First off, I think it’s great that Translink has added 3 extra late night runnings of the West Coast Express (WCE) for us people in the boon docks so that we can stay in downtown Vancouver late to cheer on our olympians. It gets cars, and more importantly one or two drunk drivers behind those cars, off the road! I wish they would run some late night train busses, but I suppose they don’t get enough capacity to make it sustainable.

Yesterday night I had taken one of the extra late trains to get back home. The bus that takes me home normally stops service sometime around 11:00pm and I was expecting to trudge back up the hill at 1:00 in the morning. To my surprise, there were buses waiting WCE passengers! And even more surprising, they weren’t following their normal routes! Instead they just served the general areas surrounding their routes and the driver would ask where each passenger where they needed to go and then zipped around town dropping everyone off as if all the passengers where sharing one big taxi!

So thank-you Translink for getting me home quickly and efficiently and for saving me a 20 minute minute trek in the rain!

Here is the post as is seeing that the two points that were typed out still apply today. I must have had some other points to make that have been long forgotten which I suppose demonstrates the importance of timeliness!

Cang and I had an abbreviated conversation about blogging the other night. I figure I’d finish the conversation here.

He thought I was posting way too frequently. Cang‘s posts are much more deliberate and are fewer and far between. I also think the content has somewhat of a greater value when compared to mine.

I agree with Cang the frequency of my posts (almost 1 per day) are ultimately not sustainable but there is a method to my madness.

First off, I’m trying to get in the habit of posting things in a timely fashion. If you wait too long, whatever you were planning to write about may no longer be relevant or as news breaking. You’ll also start to lose details of your experience or the thoughts in your head, even if you originally took notes.

I’m also throwing stuff up on the wall and seeing what sticks. Sure, one of the goals is to blog about client-side development, something that I still need to get to, but what other things from my daily happenings are people interested in reading about?

Now these things apply specifically to my blog and my goals for it. If your blog is your diary, by all means, keep posting anything you want. If you want your blog to be a specific knowledge resource, yes, keep the posts limited but high in content value.

Sam, one of our QA guys at Habanero, brought to the office the torch his grandfather carried during his leg of the Olympic Torch Relay. Really cool to be able to take a few shots with a torch that’s been “kissed” by the olympic flame!

Not a theme park, but the Burrard Street SkyTrain station.

As seen on the SkyTrain.

SharePoint Designer 2010

It will be interesting to see how SharePoint Designer (SPD) 2010 fits into our development work flow.

For SharePoint 2007, we had basically avoided SPD 2007 like the plague. It didn’t fit into our Visual Studio development work flow.  Almost everything you did from a client-side development perspective was not easily reproducible across sites as the artifacts were basically all unghosted/customized. The actual SharePoint functionality was limited just seemed to be tacked on top of the FrontPage. The HTML editing around customizing master pages and page layouts was slow, buggy and heavy handed as it would arbitrarily change our code.

The interface has been completely overhauled in SPD 2010. Instead of the HTML editing centric interface in SPD 2007, we now have an interface that instead focuses on exposing various SharePoint capabilities to users with less technical expertise. It’s still not something you would deploy to all your users. It really is for your SharePoint power user or site administrator to manage their sites and lists.

SharePoint 2010 sites now have settings to determine what SPD is allowed to do or not do. There are settings to enable SharePoint Designer, enable detaching pages from their site definition, enable customizing master pages and layout pages, and enable managing of the web site URL structure.

The other big thing about SPD 2010 is the ability for it to now create reusable work flows. You can create a work flow and then package it up as a WSP and import it into Visual Studio 2010 for further development. You can also design your work flow in Visio 2010 which is quite interesting.

Check out the SharePoint Designer Team Blog for detailed info on all the new SPD 2010 features.

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s the scoop:

Plus, On Sundays and Holidays you can use your FareCard and take five others with you for free. A total of six: Two adults (14 and older) and up to four children (13 and under) ride on a single Adult FareCard, West Coast Express 28-Day Pass, or Annual Employer Transit Pass (does not apply to Concession Passes).

Sweet! Apparently my wife knew about this for ages but it’s totally news to me as I don’t take transit much. I think it is very cool of BC Transit/Translink to attempt to get families to take public transportation together with incentives like this.

We had decided this morning to have brunch over at Londsdale Quay and my wife suggested we take the SeaBus over to the quay. I asked why take transit when it’s gonna cost the same by car? That’s when she told me about this freebie business with the FareCards.

At first I didn’t believe her and dismissed it as something she made up. So she boots up the computer and shows me the Translink fare pricing page. Guess who’s wearing the “dumb dumb” hat today?

If you want to try out the latest and greatest from Redmond, but missed out on the limited release of the pre-RC1 build last week, now’s your chance. Microsoft has made RC1 available to the public in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. You can download it straight from Microsoft or via the Akamai Download Manager.

Rich and Phuong, congratulations once again and enjoy your honeymoon!

Unfortunately at the very end of the night, I somehow managed to drop my camera and not notice it AND then proceed to run it over with a car.

I must say that the camera, a Casio Exilim EX-Z50 point-and-shoot, was pretty damn tough. Being the clumsy dolt that I am, I tend to drop things and it has survived many a drop without a scratch. Alas, even Mr Exilim does not survive being crushed under the weight of a car’s tires.

If you were to pick up the camera, you’d be hard press to know that anything was wrong with it. Turn it on, and you’ll notice right away that the LCD screen is completely shattered. Amazingly enough, the lens and motor seem to have come out intact but I’m not sure about the rest of the unit. The SD card that was in the camera seems to be dead as is the second SD that was also in the camera case.

So I’m in the market for another point-and-shoot as my wife and I find them indispensible. I’m leaning towards the Canon SD600 or SD630 (especially with the 630′s huge screen) but have reservations about their battery life and the lack of image stabilization, which seems to be a norm for cameras in their price range nowadays. Cang recommends another Casio, as their batter life are second to none and the Best Shot modes make pulling out the camera and taking a quick shot super simple.

Suggestions on any cameras in the sub-$500Cdn range would be greatly appreciated!