I forgot that I wouldn’t have a router right away, so I ended up getting a Speedtouch 516 DSL modem configured as a bridge, so I’m using Windows’ own PPPOE client until the move.

Next up is VOIP. I’m leaning towards Unlimitel because Babytel never replied to my email sent to their support address (pilot error: sent to .com instead of .ca), but there’s still a little shopping to do there. New blog theme/approach coming soon too, although that’s just fitting in the quiet moments of which there have been few lately.

Work is going awesome. I’m moving support over to RT any day now, have a huge set of projects and to-dos to drill through, and have really been given pretty much full ownership over my areas of responsibility already. (And everyone’s so great to work with!)

Off to Dan’s tonight for pizza, beer and conversation. (We tried this last week but I made it a block before I decided it was time to take a rain check and get the car in for a brake job right away. I lucked out in that a great garage happens to be exactly one block away from me, and Frank at Master Mechanic on Dupont and Concord took it in on no notice and did good work at a good price, which was nice considering I needed a garage on short notice in a strange city.)

Movers are scheduled: pack on the 25th, load on the 28th, unload a couple of days later. Final stretch!

Perhaps I was onto something when I concluded that there was little to no Internet industry left in Ottawa, and that it was concentrated in Toronto.

Perhaps.

(Of course, if you have DSL advice for me and I forgot to email you, I’m accepting it here too!)

Work continues to go well. Tomorrow’s the release of a new version of FreshBooks. It’s really too early for me to be involved hands-on in a new release, but I’ll at least get to see the procedure. I also took a few photos of the office. A bit of a difference from before, eh?

Other than actual work time, I’m pretty much ready for these two “advance weeks” to end. I need to get Christmas over with so I can concentrate on the move. Things have been fine here, but I’m just ready to head home for a bit, and then to head over to new-home here. Driving has been a real pain with the big snowfall, since I still don’t entirely know my way around, roads are about half a lane narrower, and parking has been up at the air both at the apartment and at work because of snow everywhere. Once I get into the new apartment and start doing public transportation pretty much everywhere I think that’ll improve a bit.

Thursday night’s the office Christmas party, which should be fun. That forces my hand on shopping: I must pick up something silly for the gift “exchange” by tomorrow night, so I’ll brave heading downtown then. (Downtown should be easy — walk over to Yonge and Eglinton, subway down to Queen. But everything’s just a little disorienting because of the snow and the busy-ness.)

Four (maybe three!) sleeps until I see Candice again, though! Yay!

But what the snow does mean is that Environment Canada’s forecasters get to write the apocalyptic weather warnings that they do so well. My theory is that all of the senior meteorologists choose to stay the hell home when there’s big snow coming, so they get someone from the high-school newspaper to do the writing. Excerpts from tonight’s, italics mine:

A near-crippling snow storm with heavy snow and blowing snow as well as some ice pellets tonight and Sunday…

The developing low pressure system is moving across western Kentucky preceeded [sic] by a burgeoning area of moderate snow…

This storm track will place much of southern and eastern Ontario directly under the brunt of heavy snow…

A few claps of thunder along with bursts of very heavy snow are also likely.

The brunt of the main snow event will begin this evening in the southwest and rapidly envelop all regions east to Ottawa in the overnight hours. Copious amounts of snow as well as strong winds causing blowing snow are expected.

In addition freezing rain is possible especially near Lake Erie for a few hours overnight and Sunday morning as milder air pays a brief visit aloft. Ice pellets are also quite possible generally along and south of a line from Grand Bend to near Toronto and east to Cornwall.

This massive snow storm has the potential to cause near-paralyzing conditions as road travel on any unplowed streets may become next to impossible on Sunday.

There is a high degree of certainty with this storm as the concensus [sic] of weather model data is virtually unanimously forecasting this event.

Put down the thesaurus, guys! (I liked it better when the forecasts were written by military meteorologists.) Welp, at least I’ll get to try out my new snow tires and Sorel boots.

I’m in Toronto! I got here on Saturday morning with Candice. We spent the weekend seeing apartments — 6 or 8 on Saturday, and then two on Sunday, staying at the Holiday Inn on Bloor at St. George. Most of the apartments we looked at on Saturday were roughly along St. Clair around Avenue or Yonge. We found some, and nearly went for one that would have stretched our budget quite a bit — until we saw this!

So Sunday we started out a little discouraged. And then we saw The Apartment, which I’ll talk about in a second, and then another one that was just as cute but up at St. Clair and Dufferin which was deemed too far away from the subway. We went out for dinner for Candice’s birthday to Coco Lezzone in Little Italy, which was good but not spectacular. (We’d forgotten to account for the difficulty in finding good dining on Sunday night here.) And then before we went to bed Sunday night I emailed about The Apartment.

Let’s talk about The Apartment for a moment: tonight I signed our lease! We now have an apartment (well, for January 1, but I have the keys) on Delaware Avenue, just west of Ossington and just south of Dupont. It’s right near here.

It’s a cute, medium-sized 1-bedroom on the main floor of a house, with hardwood floors, glass block walls, a giant kitchen, and a freakin’ backyard. How great is that? It’s two blocks from Ossington station, and not far from the Dufferin bus that will take me straight to the door at work. The photo of the house at right is linked to a Flickr set of the apartment, as yanked from the Craigslist ad that we found it with.The only downside: street parking, but there seems to be lots of room on that block alone whenever I’m over there.

Anyhow, back to the timeline: On Monday morning, I left the hotel and drove straight to FreshBooks World Headquarters, up on Dufferin just a bit south of Lawrence. The first day was a little bit hairy — not quite sure what I was expected to do, my manager was in interviews for most of the morning, I was stumbling around OS X for the first time ever, I was thinking about missing Candice, and I hadn’t yet seen the place I would be living for the next two weeks! But even then it was fine. Day Two felt like a “first day”, though, so the hairiness is irrelevant now. Days three and four had me doing a bunch of email support (best way to learn the product!) and finding my way around a bit more, and things are coming together pretty well.

I think it’s going to be a blast there. My coworkers are smart and a lot of fun and we seem to have much in common, and everyone, employees and customers, are really excited about the software. I’ll have plenty of interesting projects once I get up to speed on the sysadmin side, and I’ll have my fingers in a bit of the dev side as well from the sounds of things.

(I should’ve taken some pictures of the office. Drat. Also, I like OS X a lot, and need to find a way to get Candice and I MacBooks.)

Let’s see, what else? Until the new year I’m staying in Mike McDerment’s place, near Eglinton and Mt. Pleasant. Easy drive in, apartment to myself, lots around it. I’m driving back to Ottawa every weekend, and am going to be there over the holiday perineum, to see Candice and help pack up the apartment. Went over to Dan‘s to have a couple beers Tuesday night, was nice to socialize a bit, but found out just before I left that there was no beer — so went around the corner from Mike’s to the Granite Brewpub, who offer growlers of their beers to go. Their Peculier was just right.

All in all things have been overwhelming and exhausting and awesome.

However, today I left my gloves at the Future Bakery (at which I had their all-day breakfast for dinner tonight, $7 for omelet, toast, home fries, fruit, and coffee). Oh, well. Can’t have everything go right, I guess!

As of December 10th I’ll be the Network Operations Manager at FreshBooks, the company I mentioned previously. They’re a little startup in Toronto whose product is a Web-based invoicing and time-tracking application, directed primarily at freelancers, creatives, and small businesses. It’s a nice, clean, well-thought-out SaaS app, with a third-party developers’ API, Basecamp integration and more. (You can sign up for a free account which will be loaded with test data if you want to take a look, which I encourage you to do!)

The interview last Monday went really well — it basically turned into a two-hour chat between me, Levi the CIO, and developers Ben and Justin. I like to think the fit seemed pretty obvious to everyone, but it definitely did to me. I’ll primarily be responsible for their application architecture, the server-and-database-side half of things that isn’t developing the program itself, but there’ll be development and customer-facing bits to it as well. I’m really looking forward to going back to a startup. They’ve got about a dozen people right now all in one loft-style office, which is even smaller than e-smith was when I joined them.

And yes, Toronto — which means we’ll be moving in the new year. I’m going to be living out of the CEO’s unused apartment for December, and then hopefully we’ll have found an apartment up there for Jan 1, at which point I’ll be living there with minimal furniture until Candice joins me at the beginning of February. It’ll be a crazy couple of months, but we’re pretty excited — no, really excited — about how it’ll all turn out!

But it was an even bigger surprise to see what they’re looking for — outside of a couple of “I could learn that really fast” bits, it’s practically a description of exactly what I found myself specializing in at e-smith and Mitel. (The only thing that would make it completely uncanny is if it involved email and spam too, but you can’t have everything.)

“Unfortunately”, they’ve also put a $1000 referral bounty on it as of last Friday, so I suspect it just got a lot more competitive. But we’ll see what happens! I was half-tempted to put “Sysadmin sale! Save $1000” in the subject of the cover letter email, but it’s possible to be a bit too lighthearted, even when dealing with these guys.

I’m starting to think that trip last month was a good idea.

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