GO LEAFS GO!!!

So we made it to a hockey game!

Courtesy of an un-nameable source, we had excellent seats and watched the Toronto Maple Leafs kick the butts of the Detroit Red Wings 7-5 in a pre-season match at the Air Canada centre in Toronto's downtown.

The game is fast and exciting, with a lot of big hits up against the glass (perspex) walls, causing them to sway around and look like they may break at any second.

You can view the rest of our photos of the game here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/aimee.carbonell/Hockey

The game started out pretty badly for Toronto, with the wings scoring inside the first minute, but came back with in equalizer about 5 minutes later. The remaining 14 minutes of the first period went without any more goals, but lots of action, people getting sent off for 'sticking', 'slashing', 'hooking' and 'unsportsmanlike behavior'.

The second period was another 20 minutes of fast skating, 3 more goals for the wings and 4 for the leafs. At most times scores were levelled pretty quickly, with Toronto going into the break 1 up.

The third and final period had lots of action, as the clock counted down and teams got desperate to pull ahead. At one point with Toronto up 6-5, the detroit team decided to pull their goalie off and put a 6th attacker on, leaving their goal wide open. Toronto didn't take advantage of this but did put a nail in the coffin with 2 minutes to go, to make the scores 7-5.

A very enjoyable evening, and during the 20 minute breaks, a crew was using the crowd for filming scenes for a new Mike Myers movie, 'The Love Guru'. I'm not sure how hockey fits into that plot, but when it does come out keep an eye out in the scene "Game 5, Stanley Cup" and you might see me and Aimee standing in the front off to the left of the goal.

autos

I'm so over corvettes. Back home I used to dream about driving one, but they're a dime a dozen here.
well, not quite, but they're still the poor man's sports car. Sure they handle well, and they actually go around corners, but revolutionary spine replacement surgery has been developed especially for corvette drivers. Their handling ability has been achieved by putting them really low on the ground and reducing suspension travel to 1mm.

Anyway, there are a lot of nice cars here. Subaru aren't so popular, Honda is the number one player along with ford.
American cars are cheap, but only cos many of them are assembled here.

I see a lot of exotics too, Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini, Maserati and of course, Hummer.

The roads are wide and flat to accomodate these vehicles out in the 'burbs, but the city is a nightmare to drive in.
Streetcars (trams) and padestrians rule the city, I don't know why anybody bothers to drive.

I have to say; while the bus may be a bit slow, it's better than driving and you get to catch up on reading, or blogging

;)

NZ 2, Canada 8

No, it's not a rugby score, it's the rankings in the world as the most peaceful place to live.
http://www.visionofhumanity.com/rankings/
Good 'ol US is down at number 96 and Iraq is last at 121.

So, the rugby. The internet is our only source of news aboot that little competition. I see the All Blacks trounced Italy last weekend. As the community we're living in at the moment is very Italian, I can't imagine our neighbours are very happy =)


So how's life in Toronto you might ask?
Well we're really enjoying the place. It's a very happening city, with shows, exhibitions, concerts and lots of things to do.
We've been shopping at most of the malls here, went to the Canadian National Exhibition which was a giant fairground and I got to climb inside a tank and army helicopter!

The days are definitely getting shorter though. When we first arrived the sun was still high in the sky at 5pm. Now it's just dipping below the horizon at 7:30. We get to watch the most georgeous sunsets from the bus window as we travel home.

Speaking of which, as with all problems we have now found multiple solutions to our transit problem.
A few weeks ago we started catching the express bus. For an extra 50 cents the bus took us from the nearby mall, down the highway and straight to the subway station. It cut aboot 30 min off our morning commute and we could get up later! This was great until school went back. Now the students are in session and all people are back from their vacations, traffic in the mornings is worse than in Auckland and the trip down the highway takes longer than using the side roads and stopping on every corner. So we're back to plan A.

However the ride home is much better. We catch the Viva bus, which is the same price, but much nicer. It's one of those 'bendy' buses and it only has aboot 6 stops between the end of the subway line, and our connection bus. Much better, more reliable. We feel so much nicer when we arrive home.

Home, where is home? Yesterday we signed the leases to our apartments! I can move in on Saturday September 29th, Aimee still has people living in her place so will be stuck to October 1st.
It's in the affluent area Yonge and St Clair, has an outdoor swimming pool and a fountain, both of which i'm sure will freeze over in the winter.
Living here will ensure that we can be home by 6pm most days =)

So check out our photos - link is at the top - we'll post them of the apartment as they are taken, and as we do other exciting things.

One more thing:
I'm sure Eastbay could use some more NZ talent, so if you have experience with windows servers and a desire to migrate to Canada, check out the WHP (400 places left) and let me know.

Booyacasha!

Pittsburgh

We have been to America. Again.

This time by ourselves, and in our rented car (2007 Ford Fusion. 2.3l inline 4, FWD).
I feel like I should be paying Google some money too, as their maps of this continent are brilliant, especially the directions bit. Simply stunning.

So anyway, Hello to Charles and Sally, Adrienne and Tony and the rest of the crew down in Pittsburgh.

Arriving in Pittsburgh remings me of coming down the Nauranga gorge and having the city open out in front of you. The same is true of here. I gasped as it suddenly appeared, which woke Aimee up and meant we had to go around and do it again. We really did, we took a wrong turn and instead of going to Charles' place, we were going out of the city!

I finally understand now why the football team is called the steelers. The guy was telling me as I dropped off the rental car that Pittsburgh is 'the underarm of the USA' due to it's huge steel industry. I have to say, they certainly know how to use steel too, there are bridges everywhere! there must be 6 bridges crossing the river which divides the city.
It's also very nice. Charles and Sally showed us around the university grounds which are amazing. Very green and well maintained, it must be a great place to study.

Job descriptions

So what do we do during the day?

Well, my official title is Senior IT Consultant. That means I get to sit in the big chair in the office, have two 19inch LCD panels, and a blackberry.
Well, really I have to be responsible for managing the 4 projects we've got 'on-the-go' cos the rest of the team are running around like 'blue-assed flies' trying to keep up.
And by the rest of the team, I mean the other guy. Naveed, a great guy who moved to the US from Pakistan with his wife and child, came to Canada 3 years ago to finish off a training course and hasn't left.

So things are pretty busy in our office, the company not only deals with SMB's (small to medium businesses) but also has residential clients who need their modem reset from time to time.
Most customers are about the same size as LANsmart's clients, however they all have multiple servers due to having to be ISO certified and all that jazz. 1 domain controller, 1 for antivirus, 1 for mail, 1 for files etc. You get the picture.
This means a lot of management and a lot of time and work for the engineers like me for when the clients decide things are running a bit slow, we just throw another server into the mix.

It's certainly interesting stuff and will hopefully really develop my project management and customer management skills.


Aimee on the other hand has settled well into her application developer/DBA role. She's working closely with a couple of people in her team, solidifying the database and adding new functionality.

For those of you who aren't in the US or Canada, you won't be able to look at her company website.
The idea is Puretracks are a sub company of the large telco - Bell Canada. Bell decided they wanted to provide music downloads to their customers, so supported puretracks when it was only developing to do their in-house web solutions. Now for $0.99 you can buy a track of music just like the iTunes store. But only if you're in the US or Canada. Somehow this will stop piracy =)

So if you would like to buy some music and you're not in the US or Canada, just post your credit card details in the comment field and we'll be sure to buy something on your behalf.

JOKES!

Disclaimer: Aimee and Chris advise you to never put your credit card into a website you don't trust and that doesn't disply the little padlock symbol.

getting to work

Work work work.
We're a part of the working world, and part of the morning rush to get into town.
Our morning starts at 6am with a shower, and then the bus at 6:55. The 1 hour bus ride leaves us at the railway station a bit before 8, and we wait for the next train to come along. These arrive every 5 minutes or so, and we are smoothly whisked into the city.

By 8:25 we're seeing the sun as we come out of the subway station onto King street. Aimee then takes the streetcar (small electric train/bus) east, while I get mine west.

10 minutes later we're both at our desks and ready for the day's work.

The evenings are the opposite, catch the streetcar to the subway station, get on a train as soon as possible and hope we get home before 8.

We have both found apartments to live in. We're in the same apartment building, on Jackes st, which is just off Yonge st, 5 minutes north of the city by train. You can tell we're looking forward to moving in there in October.

My room is on the 14th floor. It's a single bedroom apartment, which constitutes a kitchen, bathroom, living room and 1 bedroom.
Aimee's is on the 15th floor, almost directly above me. Her's is a bachelor, which means kitchen, bathroom and large living area which will also be the bedroom. Also her balcony is bigger than mine.
It also has a fitness area, so we can work off all the hotdogs we've been eating.

Working...

Well, we're part of the working world. Well, Aimee is anyway.
I don't start until tomorrow (Wednesday).

She seems to be enjoying it. It's a nice office, very open plan (no cubicles!) with about 20 people.
It's a good team environment, so I'm sure in a few months she'll be a proper part of the family, involved in animated discussions about who dropped that table from the database or whatever it is those DBA's get up to.

She's already been assigned some work to do, so is busily tap-tapping away on her keyboard fixing some corruptions or something.

Currently I'm sitting in the Starbucks on King and Yonge (pronounced 'Young'). I'm not here for the coffee but for the wireless internet. I've been using these last 2 days of my holiday to search for a place for us to live, and let me tell you it's hard going.
Not knowing what Toronto's good and bad areas are; it's easy to see a cheap place and not know that it's in the middle of a really bad area or to see a really nice apartment that's in a good area, only to find out that it's $1800 a month for 1 room.

At this stage, we're still living in Woodbridge, which is 1.5 hours out of town. So we start each day at 5:30, catch the 6:55am bus and are in town just in time for an 8:30 start.
At the end of the day, we should get home about 7 or 8pm
So if anybody out there has a penthouse apartment in downtown Toronto going for less than $1000 a month, email me!

I saw NZ in the news again today. This time it was a newspaper article that back in 2005-6 NZ declined to receive some prisoners from Guantanamo bay.
Article here.
Not very exciting I know, but still, it made a column in the Metro, a free paper that everyone reads while on the subway.

Thanks and hello to all the people that have commented, Carmel, Andrey, my Sister, Abe, Aunty Penny, Paul, Gil, The Superfriends (you know who you are), Dad, the other dad (Nap), Anthony, Aiyaz, Kim and Rickard.
We know your time is valuable and thanks for holding, we'll be with you shortly...