Dec Update

Hello all,

Everything is well here in Dublin. Ireland & the UK are going through an unusual cold spell (with snow) these days but nothing too crazy. Work is going well. There are lots of work Christmas parties going on now - too many for one person to go to actually. We had a really cool one at the top floor of the Guinness factory where we got to pour our own Guinness.

I am sick today. I have a fever and low energy. I haven't been sick in at least a year. I took the day off work and slept in. Hopefully I'll get over it soon.

Since Julie has the potential to get into Oxford, Cambridge, or University College London, there is a good possibility that we will end up in the UK by September next year. Also, since my grandfather was born in Scotland I may have the possibility of getting a UK ancestry work visa (which transfers to my spouse as well). So I have been working hard to try to collect all the documents I need to make this happen which includes my (deceased) grandfathers birth certificate from Scotland and his marriage certificate from Manitoba. I have received Grandpa's birth certificate and I am still waiting on the marriage certificate. I have been getting a lot of help from my Aunts and Uncles to fill out some of these forms. I needed a lot of info like Grandpa's birthday, middle name, wedding date, etc. So thanks Aunt Lisa, Aunt Shirley, Uncle Donald, and Mom! From what I've read, there should be no problem for me to get this visa which would be fantastic. It would allow me to easily live and work in the UK. My current green card for Ireland is actually quite restrictive in that it is tied directly to Microsoft. If I leave Microsoft, my ireland green card is not much good. Also, for the UK visa, if we stay in the UK for 5 years, we have the potential to apply for UK citizenship! Personally, I would want that, not so much for the UK, but because it would allow us to live & work anywhere in the EU without all the paperwork & visas; that would be HUGE! I would love to, at some point in my life, live & work in a non-english country. Berlin, Germany right now would be top of my list but that may change as life goes on.

Our family has decided to spend next Christmas somewhere tropical. I can't wait for this. Hopefully we will get one large house or condo and put most of us in there. Then just get individual hotel rooms for any extras that cant fit in. Unfortunately this idea seems to be quite popular and prices for beach houses skyrocket over the Dec 25th week. It seems would could save at least 20-30% by going a week earlier or later. Regardless, I am super pumped to spend a full week with the whole family in an amazing tropical beach setting!

Tom & I are making progress on our Thailand/Taiwan adventure. So far it looks like Phuket Thailand, then Bangkok, then Taipei. I have been spending most of my time researching the Phuket part of the trip. I bouht a sweet waterproof housing for my digital camera. It was only 15 euros too! I am expecting some fantastic pics to come out of this trip. You can take it up to 3 meters under water.

We don't have any big plans for this Christmas. I think we will be doing a webcam Christmas with the family in Ottawa. Tom will also be joining from Taiwan. Hopefully that should be fun. I am not taking any extra days off from work this year because I am saving up all my vacation days for our Asia trip.

I am enjoying all of the stories these days about "wikileaks". It's interesting to watch governments around the world react to this.

I'm still working away trying to learn silverlight & trying to make an app for the windows phone. I've put learning German on hold for the time being to focus on this. I've got an idea for an app all lined up (you can ask me in private for it if you are interested). I mostly want to make this phone application to try something new and to round out my resume.

Beijing

Hello,

i just got back from Beijing yesterday. I had an amazing trip for lots of different reasons!

I'll start with the work part of the trip. We met with our vendor on Monday morning and started the training. They seem like very qualified people and I am excited to work with them. Mostly I am excited because they will take a huge load off my shoulders here in Dublin. The training went very well and they asked some very good questions. On Tuesday & Wednesday we did more hands on training and they continued to impress me. On Wednesday night we met with the COO of the company. It's a 3000 person company, so that's pretty impressive. He was a very sharp guy. I always enjoy talking to great leaders and seeing what makes them tick.

Of course, my favorite part of the trip was not the work but rather the city. On the first day, we got into the airport around noon. We were pretty tired but needed to adjust to the new time zone. We decided it best to just take a small nap then go out. When we went out, we grabbed a taxi and went to a night food market. The taxis are crazy cheap. Most of our journeys were around 2-3 Euros. The night market was a very interesting sight. It looked like this:

These stalls went on for quite a long way. It was about 95% meat which was somewhat disapointing to me. However, there were a few stands that were vegetarian and I got this amazing soup and veggie plate. The soup was a spicy noddle soup and it was amazing. That soup really gave me a great first impression for Beijing :). This dish below cost me about 3.50 euros and I'm pretty sure I got ripped off.


I got pretty handy with the old chopsticks! By the end of the trip I was being complimented on my chopstick skills.

After that nice meal, my impression of Beijing was quite good. We kept walking and these 2 girls came up to Stephen & I and started talking to us in pretty good English. They were visiting from another part of China and trying to navigate around Beijing themselves. They asked us if we would like to walk with them for a bit and try to find a bar to go to. Stephen & I were a bit skeptical, but they seemed nice, so we walked with them for a bit. When we walked by a tea house with Karaoke, they pointed to it and recommend we go in. My immediate thought was positive and thought that sounded good but Stephen quickly figured out what was going on here. This was a textbook scam. The scam is, they get you in for a drink but start to do Karaoke. The drinks are moderately priced but the Karaoke price is not listed and its obscenely priced. After we left those girls, Stephen showed me the Lonely Planet travel book and showed me this exact scam. The description in the book was EXACTLY what happened. This incident took my previously great impression of Beijing and shattered it. I really had a hard time sleeping that night. I was quite badly affected by these scam artists and how close I came to being sucked into this textbook scam.

Breakfasts in the hotel were a mix of Asian & Western. I ate western breakfasts every single day. The Asian breakfast is pretty much just lunch - noodles, rice, veggies, etc.

The next day was Sunday and one guy from our vendor (Chao) wanted to show us around Beijing. He took us to the Forbidden city, Tiananmen square, the Hutongs, and the Houhai park. At lunch, we went to a restaurant in the Hutong village. This restaurant did not cater to foreigners as the menu had no English nor pictures. However, Chao helped us order. I told him I was vegetarian and he picked some nice things out for us. The ordering process seemed to be pretty long considering there was only 3 of us. Stephen & I wondered what he was doing. for some reason the waiter then moved us to a different table. It turns out we were moved to a different table because Chao ordered so much food that it wouldnt all fit on the table we were sitting at. Here is a picture of what he ordered (this all cost 12 euros). The food was amazing by the way.

One strange thing when ordering food is the procedures are different. In western cultures, the waiter gives you the menu then you peruse it for a bit and the waiter comes back. In China, the waiter gives you the menu and just stands there until you order. You should not feel intimidated by this... its supposed to just represent very good service. It felt awkward to me though.

An interesting thing about the Hutong villages (that you can read about on wikipedia as well) is that they are traditional Beijing style homes. However, only a few have been preserved for tourism sake. Almost all of them have been bulldozed in favor of high rises and freeways. The communist party has a lot more leeway to do things like this than Western governments have. In fairness, the urban planning of Beijing is pretty rock solid. Much of that good urban planning can be attributed to knocking old things over and starting again with a clean slate.

The Western influence in Beijing is massive. Hundreds of millions of people all aspiring to a western style of life. In a lot of ways I was surprised at how much was NOT different when I first got there. People seem to dress the same, buy the same consumer products, even watch the same TV shows. Chao's favorite TV shows are: Friends, Prison break, & Lost. Most of his favorite movies were western films as well. He owns and iPhone 4. Although he lives in Beijing, his dream home would be a nice detached house with a 2 car garage, a bit of grass out front, and a german shepherd dog. Sound familiar? Sounds like the American dream to me... I just didn't expect the China dream to be exactly the same.

That being said, there are still quite a lot of cultural differences and it would still be easy enough to experience culture shock going over there.

The internet in the hotels was interesting. The Chinese government controls what you can and cannot see online. I could not access facebook or youtube. Both sites just gave me a 404 - page not found error. I managed to get around this by VPN'ing into Microsoft servers in Ireland and then using that internet. Also, I found the internet to be very slow.

On Thursday we went to the Dinghao market. It's the largest electronics market in Beijing. It was massive. It was about 4 floors of wall to wall computer electronics. Everything from GPSs, security cameras, computers, motherboards, ram, etc. Stephen bought a 16 gb USB key for 17 euros (it would be about 30 euros in Ireland). Of course, nothing has a price tag and everything needs to be bargained for. The bargaining system is interesting. Every single vendor seems to have the same calculator. It's a very basic calculator with big buttons and a big screen. You point to what you want, they show it to you and then they type a number in the calculator. You then say "no no" and you press clear and type in a new, lower, number. They get visibly offended and make a new offer. This goes on and on. Here is one reporters story about this market.

Later, we went to a very similar market that sells clothes and other consumer goods. It was the exact same story, nothing had a price tag and you had to bargain for everything. We wanted to buy a coworker a small chinese baby outfit for her new baby. We saw one we liked and she started us off at 65 euros! that was crazy. In the end, she was very mad but sold it to us for 8 euros! From 65 to 8 is a long way to come down. Even at 8 euros, Chao was saying that we paid too much. The outfit was something similar to this:

On Sunday, Chao and 2 of the top performers on his team joined us for a trip to the great wall. The trip was as much about just a hike through the forest as it was about the great wall. Although they all lived in Beijing, none of them had been to the wall yet. (I suppose this is not surprising since I still haven't been to Niagara falls). We started the day off with a hike around the wall, then had lunch, then went on top of the wall. It was very nice. I think the hike around the wall was more rewarding than going onto of the wall - the other team members I think would agree to that.

For some reason, the girls & women in China were all very interested in Stephen & I. It's probably just because we are white and they are not used to seeing many europeans in China. Chao seems to think it's just because I am so handsome - I hope this is the reason. Anyhow, on several separate occasions, people were taking photos of me or with me. 2 separate groups of girls on the great wall asked to have their photo with me. Chao took the photo below of one such occurrence (I am looking at another persons camera in this photo). On another occasion, we were all having drinks at a bar and an older woman was setting up a tripod outside taking pictures of us through the window. She then invited her friend to do the same thing.

There was a lot of interesting things about Beijing and I could probably say more about it. I think for now, I will leave it at that. All of the pictures can be found on facebook here. Enjoy.

Oct update

Hi everyone,

So good news on my stress level. We finally shipped Mac Office 2011 for all languages. After releasing, the very next day at work was night and day different. My stress level went from 100% to 0% overnight. I actually had time to put some new desktop wallpapers on my computer at work. Anyhow, things are already starting to get busy again at work but still nothing compared to the past months.

More good news, I am definitely going to Beijing, China! My flights & hotels are booked. I leave Oct. 29th and I will be staying for 7 days. I am very excited about it and I hope to make the most of the time that I am not working. I have been told that my hosts in Beijing are extremely hospitable and will go out of their way to show me a good time. So, I couldn't ask for more.

I'm making a bit more progress on our 3 week South east Asia trip. I think we will spend 1 week with Tom in Taiwan and then head over to Thailand for 2 weeks. Originally I was thinking of visiting more countries, but it just seems too complicated and Thailand seems amazing enough as is. The North and South of Thailand are almost like 2 different countries. I have been working on planning this trip for several days now and I still have so much work to do. It's crazy how complicated these trips can be. I was contemplating just buying a prepackaged trip but I think it will be more exciting to do it by myself.

Julie is working hard these days on her PhD applications. She has decided to change her topic of her PhD slightly. Originally she was going to write about the same thing she wrote about in her masters (adolescence under the Third Reich before the war). However, for several reasons she has decided to change her topic to marginalized German adolescence after the war. It may sound like only a slight change, but its fairly significant. She has at least a dozen books to read over the next few weeks before she can even start her PhD application for this new topic; She will be very busy.

I want to write an application for the new Windows 7 mobile phone. I mostly want to do this to round out my CV in case Julie gets into a school and I need to travel with her and get a new job. There are currently very few apps for the phone, so nearly anything I write will be original. Still though, I have no idea what to make. Any ideas?

That's all for now.

Germany Trip

Hello,

Wow, skimming through my last blog post made work look like it was fun. Work has been hell since that last post. I think at some point my patience ran out and I just cracked. It's been more than just putting in a lot of hours and weekend work though. Every day for the past few weeks I have been dreading going into work.

The problem is that the project is so mature at this point that people expect there should be no bugs and everything should be perfect. Of course it is not perfect and there have been a lot of last minute changes that have created a whole whack of last minute problems. At this point, when bugs are found in the product people start saying things like "why didn't you find this bug earlier?" or "how was this issue missed?". Even though I am probably doing a great job, I feel like an idiot on a regular basis at work these days. The stress compounds this effect because I do my worst work when stressed. Most of my stress has been coming from one person. I have talked to my boss about this and he said that I need to confront this person soon.

Anyhow, I just got back from Germany and a quick check of my work emails shows that this final stage is nearly over - maybe another 2 weeks of tough times. Hopefully my batteries will be recharged now and I will be full of energy when I go back on tomorrow.

The good news is that the day before I left for my vacation was my annual review. My review was pretty good. I nearly got into the top 20% again this year. I need to work more on self promotion to my colleagues and superiors. I essentially am doing good work but only those in my very inner circle actually know about it. When I do good work I need to shout it out from the rooftop so that everyone is aware and gives me proper recognition. This is advice I've heard before but I'm not very good at implementing - I still need some practice on this. From the good review I was also giving a nice cash & stock bonus which we really needed as we were getting low on funds.

So, once all the above is said... Julie & I actually had a nice (well deserved) vacation to Germany. As planned, we went to Munich, Nurnberg, and Berlin.

Munich was a very beautiful place. It's an old, clean, and wealthy city. The Bavarian culture is very different from the rest of Germany. Oktoberfest, lederhosen, and dirndl dresses are things found mostly in Bavaria and not the rest of Germany.

Julie tried on a few of those dresses and looked very good in them. She didn't end up buying one this time. We met up with a friend in a munich beer hall. The serve beer in massive 1 liter glasses.

The beer halls themselves are an interesting experience. Its just a big barn with row after row of tables. The one we went to the "hofbrauhaus" which is the biggest in Munich.

Also in the "English gardens" park in Munich there is a fast moving stream that runs through it. At some point, someone put something under the water that creates a continuos wave in the water that surfers use for fun. Technically, you're not allowed to be in the water but the police look the other way for surfers. It was really fun to watch these guys and we stayed there for about 20 minutes just watching.

Then we went to a small town outside Nurnberg for Julie's freinds wedding. The wedding was nice and I met a lot of very cool people. At the tea break before dinner I got talking to a German man who knew everything there was to know about renewable energy (a topic I am very interested in). It was very one of the most interesting conversations I've had all year. I learned quite a bit about energy storage, smart grids, super grids, and concentrated solar. At the wedding dinner we met some more Germans at our table. Luckily they all spoke flawless English. The party after the dinner was lots of fun as well and the drinks were free. Julie was teaching people how to line dance. Once they picked it up, she threw in a bit of a turn which is demonstrated nicely in this video:

Then we went onto Nurnberg for a day. We were pretty exausted from all the drinking in Munich that we didn't really get to see as much here as we wanted. Unfortunately it was also jam packed with tourists. I think there was a bike race on that weekend and I'm assuming thats why there were so many tourists. I thought Nurnberg was a nice city to see for a day but it was pretty boring so I'm glad we only spent a day there.

Then finally onto Berlin! We took a high speed train from Nurnberg which still took 4.5 hours to get there. When we got there we were pretty shocked to see how very different it is from the rest of Germany. It's really like a whole different country (which, given its history, is probably not that strange). You could quickly get a sense that this city is much more "artsy" and much less "straight edge" than the rest of Germany. There was graffiti all over the place in Berlin - something that we had not seen in the other cities. Also, the way the people dressed was much less conformist and much more individualistic. The people in Berlin are also much younger.

We did a whirlwind tour of about 10 museums while there. This city has so much history to tell. I especially like the history of West Berlin and East Berlin.

German food is terrible for vegetarians. They specialize in bread, sausages, and pretzels. I got pretty tired of bread after awhile. Luckily Berlin was a breath of fresh air. There was so much good vegetarian food all over.

We got to practice our german a bit more while there but its tricky. Once people here your english accent, they just start speaking english to you. This is mostly for the best because when they do speak german back to me I often don't understand. I'm much better at speaking than I am at listening.

The pictures of the whole trip can be found on facebook here.

I think that's all I'll say for now. I could probably write for hours about Berlin but I'm getting tired. Also, I'm typing this at starbucks right now in Dublin and my battery is about to run out.

Cya

Update

Hello everyone,

Everything is going well here. I am crazy busy at work these days but it should calm down in about 2 weeks. We are just in the final days of testing before releasing. Unfortunately, we are finding a lot of last minute bugs in the software and may need to delay the release a few days until we can get the important bugs fixed. I worked on Saturday yesterday and so did most of the mac team. We have been working a few late nights as well. Microsoft has been pretty good about buying us free dinners and ordering taxis to take us home.

All of this chaos at work will end for me on September 6th when Julie & I go to Germany! I really need a vacation and I'm super excited for this trip. I've been slowly but surely learning German with Rosetta stone but I still have a long way to go.

Microsoft is giving every single full time employee the new Windows 7 mobile phone. I played around with it a few days ago at work and it's amazing. I think it's better than both the iPhone & the Android phones. It releases in October here in Europe, so I imagine we will all get the phones then. I think Microsoft is giving us these so that we can evangelize them to our friends & family. The iPhone is very popular and I think Microsoft is embarrassed at how many of its own employees are using the iPhone rather than something made by Microsoft. Anyhow, I can say for certain the the windows 7 phone is the real deal! I will probably end up giving my current awesome android phone to Julie.

I sometimes think it's funny how technologically rich I am. I remember 15 years ago I only had access to about 25 mhz of processing power and 8 megabytes of RAM. Now, my phone alone has 20 times more power and 36 times more RAM. However, if you add up all of my computers, I'm nearly 2,000 times richer (in processing power) than I was 15 years ago! Imagine if my bank account was 3,000 times richer!

Julie is still in celebration mode from finishing her dissertation. Right now she is spending 5 days in Amsterdam and seems to be having a great time. I haven't been there yet, but she is already insisting that we both go back.

It looks like there is a good chance that Microsoft will be sending me to Beijing, China in October. This will be for me to train some contractors to write automation scripts for Mac Office like I have been doing for the past 2 years. I really hope this goes through mostly because I just want to go to China! I think it would be fun. I was hoping Tom could whip over from Taiwan, but then I looked at a map and Beijing is pretty far away from Taiwan. Also, Tom said the flights would be really expensive. Anyhow, maybe it will work out that I can meet up with Tom, otherwise I will see him when we go on our big vacation to Asia in February.

I've been really enjoying listening to podcasts on my train ride to work every morning. There are so many interesting lectures that you can download and listen to. Here's something interesting I just learned: "we live in such a specialized society, that even something as simple as a pencil can't be made by any 1 single person".

If you think about it, to make the above pencil, you need

• A lumberjack to cut down the trees
• A mill worker to mill the tree down into small enough pieces of wood
• Someone to make the long charcoal center
• Someone to get the rubber from nature
• Someone to refine and mold the rubber into a small cylinder
• A printer to print the letters on the outside
• Someone to mine materials for steel
• Someone to make the small steel band to keep the eraser attached to the pencil.
• etc, etc, etc

Crazy eh? no one knows how to do every single one of those professions. It does make me feel better about how specialized my knowledge is. If you ever feel like you know nothing relative to everyone else, just remember that no one knows how to even make a pencil.

I think that's all for now.

Cya

World Cup Fever!

Ireland doesn't have a team in the World Cup, but everyone in Ireland has World Cup fever! It's very funny at work because we can all stream the game from the internet from www.rte.ie. Most people at work secretly have the game hidden away under a few windows on their desktop and are listening on their headphones. It's funny because I will be working away silently at my desk and then all the sudden hear "YEEEAAAAHHH!" from the cafeteria downstairs and then 5 seconds later hear another "YEAH!" from everyone streaming at their desktop (the internet stream is a bit behind the TV). The kitchen staff who run the cafeteria are quite loud with their cheering and the office staff are usually a bit more reserved (although not always).

I've gotten into the world cup too. I am supporting Germany this year. No real reason, I just have a few German friends and I like Germany as a country.

Even Microsoft is getting into it as you can see with the flags in our building.

I got a black eye last week from playing soccer. Both myself and another guy on my team were both going for a loose ball in front on the opponents goal. We both collided. His forehead hit my cheek. My cheek was cut up a bit initially, but the next morning my eye also became black.

The funny part of this black eye is that I had to update my immigration card just a few days later. Of course, they took a new picture for my new card and my new picture has the black eye. So this incident will be immortalized for another year.

As promised, I put a few pictures up of or new place. We finally got a vacuum and a microwave from our landlord, so I cleaned the dirty carpets up a bit for these pictures. You can find the pictures here. Again, the location is better than the apartment. I really love the location!

Here's a picture Julie took of me on a Dublin bike in front of our place. I love these bikes! I have really become good at riding through city traffic (something I was not used to before).

Right now I am writing this blog from a pub just outside my apartment that has free wireless internet. At the same time I am watching the Ghana vs USA world cup match. I am using the laptop that work gave me... I love this little macbook laptop. I bought a new battery for it off ebay and it gets almost 3.5 hours of life. The laptop is about 3 years old, but its actually still really good!

Tomorrow I'm going to meet up with some friends in town at a pub to watch the England-Germany game and the Argentina-Mexico game. Should be good fun.

Right now Julie is flying back from Oxford, UK. She was attending a conference at Oxford university on the "history of childhood - problems with adolescence". Hopefully she made some good connections and learned something useful for her dissertation.

Anyhow, that's all for now

Cya

June update

Our lease for our apartment finished about 3 months ago. About 3 months ago I asked our landlord if we could just go month to month without signing a new lease and she said that would be ok. We planned on moving out of our place because, while it was close to work, it was kind of boring after work. We kept procrastinating for 3 months on moving just because we were always busy and our place was good enough.

Anyhow, about 3 weeks ago, our landlord sends me an email saying you must either sign a new 1 year lease or get out in 8 days. We definitely didn't want to sign up for a full year. I was pretty sure I had more rights than this, but instead I just figured we could use this as an opportunity to bite the bullet and finally stop procrastinating and make the move. Dublin is a very strange market for rental houses. In Ottawa I was used to places advertising a place that will be available in about 6-8 weeks time. In that model its very easy to plan a move. However, in Dublin, everything is available for move in "Immediately" and the good places are snatched up in the first few days. This was a problem for us because normally we had to give our landlord 1 months notice when we were going to move out but we couldn't plan to move into a new place before we gave the notice. So this 8 day ultimatum was a blessing in disguise.

So, Julie went on a rampage seeing all the properties in our desired area and we found a place in the first 2 days. I never actually saw the place before we moved in because it was in such demand Julie had to sign before I could come see it. She told me all the details over the phone and it sounded good. The place is a newly renovated, basement flat, in and old Dublin house. It is right smack in the center of town!

When we finally moved in, it seemed pretty good, but had some serious flaws. For starters the wall in our bedroom was damp and paint had started to fall off. Also, the stove wasn't working and the "furnished" apartment was missing a few key items like a dresser, a vacuum, and a microwave. The apartment also seemed to be very humid all throughout.

Needless to say we thought we had made a serious mistake. However, the landlord came over and turned out to be a super nice guy. He quickly dealt with the stove and the damp wall. He also promised to buy us a dresser, vacuum, and microwave. Once the damp wall was taken care of, the humidity of the apartment seemed to come down a bit (although, maybe we just got used to it - I can't be sure). After all of that, we are now happy with the place - phew!

One thing I find in just about every Dublin house is drafty windows. As a Canadian this drives me crazy because I am used to very tightly sealed windows. In fairness, the climate is more mild here so the seal doesn't need to be so tight as in Canada, but I still don't think that's any excuse. So, I just went around with packing tape and taped up all the drafts :). Its much better now.

The location of this place is really the best thing about it. I find we are able to do so many more things now because its just so much easier to get to them. It's much easier to go read a book for an hour in the park or go have a few drinks in town. Also, we are right beside a "Dublin bikes" stand. These Dublin bikes are amazing! Basically, you pay 10 euros per year and you have infinite access to a bike that you can use to bike around the city. There are about 30 stands around the city and you can just take a bike from 1 stand and leave it at another. It's such a cool way of getting around town. You need to limit your trip to 30 minutes or else you start paying money, but realistically, most trips are less than 30 minutes. The bikes themselves are very high quality bikes and really a pleasure to ride.


Moving day was interesting too. I hired a guy I found off the web who had a van. He had a big van and we got basically everything in the van. I feel bad for the guy though. He used to be a truck driver but has now been unemployed for about 3 months. This is his only source of income and he said he's only moving about 1 person per week. He only made 40 euros to move us. It's interesting to see how tough going Dublin is these days even for go-getters like this guy. He said there are a lot of unemployed people with vans doing the same thing.

After we moved, I went back to the old place to give back the keys and get back my deposit. We had taken everything out of the place, but we hadn't vacuumed or cleaned. When the old landlord saw the place, she said that it must be "like new" and fully cleaned. So, I spent the next 2 hours cleaning the place from top to bottom. The oven hadn't been cleaned in a year so I spent the most time on it :(. I did a kick ass job cleaning it but I still haven't got my deposit back. Apparently she has up to a month before legally required to give my deposit back. I have been hounding here a few times. I'm pretty confident I will get it back though, it's just annoying that it hasn't happened yet.

Work is still crazy busy. Today was a holiday, but I went in anyway. I can usually get twice as much work done if I am the only one in the office and that proved to be true today. I think I will do a fair bit of overtime in the next few weeks because review time is in 9 days. I want to get one little project completely done and dusted by the time I write my self evaluation. I'm still gunning for top marks in my evaluation, but this year will be much tougher than last. In fairness though, today was pretty much the only overtime I've ever done at Microsoft.

Julie and I decided to take a last minute trip to Galway on the weekend. It was a really good time. We went with 5 of Julie's schools friends. We stayed in downtown Galway the first night then stayed with a friend in a tiny village, called Oughterard, about 40 minutes outside of Galway the second night.

Julie & I stayed in a 6 person hostel room in Galway. There was a big festival on in Galway the night we went. There are about 20 bars on 1 street and they closed down the whole street for the festival. You could drink anywhere on the street, it was pretty cool! Its funny in Ireland, technically you can't drink in public places, but really the worst thing that will happen is that the cops will pour out your beer. We were talking with an American at the hostel who was walking around town with a beer in hand, not knowing what the drinking in public laws were. The American went up to a police officer and asked if he could be walking around with this beer and the officer said "well, no.... but this is Ireland". We got a decent sleep in the hostel with 4 other people.



The next day we headed out to a friend Rick's parents house in Oughterard. His parents have a large farmhouse on their cattle farm. We played a bit of Frisbee, had a nice dinner, then started drinking. At about 10pm, we headed into "downtown" (small town) Oughterard. This is a classic small town where everyone knows everyone. This first pub we walked into was an experience I will never forget. When we walked in, it was like everything and everyone in the pub just stopped for about 10 seconds. Everyone was looking straight at us. We all went up to the bar and got a drink then headed back to a table. The owner of the bar was an 80 year old woman, named Mary, who kept her eye on us the whole time. Rick says everyone knows her and she knows everyone. He said that she gets very nervous about strangers and we all got that vibe from her all throughout our stay at that pub. The next few pubs were pretty uneventful though. When we were finished up and ready to head home I quickly figured out that there are no taxis in Oughterard but rather some guy named "Kevin" who occasionally brings people home for money. We called Kevin on his mobile and he said he would pick us up soon. However after an hour of waiting he still didn't pick us up because he was too busy with other people. The girls in our group were getting increasingly restless, so we eventually called Ricks parents at 2 am to come pick us up. Here is a picture of Mary from the first bar, she is on the right:





I think I liked Oughtererd better than Galway simply because it gave us an interesting glimpse of small town, rural Ireland that we had never really seen before.

I'll put some pictures of Galway and our new apartment up soon.

Cya

April update

Hi Everyone,

Sorry it has been ages since my last post, but I really haven't been up to that much these days. Work is getting more and more crazy. We are really starting to feel the loss of our former co-workers as we pick up the slack from their positions.

I think it's amazing how much of a "fast-paced" environment I work in. I never really noticed until one morning I came in a bit hungover and my brain was functioning very slowly that I realized I can't do my job unless my brain is 100%. People are constantly coming at me with questions & emails and when you are hungover, you just want to tell them to go away. Fortunately I am not hungover at work very often.

My goal of being a top 20% employee is causing me too much stress these days. Just doing my job in these busy times is hard enough, let along going above and beyond. I am going to keep trying my best at work, but I can't have the stress as well. If I reach this goal it will be great... but if not, I will just try again next year.

Microsoft Ireland recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. They threw a big party at a fancy hotel. The party was amazing. Champagne on our arrival, an awesome dinner, free wine at the tables, open bar the whole night, an amazing 80's tribute band to start, then a very good hip-hop band at the end. The budgets at work are still very tight, but they seemed to pull out all the stops on this party at least!

Julie & I don't have that much vacation planned these days. The craziness at work should end once we release around sept/oct area which should free me up. We will be going to a wedding in Germany in September I think. I am looking forward to that.

My German is coming along very nicely. I am really sticking with this software course and I can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel. I still have a long way to go though. I think in about 3 years I should be fluent.

We rented a car last month and drove along the east coast of Ireland. At the same time we were dog-sitting a friends dog. So the doggie got to see quite a bit of Ireland as well. Driving on the left side of the road was not that hard. The hard thing was driving on roads that are supposedly 2 lanes but really only 1 lane wide. We encountered a lot of these narrow roads in the rural parts of Ireland. You can see all the pictures here. It was a fun trip. The weather was pretty good to us as well.

Work gave me a mac laptop. It's and old one, but nice. Slim & sexy. It has absolutely no battery though. I hope that on sunny days I can do a bit of work outside with it :)

There is a very good show on TV these days called "Jamie Oliver's - Food Revolution". It's about how the food in US schools today is just processed, nutritiousness, crap that is full of sugar. Jamie Oliver is a chef who goes into the fattest town in USA and tries to make some changes in that town (especially in the school lunch programs). You can watch his TED talk here. The entire show is only 6 episodes long, but I really think that he made a significant change already.

Anyhow, right now I'm off to see IronMan 2... I hope it's good.
Cya

Out of shape upper body

When I was a kid (like most kids) I could swing across 10 monkey bars no problem. If I wanted to, I could just hang on the monkey bars for a minute or two. I even remember another boy trying to pull me off the monkey bars and I was strong enough to hold us both up - at least for a few seconds.


Lately, I have been fairly good at keeping my lower body fit but I have been kind of neglecting my upper body. But, imagine my surprise and horror when I installed a chin up bar in our house, only to find that I can barely just hang there. If I just hold onto the bar, I can only hang on for 5 seconds. Pathetic eh? My chimpanzee ancestors would be ashamed for sure. It's sad to see my body deteriorate with old age.

Anyhow, I have a goal to strengthen my upper body. I currently don't have any metrics for that goal, but they will come soon. I'll keep you posted.

March update

Hello everyone,

The days are getting longer here in Dublin. I am awoken these days by sunlight at 8am which is nice on weekdays but not so nice when I want to sleep in on the weekends. It's much better playing soccer in the sun though. these days the sun is setting at about 6:30. At its worst, the sun sets here at 4:30 and at its best it sets at 9:00.

Work is going alright. I had my mid year career discussion last week. It went alright, but I am not on track to get top 20 performer this year. I need to pull an amazing idea out of my ass over the next 6 months to make that goal a reality.

My boss said I need to be taking more training courses. The one that is top of my list is cocoa/obj-c programming training which takes place in Frankfurt, Germany. So hopefully I can get on that course! There is another possible travel opportunity coming up to Seattle as well for some training on a Microsoft tool. It would be nice to do both :)

We are coming up to a major release of mac office 2011. It should be released around August but you never know, it might slip a bit later. So, things are starting to get very busy around the office.

I've been a bit disappointed with how restrictive my new phone is. I couldn't get the paid applications because Google was too slow to setup a payment system for Ireland. So I hacked my phone to fake my location. My phone now thinks it was purchased in USA and I can now buy paid apps through the US payment system. So far so good. I got a very neat application for learning German. It's a fun little game with sounds, words, and pictures much like Rosetta stone for the PC.

My German is going alright. I found myself getting off track for awhile last month. The snag was that I had no metrics for myself as to how much I should be doing per week/month/year and therefore didn't really know how much off track I was. So I decided I should be doing a full lesson per week which usually takes 3 half hour sessions per week. So I setup email reminders ever Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday to remind me to do my German. This way I know exactly whether I am on track or off track. Its worked so well that I have decided to add metrics to all my goals whenever possible. I really recommend using metrics and weekly/monthly/yearly milestones to make sure you are on track with your own goals.

I got a nice little present from the Irish taxman today. I filled out some forms for "Rent relief", which is a tax break for renters. Always nice to get a bit of extra cash.

I miss home ownership. Our house in Kanata is doing so well that I want to replicate that success again. But our lives are in limbo these days because we are not sure how much longer we will be in Dublin. We need to wait to see where Julie will be taking her PhD. She has her eyes on a few schools in the UK at the moment, so it's likely we will be moving to the UK at some point and then settling down there for 4 years at least. I'd really like to get a fix-er-upper. Something that just needs a cosmetic touch but has solid foundation, wiring, and plumbing.

That's all for now.
Cya

OCR

Many of the photos we took in the German archives were originally written using typewriters. This meant that I could potentially get the computer to interpret the photos and convert them into digital text. This technology is called Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

So I tried a few images on a free OCR program to see if I could convert them to digital text. The result was terrible. Only about 20% of the words were correctly converted to digital text. I was just about to go tell Julie that this OCR technology was not good enough and wouldn't be of any value to her. I was about to give up...

But then I got to thinking. OCR technology has been around for 20 years now. I refuse to believe it is that inaccurate to the point where its effectively useless. I decided to try another OCR software just in case. I had a breakthrough! Over 90% of the words this time were correctly converted into digital text.

So, it goes from an image like this:




to text like this:


bin ich mit der Bahn hingetsohren, morgens war schlechtes Wetter. Ich habe dann in Homburg zu Bittag gegessen und bin im Park anschließend spazieren gegangen. Da^l^ln habe ich mich auf die Kurhausterasse gesetzt und ganz ~emü:t;lich bei netter Tanzmusik Raffee getrunken. Die Sonne schien wieder. An meinen Tische setzte sich noch ein jüngeres Ehepaar und eine anscheinend lustige Witwe (~o von Ende 30 Die -lustige Witwe brachte in kürzester Zeit ein lustiges Geisprach in Gang, 80 wurde es ein fröhlicher Nachmittag. Ich habe auch oft getanzt, zum ersten Male hier in Frankfurt! Viele hübsche Lädchen waren hier. Es war ganz wunderbar. Heider bin ich nun noch nicht auf die Saalburg gekommen. Doch ich habe ja noch viel Zeit dazu. Fair macht es jetzt großen Spaß immer Niereh ganz alles n auszugehen. Es ist so Schonleich um niemand kümmern zu brauchen. so kann ich die Sonntage ganz genießerisch verleben und bekomme immer viel zu sehen. Tn Homburg habe ich gestern nach dem Essen eine ganze lange Zeit im Park auf einer Bank gesessen und die Zeitung gelesen und die Leute an mit vorbe~promer.ieren lassen. Ihr werdet es sicher ja hier ähnlich gemacht haben. Aber diese große Ruhe und das "~ich-nicht-zu-beeilen-brauchen" ist etwas sehr Wohltuendes Bach dem stets emsigen Betrieb im Werk.

Ich habe hier jetzt über manches sehr gestaunt. Der Hausmeister ~~ ist ganz gewöhnlicher Fabrikarbeiter. Er hat vom Werk hick im Heim eine 4 Zimmerwohnung zur Verfügung gestellt bekommen, wie man sie in Braunschweig nich, ke^r reit ! 11 ie Frau Hochmut h ~ mir heü:t~e mal Ihre Wohnung gezeigt. Die Leute sind etwa so alt wie ihr , haben einen erwachsenen Sohn und eine etwa 24 Jahre alte verlobte Tochter. Die Zimmer sind alle riesenhaft groß und wunderschön zurechtgemacht. Küche rundherum mit weißen Fließen, Dampfheizung , Spülbecken mit fließenden warmen und kalten Hasser, Gasherd, elektrischer Herd, . Gas und Strom gratis. Großer Balkon mit hübschen Balkenmöbel. Die Wohnungseinrichtfing ist Wunderbar. Flur mit rot-weißen Schleiflackmöbeln, Lohnzimmer mit ebenfalls m^odernen^/ge^s^c~a^ck^v^o^l^l~n und teuren Möbeln. Diese Sachen kauften sie sich immer von den ahrespramie~ und von den Betriebsprämien (die es extra gibt, wenn der Betrieb Oberschuß abwirft ~ , sagte mir die Frau Hochmut. Der Sohn ist auch Arbeiter im Werk und hat sich ein eigenes flaue gebaut. Ebenfalls mit Dampfheizung und Garage. 500 Mark Mußte er haben, alles andere gab die I.G. dafür bezahlt er für 6 Zimmer (Soviel hat das Haus) 35 ~ Miete (Zinsen) Er hat sich) da er Junggeselle ~'s~ (er war es, jetzt hat er sich auch verlobt) ein kleines Auto gekauft. D i e ungelernten Arb e it e r kö nnen ^8 ich das natürlich kaum erlaubend aber zu einem Motorrad reicht es



Now that the picture is in digital text, I can then put it through google translator. It comes out looking something like this:



The sun was shining again. At my table sat down yet to a younger couple and a merry widow apparently (~ o of late-30 The Merry Widow took in the shortest time a fun Geisprach in motion, 80 it was a joyful afternoon. I have danced often times the first Here in Frankfurt, many pretty little shop were here. It was quite wonderful. Heider now I am not yet come to the Saalburg. But I've still got a lot of time to do so. Fair is now great fun always assumed Niereh s quite all. It is so Schonleich need to worry about anyone. I can spend all your Sundays more enjoyable, and always get to see. Tn Homburg yesterday I was sitting after dinner quite a long time in the park on a bench and read the newspaper and people with let ~ promer.ieren reserved. You will indeed have made here are certainly similar. But this great peace and the "I ~-hurry-to-no-need" is something very comforting about the ever-bustling river operations at the plant.

I was amazed at some things here now, very much. ~ ~ The caretaker is very ordinary factory workers. He scored from the factory hick placed in the home a 4 bedroom apartment available, how she is not in Brunswick, reit ke ^ r! 11 IU women's pride myself Heue h ~ t ~ e time you'll see your home. The people are about as old as you, have a grown son and a daughter got engaged about 24 years old. The rooms are all trimmed gigantic big and beautiful. Around kitchen with white tiles, steam heating, sink with hot and cold fluid haters, gas stove, electric stove. Gas and electricity free of charge. Large balcony with beautiful bar furniture. Wohnungseinrichtfing which is wonderful. Corridor with red and white polished lacquer furniture, contract rooms, also with m ^ odern ^ / ye ^ s ^ c ~ a ^ ck ^ v ^ o ^ l ^ l ~ n and expensive furniture. These things, they bought more ahrespramie by ~ and the single farm payment (which it gives extra if operations chief shot yields ~, the woman told me pride. The son is also working in the factory and has its own built in slack. Also with Steam heating and garage. 500 Mark Must he have all been different, the IG for this he paid for 6 rooms (So much has the house) 35 ~ rent (interest) if it is) because he is a bachelor 's ~ (he was now he has also) engaged bought a small car. T he unskilled Arb e it he can kö ^ 8, I, of course, hardly allowing for a motorcycle but it is enough



Awesome eh?!

Now Julie can read through these and get a basic idea of what is going on and decide whether this will be valuable to her research or not. If it's not of value she can quickly discard it. If it is of value she can put the hard work involved in getting a more accurate translation.

I wrote this blog mostly because of the lesson here. This result is going to save Julie hundreds of hours and is truly groundbreaking. But... I almost gave up at the 99 yard line. I almost thought it couldn't be done. How often do we do this in life?

Trip to Freiburg

Julie needed to do a research trip to a small town called Emmindingem, Germany. I thought it would be fun for me to tag along and also to help her with her research.

We landed on Thursday afternoon in Baden-Baden, Germany, then took the train to Freiburg. We stayed at a hotel in Freiburg for the whole trip. Emmindingem is about 15 minutes away from Frieburg but we decided to make our home base there because Emmindengem is a pretty small town with not much to do. Here is a map of what we did.

The German rail system is absolutely fantastic. High speed, electrified trains, that run all over the country (even to small towns like Emmindingem). I really liked the look of the train stations, they reminded me of WWII movies.

and the old fasioned clocks at the station were neat too:

I've been learning German for the past 4 months, so I tested it out a few times over the trip. It's a very interesting experience testing out your legs on a new language. I totally understand why foreigners sometimes come across as rude when their English isn't very good. For example, Julie and I stopped at a bakery for a little snack. I asked for a Latte and and apple Berliner. I said "Guten Abend, ich habbe eine milchkaffe und ein apfel Berliner", which directly translates to "good evening, I have a latte and a apple berliner". Of course, because I was nervous, I forgot to tack on a please. I'm sure the cashier could easily have been insulted. Nonetheless, it was much better to try speaking German rather than to just speak English. I find the best learning experiences are when you make an ass out of yourself because you will be much less likely to make that same mistake again. We found that almost everyone in Germany had a little English, some quite good but most only had very little. We improved our German even during the few days we were there. Somehow, every German we talked to instantly knew the second we started speaking that we were English - I wish I knew what they were locking into so I could correct it.

On the train ride, I saw more rooftop PV solar panels and solar hot water heaters than I have seen in my whole life in every other country combined!

The food in Germany was pretty much stereotypical. Lots of beer, sausages, breads, and pretzels. It's not a terribly vegetarian friendly place, but we found some good food here and there. The German beers were good, but I still think Czech and Canada have the best beers in the world. Here's me with beer and a big pretzel.

So, now onto the main purpose of our trip. Julie is writing her final paper for her masters on childhood during the Third Reich (pre-1940). So we went to an archive in Emmindingem to hopefully get lots of diaries, journals, paintings, etc. Anything that would give a glimpse into what it was like to be a child under the Third Reich before the war. So our plan was to go to the archives armed with 2 cameras and photograph each and every page of document that would be relevant. We had no idea how much or how little this archive would have. When we got there, we were very lucky the people from the archives had some English because what we were asking for was pretty complicated and beyond our level of German. Julie had sent them a few emails to let them know we were coming and basically what we were looking for. I thought it was nice to hear Julie greeted when she got to the archives as "Frau Bailey".

The people from the archives started handing us journal after journal. Julie was getting very excited because there was a lot of good stuff. I was clicking away with the camera and Julie was evaluating how relevant each journal was and whether we should capture it. Everything was going well until we realized after taking about 700 pictures that we were going to run out of batteries and memory. The memory problem could probably be solved by buying a new memory card or dumping the pictures at an internet cafe, but the battery problem could not be fixed because the cameras have special batteries that I couldn't just go buy. We were kicking ourselves because if we planned better, these issues could be been dealt with. Now Julie had to prioritize what she wanted given the limited amount of pictures left. Luckily, after that bit of drama, it all worked out because we managed to get pretty much everything. We snapped about 800 pictures in 4 hours. Most of the pictures were something like this:

That's about all I can think of. We had a good time. You can find all the pictures we took on our trip here.

update

Hello,

Back in Dublin after a nice vacation back to Canada. We saw most friends and family but there just wasn't enough time to see everyone.

After Canada, we went straight to the UK where we spent 1 day in Oxford and 2 days in London. It was an interesting trip for sure. UK is very expensive but quite nice. Oxford seemed to be the definition of a "sleepy little English town". We saw Oxford University where Julie aspires to get her PhD at and we pretty much walked the whole town in 1 day. After Oxford, we did a whirlwind tour of London. Just saw all the major sites & museums. I really enjoyed the science & tech museum and I could have spent a whole day there, but it closed before I could finish it.

Julie & I are planning a big Asian trip next year just after xmas time. We are thinking about 3 weeks in south east Asia obviously spending a fair bit of time in Taiwan to see my brother Tom. As of now, the tentetive plan is Thailand beaches and Bangkok, countryside of Vietnam, Tokyo, and lots of Taiwan. Those plans are almost definately going to change of the next 12 months. We need to do a lot of homework and I am hoping Tom can help us do some of that homework.

Julie & I also have a very quick trip planned to a very small village in Germany called Emmendingem (click link to see map). Julie needs to access some of the German archives there for her final paper this year. I am hoping to go with her but it depends a bit on timing and work.

On the subject of work, things are going well. The people who will be made redundent are still working until Friday this week. It's only a tiny bit awkward at this point as everyone has basically come to terms with it. So far mac and games are staying pretty much separate and I imagine it will stay that way for a few months, but eventually there will be some crossover of work. Anyhow, as it stands now, I am taking on about 33% more workload because of the people we are losing. So I will be working very hard over the next few months for sure.

Dublin had an interesting cold snap that lasted a bit over 2 weeks. It caused about an inch and a half of snow and many days below freezing. To Canadians that sounds like just another day, but it was fucking chaos. Traffic was a nightmare during the snow, my coworker spent 5 hours getting home (a 10 km journey). Everyone had crazy traffic stories of abandoning their cars. I just thought it was hilarious that 1.5 inches of snow can shut a city down. But as I thought about it, there are 5 critical differences that Canadians have:

1. Plows with salt & sand (Dublin has all of about 2 plows)
2. Driver skill to drive in snow
3. snow tires
4. percentage of 4x4 vehicles
5. wide roads (dublin's roads are narrow)

All of those things add up to make a huge difference.

Another interesting thing that happened during the 2 week cold snap (which the media dubbed "The big freeze"), was that some of the water mains froze and the pipes burst. This leaked enormous amounts of water. As a result the entire city had (and still has) a water shortage. The reservoirs dropped to critical levels and several parts of the city were completely shut off. Luckily, we had water for the whole time, but our friends were without water for a full week. Even now, everyone in Dublin is told to conserve water for the next 3 months before reservoir levels get back up to safe levels.

That's all. I hope to have more regular posts again from now on.
--Ben