Pioneer on the Internet – Sean Gursky

After six and a half years with one form of Statusfirm or another I have handed in my resignation and am awaiting to begin the next chapter in my career. Over the years a lot of employees have left, the dynamic of the company changed and slowly the joy of work was sucked out.

A big reason for the decrease in satisfaction came from the events in late 2010. While not written about in the blog, those who I have spoken to in person know the story of the bankruptcy in December 2010. Ultimately, the entire staff was blindsided eleven days before Christmas with the news that Statusfirm was bankrupt and we were all told to go home.

What remained of Statusfirm was acquired by another company and nearly all employees were hired back in January 2011. Everyone was wondering how long this would last for and the attrition began as people started to leave for secure employment elsewhere and with each departure morale dropped a bit lower.

I have been looking for a job since the day after we were laid off but I didn’t get serious about applying until the summer of 2011. I hired a resume writer (Jason at ResumesToInterviews.com did a fantastic job) and soon after I had six interviews with four companies and received two offers.

As of April I will be a Telus employee working as an IT Project Manager in the Business Transformation division of the company. A decade ago I didn’t think being a Project Manager is where I would end up but it was an opportunity presented to me at Statusfirm and I’m excited to begin a new phase in my PM career.

In addition to not wearing jeans through the work week I also give up the freedom that the “startup” mentality that the Statusfirm/TeachersTV/TeachersMedia had. I am going from a place where things are done haphazardly and there is more reaction than a proactive attitude to an environment with policies, processes and more structure. To save on the cost of parking I am going to do something I haven’t done since High School; take a bus.

There will be some challenges, some unexpected surprises along the way but I hope I can look back on this decision years from now and have no regrets in leaving the comfort zone of the familiar and going into the unknown corporate world.

Following in the footsteps of the 2009 and 2010 year in reviews I wanted to continue the year end ritual. I am surprised by how much has stayed consistent (top artists, quietest online search month) but there were a few new trends I didn’t expect.

Top 10 Google Queries
1. northlands park, edmonton
2. alberta downs race track, lacombe, ab
3. evergreen park, grande prairie
4. Rocky Mountain Turf Club, Lethbridge, Alberta
5. peggy’s footwerks
6. google analytics
7. peggysfootwerks
8. made in frame
9. peggys footwerks
10. peggy’sfootwerks

The top four results are work related for the Horse Racing Alberta website I managed. I have no idea why they were ranked so high amongst everything else. I also can’t explain why I needed to search for “northlands park, edmonton” as frequently as I did.

The rest of the search results were all related to a side business and seeing how high Peggy’s Footwerks was ranking on Google. In the end I was able to add the site to Google and have it hit on keywords so I no longer receive phone calls asking “why they can’t find the site in Google”.

I used my personal Gmail account to look at my Web History so the results are from searching while logged in with that account. My busiest month for searching was in August with 1,667 queries recorded, and my least active month was in June with 864. These numbers are up from last year but June returned as my least active search month, which is a bizarre trend.

Top 10 sites
1. en.wikipedia.org
2. www.google.com
3. www.imdb.com
4. answers.yahoo.com
5. www.amazon.com
6. www.ehow.com
7. androidforums.com
8. forum.xda-developers.com
9. market.android.com
10. twitter.com

Wikipedia dominates my top sites again. I honestly don’t think I go there that often but I guess every article about someone or something leads me to Wikipedia so I imagine that adds up over time. I like that Android sites appeared in this list, even though before September the notion of leaving iOS seemed crazy to me.

Top 10 Artists
1. The White Stripes (695 plays)
2. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard (631 plays)
3. The Beatles (542 plays)
4. Tegan and Sara (541 plays)
5. Michael Giacchino 482 plays)
6. U2 (411 plays)
7. Coldplay (357 plays)
8. Daft Punk (338 plays)
9. Rob Costlow (335 plays)
10. Ludovico Einaudi (329 plays)

Standard affair with this list: White Stripes, soundtrack or orchestral…plus a few other bands thrown in for good measure. Rob Costlow was a newcomer this year, but Daft Punk is stuck in there solely for the Tron Legacy soundtrack. I listened to the soundtrack for months before I saw the movie, and when I saw the movie all I focused on was the music.

What I don’t understand is how I listen to The Beatles that much. I like their music but I rarely say “Yes, I want to listen to all of The White Album”, but somehow they claimed the third most listened to artist this year. Sadly, there was no Bear McCreary. Battlestar Galactica is getting a lot of play time, especially the Solo Piano albums, but McCreary didn’t perform those songs so any plays for that were credited to Joohyun Park.

Top 10 Tracks
1. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – A Dark Knight (29 plays)
2. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Bank Robbery (Prologue) (27 plays)
3. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Buyer Beware (26 plays)
3. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Halfway to Hong Kong (26 plays)
5. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Decent Men In An Indecent Time (25 plays)
6. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – A Watchful Guardian (24 plays)
7. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – You’re Gonna Love Me (23 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Chance (22 plays)
9. The White Stripes – Astro (21 plays)
9. Rob Costlow – Bliss (21 plays)
9. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – You Complete Me (21 plays)
9. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – We Are Tonight’s Entertainment (21 plays)
9. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – The Ferries (21 plays)

There are 13 songs listed here because of the five way tie for ninth spot. Last year “Inception” lead the way in music, and this year it was “The Dark Knight”. Odds are good that next year Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard will lead the way with “The Dark Knight Rises”.

With regards to air travel 2011 was the lowest in recent years with a pretty painless extended weekend trip to San Diego amassing 3200 miles covered. I drove my VW Jetta TDI over 13,000 kilometers and filled up the vehicle 17 times (the same number last year). I have gone two calendar years in a row without completing a police report, and I received no speeding tickets or anything incriminating like that against me.

My decline in blogging continued this year. Including this post there have been 23 entries made in 2011. The majority of those were reviewing my experience with Telus TV and my switch to Android. There hasn’t been much to report on, or anything worth updating about, which is apparent because I made a third less tweets this year with 188. I also made 41 posts on Tumblr. As expected there were no Facebook status updates either.

I like social networking but I also don’t want to bother people with hourly updates or useless tweets containing song lyrics or writing about how much food I ate. I think my decrease in Tweets was related to not posting every time I updated my Project 365. If people want to see the photos they know how to find them, and spamming them doesn’t do anything more than get a few more image views.

I sent roughly 407 emails from my @gmail.com and @seangursky.com email accounts and 52 from my @hotmail.com address. My @gmail.com and @seangursky.com usage increased a bit compared to last year but @hotmail.com dropped a bit. What I did write from @hotmail.com was mostly Kijiji related, so maybe the shift is related to using Gmail for more communication.

I made one order with amazon.ca, two with amazon.com, one with monoprice.com and none with Deal Extreme or amazon.co.uk.

Rough calculations are that I took nearly 5,200 photos with my Canon 5D this year. There was a few week period where the camera was in for repair but any photos I took with the iPhone or backup Pentax Optio were inconsequential. 5,200 is fewer photos than I took last year (7,850) but there was no two week long vacation to soak up a thousand odd photos.

All in all 2011 seems pretty quiet. Even when we tell people what we were up to the usual answer is “house stuff”. You add in a few months of Ice Dragons summer hockey, a couple trips to the cabin at Lac la Biche and you have the year in review.

2011 is in the books, I have a few things I’m looking forward to in 2012 and I’m sure the numbers will reflect that (I predict exceeding 9,000 photos taken) but we’ll see how it all shakes down in 366 days.

Several months have passed and if I wasn’t keeping track I would have thought it had been longer. My transition from iPhone/Rogers to Android/Wind came together in an abrupt fashion. The move consumed my thoughts for days and then it happened and that was it. The dust has long since settled and I’m still happily using my Wind device and loving Android.

I have been told that my previous posts didn’t have any jubilation over Android, almost as if there was some hesitancy but I can say that I really do love Android, maybe not to the way I loved the iPhone because there are the occasional hiccups that make me shake my head and wonder how green the grass was beyond that fence.

It didn’t take as long as I thought but I am completely used to my Android device. My muscle memory has stopped trying to click on the home button, and as I continue to use Android going forward I may love it the same way I did the phone from Cupertino.

Battery Life
This is more a problem with the LG Optimus 2X than Android but one leads to the other so a hardware problem affects my enjoyment of Android. I have a charger at home, at work and in the car in order to keep my phone fully powered. If I know I’m going to be away from an outlet for a long period of time I charge a spare battery and take that with me. It’s a minor inconvenience but it’s something I have had to deal with while on Android.

I will say that battery life has improved significantly over the last few months due to the Cyanogenmod 7 nightly builds I put on the phone. As I use the multiple batteries I have I find they are getting better life but it’s a marginal increase. These improvements are minor but going from a 50% charge by noon to a 75% charge by noon is good but I am still a ways off from going a few days without plugging in.

Force Close
Facebooooook ()! Or maybe Android 2.3.7! Or maybe my CyanogenMod is to blame but either way it’s always with the Force Close for the Facebook application. It feels like a daily occurrence. It is a minor annoyance to click a button on the phone, wait a few seconds and click on the application but it’s one of the few small problems I have that make me wish for the functional and slick iOS feel.

Potpourri
I can’t stop saying it but I miss the polish and integration of iOS, even after months of using Android I still like the feel of iOS. However, I will open up a setting that was previously disabled to me on iOS, or enable my phone to do something that non-jailbroken iPhone’s couldn’t do and feel in awe of the device.

I feel that CyanogenMod is something that makes my Android device better. I am not restricted to LG releasing a new version of Android 2.3 after months of delays, I don’t have to wait and wonder if Ice Cream Sandwich will be released for my device because CyanogenMod will make something that will run on my phone, provide more options than I would have otherwise and release builds faster than LG can release new phones.

Having a functional phone that allows you to do what you want when you want, free of corporate application approval policies, is a beautiful thing and giving up a bit of polish is a small price to pay for that.

Wind has been treating me fine. There are times where I’m surprised to be within the Wind Home network, and others the signal can’t penetrate. I don’t have to rely on my phone within tall buildings downtown so the times I am without a signal are few and far between.

There was a period where I wasn’t connected to the data network so this made surfing the Internet outside a WiFi connection difficult. This was due to the APN not being set, or not being configured correctly. My phone had the correct APN data for the Wind network but it wouldn’t connect.

After going a few weeks without mobile data usage I decided to look into it further. I cleared the APN data, re-entered it, added values and removed them, all to no avail. Then after another round of testing and fumbling with the settings it worked. I wasn’t going to ask any questions, so I left things as they were and went from using 0K on the mobile network to as high as 22MB a week later ().

All in all I’m still happy on Wind and happier on Android. I love the possibilities with Android, the realization that anything is possible, and when I look at a 50% decrease in my phone bill I’m all the happier I made this transition.

I have been using Android for a few weeks now and feel pretty comfortable in it, but there are some habits from iOS I haven’t been able to shake, and surprisingly they are related to typing.

My first week with Android had ups and downs. After a few days of suffering with the atrocious battery life of the LG Optimus 2X I decided to install CyanogenMod and accidentally installed the wrong ROM version. I used “LG Optimus 2X” instead of “T-Mobile G2X” and the phone wouldn’t boot and I was not able to access the recovery console.

I struggled to resolve this on my Parallels installation of Windows through my MacBook Pro for the better part of a day. When I troubleshot the issue on a proper Windows machine I undid my mistake in less than 15 minutes and within 30 I had the correct version of CyanogenMod installed and was back to customizing and installing applications.

Wind Mobile sells the phone as a “LG Optimus 2X” but it’s actually a T-Mobile variety called the “G2X” and their software isn’t interchangeable. I came as close to making the phone as inoperable as I would like. With that mess behind me I am like a kid in an elevator pushing buttons with all of the customization tweaks available.

I used the stock Optimus 2X software for a few days, liked the ability to use Swype as my keyboard of choice but that is all I miss after upgrading to CyanogenMod. I signed up for the Swype beta and installed Swype within CM7 but ran into some issues switching the keyboard over. The application would force close and it would never launch properly. Like most things on Android, it is possible to install something, but it requires a bit of legwork that I have yet to look into yet. A week after experiencing my initial issue I tried installing it again and now everything is perfect and have no reason to ever return to the stock ROM that shipped on the phone.

Wind
I have not left the Edmonton or Sherwood Park Wind coverage region yet () so whenever I’ve looked at my phone I have had reception. Even in my basement I get reception, an area Rogers wasn’t able to adequately cover. I rarely download anything over the cell network but when I do it blazes (SpeedTest results ()). For the few calls I have made call quality has been good and Gord reported it sounded better than when he spoke to me over my iPhone.

Thus far I have no complaints with Wind, but the moment I spend a weekend at Lac la Biche or visit Dad in Millet I’ll lament not having coverage but for $29 a month it’s a sacrifice I can make.

I noticed I wasn’t receiving text messages on @gursky mentions via Twitter or SMS reminders for a Google Calendar event. I didn’t think much about this but under Mobile Setup for Google Calendar I noticed that Wind Mobile was missing from the drop down list (). None of the other carriers listed would work so for the time being I am left without SMS alerts.

As the Wind Mobile network expands I can only hope that they become recognized and appear in the same drop down list as the big telecom companies in Canada.

Android
The learning curve is starting to plateau and while all touch operating systems probably behave the same way the naming convention and knowing what icons control what is something I’m still learning. If I read an article or a forum post explaining how to do something I won’t know where the person is referring to unless the explicitly explain each touch press they made to get there. Simply saying “edit the Application Drawer settings…” loses me.

It’s the small accomplishments where I understand the Android OS a little more that feel like the biggest gains. It was only a few days ago I learned how to precisely move the cursor when editing text. I would keep finger pressing the paragraph of text hoping to get the cursor into position when all I had to do was click and drag the indicator that appeared (). With Apple I would hold down on the area of text I wanted to insert the cursor, wait for the Magnifying Glass () to appear, and then I would roll my finger left or right to place the cursor precisely. These are small accomplishments but slowly add up to being more comfortable with Android.

I think the biggest surprise I have encountered with Android is that if I don’t like how something operates I can modify the settings or install an alternate app that can achieve what I want. With the iPhone if I didn’t like the Calendar or Mail application I was at the mercy of Apple to release updates or venture into the Cydia aftermarket. In the Android Market the options are almost endless.

These infinite options have led to a few problems with the phone. Every application has a setting for notification and behavior, but those settings can be overridden elsewhere in Settings and figuring out which one is causing the application to not behave correctly can be a little annoying. Because I can have multiple applications for the same job I have found that this leads to the phone getting confused.

For instance, while listening to WinAmp I lock the phone but if I advance songs through the lock screen widget a different playlist begins playing and I have two songs going at the same time (and last.fm gets all sorts of confused ()).

These will all be resolved in time, it’s just a matter of taking the effort to isolate the issue and remove the application. Android gives you the power to get into trouble but also allows you complete control to undo your mistake.

I miss the simplicity of iTunes and iPhone, I liked having a desktop application that I could control all information on my phone from. This was a nuisance if I wanted to sync my phone with a new album or add a new video and had to wait until I was back at my main computer. With Android if I want to add a new song I can do so from anywhere and it works. It’s really as simple and dragging the file onto the phone when it’s plugged into a computer (or set up wireless syncing if I was so inclined).

I never realized how used I got to “swipe horizontally to bring up a ‘delete’ toggle” () with iOS but I find myself doing that frequently with Android in Messaging or Email. It’s easy enough to delete something within Android but swiping across was such an elegant way of taking a shortcut to delete something. This wasn’t a feature I immediately noticed in iOS and it’s funny how those little features end up making the biggest difference.

I find myself missing badges on the application icon () that shows the number of outstanding/unread messages. This was necessary for games or emails and I really miss it. You can download notification applications for the Launcher of your choice but I have not found them to work reliably, and paying for something that feels like it should be available by default is a little backwards.

Plus, there isn’t a notification for all the applications I use so it would be a little wasted. The Android notification bar () at the top of the screen is nice, but with iOS 5 getting badges and their own notification bar I feel like I’m one step behind here as far as software is concerned.

Another gripe I have is that I wish there was a little consistency between applications. In iOS I would tap near the top and the application would scroll back up. I have found this to not be common in all Android equivalent applications. I hope this is something that will become available in the future because it was incredibly handy for browsing my Twitter stream or a long webpage.

Being able to send applications from the online marketplace to the device is a great feature. This is such a brilliant concept it makes locating and installing a lot of applications a breeze. Even if the phone isn’t physically connected to the computer it can still receive application installations (), amazing!

Every few days I discover something else that I am missing from iOS and then I will Swype a message and forget all about it. I am surviving with Android and maybe in the distant future I’ll wonder how I ever survived without the little green robot.

I am no longer using an iPhone as my cellphone of choice.

Let that sink in for a moment. I have purchased an iPhone 3G, 3GS and 4 on launch days, lining up several hours before the store opened and I give up the Apple device so close to the release of the iPhone 5? How did this happen?

For the last few months Gord has been touting the joys of cheap () and reliable phone service from Wind. After looking at my $70+/month phone bill with great disgust I thought it was time to become contract free and save some money. Wind and Mobilicity operate on the AWS network band and this means that all available versions of the iPhone are incompatible so if I was going to make the switch I would have to (1) wait until T-Mobile became a carrier of the iPhone 5 (who operate on the AWS band) or (2) go in the opposite direction and use an Android device.

T-Mobile announced they would not be receiving the iPhone 5 so if I was going to be contract free it would be without Apple. I have always been curious about Android but had no reason to switch so Hell froze over and I made the move.

Mobilicity did not have coverage in Sherwood Park so I was limited to look at Wind phones. There are new Android devices released every month but Wind only had a few available to purchase, and even fewer were in stock.

I went to five different Wind locations (two at Blockbuster and three kiosks) before finding one that had the LG Optimus 2X in stock. I tried to phone in advance but no one answered the listed numbers so I had to drive to each and ask about their inventory levels. Gord gave me some assistance from Calgary as to which stores had the LG in stock but I was still turned down at the City Center kiosk.

I was willing to drive a bit to switch from Rogers but my patience was growing a little thin locating kiosks inside a mall. Thankfully Kingsway Mall would be my last stop as they had the LG in stock. The annoyance of driving around has long been forgotten and in the end it all worked out. The phone may not be one of the HTC brands I lust over but the the important thing is that I am off Rogers and am a free agent.

I love iOS and find the Android OS very confusing so I am faced with a bit of a learning curve. Millions of other people figured out Android so I’m sure I will in time, it will just take some hands on experience.

I sold my iPhone 4 to a co-worker and the money earned nearly paid for terminating my Rogers contract so that’s it. I’m an Android user. Maybe for a year, maybe forever. I do know I won’t go near another long term contract when there is now some much needed competition in the market.

I’ll write another post on my thoughts about Wind and Android in a few weeks time.

Update: The post regarding my first two weeks with Wind and Android is here.

The gloves are still drying from the final game of the Ice Dragons playoff game last night and the wound of this loss is going to take months to heal. For the second year in the row the Ice Dragons were ousted from the EMHL summer coed post season by the AMS Shredders in a shootout and the hatred we have for that team grows a little bit stronger.

How we got that far is a story onto itself and our season came to an end one week after one of the best memories I’ll have in my hockey career. On paper the Ice Dragons weren’t worth a second glance. We posted a 7-8-0-1 record for 15 points, one above the team at the bottom of the B division. After a stretch of losses the team was moved to C division where the victories came easier and the games had less meaning. After a few weeks of accumulating wins we were moved back to B division and were given a harsh wake up call.

It seemed that every team got exceptionally better in between seasons and we stayed the same. There was no middle ground for us, it was either an easy victory in C division or a lopsided affair in B division. Having nearly identical rosters to last year I can only assume everyone else stepped up their game, or played a little bit harder against us.

Our regular season ended with two victories in a row and we were slotted to face the Yellow Pencils in a first round matchup. The Pencils had a dominating record of 11-4-0-1 and with the exception of a few forfeits they were the best team in the division. We lost the first game, fielded a larger roster for the second game and staved off elimination.

A few days later we met for the third and deciding game. We had eight skaters and the odds stacked against us. It was a strong game on our end as we didn’t show signs of being short and had the Yellow Pencils number. With the seconds ticking down the Yellow Pencils tied the game and we were heading to a shootout.

After the first three skaters went we were tied at one apiece and it was my chance to go one on one with the goalie. I may not remember all of the goals I score but from the blue line to celebration I remember my position, where the puck was and what I was thinking. I came in on the left, cut across in front and hit top shelf. I thought about back hand, deke or something else but as I went left to right I knew what I was going to do and after that goal I had a grin on my face for hours.

Some controversy followed from the opposition as to who would shoot next, but it didn’t matter, they missed and we celebrated hard.

Next up were our arch rivals the AMS Shredders. We lost all of our regular season games against them this year but knew we they could be beaten. We had back to back games scheduled and the score card will show them winning both but not without a fight.

For the second Friday in a row the Ice Dragons were short benched with eight skaters and were in an elimination game. Sadly the outcome was different this time. It was a solid effort from everyone on the Dragons as we overcame an early deficit and killed off several penalties. The Shredders scored with 16 minutes left and we were heading to another shootout.

Instead of being a part of the celebration we watched these jerks celebrate a shootout victory over us for the second year in a row. With their top competition (Yellow Pencils) removed from the playoffs the B division is theirs for the taking in a second year in a row and we’ll be looking forward to the playoffs next year for revenge.

Pushing aside the bitterness of this loss it was still another fun year being a part of the Ice Dragons. My assist amount decreased this season from last, but I made up for it by scoring the most goals I had in any Ice Dragons uniform.

Our team had a lot of returning players from the 2010 season and it made for a tight knit group. The new players fit in well and I would be pleased to have everyone come back for a fourth Ice Dragons season. The team Gord started in 2009 has come a long way and hopefully one year we’ll get to know what the Finals taste like and have a chance at claiming a division championship.

Until then I will be thinking about this all summer long (again): stupid short bench, stupid Flyers Shredders.

Photos from this season can be found in my gallery here. Photos from the Shredders playoff games will be added this weekend.

For better or worse the 2011 NHL Playoffs have come to a close. I was able to watch the Vancouver Canucks play until the middle of June, and with a game almost every other night I had it all. My alcohol consumption increased, I grew a few more gray hairs during the stressful first round against Chicago and suffered the devastation of a second Stanley Cup Final Game 7 loss.

Over the last few years I had some heavy superstitions and there were periods I thought that simply by watching the game would affect the outcome. For a stretch Vancouver won more games when I didn’t watch than when I did. In 2009 and 2010 I grew a playoff beard and on May 11 in both years I shaved them off after Vancouver lost to Chicago after six games.

I felt that 2011 would hold playoff success so I opted to not grow a beard. If I looked like a sleazy pirate after a month the results of going unshaven for two months would be a thing of bewilderment and ridicule.

I kept a routine but it wasn’t as visible, and it didn’t affect my hygiene. Instead of growing a beard I allowed myself to shave except on game days. I would rotate through my Canucks jerseys as I watched the game at home. I didn’t have a set order I went through the decades of jerseys, but each one has been worn several times since April.

During Game 7 of the first round I decided to have a shot of alcohol every time someone scored. It was a low scoring affair with only one goal for Vancouver in regulation, but when Burrows capitalized on a Campoli turn over I didn’t hold back and had a few shots of Alize. That developed the routine of taking a shot of Alize on each Vancouver goal in any elimination game, in addition to having a few at the end of a series. This was all on top of the beer or rum and coke mix I had.

In the rounds against Nashville and San Jose my traditions stayed in check. Because of schedules I wasn’t able to see all of the San Jose games live, but the curse had been broken and the Canucks did fine without me watching. This bit of knowledge was useful when the Finals came and I had to miss a few games due to a U2 concert and Ice Dragons hockey games.

At the end of the Stanley Cup Final this culminated in an all our drink fest. A scoreless hockey game, a difficult first period goal and the weight of a good season hanging in the balance meant that last night got sloppy, something that would have happened if the score was in Vancouver’s favor and they had won.

It’s going to be a long off season, and an even longer time until April when playoffs start back up and I decide how superstitious I am going to be.

The move from condo to house last year meant we would be responsible for shoveling snow in the winter. For the last four years the extent of snow removal I have had to do was limited to cleaning my car off on snowy days at work. If there was ever a year to dive head first into shoveling snow this was it.

Every time I shoveled snow I tracked the time in DailyBurn and have some rough figures for amount of times, number of calories and time spent between November 2010 to April 2011 shoveling snow.

There were 140 days between the first snow shovel and the last with the numbers breaking down to be:

• Number of times shoveled: 35 (average one shovel every four days)
• Hours spent shoveling: 36.5 hours (average 62 minutes/shovel)
• Calories burned: 14,194 total (average 405 calories/shovel)

Hopefully the 2011 winter isn’t as bad, but we’ll find out how the numbers look next year.

In August 2010 I registered for Groupon. There were a few interesting deals that showed up in the weeks following my registration but in September a deal appeared for Photobook Canada. Incidentally that deal remains as my only purchase on Groupon since I registered six months ago.

The coupon was for $35 purchase that got me a $110 credit to be used on any photo book order from Photobook Canada. With our England/France trip coming up in a month I thought this would be a good way to create a scrapbook from our trip without having the hassle of printing photos, buying extra sheets and plastic covers and, most importantly, finding a photo album that we liked and could expand in size.

In December we got serious about creating the album and put a few days of effort into putting it together, here are my thoughts on the Photobook Canada process.

Software
I was intimidated by the software at first but after a bit of time experimenting with the features I became quite comfortable and still never utilized all of the capabilities of the program. Once you have added your images to the album you can select different page templates for each page, alter the background color, apply borders to items, manipulate images, add text and shapes.

We didn’t know where to begin and we feared our inexperience with the software would produce a poor quality album but we took it slow, started by adding images we wanted onto a page (no layout or theme, just the straight images) and worked our way through the trip.

The page templates are incredibly useful and I feel the pages we used a template on were the strongest of the book, but they only serve as a guide and could be modified and adjusted. I never felt restricted with the software or that it was holding me back from doing something I wanted to do. We were able to lay images on top of each other, scan brochures and other mementos we picked up on our trip and still give it a hand made scrapbook feel without the glue or double sided tape.

On my 15″ MacBook Pro running a 1440×900 resolution I never found the interface to be too cluttered or crowded. I was able to see both pages I was working on and still access all the tools. I was able to “Preview” the photo book and flip through the pages, but if I wanted more control I could export the album as a “Proof” and look at the pages as images. This gave me a good feeling for what the final product would be and it didn’t disappoint.

Ordering
Through the Photobook Canada software I was able to upload my order to their website. I had a few connection issues with their server so I had to try uploading a few times but on the third attempt it completed. This created some confusion on Photobook Canada’s side as I had someone from the company email me a few days after I uploaded my order (I uploaded it on December 23 so a few days to catch the issue and write me is expected) saying they couldn’t find my images and I would need to upload them again. However, a few minutes after that message I received another one saying they located my order and would begin the printing process.

From the time of placing my order to receiving the product () was 23 days. This was longer than I expected but the Photobook Canada website talked about delays around the holiday season so I expect if you don’t order during a busy time the turn around time would be faster.

One thing that stood out is that once my order was put into “In Production” the status never changed. Even a week after delivery it hasn’t been updated. I’m compulsive about order tracking, but for others it may not be important.

Final Product
The book was packed extremely well. It was covered in plastic, bubble wrap and a tight cardboard box. The box would need to be cut in half in order for any damage to come to the book and the final product looked flawless.

I ordered a “15×11 Large Landscape Imagewrap Cover – ImageWrap Matte Lamination” with 46 pages. Including shipping and paying for the additional pages I paid $22.05 over and above the original $35 Groupon order. For $57 we got an incredible product and an even better deal. If I had to pay full price for the album I probably would because the cost of materials to create a photo album on your own would come close to $100 (or more), plus the time to create it would be far greater than the hours we spent on this.

For value and final product I would highly recommend Photobook Canada. We will keep their name in mind the next time we have to create a photo album.

Following in the footsteps of the 2009 year in review I thought it would be interesting to gather the same information and post them here. Some of the results are to be expected, others are a surprise. It’s interesting to see the trend in this information as a lot of what appeared wasn’t available or accessible to me until the last half of the year.

Top 10 Google Queries
1. lost season 6 soundtrack
2. *
3. from:53.522911,-113.520347 to:53.522911,-113.520347
4. corkhole poster
5. ups 1ZY511176793770653
6. london luton
7. google translate
8. 1Z8F73V8D900199952
9. usps CP684389748US
10. apple trailers

I really, really wanted to know when the sixth season of Lost soundtrack was going to be released. And when I found out there was a second release for “The Last Episodes” I used the same search query later in the year.

I don’t understand what * and from:53.522911,-113.520347 to:53.522911,-113.520347 are doing there, perhaps * is a blank query but I can’t see it happening that much to claim the second result on my query.

The third entry are longitude and latitude coordinates for near the Timms Centre for Arts on University Campus, which makes no sense to me. In July the World Wide Photo Walk was held there but I can’t understand how I searched directions to and from the same location for a one day event enough times to make it the third result.

I searched for the arrival of three packages enough to make them in my top ten, I guess it’s hard not to be compulsive when you track something travel across the country.

I used my personal Gmail account to look at my Web History so the results are from searching while logged in with that account. My busiest month for searching was in December with 1,320 queries recorded, and my least active month was in June with 628.

Top 10 sites
1. en.wikipedia.org
2. answers.yahoo.com
3. wwwapps.ups.com
4. www.google.com
5. epguides.com
6. www.amazon.com
7. www.imdb.com
8. www.ehow.com
9. mbradyclark.bigcartel.com
10. maps.google.com

Wikipedia was my top site in 2009 and it holds strong this year, and there were three other results that stayed in the top ten from last year. The combination of answers.yahoo.com and ehow.com appeared because they were a resource when it came to home improvement questions that came up in the condo and house. The rest are my compulsive nature to rename TV show episode titles and checking IMDB to answer the question “Where do I know that guy from?”.

Top 10 Artists
1. Michael Giacchino (1,827 plays)
2. The White Stripes (882 plays)
3. Philip Glass (698 plays)
4. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard (637 plays)
5. Bear McCreary (571 plays)
6. Hans Zimmer (530 plays)
7. Ludovico Einaudi (501 plays)
8. U2 (374 plays)
9. Matthew Good (296 plays)
10. Florence + the Machine (290 plays)

Bear McCreary is knocked off the top spot in place of Lost composer Giacchino. Like my search queries above indicated, I really wanted to listen to the season six soundtrack of Lost and listen to it I did. The first season six album was released in August and the second was released in October so there wasn’t much time to shoot it up to the top of the charts.

Overall the number of plays in my “Top 10 Artists” are down from 2009 but I think those plays were distributed to other artists outside of the top 10. I found it difficult to see how many tracks I listened to within the calendar year so I wasn’t easily able to verify this but my listening habits at home, work and on the iPhone all stayed consistent so I would suspect the tracks played stayed similar too.

Top 10 Tracks
1. Michael Giacchino – Life And Death (47 plays)
2. Hans Zimmer – Time (46 plays)
3. Hans Zimmer – Waiting For A Train (44 plays)
4. Hans Zimmer – Half Remembered Dream (43 plays)
4. Hans Zimmer – Paradox (43 plays)
6. Hans Zimmer – Radical Notion (39 plays)
7. Hans Zimmer – Dream is Collapsing (38 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard – A Watchful Guardian (34 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer – We Built Our Own World (34 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer – 528491 (34 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer – Mombasa (34 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer – Dream Within A Dream (34 plays)

There are 12 songs listed here but with a five way tie for eighth I had to include the extras. Guess which soundtrack I listened to a lot this year? The non-Inception Zimmer song was from the second disc of The Dark Knight soundtrack, which got a lot of plays when I discovered its existence in February.

There weren’t as many flights in 2010 as there were in 2009, but there were passport stamps in England, Paris and Iceland.

I drove my VW Jetta TDI over 14,000 kilometers and filled up the vehicle 17 times. I didn’t file a single police report this year but I did have someone threaten civil action against me.

Including this entry I wrote 42 blog posts in 2010, I made 610 tweets and one Facebook status update. In July 2008 I talked about my fears of using Twitter and the decline in blogging, and I think you can be active on both…if you make the effort to do so. Unfortunately, I rarely tweet and I rarely blog.

I don’t think my lack of tweets and blog updates are related, I think it’s just that I have been busy and don’t have enough time to fill a 140 character space with my thoughts let alone write a several hundred word update. I wrote a few posts in December to catch up on what I had been meaning to write in November so if I can write a few posts a month in 2011 I’ll consider myself active.

I sent roughly 420 emails from my @gmail.com and @seangursky.com email accounts and 70 from my @hotmail.com address. I made two orders with amazon.ca, two with amazon.com none from amazon.co.uk and two with monoprice.com. I thought I ordered more online this year but I guess they were through other methods besides Amazon.

Rough calculations are that I took nearly 7,850 photos with two different cameras this year. 7.65% of my photos taken this year were done in the two weeks in England/France. The majority of my total photo count came from my Canon EOS T1i/500D which had over 5,350 actuations and the Canon 5D had 2,500 actuations.

2010 is in the books, 365 days until I count it down all over again.