After this, I’m packing my things and moving to Kitchener/Waterloo because I will soon be joining my good friend and perfect pair (programmer), maplealmond at PostRank. I’ve got a place to stay temporarily but will be starting a very serious apartment hunt soon after my first day at the new job.

I’m excited at the opportunity to further expand my current Ruby/Rails skills and learn even more new ones while working on a team that is strongly dedicated to producing top-quality code. This new gig will also give me a chance to apply my skills to problems surrounding social media, a topic I’ve become deeply interested in since I’ve been networking with many social media professionals in Toronto.

That all said, I have liked working on this project with the Society and I will miss the people who I’ve been working with these past 11 (or so) months. Particularly, I will miss my manager, who has been excellent to work with. Together, we have achieved a lot in a relatively short period of time. I will miss many others in Toronto, including my family, my friends, and various social groups that I have met with from time to time. I may find myself unable to attend Rails Pub Nite; I will miss every single one of you!

Last Friday Karaoke shall continue, but there will be a special session this month. I’ll be at Anime North on the last weekend of May so I’ve decided that Last Friday Karaoke will be on the second-last weekend of May instead. It turns out that will be the weekend just after my birthday, so Last Friday Karaoke will become Second-Last Friday (or Saturday?) Karaoke, Birthday Edition.  ;)

The Japanese Learner continues to pod-fade, even after PodCamp TO 2010 got me so fired up to do it again. Hopefully I can find some people interested in recording the show with me in Kitchener/Waterloo. With commuting to/from work eating up way less of the hours in my week, I can squeeze in some more Japanese study and podcast work.

I have also been working on a new secret pet project. Hints: it involves Rails 3, GitHub, and has prompted some contributions to Wynn Netherland‘s octopussy, a Ruby wrapper around version 2 of the GitHub API.

I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: where one adventure ends, another begins.

My subway ride was smooth as usual. Having left the office later, the subway cars were not as crowded and almost halfway through the trip I managed to snag a seat and sit comfortably for the rest of the stops leading up to the north end of the Yonge line, Finch station.

This is where the fun begins.

I reach the top of the three sets of stairs that lead from the subway platform to the bus platform. Then I move through a set of double doors to my left leading outside. The picture above fails to show the full magnitude of the crowd of people that I had to squeeze through to get to the location from which I shot it. The two lines of people that usually form for the 36 Finch West buses both curve in the same direction and run parallel to each other on the other side of the platform.

At this point, I know I’m in for a long wait in the cold and I’m visibly anxious. I watch all the buses that pass by.

Out of service. Out of service. 60. Another 60. 36C (to Jane, not far enough for me). Another 36C. A 36D (Weston, still not quite far enough). Out of service sign that switches to DETOUR ON ROUTE (wait, what?). Another 60…

As the 36′s stop to pick up people, I start to move closer and closer to the front of the line. But my bus is still to arrive. About an hour passes. I make fists with my hands to keep them a bit warmer. My feet hurt I am shivering. I continue to wait, wondering if maybe there was a detour on Finch West causing delays in getting buses back to the station.

Finally, a 36B. This one will go all the way down to Humberwood, well past where I need to get off. I’m close to the back door and desperate to get out of the cold. As we file onto the bus, I feel an unpleasant sensation between my shoulder blades: I’m being pushed from behind. Another passenger turns to yell at the man behind her, demanding to know why he’s pushing her. Clearly, the people behind us are as desperate to get on the bus as we are and considerably less polite about it.

The bus is packed as tight as a sardine can. The driver tells riders at the front door that he has no more room and that another bus is behind him; he doesn’t know if it is another B. The back door is particularly crowded. The riders there exit the bus and re-enter, playing a precarious game of human Tetris (no, not that human Tetris) against the two bars that trigger the door to open at stops. The driver tells people to try entering via the back door. Each time he does, the passengers near the back door groan.

We pass by the major stops: Dufferin, Bathurst. The bus is still roughly as packed as it began.

At Keele, a person further to the front squeezes past me to get to the back door. As he passes by, the messenger bag that is hanging on my right shoulder is pushed behind me and lifted way up. Finally, he manages to break through and exit the bus.

Not until Weston do enough people clear out to give me some space to breathe. There are still no seats however; I’ve been standing the whole time.

Now I’m home, quite irritated and wondering why my usual commute had suddenly doubled in length. TTC’s official Twitter feed for service notices says nothing about it. It reminded me of a customer service tip that might be useful to the TTC: perception matters.

Even if you’re doing the best you can, if that’s not what it looks like to your customers, you have lost them. That’s why the photo of the sleeping fare collector caused such a stir in the community. We now pay more than ever for each ride, including Metropass holders, and we want to see the return on that investment.

One of these parallels between humans and computers is the way that we multitask. Computers only seem to multitask by switching between tasks rapidly, with the exception of new multi-core and multi-processor systems, which can run as many tasks in parallel as there are cores or processors. So it was interesting to read recently that the prevailing theory is that humans multitask in precisely the same way!

Analogous to a multitasking CPU, current experimental psychology research shows that interference occurs when we attempt to perform even simple tasks simultaneously. There are certain exceptions to this, particularly when one of the two tasks is stored in “muscle memory”, but this is because we can perform such tasks without even thinking about them. In many other cases, the effectiveness with which we perform the tasks is diminished when we are doing more than one task at the same time.

It is also common wisdom in IT that when somebody is deep in his/her work (commonly referred to as flow), an interruption of even a few seconds can result in 15 minutes of lost productivity. While I’ve never verified the actual number, I have often had trouble putting myself back on a task after being jolted out of it by a short interruption.

When a CPU switches tasks, it must perform a context switch. The current state of the program that is running on the computer, including the values stored in the registers, a reference to the next instruction to execute, and other housekeeping information are stored in memory (RAM). When the program comes back, the stored information is put back into its proper places so that the CPU can pick up where it left off. This is a fairly costly operation as the CPU cannot access RAM even a fraction as fast as it can access its registers. Of course, this means that when a CPU runs two programs simultaneously, it is less efficient at each than if it were concentrating entirely on one program or the other. Determining when to switch to a different program is therefore an incredibly important concern in the design of modern operating systems.

I’ve witnessed human “context switching” in a co-worker of mine. When I knock on her door to ask her a quick question about work that I’m doing for her, she asks me to give her a moment and looks to be deep in thought. She then asks me to repeat my question and answers it with surprising conciseness and accuracy. She has told me that she needs to switch from the mindset of what she’s currently working on to the mindset of what I’m asking her or she can’t answer properly.

This isn’t to say that multitasking is bad, but I am acutely aware that when I do multitask, I am not going to be able to perform each task as effectively as if I were focused entirely on one. Also, there are certain points at which it is easier or more natural to switch from doing one thing to doing another, particularly where I’ve accomplished a sub-goal in the task or where I’ve written down detailed notes on the current state of what I’m doing, which makes it easier to switch back to it later.

What do you think?

Near the beginning of the year, I decided that I needed to switch gears in my career. I made a very dedicated push towards becoming a full-time Ruby developer, leaving my comfortable position as a J2EE web content management and identity management specialist. My leisure time was consumed with sharpening my Ruby skills and learning new technologies. I made Rails Pub Nite a monthly ritual and networked like crazy on just about every networking site I could. I followed a number of job site feeds and sent out many cover letters and resumes.

Finally, my break came from a very unlikely source: Facebook. I posted to a Ruby on Rails group on Facebook to advertise my skills and experience and offer my services. This was seen by the Systems Manager at the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants, who asked me to send her my resume. I did so gladly and not too long after that I was asked in for an interview.

The project they needed me to work on was definitely very appealing, if a bit ambitious. They wanted to replace the monolithic pile of .NET that was currently doing an incredibly bad job of managing their records and processes and replace that with something leaner, meaner, and more attuned to their needs developed in-house using Ruby on Rails. This was my chance to gain experience working on a large Rails project from the ground up and to do so for a technologically progressive organization providing a valuable service to so many people all over the world.

That project is still on-going, and I recently accepted a permanent position with the Society. We hope to launch an initial release of the project early in the new year and I’m definitely bracing myself for a challenging job in 2010.

The professional networking I did then paid off in other ways as well. I previously wrote about how I helped a very good friend of mine land a job at PostRank. He moved to Kitchener/Waterloo while I moved back to North York, yet another of the changes that 2009 brought.

Finding myself back in Toronto after two years living in Mississauga, I quickly got to work making new friends and reconnecting with old. I’ve started participating in some Meetup groups related to my various interests, as well as events with #GenYTO and the Freshbooks crew. In just a few months, I’ve met some awesome Torontonians (I couldn’t possibly link to you all!).

So, at the end of 2009, I find myself in a new place — well, new in the sense that I haven’t been here in a couple of years — with a new job and new friends.

I am looking forward to 2010 with much excitement.

That love of music carried into high school. I had stopped playing piano but in music class I picked up the clarinet quite quickly. I transferred to another school after grade 9 because the school I was in was planning to cut their music program entirely and I could not imagine being without it. At my new school, I was blown away when I heard the excellent performances of the senior jazz band and ensembles. I was fiercely determined to play with them but not many modern jazz arrangements called for a clarinet. So I learned to play saxophones.

At the same time, I continued tinkering with computers, teaching myself how to program because I wanted to program video games one day. An exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre featuring the “new” graphical web browsers, Netscape and Mosaic, inspired me to try my own hand at web publishing as soon as we were able to get connected to the Internet. In high school programming classes, I was well ahead of the curve, frequently finishing assignments meant to take hours in a matter of minutes.

And so, when I graduated from high school and decided I wanted to go to university, I had a difficult choice to make: which of these two things would I choose to focus on?

I ultimately decided that I was more passionate about computing and that it would also lead to a better career, so I decided to major in Computer Science.

Even then, I didn’t entirely stop playing music. I started taking clarinet lessons, intending to enhance my skills well beyond the intermediate proficiency I had achieved in high school. My teacher encouraged me to play for a youth symphony orchestra. My stand partner eventually became my first girlfriend and my stint with the orchestra culminated in a performance of von Weber’s Clarinet Concertino.

I’m not sure exactly when it was, but I did eventually stop playing music to devote myself entirely to my Computer Science coursework and related projects. My clarinet has been sitting in storage for a long time, untouched, unplayed, unloved. The piano my sisters and I used to play is still in our family home, but has been in need of tuning for a very long time and has also been neglected.

I’ve begun my career as a web developer and I feel that I’ve made an excellent choice. But recently, I felt like I needed to bring music back into my life. Taking advantage of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s youth program, tsoundcheck, I bought a package of tickets for three concerts, two of which I’ve already attended. Now, also for the first time in years, I have thought about taking my clarinet out of storage, having it checked out, and playing it again.

I am rediscovering my art; I am rediscovering my music.

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Happy Halloween, everyone! =D

In other news, I’m being asked to look over the Japanese translation of Radiant again, which I will find some time to do in the next week or so. I think I’ve found a new place to record my podcast so I’m looking forward to producing episodes of The Japanese Learner again early in November.

I’m moving. Moving day is tomorrow and I’m still scrambling to get everything ready. The logistics look like they’re going have very little room for error but I think we’ll be fine; we’ve got lots of help!

My good friend and long-time housemate has been hired up by PostRank — this was partly my doing and Twitter was involved — and so he and his girlfriend are moving out to Kitchener/Waterloo. I have decided to move back to Toronto (I lived in North York before).

I look around the house, clean almost to the point of being sterile and filled with boxes of our stuff, and realize that I’m going to miss this place and these people I’ve been living with. But life is full of changes, entrances, exits, and opportunities. I look forward to being closer to all of the awesome stuff that the TO tech community organizes in the city and to all of my friends who I’ve lost contact with since moving out to Mississauga two years ago. After I’ve settled back into the city, I also plan to try and revive my currently pod-fading podcast: The Japanese Learner.

Where one adventure ends, a new one begins.

• Facebook Contact Sync:  There’s an application for downloading Facebook profile pictures and associating them with Google/phone contacts but I wouldn’t mind being able to synchronize contact data too.  There are so many people whose phone numbers and e-mail addresses I can only retrieve via Facebook that this kind of application would save me a lot of time.
• Facebook Application: As I wrote in my previous post, there’s no decent Facebook application for the Android.  I’d be happy with a fairly lightweight interface that just allows me to follow my friends updates, access my inbox, and browse profiles and photos.
• Freshbooks Time Tracker:  Freshbooks created one for the iPhone, but there doesn’t seem to be one for Android.  Just the basic functionality of being able to select a project and task, start/pause/stop a timer, and submit the hours to Freshbooks would be plenty for me.
• Package Tracker that works with Canada Post:  I’ve seen package trackers for other carriers but none for Canada Post.  Android has only just been released in Canada, so maybe it’s just a matter of time.
• Things (Cultured Code) Sync:  Cultured Code has a Things for iPhone, but there is no Things for Android.  I’ve sent in a feature request but have received no answer as of yet.  I imagine that they probably don’t care, seeing as it’s a Mac-only app.  =(
• A Real Japanese IME:  There are a number of applications that serve as an IME for Japanese but none are integrated into the Android Input Method Framework. Instead, I must open the application via an ongoing notification, enter my text, and then copy and paste it into the text box that I was intending to type into.  I’ve also recently noticed that this interferes with the software keyboard that I recently downloaded.  I can’t use “Touch Input” and one of these programs at the same time because Touch Input helpfully corrects my romaji into English words.  >_<

The turnout from the Toronto Ruby community was excellent and I made and strengthened a lot of professional connections.  I even got some compliments on my display and print-outs!  Just in case you missed them, I’ll be posting them here soon.

It did feel like there were more developers than people looking to hire developers, but this was just the first of what I’m sure will be many such events.  In any case, I did hand out a lot of my brand new business cards and a few of my resumes.

I can’t wait for FutureRuby!