So, despite completely spacing the voting, I just walked into the Keynote session to see my name up on the big screen winning second place. Wow. I'm totally surprised, and honored. Thanks to everyone who voted for the Virtual Earth Tile Server, and if you have used it, and made changes - please be sure to submit the fixes / updates / patches etc. either to me, or directly into the subversion repository. To get write access into the repository you need to be a member of the project @ Assembla.com - just shoot me an email (contact link above), and I'll send you an invite.

I would list the other two winners, but honestly I was too floored to take notes.

Again - thanks to everyone who voted!

Since leaving my former employer, I've gotten quite a few emails along the lines of "congratulations, I wish I could..."

The thing is anyone can make a major life change - all it takes is a few things:

1) Recognizing the status quo is not working for you, and

2) Get inspired and create a plan of action

I can't help you much on the first one, but if you make it to #2, here are some things that can help.

Inspiration

Four Hour Work Week - Timothy Ferriss 

Getting down to four hours may be pushing it, but there are lots of great ideas in this book. It's pretty focused on setting up a "hands off" business, but the other "zen" ideas are really good - mini-retirements, long international trips, becoming an expert etc.

TED Presentations

TED finds great speakers who talk about really cool stuff. These are inspiring - start with Hans Rosling - who would not want to work with/for him? What I think it so great about these presentations is that you see people who are genuinely excited about what they are doing. Given the general level of job dis-satisfaction today, it's good to be able to identify real enthusiasm when you see it.

Free Prize Inside and The Big Moo (Seth Godin)

You could also add in all his other books, but these are two that I have read. They are both packed with good ideas - from how to stand out in an organization, selling your ideas, and marketing 2.0. It's worth noting that if you are planning a change, reading about marketing is good - even if the only thing you market is yourself.

Presentation Zen Blog

Like it or not, Power Point is in your future. The difference between an average (i.e. painful) presentation and great presentation is easily seen, yet difficult to produce. This blog covers all things related to giving presentations from slide design to  speaking tips. It also has lots of links to great presentations.

Finally, when you need to vent, but can't actually yell at your boss, head over to True Office Confessions and let it all out (anonymously). It's also comforting to know that you are not alone.

I spent a fair chunk of my free time this weekend dealing with a jacked up hard disk on my home PC. I have a Shuttle XP for my home box, and it only one drive can fit in the case, so any drive issues are serious - all the cookies are in the same jar!

I had a 160GB Western Digital Caviar disk, which I partitioned into 4 ~40GB drives. I noticed that things were running a bit slow, and figured it may be time for a defrag. When I opened Disk Manager, it seemed that my "F" drive had disappeared. Or,more specifically that everything on it was gone, as Disk Manager was noting that it had 100% free space. Uh oh! This was the drive that held all our digital photos - specifically 30Gb of photos. Thankfully I have a local back up on a USB drive (runs weekly), and an off-site backup @ Mozy.com, so at worst we may have lost a few days of photos.

Right about this time, everything on the machine started to bog down. File Explorer would hang, "cd-ing" in a command prompt was dicy at best. I managed to setup a check disk (chkdsk /f) on the C: drive and rebooted. After a lot of thrashing, XP came back up - slightly more stable.

I was able to copy pretty much everything else that I wanted off the other partitions before the disk failed outright, so that was good.

Anyhow - this was the perfect excuse to get a 10,000 RPM disk, and upgrade to Vista. I popped out to BestBuy and grabbed a Western Digital Raptor, and then started downloading the Vista Ultimate ISO image from MSDN. After about 2 hours it was done, and burned to a DVD. I booted from the DVD, and in less than 30 minutes I had Vista up and running. Smooth as silk.

Now I just need to spend a few hours installing everything!

Just a quick update on getting our office setup. In the last post on Building our Rigs, we were still in Chris Spagnuolo's house. We have since moved into our "temporary" space while our final home is being built-out (more on that as the plans get finalized and construction starts!)

So let's take a look around. As I noted before, we all have 3 monitor setups. It's as good as you'd think. The workstation itself seems really fast, and the other guys have been really happy with the performance while developing. I've been traveling and setting up servers and the network so I'll report back when I've had a chance to really beat on it.

As you can see I'm currently rocking the Home Depot desk. We're still waiting for our Ikea desks to arrive, but a sheet of plywood and some sawhorses work quite well.  Since we went with the very economical Ikea desks we could afford Herman Miller Mirra chairs. Besides being a little less expensive than the Aeron, these are 96% recyclable. We gave these a test run at Rally when we visited them a while back.

Speaking of recycling, setting up an office generates an awful pile of waste from the packaging. We're trying to recycle what we can, but these two bags are full of Styrofoam and other non-recyclable plastics. This pile is just from the packaging for the chairs, the printer and some other misc office supplies.

We have been able to put some of the cardboard boxes to some good use...

We'll get a rack once we move to the new space, but for now our servers have to make do with what we've got. Speaking of servers, we got Dell PowerEdge's with Xeon LV chips - they are supposed to use significantly less power than the standard Xeon chips. We are running 3 physical machines for now.

Our the File Server / Domain Controller and the SQL / Oracle servers have a single Quad Core Xeon CPU, and ~500GB RAID5.

Our App Server has two Quad Core Xeons, 8GB Ram, and two 15k disks. We'll be running AGS and IMS on the base OS, and other stuff as needed in VMs.

We just barely got them up and running last week, but I can say this - they be FAST. And just disregard that tangled mess that is supposed to pass for a "built in networking panel". We''ll be keeping an eye on whoever is wiring up the new space for us, and ensure that we get a patch panel rather than another one of these!

Our server room also does double duty as a separated recycling storage area. Separating this stuff before you take it to the recycling center makes it so much easier.

So that's about it for now. After the new year we'll be getting a serious firewall so we can start hosting demo sites, and other fun stuff. Construction build out will start mid-January.

As many of you know, I am Canadian, and I live in Colorado. After more than 10 years on a variety of work visa's tied to an employer, this September, I finally got my "Green Card". What this means is that I can now work for anyone, doing anything. Not that I've been yearning to flip burgers at a fast food joint, but now I could.

During the last few years - while the green card was "in processing", I did some reflecting, and decided that while I enjoyed what I was doing, I really needed a change of pace, and vertical market. So after receiving the green card, I did a quick job search, and submitted my resignation on October 31st.

Agile to the End…

For the past two weeks I have been working on documenting all my projects and responsibilities. In order to ensure this process went as smoothly as possible, the transition team utilized Scrum to ensure high-priority items were documented during the available time. All in all, the process went as well as could be expected given the circumstances.

My New Home…

Today I started with the new company. At this time, we are still discussing what linkage (if any) there will be between them and my blog, so for now, they will remain nameless. I will say they are wicked-cool, and have been great to work with up to this point.

As for my role, I will still be designing & developing GIS systems using Agile methodologies. I expect that most of the work will be with the ESRI platform, but with a much larger focus on web-based solutions. I'm very excited about this change, and will be sure to post more in the coming days.

Thanks!

As I move on, I also wanted to say thanks to all those I have worked with over the past years (and especially the transition team) - I wish you all the best in the future, and look forward to catching up at conferences.

Thought I'd share a little about my summer project.  No it's not GIS or software related - hence the "life" category tag.

Around May of this year, a co-worker (who shall remain unnamed since he bailed on actually doing it) asked me if I'd be interested in doing the Laramie Enduro mountain bike race. Now, I'm not a "racer" by any means, but I'd heard about this event in the past and thought it sounded like an "interesting" ride. About all I knew is that friends had said it was "long", and it was in Wyoming.

A little background - the Laramie Enduro is a 70 mile / 111 kilometer mountain bike suffer-fest, held at the end of July (hot) just east of Laramie Wyoming. In the abstract, 70 miles sounds long, but still not to bad. Throw in the fact that it's all dirt, about half single track, at least 7,500 feet in elevation with 6700 feet of climbing, and it gets a little more daunting. Add to that conversations with various friends who are serious cyclists, and who say this is a very hard ride, and you start to get a little worried. After a lot of training (~600 miles) I got up to doing 55 mile rides on a regular basis, at which point I realized that 70 miles was indeed very long. Very very long. For those interested in checking it out, here's a link to some KML on Google Maps showing the course.

Fast forward to last Saturday, July 28,2007 - race day.  The short story is that I finished in an unremarkable 9 hours and 30 minutes total time, with a riding time of just over 8:30. The longer story involved getting up at 5:00am, making poor breakfast choices, much internal debate about pulling out of the race at the last few aid stations, consuming more Gu than I thought was possible, and a furious ride up the final, dreaded "Headquarters Hill" when I found out (by riding up half of it without realizing I was on it) that it was much much easier than the hills I'd been training on (fyi - if you're in Fort Collins, ride Michaud as a prep for this race). 

Overall, this was easily the hardest thing I've every done, yet, I'm already  planning on doing it next year and plotting out more appropriate training rides.

One thing that I realized, in reflecting back on this, is that the hardest part for me was dealing with the "psychic weight" of not knowing what was coming up next. Aid stations were spaced about 10 miles apart. You could pull out at an aid station with little risk, but if you were out on course and  bonked, cramped up, got hurt etc, it could be a few hours before anyone got to you. Since the latter sounded extremely unpleasant, I was leaning to pull myself out at each station. Yet, within minutes of leaving the station this fear melted away, and I knew I would make it to the next station just fine.
Yet, the unknown aspect was making me ride very conservatively - never pushing too hard for fear that I'd have tapped out all my reserves prior to "Headquarters Hill". Anyhow - most of this is for those who know me, and those who may Google for the Laramie Enduro looking for info, but I did briefly think about trying to tie this anxiety of the unknown back to software development, but I think I'll leave this as a pure "life" posting.

Steve of the Sacramento Citron-Pousty's tagged me for this little disclosure.

 
1) While programming, I really like to crank trance / techno music. Can't stand it any other time, but I've got a big pile of Paul Oakenfold etc. for hammering out code. Go figure...

2) Despite being a life long geek (I had a Commodore PET way back in the day), I somehow also got into skateboarding. Apparently I was pretty good, as I was sponsored by a local skateshop (or maybe there were not many skaters). Being as I lived in Ottawa, Canada, and skateboarding was not socially acceptable at that time, there were very few skate ramps. The one time I did get on a big ramp (16 footer), I slammed and busted my nose.

3) I am a chill/ambient music junkie (maybe this transcends from the techno thing?). Ambient Nights is a great free collection if you've not checked this out before. Reminds me of chillin on a beach in Thailand, sippin Mai Tai's.

4) When I started at COGS (wow that's a podunk web site for a very good school!), my plan was to go work for ESRI in Redlands. HOwever, the plan changed when I met (now my wife) Jill, and thus we are in Fort Collins.

5) Despite egging on every American I know to get out and vote, I have not voted in a Canadian election in 10+ years. Maybe it's because I figure that if the most extreme lunatic gets elected there, they will have little net negative effect on the world. As we have seen, this is not the case in America. 

Apparently I get to pass this on. Who's up? How about Art Haddad, Brian Flood, and Glenn Letham.

Not sure who get's to officially "call" a snowday, but I've got 2 feet of snow outside my garage door, and an alley with 3 foot drifts in it, so I'm not going anywhere today! Here are some pics...