award tour

I’m back from Spain. It was awesome. Barcelona is my new favorite city. Also, the Citroen C2 is amazingly roomy for a tiny car and has an insane turning radius. Hopefully I’ll steal Auriol’s photos soon and you can all see them.

I landed at 9pm on Friday and headed immediately to the opening night event of RubyFringe, Unspace’s punk-rock tech conference. The whole thing was an unmitigated success (in my humble opinion) and I was very glad that everyone I asked seemed to agree. All of the presentations ranged from “awesome” to “best I’ve ever seen”. The food and parties set a new bar for tech conferences (in my humble opinion). Though lots of people helped out, my fellow unspacer Meghann deserves an insane amount of applause for doing such an amazing job organizing and planning the event. Checkout what people are saying about RubyFringe on Twitter here and tons of photos on flickr here.

And now that I’m back, I went out and bought a 16GB iPhone. $90 a month to the man (Ted Rogers). Maybe I should buy like $1000 worth of Rogers stock just so I feel like I’m not getting completely screwed by this GSM monopoly.

I just paid $8 for a pint of guinness. Eight fucking dollars! On the plus side, leaving work to go watch Eurocup is quite easy.

I’m back in Toronto now. I’ll be posting some photos of the road trip as soon as Sean sends them to me. I still have my Seattle cell phone number and might just keep it until Rogers releases the iPhone. Also, I shall be at the Toronto Rails Project Night tonight with fellow unspace people who will be telling people why RubyFringe is a must-attend conference.

Looking at feedburner trends over the last few months it looks like there’s about 30 people who read awardtour five days a week. I highly suspect that I personally know every single one of these people. I also suspect that this won’t be news to any of them as it’s been in the works for a very long time…

I’m leaving Amazon in May and Seattle in June. I’ll be driving my 2000 VW Golf across the USofA and should be arriving at my final destination, Toronto, sometime during the second week of June. Soon after that, you’ll be able to find me at the offices of Unspace near Queen & Spadina. I met the guys from Unspace at Railsconf last year and I’m quite honored that they asked me to join their ranks. I suspect this is when I start asking everyone I meet “Hey, do you need a kickass Ruby on Rails consultant for your cool project?” or exclaim “What do you mean you’re not going to RubyFringe? Are you out of your mind?”

“But Tyler, don’t you love Seattle and enjoy working at Amazon? Have you lost your mind?”

‘Tis true. I am quite fond of Seattle and Amazon, excluding my brutal first year, has been great. But as you might also know, I’ve been dating my lovely girlfriend (who’s still in Toronto) for the last 3 years. Three years of phone calls and flights is more than enough for me. That said, I’m so excited to be moving back to Toronto (more so than Jessie Spano on caffeine pills).

Seattle people, I have no idea when the going away party will be. Toronto people, would asking for a parade upon my return be out of line?

That’s all for now.

Oh, I also suspect this is when Ram comments “Fuck ya! Toronto rules! What took you so long?”