Saturday 12 April 2008 at 07:42 am
ok, I've finally got around to doing a technology related post... :)
http://blog.wekeroad.com/mvc-storefront/ I follow this guy's blog (Rob Connery), and have watched the last few screencasts he's done on learning Test Driven Development (TDD). He's a very experienced dev, but new to practicing TDD. He thought he'd blog/screencast his way through the learning experience (and he's building an asp.net MVC app which is pretty cool too). It's been an interesting experience to see him go through it and watching the feedback he's been getting from folks watching him do it. :)
Just passing along as I thougth some of you might also be interested.
Tuesday 08 April 2008 at 11:37 am
Wow. Every once in a while you stumble acrross a restaurant that really impresses. This is one of them for me. Shelley and I were in Vancouver Monday evening and were hunting for a place to have dinner. We saw the Banana Leaf restaurant on Broadway a couple blocks west of Cambie, and decided to give it a shot.
The restaurant was nicely decorated and had a good atmosphere. We both tried the 'tasting menu' and every single dish was fabulous. I'm not going to go into the details - their website has some information on their menu. http://bananaleaf-vancouver.com/index2.html All I can say is that we had a super meal and think we've found a new 'destination' restaurant. Definitely will be recommending it and returning ourselves. :)
Saturday 05 April 2008 at 8:19 pm
Today I spent some quality time with our boat, the Genesis I, getting it ready for the new boating season.
This is our first boat, and we've only had it for one boating season (we bought it in Nov 2006), but we've fallen in love with boating.
Of course as our first boat, we purchased something older (1974) and cheaper and well, 'needing maintenance' :). When we first bought the boat, one of the engines was not running, so we got a great deal. I managed to tune up that engine and with the help and advice of a few people managed to get it to run well enough, but it was hard to get started. A bit annoying, but not too big of a deal.
Last year (before our first boating season), I replaced the whole exhaust manfold systems on both engines with a new, more modern configuration. It was a ton of work and required a bunch of replumbing of the cooling system, but overall it was a fun job and rewarding to see the improved engines up and running.
This year, we took the boat out of the water to get it's bottom professionally painted - I'm sure it had been 4-5 years since it had last been done. When preparing to fire up the engines for the first time this season, it became apparent that the 'hard starting' engine had become the 'no starting' engine. :) So about three weeks ago, once again with the advice of some experienced people ringing in my ears, I took the carburator off the engine, took it apart, cleaned it, and put it back together. Well the engine started and ran fine, but it was still pretty hard to start.
Today, I decided to do some more generic maintenance - changing the oil & oil filters, finding and sealing the source of an annoying oil leak that was making the bilges pretty grungy, cleaning the bilges, etc. Well, I decided to change the fuel line filters, and I found that they were both filled with WATER! Because one of the engines had been running flawlessly, I never suspected that I had water in the fuel. Both filters had a lot of water, but the one on the 'hard starting' engine was completely full. With the new fuel filters in place, that engine started up as easily as the other - what a relief!
As with most any older boat, there's still a list of things that need attention - Shelley wants to redo the upholstery in the interior, one of the engines seems to run hotter than the other, the hot water heater needs repair, and I'm sure by the time we get through that list, there will be more we'll want to do. But that's part of the fun of boating - at least in the class of boats that I can afford. :)
Friday 04 April 2008 at 08:58 am
As I mentioned in my previous post about building a set of stairs and deck railings, I have been having fun re-aquainting myself to creating shop drawings. I initially started working with OpenOffice Draw, because I had it installed and I knew it would be able to do the very basic 2d modeling I needed. However, I found it a little lacking - it would have been nice to be able to show detailed expanded portions of the drawing (but still to scale) as I had learned to do with Corel Draw in my past jobs. So I started looking for free 2d or 3d drafting tools just to see what was out there. I stumbled across Google SketchUp, and have found it to be an amazing tool. It is really easy to use, and comes with great documentation - good help files and tons of video tutorials. They've done a great job of creating an intuitive way of working with 3D objects they call their inference engine. I have to say that it works incredibly well compared to any other tool I've used. Here's the start of the drawing that I created for the deck project:
And here's the almost finished drawing (I don't think I'm going to take it much further than this because it's probably not neccesary for the project...
And here's an example of a detailed view:
I know there's a ton of features I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of yet; I might post more drawings if I wind up doing more just for the fun of it.
