First, PostRank has been acquired by Google which is pretty awesome. This has the added note that, we’ll be moving to California in the coming months. Lots to do, house to sell, stuff to move. Both Stacy and I are pretty excited by this set of events, plus, you know, no snow. That’s definitely a bonus.

The other piece of news is that, my first PeepCode screencast has been published. You can go checkout Meet EventMachine: Part I if you’d like to learn more about EventMachine. The second part should be published soon. This has been a long time coming, my fault given I was dragging my heals shooting the initial video. Geoffrey from PeepCode has been absolutely awesome through this whole process and the finalized video is much cooler then I originally envisioned.

That’s the nutshell. Hopefully things will calm down soon.

On the whole, everyone here is doing good. The stream of visitors has slacked off after the first week which was nice. Gave us some time to nap up and get things in order. We’re slowly moving in to a routine and getting used to all the feedings, poopings and droolings. I didn’t think it was possible to poop that much. On the whole I think we’re, slowly, getting this whole baby thing worked out and our ducks back in a row.

I’m gearing up to head back to work, which is going to be a change from staying home for the last few weeks. We’ll see if I fall asleep at my desk, heh.

Along with the job, we’ve moved into our new house in Waterloo. Stacy and I have been busy unpacking and organizing stuff for the last couple of weeks. Most stuff is sorted out now I think, Canada Post finally found our mail from the two week hold they had on stuff and both of us are settling in pretty well. Just waiting on the last few pieces of furniture to arrive.

Since we’ve finally got a house, and a bit of a yard, we picked up a puppy on Saturday. We got ourselves a little Welsh Corgi which we’ve named Odin. He’s been a lot of fun so far. Lots of energy and lots of sleep seem to be the orders of the day.

There have been lots of other fun side trips, losing of Foosball tournaments, wine tasting and other goings on that I’m leaving out at the moment.

Hopefully I’ll get back into some more regularly schedule writing now that things are starting to settle down. Although, I appear to be getting volunteered to do a presentation at DevWaterloo tomorrow so we’ll see what happens.

While the steam cleaner works well at picking a lot of gunk out of the carpet it doesn’t do so well with cat hair. The hair just kind of clumps together into balls. Stacy spent a bit of time picking these up as our vacuum cleaner sucks.

Once we got sick of this method we went and bought a Dyson. If you don’t have a Dyson go buy one, it’s awesome. We didn’t have to steam clean the bedroom as the Dyson made the carpet look new. Damn, the amount of cat hair that thing sucked up. Was an impressive sight.

So, with the carpets almost clean, the holes in the walls filled and primed and about 1/2 of our stuff shipped up to my parents house, we should be ready to have this place on the market in a few days.

Here’s to hoping for a quick sell.

It’s been pretty interesting so far. If you’re interested, check it out over at http://streamingcolour.com/blog.

At this point we ran into what must have been the longest line I’ve seen in an airport. All queued up for the Delta checkin. Ok, fine, I’ve been in lines before, we join the line. We wait. And wait. And wait. Three steps every 10 minutes isn’t much progress. The clock rolls around to 3 and we’re starting to get a bit nervous. You have to check in an hour before your flight so we start looking around for any Delta people on the floor that we could talk to. There was an American Airlines guy but he was just helping his passengers through the Delta line.

At about 3.20 I jumped the line to ask the guy at the Delta counter if we should be moving up as we had the 4.20 flight. I was, tersely, informed that everyone in the line was waiting for the 4.20 flight. Back to the line I went. 3.30. 3.40. 4. 4.10. 4.20. By this point we were about 10 feet from the start of the roped off section marking the beginning of the line. According to the flight board our flight was still on time. 4.30. 4.50. 5. 5.10. Ok, about 10 people left in front of us in line. Well, except for all the people that keep budding into line. And the people that take 45 minutes at the counter. What could you possible be doing that takes 45 minutes and the ticket agent to be on 2 phones at the same time? Yes, she had a phone pressed against each ear.

Keep in mind, in all this time Delta hasn’t said anything to us. There are no Delta agents in sight except for the people behind the counter. The GTAA (Greater Toronto Airport Authority) agents keep telling us that a Delta agent will be out soon to tell us what’s going on. No Delta agent appeared.

5.30 rolls around and an agent stands up and says Ok, everyone in line will have to be rebooked on a flight tomorrow. At which point a lot of people go ape shit. The two ladies in front of us were trying to get a connection so they can get to England. It looked like that managed to brow beat the agent into giving them a ticket.

Stacy and I didn’t bother. I called up Expedia and after an bit time on the phone got a full refund from Delta and most of a refund for the hotel. We’ve got to pay for one night but that’s it. Not too bad. Sounded like she didn’t’ have too much trouble with the Delta office either. Other people in line were calling and Delta was telling them they were still able to get on the flight or it was their problem for being late (not what you want to tell someone after they’ve been in line for 3 hrs at your ticket counter.)

So, kudos to Expedia for getting everything cancelled and the refunds for us. Delta, bite my shiny metal ass. I’ll never book on your airline again.

We started at the Honda dealer. Stacy is a big fan of the Honda Fit so we took that out for a drive first. The car we took out was a dealer car, so one year old, 47,000 km on it. Priced at 17.5k. The fit has a really nice drive, good acceleration, handles well. Not a lot of space. Just in terms of the around the block test drive I could feel my leg cramping on the gas pedal. Not good if you’re going to do any driving up to Owen Sound. The fit would probably be perfect for Stacy. The Honda guy was offering 3.9% financing so the price wasn’t too bad.

From there we wandered down the road and, on a lark, stopped in at the Volvo dealer. We both assumed that Volvos would be outside of our price range. Again we took a look at the used cars and test drove a used S40. This one was 2 years old and 60,000 km I believe. The S40 handles really well, has really good acceleration and is quite comfortable. Given that the Volvo is one of the safest drives on the road the S40 was a serious contender. The dealer got a bit offended when we said we were comparing cars and one of the cars we were comparing too was the Honda Fit. There is just no comparison he said, heh. He got a bit pushy at the end trying to make the sale, We can only give this price today kind of thing. The financing would be at 7.0% but the numbers didn’t seem too bad in the long run. The Volvo was definitely in the lead over the Fit. Plus, he gave me a bottle of water which is always nice.

From Volvo we cross the parking lot to the Volkswagon dealer. We got what must have been the pushest, most useless dealer at this point. Tell me what you want we’ll sell it to you today. Um, we want to look at the City Jettas and the Rabits. Tell me what you want we’ll get you into one. This repeated for about 10 minutes, without us getting any information or seeing any cars, before we ditched him and went to look inside. I’ve had a Volkswagon before, the car was pretty nice but when I got rid of it I was starting to have issues with things going wrong. We bailed quickly due to the sour feeling left by the dealer.

We continued our trek up to the Nissan dealer to take a look at the Versa. Apparently the Versa is a really hard car to find. We asked about availability and the dealer basically said, give me a list of 5-8 colours you like and I’ll try to find one of those. We quickly left as neither of us wanted to play colour lotto with the car.

Leaving Nissan I informed Stacy I wasn’t built Ford tough so we skipped the Ford dealer.

As our last stop of the day we went to see the Saturn Astra. The dealer kind of looked at us funny when we asked about used Astras, apparently they’ve only been available in North America for 4 months. So, no used cars. But, Sebastian (the sales rep) quickly told us some of the features and the price range of a new Astra. This certainly peaked our interest so we took one for a test drive. The Astra handles really well, we took it out for the longest test drive of the bunch and Sebastian gave us lots of interesting information on the car. Along with trying to get me to take some corners at 100 km/hour. The Astra lacks a certain amount of punch that some of the other cars may have but I’m not looking for something that needs a lot of kick. As long as I can get up to speed before something else hits me I’m good to go.

So, we went back to the dealer, talked price and we’re picking up our new Saturn Astra XR 4 door with sun roof on Wednesday. We got lucky and a silver Astra XR with the features we wanted had just arrived the day before. Apparently the Astra has been moving off the lot pretty quickly for them. The interesting thing being, because Saturn has a 0 down, 0% financing for 72 months the Astra actually ended up being cheaper monthly payments then any of the used cars we looked at. That’s with us getting the extended warranty on the Astra (so, 5 years on the Astra instead of 2 or 3 on a used.) They also give you a 500$ gas card which is handy.

Now I just need insurance. Oh, and Stacy needs to get a full license.

Getting one for me, well, thats another story. When we got Stacy’s it used our ‘upgrade’ credits from Rogers. The credits reduced a 150$ service charge to 25$. So, trying to get mine we didn’t have any of those credits so the iPhone would cost me 350$. That’s more then half again the price of the 200$ phone. In order to get the iPhone for the 200$ normal price I have to wait until my account gets its credits topped back up. Which will be a few months, which conveniently for Rogers is when the 6gig/30$ deal is no longer available so I’d have to get the 100$ plan to get the same amount of data.

I tried to explain to them that by not getting the phone I won’t be signing up to their 30$/month data plan. So, in 6 months they would have made their 150$ plus extra back. That didn’t fly, with the iPhone they won’t make exceptions.

The really stupid part, this is all because I’m an existing Rogers customer. If I was a new signup I’d get the 200$ price, no problem. Because I’ve been a Rogers customer for a few years I get screwed.

Hows that for customer satisfaction?

I must say it was fan … wait for it … wait … wait for it … tastic. It was the right mix of singing, quotes and blood to keep the audience laughing.

Deaths a bitch …. a stupid bitch

If you get a chance, go see this show. It’s just been extended in Toronto until June 14th so get your tickets. Oh, and if you don’t want to get bloody, don’t sit in the first two rows. Some of those people were pretty wet by the end of the show.

Anyway, what have I been up too? Well, there has been a few work based trips and Sahba and I went and spoke at CarolinaCon and NotACon about the Exploit-Me tools. Both cases were a lot of fun. Sadly we had to fly out early on the Saturday so we missed a lot of NotACon. I believe the video of the NotACon talk will be online at somepoint. It was filmed by the guys from Media Archives.

Damn, were we ever right.

The show is fantastic. If you ever get a chance you should go. The voices he does are really good, a few were weak but it doesn’t detract from the show. The mannerisms are what makes everything work. Hunched over for Burns, reeling for Barney. Really well done.

So, if you get a chance, and MacHomer comes to a city near you go, for the love of all that is donuty, go.

I ended up spending about five weeks in Seattle doing some work stuff. Flew back to Ontario for a few of those weekends which makes it a bit tiring in the long run. Was an interesting trip. Seattle is definitely a good town, I can see why Stacy liked it so much when she was there last summer. It’s very different to go to bars down there were 90% of the beer on tap is a local microbrew. Spent a lot of time sampling the different beers from around the area. I was a big fan of the Roslyn and the Old Seattle.

On most other fronts I haven’t done too much. Been playing video games, I’ve suddenly got a back log with Turok (thanks Owen), Lost Odyssesy (thanks Stacy) and Rockband (thanks me) all on board at the moment. A backlog of older games I’m still playing as well. Doing another run through of Assassins Creed for some of the achievements I missed the first time ’round.

Rockband has proven to be a lot of fun. Stacy and I are playing through with me on drums and her signing. She cheated while I was in Seattle and played through easy as the singer, you know, to rub it in my face that she’s better then me. I’m just waiting for the day she starts doing karaoke.

We’ve made it up to season 6 of Buffy which we’ll hopefully start watching tonight. Season 5 wasn’t too bad, it was starting to drag a bit by the end and man the bad chick was a bad actor.

Other then that, well we’ll see how long it takes me to write the next post.

Too much stuff to really catch up on here. Hopefully I’ll be better at this in the new year. Tho, I wasn’t doing so bad last year I don’t think.

Anyway, been playing a bunch of video games. Just finished Jericho. Was pretty fun, you don’t get many achievement points on the normal setting but that just means I’ll need to play parts of it again. Spent a good chunk of time the last few days reading Black man by Richard Morgan. Good book so far, I’m almost at the end. That said, I’d recommend his other stuff over this one, Altered Carbon was fantastic.

Not quite sure what to expect in the new year. But, it should be fun.

There have been some books, some movies, some video games. Other events, trials and tribulations. But, that’s the condensed version.

Hopefully things are slowing down a bit and I’ll be blogging regular like again but we’ll see.

North Carolina wasn’t bad except for the fact that I got threatened with arrest for taking pictures of some of the buildings downtown. I checked afterwards and it isn’t actually illegal to take pictures of buildings in the States yet but, I also read that if you argue with the cops they’ll find some other reason to arrest you.

The whole thing was pretty stupid since all it really did was stop me from shopping. I was downtown looking for something for Stacy and after the incident just went home. Talk about destroying your tourism dollars.

Anyway, got back from the States and had Owens bachelour party at my place on Saturday. That was more drinking, youtube videos, and a large quantity of Guitar Hero II. I bought a second guitar just for some hot guitar-on-guitar action. Hit up a few bars afterwards with a live band playing at the Hideout which was pretty cool.

That’s about it for now. Off to Owens wedding on the weekend and then I think we actually have a couple weekends without anything penciled into them. So, video game time, heh.