Moving Parks

Almost three years ago, three of us in this picture was all still unmarried.  I was the one facing the change in life status into the blessed life of being legally attached just a few hours after this picture was taken.

Fast forward and all three of us in the picture are now married, live in three different parts of the globe and all three with different stages in life.  Dan, is working in a bank (can you get any more stable?) owns a house and settling down to dig his roots into the ground.  Ben, just recently married, about to start a new exciting career in management consulting.  And of course there is me.. Uprooted my family and about to take my first real adventure in trying out a different city.

How sureal that simple time of 3 years can change so much.

I hate preparing for a move but for some reason I thought it would be less stressful and I won’t hate it as much if the move itself was fully paid for and it is a full move service. With the upcoming move, where everything really is paid for and taken care of by the company, it is less work definitely but it is still stressful nonetheless.

Stress of having to remove myself from everything familiar and also realizing that many things I have taken for granted all these years (e.g. being able to just drive less than 30 min to go see my parents for instance) and starting to understand how much impact that may have on my relationship with people I know and love.

I cleaned out my car yesterday as it is being sold. My trusty new car that was bought less than 11 months ago brand new. Took almost 30% depreciation as I dispose of it in a hurry. While cleaning it up, I couldn’t help but feel sad about the task and having to say a farewell to this object. If my emotional attachment to a car is this great, how am I going to handle having to leave this city and the people who live in it? Specially those who do have special place in my life?

I’ve been saying that this move is something that’s a long time coming as I have lived all of my adult life in Vancouver and I always wanted to try somewhere bigger, more exciting, and offer me more opportunity. I still have to question, is all this worth being out of my parents’ life while they are still alive.

There are many different skill set looked for in a various roles in software development environment but as I progress further away from day to day detailed delivery task, I am venturing into a completely different realm of the void between technology and business. My role of an Application Architect of past 4 years have been scary and exciting at the same time.

Now, what would be a good question to ask in an interview if I was to find a replacement for myself?

Here is a vague yet specific question I have been asked before. It’s not a very technical question on the surface but can turn into a technical discussion or a one long complaint session:

Why Do So Many Software Projects Fail?

Your response?

I have been contemplating on change of this blog’s name for some time now.

It’s been years since I actually had interesting enough things to blog frequently or rather I’ve had the longest blogger’s block!

In anycase, I’m back with number of interesting things happening in my life to worth keeping this blog active for next while.

First of all, what does the new title Geek Meets World really mean?

I’ve been a geek for most of my life and as I grow older and become more mature, I have grown to accept my inner geek and at the same time have become quite proud of it. For years, I have been observing the world around me and suspected that I take on and understanding things in a slightly off-phase spin. This resulted in humor sometimes but other times are down right disastrous.

Here is to the second coming (actually a fourth coming, I think) revival of my blog that used to be known as Random Mine.

I hate business travel.

Most often, company has a silly policy that forces you to stay out in the middle of nowhere. They make you take cabs rather than rent you a car… and on top of that, book you in a cheapest flight so you have a stupid 4 hour layover.

I can’t wait to get away from this living out of hotel room.

Over the weekend, I finally ditched my 10+ years of broadband connection through TELUS to go with fiber connection to the building and a 10BaseT connection coming out of my condo.

I’ve always had better than this connection to the net from work but having this speed at home (Currently tests 9mb/s from SpeedTest.net) brings out something completely different in terms of surfing characteristic.

Starting with using my dreamhost account’s unused space for offsite backup of everything I do value like pictures.