Tony Lepage

This past weekend, I went to the Toronto Art Expo and found some wonderful art that I’d love to get my hands on. I went with the intention of buying but quickly found that the art I wanted was way out of my price range.

I became particularly obsessed with the art by Peter Harris. One particular piece, Night Vision 31, is arguably the best Harris brought to the show. It has great placement of color, highlighted with solid lines against well placed value. The reflections in the rain show welcome impressionist influence. Amazingly, the dominant style appears to be realism, yet the subject matter feels of irony and abandonment while giving a sense of surrealism. I want it on my bare wall. The problem is, I am not sure if I want just one large work, or a couple slightly smaller matching ones. Oh boy the choices seem never ending now.

Some other artists that caught my eye:

• Gisel Bouliane
• Miguel Freitas
• Joseph Sampson
• Karl Au-Yeung
• Won-Ju Jeong
• Desmond Donnelly

Luckily, I’ve created a budget so that I can invest and spend but the largest obstacle to this budget remains my habits. I love to spend my money and most of the time, I love spending more than I should. Because I’ve started to save and file all my receipts, I’ve noticed that its the little things that have been taking the biggest toll. Buying take-out & clothes, using the cash machine and going out all adds up quickly. I have my eye on a couple large items so these smaller things can and will be cut!

Aside from spontaneous art, I’ve been looking into cameras and would like to buy a Nikon SLR next month. A flickr account is my inspiration. Hopefully, I’ll follow this budget and fill my wall with art and photos.

Thanks go out to Nara for all the comments and the linkback! I’m a regular lurker of her blog and I frequently laugh outloud at the humerous reporting of Chris and Nara’s adventures in Korea. I promise to start commenting!

Check out her blog here.

Me: “I can dedicate two hours a day for eight days to have it completed.”

[Great! This way I can work on my other tasks and have time at night to work if the project is harder than expected.]

Manager: “If my math serves me correctly, two times eight is sixteen. That’s two days, we need you to work on this primarily because the application and related documents need to be packaged on Friday.”

Manager: “Can you have the app completed for Wednesday. Are your estimates correct?”

[Doh!]

Me: “Yes.”

[What is wrong with me?!]

I just learned my first lesson as an IBMer. When you give an estimate, be sure to leave a comfort zone so that if anything unexpected arises, you’ll have time to deal with it. No one knows how fast I can perform, so leave some extra safety padding!

What exactly do I have to do? Well, our team creates courseware for the training clients. All of the courses we have need to be updated for the new version of our software. The first on our priority list is a course directed at the business thinkers. This course needs some serious revamping. As it stands, students will have to install some software in order to use it. This brings up all kinds of problems because this audience will have little or no experience doing this type of work—and it shouldn’t be necessary.

Because our software is middleware (well, not exactly), there are plans to create an interface available through the internet. This is perfect because users will only need to have an up to date browser installed on their machine to take part in the course. This also helps us avoid a pile of licensing issues and installation headaches.

I volunteered to create a Ruby on Rails interface and woo everyone with its splendor, elegance and functionality. The problem is I have no experience integrating RoR with enterprise applications. It’s taken me a long time just figuring out where to start. I’m also quite new to RoR AND J2EE! My biggest hurdle is making the RoR communicate with an EJB, or Session Bean. Once that is done, the joy of RoR will allow me to add all my functionality with ease.

Because I will be creating courseware on a daily basis, I will also post a tutorial because I don’t think there is a single resource on the internet dealing with this task.

Hopefully I can develop this as I am envisioning because it will do wonders for my reputation.

Oral Allergy Syndrome, or OAS, that’s the technical name for my self diagnosed “burning mouth disease.” 

I got today off to get tested for allergies, finally, after a 9 month wait for the appointment. It has set me far behind in my preparations for a meeting I have tomorrow. On the bright side, I can confidently add another couple allergies to my list: birch trees, grass and dust mites.

Here’s the kicker, when I eat any pitted fruits my body thinks that I’m eating a birch tree. Yup, and it reacts as if I’m allergic. Thats the non-technical definition of OAS. Luckily, I’m not part of the 4% of people with this syndrome that have worse reactions. In fact, I can continue to eat these fruit as long as I stop as soon as the reaction happens (unfortunately, lately that has been after about 3 bites).

I guess I should get to work now that I’ve made it easier for murderers to kill me by posting my weaknesses on the internet.

• Home-buying intent weakens
• Ignoring Silver Bad for Your Financial Health
• The U.S. and China’s savings problem

It’s interesting because these types of topics are coming to the front of regular news programming. I’ve certainly noticed RobTV has been talking about Gold (and Silver, etc) for about a year now but now CNN is picking it up a bit.

Here’s a thought: Since we’ll all end up playing the game, why not know the rules?

Thanks to Andrew for these links!

I used to be an outspoken google user. I used to admire the fact they acquired Usenet so that everyone could use it. I certainly love the idea of unlimited email space and I know many investors who love an $80 IPO that flies to over $500.

Then they censored google.cn.

Now I wonder if my search results are compromised. I don’t wonder if it will happen, I wonder when. I wonder why they don’t answer questions about reporting search engine usage to the department of homeland security. Why is the google cookie set to expire in 2038? Why do they need search data for this long? For all the hype that surrounds google, there is certainly a lot of shade. 

>> EPIC 2014

EDIT: This article seems to suggest that google DOES in fact plan to implement the Google GRID as portrayed in the above link

This is my first chance to write an update because I’ve been very busy. I promise to make more frequent updates and to keep them exciting.

First off, I took a job with IBM at their Toronto software labs. I am working within the EMDS group. My team is part of an acquisition by IBM of DWL. What am I doing? Well, I have a lot to do. I am a Learning Specialist and it is my job to develop education materials. We’ll create documents and deliver lectures to our own implementation teams, so that they can install the software, and we’ll train the IT departments of our customers, so that they can use and customize our software. Over the next few months, I’ll become certified in many things, including Rational Software Development Environment, J2EE and WebSphere, plus many more I haven’t decided on yet. Bluntly speaking, I’ll learn more over the next 6 months than I did throughout the last 2 years of university. However, I’m very happy with this because it will give me the opportunity to show big blue what I’m made of and I’ll be well compensated for it.

I’ve moved into an apartment building beside the Don Mills subway station in Toronto. It’s also on the Viva Bus line which makes it very convenient to get to work without needing a transfer and not needing to purchase a vehicle. Buying a vehicle is something I am seriously attempting to avoid. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that I think I can do much more with my cash beside dump it into a devaluing piece of crap.

Here is a video I made with my sister for a school project while I was at home in December/January. It made me re-discover my love of video editing. Watch for some more videos soon. Although it is not too brilliant, it scored her an excellent mark and we had a very limited time to produce it.

I’m going to be buying a new digital SLR and can already think of a few photos I want to take. I’m going to open a flickr account to keep my photos in. If I’m going to be travelling, I better learn how to take good photos. I also plan to replace the picture in the header very soon. I had to install some blog software because I was getting spam comments in excess. I have had to delete over one thousand comments too many times. It is hard to manually delete comments from a database while not deleting the real comments.

Expect this blog to be updated every couple of days from now on. For now, I’m going to watch the Oscars and… Damn, Salma Hayek is hot!!