Archive for the ‘life’ Category

A proud day for Canadian Athletes

Today is a proud day for Canadian athletes. No, I’m not talking about the Olympics. I’m referring to the World Ultimate Frisbee championships that concluded today in Vancouver. Canadian teams won gold in the Open (Men’s) and Mixed (Co-ed) divisions. The Open division final was the highlight with incredible displays of athleticism exceeding what I’ve seen so far in the Olympics.

In the Open final, the Canadian men’s team took on their American rivals. Despite being the underdogs, the Canadian team came out with an early lead due to some intense, high-energy play. As the rain started coming down and the wind picked up, the Americans began to resort to calling out fouls left, right and centre. Ultimate frisbee is a game without referees, where the rules are balanced to provide a fair system of play — assuming, of course, that players are displaying good sportsmanship. Time and again the Americans called fouls on legitimate defensive plays made by the Canadians. It was a shame to see such dispirited play. Fortunately, the Canadians really showed their class and shrugged off the controversial calls to prevail in the end 17-15. I was proud to see the Canadian side rise above the pettiness and carry the victory.

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Filed under life : Comments (0) : Aug 10th, 2008

China Quake

I have been reading with horror the unfolding news of the major earthquake that struck China’s Sichuan province earlier this week. Having just returned from 6 months living in China — in Xi’an, more precisely, which is not too far from epicenter of the quake — the news of the aftermath hits much closer to home. Living and growing up in Vancouver, the threat of a major earthquake is never that far away, and the idea of something like this striking Vancouver is unimaginable.

Reading the public reaction, at least here Canada, to the devastation has been challenging. The quake happened right at a time when criticism of China’s human rights policies and policy towards Tibet in the lead up to the Olympics was at its peak. Underlying this criticism there is also an unstated fear of China’s growing economic dominance as North American economies head further into recession. Watching people struggle to switch from China bashing to sympathy for those affected by the earthquake is to get a sense of how complex and tangled these issues are. At least in China, unlike in Burma, people are supported by a strong military and a central government that is acting in the interests of its people. On the other hand, this self-sufficiency makes me feel powerless to do anything to help.

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Filed under life : Comments (0) : May 15th, 2008

Ani and a xylophone

Last Monday night, we went and saw Ani DiFranco at the UBC Chan Centre. I’ve seen Ani in concert 5 times, and this time was definitely not a disappointment. She played a lot of material from her forthcoming album and it was truly excellent. I think that it’s pretty rare to see an artist in concert and like their new material just as much as their old songs — especially for a musician as prolific as Ani DiFranco.

Her new band consists of an upright base, drums, acoustic guitar and a xylophone. I wasn’t sure how the xylophone would work, but it sounded great and it was a nice enhancement to the sound of her older material.

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Filed under life : Comments (0) : Apr 28th, 2008

Earth Hour

At 8pm Saturday March 29th, people around the world turned out the lights in support of Earth Hour. Earth Hour is a campaign organized by the WWF to raise awareness of the connection between energy use and global climate change. The event encourages people to take action by turning off their lights and power to any non-essential devices for the 60 minutes between 8pm and 9pm.

This year’s Earth Hour was a very busy event for me and my new company Small Energy Group. In partnership with the University of British Columbia, Vancouver City Hall, and the Village of Hartley Bay, we monitored the energy use over the day for each site to quantify and make visible the energy savings impact of their actions. UBC had committed to powering down non-essential services over the entire day; City Hall shut off the floodlights lighting the art deco facade for the building; and in Hartley Bay, they turned off the diesel generator that supplies power to the whole community plunging the village into darkness.

You can see the results of the savings achieved by each site by checking out the web site: http://earthhour.smallenergygroup.com/.

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Filed under environment, life, technology : Comments (0) : Apr 10th, 2008

Beyond ThoughtWorks

I had my last day at ThoughtWorks about 3 weeks ago. In my 5.5 years with the company I had the chance to live in 4 countries (Canada, China, India and England) and to work with and learn from some really amazing people. I think that ThoughtWorks is a great company with a great depth of talent and knowledge, a solid global culture, passionate leadership and a progressive perspective on the IT industry and the world. And I still find Roy to be an inspiring leader.

However, having recently returned from 6 months in China, I wasn’t really looking forward to the prospect of more travel. China was a great experience, but it sure made it feel nice to be back home. As there’s nothing happening for ThoughtWorks in Vancouver these days, work would mean spending a considerable amount of time on the road or moving elsewhere. Considering that I live in Vancouver because I love being in Vancouver, spending most of my waking hours away defeats the purpose. I also wasn’t looking forward to being an absentee father to my amazing one year-old daughter. So, it was time to part ways with the company.

For my last day, ThoughtWorks graciously offered to fly me out to Calgary to say farewell to some of my colleagues. Serendipitously it coincided with the office’s annual ski trip to the Rockies, so I got 3 days of fabulous skiing at Fernie in the bargain. It had been snowing heavily before we arrived, so there was tonnes of fresh powder. JJ and I had a once-in-a-lifetime run down the saddles into Lizard Bowl just as the ski patrol dropped the ropes.

In considering what to do next, I was pretty confident in finding local Agile consulting engagements in the city by leveraging my growing network here. I also had a burning product idea that I was thinking about tackling. But what I really wanted to do, and have wanted to do for the last 6 years, is to align my skills and experience delivering enterprise systems with the issue that matters most to me — namely, addressing the problem of global warming. Fortuitously, just as I started looking around, an opportunity came into my inbox via the Web of Change mailing list. The opportunity was with a local start up called Small Energy Group that is helping large buildings and institutions to monitoring their energy usage and significantly improve their energy efficiency. Several sets of interviews later and I’m the newest member of their team.

I can’t talk too much about what we’re working on right now. But we have a public release coming up quite soon, so I’ll post information about it then.

The company is located in (unassuming) Dundarave, West Van. I’m commuting back at forth to work by bicycle (one of these days I’ll post pictures). This is what my route looks like:

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Filed under life : Comments (1) : Mar 13th, 2008

Agile Vancouver Tech Talk

Last night, we ran Agile Vancouver’s first Tech Talk session. The session was co-organized with Skye Cove at Sophos. The tech talk idea came out of our desire to get more technical content into the regular Agile Vancouver meet ups. We also wanted a different format from the regular monthly talking head presentations. Our goal was to create something that was more participatory, that would provide an opportunity for local Agile practitioners and techies to meet and share their knowledge and experience.

When planning the session we really didn’t know how many people would turn up. The previous attempt to do something similar ended up with very few attendees. So I was surprised to arrive at 5.45 and find that about 30 people were already there and more were trickling in. We probably ended up with about 50 people all told. I quickly realized that my idea of having an open discussion would not work — so we turned it into a fish bowl instead. I think that the fish bowl worked quite well and we had a pretty good variety of people opting to come up and speak.

The topic was “Branching and Merging on Agile projects”. Remarkably we managed to stay pretty much on topic throughout. I was especially happy to see some people come forward and posit unconventional positions like:

  • source control is not necessary on Agile projects because it is an impediment to communication
  • using file locking to control access to different parts of the repository
  • distributed vs centralised source control systems

Now that more people are familiar with the fishbowl format, I hope that even more people will participate next time. A few things that we will change for next time:

  • Greg Young suggested distributing cards at the start of the session to collect suggestions for the next session’s topic. We can post these on the wall and people can vote on them on the way out.
  • Shorten the length of the fish bowl so that there is more opportunity for small group interaction after the session. I think restricting the fishbowl to 1 hour is sufficient.
  • Greg also suggested collecting feedback on the session that can be collected at the point when people vote on the session.

I’d like to try some small group sessions or micro-open space sessions, but for now I think that it will be good to try to keep the format consistent as more people get the chance to become familiar with it. If you have other feedback or ideas for the event please let me know!

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Filed under agile, life : Comments (3) : Feb 13th, 2008

Supporting medical clinics in the Congo

My friend Josie Leung recently returned from Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo where she was helping to support a rural medical clinic there. She has set up a charity on GiveMeaning.com to try to raise the funds to support the continued operation of the clinic. The charity needs a certain number of votes to get the project supported, so if you feel so inspired head over to her project and add your vote in support.

GiveMeaning.com is the brainchild of Vancouver-based philanthropist Tom Williams, who I met a couple of years ago at Web Of Change. He gave a few demos of the site at the conference, but Josie’s charity is the first time that I’ve had the chance to use it. It’s nice to see people using ASP.NET for a good cause :)

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Filed under life, technology : Comments (1) : Jan 23rd, 2008