Yesterday, Sep 26 was my 7th year anniversary at IJW. Looking back, a lot has happened in my life both professionally and personally. Hopefully I'll be able to stay for another 7.

I just read on slashdot that Sep 27 is google's 7th year anniversary. That means the day after I started work at IJW, google was founded. That's so neat!

In other news, James from BC is in town for 3 weeks. His wife has family in Alliston and they came to visit for Thanksgiving. Also, I think my mom will be going to Jamaica for Thanksgiving to get married.

It's been a while since I posted last. There's just so much going on I haven't had a chance to sit down and type something. This past week I went to Atlanta with 3 other IJW employees to meet with NCR and train them on the installation of our checkin kiosks. The weather was great down there (mid 20's C) and we had a Fry's Electronics around the corner. We don't have that in Canada. I was impressed with the size of the store. It felt like 2 or 3 times larger than a Walmart, packed full of all kinds of electronics. I spent a few hours in there and picked up some goodies.

I was really impressed with NCR's building. It was huge, obviously had an interior designer dress it up, and there were so many cubicles. That place was huge. Maybe one day IJW will be that large.

The first night in Atlanta we had dinner at a place called Longhorns. After dinner I decided to have desert. I chose the Chocolate Stampede. It looked like a slice of some kind of chocolate cake. Little did I know I was going to get half the cake! I asked her why it's so big, and she said "well it is a chocolate STAMPEDE..." Wow. Enough to feed 4 people. I ate half, took the other half to my hotel room and ate it the next night. It was kinda neat.. my body found a way of telling me when was enough. Basically both nights, when I got to a certain fork-full it felt like I was going to puke so I spit it out. Nice eh? :) That was some heavy cake.

I've been working on and off on the Magma project a lot lately (mostly on) and this past week has been quite important. I worked with the front desk staff and trained most if not all of them on inputting tasks and monitoring them. I also worked with the engineering staff on using the PDA's to get tasks and complete them. Things have worked out really well. The front desk staff were all amazed at how little they needed to learn to use the system and how easy it is. Engineering have said the same thing. One guy high up said that there is no other product like Magma out there and that this will be a huge success in hotels everywhere. I've been working 10-12 hour days lately to keep things moving forward and today it was decided to go live with the system! Everyone was quite pleased. Hopefully there are no serious issues and it helps them do their work more efficiently. Several follow up meetings are planned.

Crescendo has been mostly done since it's roll out in July though there were still some non-critical features that hadn't been implemented yet. I've been on and off the project for months and the other day finished adding the last of them. I'm quite pleased at how this project has been almost bug free since it's release and how well accepted it is with the group of users. One of the new features I added was the ability to form-fill PDF files and store a history of the files generated. This is used for contracts. The original document is created in MS Word, exported to PDF, then brought into Adobe Acrobat to have form fields laid on top. Then it is brought into Crescendo and it just works. The trouble is that the PDF library I used to form-fill and merge the FDF with the PDF costs $2500 USD for unlimited royalty free distribution. I've looked at all the free ones and they don't do what I need. Since the software has to work offline I couldn't just buy a 1 server version. Once the client has purchased the license then I'll release version 1.1.0 of Crescendo. 1.0.0 had one of the two major modules complete and the second mostly completed. Sometime this year I think we'll be adding a 3rd major module to the system and when it's fully functional and implemented it will become 1.2.0 Well I hope this entry didn't put you to sleep!

Tomorrow is Doug and Jim's birthday and today we had a cake at work. I was telling James and Craig (BC office) about the cake.. and Craig ended up sending Jim (our office admin) an email:

> Hey, send some of that cake (Ryan's been gloating about) our way. FedEx?

And Jim's response:

Hey Craig, Do you mean the cake from Mariposa Market, with a big chocolate wafer on top, drizzled with chocolate icing, with six huge fresh strawberries on top? So rich to die for, totally fat free and dietetic with no cholesterol. That one?

And here is what Doug (owner of IJW) said:

as a company we have stayed away from restaurant POS (point of sale) systems as we could probably never get ryan out of the restaurants where we would be working

ryan does know his food though