m@adie

Marathon Smile

This is a picture my friend Kavita took of me after I finished my marathon. I look a little goofy when I smile, but I must say I was pretty damn happy.

Hasidic

I love living in Mile-End (and well Outremont)… Today the Hasidic community had a little parade down my street. I’m not sure what it was all about, but they were dancing and following a PA system setup in the back of a truck. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than 15min. Strange impromptu things like that seem to happen in this neighborhood all the time.

lazy weekend

Laze about weekend letting my body heal. With the exception of Friday I didn’t do much of anything beyond geeking out and watching TV. At my most active I met a friend for coffee. I also believe that Friday was my last day of drinking, and today my last day of sweets. I may still indulge periodically in some debauchery, but periodically is word to notice and note. I have to start focusing on building a lighter stronger body. Some think me strange for things doing like this… but…

Tomorrow I’ll start some mild training, but I’ll carefully monitor my cough. I’ll also start tracking my diet, my weight, and my standing heart rate (hard to remember to do in the morning).

I’ve also scratched the surface of writing my own Drupal theme using the PHPTemplate language. I plan to try to make it XHTML Strict and fully standards complient.

Save Parc Ave

Here’s a link to the Save Park Avenue site which is coordinating efforts related to stopping the Tremblay administration from renaming Park Ave to Robert Bourassa Ave.

Demonstration:
Lundi / Monday 30 Octobre,
19h – 7pm
Hôtel de Ville
275, rue Notre-Dame Est
Montréal (Québec)

Save du Parc / Sauvons du Parc

Aidez nous a sauver l’Avenue du Parc, que le maire veut rebaptiser, sans consultation publique, Avenue Robert-Bourassa. Signer la petition :

http://causes.ca/duparc

Help us save Parc Avenue, which will be, without any public consultation, renamed Robert-Bourassa Avenue. Sign the petition:

http://causes.ca/duparc

High Ed Web Dev: Day 4

Oh the pain… I missed breakfast, and I only managed to make it to one of the morning sessions. Drinking until 2:30 is not wise when you’re supposed to get up early in the morning. I did however take a couple of Tylenol, grabbed a sandwich thing at a weird mall, and went to the seminar on legal "Fair Use". It was pretty good, although I still have to check whether canadian law has something similar.

I ate lunch with some of the people I had gone out with the night before, bid my farewells, and decided to skip the afternoon session and take off. I figured I’d get more tired as the day wore on and that the drive might become dangerous.

Anyway I got home safe and sound, the conference was worth it, and all is well.

High Ed Web Dev: The Excursion

So we went to The Rochester Museum & Science Center where they had an open bar from 6:00 to 9:00 as well as a buffet. We had the run of the whole place, and we had a planetarium show from 7:00 to 8:00. It was really quite fun, and I met quite a few nice people.

After the Science Center I ended up bar hopping with a click of people who had known each other from attending the conference for a couple of years running. I thought I was just getting a lift back to the hotel but… I didn’t get back to the hotel until 2:30am. It was a strange night out, the people I was with were very nice, but in a way it had a frat party sort of feel to it. I ended up doing a shooter that consisted of a shot being placed on a plate with spillover, set on fire, and then extinguished with an upside down glass. The fumes were preserved within the glass and inhaled after sucking up the shot with a straw. It hits you pretty hard and pretty quick. Things got even a tad stranger when I decided to follow some people up to the presidential suite before heading back to my room, but there’s not too much story to tell there…

High Ed Web Dev: Day 3

Had a great night’s sleep and I’m feeling a great deal better today than I did yesterday. I woke up naturally at 7:00, but I still had trouble motivating myself to get to the first seminar.

The first seminar was good, but it was about SEO (search engine optimization), which I’m only partially interested in. I did however learn a couple of things that might help me out in the long run.

The second seminar was about designing universally accessible templates for faculty. This was a bit of a waste of time for me, they didn’t say anything I didn’t know, and it was pretty simplistic.

The third seminar about form fillable PDFs was pretty useful, and I’m sure I will be able to apply it to the Office of Research at Concordia where I work.

Lunch was good, I sat with the a bunch of the Canadians, and I seem to get along with them pretty well.

The first seminar of the afternoon was about security, and since I’ve been both a server and network admin, and since I’m a Linux freak (my favorite distro being Gentoo), I found the take on security to be very lightweight and simple. Still I could see it being useful to the other attendees.

I went to a seminar about implementing a University Student Portal. It was mostly just the story of how they went about implementing it. I found it reasonably interesting, but not directly relevant to me.

The last seminar was about implementing Podcasting, and it was also interesting. I don’t really know much about Podcasting, but it seems fairly easy to implement an RSS feed using PHP.

I’ll blog about tonight later tonight, right now I’m resting before heading out to the museum.

High Ed Web Dev: Day 2

Well up at 7:15 for breakfast at 7:45 to make the keynote at 8:00, but I got a good night’s sleep, after my drive yesterday I went to bed at 9:30 – yes I skipped movie night.

So the first seminar this morning was too management oriented and not technical enough for me. Although it’s in the TPR track (the technical track), and billed itself to be about web application security.

The second seminar was about Ruby on Rails, and it was great. I really have to use it to do something sometime, but the question is what? They impressively demonstrated how quick a simple web app could prototyped.

Lunch was good, but I took off pretty fast after. I decided to go to my hotel room, skip the first afternoon seminar, and have a little nap.

The fieldset seminar was good in the sense that I didn’t know much about them (didn’t realize that they even existed as a semantic organization element for forms), but bad in the sense that he could have said everything in 10min instead of an hour.

This Apache seminar was good, but it mostly covered stuff that I’m aware of. It might have been better if he had more time to go into detail.

The Voice XML seminar was also interesting but was way too big to fit into the half hour time slot.

Hanging out with geeks and pseudo geeks is kind of fun. I’ve met a cool crew from the mid-west and I’ve met a bunch of Canadians here as well. We went to the Dinosaur BBQ, and the only thing for me to eat on the menu was a portabella burger (granted it was very good). But I haven’t gotten too social yet because I’ve been resting rather than cavorting.

Training & Diet

I’m in Rochester, and while I planned to train, I neither think that I will get much of a chance nor feel quite up to it. Therefore I’m not really going to track training or diet for the next couple of days.