If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you!

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)

1. I was born in Nova Scotia
2. I have never felt more at ease than when I was in Scotland
3. I am going to Mexico in 22 days
4. I miss making music
5. I like it loud
6. Except when I don’t
7. I am a solid convert – to Macs
8. I am a proud Atheist
9. I usually need spell check to spell Atheist correctly
10. I love sci-fi
11. I have an awesome family
12. Boxer briefs
13. I love chick-rock
14. I might be an author today if not for one English teacher
15. I miss writing
16. I actually enjoy programming
17. I hate to admit it but I dig Lindsay’s One Gossip Tree Girl shows
18. I am a whore for documentaries
19. I am intrigued by Eve online
20. I miss playing WoW
21. I am an introvert…
22. …but I fake extrovert fairly well…
23. …or maybe I’m bipolar
24. I think I could do a better job than our Government or any of the lame other parties we have
25. I wish I could spend more time with my wife and daughter.

It was almost noon when the text message arrived. It was from my wife. All it said was “Happy new phone day, honey!”. Finally, FINALLY! After nearly a month I finally had an iPhone! It had been a little over a week since I was promised a phone through the “lost and stolen” program and someone at Rogers had finally delivered on a promise and UPS had finally delivered a box full of iPhone. It had been a long, long month. I think I spent as much time talking to Rogers as I spent talking to my wife. It was finally done, my ordeal was over!

Okay, yeah, reality check. The ordeal was far from over. At the time, however, I thought it was over. I’m going to keep that delusion going for a moment now and talk about the iPhone. I love my iPhone. This is 100% to the credit of Apple. They have made a great phone and I couldn’t be happier with it. Well, I would be a little happier if Rogers’ G3 network wasn’t complete and utter shit, but I’m taking a break from talking about Rogers. Ever since I started working at VendAsta I have been a complete Apple fanboy. I was uncertain about whether or not I would like working on a MacBook Pro, but I have to admit that I love it. I am fully aware that some of my iPhone enthusiasm is a side effect of my new fanboy status. Nevertheless, I have found the iPhone to be a very well designed and implemented device. There are lots of reviews on the web for the iPhone, so I won’t go any further into that but I definitely recommend the iPhone. Just try and get it through anyone other than Rogers. And Michael, I have had absolutely zero troubles using the iPhone out in the cold. It works like a charm inside or out in -40C.

With my iPhone in-hand, all I had to do was make one final call to Rogers to get it and the BlackBerry activated. I dialed the hateful toll-free number for what I hoped to be the last time. I belched out my phone number, name, postal code and date of birth to what had to be the last time. I was connected to a young-sounding gentleman who sounded really eager to help me. We went through the activation and everything seemed to be good to go. He even managed to reassign the SIM cards in the phones so that I could put the SIM card that shipped with each phone into the phone it came from. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly!

With the activation complete we began to discuss my compensation for all of the trouble I had gone through so far. I told him that I had been given 3 months of unlimited local calling for four days worth of inconvenience so what could he do for the two weeks that followed? What he said next was a pleasant surprise. It appears that my raging had really made an impression on the last guy I had talked to. He had placed a $10 / month / phone credit on my account through 2011 – for the full 36 months of my contract! I was very pleased. I said to the guy, “Well then, everything is all taken care of. I got this credit for the past two weeks and the 3 months of unlimited calling for the original four days.”. “Well…”, he said. Oh shit. So it turns out, the three months of unlimited local calling that I was told was only available to new customers is actually something that everyone gets – upgrades and new customers. Sigh. So then, I asked the guy what he was going to do for me? I was now compensated for the past two weeks of trouble but now I needed to be compensated for the original four days of hell. Three months of unlimited data usage ought to do it. My rage compensated, my phone activated, I happily ended the call. It felt good to have it all behind me.

I brought my wife her BlackBerry and we started playing with our new toys. Even with two email and Internet-enabled smartphones, we were eager to try out text messaging on the new devices. Lindsay and I have been texting each other incessantly almost since the moment we met…but that’s another story for another saga. I entered her phone number and the profound message “hi” into my iPhone and hit send. Just like in iChat there was the little woosh noise of a sent message and the other woosh of an arriving message. I had sent the message to my wife’s number and it had been delivered to my phone. Sigh.

I figured that the magical reassigning of SIM cards had not actually happened but I wanted to be sure – the guy had said something about the reassignment ensuring that the right data plan was on the right phone so I wanted to make sure that we would both have what we needed. I dialed again. I spouted again. Phone number. Name. Postal Code. Date of birth. I explained the situation. I was told that a SIM card cannot be reassigned to another number. I was further told that the data plans are assigned to the phone numbers, not SIM cards. I was told to swap the SIM cards back and try things again. I did. I texted. Messages arrived where they were supposed to be. The new guy asked if there was anything else he could do for me. I said nope, unless he wants to give me more free stuff. He said sure and put a $50 credit on my account.

So, I had my phone and a few credits on my account. Unlimited data usage for three months to get a feel for my data usage requirements. It seemed like things were finally coming together and now all I had to do was enjoy my phone, right?

Update 01/21/2009: Episode 5: The Empire Bills Back has been released.

Update 02/10/2009: Episode 6: Return of the Mad Guy has been released.

Update 07/06/2009: Episode 7: Seeing Red has been released.

Update 07/13/2009: Episode 8: Resolution has been released.

Update 07/27/2009: Roger’s Wars Epilogue has been released.

I finally got a chance this week to take a crack at customizing things a little bit. I have been listening to Internet Radio .977 lately, a set of “radio” channels I found in my ShoutCast playlist in XBMC. One thing that is very cool about working on a Mac is that so many of the applications play really well together. For instance, if you are listening to music in iTunes, with a couple of clicks you can have the current song showing up in your status in iChat or Adium. Unfortunately for me, the .977 stream does not play in iTunes. I listen to it in VLC, which does not fit together with the chat apps the way iTunes does.

I did a little Googling and wasn’t able to find much on the subject. There are a few ways to get current media information out of VLC, however, most of that is geared towards playing mp3s and using these techniques I was only able to extract the name of the radio station I was listening to, not the track name that was appearing in the VLC window. Additionally, I was able to find a site that detailed writing some Applescript and BASH scripts to set iChat/Adium status to dynamically indicate your location, based on IP address. After a little tinkering I was able to put something together.

I won’t bother with all of the details here (anyone who wants to know how it was done, drop me a line). Basically my solution was this: setup VLC to write its log out to a file and set the verbosity of the logging to max. When the track playing changes a line is written to the log including “New Title=XXX” where XXX is the track listing as it appears in the main VLC window. This information was utilized with two BASH scripts (one to pull the last song entry from the log and parse the song from that line and another to control this whole process) and one Applescript to push the status into the chat apps. A little cron magic and it works like a charm!

Perhaps the thing I was most impressed with today, was the amount of thought and planning that has gone into their process and systems. From Google Apps for mail and documents, to JIRA for bug / feature tracking, Subversion for revision control and a couple of other technologies, the level of integration is astounding. Using Subversion commit hooks there are automated syntax checking and unit testing routines, integrated code review facilities and a whole pile of other stuff that I was briefly introduced to today. I know that I am missing a lot of details here, but everything I have seen has really impressed me. I am really working in a professional software development environment now. It’s great! I am sure I’ll be posting more details as I come to understand things better in the coming weeks.

Anyway, back to my first taste of VendAsta. I arrived there shortly after 3pm to find the offices apparently deserted. I wandered around a little and found everyone in the back meeting room watching a video. The video in question was the second Spokesmonster promo for the StepRep application. The first Spokesmonster video is embedded below. For me the fact that such creative and fun things are not only applauded internally, but also released for public consumption, is amazing. Coming from a place like Cover-All, where one of the graphic designers creates hilarious mock advertisements all of the time and the public face of the company remains a stark beige yawn, this is a brave new world.

Equally interesting / frightening was another presentation that was made involving a Finite State Machine. Actual computer science is being performed at this company. This represents a quantum leap from the seat-of-the-pants type of environment I have been working in for the past three and a half years. I have to admit, it is a little daunting. There will definitely be an element of culture shock for me as I move into a real, honest to goodness, software development environment. Very, very exciting.