I know that it is early in the year twenty O six but I am already proclaiming jPod by Douglas Coupland to be the best (and also my favorite) book of the year. A lot of things in the book remind me of my work day at TG and of the tech industry as well. You will relate to a lot of things in this book if you are a programmer. 

Anyway, go buy the book. It is better than reading this.

I have been playing with Ruby a lot lately just for fun. I was pumped today to see Don Box on his blog that there is a Ruby programming IDE and debugger for Visual Studio 2005. Awesome!

Left side = Justice from Gray's Matter
Right side = Mike Score from A Flock of Seagulls

Ouch!

We got word today that our next speaker has confirm for May 25th! The next speaker is...Rod Paddock of Dash Point software, CoDe Magazine and CodeBetter.com. I must say this is pretty cool, I am a fan of CoDe Magazine, it is a great magazine for .NET developers and their user group support is awesome.

I couldn't have asked for a better birthday present than the first meeting of the Edmonton .Net User Group. Jean-Paul Boodhoo came in and gave a killer talk on Test Driven Development using .NET. A lot of light bulbs went off for me during the talk. Jean-Paul is a first class presenter and person and if you can convince him to speak to your user group it will pay off.

On the drive to the talk, one thing that really inspired me was Jean-Paul's statement that we are the next generation of developers and that the same old group of presenters are getting outdated. It kind of changed the way I am going to go about looking for presenters for future meetings.

Be sure to download the code from the presentation here and try and complete the solution. Later you can compare what you came up with to the finished product.

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.

Dr. Dobbs has went online with his site: http://www.ddj.com. Besides the video that starts automatically on every page it is a pretty cool site, I found a Steve McConnell MP3 on software estimation and an article on Dependancy Injection and Testable Objects. This site looks like it has potential.