Yaletown at night seen from the bottom of the Cambie bridge at Spyglass place, Vancouver, BC

Seen a few meters from this.

Vancouver, BC, Canada - February 3rd 2010

Inukshuk along the seawall in Vancouver, BC, around Stanley Park on Christmas day.

Vancouver, BC, Canada - December 25th 2009

Update: it is actually closer to English Bay.

Taken tonight, from the Cambie bridge in Vancouver, BC toward the science center over False Creek.

Not from the same vantage point as this

Vancouver, BC, Canada - February 3rd 2010

When I left my job in 2008, one of my biggest fears was "Will I need insurance?" I was quite happy with my PPO insurance through InCharge (and earlier, the "pretty much everything's covered" dot-com insurance at Citrix). At my height/weight ratio back then, it was pretty much impossible to get private insurance, even HDHP+HSA plans with $5200 deductibles. I went uninsured for 7 months until Tammy took pity on me and we tied the knot.

At first I was a bit nervous about being on an Tammy's plan, as it was a Cigna HMO and I've heard nothing but trash talked about managed care...

• My PPO plans had always allowed me to go a huge variety of doctors. The HMO limited me to... well, choosing from a slightly less huge variety of doctors. I found one I liked and they became my PCP. My doctor's office is rockin.
• The PPO meant I just had to cover my deductible ($200/yr last I remember) each year and then I only paid 10% of the bill. The HMO charged me $20 a visit. I'd have to make several HMO visits a month before I got close to spending as much as the PPO deductible.
• PPOs were always touted as the upper-crust plan, with HMO patients having to wait 2 months to get an appointment, only to sit in an overcrowded lobby for an hour waiting to be seen for 2 minutes before being shuffled off. Under the HMO, pretty much anyone I called for an appointment (doctor, dentist, optometrist, endodontist) scheduled me for the same or next day. Often, they simply said "We've got openings right now. Just stop in."
• PPOs were supposed to be the good guys and help you get treated while HMOs pinched pennies and denied everything. Cigna has approved every single procedure my doctor/neurologist prescribed, including a number of pricey advanced radiology procedures. There was an occasional lag of 3-4 days before it was approved, but that was pretty common according to the medical staff.
• Cigna also called me out of the blue to enroll me in a wellness program because of my height/weight ratio during my last physical. I get a nurse that calls me every month or two to check up on me, ask about diet and exercise, offer advice, forward me relevant news articles or information, etc. It's the first time an insurance company actually took some step *before* I got sick.

All things considered, I've been pleased as punch about managed health care and think that my situation is as least a narrow, anecdotal view of how managed care done correctly can be a good thing.

And I'm writing this HMO love letter because I just heard back that my new $2000/month prescription I'll soon be taking was approved by my insurance company for a $0 copay.

Let's continue from Part 1 about boardgames.

• Carcassonne (and its derivatives): Carcassonne is another successful game, to the point that, like The Settlers of Catan, I can find it in bookstores. It has several derivatives and several expansions. They are all based on the same principle: each player place a tile on the table, next to another (there are simple placement rules) to create areas (buildings, cities, markets, fields, roads, etc. depending on the flavour) and eventually place, if permitted, a pawn (called follower or more colloquially meeple) to mark the territory in order to score, immediately or later on. This game can be played with or without confrontation as you can either try to just score more that your oponents or to block them through the placements of tiles and meeples. All the variants deserve an article to themselves.

• Dominion: This is the game that came from nowhere end ended up in the preferred list of gamers. Dominion is a card game where each players buy and accumulate cards in their deck, cards that will come to play when the deck is reshuffled. There are 3 kinds of cards: money, action and victory. Each player start with a deck with a little money and a few victory point. Each turn the player take the top 5 cards of the deck and play them (or not) before discarding them all. These discarded cards are his and will be reshuffled when the deck is exhausted. Action card allow bonuses, "attacks", playing more, etc. Victory point are just this, and waste a precious slot in your hand. Money allow buying, with more or less value. The game ends when some of the cards available for purchase are exhausted ; then points are counted. While I like that game, I grew a bit tired by the hype and the very limited player interaction, even though Dominion Intrigue have some interesting new cards (you can combine the sets). I have been told that if you liked Magic The Gathering, you'd like Dominion, but I still have to play Magic.

• Fjord: This small two player game got my favors recently. Each player alternatively place hex tlles to form a terrain and eventually place one of their farms. When all the tiles are placed, each player place his tokens, to score. The placement of these token is determined by the initial placement of the farms and the placement of the opponents.

• Elasund, the first city of Catan: While this game has Catan in its name (branding it is called), it is a different game by the same author. No trade of resource, no road or settlement, but buildings to build to bring you gold (or influence) and victory points. And that's where it get interesting: buildings can be build over (partially) others withdrawing resources and point from opponents in favor of yours. And given the limited space on the board, it can be the only way to win.

To be continued...

Generated by the Bart Simpson Chalkboard Generator

For those who wonder why, it is because I'm tired of people using Facebook to send message to people when there is email (and I'm not talking about the "comment" feature but realy about initiating conversions using the facebook wall, which is public, or the facebook message which is...). It goes in line with what I have been saying for a while: Facebook is the new AOL, a proprietary silo that does not communicate with the outside world.

Apparently, in the Silicon Valley, the Settlers of Catan is the new golf, where high-tech exec and founder gather to play an old tech game. While I have no interest in golf, The Settlers of Catan I do. More broadly in boardgames.

If for you boardgame mean Monopoly, Clue or Scrabble, I'd yes, but no. In March 2009, Wired had an article about Catan and its success that will help you understand were it comes from, and its success, Catan being often considered as being the initiator of the renouveau of board-gaming, with a new wave of Euro games also called designer games because they don't necessarily come from Europe anymore. They include a large part of strategy and usually much less of a luck factor.

The games vary, some have only cards, some use tiles, or come with a board, or a combination of these. Dice are not necessarily part of the game components, but maybe here to provide some randomness. Unlike in a game like Monopoly or Clue, that randomness is not a decisive part but rather just a way to fuel strategic decisions. When there is no dice, it is just the order the tiles are shuffled, or the cards.

Most of the games have a theme, avoid total abstraction like checkers or chess, making theme a bit more attractive to players.

Several elements that makes The Settlers of Catan are the modular board (constructed out of randomly distributed hex tiles), the resources and their trading between players: what can make your fortune can also make your demise. These resources are the commodities produced each turn that allow you to build, and reach the victory points to win the game, the production being determined by the placement of your settlement on the board and the roll of dice. No game is the same.

Beside Catan, that requires at least 3 player (4 to be optimum, for 5 or 6 you need an expansion), I have a few favorites, that works well with two players:

• Catan the card game: this is not the same game as Catan, but takes a lot of its principles, using cards, and as a two player game only. You still have resources, their production, the trade and building to reach victory points, all tailored for a two.

• San Juan: another card game. You build buildings that have various "powers". You alternatively take a role that gives you a privilege for the action you can do during the turn. Your opponents will have taken a role too and get their own privilege, all executing the chosen actions. One of the original bits is that the card you have in hand are used a currency to build (a card is a card), as good you produce (a card is a good) and then exchange for more cards (depending on where it is produced).

• Race for the Galaxy: another card game, with a science-fiction theme. I played it before San Juan. It definitely inherit traits from San Juan, like card as good, card as currency, action chosen and privilege. But the combination are more complex and production allow to get more than just cards. Like San Juan I find that the game don't have much interaction between players, which is good if you like non-confrontational games.

• Ticket to Ride: trains, trains, trains. Trains seems to be a recurring theme in boardgames for a while. In Ticket to ride, each player has a set of "tickets" that represent routes, routes he has to build in order to score. Two challenges: to build segments for the routes, you need certain cards (one to several of the same coor). Also segments (a direct route between two cities) might be built by a competitor so you the shortest path is not necessarily the right one. The original game use a North American map. There is a European map a bit more "compact", that is more competitive and more suited for 2 players. One proof that simple rules can lead to a great game play.

To be continued...

On November 11th (it is a holiday here in BC) we decided to venture to Granville Island, by taking the Aquabus. Here it is, waiting for a an Aquabus, at Spyglass Place across the Cambie bridge.

Vancouver, BC, Canada - November 11th 2009

On December 26th, there was a lot of fog over False Creek in Vancouver. Here is the view of the Science Center taken from the sea wall at the end of Smithe in Yaletown.

Vancouver, BC, Canada - December 26th 2009

Here we have gbrainy 1.30, two months after the previous major version. gbrainy is a game that challenges your logic, verbal, calculation and memory abilities.

 

What is new in version 1.30 from the NEWS file: 

* Re-architectured for better multiplatform support
* Personal records tracking
* Improved player scoring algorithm
* Better accessibility
* 9 new verbal analogies and a new logic puzzle
* Mallard documentation
* More HIG complaint
* Bug fixes

gbrainy 1.30 is available for download in source code from:

* http://gent.softcatala.org/jmas/gbrainy/gbrainy-1.30.tar.gz
      (md5sum 80135619a92a350434471c30832f6106)

Additionally, gbrainy is available for all major Linux distributions. 

Let me elaborate bit more on new features and changes.

Mallard documentation

I wrote a first version of the gbrainy documentation using Mallard, that is going to be documentation system for GNOME 3.0. As usual, translators did an amazing job translating so many strings in just few days.

Better Multiplatform support

I have re-architectured gbrainy separating the client side from the gaming logic making it now possible consume its services from different front-ends. For example, I did a native small Winforms client. It is possible to write new clients in most of the popular front-end technologies, including web based.

gbrainy at GNOME Bugzilla

Since two weeks ago, if you want to report a gbrainy bug you can do so using GNOME Bugzilla.

How to help

This is a common question that I get. Let me point out some areas where you can help:

• Play the game and provide feedback about the application.
• Translation to different languages. Check the current status of gbrainy translations.
• Any development aid, including fixes or new Puzzles for the current system (see the development section).
• Ideas for new logic puzzles, memory or calculation trainers.

If you like gbrainy, blog about it and tell your friends!

Debut in Ubuntu Lucid as default game

gbrainy debuts as default game on Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid Lynx) alpha 2 CD. I want to thank Robert Ancell and Siegfried-Angel Gevatter for their effort on packing the application and their help on QA.

I'm off to the beach (Apollo Bay) next week and decided I needed to remain connected to the net. After checking around I found that Telstra is the only carrier that has coverage down there. Further checks implied that their USB broadband modems worked under Linux. After checking out the option I bought Telstra's casual plan and their "Telstra Turbo" USB mobile. This has the advantage of being able to be discontinued between uses. The price per GB is about 5 times greater than other Australian carriers. On the other hand, Telstra really do have a very wide coverage and this really is expensive. The other carriers are essentially limited to just metropolitan areas.

I spent an hour or so futzing around with settings, searching the internet etc until I eventually discovered the SIM card was not properly inserted! Hint make sure the lights show blue not flashing orange :-)

After getting it properly seated I just clicked on network manager, chose mobile broadband, chose Australia, Telstra, default settings, clicked OK, requested a connection to Telstra and hey presto it worked!

Yay! This is exactly the experience I want :-)

Congratulations to Fedora 12 and the network manager team.

Hurrah, 2010 is upon us!

One new years resolution I have set for myself is to blog more about what I’m working on. I’ve learned over the last year that the audience of people who care about your projects in development is vanishingly small. Thus, the need for secrecy in order to make a “PR splash” is rather small– announce far and wide when you have something that people can use by all means, but don’t worry too much about talking about what you’re working on with the internets.

In this spirit, some projects I’m 99% certain I’ll be releasing publicly in 2010:

• neocoder A lightweight geocoding library, with wrapper libraries for your language of choice. Written in C++ using SQLite and boost regular expressions. Will support both OpenStreetMap and GeoBase GML as input. Currently in development on github, hoping to release with routez (as its geocoding component).
• routez A generic travel planning web service, written in python using the django framework and the libroutez libraries. This is basically the software behind hbus.ca… the goal for 2010 is to clean it up and make it generic by clearing out the Halifax-specific stuff (mostly just the geocoding and site theme stuff at this point), then release it to the public under the Affero GPL License (was originally going to with GPL, but Simon Law convinced me otherwise… more on that in a future post).
• Transit To Go A dedicated iPhone client for the routez software, developed in collaboration with Dmitri Dolguikh and Bill Wilson, two talent developers from Halifax. Has some innovative (in my opinion, anyway) details on how things will be viewed. This one’s going to be proprietary, but will be affordable and awesome.

Besides this, I have a few more irons in the fire… however, I’m hesistant to talk about them just yet. Just getting the above done in the midst of my work with Navarra (to say nothing of having a life in there somewhere) is going to be challenging.

Thoughts? Would be particularly interested in hearing from people working on similar projects to neocoder and routez. Despite how it may some times appear, I don’t have a NotInventedHere mentality: I’ve done as an exhaustive survey of the field as I could before deciding to work on my own projects, and what I’ve found just hasn’t been the right fit for what I’m trying to accomplish. However, the world’s gotten so damn big that I’m not sure if I’m missing something…

So I haven’t been blogging much lately. Story of my life, I’ll try to be a bit more active in the new year.

I’m now back living in Montréal, which has been great. Very sad to leave Halifax and all the goings on, but I’ll be back to visit. And I’m not done with disruptive transit-related apps for that city. Au contraire. More news on that soon.

Another year almost over:

• My weight was hovering around 270 in January. I started working with Kat Fieler, an awesome and inexpensive personal trainer, twice a week this year and am down to around 240 now. If I can get down to 200 by the end of 2010, I'll be very satisfied. Even as it is right now, I'm happy with the weight loss, muscle gain, and extra energy I've had recently.
• Besides working out, part of the reason for my weight loss has been the changes to our diet. While we have been gradually altering what we eat since well before 2009, it really kicked into high gear when Tammy started seeing her nutritionist, Tracy Neely, this year. We've now started incorporating a lot more organic foods, a larger variety of vegetables, much less processed foods, green smoothies in the morning, etc. It's been a lot more about finding things we like to eat than forcing us to stop eating something altogether. Eating healthy doesn't mean our food is boring or flavorless and Tammy has become a kick-ass chef. I'm sure I could have lost the weight without the dietary changes we made, but I have no doubt it would have been slower.
• Our honeymoon trip to Alaska was fantastic. We got to see the sights, do the hikes, paddle the kayaks, ride the planes, and hug the statues. While it's hard to imagine topping this trip, it has raised the bar for anniversaries. This year we went ziplining. Next year we'll climb Everest or wrestle a polar bear.
• Our first year as a married couple brought a lot of other "first (blank) as a married couple"; first date night as a married couple, first valentine's day aamc, first time grocery shopping aamc, first odometer palindrome aamc (odometer palindromes amuse me, no idea why). We're getting ready for our second Christmas as a married couple and I couldn't be more content.
• My blurred vision in my left eye (a pretty accurate depiction) ended up being Multiple Sclerosis. This finally explained other mystery symptoms that cropped over over the last 6 months that my Dr ordered all kinds of tests for, but was never able to diagnose before they seemed to clear up on their own. I've got a ton to say about this subject in general, but it will end up being another post sometime in the near future. In the end, I'm not losing any sleep over MS, it's just a name to what I've been frustrated by for the last 6 months.
• Our house fell apart a little bit more this year. We've replaced entirely too much plumbing in it. Tam and I both have a love-hate relationship with the house. We love that we are lucky enough to have one at all, but hate that it's so small, falling apart, and has lost about 60% of its value since we bought it at the height of the bubble.
• Probably the highlight of 2009 has been preparing to become foster parents. We completed the training and home study, got the baby room all set up and stocked, and are just awaiting my fingerprint clearance letter from the FBI so that we can get licensed. We're both as ready as we can be, now we just have to sit and wait.

Overall, a very satisfying year.

We are running an election to see which of the following characters are most important to you on Maemo: $ % & ( ) = > \ _ | ~ £ €

Dear Dave,

This is a difficult question indeed; I must admit I have certain partiality for the £ but these days I should perhaps prefer the €, even if € < £ (€ > £ , banish the thought, $ = £ God help us all). I could _ not _ possibly live without %, since I have to borrow at least some of the $, £ & €. My day job relies on the |, and no day job ~ no £. But you can have the \, I could not care less about that one,

Yours truly,

It has been a week since the official PySide 0.2.2 release and we finally finished the Maemo packages, that includes full implementition of Qt 4.6 and the new module QtMaemo5.

The packages are available at extras-devel repository. More instructions on how to install (into device and/or Scratchbox) can be found at PySide website - download section.

The PySide team would like to thank all those who helped on this release, reporting bugs, sending patchs and discussing on irc channel. Also, we would like to invite users and developers to discuss the future of a new PySide "pythonic" API, and help us to produce a powerful Qt binding.

PySide contacts:
WebPage: http://www.pyside.org
irc channel: #pyside at freenode
mailing-list: pyside@lists.openbossa.org
bugzilla: http://bugs.openbossa.org/

Today the PySide team released a new version of project, with full support for Qt 4.6, including QtMultimedia.

Another great news is support for Mac OS X. The first working package have already been released and you can download it from PySide website.
A package for Fremantle is coming :D

Some time ago I start a new implementation of a Ogre OpenGLES render system, to get this running in the future on Maemo devices, I finished this but never get a chance to see this working on Maemo. But now the things have changed and the new Maemo device already have support to OpenGLES, and my code was merged in Ogre mainline, I can go back and start the test but first I need update this to OpenGLES 2.0 because the old code is implemented on OpenGLES 1.0. I will keep you updated about the news and I hope show some videos :D.

Ogre OpenGL render system: http://ogre.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ogre/trunk/RenderSystems/GLES/src/

Here we have gbrainy 1.20, eight months after the previous major version. gbrainy is a brain teaser game and trainer to have fun and to keep your brain trained. It provides the following types of games:

• Logic puzzles. Games designed to challenge your reasoning and thinking skills.
• Mental calculation. Games based on arithmetical operations designed to prove your mental calculation skills.
• Memory trainers. Games designed to challenge your short term memory.
• Verbal analogies. Games that challenge your verbal aptitude.

 

What is new in version 1.20 from the NEWS file:

* 6 new games
* Verbal analogies (new type of games)
* New translations
* Bug fixes

gbrainy 1.20 is available for download in source code from:

* http://gent.softcatala.org/jmas/gbrainy/gbrainy-1.20.tar.gz
      (md5sum b9ef1fed6da07c6e3c4c8359841d11c2)

Additionally, gbrainy is available for all major Linux distributions.

On top of the already existant translations, in this version debuts the Danish translation by Joe Dalton.

Extending gbrainy

gbrainy can be extended in two main ways:

• Developing new games as extensions. These are external assembly files that gbrainy recognizes at runtime.
• Defining new verbal analogies using an external file.

If you extend gbrainy, please considering contributing your work to be included in gbrainy.

Windows Version

After a year without releasing a new Windows version of gbrainy I have prepared a new Windows version. This new version works much better because it includes newer versions of the GTK and Mono stacks and a few fixes in the installer.

How can you help gbrainy?

This is a common question that I get. Let me point out some areas where you can help:

• Play the game and provide feedback about the application.
• Translation to different languages. Check the current status of gbrainy translations.
• Any development aid, including fixes or new Puzzles for the current system (see the development section).
• Ideas for new logic puzzles, memory or calculation trainers.

If you like gbrainy, blog about it and tell your friends!

Groups, View, Export in abicollab.net

This post is public domain. Feel free to copy and paste where ever you like

The first 3 articles of this series showed some basic operations of abicollab.net, how one could go about finding the friend you want to collaborate with and then how to setup a real time collaboration.

In this post I will talk about the Groups, View and Export features of abicollab.net.

Groups

One often has a collection of colleagues, friends and co-workers with similar interests who need to work together on documents. The abicollab.net webservice makes it easy to allow collections of people to form a group and to work together on common documents.

For testing purposes I've created a number of abicollab.net identities for myself and I'll use these to show how one creates such a group.

Simply click on the "my groups" link.



You see the list of groups for which you have membership.



To view the documents held by the group or the membership click on “view documents” or “view members”. The screen shot below shows the membership of the “abicollab” group. We’re the group that directly codes and tests the abicollab.net webservice. Marc and I are administrators of the group. Either of us can approve whether an applicant can join the “abicollab” group. Applicants to the group are shown in the “Aspiring members list”.



To create a new group, click on the “create a group” link, type in the name you wish and click “save group”.



The new group is created with you as the administrator.



Here I’ve created a group called “MartinSeviors”. Now suppose another user called “M. Edmund Sevior” wants to join this group. He navigates to “my groups”, searches for the group by typing in it's name, then clicks “Join a group”.



Now the administrator of the group receives an email of this request which also shows up as a message in his “message central” region.



I can now accept or decline the request. After accepting the request, navigating to “my groups” and clicking the member list shows the updated member list.



Any group administrator can promote any other member to become an administrator too.

view

The “view” link associated with every document shows the contents of your document in your browser. What you see is what you would get if you exported the document to html. With this one one can quickly tell if you have selected the right document to edit, without having to download it into AbiWord.

export

Every document on abicollab.net can be exported into a number of common word processing formats. This is accomplished via the “export” link. One chooses the preferred format then clicks “export".



This post is available on abicollab.net at the link:

https://abicollab.net/documents/embed/10651/latest.

Real time collaboration

This post is public domain. Feel free to copy and paste where ever you like.

My first two posts showed some basic operations of abicollab.net and how one could go about finding the friend you want to collaborate with.

Now I'll talk about the killer feature: Real Time Collaboration!

To set up a document for Real Time Collaboration, one simply sets the permissions to "view & collaborate" for the friend with whom you want to work with the "share" link associated with the document.



Then choose who you want from your list of friends.



Click on "save settings" and the permissions are set!



The document now appears in the list of documents available for your friend. Since you've allowed your friend to collaborate on the document, it shows up on the list of documents he can work on. The friends "my documents" view is shown below.



Now you open the document by just clicking on its name and it opens in your AbiWord. Remember you need version 2.8 or later. You start typing away....

(Your version of AbiWord shown below)



OK, now your friend logs in and sees a new document, shared with him. He decides to edit it too and so opens it. It loads into his version of abiword.



Hey presto we have a Real Time Collaboration!
So both of you can type away in the document, editing as you wish while you see each others changes in real time. If either press "save" in their AbiWord, the current version gets saved into the history of the document on the website.

I just want to point out a couple of things. Your friend did not actually download the document from the website. It had never even been saved! Instead what has happened is that the two have established a peer-to-peer collaboration via a abicollab.net router daemon. The website joined a connection from you to a connection to your friend and passed traffic between the two of you. After that the two AbiWord's transferred the document and established the collaboration.

Consequently everyone is guaranteed to always see the absolute latest version of the document!

We've totally eliminated the edit=>email to colleague=> update/comment/fix => email =>update/comment/fix => email... cycle.

There are many other very cool things about AbiWord's real time collaboration but I'll save them for other posts.

You can find this post on abicollab.net at:

https://abicollab.net/documents/embed/9886/latest

This post is Public Domain. Feel free to copy and paste as you wish.

The main benefit of abicollab.net is to allow people to work together on joint documents. To do this one first needs to establish a connection to the person you wish to work with. This is done with the “my friends” link.

First click on the “my friends” tab. This takes you to the “my friends” tab seen below. In this case the user currently has no friends within abicollab.net. You can tell because there are none listed.




Lets make him some!

Next click on the “add a friend” link.

This pops up a box that allows you to search for your friend.



Start typing their name in the “search for friends” box. As you type, names that match your text appear in the “search results” list.




It is worthwhile to include some additional information about yourself, otherwise your friends might not be able to find you! Note that when I made that screenshot, abicollab.net had not been released. Now there are many more Martin's that appear in the search results. You can also search on region and country by entering name, location, country separated by commas. Uwog just added that feature last night!

When you see the person that you’re looking for, click on “add as friend”.



After you click “yes I’m sure” your friend will receive an email message and if they’re logged in they will see your request to become a friend appear in the “message central” region. If they click on “accept” the two of you become friends and can share the documents you wish to work on together.



The latest version of this document is available on abicollab.net at:
https://abicollab.net/documents/embed/3276/latest

The AbiWord 2.8.0 Windows release was fine, but the Linux one contained an annoying bug leading to random crashes. This lead me to release AbiWord 2.8.1 and fire our entire QA team. If you use AbiWord 2.8.0 on Windows, then you are perfectly up to date and don’t need this release. Linux/FreeBSD/Hurd/etc. packagers and people compiling AbiWord for themselves will want to grab this release.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

This post is public domain. Feel free to copy and paste where ever you like.

Firstly, we made slashdot!

Secondly reading and answering the comments made me realize how hard it is to explain all the cool features of http://abicollab.net. My intention is to post a series of blog posts to try to fix that.

http://abicollab.net is designed to make it as easy as possible share work and collaborate in document production with friends and colleagues, no matter where they are in the world. The service uses very little resources so it quite feasible to host a medium sized organisation, say a 1000-person business or High School, from a single server.

The main strength of http://abicollab.net is also its biggest drawback. You need AbiWord-2.8 or later. If you don't have that you miss out on the best features. Getting AbiWord-2.8">AbiWord-2.8">AbiWord-2.8 for windows is trivial. Getting it for Linux is harder at the moment but will become easier with time as it gets bundled with distros. It is even harder for OSX because you'd have to compile it as an X11 app.

Having obtained AbiWord-2.8, lets go through a work flow. This is not the only work-flow and I'll post about others later. This example shows how to use the storage features of the web service. I personally have 4 separate work environments. My Linux partiton on my laptop, my windows partition on my laptop, my work workstation and my home PC. Just using the central storage facilities of abicollab.net saves me a whole lot of hassle.

First we log into the website and it takes us to the "my documents" page.



Next we decide to create a new document and host it on the site. You do that by clicking on "new document" and filling out some info about the document.



We see the document has been created.



Now we'll tag it so it can be easily sorted. We click on "tag" in the range of options for the document.



Ok now we actually want to put content into it. So click on "open" or the document name.
http://abicollab.net downloads a router file with the MIME extension ".abicollab" to firefox. Firefox has registered this as being associated with AbiWord, so it loads AbiWord which grabs the router file and uses it to extract the document from the web service. The result is that AbiWord opens with the contents of the document hosted on the web service. In this case the document has just been created so it is blank.




OK now we edit away in AbiWord until we think we'd better save it. To do this we simply click on "save" in AbiWord and the document is saved back to the web service.



The complete history of the document is recorded on the web service. To view it, simply click "history" next to the document.



This history of this document contains just the initial creation, which is of course blank, the second from this save. One can immediately inspect a particular history by clicking "view".



OK so now we edit away in AbiWord as we wish, saving whenever we want. Each save gets recorded as a separate history.

Now I'll set the permissions for the document. Permissions are "none, view,view + collaborate" for "everyone, friends, groups".
For this document I want everybody to be able to view this document and people in the abicollab group to be able to collaborate on it. We set permissions by clicking on "share".



Finally for today you can post the document on the web in variety of formats with the "Link" command.



I'll create a link to a HTML-sized version of the document that opens in firefox. I do this by choosing "embedded link"

And here is the document on the web

https://abicollab.net/documents/embed/7851/latest

Every time I click "save" in AbiWord the contents of that link update to reflect the latest version.

The next post will cover sharing and collaborating with colleagues.

Thanks to awesome work from a whole collection of people in the AbiWord team, the great folks at BetterBe.com and creative genius types at lemon8.nl, AbiWord-2.8 is released together with a totally revamped http://abicollab.net. This website tightly integrates with AbiWord-2.8 and enables easy real-time document editing, stores documents online, allows easy document sharing with your friends, and performs format conversions on the fly.

Think google docs but with a real Word-Processor not an application in a web-browser.

Special congrats to my long-time friend and partner in-crime, Marc Maurer, aka uwog, who worked day and night, many many nights, to pull all this together.

Quick screenshot of http://abicollab.net

All the fun stuff can be found in the AbiWord 2.8.0 release notes, so read them! Also make sure to check out our new collaboration webservice AbiCollab.net.

Hello everybody, Due some problems with gcc-4.2 (currently available on Fremantle), we had compile PySide armel packages by ourselves, and that takes some time. Today I generated and uploaded these packages to PySide repository. Instructions to get this running can be found at PySide site at Download section.

Best fan production ever!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmwM_AKeMCk

It's totally awesome :-)

...it is surely a duck.

Happy thanksgiving to Canadians.

Ottawa, ON, Canada - June 6th 2009

Around 24 September, once again Barcelona celebrates its annual festival. The last blast of summer before the autumn starts, La Mercè is the festival of festivals, where, in just a few days there are hundreds of activities.

The building of human towers (called castells) is a Catalan tradition that goes back two hundred years. Teams of Castellers (the people that builds them) can be seen competing against each other who can build the highest human tower. Every Catalan town has their own team or Colla made up of men, women and children.

This mooring in Sant Jaume square in Barcelona we saw demonstrations of castells (human towers). The most impressive one was performed by the Castellers of Vilafranca (they always dress in green shirts). Today they managed to build a human tower of 2 of 9, one of the most difficult ones to do that they built for the first time in 1995.

Every time that I see human towers demonstrations they remind me of the power of communities and how much can be accomplished by groups of coordinated and motivated people. This idea was already used in one of the Sun Solaris 10 releases (they used castells to illustrate the DVD cover).

Last Sunday I was in Tarragona during the annual festival there (that lasts for more than a week) where also I saw some very good demonstrations. Every town has actually demonstrations during its festivals.

Dear Lazyweb,
Since upgrading to Fedora 11 some months ago, gtk applications that honour GtkSettings such as
AbiWord, no longer allow the caret to blink. For the life of me I cannot find out how to change GtkSettings in any preference in Fedora 11 to set my carets blinking again.

Does anyone on the web know how to do this?

Thank you!

Update:

Thanks to Marc Maurer (uwog), I now know how to do this.
In keyboard preferences, first tab, enable "Cursor blinks in text fields" check box.

In case you need to build some binaries for some kind of DOS based bootstrap process, don't look far, the repository home:fstrba:msdos has all you need. A gcc-4.3.4 based cross-compiler for C and C++ along with the CVS HEAD version of DJGPP headers and libraries. The resulting executables running under DOS need a DPMI implementation like this one in the same directory to run.

When/If I have time, I will try to extend it to different languages supported by gcc.

Taste it and enjoy how sweet it is.

A French mail dropbox, old style, somewhere around Paris suburb.

They don't make them like this anymore.

Chanteloup-les-Vignes, Yvelines, France - September 27th 2008

Stata Center - MIT, Cambridge, MA - October 11, 2008

Update: fixed typo in the date.

Empty chairs on the lake - Meech Lake, Chelsea, Québec, Canada - October 19th 2008

Leaf in autumn - Parc de la Gatineau, Québec, Canada - October 19, 2008

Now that I'm on Facebook, I've mostly stopped posting on LJ. With LJ, I feel like I need to have something important to say, which I usually don't. Twitter's inane one-liners and jarring, disjointed reply-to tweets were just annoying. Facebook strikes the perfect blend of promoting unobtrusive, minimal conversations/pics/links/whatever that are kept in a logical order.

So many more friends use Facebook over LJ as well, so I'm pretty much abandoning ship and just reading/commenting on LJ from now on. Look me up on Facebook if you want: http://www.facebook.com/mikeycooper

For a long time I wanted to add verbal analogies support to gbrainy. Today the initial support has landed in gbrainy git repository and I will be part of the next major release.

gbrainy verbal analogies are defined in an external XML file that has a very simple format and can be easily extended. This is an example of analogy from the file:

<analogy>
<_question>Which of the following sports is the odd one?</_question>
<_tip>Think of the elements used in the game.</_tip>
<_answer>Water polo</_answer>
<_answer>Basketball</_answer>
<_answer>Tennis</_answer>
<_answer correct = "yes">Cycling</_answer>
<_rationale>It is the only one that does not use a ball in the game.</_rationale>
</analogy>

If you are a hobbyist, teacher or you just like verbal analogies consider donating some to gbrainy (under the same licensing conditions). Please, make sure that they are original.

If you have doubts on how to prepare them or send them to me please just write to gbrainy public forum or me directly (jmas at softcatala.org).

My ability to focus seems to have diminished significantly over the last few months. I find myself forgetting things more frequently and arguing points others aren't even trying to make. I will do something and then need to go back and look at what I just did to see what I'm supposed to do next. In the past week alone, I've forgotten my car keys at the bank, argued against imaginary code designs because I misread IM conversations (twice), forgotten to marinate dinner, forgotten to pack lunch, and left my ATM card in the ATM.

I dunno what happened to distract me so, but it's starting to become very frustrating. It's not like I have all that much on my plate (and apparently not a whole lot going on in my mind). Whatever the cause, I need to figure out how to get back into the swing of things.

Here we have Mistelix 0.3 Mistelix is an open source DVD authoring application also with Theora slideshow creation capabilities for GNU/Linux systems.

What's new in version 0.3

• New Welcome view. When you load Mistelix now you have two buttons that allow you to quick create a new DVD or slideshow project, and also, the list of recent used projects.
• Small UI enhancements. There many small UI enhancements in the main user interface and dialog boxes. 
• GNOME Thumbnailing integration. When running on a GNOME system Mistelix uses GNOME thumbnail infrastructure. For example, if you have already browsed the files from Nautilus, Mistelix reuses its thumbnails (faster).
• Possibility to drag files from other applications, including the desktop or file managers.
• Select video time & slide in slideshow for thumbnail. It is possible to select the image from a slideshow that will act as a button in a DVD menu or the frame of the video.
• New slideshows transitions, thanks to contributors.
• Bug fixes. On top of the many fixes introduced during the 0.2x release cycle this version introduces some major fixes too.

Download
The new version can be download it from:

http://mistelix.org/files/mistelix-0.30.tar.gz
MD5SUM: 582fd78dd7ed66610f0d65ffda4cf8a1

And it is already packaged for some distributions. If you test it and have questions, you can use the public forum. If you find bug, do report them.

Contributions

In this version, Mistelix had the following contributors that I want to specially thank:

• Adrián15, Quality Assurance. Many issues reported.
• Siegfried-Angel Gevatter, packages for Ubuntu/Debian that already available in Ubuntu Karmic repositories.
• Pau Iranzo (from SomGnu.cat) for his design for the new Welcome Screen
• Dani Hernandez Juarez for his BarnDoorWipe transitions
• Hector Blanco de Frutos for the Star Wipe transitions

I would like to thanks the GNOME translation community for all the translations updates and the new translations.

How to contribute
There are many ways of contributing to Mistelix. However, let me highlight three:

• Check ideas for contributing if you are a software developer.
• Help making Mistelix available to other languages (see current translations). If you are fluent in other languages, with four hours of work approximately you can translate Mistelix and make it available to more users.
• Help to test and improve it. Mistelix is about users, give it a try and provide your feedback.
• Create slideshows transitions or effects extensions.

Following on from James Denton's project last year which got us MultiPage View (available in our upcoming 2.8 release) I had the good fortune to mentor Aditya Manthramurthy this year. Together with legendary AbiWord Hacker Joaquin Cuenca Abela, we fixed two of the four issues that slow down AbiWord's performance for large documents.

The first fixed was our table layout algorithm. Aditya identified and fixed the cause of our layout speed increasing as N^2, where N is the number of cells. Here is a graph showing the performance of the table-layout branch.



We also had time at the end to improve the performance of AbiWord's core PieceTable by implementing Joaquin's awesome Log(N) data structure. AbiWord's current PieceTable is a doubly linked list of objects called "fragments". In addition it has a vector of the fragments ordered in their location in the document and a little cache containing the last Fragment. We perform binary searches on the PieceTable so that we can look up random positions at a rate proportional to log(N) where N is the number of fragments in the document. However upon every insert or delete we need to rebuild the vector of Fragments to reflect the changed location of the fragments downstream of the change. This means that an insert or delete happens at a rate proportional to the number of fragments, N. Consequently operations like inserting a table, which require 4 fragment inserts for each cell, slow down at a rate proportional N*N*N*N = N^4!

Joaquin invented a PieceTable based on a Red/Black tree structure which allows searchs, inserts and deletes to all happen at a rate proportional to Log(N). (See the link above) and we finally found the time to actually implement it in AbiWord. See the dramatic improvement for large table inserts below.




Since we're polishing off 2.8 now, you can expect these and many other improvements in AbiWord-2.10 :-)

gbrainy is a brain teaser game and trainer to have fun and to keep your brain trained.

I have just released version 1.12 that is a minor release that introduces the following enhancements:
  
* 3 translations updated
* 2 bug fixes (1 major)

gbrainy 1.12 is available for download in source code from:

* http://gent.softcatala.org/jmas/gbrainy/gbrainy-1.12.tar.gz
   (md5sum ce9faec1a3d433a9b298604c84559706)

Additionally, gbrainy is available for all major Linux distributions.

Enjoy!

Started to use a new piece of hardware at the Navarra office today, which resulted in the following gem being added to the GNOME notification area. Would anyone care to guess what the following icon is supposed to represent?

Just playing around with wordpress.

Welcome to Mirwin Labs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

If you read this, then this blog has finally moved. Let's hope it is faster now.

My previous employeer Openbravo is looking for a Community Content Editor based in Barcelona. You will find there a very talented team and a very open mind and flexible company  (including working from home). They are looking for someone with previous experience contributing to free software communities and used to the most common tools and processes. If you are interested you can apply directly in their web site or write me directly if you need a direct contact with the person that take over my responsibilities after I left.

I hope we will only have to do 1 more development release after this one, before we can release AbiWord 2.8.0. Already looking forward to it. In the meantime, you’ll have to be happy with AbiWord 2.7.8!

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

Here we have Mistelix 0.22. Mistelix is an open source DVD authoring application also with Theora slideshow creation capabilities for GNU/Linux systems.

Lots of stabilization work goes in this version that introduces 19 bug fixes . It can be downloaded in source code form from:

http://mistelix.org/files/mistelix-0.22.tar.gz
MD5SUM: 4cd270ad0f98dd89d121d0079a0cbd81

The most important fixes have been: remove some dependencies & better dependence detection, generated DVDs can be reproduced in more DVD players, and a few fixes for crashers.

And it is already packaged from some distributions. If you test it and have questions, you can use the public forum. If you find bug, do report them.

I keep working on 0.3 (0.2 series was released in May) and expect to complet it during Setember 2009. Some features are already sitting in the git repository.

I think it’s fair to say that Halifax’s first iPhone hackathon for charity was a big success. The idea was pretty simple: get a group of people (developers, marketers, artists) together over a weekend and try to produce as many iPhone apps as possible over the course of a weekend. Sell the apps on the app store (or otherwise monetize them), then donate the proceeds to charity.

I think we managed to get a group of about 15 together. After the weekend was over, we had three apps in various stages of completion. They are:

• PostCard: Send post cards, with a local twist.
• Meet me here: A streamlined way to tell your friends where you are.
• Civic Snitch: Report on problems in your neighbourhood using your phone. A front end to the amazing fixmystreet.ca (this is the one I worked on).

As usual for a hackfest, the energy level was amazing. In addition to seeing the familiar faces of MindSea, Applied Logic, Hand Puppet and Say Hi There, it was fantastic to meet the new faces at North Knight and an amazing group of unaffiliated (yet crazy competent) developers. A weekend is a bit too short a time to do anything but a trivial iPhone application, but we got a good start on all of them. Rumor has it that the postcard application is quite close to completion. Another few hacking sessions and we should have some apps that are good for release.

It’s hard to do justice to the overwhelming feeling of WIN that came out of this. Since co-founding Navarra a year ago, I’ve been at a ton of conferences, hack weekends, and other networking events and this has by far been the one I’ve felt the best about. What made it so great?

• First and foremost, the feeling that the work you’re doing will be used for good.
• The opportunity to take part in something untested and different. In these difficult times, charities are looking for new ways to fill gaps in fundraising– can software developers help?
• The Halifax Hub’s open concept space which did so much to facilitate collaboration and communication (as it always does).
• The amazing catered food from Local Source Organic (Splice Training also provided some tasty home-baked cookies).
• The awesome high-quality t-shirts, featuring an amazing design by Nick Brunt (printing courtesy of Mindsea).
• The free massages from Be Wellness.
• DJ Rich.Ness spinning tunes for us to enjoy all of Saturday night

So what’s next? Well, that’s something we’re working out with a lawyer. The idea is to create some kind of legal structure that allows us to safely collect any app store proceeds and get them sent to charity, though we haven’t yet finalized on what that will look like. The hope is that we can create a model that can be reused in other cities (iHackMTL anyone?).

Likewise, the final decision on which local charities will be receiving the proceeds has not yet been made. Something like ten organizations submitted proposals before the hackfest. It’s great to see so much interest, but it’s obviously not possible to accomodate everyone this round. It’s fair to say that at least one app will be going directly to an organization which helps in some way to address poverty in the HRM. I think there’s a collective understanding among the participants at the hackfest that we’ve been quite blessed by circumstance and good fortune and that there’s a responsibility to help those who haven’t been so lucky.

As for the apps themselves, the plan is to put the source up on github ASAP under the MIT License. I’ll be sure to post an announcement when this happens (though this is of course only of interest to the hardcore geeks).

Thanks again to the participants and the sponsors (The Hub, Local Source Organic, Be Wellness, Splice Training, Say Hi There!, Mindsea, innovacorp, Nova Scotia Rural BroadBand and Development, The Coast

, and The Coast, and The Coast, and The Coast, and ');"http://www.huminahuminah.com/">Humina Huminah) for the amazing weekend. Most especially, Dale Zak, the event organizer (and happy hacker) deserves huge kudos for the amazing idea and the perseverance to make it happen.

Because there are so many misconception about why I wrote Gnote, I think I should clarify a bit as my original announcement wasn't clear. This is to follow up on a question that was asked to me this morning where said person, who will likely read that and probably recognise thyself, had said misconception.

I wrote Gnote to answer two questions:

• How can I have Tomboy functionality on my custom openSUSE image I made for my EEE PC, that will fit the 2GB? I don't have room for Mono on this. For what is worth, back when I tried to put a distro on it, the only distro that would fit out of the box on this EEE PC was Eeedora, a Fedora based image for the EEE PC, but that only did provide XFCE. Since I wanted GNOME, it ended up not being that useful as I didn't have a the Fedora tools to actually regenerated a custom one. None of the other did fit on 2GB, including the Mandriva Flash I had from GUADEC, Ubuntu's own, etc.
• Is it easy to port a C# application to C++?

The second question helped me to answer the first question.

I decided that since I'm advocating Free Software, there was no reason to develop behind closed doors. I just kept it silent for the first weeks of coding, as I actually wanted to have something that works, but it was, since day 2, on gitorious. For the rest, you all know what happened: the anti-Mono crowd took it as their victory, started FUDing, etc. Barely nobody asked me why I had written that code, compared to the many that actually thought I was supporting their cause. But that's how the internet work.

The worse part is that I seem to be have been the target of hateful messages and comments from a certain number of people who found that writing code is hostile, while they blessed Tomdroid and Conboy which both take a different approach to a similar problem (kudos to their respective authors, I find Conboy fitting well on my N800, even though any typing is like torture).

And if you still think I hate Mono think again. I worked for the company that pushes Mono (and still wish I was), and I was using Tomboy on all the Linux machines I had (and to be fair I was surprised of the number of people who actually told me they had never used it because it was Mono based... looks like this didn't stop me as I had been using it for as long as I have the laptop I'm typing this on, circa Dec 2005).

Will I continue Gnote development?

Even though I'd love to have help, I definitely will maintain it as long as I can. The next release will have a boatload of features and fixes, including D-Bus support, etc. It is all in git. One has to admit the pace as slowed down recently because I have been working on other things, including AbiWord and Niepce.

Will I port another application?

No. But if a somebody is willing to hire me for that, please, feel free to contact me, I'll see what I can do.

… which means we needed another development release (and another one will soon follow :). Therefor we just released AbiWord 2.7.7, which contains a bunch of cleanup work, and a totally revamped Mac OS X renderer based on our Linux Cairo+Pango renderer. The renderers actually share most of the code now, where they used to be two totally different renderer implementations.

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

Today AbiWord is eleven year old according to this commit.

Over these 11 years, it has been ported to 5 different platforms/toolkits, 2 of these having been dropped (QNX and BeOS), 1 on life support (MacOS X). It has had 3 build systems. Plain Makefiles, autotools and then a rewrite of the autotools build system for better, not mentioning the "IDE" support. It has had 3 different servers, one at SourceGear, one at the University of Omaha, Nebraska and the current at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, running respectively Debian, FreeBSD and Fedora. Also 2 version control systems: CVS then Subversion.

According to ohloh, AbiWord have had 79 committers, including the 5 top with over 1400 commits, 405K Lines of C++ Code (and more with the other languages) 1929 source files in the tree. According to ohloh, again, AbiWord code base is worth close to 10M$ (I'm not convinced about that last statement from ohloh metrics, but why not).

And we forgot to celebrate the 10 years last year. :-(

I don't know what the meme is about but:

I WRITE CODE

nuf said.

Nothing is better to prevent me from posting something than the laptop that decide to switch itself off when I delicately lift it to move downstairs. I had the feeling I had to save the post. It will have to wait.

We just released AbiWord 2.7.6, which is an awesome release in my opinion!
It for example adds native JPEG support, so we don’t convert every JPEG internally to PNG anymore. This will be of great benefit on the OLPC laptop, where kids use built-in camera to produce photos in JPEG format and add them to their document. This will greatly reduce the filesize of their document. It will also be a lot less bandwidth intensive when collaborating on such a document.
Other big changes are the greatly improved OOXML import and export filters. This work is done during this years Google Summer of Code OOXML import filter improvement program by Firat Kiyak. It was just too good to not merge it already.
Lots more stuff in is listed in the changelog, make sure to read it! All this work was done during the last 2 weeks, which I find very impressive.

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

Half a decade ago I landed in Canada. Not sure what happened since, but that's surely 5 years.

AbiWord had a long lasting usability issue: pressing the insert key caused to toggle the overwrite mode on and off. When doing so we provided two different feedback to the user:

• a display in the status that switch from "INS" to "OVR"
• the caret (insert point) switch to red.

This lead to different kind of complaints:

• "When I type, the text to the right is replaced"
• "Why is the insert point red? What did I do?"

See bug 3641

This reveal two problems. The first one is that the user didn't realise something happened. I hit a random key (ie he didn't realise which one) and something happened. The second the user noticed the caret changed colour, but still didn't know why.

I had a few ideas in mind.

• Change the feedback, and there are a few options for that: change the caret shape (colour is never enough), change the status bar message, any other kind of notification
• Do something for the key binding: popup a dialog, use clippy, play a music just make it disabled by default.

How I did implement it:

• For now I changed the status bar message to be more readable. INS and OVR are just confusing obscure and an anachronism inherited from the AbiWord first step over 11 years ago mostly in trying to clone MS-Word with some of its atrocities. Now it is in plain $LANG (English here, but it is / will be localised, I hope).
• I added a UI to enable the toggle. We had that option already in place, it was just on by default, not bound to any UI. I'm not a big fan of adding options, but that's just the best way to do it for now.

What can be done in the future?

• Change the caret shape when in overwrite mode. I didn't want to do it that late in the release cycle has it seems to have been source of problems. Also it need to be well thought too as we also deal with bi-directional writing.

But that was a real paper cut for AbiWord. Not the only one, just one of them, and it was not that hard to fix. For the sake of it, I did it watching the BSG mini-series for the 3rd time.

Tam and I embarked on our honeymoon last week. We took a 7-day cruise to Alaska that was jam-packed with excursions. Pictures of it can be found on my Picasa album.

Juneau
Our first stop was in Juneau, where we took a nice float plane tour. We got to see a number of forests, mountains, and glaciers up close. The blue glacier ice was especially visible in Juneau. Eventually we landed at the Taku Lodge. We walked around the forest trails there for a bit before getting treated to a delicious salmon feast and learning the history of the lodge and its past owners. When all was said and done, we took another float plane ride back to Juneau.

Skagway
Our next stop was in Skagway, which unexpectedly became the highlight of the trip. Our excursion here was booked with Packer Expeditions. After taking a short train ride on the Yukon Route Railway, we were dropped off in the middle of nowhere next to the Tongass National Forest. Our guides led us on a 3 hour hike across some mildly rugged terrain. We hung back a little bit with Brooke, one of the guides, who pointed out various off-the-trail paths to explore, great photo spots, plants that could be eaten, and general information about the trail. It felt a bit like having our own private tour of the forest.

My favorite photo was from this excursion, for those who don't feel like looking through the 300 pictures in the album:


Ketchikan
After Skagway was Ketchikan, easily the town with the most charm and character of the three we visited in Alaska. Other than the harsh winters, it was the one we could see ourselves most enjoying if we lived there.

In Ketchikan, we did a kayaking/float plane combination excursion. We kayaked around a bit and our guide found and handed us various starfish and talked a lot about the surrounding forest and the necessity for conservation. We also saw a pair of bald eagles guarding their giant nest up in the trees.

Afterward, we had a nice salmon and hummus lunch on the boat before a float plane landed and pulled up. After boarding the float plane, we were flown around the Misty Fjords National Monument. The cliffs and waterfalls were gorgeous and we briefly landed at a small float plane dock to take some pictures. Out the windows of the plane, we were able to see a few pods of orcas at various times during the flight.

Victoria
Our last stop was in Victoria, B.C., where we visited Butchart Gardens, a garden built on top of a former limestone quarry. One of the largest limestone excavation sites was turned into a two-story-deep pit of flowers and plants called the Sunken Garden. Other parts of Butchart are parceled out into theme gardens, such as the Rose Garden, the Japanese Garden, and the Italian Garden. It rained for most of the time we were there, which allowed Tammy to capture some gorgeous close-up shots with water droplets on the flower petals.

Seattle
We got back into Seattle at 8am and our flight didn't leave until 11pm, so we decided to check out the Seattle Aquarium and Woodland Park Zoo. On our way to the zoo, we ran into a Seattle gay pride parade. We hung around for awhile, enjoying the costumed revelers, casting aspersions at the protesters and their "God hates fags" signs/rhetoric, and enjoying the absurdity of the anti-protester protesters and their "God hates fun" and "Marching is a sin" signs.

We also noticed several people running for office marching in the parade (one for Mayor of Seattle, I believe), which was surprising to me. Linking yourself to a gay-pride parade would be a death sentence here in Florida.


...so that was our honeymoon in a nutshell. We both had a blast and it's the first all-about-us extravagant vacation we've been on. I'm hoping it's not the last. This trip made me want to get out of Florida that much more.