It's the unofficial end to summer, and it looks like the weather got the memo.  It's only 20C outside.

I was at Kirk's cottage for the weekend.  Heaney came down and so did all of us from university (the same guys that went to the Bahamas), plus a bunch of other people.  Kirk had a DJ on Saturday night and a band on Sunday.  It was a fun weekend.  Some came with their kids, mostly aged 8 - 12.  The first night the older kids were getting into the beers in the coolers, so the 2nd night we set up a little bar area and Doaner and I bartended all night.  Kirk's neighbours from around the lake joined us -- there were about 40 or 50 people each night.

I got a ride to Kirk's from Panko, in his new toy, a Tesla roadster.  It's a fully electric car, and goes from 0 - 60 mph in 3.7 seconds.  Because it's electric, there's torque at all rpms, and so there's no gears.  Kirk has a 240V outlet in his garage (for welding) and so Panko was able to recharge in about 90 minutes.  It took about 75% of a full charge to get to Kirk's.  One of the controls shows the g-forces when you accelerate.  The highest I saw was 0.68G.  Anyways it was pretty cool to ride in.


I was going to start looking for a job in August, but there's not much going on because of vacation, so instead I wrote my PMP exam in mid-August.  The exam is changed on Sept 1, so I wanted to write the exam before then, because it takes some time for the study guides to catch up.  It's 200 multiple choice, and all you get is a pass-fail, so I don't really know how I did, except that I passed.  It's computer-based so you find out right away as you leave the exam centre.

I thought about doing other credentials such as Six Sigma, but I haven't seen many jobs looking for anything other than PMP or ITIL (both of which I now have).

So the next thing on my list over the summer was to develop an iPhone app.  There'a a card game called Wizard that my Ultimate team plays after games.  It's a trump-based game based on bids.  Generally no one likes to keep score; so I thought it was a good task to write an app for.  It's also relatively simple, because it's just form-based.  So I dusted off my C+ text books and with considerable help from Google, I wrote the app.  As a developer I can only load it by cable onto my iPhone, for testing.  The next step is to submit it to Apple for approval, which I did last Thursday.  If I'm lucky it will get reviewed (and approved) by Apple by end of this week, and then it's in the App Store! (where anyone can download it).  I'm just putting it up for free at first.  I wrote the app more for the sake of figuring out the process, and also to use it amongst my friends, so I'm not too concerned about how many other people download it.  As per Apple rules, I had to set up a support site, so that's all ready to go too.