General

Brrrr! Welcome to a chilly blog post from the frigid land up north. We’ve been suffering through a bit of a cold spell up here, wth windchills close to -40 degrees celsius. Of course, a little cold weather can never keep ActiveSteve down. Although I’ve tried to stay indoors a touch more, I’ve still been getting outside for some running and snowshoeing. I’ve also vowed that I have to get out on the cross country skis soon. After all, I haven’t used them since 2007, as a result of being in NZ last year! The cold weather is giving me a chance to catch up on a post I’ve been meaning to write about last weekend. You see, Matt, Rob, and I spent the weekend in Toronto doing what guys do best. Not a whole lot other than drinking beers and trying not to be too obnoxious to those around us. I’ll let you judge whether or not we succeeded. Before you read the whole post, you can click on over to flickr to see the set of pictures from the weekend (mainly Super Saturday shots).

Brace yourselves friends, for I am about to do something that I virtually never do. Those who know me will understand that talking about work is something that I rarely do, and usually only when prompted. The inevitable questions around ‘what do you do’ sort of bore me, because to me work stays at work, and when I leave the building, I don’t take it with me. However, in an unprecedented case of giving a crap, I’ve decided to venture out and post a little something about my current work stuff. Don’t worry, this site will not devolve into a diatribe about my daily grind. Trust me, both you and I are probably much more interested in my other life ;-). However, I’ve gotta get this off my chest, so please read on for a rare insight into WorkerSteve.

Howdy everyone, and welcome to ActiveSteve 3.0! Yup, it was time to throw the switch on the things I’ve been working on in the background for a while with respect to this website. In celebration of the fact that ActiveSteve has essentially been reborn as a result of getting the clean bill of health, I decided to get my portal re-vectored in anticipation of my future adventures 🙂 Although I’ve always been pretty happy with the site that I had, it was time to try some new things. Well, that and the fact that my server host has been sort of trying to get me to upgrade my underlying content management system (CMS), Drupal specifically. Of course I’m sure you’re not all that interested in the boring techy side of this. You’re probably just interested in finding out what exactly I’ve changed, what’s new, and what you can do here at the new ActiveSteve. I’ll keep is relatively short, but if you’d like to actually read about what’s new, rather than just messing around yourself, click the link to read more.

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.