blogs

I've been using Books 24x7 alot recently and have found it to be one of the best resources on the web. The vancouver public library offers it as a service, so access is free of charge. If you don't mind reading on the screen, you really can't get much better than this. Simply go to the Vancouver public library site's electronic resources.

First post of 2006. . .Happy New Year!

While I worked during most of the break to bring the shiny new ams template live, I did manage to sit back and enjoy time pass by. Apart from the few times we made it up to whistler to do some riding, it was a slow but relaxing break. :)

This past weekend we were up in Penticton to ride some of the fresh Okanagan powder at Apex resort. We were greeted with a good 10cms of the fluffy stuff and clear skies. Couldn't have asked for a better day of riding. . .well I could have done without the whiplash from the 3-4 times of hard bails I took. Anyways, I managed to get a good 13 hours of riding in over the 2 days and left with a great impression of the resort. Powder, hot tubs, and tubing. . . good times.

Through a few kind words and praises, my resume found its way to the hands of a recruiter at Microsoft a few weeks ago. I was a little shocked as it was not even a week after submission and I was already being scheduled for a 'very technical phone interview'. With a big term project winding down and a Japanese test I had been studying night and day for just around the corner, I was definately not in the ideal state of mind. . .

The interview started with a few HR questions to make sure I was who my resume said I was. . . Why do you want to work at MS? Have you had any previous internships / co-op experience? etc.

The past few weeks have been busy and things have slowed down considerably since. =D

The RGS reversi game we developed using Spring and DWR came out working pretty well. While essentially doubling the amount of implementation where used, AJAX gave our project a rather slick interface and improved usability greatly. We mirrored the existing MVC architecture of Spring MVC by exposing some controller methods, which then returned a model that was automagically converted to javascript objects for us by DWR. Programming with tomcat and j2ee for the first time allowed us to build a fair bit of redundancy into the system, which would have otherwise been a challenge in PHP.