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The imaniacs won last night’s game 7 - 6!
The team was down 1 goal at 6 - 5 with 2 minutes left. Steve switched into the game, scored 1 goal, evening it out at 6 – 6 and with 1 minute left he scored another making it 7 – 6 and winning the game!
This places the imaniacs in 4th place - the final spot for making the PLAYOFFS!
EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!
A number of imason-ites are playing 5-a-side floor hockey in a local Toronto League.
After 7 games and last night's win, the imaniacs are above .500 at 4 wins and 3 losses. Last night we played our best game of all. We beat the second place team “OPSEU Blues” 20 – 15!
Everybody delivered their best game:
- Salma and Jacqui in offence continued their endless goal streaks
- Alex and Kimi were unbeatable in defence, their nickname shall become “the imaniac filtration system”, letting through 1 ball in every 50
- Cosmin, our goalie, continued with his consistent A-game
- Chris sniper-ed plenty of shots past their goalie nicknamed “The Wall”
- Steve accounted for half the goals with his nuclear-warhead-rocket-shots
- Rez followed suit and did not let their goalie rest
- Paul (Steve’s cousin) contributed to making sure “The Wall” was getting plastered with the ball every 5 seconds
Next week, we'll bring the record to 5-3!!
So, I was out in Seattle last week and was travelling through Vancouver. I decided to stay a day in Vancouver; in part to spend some time with a friend, in part to avoid the red eye, and in part to do the Grouse Grind which had been on my todo list since my wife did it back in the early 2000s.
What is the Grouse Grind, you ask? It's a 'hike' up Grouse Mountain in North Vancouver (about a 15 minute drive from downtown). I write 'hike' because this isn't the type of hike you might be imagining - it's 2.9km long, but covers an elevation gain of 2,800 feet. This is a few hundred feet more than the elevation gain at Mt. Tremblant.
I did the hike on a reasonably warm (10 C) and dry day. I wore my usual running gear and brought nothing more than a bottle of water and a change of shirt for the top (the top was pretty cold and windy, so I'm glad I had a dry shirt). My time was around 65 or 70 minutes, which I was pretty happy with. This was a pretty gruelling hike, and you see almost nothing along the way - but the view from top of N. Van and Vancouver is pretty stellar.
This was an amazing adventure - I highly recommend it if you enjoy this sort of thing. Take the gondola down for $5, and save your knees!
Windows 7 Announcement – These were a few of the interesting features that jumped out at me…
- Redesigned task bar: mouse-over thumbnails and progressive popups of larger thumbnails; individual IE tabs are shown as separate thumbnails; you can now drag&drop reorder apps in the task bar
- Jump Lists: these appear in different parts of the UI, but one specific example was on the new task bar. If you had Word on the task bar, right click to get your “most recently used” list of documents.
- Windows Explorer: use of libraries – used to consolidate content.
- Search: integrated highlighting in search results
- Home networking: new level of simplified home networking – the “home group” - Win7 PCs will find each other automatically as well automatically provide access to peripherals in the home group like printers. Smart enough to automatically switch between home printer and work printer
- Gadgets can be anywhere on the desktop (no longer stuck to sidebar)
- System tray – notifications area - user can now control what appears in sys tray - ability to specify how notifications will be provide or suppress icons & notifications all together
Day 1 was packed! 2 hour keynote with Ray Ozzie announcing Azure (www.azure.com), Panel Discussion with Microsoft Canada and the press (see other post) and then two sessions on Visual Studio (1) VSTS 2010 cool new features (2) Agile & Visual Studio.
First key thing to mention is that many (all?) of the sessions are available on-line here: www.microsoftpdc.com (which links you over to channel9)
Keynote:
In the interest if time, skipping the summary of Azure as I'm assuming that's available from many other sources. Here were some of the thoughts and impressions that I walked away from the session with:
- Azure's Fabric Controller - the statement was made that you would have the ability to upgrade your app in real-time. The app and OS are managed separately using the Fabric Controller - during an upgrade developers would specify end state and the FC will carefully make changes. No details in the demo, but the promise is a very interesting one and I look forward to seeing how this will play out.
- A new Language: the Azure team demo'd "modelling your service" which incorporated a whole new set of terminology and concepts (example: roles (code); channels (networks) and end points) - very cool new set of challenges for developers to take on.
- New Patterns and Practices: The MS Team did a good job of drawing out the fact that as a developer all your .net skills are transferrable, but I think the real challenge will be the new kinds of solutions that will need to be pioneered in this new S+S hybrid model
- Bluehoo example (www.bluehoo.com) - this grabbed me from the perspective that now small startups with ideas that require massive scale or reliability right out of the gate, have access to infrastructure that would typically be reservce for established enterprises (or very well funded startups)
- Testing: It's interesitng to start to think about how cloud-based apps will be performance/load tested.
If you're going to watch the session, check out mid-way thru where they publish up a new service to the cloud - couldn't believe how easy it was to deploy. (Yes - I'm sure I sure I have koolaid dripping from my face....)
Session: Lap around VSTS 2010
Disappointed that I missed this one, but Alex said it was a good one - here's the direct link: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL47/
Session: TFS 2010 Cool new Features
OK - after having spent the last year mucking around in VSTS 2008 (and having a good time), I definitely started to feel the pain on certain fronts. This session was like waking up on Christmas Morning and finding out that your parents got you everything on your wish list (with some minor exceptions). Definitely recommend watching this session if/when it comes on-line. Where to begin...
- Parallel Dev - we've had so much pain at one client over our merging and branching strategy - they've rewritten it and it's a huge step forward - the graphical representations of branches and change-set tracking was a beautiful thing
- Work Item Usability - support for rich text, you can now make work items heirarchical, support for your own Query folders, permissions on those folders, robust new query tool enhancements. Sadly, still no support for Copy & Paste of images into work items.
- Sharepoint Web Parts - they refactored Web Access into Sharepoint Web parts
This just scratches the surface. Check it out if you can.
Session: Agile and VS 2010
- better support for TDD - enhancements to allow you to stay in your initial test case without having to switch in/out to stub things out
- Gated check-in - reverses the typical order of check-in-then-build-then-test so that you can't check in without passing the build&test gate first
- Sexier, easier build reports
- Better, smoother integration with Excel
- Very cool 3rd party product from Conchange for teams using post-it-notes (will try to update post to embed link/name later)
Looking forward to Day 2
George took some time out in November to talk about the Visual Studio and what's coming in Visual Studio 2010. A snippet is below and the full article can be found here.
"I've been working with Visual Studio since 2002, and it's been great to watch its progress over the last six years, to see how it's improved and really become a robust development tool on par with Java tools and any other enterprise framework," said George Pechtol, Internet architect at iMason.
Steve talked to the press while down at PDC. Here's a snippit...
Stephen Kearns, senior product manager with Toronto-based imason inc., said that what jumped out at him about Azure was that some of his company's SMBs clients will be able to take advantage of a level of infrastructure that was reserved for much larger companies.
Another aspect of Azure that Kearns found beneficial was its high availability.
"It is a classic challenge that we face when helping our customers build applications," he added.
Kearns also liked the skills transfer and simple deployment aspect of Azure.
Check out the full article here - http://www.echannelline.com/usa/story.cfm?item=23854
imason is sending Alex Dowbor (Practice Lead) and Steve Kearns (Sr. Project Manager) to PDC (www.microsoftpdc.com) this year (Oct 27-30 in LA). More posts to Follow.