My horoscope didn't say anything about this...

Thursday Feb 4, 2010 is going to be etched in my memory as one of the toughest days of my life so far. If ever there was a day where it didn't pay to get out of bed, this was it.

I needed to do laundry because I needed some decent business clothes for some meetings in Toronto so I got up early and went to the 24hr laundromat. I brought my laptop with me to do work while I was waiting. After laundry was done, I went home and decided to stay there and work until lunchtime before going into the office. I had a hard time concentrating so at around 10:30am I decided to pack up the car, drive into work, and then head to Toronto straight after I was done work.

At around 11am, I was driving south along Bagot St. through the intersection when a guy ran his red light coming east down Princess St. and t-boned me. My car spun around, stalled, and then rolled backwards into the building of the Shoppers Drugmart.

Here's what my car looked like after it was all said and done:







I even made the evening news in Kingston.

If the resolution was a little better you could see me talking to the cops and firemen. The guy who hit me got a ticket for running a red light.

I got a little sentimental when I saw my car get taken away on a flatbed tow truck. I felt incredibly lucky not to be hurt physically, and that no-one else got hurt. That was my first car and I had it for 10 years. I have a lot of good memories associated with it. I knew it was time for a new car, but I didn't want it to happen like this.

Back in Kingston

About a month ago, I was on my way to Ottawa for an info meeting with an engineering company. I made plans to stop in Kingston along the way and arranged another meeting with a company in town. The traffic on the drive was a lot lighter than I expected and I got into Kingston a couple of hours early, so I decided to stop by the business school and say hi to the MBA staff.

I ran into my old team facilitator from the MBA program and we decided to go out for lunch. I turned out that there were some changes that happened in the career centre and he became the director there over the summer. He was telling me about some of the challenges that he was facing. One of them was that the Queen's alumni weren't being utilized well enough in placing graduating business students in jobs. He wanted a database developed that would help in engaging alumni and help his department prospect jobs for students. He asked me how my job search was going and then asked me if I was interested in running with the project since he didn't have anyone available to make it happen. So we ended lunch with a verbal agreement on a 3-month consulting arrangement to get this database off the ground and I agreed to start 4 days later on Nov 23.

The info meeting in Ottawa fell through and nothing came of the other info meeting I had set up in Kingston so I left town earlier than expected to head home to pack a bag with some work clothes.

I've been working on defining the requirements of the project over the last 4 weeks...interviewing staff and asking them how they use alumni data and how they store it. It's a similar type of information flow and data problem to the one that I was tackling with my big business idea. People use data in a business process but keep track of data differently. You can gain efficiencies and better performance through a combination of behavioural changes and application of some technology. In the case of the business career centre, the goal is to place a higher percentage of students in jobs in a shorter time period. The final product will either be an adoption of an existing CRM database or a custom built system specific to the needs of the career centre. I'm leaning towards recommending a custom solution but there are other financial and time factors to consider. The new system should be up and running by mid-feb barring any issues.

It's an interesting place to be...My previous interaction with the career centre staff was as a student. Now I'm working with them in their office. The first week was a little surreal but I'm starting to get used to it now. I have to say that I like this type of consulting gig. I set my own hours and don't really have a boss. I just invoice my time and show results. I just have to find some longer term arrangements so I can finally stop living like a student and get to feel like a pro again.

Places I've been

Played with google maps a while ago and included a map of places I've been to in my life so far on my online resume. I figured it'd be a good thing to include here. There's a link in the side bar on the right too.


View Places I've been in a larger map

CanadaBrainstorm.ca

Ever since finding about the Brainstorm Ubuntu site, I've had an idea of building a similar website, but for people to exchange ideas on how to improve Canada. I've been watching the news about Canadian politics for a while. I got discouraged at watching elections and how some issues dominate the campaigns. The central campaign issues, like same-sex marriage or public funding for religious schools, have little to do with the national interest of our country, but are really specific. It's a neat marketing/campaign trick by clever strategists to come up with a hot-button issue that everyone has an opinion on and that deals more with belief and cannot really be debated based on logical reasoning. These polarizing issues pretty much divide the voters into for and against sides pulling otherwise undecided voters into one political camp or another. Larger issues such as foreign policy, international competitiveness, inter-provincial trade, and environmental policy get drowned out by the media hype around the single polarizing issue. The end result is that we elect governments based on personal beliefs and ideals rather than a reasoned evaluation of their policies and platforms.

So one way to combat this problem is to define the issues ourselves in some sort of grassroots movement independent of any political party. So during campaigns, when political parties talk about what they think Canadians want, we have some sort of record that contains ideas brainstormed by the population for the kind of country that we want to live in. Political parties can then be evaluated based on how closely they match with the idea repository. These ideas also need not be limited to the realm of public policy. Private industry leaders can also take notice and work to fill a demand in an area that they see an opportunity in.

In any case, looking for a job is a time-consuming process and I need some other way to feel like I accomplished something. So I built CanadaBrainstorm.ca using Drupal and the IdeaTorrent package from the Ubuntu people. The basic premise of the site is as follows:

Great innovative ideas for improving Canada are exchanged between people everyday. However, the majority of these ideas never reach public policy makers and industry executive-level decision makers.

A method for storing and evaluating these ideas is needed so that the best ideas can be accessed by political and industry leaders. These ideas can then be acted upon and brought to reality.


Anyone can create an account, log in, and contribute an idea or vote on one. I'm trying to publicize the site through facebook and personal emails. I'm hoping that some people will be keen on the idea and the site will generate some momentum. I have a section about me with links to my resume and this blog. Hopefully, some sort of job lead will come out of it as well.

I've included a link in the side bar. Please spread the word about the site and get involved!

Lemoine Point Walk

The fall season here in Canada is a nice time to go out for a walk in the woods. The colours of the leaves turning are pretty vibrant. They usually only last for a couple of weeks before the leaves fall due to wind and rain.

I organized a little outing a couple of weekends ago to the Lemoine Point Conservation Area near here. About 20 of us went. It's a short 20 minute drive from downtown Kingston.

I've been luck with the weather for the events I organized. It was a beautiful fall day. Here are some pictures:















You can have a look at the rest of the album here.

Kingston population boom

Wow! Kingston just exploded after labour day weekend. The Queen's campus got overrun with a ton of students returning to school. There's a lot more excitement around campus and the business school is a lot busier and noisier.

I keep walking around campus and wishing I was an undergrad again. It's a vastly different atmosphere than the one I experience at Waterloo. Lots more girls...I mean lots !

That also makes me feel a bit old. I know I'm over ten years older than the majority of the kids on campus.

The house I'm living in is also full now. We went from four people to seven...4 girls and 3 guys. The new people seem nice. I'm hardly ever there so I only run into them every now and then. We only have one laundry machine in the house so managing that might be a little tricky.

Skydiving Drama

As I mentioned in a previous post, I arranged a skydiving trip for our class. It's something that I wanted to do before starting MBA school but ran out of time. It turned out that we had to do a business case for a skydiving outfit in Gananoque for our Management Accounting class. I thought I'd only get about 10 people to sign up, but ended up with 23 people in total including a couple of professors.

In talking with the owner of Skydive Gananoque, I decided to book the day before Canada Day since he was going to have a Twin Otter plane that could take a group of 6 tandem jumpers at once. I planned it out that 12 people would go in the morning and 11 would go in the afternoon, sandwiching a class that we had that day. Things didn't go according to plan...the pilot for the plane got held up at the border and they had some other issues. We ended up going on the smaller Cessna planes that could only accommodate two tandem jumpers at a time. The morning group took a lot longer than expected while the afternoon group and me ended up waiting around for about 3 hours before the first of us got on a plane. It was a bright sunny day with minimal clouds and they barely squeezed us in before sundown. Our management accounting prof who set up a whole business case for them didn't get to jump. They suited him up and then told him that it was too dark to go. Not very nice. A little communication on the part of the owner to let me know what was happening would have been good just to manage expectations a little bit. We could have figured out a way to make it work out for people.

It wasn't an entirely negative experience though. The jump itself was euphoric. I laughed myself to sleep that night. It's too bad it got marred by bad customer service.

Here are some pictures and videos:





I think this one of Kwesi is the best though...


Here's the video I paid $100 for...maybe I'm losing my sense of humour, but I didn't appreciate what the tandem instructor was doing during the free fall.



Here's one of the videos that we took on the ground. You can see how dark it was at the time. Kwesi took this one for me...you can hear what they said about Clinton (the prof) not jumping in the end.



Clinton decided to take his money back and go jump somewhere else.

You can have a look at the rest of the pictures here.

At the end of the experience I was a little upset by the customer service we received. One of my former colleagues asked me about and I replied to him in a bad way. Word got around to the owner of Skydive Gananoque, Tom, and a few nasty emails got exchanged. Here's how it went:

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I removed the email thread after some advice from people. Probably not the best thing to do.

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I know I'm no angel in this, but I think Tom was over the top. Personally, I think he had a really bad weekend on Canada Day where things didn't go very well and my comments just gave him an outlet to take out his frustrations. As much as he dislikes me, he still has my picture on his website. It was a good lesson on how not to do customer service in any case.

I'll have some recommendations for next year's MBA class if they want to go skydiving. Tom's outfit is close to Kingston, but he probably has a grudge against MBA students now...thanks to me. Next year's class may be better off going to Ottawa for the day...that's a 2 hour drive to get there but they might get better service.

Why get an MBA?

I've thought about getting an MBA for a while now. A couple of my friends have gone through Rotman and one through Wharton and they shared their experiences with me. I liked everything that I heard and was really interested in the topics, but, in my mind, two years of schooling with no income was a steep price to pay...never mind the tuition. It wasn't until I found out about one year programs that I seriously contemplated going back to school.

Here are a few of my reasons for doing it:

Ambition
I've had thoughts of starting my own business for the past few years and even attempted starting my own mechanical design company after my career break. I've also been keen on sometime managing an engineering department. To achieve either goal, I'd need to obtain some sort of management and business knowledge and apply it somewhere. An MBA is one way to get that knowledge...applying it in a new position after school would be a great experience.

Increased Opportunity
Between my co-op and full-time experience, I've spent almost 9 years in the same sort of mechanical design role designing machined/stamped metal parts. The context of the design, whether in high-tech, aerospace, or automotive, has changed, but the overall process and methodology has been the same. Over the years, I've developed other interests and contemplated a career switch to something in the field of computers/software. Starting over from scratch at an entry level would have been a long and arduous process. An MBA gives me access to other non-engineering industries without having to start all over again. Industries like banking, financial investments, information systems, and management consulting all recruit MBA students. Last year's Queen's MBA annual report shows a list of companies that recruit their students...it's a long list (page 8).

Personal Growth
I've been able to excel at almost every job that I've had. I want to see just how far my talent and ability can take me. The personal coaching and leadership training that an MBA offers can be extremely helpful and can help me attain higher goals.

Higher potential income
Pretty self explanatory here. I can draw a higher income with an MBA than with an engineering degree alone.

Timing
Manufacturing in Ontario is slipping and the local economy is not doing so well. It seemed like a good time to step out of it for a while and go back to school.


Here are a few of my reasons for choosing Queen's:

• 1 year program


• Technology based


• Team oriented approach


• Kingston: smaller town and sailing mecca


• Timing: the program starts in May and my lease in Toronto ended at the end of April...it just made a lot of sense.


• Intangibles: not sure why exactly, but when I tried their student-for-a-day trial I pretty much knew that an MBA was what I wanted to do and Queen's was where I wanted to do it.

Most people apply to a bunch of schools but I only applied to Queen's. It was a pretty safe bet that I would get in as long as I didn't screw up on the GMAT exam.

Anyways, student life officially started today. I just moved into a room in a house with 6 other grad students. Tomorrow I'll stop by the MBA office and pick up my student card. I'll pick up some groceries and a few items. I already have homework to do so I'll have to get cracking on some reading.

I've thought about making entries on this blog summarizing my readings as a study method to try and make the knowledge stick better. I'm not sure how practical that will be, but I'll try it and see how it goes.

Moving on...

Yesterday was my last day of work at Multimatic. I'm headed back to school for an MBA at the Queen's School of Business. I'd only been at MTC (Multimatic Technical Centre) for a year...a year and two days exactly. It's a decent place to work, there a lot of highly capable people and I got along with almost everyone. In terms of Mechanical Engineering, there aren't many other places that have the capabilities that they have. Their core business is automotive hinges, but they're also into race cars, high end sports cars, and the occasional sailboat.

I got to work on an interesting project relating to European automotive standards for head impact protection in the event that a car hits a pedestrian or a bicyclist. The basic idea is that the hood of the car would be designed to absorb the energy of the impact of the victim's head as a method to reduce head trauma or fatalities. You can read more about it here.

In terms of design, there are two ways of achieving this goal. You can design a passive "soft" system where the hinge, supporting structure, and the hood buckle under the impact of the victim's head. The other method is to design an active system where the car has sensors on the front bumper to detect a collision and an active lift system where the hood is raised by about 50-150mm at the hinges. This youtube video shows the implementation of the system on a current Jaguar vehicle (EUMatic is a European division of Multimatic and they produce the hinges for Jaguar).

The project I worked on was an active system that was already in development, but I was tasked with designing a hinge system proposal for a future European version of the Chrysler 300. Instead of airbags or other pyrotechnic devices for lifting the hood, the system I was working on used gas struts. The central idea is that in the event of a false deployment (faulty sensor or impact with a garbage can or other inanimate object), the driver could just manually reset the system by opening the hood and continue driving. Currently, a false deployment with the Jaguar system would mean that the driver would have to call for a tow truck and have the hinges/hood/airbags replaced...pretty costly. The Multimatic system would protect against that.

I can't go into details about the project, but it was a really good learning experience. The workload was heavy but interesting. I did some pretty neat kinematics on the design side (something akin to this), had three quarters of the analysis department work on the strength and dynamics of the system, and got to be part of a technical review at the Chrysler Technical Centre in Auburn Hills, Michigan.

Unfortunately, even though the Chrysler engineers loved our system from a technical standpoint, the price tag was a little to high for their liking. The last I heard was that our system was around US$50 more per system than the next competitor. That came out to around US$6M more for the entire vehicle program. They went with a supplier that offered a non-resetting pyrotechnic system.

My last design task was to design some demo fixtures of the GM Tech World show where GM invited a select number of suppliers to show case their technologies. One of the demo fixtures was for the active system using a Saab 93 hood. It was really cool seeing the system in action...the fixture literally jumped of the floor. Pretty dramatic! It'll be interesting to hear about the reactions of the GM people.

In the end though, as interesting as that work was, I decided that it was time to move on to something different. Pursuing an MBA was a step that I need to take to get to do the kind of work that I'd grown more interested in. I'll write more about the thoughts that went to that decision in another post...

No Ads

I checked the Google Adsense account for this blog and found that no one had even clicked on anything...ever. I decided to remove the feature; thought it was a bit of an eyesore anyways.

It's been a while...

I've been pretty busy over the last few weeks and haven't really had anything to write about so this blog's been neglected for about a month.

The weather's just starting to turn cold after a balmy Thanksgiving weekend (Canadian thanksgiving weekend is in October). So I may have more time to ponder stuff and write about it.

My photography hobby is pretty much at a standstill. I haven't explored Toronto nearly as much as I would have liked to, but hopefully the pace will slow down a bit soon. I did manage to capture some good moments of our thanksgiving dinner in Fort Erie like this stitched panorama:



It's a good one of the after dinner mood. My brother made it in from Vancouver, my aunt from Florida, and my uncle and his family from Toronto. It was a good time and I think everyone thought so too. Good memories, hopefully we'll have more family members join us in the coming years.

Back to School

I was thinking about going back to school for a while now mainly to take a fluff course to meet some people...particularly women...and get my social life going a little bit. I decided that I'd go to Ryerson University because it seemed like I'd get more value than at Seneca College or a similar college. Then I started thinking that as long as I'll be spending the money (not an insignificant amount), I may as well take something that I'm interested in.

I ended up registering for computer science 1. This may come as a surprise to some, but it's not exactly a field that's dominated by supermodel-type women.

The first class was yesterday. It was a bit of a pain to get down to the campus. I'll have to leave work a little earlier next week because leaving at 5pm put me right in the middle of peak afternoon traffic. I didn't have enough time to grab a small bite for dinner. I pretty much parked my car and hopped on the subway downtown.

Anyways, I'm pondering getting a certificate for programming applications available through Ryerson's continuing education program. I figured I'd try a course out to see if I like it...it couldn't hurt and I can get a bit of a tax credit for the course tuition.

The course itself is an introduction to programming and uses Java as its base language. The first lecture covered the basic concepts of classes and objects. It moved along pretty slowly...in my opinion, the content could have been covered in one hour instead of three, but that's the way courses are.

I got a little amusement out of listening to the professor. He's got a very robotic voice and way of talking that sounds a bit like Stephen Hawking with a Slavic accent. He also lacks almost any form of facial expression except for the occasional blink.

It should be an interesting course anyways...who knows what it'll lead to.

I'm now thinking that if I pursue the programming certificate I should also balance it with some other courses where I'll have a significantly better chances for dates...something like fashion 101 or the like.

Google Tools

I've been reading about Google's Adsense and wanting to give it a try in the hopes of making some money off of this blog. I applied for it the other night and the application went through. I think pretty much any site will get accepted unless there are a bunch broken links or the site content is pretty foul. There's a ton of fine print to go through. I skimmed through it and basically I'm not allowed to click on the ads on my page and I'm not allowed to direct page viewers to the ads visually (through fancy flashing arrows and the like), verbally (asking people to click on them), or through the code (forcing viewers to click on something before viewing content).

I'm not sure exactly how Google picks out the ads to display. I tried looking for a setting where it would only display ads for canadian outfits, but couldn't figure it out. I'll have to do a little more research some other time.

I'm looking forward to seeing how it all works. Who knows ? Hopefully I'll make some pocket money for a coule pints here or there...

Another neat little Google tool is Google Analytics. I recently signed on the other night and am starting to see the results roll in. It's pretty amazing. All you really do is insert some javascript code in you blog template and Google uses it to track interaction with your page. Again, I'm not sure how it all works, but the numbers it collects are neat. Here's a sample of my dashboard:



There's a lot of data in the underlying layers and it's presented in a neat fashion. It could be pretty useful for some web designers, but I have it mainly because I'm interested in how my blog is being viewed. Again, who knows where this will end up, but it's a neat piece of technology.

The Fresh Kids...

It was the 80's, we were kids, and we were breakdancing in the middle east.



I know I'm going to hear about this from a few of my friends, but I've recently gotten in touch with people from my days in Jordan so I figured it would be nice to share this.

My parents had this picture on their mantle. I was in a bit of a rush and used my digital camera to capture it rather than scan it, hence the poor quality.

Labels...

I decided to make use of the label feature on posts. I turned out to be a tedious process since I had to go through all the posts since I started the site. You can now see the post categories in the side bar. I did it mainly for my sake so I can find stuff a little easier.

One tough bit is finding broken links in the older posts. I did a little searching for some online link checkers. I tried a couple sites, but the reporting wasn't that great and I had to dig through my posts anyways. There probably are some broken links still...

Old Class Picture

Thanks to the facebook phenomenon, I've had a few old classmates from Jordan get a hold of me. It's a bit surreal to think about, it seems like a lifetime ago that I was living in Amman and going to school with them. It might be nice to travel back there again and see how the place has changed over the last 15 years or so.

My parents have some old photos from those days...here's a class picture from Abdul Hamid Sharaf in Amman:



I did a little search online and found a wikipedia entry for the school. It seems a disgruntled student managed to add a few vulgar lines at the end of the writeup.

Poo....

Sad day. The Anaheim Ducks just beat the Ottawa Senators for the Stanley Cup. It was a great run for the sens...too bad they couldn't put up a better fight. Great season though...Hopefully they'll be just as good next year.

Hockey season's over now...I'll probably cancel the cable sometime over the next couple of days. Time to see what life is like without TV.

Getting settled...

It's been a couple of weeks since I moved up here to Toronto. My place still needs a bit of work, but I'm slowly getting around to it. I need a couple pieces of furniture still...I've been shopping around different places, but it seems like Ikea still has the best deals around. I think I've finally decided on what to get without spending a fortune.

Work has been good so far. Still in learning mode and feeling a bit like a co-op student again, but hopefully I'll be picking up speed over the next couple of months.

Life in the big city is still as hectic as I remember it. It doesn't seem to matter what time I head home, there's still the traffic jams and idiots driving around. It'll be better once I settle into the rythm of life here and not have so many chores to do after work.

I've started cooking again...I'm having to brush up on my chef skills. I though I might be able to find a local butcher in my neighbourhood, but so far haven't come across any.

I still haven't found a gym nearby yet...squash courts will be a must I think. Other things to check out are the North York Library, Sheridan College courses, and Johnny's burgers.

The joys of moving

It's a pain. I haven't moved in about 3 years. Luckily, apart from a couple pieces of furniture, most of my stuff is still packed from when I moved home from an apartment in Toronto. The worst part about moving is seeing all the garbage I managed to accumulate and getting rid of it. I can move in small batches over the course of a few weekends though. I'll just need to rent a truck to move the bigger furniture pieces.

I did manage to find an apartment fairly quickly. It has easy access to both the Don Valley Parkway and the Toronto subway train system. The amenities are pretty good...there's a mall right across the street and a grocery store nearby. I just have to find the closest machine for my bank.

The main thing is that I can still abide by my rule of having a 20 minute maximum commute to work and still have easy access to the downtown area without having to drive.

Hiatus is over

I finally got a job...I'll be joining a couple of my friends at a place called Multimatic in Markham, Ontario.

I'll be working in the design department designing hinges for cars...doesn't sound too exciting, but there's a lot involved in designing door/trunk/hood hinges. It should be a really good learning experience for me...I'll be working with other engineers and being supervised by more experience engineers. It's a really good change from where I was working before I decided to go on my career break.

It's all happening pretty quick...I start on Monday on training for Catia for week and then get at 'er the following Monday.

I'll be busy hunting for an apartment or some sort of accomodation. I had a quick look and the prices seem ridiculous for some of the places I see. I wasn't a big fan of living in the big metropolis before, but I didn't exactly live in the best neighbourhood either. I'll have to find a balance between rent and location and hopefully find a place that'll be a good value.

The photography stuff will obviously be on hold for a little while...