Activesteve.com is Born…

Since I’ve got your attention on these matters, I think I’ll also share another source of inspiration that I’ve unearthed. I was going to tack this onto the end of my last post, but decided that it was important enough to get it’s very own post. This inspiration comes from an unlikely source. Well, maybe not unlikely, but undiscovered by me until just today. It came in the form of a news article shared to me today by Larry, an old co-worker of Jody’s from her CREA days. This article was about a fellow by the name of Randy Pausch, who just died today from pancreatic cancer. He was a university prof with a very distinguished pedigree in the world of virtual reality. So just what is the source of inspiration from him? Well that would be his 1hr and 16min lecture that he delivered in September 2007, which was his ‘Last Lecture’. Basically, profs at Carnegie Mellon are given the chance to reflect on their lives and give a lecture based on what they would say if it would be the last lecture they would ever be giving before dying. Well, in an odd twist, Randy was actually doing just that. He had already been handed his death sentence resulting from the cancer diagnosis, and had to come to grips with it.

Howdy all! Well, this past week, I attended a conference in Toronto called ICE ’07 (Interactive Content Exchange) as part of my new role in which I am doing research on New Media. This conference was a relatively small affair with about 440 attendees, most of which were owners and/or high-level company officials form some of Canada’s cutting edge New Media companies. It was a great networking opportunity, and I met many interesting people with whom to chat about technology, shilfts in consumer behaviours, and web trends. The bulk of the conference was panel discussions, not straight presentations, which I think was actually better. Of course, it meant I had to take a lot of notes myself, but it sparked some interesting debates. This was also an opportunity to learn more about some of the latest web properties fighting for eyeballs in the vast emptiness of what we know as the Internet. This has prompted me to step back a bit and re-examine my online presence and the tools I’ve been using to promote me. As you are all well aware, it consists mainly of this site, as well as all my pictures up on Flickr. Not a great Web 2.0 presence, is it? Well, read on for some of my thoughts on where to go next.

Thought I’d pop in another post on the progress being made on the bar front. Things have been going so slowly that I ended up actually taking a day off work to get some work done on this project! Actually, I had a ‘personal day’ that was going to expire if I didn’t use it by the end of the month so I figured it would give me a chance to get a little extra work done on the bar, not to mention get laundry and my taxes done! Pictured to the left here is my attempt at capturing what the oak pieces look like after two coats of stain and three coats of varnish. Shiny, isn’t it? What you see is the product of almost 2 weeks of effort. Every step takes me an evening, because you have to let the stain / varnish dry thoroughly before either sanding it or re-coating it. Plus, most of these pieces had to have both sides done, doubling the time! The good news is that I have about 2 other ‘groups’ of pieces that I have to work on, and most of these are simpler pieces with a lot of 1-sided finish coming up. After those are all done, it’ll be the true building time. Can’t wait for that stage! I have to question the people who submitted testimonials on the website where I got the design saying it took them 3 weeks to build the bar! Okay, maybe they truly meant ‘build’ and not prepare. In my opinion, there’s no way on God’s green earth someone could possibly do all the cutting, routing, sanding, staining, varnishing, dry fitting, and putting together this whole bar! NO WAY!! Maybe if they worked full time on it. Naw. Granted, I had to learn a lot of things along the way (namely how to properly use a table saw and router), but just these last few steps of finishing take so long…