So I need to incorporate or something to that extent, and I am looking for a name for my company… ideas are welcome…

That is all.

So some goals have gone achieved, others are failing… In either case I thought I should take this chance to address some since it’s nearing the 1/3rd mark for this year.

Read at least 3 books for fun - Well I read Watchmen, and V for Vendetta, since they are both “Graphic Novels” I’ll call this one book. I think next I am going to read Solaris, it was on tv the other day and I’ve always wanted to read it since I loved 2001 and it’s supposed to be the Polish equivallent.

Run another half marathon (or at least 10 km) - Been running a lot, however the half is in may, so it’s looking like this will just be a get better at running goal.

Ski at least 20 days - Achieved!

19 days at Fernie

4 days at Revelstoke

3 days at Lake Louise

1 day at Silver Star

1 day at Kimberly

1 day of cat skiing = 29 days total, not a bad showing.

All other goals are… well works in progress, so stay tuned Suckas!

.joe out.

I’ll try and avoid any serious spoilers, but you’ve been warned.

So it’s all over, sigh. I really felt like they could have kept going. For those of you who have been living under a rock, and not seen the best show on earth! Battlestar Galactica (BSG hence forth) is a re-imagining of the original show from the 70s. The show starts off with the holocaust of mankind as we know it (in the show that is) and their escape and search for a new home called, earth.

Now from the outset it seems like just another science fiction drama, with lots of great explosions and so forth, but they really got back to the real essence of Sci Fi. In my humble opinion this essence involves the discussion of big ideas. The settings of science fiction allow the reader to be comfortable discussing things like religion, race, sex, torture, and so on because it is not their reality. This is exactly what BSG leverages. To give you an idea of how dark the show is, within the first 20 minutes of the pilot one of the main characters breaks a baby’s neck… and it gets darker from there.

Alright so the finale… A thing I very much respected about the writers of BSG is that they were not promised 5 season (God only knows why) and rather than have to wrap everything up in 4 episodes because of the network canceling them, they decided to put the show to bed in 4 seasons on their own terms. What made this ending great is the total sense of nihilism it left me with, odd I know, but the whole show you felt like they were building to something huge, and in the end it’s big… but it wasn’t the metaphysical revelations that we may have expected. They paid off on almost everything (with the exception of Starbuck, which they sort of did… but at the same rate didn’t really).

All in all I think this show will stand as one of the great Sci Fi shows of the genre, and in general a great story.

They are coming out with a prequel show called Caprica, but I am not holding my breath for it to be any kind of good. I am however pretty excited about ‘the plan’ teleplay which will come out some time in June.

.joe out.

I’ve been away for the week ripping up Fernie. Having grown up here I am all to familiar with the Skier vs Snowboarder mentality around here. For the balance of my life I’ve sat on the skier side of the argument, especially here where there is so much traversing on a deep pow day boarders just get left behind.

With meg in town, and me trying to get more days in on my pass I decided to give snowboarding a try, and sacrafice a pow day to my board. Turns out, it’s crazy fun.

Granted I fell more yesterday than in probably the last decade of skiing, once i figured out how to float the board on the snow, I started to really enjoy my self.

So my suggestion to you is to go out on a the next big pow day, and just give it a try. It was a blast.

.joe out.

Also you can read my report, and see some photos form fernie at

http://blogs.fernie.com/localsreport/2009/03/04/fernies-skiing-like-whistler/

I’ve been volunteering as a developer for Christmas Future, a local charity founded by my good friend Jay Baydala a few years back, for quite some time. What with my return to the world of working etc etc, I have decided to put about 4 - 8 hours a week into doing a bit of CFoo work.

My current project is building up a small REST API to expose a bit of the data in the DT core to outside developers. Though in this case those outside developers will also be me. I (and Charlie Godsoe) will be using this API to build up a few widgets that will be plugable to all your favorite social networking apps (Facebook, Blogger, MySpace etc) as well as a Dashboard widget and a Vista Gadget.

So all in all there is lots on the go here in C town, so stay tuned, as I finally have something developer-ey to blog about.

.joe

Alas my running has been put on hold as I hurt my ankle on monday. I think it’s I aggravated a sprain from earlier in the year, but hopefully it will be back to normal some time next week and I’ll be able to get back on it.

.joe

Those of you who know me in person (which I’ll just go ahead and assume is 100% of the readers) know that I am a huge Star Trek fan, well perhaps less so in recent years with the advent of the much superior Battlestar Galactica, but none the less I grew up on the trek.

In any case,  my thoughts have recently have been of this poster my dad got me when I was maybe 7 or 8, which read - “Everything I need to know I learned from Star Trek”, and it listed a few clever lines form the show (Can easily be googled for and example). As you may have seen in my earlier post we dressed up as the crew of the enterprise for halloween, in preparation for our parts we spent a month or so watching old Star Trek:The Next Generation. Watching the old shows a few things dawned on me.

- This show looked a lot more bad ass when I was 7.

- There are only four sections of hallway, and they all seem to curve for some reason.

- These characters are mostly pretty boring and one dimensional with the exception of Data.

But most importantly it occurred to me that more so than the religious teachers of my child hood (I went to a Roman Catholic french school for much of my upbringing) Captain Picard and his group of trekers shaped my view of morality. There is some guy out there on the web that wrote a song “What would captain Picard do” and I feel to a certain extent this has some resonance with the geeks of my generation. Picard was a great renaissance man that everyone should aspire to be, he was well read, charming, played music (the tin whistle never sounded so good), he was diplomatic when he needed to be, and tough as nails when the situation called for it (THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS).

Kirk on the other hand was much more brash, and seemed to see the world in two contexts. Something to be seduced, or something to be judo chopped. He was a cowboy who tended to think in terms of absolutes, in contrast to Picard’s more thoughtful approach. Kirk possessed a moral dichotomy similar to George W. Bush, the with us or against us black and white galactic view. Though it should be noted that I am talking about TV show Kirk, in Star Trek 6 they attempted to round him out a bit more, and there was that search for God in Star Trek 5. 

At the end of the day I think Kirk represented more of the kind of hero figure children have, who always knows right from wrong acts on it, and has beautiful women dripping off him. Where as Picard is more the kind of man that one comes to admire as they get older.

So which are you, Kirk or Picard…. or God help us Janeway… (I guess Sisko was pretty rad too, but he wasn’t really human so that doesn’t count)

.joe out.

So I managed to hit a new distance record of 5Km yesterday, again really starting to feel like this half marathon thing is within my grasp given my recent bout of successes. Though at present I have a monster blister on my arch which is probably going to limit me running over the next few days anyway. There is something interesting though about having a bit of an acute pain when you are running, but powering through it. In any case I’ll update more on the run progress as I have information. Oh, the cool bit, upon completing my 5km Lance Armstrong spoke into my ears saying “Hey I’m Lance Armstrong, congratulations on your longest run to date”, I love automated inspiration!

In other news I couldn’t help but turn on CNN last night and find my self amazed at the goings on. It’s been said millions of times before  that the media sensationalizes news, and more over reports on the minutia of everyday poloitics. However I was shocked to hear how CNN in particular was just laying into Obama (perhaps trying to downplay their liberal media bias….). Set aside their going on and on and on about what he wore to work on a saturday, what he eats, etc. The fact that he made a few little bobbles here and there (tapping a few seemingly corrupt people to serve in his cabinet) means that it’s back to business as usual on capital hill, as the put it on the daily show last night “The Honeymoon is Over!”

I guess his campaign of Change and Hope requires immediate change and hope… with no delay. I have started to get the feeling that he has set the bar so high for him self, and that if he is anything short of the panacea of our woes (I speak in the american sense of US) then he will be regarded as a failure of  a president.

I think Bush had a much stronger strategy in some regards, he aimed much lower, and so we were mostly impressed when he didn’t choke to death on his own food. 

I think I’ve learned something from this experience…. turning on the TV is a bad idea, or I should just watch the BBC from now on.

On another funnier note, which only Paul may appreciate, I was on hold with Apple today and the hold music was Cupid De Locke by the Smashing Pumpkins. I felt both dated for a song from my youth being relegated to hold music, and annoyed because I’ve always hated that stupid song.

.joe out.

I guess this doesn’t really affect anyone but me, I upgrades to word press 2.7 so far I really like it. They have used the dashboard metaphor quite nicely so now I don’t have to click to much to remove all of the spam comments and such.

Long live open source.

In other news, I’ve hit two more 4 KM runs, and am really starting to believe that this half marathon thing is going to be possible.

UPDATE: I also fixed the Nike Plus plugin to work properly for me… and turned it metric… since miles have little to no meaning to me.

.joe out.

So as per my previous post, and somewhat as per Leif’s suggestion I’ve invested in some tracking technology to help me work out my running. I purchased the Nike + iPod system, and I have to say so far I am quite impressed, the web app for one is quite slick and they appear to have a lot of interesting ways to help motivate you to push harder.

If you aren’t familiar with Nike+ it is essentially a pedometer that connects to your iPod nano / touch. It allows you to track your distance and pace, when coupled with the Nike+ website it allows you to generate graphs of your runs, calories, distance, and all manners of neat things (the graphs are quite cool looking, see below).

An example of the Nike+ graph, my first run to boot.

The first and most obvious down side is that the sensor you put in your shoe is meant to go in Nike shoes which are not the best running shoes for the avid runner. However a third party makes a small little pouch that you can attach to your laces, allowing any shoe to make use of the technology.

For my part, because I run at the gym (around a track) I like this system because it doesn’t require me to keep track of how many laps I’ve done. However, one thing that appears to be lacking is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to set a goal to hit a particular distance for a single run, which I would like. Specifically because I am trying to just hit some milestones in the near future (5km, 8km, 10km)

In any case you may now notice a happy little mohawked character on the left bar here, and he will let you know what my progress has been. I think they borrowed a page form the WII MII idea, right now my Nike+ Avatar is pumped, but I am told if I slack off, he will get less happy with me.

My first goal is to run 60 kM in the next 4 weeks, which I think its probably attainable. I had a great run today, and my knee appears to be holding up with the new shoes.

So the long and short of it is that I am well on my way to the running goal.

As for the book front, I am currently reading: The limits of Power, the End of American Exceptionalism… more on that later.

.joe out.