Unfortunately we didn’t get a picture of the five of us because we’re kind of dumb, but here’s a couple that show everyone from Carrie’s Flickr set of the trip (because I didn’t bring our camera along!):

(Lushes.) The top picture is from Future Bakery, and the bottom from the Victory Cafe. It was a pleasant surprise to me how easy it was to find places to flop on a patio that were kid-friendly, and with the heat and all the walking we did a lot of flopping.

It was a fun weekend on the face of it, but it was also great because this is the first time the five of us have all been together. Candice and I met Carrie for the first time at Trevor and Jenny’s wedding back last September. What happened next is complicated, but Carrie and I learned we had had an old mutual crush on each other, helped each other through some hard times in the month or so after that wedding (Carrie was a big help in my decision to withdraw from the MBA, for instance), ended up pretty close, and we had been struggling since to try to find the best way to remain a part of each other’s lives in a way that made our families feel safe and respected (and through a lot of change on Candice’s and my part, with me leaving school and us moving to Toronto!).

That hasn’t been easy, but this weekend things clicked. Misunderstandings cleared up; Jason and I finally met and got along well (and we learned we share an awful sense of humour, to the point where we were often racing to make the same bad pun first); Amie took to me so well that Candice and Carrie were calling me her boyfriend; and the whole thing was just comfortable. It felt like family, which was sort of a goal that Carrie and I had talked about months ago but which I sometimes thought was impossible.

What better way to finish off than this:

(And for those keeping track, now you know #23.)

On Father’s Day we drove back to Belleville to go out to dinner with my father, the first long drive we’ve done in the caar since my trips back and forth to Ottawa while Candice was still living there and me here. About halfway home: grindy noise! It came and went but performance, temperature and so on didn’t seem affected, and I noticed a wobbly pulley, so I figured it’d get us back to Toronto fine (and it did) and then I could take it in.

A couple days later, I had a new A/C compressor, and the wobbly pulley (and the serpentine belt) replaced too. And parts are not cheap for this old Swede.

Combine that with how often we drive — I filled up the tank for that trip, and before that the previous fill-up was March 25 — and the crazy cost of car insurance living in downtown TO, and the conclusion jumps out at you: We really don’t need a car here.

I take the TTC or my bike to work every day. Candice walks a few blocks to work. Grocery stores are even closer. Whenever we head downtown or to the Annex or Queen West we just take the TTC or walk. Hell, we don’t even have parking — the car is on the street all the time. And for the odd errand that does require a car, we can just use Zipcar or Autoshare in town and a regular car rental for road trips, and come in way, way under what we’re paying to have a car sit on the street, even though the car’s fully paid for.

I was car-free in Montreal from 1994 to 2001, but then as soon as I moved to Ottawa I bought the Saab, partly because Ottawa (and the neighbourhood I was living in) was pretty car-heavy, and partly because I had the disposable income and an excuse. But for someone who’s read car mags since childhood, I didn’t find car ownership all that fun. Too much maintaining and not enough spirited driving, maybe? Or maybe too sensible a car, or maybe too sensible a place to drive.

(The same thing happened with the motorcycle, I think. I’m not sure why, specifically.)

So the car’s going for sale later this year. Not sure when yet. Not looking forward to the process one bit, either! But I’ll be back to car-free soon, and I’m pretty happy with that, and especially happy living somewhere where I can, and not be too inconvenienced or treated like a freak for relying on transit.

But it seems that aside from reminding myself of what I’d like to be doing, there’s always these tiny little things that motivate me right then. That shouldn’t be a huge surprise, I suppose, since the whole point of the book is motivation and Covey is a motivational speaker, but it’s nice that it happens. I never post about those little things because they’re usually really obvious, and sometimes the impact of really obvious things doesn’t come across well online.

This time around it was this:

What one thing could you do (you aren’t doing now) that if you did on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in your life?

The first implication, of course, is “Then why aren’t you doing it?” — but the central thesis of the entire book is that there are many usual reasons that you’re not, and that it’s a lot of work to develop such that you can get past those. The second implication is that once you’re doing that, you’ll find another One Thing. And Covey’s explanation for why you’re not doing it is that it’s always a Quadrant II activity — “important but not urgent” — and the Quadrant I and III activities (“important and urgent” and “urgent but not important”) crowd out Quadrant II without effort to the contrary — but that’s detail. Just the seed of the idea is enough for now. If I’m not working towards finding and doing it, what am I waiting for?

(And while digging up the exact quote I thought of another three or four ideas I want to write about, but I know people can only take so much of Seven Habits, so you’re safe for now.)

I forgot that I wouldn’t have a router right away, so I ended up getting a Speedtouch 516 DSL modem configured as a bridge, so I’m using Windows’ own PPPOE client until the move.

Next up is VOIP. I’m leaning towards Unlimitel because Babytel never replied to my email sent to their support address (pilot error: sent to .com instead of .ca), but there’s still a little shopping to do there. New blog theme/approach coming soon too, although that’s just fitting in the quiet moments of which there have been few lately.

Work is going awesome. I’m moving support over to RT any day now, have a huge set of projects and to-dos to drill through, and have really been given pretty much full ownership over my areas of responsibility already. (And everyone’s so great to work with!)

Off to Dan’s tonight for pizza, beer and conversation. (We tried this last week but I made it a block before I decided it was time to take a rain check and get the car in for a brake job right away. I lucked out in that a great garage happens to be exactly one block away from me, and Frank at Master Mechanic on Dupont and Concord took it in on no notice and did good work at a good price, which was nice considering I needed a garage on short notice in a strange city.)

Movers are scheduled: pack on the 25th, load on the 28th, unload a couple of days later. Final stretch!

Embrace joy

Inspire hope

Cultivate love

Build intimacy

Celebrate life

Couldn’t put it better myself, folks. May all beings be happy in 2008 and after.

Perhaps I was onto something when I concluded that there was little to no Internet industry left in Ottawa, and that it was concentrated in Toronto.

Perhaps.

(Of course, if you have DSL advice for me and I forgot to email you, I’m accepting it here too!)

Work continues to go well. Tomorrow’s the release of a new version of FreshBooks. It’s really too early for me to be involved hands-on in a new release, but I’ll at least get to see the procedure. I also took a few photos of the office. A bit of a difference from before, eh?

Other than actual work time, I’m pretty much ready for these two “advance weeks” to end. I need to get Christmas over with so I can concentrate on the move. Things have been fine here, but I’m just ready to head home for a bit, and then to head over to new-home here. Driving has been a real pain with the big snowfall, since I still don’t entirely know my way around, roads are about half a lane narrower, and parking has been up at the air both at the apartment and at work because of snow everywhere. Once I get into the new apartment and start doing public transportation pretty much everywhere I think that’ll improve a bit.

Thursday night’s the office Christmas party, which should be fun. That forces my hand on shopping: I must pick up something silly for the gift “exchange” by tomorrow night, so I’ll brave heading downtown then. (Downtown should be easy — walk over to Yonge and Eglinton, subway down to Queen. But everything’s just a little disorienting because of the snow and the busy-ness.)

Four (maybe three!) sleeps until I see Candice again, though! Yay!

I’m in Toronto! I got here on Saturday morning with Candice. We spent the weekend seeing apartments — 6 or 8 on Saturday, and then two on Sunday, staying at the Holiday Inn on Bloor at St. George. Most of the apartments we looked at on Saturday were roughly along St. Clair around Avenue or Yonge. We found some, and nearly went for one that would have stretched our budget quite a bit — until we saw this!

So Sunday we started out a little discouraged. And then we saw The Apartment, which I’ll talk about in a second, and then another one that was just as cute but up at St. Clair and Dufferin which was deemed too far away from the subway. We went out for dinner for Candice’s birthday to Coco Lezzone in Little Italy, which was good but not spectacular. (We’d forgotten to account for the difficulty in finding good dining on Sunday night here.) And then before we went to bed Sunday night I emailed about The Apartment.

Let’s talk about The Apartment for a moment: tonight I signed our lease! We now have an apartment (well, for January 1, but I have the keys) on Delaware Avenue, just west of Ossington and just south of Dupont. It’s right near here.

It’s a cute, medium-sized 1-bedroom on the main floor of a house, with hardwood floors, glass block walls, a giant kitchen, and a freakin’ backyard. How great is that? It’s two blocks from Ossington station, and not far from the Dufferin bus that will take me straight to the door at work. The photo of the house at right is linked to a Flickr set of the apartment, as yanked from the Craigslist ad that we found it with.The only downside: street parking, but there seems to be lots of room on that block alone whenever I’m over there.

Anyhow, back to the timeline: On Monday morning, I left the hotel and drove straight to FreshBooks World Headquarters, up on Dufferin just a bit south of Lawrence. The first day was a little bit hairy — not quite sure what I was expected to do, my manager was in interviews for most of the morning, I was stumbling around OS X for the first time ever, I was thinking about missing Candice, and I hadn’t yet seen the place I would be living for the next two weeks! But even then it was fine. Day Two felt like a “first day”, though, so the hairiness is irrelevant now. Days three and four had me doing a bunch of email support (best way to learn the product!) and finding my way around a bit more, and things are coming together pretty well.

I think it’s going to be a blast there. My coworkers are smart and a lot of fun and we seem to have much in common, and everyone, employees and customers, are really excited about the software. I’ll have plenty of interesting projects once I get up to speed on the sysadmin side, and I’ll have my fingers in a bit of the dev side as well from the sounds of things.

(I should’ve taken some pictures of the office. Drat. Also, I like OS X a lot, and need to find a way to get Candice and I MacBooks.)

Let’s see, what else? Until the new year I’m staying in Mike McDerment’s place, near Eglinton and Mt. Pleasant. Easy drive in, apartment to myself, lots around it. I’m driving back to Ottawa every weekend, and am going to be there over the holiday perineum, to see Candice and help pack up the apartment. Went over to Dan‘s to have a couple beers Tuesday night, was nice to socialize a bit, but found out just before I left that there was no beer — so went around the corner from Mike’s to the Granite Brewpub, who offer growlers of their beers to go. Their Peculier was just right.

All in all things have been overwhelming and exhausting and awesome.

However, today I left my gloves at the Future Bakery (at which I had their all-day breakfast for dinner tonight, $7 for omelet, toast, home fries, fruit, and coffee). Oh, well. Can’t have everything go right, I guess!

Rich likes chili
Originally uploaded by nyxie

Candice took this at Memories in the market this weekend. I couldn’t not post it. Om nom nom.

As of December 10th I’ll be the Network Operations Manager at FreshBooks, the company I mentioned previously. They’re a little startup in Toronto whose product is a Web-based invoicing and time-tracking application, directed primarily at freelancers, creatives, and small businesses. It’s a nice, clean, well-thought-out SaaS app, with a third-party developers’ API, Basecamp integration and more. (You can sign up for a free account which will be loaded with test data if you want to take a look, which I encourage you to do!)

The interview last Monday went really well — it basically turned into a two-hour chat between me, Levi the CIO, and developers Ben and Justin. I like to think the fit seemed pretty obvious to everyone, but it definitely did to me. I’ll primarily be responsible for their application architecture, the server-and-database-side half of things that isn’t developing the program itself, but there’ll be development and customer-facing bits to it as well. I’m really looking forward to going back to a startup. They’ve got about a dozen people right now all in one loft-style office, which is even smaller than e-smith was when I joined them.

And yes, Toronto — which means we’ll be moving in the new year. I’m going to be living out of the CEO’s unused apartment for December, and then hopefully we’ll have found an apartment up there for Jan 1, at which point I’ll be living there with minimal furniture until Candice joins me at the beginning of February. It’ll be a crazy couple of months, but we’re pretty excited — no, really excited — about how it’ll all turn out!

Thought I should update everyone on what’s up with my life: after a whole lot of self-reflection and investigating alternatives and looking at cities and some much-needed unwinding time, I’ve started to get things back in gear again.

The current plan is to stay in IT, and look for positions that are well-suited to my sysadmin experience first here in Ottawa, and then failing that in Toronto. We considered Vancouver but decided it was too far away and too much of a “well wouldn’t it be neat” rather than a practical alternative.

Before I explain the city thing, here’s the lazyweb portion of today’s post:

I’m working on my resume right now and I’ll link to it when I’m done, but here’s how I’ve narrowed down the last twelve years for the “summary” section of my resume, which I use instead of an “objective”:

• Senior Unix system administrator with 12 years Linux experience, 6 years Solaris experience, also comfortable in Windows
• Internet mail, DNS, and anti-spam expert
• 7 years experience with MySQL performance tuning and high availability in an Apache-based web environment
• Experienced writing software including Web applications in Perl and PHP, and debugging software and Unix kernels in C

For those of you who know me semi-professionally, does that sound like an accurate summary? Is there something in there that you feel like you should call my bluff on? Something that you associate with me that’s left out? I mean, there’ll be a lot more detail in the rest of the resume, but that’s me in a nutshell, and that’s also how I’m shaping the job search, too.

As for cities: the main reason we’re looking hard in Ottawa first is that it’s a real big pain for Candice to move, since she’s spent the last year and a half establishing her massage practice here in Ottawa. She takes her experience and education with her, sure, but she leaves her client list, and it could easily take another year to build things up again elsewhere — and doubly so since she’d have to learn the markets and dynamics of another big city while she built things up again.

But Ottawa is not a great environment for me to find things in. A lot of the IT work here is either entry-level — call centre, desktop support, and so on — or it’s government contract, which often requires bilingualism, secret or top-secret security clearances, and tends to be mostly Windows-oriented. And then there’s a big chunk of private high-tech that is in the military/defense world which I can’t do.

So I’ve basically realized that at this point I do have a career, and that’s one of a predominantly Internet-oriented Unix sysadmin, and that I owe it to myself to find a job that builds on that instead of just any IT job with “administrator” in the title.

Anyway, back to resume-writing for me. I’ll post again when I’m done that in case any of you think you know of someone that could use someone like me!