Declan was asking me to tell him when words on road signs came into focus for me. At school, I’d been noticing that I had to sit closer to the front of the classroom to read the board properly. The road signs came into focus later for me than they did for Declan. A few weeks later I had my first pair of glasses.

I didn’t like wearing them, and only wore them when I had to. When it came time for university, I bought some contact lenses with the money that I earned from my summer job.

Since then I’ve been wearing contact lenses or glasses and become increasingly dependent on them as my prescription changed.

A few weeks ago I was at the optician’s for a checkup. I halfheartedly asked him about laser vision surgery. He studied my records and told me that I’d be a good candidate. Within 24 hours my halfhearted interest turned into a definite desire. I thought to myself … even if I only had 20/20 vision for a couple of years after surgery, it would be amazing to experience that again. Contact lens were tiring my eyes out, glasses were becoming thicker and heavier.

I went for a consultation, then measurement at the laser surgery place, and last Friday I was scheduled for my operation.

It is an impressive process. They have equipment that can very accurately measure the capabilities and sizes of your eyes. They check and double check, then triple check the prescription. Their machine measures in decimal places, whereas a regular optician measures in .25 increments.

The operation felt a bit like how I imagine it would be being abducted by aliens. I lay under a machine, looking at a light, while a doctor put things in my eyes to keep them open and fixed in place. Then they turned the laser on. A 40 second blast for each eye in my case. My eyes were filled with drops and fluid, but I could see the light changing through it all.

It was an uncomfortable operation, but the whole thing only lasted about 20 minutes. I had to sit for a half hour so that things could settle, then the doctor looked at my eyes. He said it went well.

I could see things in focus, but beneath a fog. For that evening and the next day, I was pretty much falling asleep whenever I sat down. It was the weekend. On Sunday morning I woke up and could see the thin clear line of light beneath the curtain. Normally it is a thick blur of light. I thought … “Oh my God, I can see clearly”. I focused all around the room – the numbers on the alarm clock, the second hand on my watch, the spider’s web in the corner!

It is only just a week ago. I’m still getting used to my eyesight. It isn’t perfect yet, but is very good. My eyes have been dry and tired as they recover. I have some slight halo problems at night time, but I can live with them. It is amazing. They say my sight will improve as my eyes heal and stabilize over the coming months.

I still can’t believe that I did it! But so far, so good …

I’m a Man City fan – the wealthiest club in the world, and they’ve been doing their best this summer to spend some of the billions at their disposal. They’ve signed 80 million UKP on just four very strong players, and are chasing a few more. Real Madrid spent the same amount of money on just one player – Christiano Ronaldo.

However,  it isn’t those stories that have moved me the most. The story that makes me smile is the story of Michael Owen getting a new chance to play for a world class team when many had written him off.

I’m not quite sure what it is about this story – but I really want Owen to succeed, and prove the skeptics wrong. I want to see him win a premier league title, and force a place in the world cup. I think that would be the sign of a remarkable player, and a remarkable person. Regardless of the footballing talent, I think I’m moved most by his nerve, and the recognition Alex Ferguson has of his capabilities.

For me, his story outweighs the stories of huge financial deals. For me his story is all about the talent he has, and the work he has put in. He faced a difficult professional time at Newcastle, and carried a disproportionate share of the blame for the shambles there. I like what he says in this article. I predict he’ll be high up the scoring charts in May.

McConville family holding an Olympic torch

We saw the PM and Governor General arrive ( with serious RCMP pomp ). The snowbirds dazzled us with their fly-overs and we took in some of the sights and sounds around Major Hills Park before stopping for lunch on a courtyard and coming home with two worn out children.

We also held an olympic torch and met a gold medal winner. Next year’s Winter Olympics are in Vancouver – the government has done a good job advertising them!

North American Millipede in bug jar

It is an interesting creature … with ( we’ve since learned ) between 46 and 400 pairs of legs! We ( I ) believe that it has also laid some eggs in the bug jar. We’ll be releasing it soon into our composter, or into the woods near us … but we’re kind of intrigued to see what happens with the eggs … if in fact they are eggs.

Since they are nocturnal and it is night time, I can hear it moving in the room beside me. We’ll take good care of it … and release it soon.

Geese and Goslings

Each day as you drive past one of the ponds there, you’ll see the flossy little green goslings grow into huge noisy adults that will wisely depart for warmer climes in the fall.

Especially when my kids were a bit smaller I could completely relate to the Geese – constantly checking on their goslings to make sure they were still following them, quacking at them to hurry up, scurrying across the road as fast as they can, guarding and hanging out with them as they ate.

Over a decade ago, when I was playing football (soccer) during my first summer in Canada, I remember seeing the geese fly over the field, and was totally culture shocked by their size. They seemed like pterodactyls or something from the land that time forgot. You just don’t see birds that big flying so low, and in such large numbers in the UK. Certainly not the parts that I lived in.

The geese have been a constant herald of the warmer months here – a fantastic reminder that I live in Canada. It is lovely to see them come back, funny to see them living in their wild families and of course sad when they’re taking off again.

I know that it seems absurd, but when I left Nortel I was sad that I wouldn’t see the geese in the pond everyday. That’s a silly thought to have had when there were so many more serious consequences at the time.

But guess what! There are ponds and open areas where I work now too. There is a new gaggle of geese there, and this year I became the fly on the wall of their family lives each day.

Next week I’ll begin my second year of work at IBM Rational. I’m trying hard to make a new career there, and for the past few weeks have especially liked the work that I’ve been doing. It continues to be an adjustment for me to adapt to IBM culture – not because it is a difficult culture to adapt to, or a bad culture or anything – just because it takes me time to relate and understand it all, and I still feel a bit impatient about that.

The geese I see on my way to IBM every day are the same breed as the ones I saw on my way to Nortel – just in a different setting, and maybe with slight differences in behaviour. I’m glad of this constant, and grateful to have learned that there are other ponds bursting with new life for me to discover.

I called my new WordPress theme ‘L’Etoile Mysterieuse’ – there isn’t too much going on with the page visually, but I sampled colors from the fantastic book by Herge.

Toby looking serious at his first communion and confirmation

It seems like a blink of an eye since Toby was born. It was almost surprising me to be sitting beside him in the church before he made his way up for first communion. He has certainly grown up! Now both of our kids can receive communion at mass.

Toby’s sacraments were the catalyst for us to switch churches. We now go to Holy Spirit Church in Stittsville.

Since I’d worked with Jake through these sacraments, I asked Tracy to work with Toby through his. The sacramental team in our former church just said the wrong things in the kick off meeting. That experience, combined with some other disappointments  that we had in our local church caused us to reconsider.

Tracy is teaching in a Stittsville school and so came across Fr. Steve – the parish priest there. He sets an inclusive and pragmatic tone for the year old church there. It is a beautiful church – calm, fresh and welcoming.  Fr. Steve is clearly very strong in his faith, and is a brilliant communicator.

Toby was away from his school friends, but as it turned out even his school friends didn’t celebrate their sacraments together at our local church. It seemed so disconnected.

It was a little tricker to keep up to date with all of the sacramental milestones for Toby – the church in Stittsville is fantastically woven into the schools – so the teachers were also very involved in preparing them there, and Toby missed out on that ( there was no equivalent at our local church ) – but of course he benefitted from the wonderful support of his teachers at St. James.

In the end it was a lovely ceremony – with considerate and challenging words from the priest, and an emotional integration of the ceremony into the mass. I was moved. Very proud of Toby and very grateful that we celebrated at our new Church. Fr. Steve told the kids that their day was the day that gave them the strength to say yes to love for the rest of their lives.

It was fantastic too that Toby’s friends Kate and Mark came to the ceremony. They both whispered loudly to him when they went for their communion – calling him ‘Toba’ and giving the thumbs up. They made it very special for him.

Afterwards we cooked on the barbeque and sat around the table talking. The kids played outside and on the wii. 

I wish my parents and family could have been here. I called them the next day and they talked with Toby. Lately I’ve been thinking about them a lot. I thought back to my first communion too. The one piece that was missing really on the day. But thankfully we had some friends here. An interesting path for us all to this sacrament – a testing one. Maybe that’s the way it is supposed to be!

Exciting view from the balcony of my room in Toronto

So my first session was ‘Professionally Pushing Pixels’ by Ralph Hauwert. It was another fantastic talk. He wove a story that dipped into his influences as a kid ( ninjas, robots and the Commodore 64 ) and connected dots from them to projects in the present. The culmination was a high speed flight though 3D graphics theory played out on Flash 10.

I learned loads. I’m not sure that I’m ready to immerse myself in 3D yet, since to be honest I have challenges in 2D, but I’m so glad to understand more about how shading works, and to be able to compare rendering in voxels with triangles.

Ralph demonstrated some of the next generation of PaperVision 3D that he contributes to. Great talker – very good story teller and inspirational developer. Catch him if you can.

Following that I attended a talk called ‘Online, the brand is you’ presented by Carole Guevin from NetDiver. This presentation was all about developing an online portfolio and interested me for a few reasons.

When I ‘left’ Nortel last year I suddenly realized that my career’s work was stashed away in networks around the world.  A lot of my work is embedded in boxes, but quite a bit of my work was graphically based, and I wished that I had a way of showcasing it all.

Leaving Nortel prompted me in some ways to invest more of my time in personal projects. I’ve been working hard on a big project that lives in the cloud and ( I think ) pushes a few boundaries with cloud APIs. I want to showcase that project, and have a list of ideas for other experiments and utilities that I’ll set up soon.

In the end Carole’s talk was more about the psychology of ‘you being the brand’, than the actual presentation of the portfolio ( which was the reason I’d attended ). I loved her talk. It was real dose of wisdom and useful as advice for anyone even writing a resume, identifying personal values or setting goals for the future. I have lots of notes written down but I’ve linked her PDF document for those interested.

I hope to set up my portfolio and ‘lab’ experiments page in the coming months and will certainly use Carole’s advice.

After a break for lunch, I attended ‘Cool Shit!’ a toy show type presentation where a few ‘Rock Star’ presenters showed some of their latest work and experiments. I’ve linked a few things to check out below. Very cool.

• Sourcebinder
• More from Quasimondo
• Koen De Weggheleire

Introducing… The Enraptured Cranberry Jellyfish from Tokyo from dr woohoo on Vimeo

Finally I joined in ‘Things every ActionScript developer should know’ by Grant Skinner, which was packed with people. I concurred with a lot of the content of his presentation, which again was more about the psychology of developing software and would be equally as applicable to any programming language or platform.

I especially related to what he was saying about programming being like an artform. I know that it could easily sound pretentious, but part of the ‘simplicity’ that I was looking for in my work post Nortel was to be able to immerse myself more in software development for a while. To re-connect with algorithms, structures and symmetry of coding – to try and connect my past with the present some more ( I’ve been coding since I was 11 and although a lot has changed, much of the early theory I learned has a place in developing today ).

The FITC conference doesn’t end until late tomorrow night, but I’m typing up these notes on the train back to Ottawa at the end of the second ‘proper’ day. I didn’t know what to expect ( as I mentioned yesterday ) and only budgeted enough time and money for a couple of days.

It was a worthwhile experience for sure – incredibly high quality of presentations and organization ( I didn’t make it to the parties and after show events and am a bit sad that I didn’t ). Lots of energy and inspiration. I’m certainly coming home buzzing with ideas for projects and research – mainly in the context of browser graphics. I made a couple of new connections with people there too.

Well done FITC organizers and presenters! Thanks.

Blurry iPhone photo of 'Beautiful Algorithms' presentation.

I didn’t really know what to expect of FITC – I’d luckily been given a conference ticket and wanted to make the most of it, and was glad that I did …

FITC began life a few years ago as ‘Flash In The Can’ – a Canadian centred Flash conference. In recent years it seems that FITC has morphed into a ‘festival’ with an emphasis the collision of art/design and software technology.

My experience of software conferences has been largely based on JavaOne – I was lucky enough to attend it I think on four occasions, and presented once. It is the world’s biggest software conference – or at least was – not sure how it’ll fare now that Oracle own Sun.

In contrast, FITC is smaller but still very substantial – 1000 attendees from diverse US towns and cities as well as Canadian ones. The bigger difference though is the emphasis in art and design.

My recent work at IBM has seen me increasingly working with browser graphics. I’ve been dealing a lot with geometry and transforms, so I’m developing more of an interest in where art meets computer science in my work. I’ve worked in this area in the past though and had hoped to work more in this area in the future.

So, art and technology is a fresh and stimulating area for me. The first session that I attended was called ‘Beautiful Algorithms’ by Alec Cove. It was a study of the occurrence and rationale of patterns in nature, and how they could be modeled using pretty simple software algorithms. It was a nice presentation – a great way to start the show. I felt though it would have been solidified with more real life examples of software that has shipped with these algorithms, or how we should apply what we’ve learned.

The next session that I joined was Mario Klingemann’s Tinkerer’s Box. He is a character, and his talk was very entertaining. It was in some ways an extension of  Alec Cove’s talk … was nice for me that one almost led to the other. Mario took some of the algorithmic ideas and applied them to photographs with some fantastic results – plotting lines and effecting transforms at dark and light shades. Definitely inspired me – gave me a couple of ideas for personal projects that I’d like to explore.

During the lunch break I chatted with a guy that had been to FITC a couple of times before and recommenced that I attend ‘Art, Gesture, Computation, Framework’ by Golan Levin, and Zachary Lieberman. I could write a really long report just on this one talk, which to be honest with you was mind blowing. A bit like a TED talk. Here’s a glimpse, but consider checking out the clips that I linked to their names above. Seriously – it’ll be worth it to spend 30 minutes looking at their project clips.

Adobe presented some updates – some attention to text in Flash. I’m not going to be using Flash much with my graphics work in the coming months, so a bit late for me this one, but based on my experience with text so far – much needed. Some very cool links below:

• Neat game concept – “Closure“
• Neat effects with triangle shapes
• Augmented reality – this is especially cool with webcam and printout – do it!

Finally we had a presentation from artist Joshua Davis. It was a fantastic talk, really funny! His art is beautiful. He worked on the art for the conference. He showed some examples of his work, and how he used flash and algorithms to help develop the pieces. He talked about his influences and dug into them in insightfully amusing ways ( like how Italian WW2 planes looked like they wanted to be on a catwalk ). It was a world class presentation.

I met up with my work colleague Simon and his wife Kate who live here in Toronto. They shared a delicious supper and great conversation.

Missing my family. I’ll see them tomorrow night. I’ll squeeze in a few more talks before then.

Their school has creatively planned items for each day. We’re encouraged to pack litter-less lunches for them. I’d thought we did pretty well with our lunches until my conscience was pricked to make them totally litter free. Usually I pack them a juice box each, and a little yoghurt. This week they’re taking refillable metal bottles of water, and tupperware pots with cereal or crackers in them.

They surprised me by drinking all the water. It’s great, I’ve been suggesting to them to drink more water, rather than juice. I’ve been surprised too by how much I’ve lapsed into convenience with their lunches – by using small plastic snack bags, and prepackaged treats. Earth week has certainly helped me to rethink – although history has shown that some of the little tupperware pots, or lids don’t seem to make it back – which was the catalyst to my slip into convenience with pre-packaged things.

Tomorrow they need to wear blue and green clothes, to harmonize with the earth’s colors ( I’m anticipating they’ll add their own patches of authentic mud from the fields ). 

On Wednesday they’re cleaning up the gardens and yard.

All very neat, and of course they’re 100% committed and enthusiastic. Hats off to St. James.