this was Elliot's first ride outside of our yard. Elliot did extremely well. We started before the 14 Km mark and rode past the 15 Km mark before turning around. I'm guessing we rode around 2.5 Kms.

Here we are taking a short break.

Nice form!

Having a good time.

Beautiful day for a ride.

Smiles all around.

Water break.

Here are a couple videos of Elliot in action. After we turned around we took a couple rest and water breaks on the way back to the car. Once there Elliot and Amy played on a playground for a bit before we headed to Matticks Farm for lunch and ice cream cones. Great family time.

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There is some pretty funny content on youtube. It is just a matter of finding it. A while ago I came across an ad by Toyota: "The Swagger Wagon"

The other day on Twitter I got a link to "The Dad Life".

Both ring true to a certain extent.

Since Ulti is over for another year I decided that for tonight I should revert to swimming on Wednesday nights.

Tonight was my first time in the length pool in a very long time. I was slow, it felt a little awkward at first, but eventually I got into a rythm.

There was one other person in my lane, and she was even slower than I. I had to weave around her several times, but that was ok, it gave me a chance to take a breather every now and then.

The one thing about swimming is that I have a hard time keeping track of how far I swim. I keep losing track of how many lengths I have done. In then end I know I did at least 30 lengths and as many as 34. This means I swam between 750 metres and 850 metres. Not bad. Next time I will work on swimming more than 25 metres at a time without stopping

Off for a quick sit in the hot tub, then a short walk home. Nice.

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Let's get straight to the meat of this post: I accepted an offer letter earlier this week, and as of September 1st, I'll be joining the team at iQmetrix.

Now, most of you won't have heard of iQmetrix. I think they're going to be known as a great Canadian success story. Here's a bit of background about the organization.

The company is privately held, around 10 years old, and started in Regina, Saskatchewan. They scratched their own itch at Jump.ca – a wireless retailer AKA store that sells cellphones / mobile plans / accessories etc. – and wrote their own software for CRM, point-of-sale, and so on. The productized version of this became iQmetrix, and they went on to grow until today, there are wireless retailers using the software in every major mall in North America.

So the entire executive team packed their bags back in Saskatchewan, pulled up stakes, and moved out to Vancouver with their families to found the corporate head office here. And now it's time for iQmetrix to kick into growth mode.

We're seeing the first non-phone devices like the iPad coming into wireless retailers, and the app store model for software sales is going crazy. There will only be more devices, more accessories, and more things that your wireless retailer will be selling, and that Main Street America will want to know more about.

Is the wireless retailer going to become like the local computer store? Perhaps - that didn't exactly turn out well. And the story is different in Europe of course, where many countries already have many more wireless retailers or SIM card vendors than we do here.

The other angle that iQmetrix has is around interactive retail. This is another new term to me, and as I've been digesting what it means and how to explain it, the analogy I've come up with is this:

Right now, advertising in the offline world is on a continuum somewhere between billboards and Minority Report.

That is, a range of technologies and products from physical billboards and signage in malls and along highways at one end, to the future of personalized, digital, local offers as seen in Minority Report (touch interfaces included, of course) at the other end.

At the billboard end, there is relatively boring evolutionary technology like digital billboards that aren't interactive and are still broadcast. 

Closer to the MR, revolutionary end of things, we have personalized, direct offers, with the recent news of the Shopkick install into Best Buy stores perhaps being one example. Sites like Foursquare and Twitter might be something that we include on the right hand side of the continuum - there is lots of revolutionary change & experimentation happening here (the Foundry Group's HCI Theme fits in this space).

I think that the current buzz-tag "O2O" (Online 2 Offline) is related - Groupon is held up as one example in a recent Techcrunch article, but I actually believe this is just a (rising) trend of small businesses adopting technology / advertising solutions that are web-based, and so we are seeing a shift of dollars.

In any case, it should be obvious that I'm excited about the opportunity. I have a lot to learn about this new space, but it feels like an area that is starting a decade long change that mirrors the growth of the web in the mid-90s. I will be bringing some startup, web native, and community experience to the table, and to continue to tell the iQmetrix story.

Thanks to Kerem Karatal for reaching out to me while I was sitting on the bench after Bootup, and thanks to the exec team at iQmetrix for hiring "title TBD". I'm looking forward to what we can all accomplish together, and I'm happy to be keeping the Vancouver community as my home base. 

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To the Ass-Clown in the Grey Dakota:

When I am driving I tend to use my turn signals. It would be swell if you noticed that. In addition, I typically don't stop in my lane right in front of a road with my turn signal on for no reason. Sometimes the road is blocked, or traffic can't move (sometimes due to some flaky chick pulling a horrible u-turn). It would be super-swell if you didn't honk at me, then pass me on the left, thereby making an already silly situation more unsafe. Add on that this was in a residential area and there really is no excuse, nor hurry grand enough to explain your idiotic driving abilities.

Have a nice day.

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Last night was a double header for Ultimate. We needed to win both games to play in the finals. For me this season has been great. The team I am part of is a great group of people who really got the game. We had a number of people who could teach the newer players, and I actually offered a few tips here and there too.

The first game was against a team we had only beaten by one point. They have one player that is awesome on defence. Actually, he is just awesome since he just got back from playing in the worlds, but he is especially awesome on D. Any time I was handling for this game I checked where he was and avoided throwing to that location. The rest of the team, for the most part, did the same.

I ran hard, played hard, and threw well. I also wasn't afraid to layout. Near the beginning of the game my check broke away from me for the end zone and the thrower hucked it hard. We both chased after the disc with him one step ahead of me. I could see he was going to catch it, so I gave it my all and at the last possible moment dove for it. With a big swat I knocked the disc out of the air as he was reaching for it. Thankfully the grass was soft and I didn't hurt anything with my dive and roll.

During the first game I also had a few good diving catches. I was catching well this game and I was proud of that.

One zoned offense when I was handling we were swinging the disc well, but not making much progress up field. I got the disc and I could see one of our players in the end zone, open from everyone. The only way to get it to him was a hammer. I threw it up, and it was perfect. It arced perfectly and landed in his hands with little movement from him.

Nearing the end of the game we were tied 12-12. Universe point, just like the last time we played this team. I headed off the field and sent another team mate on. Moments later he called me back. The captain called a set line and I was one of the players she wanted on. We worked the disc up field when we got possession, but that one player was always lurking, waiting for his chance to D block the disc.

I passed to one of the women handlers, she took one look, and one of our long strikers broke for a sideline. The tough D player didn't follow. The handler put up the disc, the striker caught it, and we won!

Game two was going to be a much more difficult game. We played the team earlier in the season, and somehow managed to beat them. Once we started we were shocked at how relentless they were. Quickly we were down 3-0 and our egos were shattered. Time to rebuild and get moving.

On one of our pulls, it was a high hanging pull that dropped in the far right corner. I booted down the field and saw where the first pass was going. I pushed as hard as I could to intercept and came oh so very close. The recipient was visibly shaken that I had got there so quickly and was so close to intercepting. After a couple more throws there was a turnover and we capitalized for out first point.

Unfortunately no matter how hard I tried we kept getting beat. Our teams morale dipped, then someone went on a beer run and that was the end of our game. We had a good time, but we were not running nearly hard enough. We ended up losing 13-4.

At the end of the night I was drained, sweaty, dirty and sore. It was a great season full of hard played ultimate. Definitely one of my favourite summer league seasons. Next week the finals are being played, and I think our team is going to play another for a fun game for third/fourth spot. Time to figure out another source of exercise.

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I've played with PostRank in the past (probably back when they were called Aide RSS). They're a Canadian company, based out of Waterloo, founded back in 2007 (CrunchBase entry). They're best known for their "PR" - ranking on blog posts to see if it is important. Since this is similar to what Summify is doing with their social news reader, I'm hoping there might be a connection here.

I dived back into it in the last couple of days because I got notification about PostRank Connect, which is a brand / influencer connector / tracker (as near as I can tell - it's not really "turned on" at the moment).

But PostRank analytics is what is live now, and it's great. Here's a screenshot of the front page of this blog, the default "Overview" tab in PostRank:

The top is the engagement value as tracked by PostRank - comments, tweets, delicious bookmarks, and so on that that post has generated. The bottom are page views from Google Analytics - you click a button, do the OAuth dance, and then connect in your existing Google Analytics account.

Most of the traffic to my blog is organic search from being around for 10 years, so you don't see massive spikes of pageviews correlated to engagement.

Here's another screen shot from the "analyze" tab, which shows you a compact view of posts to your blog, with engagement events and engagement points to give you an overview of how impactful each post is:

If you look carefully, you can see that the Twitter and Delicious links are underlined - you can click through and see more info about who has tweeted / bookmarked your posts. I'd like to see click throughs and info for all of them.

You can see more details about the PostRank Analytics service on the tour page, where you'll also find that it is $9 / month or $99 / year, although I've been told that with a "Connect" account, you'll get a free Analytics account.

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I've been following Explore Music's Five Songs You Gotta Hear Today (RSS Link) for a while. Back in July they covered The Gracious Few. Take the most of the band Live, throw in the vocals from Candlebox, and crank it up a few notches. Here is the first single from The Gracious Few. Sounds awesome and I can't wait for their debut album to be released.

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After Wednesday night's ulti game I stayed up pretty late from the adrenaline. Some time around midnight I tried sleeping. The next morning I was up early so I didn't get all that much sleep.

After dropping the kids off at daycare I hooked up with James for a spin at the dump.

It was a gorgeous day for a ride, but a tad warm. We took an easy spin around the lower section of the dump with the intention of heading to the top to ride Who's Yer Daddy.

Along the way we figured we'd take a spin down the new Torpedo Run. I'd seen the trail before, but hadn't ridden it. It is styled after A-Line in Whistler and has a bunch of table tops and lots of berms. It was a fun trail, but rather short. Typical of the dump really. Once I get a few more runs down the trail and learn what comes next I'm sure I can clear more of the tables. For the first run there was only one or two that I actually felt like I jumped well. A couple of the berms were pretty loose too and I almost washed out on one as I leaned into it.

After Torpedo Run we rode back up the switchbacks, then up to Old Pay Off. The last trail was Who's Yer Daddy. My legs were feeling pretty fried from the ulti game and the lack of sleep. Still, this trail is a lot of fun, but the uphill sections were painful.

The ride was a lot of fun and I had that wonderful post summer sticky, sweaty, grimy feeling. That just makes the post ride shower feel that much better.

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Wednesday night's Ulti game was frustrating and a little demoralizing. We lost. We lost big. At one point the game was 12-1. It ended 15-4. I'm still trying to figure out what went wrong.

I think it boiled down to the whole team making a lot of rookie mistakes. We weren't playing well, we weren't running well, we weren't trying hard, we weren't holding our force, and we weren't checking well.

I gave it my all on the field, but my throwing was off for this game. I threw too many blades and high passes that were intercepted. After a while I stopped volunteering to be a handler. This worked out much better since I was catching very well.

One of the things I practice when warming up is catching with my left hand. I actually had to make a left handed catch in the game.

I dove a few times as well. I made a couple good diving catches that helped us keep possession, and I made one defensive dive that I was sure missed the disc. We were in the end zone and as I got up I was sure that my check was going to be standing there with the disc. Instead he was walking away and my team was setting up our play. I never learned what happened, but I guess I got in the way enough to cause him to miss.

I called one foul. In the end zone on offense I was jumping up to catch the disc. I was stopped when I jumped and went straight up. I owned that space and yet my check jumped into me and when he came down his elbow made contact with my head. We got possession right on the end zone line. I don't think we converted that point either.

The whole game I ran as hard as I could, threw as well as I could, yet the other team had us utterly dominated.

Next week are playoffs and I really hope that everyone gets there early so we can work on some things. Like holding the force. Very important to hold the force.

Thankfully that loss didn't affect our standings. We finished the season in 2nd place. This has been an awesome team to play with. Most other summer league teams I have played on have not been anywhere close to making the playoffs, usually since we had a lot of newer players. This team has a lot of veteran players, and newer players who have some experience. I just hope that next week we win the first game. If we do, then we play a second game.

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Another section of Atlin Road Construction is currently going through YESAB. I suspect that it may not threaten the climbing any further but thought I would post just in case:

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";}

Project Number: 2010-0186

Project Title: Atlin Road #7, Highway Reconstruction Km 32 to Km 41, Yukon

On the YESAB website the project that I am referring to is the botom one in the list: http://www.yesab.tzo.com/wfm/lamps/yesab/public/public.jsp;time=1281115591579#

Just a quick reminder that the annual bouldering festival in Ibex Valley is on Sunday! See their website for information:

http://www.yukonbouldering.com/

Jason Santa Maria wrote a long post called A Real Web Design Application, where he talks about searching for a tool that has the creativity of Photoshop with more of a native understanding of the web. It's a good read, and the comments are over 250 and counting.

I remember talking about how Dreamweaver is dead as part of my 3 Stages of Dynamic Systems talk at Web Directions North 2008. And yet, just the other day I met with someone that was doing a content-based startup and had built hundreds of pages with Dreamweaver templates.

 

Today, I tend to still reach for OmniGraffle for prototyping, site maps, and so on. On the other end of things, I'm still using a basic text editor for coding (Smultron). I love the team at Balsamiq, but I just haven't been able to get over my distaste for AIR apps. I don't use Photoshop, because I'm design-disabled :P

In any case, I found two interesting tools in the comment thread that might at the very least be Dreamweaver killers.

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Steve Parks wrote an article over at Drupal Radar about "elephants" (aka large global IT / services / consulting) shops like Capgemini starting to adopt Drupal and what that means for smaller shops.

Jo Wouters from Krimson left a comment that made a couple of good points. The first part of his comment was that adopting Drupal is a strategic choice, where community was part of the value of adopting Drupal in the first place. I'm quoting the last bit of his comment directly:

Some anecdotal evidence: we are working on a proof of concept for one of the elephants. The spreadsheet they provide us to calculate budgets, has fields for all traditional costs (debugging, project management, contingency, …) and for this project they added an extra field with the label “Community 10%”.

via drupalradar.com by Jo Wouters, Krimson

(emphasis mine)

Budgeting for "community" is absolutely the right thing to do. I've spoken for years about the concept of "Community ROI" (return on investment).

It's very much the language of business - that investing in the community will see a return. Many from the community side find the language of business problematic - we do this because we love it. I've tried to be more pragmatic: having a sustainable business means that you can be funded to continue to do the things you love. In any case, it's clear that these strategic decisions see the value of the community, and see the return in investing in it.

There are, of course, many shops that don't contribute to Drupal. Sorry, writing case studies doesn't cut it - I'm looking for links to patches, module maintainership, contributing handbook documentation, and so on. That, and as I just wrote, actively contributing patches back as part of the client development process. I honestly believe that any shop that doesn't follow community practices as part of developing a site is doing their client a disservice.

Of course, if you don't have experience doing this, it can be hard to get started. Especially, it can be hard to "sell" to clients. One concept I've been tossing around is a line item labeled "Platform Maintenance". If your shop absolutely can't get past the mental hurdle of selling community involvement, then explain to clients that you add (some percentage / some hours) in order to keep their website future proof, secure, more maintainable, etc. Take this time and follow best practices for patching / features for contrib as part of development. Take the time and bundle a module or feature and post it to Drupal.org (the client gets a sponsored by link on the page -- Drupal being a high traffic website, this counts for a lot).

Back to the elephants. We've been lucky to build a critical mass of community before larger players arrived. The Drupal community has always been an ecosystem. There are larger players and smaller players, but we all orbit around the Drupal.org community space. The actions of Capgemini and others are showing that they are stepping up to be part of the ecosystem, which is fantastic. It means, for smaller players, that they need to step up their game when it comes to business planning and other aspects that many have just "grown into".

I'm interested in how you / your shop "sell" Drupal community and/or open source. Many shops have a standard "what is Drupal / why is it awesome", but it tends to focus on features or perhaps low cost. What are the specific open source points that you sell? How do you budget it - do you just work it into your cost, or show line items to clients?

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Patches that we write for drupal.org modules are submitted to the issue queue, and we refer to the patch’s location on drupal.org in the make file. This has made us much better contributors to other people projects as it makes being involved in the issue queue a normal part of development, and it encourages us to only patch contrib modules where it’s likely that the patch will be accepted. When a patch gets a review, we make changes, upload a newer version of the patch to drupal.org, and update our make file.

via developmentseed.org

This is actually a quote from Jeff in the comments on the article Drush Make Files for Production Drupal sites, but I thought it was definitely worth highlighting on its own.

In this particular case, using make files actually codifies the decision to integrate closely with contrib modules and actively improve them / add features as needed for a particular project.

I've followed this practice for years, albeit without make files. Patches go in a "patches" directory in version control, with the patch file named with both the name of the module and the node number of the issue on Drupal.org.

An additional process is that if a patch is needed, you run it in the issue queue on Drupal.org, but you also have an internal ticket that links to that issue. You don't close the issue until the patch has been accepted into the mainline of the module. Then you can remove the patch, update the version of the module you're using, and your clients' website is one step closer to easier long term maintenance and updates.

And yes, being involved in the issue queue SHOULD be a normal part of developing Drupal websites.

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• macvim
  MacVim is a port of the text editor Vim to Mac OS X.

Tonight was a tough Ulti game for me. I played through the cold I currently have, but I was pretty beat on some points. I tried to handle as much as I could for the night and that I did well. My hands were catching everything that came my way, and my throws were going (mostly) where I wanted them too. I felt like I was making smart plays too. I would bide my time, waiting for the right opportunity to strike. I was directing people, showing them where I was going to throw.

I managed to catch a few points, and throw for a few points too. The women on the team are very good about getting open in the end zone. One bad throw I made was to one of the women on the team. She was open in the end zone, and her check had no clue where the disc was, nor where her check was. I pointed to where I wanted her to go and sent the disc there. Unfortunately the check was also moving in that direction and the disc hit her right in the butt. Bad throw.

The other team battled hard. We were up 8-3 at one point, and near the end of the night it was 11-11. We scored the next point maing the score 12-11. We were pumped to score the last point. We marched the disc up the field with myself and V as handlers. Near the end zone we called a stack and everyone went there quickly. I broke out to the corner of the end zone as V sent the disc there. The cut was perfect and the throw was awesome. The disc was knee height, and I did the proper two handed catch. And yet somehow the disc popped out of my hands. I hadn't dropped anything all night, and the one I drop was the game winner. Aaargh.

Of course the other team making the score 12-12. The universe point was called. We did our best, but failed. The other team capitalized on a small mistake and won the game. Bummer for us. I am still beating myself up over that one drop.

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Last weekend we were on Saltspring Island. We stayed at a nice cottage, checked out the Ganges market, went to the beach, went for a hike, and more. It was a lot of fun, but we experienced a lack of sleep unlike anything we had felt in a long time. Both the kids were waking up multiple times in the night, and since we were all sleeping in the one room, well, we all woke up multiple times in the night.

The cottage had a nice flower garden.

The hike was pretty steep, so Amy got carried the whole way.

Snack time.

Snack time silliness.

These trees grew so close together that it almost looked like they were melded together.

Arbutus trees can be quite photogenic.

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