unthinkable

• I moved to Vancouver in January and spent the year looking at mountains and not doing much else.
• Before the move, I went to Montreal for three and a half days in January. It was not as cold as you’d think. After the move, I went to San Francisco for three and a half days in April, and caught the nice-week-in-April pretty well. Sunburn was obtained. I visited Portland, OR and Victoria, BC over weekends during the summer, and spent around six weeks total in Seattle in small bits, but didn’t have a major trip this time around.
• I saw Sigur Rós live on consecutive nights in Seattle and Portland. I saw Stars live for the record fifth time, a number likely to grow again next year as they just keep on touring. I also saw Bruce Peninsula and Beach House in Vancouver.
• My earphones finally broke after four years of abuse, underscoring a year of not listening to that much recorded music. Of newly released albums, I really only got into the new Stars and Crystal Castles albums. Other than new stuff, I listened to a lot of FM Belfast, Broken Social Scene and Stars as usual, The Rural Alberta Advantage, and múm. I surprised myself by not listening to the perfect rainy-day weather album — Emilíana Torrini’s Fisherman’s Woman — nearly as much as I would have expected.
• We come from a place where we count the days until nothing.

• A calm, unremarkable year with some ups and some downs, slowly growing restless.
• I got fibre-to-the-node DSL installed in early January, bringing an end to half a year of EDGE-only internet access at home. When the promotional price was about to run out in May, I instead got tetherable 3G, which got me through the rest of year. It’s workable, except I haven’t put in the effort to bridge my house router to this connection, and so I have two networks at home, one with my file server, one with the internet. Not a good setup.
• Speaking of tetherable 3G, that’s Android, and I got reasonably-recent cellular technology in a 7″ Galaxy Tab to start off and then a Nexus One. I’m still not sure how I feel about the form-factor of the wide touchscreen candybar Nexus One, but the software is by most standards a huge upgrade over my BBOS 4.5 Pearl.
• Music heavy year kicked off by bingeing on The Naked And Famous after discovering them in late April and seeing them three times within six months. Continued the Toronto music tradition by bingeing on The Rural Alberta Advantage and ohbijou starting in October, seeing each twice, and to a lesser degree Do Make Say Think, Owen Pallett, and Torq Campbell’s side projects. Paper Bag Records’ summer sampler brought me the single most-listened and probably catchiest song of the year, Johan Agebjörn’s Watch The World Go By. Further shows by Stars twice on back-to-back days, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai, Junior Boys, and M83, among others.
• Not a photography-heavy year, as I continue to fail at timely Flickr; not a travel-heavy year, although I did visit Montreal in February (cold), Ottawa during Canada Day (busy), and Manhattan in August (warm).
• What if I’m only satisfied when I’m at home, sitting in a city that’ll never let me go?

Happy ten years to us.

So the replacement of Jobmine, known under a number of names, all of them too horrible to reproduce on an esteemed blog like this one, has been scrapped. Students disapproved and several resolved to write their own, one uttering the words “startup idea.”

Of ways to annoy me, proposing a startup as a part of solution for a problem you don’t understand well is near the top of the list.

Similar sentiments have been expressed previously during the project’s lifecycle; when first announced, several declared they could get it done within a four-month co-op term. This week, I was asked to explain why a Jobmine replacement is unrealistic for a year’s work. I had some procrastinating to do, so I jumped on the opportunity. (The title of this post is inspired by How to clone Delicious in 48 hours, which was written in response to similar reactions in December 2010.)

For those not in the loop, Jobmine is the online system supporting the co-operative education program at the University of Waterloo (UW hereafter). UW claims, with some justification, to operate the largest post-secondary co-op program in the world.

Jobmine was first introduced in 2004 and although an improvement over the previous incarnations, is generally agreed to be a horrible, horrible web application. Much of the blame lies with the horrible PeopleSoft software on which Jobmine was based hacked together. PeopleSoft promptly got itself acquired by Oracle next year. The horribleness was too much even for UW to handle and soon there were plans to do it all over again, but ourselves and better.

Disclosure: I was part of the project in the heady days of 2007 and early 2008. In 2007 I was prototyping and exploring and in 2008 I worked on a part deep inside the designed system. I haven’t been in close contact with the team since, and I have no insider information on the cancellation. I’m almost certain none of the prototype code is still active and although I’m not sure it wouldn’t surprise me if the latter code got axed or at least heavily reorganized since. That being said, I’d like to think that with the experience I understand what Jobmine actually is a bit better than the average student.

Here’s a brief guide to what a Jobmine replacement actually needs to do. Unless otherwise noted, this is the bare minimum to merely replace Jobmine, not improving on it much, presumably excluding the UI. Read the rest of this entry »

• I went to school for last four months, and then I graduated, and then I had a failing nightmare.
• I bought a DSLR, and then I took some pictures.
• I went to Iceland for two weeks, and then I got a lifetime of memories and a need to come back.
• I moved to Toronto full-time, and then I lived half a year without wired internet at home.
• I meant to write about all of this, and then I didn’t.
• A new Hot Chip album came out. Then a new Muchy album came out. Then a new Crystal Castles album came out. Then a new Broken Social Scene album came out. Then a new Underworld album came out. It’s been a good year.
• I saw the xx and Hot Chip live. I saw Stars live again. And I saw Broken Social Scene live again.
• To był dobry rok, bez rocznic i postanowień, bez wspomnień i rozczarowań.