Category: Journal

I used to volunteer at the Royal Medieval Faire, usually working gates: taking money and welcoming people to the Faire. One year the Faire tried giving people wristbands instead of hand stamps to let them back in. For no discernible reason, the wristbands were pink.

One little boy worked his way up to us in the line with his parents. Dad paid the admission and we got out the wristbands.

“You’re not putting that on my son.”

He was, we thought, unnecessarily forceful. We explained that they were meant to let people back into the park.

“I won’t have him wearing that. It’s a girl’s colour. My son isn’t a girl.”

We actually got a few people like that. None quite as aggro as the one father, but it had us shaking our heads.

Really? Parents were really willing to push their preconceived notions of gender on their kids that hard? I had to feel sorry for the little boy. What if he turned out to be gay? Or just secretly liked flowers? I can’t imagine what it would be like living with a father like that.

I read the [Parents Keep Child’s Gender a Secret](http://www.therecord.com/living/article/535943–parents-keep-child-s-gender-a-secret) story and thought “Huh, I can kinda see their point.” But then I read the comments (more on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/waterlooregionrecord/posts/116849045067945)) and my heart sank. And I thought about that little boy and realized there are a lot of people out there like his dad.

I have the start of four other posts about the current Canadian parliamentary election in my drafts folder. I’ve been having a hard time collating my thoughts into something novel or interesting.

This election scares me and makes me profoundly sad for my country. That’s made it hard for me to get my thoughts together. Fortunately, Canadian constitutional expert Peter Russell does a better job than I could.

I’ve got an Ubuntu release party this weekend, but I’m hoping I get pull together some sort of substantial election post before the actual election.

Ten years ago today, I posted [my first blog post](http://flyingsquirrel.ca/squirrel/archive.php?article=1).

Okay, technically, that was on my old, hand-coded blog, and I’m lame even after almost 4 years, I haven’t imported my old blog into this one, but woo! 10 years!

Equally technically, I was posting something like blog posts on my old homepage, starting around 1998 or so. They weren’t archived or anything, I’d just insert a couple paragraphs between <hr> tags on whatever I happened to feel like writing about at the time, replacing whatever was there before. No, not a blog, but my blog was an extension of that.

My ideas about blogging have changed quite a bit. I originally wanted a place I could write anonymously about whatever I felt like. Then I decided that blogging anonymously was horribly pretentious and nobody actually cared. Now I’ve got [Twitter](http://twitter.com/flying_squirrel) satiating most of what used to drive me to blog. That’s my current excuse for why I don’t hang out here quite as much, anyway.

Ten years. That’s a long time.

[Neil Gaiman beat me by a week](http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2011/02/now-we-are-ten.html).

When I started at my current employer (about 18 months ago), I got it in my head I should take advantage of their training budget and proximity to uWaterloo (like the kids are calling it now) and take a course.

For one reason or another (sanity, mostly; also scheduling), I wasn’t able to take [the compilers course](http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs444/) in my 4th year. Compilers is one of the big project courses. In terms of workload, it’s well behind [real time](http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs452/) (the train course) and [graphics](http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs488/), but it’s still nothing to sneeze at.

When I was an undergrad, I think I would have probably preferred to take graphics. But as you get older, you mature. Or something. Yeah, graphics is cool and fun, but I think it would be a harder sell to get my employer to pay for it. Particularly when your employer has its own [proprietary language](http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-oscript-526.html) to maintain.

> For my part, I want to encourage people to make their own languages, because doing it makes you a world-class programmer. Seriously. Not just a better programmer, but a best programmer. I’ve said it before, and I’m sticking with it: having a deep understanding of compilers is what separates the wheat from the chaff. I say that without having the slightest frigging clue what “chaff” is, but let’s assume it’s some sort of inferior wheat substitute, possibly made from tofu. –Steve Yegge, [The Next Big Language](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.html).

I don’t know if I’ll actually make my own language, or move to the compiler team at work, but I do know that understanding this stuff is really, really useful and fundamental to software development. There’s a lot of computer science-y stuff that’s not especially useful, but compilers are everywhere.

2010! All in all, I think it was a good year. Personally, I mean. I have some issues with it geopolitically, but I don’t think we need to go into that. And, for a change, it went by without any significant job turmoil. That’s something!

* Back in January, I got myself dragged into the long-running Northdale neighbourhood debate in the city of Waterloo. Not something I enjoyed greatly, but I felt I had to dip my oar in. I even [presented to city council](http://www.flyingsquirrel.ca/index.php/2010/01/13/my-delegation-to-waterloo-city-council/) about it.
* I was [interviewed](http://www.flyingsquirrel.ca/index.php/2010/03/25/local-transportation-stuff-and-the-100/) by the (now sadly podfaded) The 100 Podcast about transportation issues and the LRT. That’s kind of cool.
* I made a failed attempt at live coding for [Kwartzlab’s latest 5+5 event](http://kwartzlab.ca/blog/dw/2010-07-05/55-v2-rocked-out). Fun, though. And I’m glad I did it.
* [[Kwartzlab]] continues to be a great thing in our community, that I’m happy to be a part of.
* I ran an [[Ubuntu]] Global Jam, two release parties and helped host a LAN party with Eric. I started holding [Ubuntu Hours](http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Hour) in Kitchener-Waterloo and IRC meetings for Ubuntu Canada online. In the end, [txwikinger](http://blog.txwikinger.me.uk/) and I became the new “contacts” for the [Ubuntu Canada Local Community](http://ubuntu-ca.org) organization.
* I joined the office dodgeball team, leading to a number of minor injuries.
* I went to [Bill](http://thesidekick.ca) and Tara’s wedding. Eric and Alex get married tonight.
* I co-presented on unit testing with [Alexei](http://twitter.com/az1) at the local [agile software development group](https://waterlooagilelean.wordpress.com/). More live coding!
* Speaking of the Agile P2P, a number of us got together to start a technical [book club](http://agileclub.wikispaces.com/), starting with [Uncle Bob](http://www.objectmentor.com/omTeam/martin_r.html)’s [Clean Code](http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsmanship/dp/0132350882). A number of agile development luminaries, including Uncle Bob, have joined our conversations.
* My blogging output flagged a bit, with everything else going on. I took out some of my local politics frustrations on the [[Waterloo-Wellington Bloggers]] Association, but that site is now defunct, merging with [Wonderful Waterloo](http://wonderfulwaterloo.com). That site has asked me to contribute as a blogger, but I haven’t pulled together a post yet.
* The new season of Doctor Who was awesome! I thought so, anyway. Also, I now have a ridiculous amount of Doctor Who toys.
* Ellen is still awesome.
* I became an uncle. My sister Erin’s son Grady was born in October.