I recently read a post from Carbon Five about RSpec best practices. The most delightful thing about it was reading it after I’d been writing a spec at work and noticing that how I was doing it was close to what was being described. It was a little bit of validation, a pat on the back for all of the reading, practicing, and thinking about BDD that I’d done to that point. But then Carbon Five asks “so what else?” Read the rest of this entry »
Living in Kitchener
(Miscellaneous) November 9th, 2010At this point, I’ve been living in Kitchener and working for PostRank for close to half a year.
I’ve got my own apartment just a short walk away from the office, which makes me happy because I get to experience living by myself for a while and because I don’t have 3+ hours of my weekdays being eaten up by transit. A great deal of my time has been reclaimed and I think I’ve been putting at least some of it to good use. This apartment also came with a cat. The previous tenant didn’t want her to have to move. I find his logic highly suspect now but I’ve always wanted to own a cat anyway and now I do. She’s adorable and unlike her previous owner, I fully intend to take her with me wherever I should end up next.
The job is awesome. I don’t think I can say it often enough. These last six months have been filled with new things to learn and new challenges to tackle, all in a field that I find infinitely more interesting than anything I’ve done before. I sometimes forget that I get paid to do this. I feel like I’ve truly progressed as a developer and I still see a long road ahead.
But that’s not to say it has been all sunshine and rainbows, either. I thought I’d have an easy time making friends in the new city, with University of Waterloo’s world-renowned Computer Science programme drawing geeks like flies to honey. What I failed to realize is that means nothing if I never have opportunities to interact with those people at all. Kitchener-Waterloo has a student bubble and I’m very clearly outside of it.
Being a smaller city, there also aren’t as many established meetup groups for my various geeky interests in town. Some of my hobbies that were previously social outlets have become not so because I can’t find groups that engage in them and don’t have the connections to effectively bootstrap my own. For example, as far as I can tell there is no Japanese culture or language exchange group in KW. Absolutely none. My main source of Japanese speaking practice and one of my social outlets is simply gone. I’d create my own group if I knew some native Japanese speakers in KW but I don’t — if I did I’d have no need for such a group in the first place!
I haven’t yet established a circle of friends here like I had in Toronto and I miss so many people that I used to hang out with there. My once-a-month trip back to TO for Last Friday Karaoke and to visit my family is not nearly enough but without a car or license to drive one, being in Toronto more often than that simply isn’t practical. But I need to give it time. Almost my entire life has been spent in Toronto or the GTA; I can’t reasonably expect to rebuild everything in six months.
Overall this move has been worth it. This is an important step in my career and personal development. The trials I face now will teach me valuable lessons and the rest of my life will be so much richer for it.
Fall 2010 Anime Picks: There’s No Way My Little Sister Is This Cute!
(Japan) November 7th, 2010
There are a couple of different ways to translate the title of this cute up-and-comer from the Fall 2010 anime season. Since the title is super long, I’m going to abbreviate it similarly to how I did KamiNozo and call it OreImo. However you find it and whatever it has been translated to, it is one of my top recommendations for this season. Read the rest of this entry »
Power Grid: Supply Electricity, Make Money
(Miscellaneous) November 6th, 2010Last night I was at a games night with CTRL-A, University of Waterloo’s anime club. This is a nice alternative to the board game nights I used to attend with TAG on Wednesday nights. To that end, I’ve been getting more chances to play some of the other board games in my collection. My family loves Ticket to Ride, but I do like to switch it up every so often. One of my more recent acquisitions is Power Grid, published by Rio Grande Games. Read the rest of this entry »
Fall 2010 Anime Picks: Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt
(Japan) November 5th, 2010
The Fall 2010 anime season has come with a couple of very odd shows and Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt might prove to be the weirdest of the bunch. It is also not entirely what you might think it is.
Panty and Stocking are angels who have been kicked out of Heaven for behaving badly. They are put to work in Daten City, a city on the fault line between Heaven and Hell, by Reverend Garterbelt. Their job? To exorcize the “Ghosts” that occasionally terrorize the city and collect the “Heaven” coins that they drop to gain readmission to Heaven. They are joined by a small green, Invader-Zim-esque dog Chuck and get around the city in their pink Humvee, “See-Through”. Read the rest of this entry »
Fall 2010 Anime Picks: The World God Only Knows
(Japan) November 4th, 2010
In my other blog (which at some point was a podcast), I wrote about a particular moment in a very recent anime series that made me really appreciate that I’d taken up learning Japanese. I mentioned there that I’d be writing about the shows in the new season that I like… and then forgot about it. Well, I’ve finally seen enough of the new season that I can start writing about some of the stuff that I’ve been following. Read the rest of this entry »
Things I Dislike About FFXIII
(Miscellaneous) November 3rd, 2010Last time, I dug deep to write about the things in FFXIII that I like and hinted that next time I’d flip that around and write what I didn’t like. Here I go:
The story has failed to be compelling and is told poorly. Even FFX managed to have something compelling happen in the first hour — after which I spent the rest of the game wishing the main character would just disappear… But anyway, FFXIII has failed the first-hour story test I usually apply to RPGs. At the same time, it seems the game thinks it has so much story that it can’t even tell it all in the cutscenes! Square-Enix has somehow forgotten that it’s better to show something than to tell it, especially when that telling involves asking you to once again go to the menu and click through all of the bits that have been marked as “NEW”. But if I wasn’t doing that, I would have even less of a clue about what’s going on than I already do, as characters often drop names and terms without any explanation whatsoever.
The story telling is so bad that this post actually rags on it twice. Read the rest of this entry »
Things I Like About FFXIII
(Video Games) November 2nd, 2010Final Fantasy XIII has quickly become the game in the mainline FF series that fans love to hate. A cursory search can probably find you a lot of criticism about the game on various blogs and forums. One of my co-workers advises us to just skip it. Having now played some of it myself — clearly I’m bad at taking advice — I could easily write about all the things I dislike about it. But that wouldn’t be much of a challenge for my second blog post of November, would it?
Therefore, I’ve decided to write about all of the things I like about FFXII based on what I’ve seen so far. Read the rest of this entry »
