Jen and I met some friends after work for a happy hour at The EX in the Rideau Centre yesterday. When we walked in, we were directed downstairs thanks to my neck tattoo tipping the staff that we were in a group with the first to arrive and find seats. It was quite fun to sit with a bunch of old and new friends and talk about whatever was on our minds at the time, over beer and good food.
I’m enjoying this weekly event.
Jen and I took a 4 day weekend and went to Sudbury, to visit our families and have an engagement party that was thrown by Jen’s parents. The weekend was great. We hiked in the Laurentian Conservation Area, we hung out with her friend Mana and we enjoyed a perfect Saturday in the sun during our party.
I’m going to change my photography portfolio from a custom (albeit poorly coded) JavaScript app to a WordPress photo-blog this weekend to simply make it better while I focus on getting aFrame out of beta, and complete some lab apps for Zend certification.
Once I have that certificate showcasing my awesomeness, I’ll either toss away the WordPress install or wrap it in aFrame.
Is it bad to want to sleep in? I don’t think so. Doing so, would mean I’d have to stay late at work to meet the hour quota which isn’t something I’d want to do (start early vs start late).
On the subject of work, it’s been going well.
I’m trying to focus on one ‘hobby’ at a time to get everything sorted out and back on track (ie reef, mountain bikes, programming, etc); it’s quite the time requirement. So far, last weekend I addressed a lot of problems in my reef and it should be on track to healthy living until we move out next year. My bikes aren’t going to be as easy to fix, but I can swap the busted Shimano hub on my hard tail for one without ruined bearings (still riding it, it just doesn’t spin freely [aka my legs are burnt when I get to work, or home from it]).
That really just leaves a few loose ends of programming projects to sort out, and photography. Balancing photography with day to day life has forced me to realize you can’t do everything, or even hope to accomplish everything on a sliding time scale. I need to start scheduling workshops for myself, just to make sure I shoot & process (aka Photoshop Thursdays!).
It’s online, and empty at the moment. I need to organize my projects into it’s directory structure, after I work out my authentication model.
Jenz added a Flasher Wrasse today. It looks healthy and pretty young, I’d guess maybe 8-12 months old. I picked up a set of Hydor Koralia Evolution 1050 which I can put on timers to create waves!
I’m pretty sure my reef hardware is set for years (not counting the aquarium, which I want to replace when we move).
I decided to give myself a proper development lab for all of my projects to sit in, like a sandbox behind a 256/2048 bit SSL certificate. Now I just need to finish the authentication gateway for the dashboard on avoidwork, my photography portfolio and a few other apps that are in development or on the planning table.
Keeping myself busy is turning out to be too easy, thank god Jenz makes me go outside on weekends!
Celcius was offline for most of Friday, and some of Saturday. At first this was due to a software conflict, which then turned into an opportunity to do a hardware swap / upgrade to prepare for an OCZ Revo PCIe based SSD. I also took this time to install a wildcard SSL certificate for avoidwork, which I mentioned in the previous post.
No data was lost, we just experienced a little downtime.
I decided to look into wildcard SSL certificate providers this weekend and was blown away by the price difference between my usual registrar and GoDaddy. After a little more research, I decided to get a ‘Standard’ wildcard for avoidwork which I plan to use across a lot of services and URIs; including a proper secure online lab.
The first things I encrypted was the client area (project manager) and a brand new webmail.
I went for a walk with Jenz along the Rideau Canal and eventually into a Turkish festival that was happening in Confederation Park.
