This blog has been really quiet as of late, as you probably noticed by the lack of updates in your favorite RSS reader. The reason is because I got married this past weekend and have not had time to update over the past month. I will make up for it next month but for now I am going to go and enjoy my honeymoon.

Justice asked a bunch of us to write a treasured memory that we have of Donald Belcham as a birthday tribute to Don. I am in a bit of a blogging slump so I figured I would oblige his request.

My memory is from DevTeach Vancouver last year. It all started at the Party with Palermo. Donald started the night off having a great conversation with a bunch of us about the merits of TDD and how it relates to life, the universe and everything.

Then someone told him that the booze was free.

Donald proceeded to order the finest scotch available in the bar. For those that don't know him Scotch to Donald is like Beer to Bender. Donald was ok but then Jeffery Palermo announced that booze would only be free for the next 5 minutes.

I was standing at the bar when the announcement was made and I heard Donald yell "LETS DO SHOTS!!!". Luckily Donald kept it classy and suggested that everyone do Prairie Fires (tequila and Tabasco). Knowing the dangers that Prairie Fires can bring, I tried to convince Donald that he should do something less harsh like Whiskey.

After 10 Prairie Fires everyone was amazed that Donald had proceeded to keep them down and we went for more drinks at The Earls on Robson Street. After 10 minutes I look over at down who is slumped over and hiccupping. 10 more minutes pass and Donald's cheeks are full with a finger holding in the gray liquid that eventually shot out into D'Arcy Lussier's hot chocolate (that whole sentence just sounded wrong).

The next day Donald was scheduled to present and he lays out a great metaphor which to me, is pure Donald Belcham:

"A development shop without Cruise Control and NAnt is like having too many prairie fires here at DevTeach. Everything looks ok on the outside but sooner or later things are going to blow up."

PHENOMINAL!

If this blows your mind, make sure to check out Donald at this year's DevTeach Toronto. He will be presenting not one, count em 4 different presentations all likely to be fuelled by prairie fires and scotch.

I like reading other people's posts on the year that was 2007 so I thought I would try it myself.

During 2007 I had a lot of fun in software development

- I managed to somehow do 3 speaking engagments, 2 at the Calgary and Edmonton Code Camps and one at DevTeach. Although I had fun presenting, i'm not sure if the spotlight is for me. Helping the community has always been one of my main goals but I got into software development because I like coding. I could care less if I get my way paid to various conferences based on my speaking ability I would rather be recognized for my coding ability.

- I completed all of my goals that I had for becoming a better developer. This surprised me as I thought I was way behind on them.

- I contributed to a couple OSS projects. In 2008 my main goal will be to give away even more code. Take it, its yours.

- I found something new that I am going to use to motivate myself to get my skills another level, I'll probably write about it sometime in the future but now is to soon.

 

Non-Technical Stuff

- Last year started out very poorly for me. I lost my last remaining Grandfather a year ago today, he was my hero and things haven't been the same without him.

- I was finally able to move into a new condo that I bought with my fiance. No more paying rent for me. Despite having a flood and still waiting on our floor to be replaced I am happy with the new place.

- I got to help my fiance Catherine celebrate a special birthday this year.

- My dog somehow got published in a book and featured on Entertainment Tonight (blog post dog mention quota met).

Whats in store for 2008

- I am getting married in May of 2008. At least if we can get organized in time.

- More OSS coding than last year.

- Many more things that I have yet to find out about.

When you have to do 5 timesheets to let the business client know your "status".

I feel bad for the poor person on the business team that has to go through all the timesheets that are submitted, I would guess they aren't even reading the timesheets and it is all a big conspiracy to waste hard drive space. 

Will they be confused if I add a task for entering time instead of developing?

How come people don't realize that a business client can get more from a 5 minute standup than they can from reading timesheets?

I've started a side blog at http://my.hockeybuzz.com/knucklesandwich. It is all about hockey and it came with my subscription to Hockey Buzz. My first post is my first impressions of the Flyers/Rangers preseason game that I watched today. To summarize it here, the Flyers off-season moves were a lot better than the Rangers off-seasons moves (the Rangers defense looked like pylons in blue jerseys).

If you are interested in hockey please check it out and give me some feedback.

Dear Friend,

Just because WestJet does not give away headsets for free doesn't mean you should feel obligated to provide commentary to the touranment on the golf channel.

Thank you,

Steven

This year my fiancee Catherine and I will once again be participating in the SuperWalk for Parkinson's (SPONSOR US HERE). Last year I lost my Grandfather to Parkinson's disease.

This year I am walking in memory of my Grandfather, but I am also walking for my auntie who has shown a lot of courage while dealing with Parkinson's Disease. Imagine drinking 20 cups of coffee everyday and then trying to knit a quilt, it can get very frustrating really fast trying to keep your hands steady enough to sew a straight line. A couple of years ago my auntie knit quilts for the whole family (10 of us) while suffering from the effects of the disease which included tremors in her hands.

Today, my auntie is now able to enjoy a better lifestyle because of treatment from drugs and an operation which is all possible because of the money raised from the SuperWalk. Her strength and perseverance has been an inspiration to me. If you are interested please sponsor Catherine and I in this year's SuperWalk so we can continue to raise money for Parkinson's research.

Check out this billboard that the Dallas Stars are using to advertise hockey. As a Canadian, I don't care if Americans watch hockey but it is nice to see hockey take a shot back at some of the other sports after all the shots taken at hockey from American "sports experts".

Goals usually aren't worth doing unless you follow-up on them, so here is a quick update:

1: Learn more Boo.

This has been going fairly well and is a lot of fun. Some of the concepts are similar to Ruby and Python. I think a good approach to take is to rewrite a side project of mine in Boo so I can run into the problems that aren't covered in the tutorials.

2: Learn LISP.

I downloaded a screencast and watched it but I haven't spent a lot of time on this yet.

3: Code more at home without distractions. I also want to develop a couple of ideas I have in my head to make me faster setting up and developing .NET projects. Maybe this involves contributing to TreeSurgeon.

- I have thought about this a bit. I talked to Jonas who did something similar with NAnt that sounded cool.

4: Speaking of contributing, I would like to contribute more to OSS projects.

- I haven't contributed to any open source projects since writing the original blog post. I did notice that Ayende put out a call for help on his Reflector.BooLanguage tool which would be a great opportunity to learn Boo and help out the community.

5: I think the last thing on my list of becoming a better developer is to always try to be a pragmatic developer. If I find myself falling into a rut or believing the hype of the various communities then I am not being true to myself as a software developer. In my opinion the best thing a developer can do is keep an open mind.

- I subscribed to a ton of new blogs that aren't centered around .NET quite awhile ago and have been looking at concepts from other languages that aren't common place in .NET yet. This post on Higher-Order Functions was well worth the read.

I've been tagged by Justice on what i'm doing to become a better developer. Here's my list:

1: Learn more Boo.

2: Learn LISP.

3: Code more at home without distractions. I also want to develop a couple of ideas I have in my head to make me faster setting up and developing .NET projects. Maybe this involves contributing to TreeSurgeon.

4: Speaking of contributing, I would like to contribute more to OSS projects.

5: I think the last thing on my list of becoming a better developer is to always try to be a pragmatic developer. If I find myself falling into a rut or believeing the hype of the various communities then I am not being true to myself as a software developer. In my opinion the best thing a developer can do is keep an open mind.

Every once and awhile I get bugged to do a non-technical post so I created a Simpsons style Steve of myself here.

Ironically, this was found via a technical blog.

In the 4 hour work week Tim Ferriss talks about Parkinson's Law. Parkinson's law states that  "work expands to fill the time available" which seems to hold true for me. I figure that if I have time to spare I can read RSS feeds for just a little while or check email. 

To combat this I have been setting fake deadlines to challenge myself. In the morning I usually have a lot of meeting so setting a deadline of noon to finish things is really challenging, if I finish the task before then it is a lot more rewarding than if I let it swell to the time allotted for it.

A concept that I like from the 4-Hour Work Week book is that we are not naturally multitaskers but we convince ourselves that we are.

Try and take one task during your day and do it without getting distracted by anything else, I bet you can't. The distraction can include other people, outlook, or meetings try to eliminate it!

As a developer if I am working on a piece of code is there really a reason for me to have Outlook open? It is natural to say yes, but

The first thing that I tried to implement in my life from the book was setting times that I could check email and sticking to them. My times were 11:30am and 4:30pm. How did it go? It went really well and I quickly found out that email wasn't as important as I previously thought it was. I also found out how hard it was to change the habit of letting things like email take a backseat to the task I wanted to accomplish. My best advice is to disable the popup that comes up when you get email and to disable any sound notification. 

Last week I finished reading the book 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. The book is very motivating to say the least, I highly recommend it.

After I read it I stepped back and took a look at my profession and my life to try and find out what makes me happy professionally and personally. Over the next little bit while I am waiting for my foot to heal, I am going to post on various topics from the book that I have tried implementing in my life as a software developer. Hopefully they help out someone else as well.

Last year I had an unfortunate incident where my foot met a puck. Once again my foot has met a puck and I will be in a cast for a yet to be determined amount of time. If I have any advice for other software developers that need to get a cast it is to bring a book that you haven't been able to find the time to read. I guarentee you that getting a cast will take a lot longer than you expect and you will be able to finish your book.

Tonight the Edmonton .NET User Group celebrated its one year anniversary with a presentation by Chistians Izquierdo at the Maverick Brewery. Looking back at a year ago I never would have dreamed that I would have changed this much professionally as a developer due to the efforts of this community and due to guidance of the quality speakers we have been fortunate enough to have.

There are probably 2 turning points in my professional career that made me strive to be better at my profession. The first, was a manager telling me "you don't know what you're doing" (I admit I didn't know what I was doing at the time).  After that managers words, I wanted to prove him wrong so I found the .NET Wizards and met other developers that could help me get better.

The second turning point was a car ride to the first meeting of the newly formed Edmonton .NET User Group where Jean-Paul Boodhoo stated to me "we are the next generation of software developers." Those words said to me that I could either choose to be more pragmatic about how I approached my career or I could be left in the dust, it was my choice.

If I can pass on anything that I learned from a year of the Edmonton .NET User Group, it is to strive to be the next generation of software developer. Don't let yourself be left in the dust and always look for ways to improve your skills. Never forget that if you look to the person on your left you may see someone who is better than you at software development, but if you look to your right there is someone striving to be you. Strive to be better than the person on your left and mentor the person on our right!

Cheers to another year of being the next generation of software developers and thanks to the community who has helped make the Edmonton .NET User Group a success.

It has been over a week since I arrived back in Edmonton from Maui. I meant to post pictures as soon as I got back but the reason for not doing so is not because I am lazy, it is because the weather has been terrible here and posting pictures of the amazing Maui weather would get me lynched. If you are interested you can check out the rest of the pictures in my Maui Flickr photoset

 

Palm Tree Sunset.

Our Condo where we stayed while in Maui.

Surfer dude.

Catherine and I watching the SuperBowl.

Tonight I am coming back to Edmonton from Maui. Besides coming in during a big storm, the weather here has been nothing but good to us. Check out what it was like when we got here: http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/10516.aspx

I'll post more later but I wanted to link to Rick's post now so I don't forget.

I've been tagged by D'Arcy, so here we go with 5 things you may not know about me.

1 - I originally went to school to be high school teacher majoring in history. As part of my curriculum I took a programming course which I enjoyed more than teaching so I decided to take my current career path.

2 - I love hockey (maybe thats a bit obvious). I grew up playing and I still play today. I played against a couple of guys that are in the NHL today but no one really special. I also think that Steve Yzerman is the best all around player to ever play the game, and don't say Gretzky was better because all he could do was score goals, his defensive game was WEAK!

3 - I am a big fan of Tennis but have never really played. Maybe thats why I am addicted to Wii Tennis. My ranking is 2034 (pro is 1000).

4 - Like D'Arcy I grew up on Macs. I didn't get my first Windows machine until I was 18.

5 - I am a big supporter of dropping Africa's debt and providing them with cheap drugs for treatment. I am a proud Canadian but I think it is embarrassing that Canada originally authored the promise that all G8 countries should contribute 0.7% of their GNP to Africa in 1969. Yet,we have failed to meet that goal despite budget surpluses. 4 countries that are not members of the G8 and with weaker economies than us have met that goal. We are being embarrassed on the world stage.

I will now tag Catherine, Jean-Paul Boodhoo, James Kovacs, Dave Woods, and Kyle Bailey. Sorry, again sorry.

After about 20 previous tries I decided to once again re-try installing the new Windows Vista RTM tonight. I had tried installing it numerous times before but the installation would always freeze on me. I don't blame Vista itself for the freezes because it turned out the first time I burnt the image I burnt it on an angry dvd that my drive didn't agree with.

Heres my first impressions:

• My favorite thing so far is the Alt - Up Arrow shortcut when navigating through folders. Its a lot more intuitive than Alt-V-O-U!
• My computer scored a whoping 1 on the Vista O Meter because my video card is old! Besides maybe playing around with WPF (after WCF) I have no reason to upgrade it.
• My old D drive is now my E drive.
• My old E drive is now my D drive.
• .NET 3.0 is already installed. IIS7 is not.
• Nero now works with Vista.

Thanks to everyone who offered their congrats on the recent engagement. We made it back safe to Edmonton, although I seem to be suffering from vertigo and I feel like i'm still in the eastern time zone (at least i'll be early for work tomorrow).

Here is a mini tour of my vacation, for the rest go check out the Flickr photo set and the Flickr map.

 

The first thing I did on the vacation was get engaged to Catherine:

The first stop of the cruise was Nassau, Bahamas.

The picture below may be the Coding Hillbilly's house or it may be Chuck Norris' house. I'll leave it up to you to decide:

We only had one day in Nassau so we went snorkeling off of Pearl Island.

 

The next stop was St. Thomas. We decided to go to a small island off of St. Thomas called St. John which is a national park and my favorite part of the whole cruise. We went with my sister who works on the cruise ship.

 

The last stop of the cruise was Orient Beach in St. Maarten, Catherine's favorite stop on the cruise.

 

We then had a couple of days in Orlando, Florida so we went to Universal Studios where I had to save Catherine from getting eaten by Jaws and I got to see a Flux Capacitor.

I am halfway through my vacation in the Caribbean and right now I am sitting on a beach in St. Maarten having some kind of Guava alcoholic beverage.

Last Saturday, I asked my girlfriend to marry me and she said yes! Pictures to come later.

This weekend, Catherine and I participated in 2 charity walks this weekend. The first one was the Superwalk for Parkinson's. The Parkinson's Superwalk was extra special because of the passing of my Grandpa last week.

Thanks to everyone who was kind enough to donate, Catherine and I managed to raise over $1,000 for Parkinson's research, hopefully next year we wont have to! If you would still like to donate you can still sponsor me using the instructions here.

Today, Catherine and I also participated in the 15th Annual HIV/AIDS Walk for Life. We decided to bring along Daisy along for the walk and she got pretty tired after 1km so I ended up having to carry her for the rest (4km) of the walk.

 

 

Technorati Tags: parkinson's - hiv - aids - charity - walk

When my Grandpa was 17 he joined the Canadian Navy just for the free boots. Little did he know that during his service in the Navy he would meet Winston Churchill, become one of the first Candians to learn how to use radar, chase the Bismarck, ram a U-Boat and storm the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.

I loved hearing his stories about the war but despite the many adventures he had, he always spoke out against war. If you asked him, he would say that his greatest achievement was the family that he raised after the war.

My Grandpa passed away today. He was a great man who I respected a lot. The impact he had on my life will be carried with me until the day I die. I am not very good at putting it into words but I will miss him a lot.

September 23rd, Catherine and I will be doing the Parkinson's Superwalk at Rundle park here in Edmonton. I have been doing this walk for the past 3 years hoping that it is contributing to a finding a cure for Parkinson's.

Every year I do the walk for my Grandpa. This year is going to be tough because on my birthday this year my Grandpa was sent to the hospital suffering from the effects of Parkinson's and has not came out since.

This weekend, I am going back home to see him for what may be the last time so it would mean a lot to me if you could sponsor me (or if you don't like me sponsor Catherine) in this year's SuperWalk by clicking the link below:

Sponsor Me in the 2006 Parkinson's Superwalk

Thanks!

Update: I have been informed that people had problems with the previous link, I have updated the link but you will now have to put in the following information to sponsor me:

• First Name: Steven
• Last Name: Rockarts
• Province: Alberta
• City: Edmonton

I was pretty impressed with my girl today. I came home from work and sitting there waiting for me to  install it on her computer was an extra gig of ram. :)

The reason for the upgrade, so she could play WoW. Does this make her geekier than me?

[ Currently Playing : Blackstar - Radiohead - The Bends ]

Last weekend my Dad and I went to the 2nd annual West Edmonton Mall Grand Prix presented by the Brick at JAGflo speedway...I think they need to have less sponsors next year. Here is my recap of the race weekend.

During the 1st round of qualifying, Sebastian Bourdais set the best qualifying time with a time of 59.895 seconds right behind him was rival Paul Tracy with a time of 1:00.067.

The 3rd practice session was an interesting one with half of the drivers breaking the minute mark. The rookies Dan Clarke and Katherine Legge were both broke the minute mark in what ended up being their best times of the weekend. Katherine also broke the minute mark in the second qualifying round but the time didn't count because of a crash on the track.

 

In the second qualifying session, Bourdais once again had the best time of the session coming in at 58.560, with that time he also beat the track record set last year by A.J. Allmendinger. A big surprise was rookie Will Power's time of 59.460 which ended up being good enough for the 6th spot on the grid.

At the start of the race my money was on Sebastian Bourdais and Paul Tracy to have an incident  in the first turn but it ended up being Cristiano da Matta who ended up going into the tires.  Here is a low quality video of the first turn from my camera and a couple photos of the result:

First turn video

My money was on Nelson Philippe to win the race but he ended up crashing late in the race on turn 7.

 

The turning point of the race was when Justin Wilson beat Paul Tracy out of the pits, he narrowly avoided beating him out but it proved to be worth it. I was actually surprised when Wilson passed Bourdais for first on the back straight away, he made Bourdais look like he was lap traffic and ended up taking the checkered flag. Here is his celebration.

I have a lot more pictures up over at Flickr if you want to check out some good shots of the Atantic race and some additional champ car pictures from the weekend. Also, Mack has a recap of the weekend as well.

My summer is now officially over. I must've been watching too much soccer because last Wednesday while playing hockey, I turned my foot sideways to block a shot and the shot broke my foot. I went for x-rays last Thursday and today (Monday) they finally let me know that my foot was broken and indeed I did need a cast.

Today at at lunch I was walking to go renew my license and pick up a buss pass and I saw Niklas Lidstrom, Chris Chelios, and Robert Lang sitting outside a restaurant having lunch. 

They were finished eating so I said hi and wished them good luck for the next game. I have been a fan of the Red Wings for a long time so meeting them was pretty cool!

We lost our 2nd game in a row of the playoffs last night and in our league, losing 2 in a row means you are eliminated from the playoffs. Looking back on the hockey year I had my best year since I joined the league 3 years ago:  

Player	GP	GLS	ASTS	TPTS
STEVE ROCKARTS	25	32	28	60

I also had a good 2 games in the playoffs with 3 goals 2 assists and a shootout goal in 2 games. So it was heartbreaking to lose last night.

On the bright side, I will be able to watch the Oilers play the Red Wings in the playoffs. I managed to get 2 tickets to game 6 so hopefully the series goes to game 6.

Today also officially marks 2 TV season. I love watching 2–3 hockey games simultaneously in the first round, there is always tons of action.

This week was a busy one for me and I am looking forward to relaxing a bit this weekend. At the start of the week I played 3 hockey games in 4 nights, we ended up losing 2 of them and winning one. By Wednesday it felt like it was already Friday.

On Thursday The Igloo Coder, a coworker and I took a 3 hour road trip down to Calgary to see Scott Hanselman speak on DasBlog . It was a great presentation that seemed to get off track at times but when it did go off track it was still informative and interesting. I also got the opportunity to ask Scott about some code I am trying to add to Dasblog and got a couple of tips on how to improve it.

It was nice to see a good turnout at the presentation, the Calgary user groups really have their act together down there. There was probably between 50–75 people at the presentation. I got the chance to speak with a couple of presenters that expressed interest in coming up to Edmonton to present and hopefully the will come out to the Edmonton Code Camp.

The next trip down to Calgary will probably be for the Calgary Code Camp in May.

Now playing: Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Phenomena

I just found out today that our estimated condo date has been delayed until June or July and it couldn’t make me any happier!

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Despite rain, sleet, snow, ice, multiple road closures due to accidents and road closures due to avalanche patrol we finally made it safely in just under 17 hours. As a bonus I got to see East Hastings street.....good times. We could've flown 4 times back and forth between Edmonton and Vancouver.

The weather is nice here so it was probably worth it. I am going to try and go see the World Jrs. Apparently I can get seats to USA vs. Norway on boxing day.

I have to get going now and have some beers and go check in at the hotel.

Today is Christmas Eve for me. This year we are going to Catherine's parent's house on the 25th for Christmas so my family is celebrating Christmas tomorrow at our house tomorrow. 

Some things about this year's Christmas worked in my favour:

- I finished my Christmas shopping last Monday, this beats my old record by about 10 days.

- This year I wasn't allowed to wrap any presents because, to put it bluntly, I suck at wrapping presents. My technique usually involves a lot more wrapping paper than I really need and way too much hockey tape that holds everything together. I do think however, that my Chirstmas present wrapping technique makes Christmas last longer because getting into presents that are from me often involves a knife, a bottle of whiskey and some gumption.

This year because we are going to Vancouver I am going to be missing Christmas with my Dad's side of the family. This is both good and a bad.

The bad thing about missing Christmas on my Dad's side is that this year is my Grandma and Grandpa's 60th wedding anniversary and I am going to miss it. Catherine and I will have to make a special trip to visit them in January.

The good thing about missing Christmas on my Dad's side is that last year my Grandma decided to serve fruitcake that was from 1984 (I am not kidding), this prompted the best line of Christmas 2004 to come from my Grandpa "fruit cake is like a good scotch, the older it is the better it gets". I coudln't have said it better myself.

Sick of moving your eyes over all those "words" on my blog?  Well now you don't have to!  All of my blog posts are now automatically podcasted (read to you for the non-nerds in the crowd) using Feed2Podcast.  Now you can listen to me on your commute to work, school or on long road trips.

The Feed2Podcast service is free and I am impressed with how they slip their ad in at the end of the post, very casual.

Subscribe to the feed here. Or using the link in the Links section on this webpage. 

Catherine posted some pictures of our condo (warning sign not included) on her blog. We got a letter the other day asking us to pick out our options.

Yesterday night around 9 (I didn't know delivery workers worked that late) I received my parent's new eMachine computer that I bought them for Christmas. I was a bit worried because the tracking information said that it was delayed due to a train derailment. Besides a scratch on the case the hardware was all ok, no noticable train derailment damage.

I waited for the computer to warm up and then fired I it up. It is incredibly fast....waaay faster than my machine.

Here are the steps I took to make it a bit more user friendly for my parents:

- I then decided to load it up with parent safe software (firewall, anti-spyware, anti-virus, anti-phishing).

- I configured it to run under a user account instead of admin.

- I configured it to automatically download security updates.

- I added a tool so they can find out their IP address so I can remote desktop into their computer and fix things for them. Plus I added a remote desktop shortcut on the desktop so that they can find it easily.

- I added the Google toolbar since they often ask me "how do I find stuff on the internet".

- I added links on the IE toolbar to just about every site they would want to visit (including this one).

- I added Microsoft Office.

- I installed the .NET framework 2.0 just for kicks.

Hopefully they will use the computer now that they have one that is over 200mhz. I hope I didn't miss anything further. If anyone has any ideas of software that will make my parents foray into the computing world easier, I would be happy to hear it.