Sometimes events in my life end with a Seinfeld ending, and tonight was no exception. Earlier this week, my condo building informed me that they are power-washing the garage, so I need to remove my car from my parking spot this Friday. Well there are a couple issues with this. First of all, I have a car and a motorcycle and a bicycle in my parking spot. Second of all, I'm going to be in Montreal on Friday playing in a hockey tournament so I'll be unable to move it that day. The last issue is that there is nowhere to park my car outside because there is only 1 hour parking on the streets from Monday to Friday. So you might say I'm in a bit of a bind.

Well I brought the Jeep back from my parents last weekend and left the Acura at their house because I figured I'd have a better chance of selling the Jeep if I had it with me in Toronto. As it turns out I was able to sell the Jeep tonight, so now I don't have to worry about clearing my parking spot on Friday because the Jeep is gone. I'm sure I can find somewhere out back to put my motorcycle for the weekend, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Although I didn't get as much as I had hoped for the Jeep, the buyer paid mostly in twenty dollar bills, so it sure feels like a lot of money. The smart half of me says the money should go on my line of credit, but the crazy side of me wants to purchase a BMW FS650 GS motorcycle. I think I'll make the smart choice this time and either invest the cash or put it toward my line of credit. I'll make sure not to bring the cash with me to Montreal, now that would be calling for trouble, eh Mikey?

This week the weather was beautiful (before the weekend). Spring has finally arrived and I'm already starting to get a tan from walking to work. Since I walk East to get to work in the morning, the sun is shining on me, and then when I go home I get even more sun. I'm convinced that the West side of a city is always nicer and more developed than the East side simply because people would rather walk toward the sun and get a tan on their way to work. Nevermind, that's a ridiculous statement.

A couple times when I was walking to work I was very tempted to go to the beach instead of going to work. Working inside is a real drag when it's nice outside.

Here's how nice the grass looked last weekend:

The last two days I have had a very difficult decision to make. One decision I had already made last week is that I wanted to work at a Consulting firm to gain experience. Consulting is a great way to be exposed to different technologies, different types of projects and work at different companies. I had my mind made up and I knew which company I wanted to work for. Just yesterday a new offer surfaced that made me re-consider my options. It was an opportunity to accept a position as a Project Manager for a another Consulting firm. This is a step up for my career and would be a great opportunity for me to advance my career to the next level. It would take me about 6 months to get the proper training to fill in any gaps I currently have and prepare me to become a Project Manager.

So the two offers that I was strongly considering was the original offer to be an Internet Consultant and the offer to be a full blown Project Manager. Accepting the Internet Consultant position would get me all around more experience in develoment, consulting, and I would even be involved in the Project Management tasks, but on a smaller scale. The other part is that the company offering the Internet Consultant position has a great reputation as having high integrity and specific focused knowledge. Everybody that works there has pride and passion. That's one thing that was pulling me toward this company, the opportunity to learn and the opportunity to feel like part of a community by working closely with other consultants and learning from them. The Project Manager position can't offer the same learning opportunities. If I choose the Project Manager path, it's hard to go back to a consultant position after that. But the PM route has its own pros, such as the opportunity to go down the sales route and the opportunity to be a leader and manage people.

So I put a list together of the pros and cons of each offer. PM is more money but more stress, Consultant is less money but more opportunities to learn and grow. There are many variables that influenced my decision. But ultimately I didn't want money to be the main deciding factor and I'm financially happy with both offers anyway. I wanted to make a sound decision based on where my heart is, and where I feel I will grow the most. I think if I was ready to be a full blown Project Manager and if my heart was there, it would be an easy choice and wouldn't require any contemplation. If I went that route I'd be turning down the opportunity to learn and grow in other areas because my learning would be focused specifically on Project Management.

So I've decided once and for all to take the Internet Consultant position as an opportunity to grow myself. I think if I decide two years from now that Project Management is the direction I want to go, I will be a better Project Manager because of the consulting experience I'll be gaining. So there is nothing to lose by choosing the Consultant position, and hence the reason for my decision.

I have decided to change the direction of my career. I'm going to be accepting a position as an Internet Consultant for a small firm based in downtown Toronto that specializes in web solutions using Microsoft technologies.

There were many events that led to this decision. Looking back, I realize the first trigger was back on February 6th when I wrote an article about Over-emailing" after months of being bombarded with emails from the project I was working on. I would stay up late at night sorting through my emails, but I really didn't feel like I was learning anything or adding value by having so many emails. Many times I wanted to do something technical, but I was unable to find the time because any spare time I had I'd be cleaning my emails. If I ignored my emails or filed them without reading them, people would come back to me after a couple weeks and be upset that I hadn't responded to a question they asked, so it was necessary to go through the emails. I've seen people at work that have thousands of emails that they've never read. But I don't want to be known as an unreliable person who never responds to emails.

The second event was on the next day when I worked an 8 hour day and then I went home and did development and bug fixes for another 8 hours. I remember how I felt at 1:45AM when I was finished and everything was working properly. It was a great feeling to have a challenge and fix the issues. I hadn't done a lot of software development in the last year because I was the technical lead, so this was one of the rare times I got the feeling of accomplishment from actual development. The next day I was back to square one with a full mailbox again and other issues to deal with (Usually political more than not).

In the last few weeks I really started questioning where my career was headed. I started to look at where I see myself in 5 years, and I really started to question whether I was headed down the right path. I would look at people who were higher than me in management positions. Some of them have worked at the bank their entire lives and you can just tell they are sick of the people, the politics, the processes, and the over-emailing. But they are afraid to do anything about it because they've never been anywhere else and because they don't have the self-esteem to re-assure them that their skills are an asset to another company. Or possibly they feel like they won't make as much money at another company with their experience. So then I looked at the "Architects" and thought about whether that was a path I wanted to take. I think someday that might be a path I'd be interested in, but at this point in my life, I think the Architecture teams at the bank are too high-level, and I wouldn't have the same sort of challenge that consulting will offer me.

With the consulting position I will still be dealing with clients, I'll have the challenge of designing solutions for the client and I'll even have the opportunity to develop the software for the client. The projects may change every couple weeks or every few months depending on the project, so there will always be new challenges. This is definitely the path I want to take at this point in my life, and I'm very excited about the new challenges I will encounter. I've already downloaded Visual Studio 2005 and I plan to install the Beta version of Microsoft Office 2007 soon.

In a recent MONEY Magazine and Salary.com review of careers, a Software engineer was rated the #1 job in America. Jobs were rated by their growth, pay, stress-levels and other factors.

Here were the top 10 jobs in America including their 10 year job growth and average US salary.

1 Software engineer 46.07% $80,427
2 College professor 31.39% $81,491
3 Financial advisor 25.92% $122,462
4 Human resources manager 23.47% $73,731
5 Physician assistant 49.65% $75,117
6 Market research analyst 20.19% $82,317
7 Computer/IT analyst 36.10% $83,427
8 Real estate appraiser 22.78% $66,216
9 Pharmacist 24.57% $91,998
10 Psychologist 19.14% $66,359

It looks like I'm in the right industry, and in Toronto and around North America, there has been a huge demand for Software engineers recently and it seems to be increasing rapidly.

A recent survey by Mercer (www.mercer.com) (A Human Resource Consulting firm) has rated Zurich Switzerland and Geneva Switzerland as first and second place in the world for cities with the top quality of living. Vancouver rolled in at third place behind the Switzerland cities with a ranking of 107.7. Toronto ranked 15th this year, up one spot from last year with a ranking of 105.4.

Ottawa, Montreal and Calgary placed 18th, 22nd and 25th, while the top city in the US was Honolulu Hawaii in 27th place. San Fransisco followed Honolulu at 28th position, and Houston had the lowest ranking in the US.

Out of cities in Asia, Singapore had the highest ranking in 34th place with a ranking of 102.5 with Tokyo following in 35th place.

Baghdad had the worst quality of living in the world for the third year in a row.

View the World-wide quality of living survey summary or download the top 50 rankings.

8 bodies were discovered in a field just west of St. Thomas Ontario, and the police are investigating a mass murder. From the few details released in the media, it is safe to speculate that these murders were related to organized crime, and the deceased had probably gotten themselves into some sort of bad business with the wrong people. Police have indicated that all 8 victims are from the Greater Toronto Area and they all knew each other.

There was another murder that happened in Toronto on Friday night that I find even more disturbing. A man went to a bingo-hall and won $1000. When he was leaving the bingo-hall, he was approached by 4 women who demanded his winnings. When he refused, they beat him up, stole his money and left him to die.

This is one of the most disturbing murders I've ever read about; beating a man to death for a mere $1000. I have no doubt that these women will be caught, but Canada's justic system is very lenient, so they will likely be guilty of Manslaughter and will probably only end up spending a few years in jail.

When I was a kid, I used to love doing magic tricks. I knew a few card tricks, and I even had my own Houdini kits.

A couple weeks ago I went to my cousin Geoff's place to hang out, and there were a few guys from his band there. When I got there they were already half in the bag and they were playing "black magic". Well I had played this game as a kid, so I knew exactly how it worked. But Jesse and Geoff couldn't figure it out for the life of them. They were amazed that I could leave the room, they could pick an object in the room, whisper it in Roddy's ear and then I could come back in the room and tell them which object was whispered. Roddy would simply point at different objects one-by-one and when he comes across the object that was whispered, I would know that was it.

They were trying to figure out the trick. Maybe it was always the 5th object that Roddy pointed at? Nope, that didn't work. Even to this day, they still don't know the trick, and I refuse to reveal the secret. Geoff asked me about a week ago what the trick is. He told me that I'm either going to tell him what it is, or he'll never ever know. I opted to leave it as a mystery. It makes the game more exciting. A simple Google search would likely reveal the secret, but Geoff is a rock star, not a computer scientist ;)

Tonight while bored studying for my final exams I wanted to play a little magic trick on my brother, but I failed miserably.

He was making grilled cheese sandwiches on the frying pan. So when he went upstairs, I replaced his frying pan with Han's frying pan and sliced up a banana and put the 4 chunks of banana on the frying pan. I wanted to create an optical illusion and convince Tom that his grilled cheese had turned into a banana.

It didn't work, he gave me a strange look and called me a weirdo and asked me where the hell his grilled cheese went.

These are classics. I picked my favourite 11.

1. To me, it's a good idea to always carry two sacks of something when you walk around. That way, if anybody says, "Hey, can you give me a hand?" You can say, "Sorry, got these sacks."

2. Before criticizing someone, walk a mile in their shoes. Then, when you do criticize them, you will be a mile away and have their shoes.

3. If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let go, because, they're gone, man. They're gone.

4. If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

5. If you ever catch on fire, try to avoid seeing yourself in the mirror because I bet that's what REALLY throws you into a panic.

6. Whenever I see an old lady slip and fall on a wet sidewalk, my first instinct is to laugh. But then I think, what if I was an ant and she fell on me? Then it wouldn't seem quite so funny.

7. I hope if dogs ever take over the world and they choose a king, they don't just go by size because I bet there are some chihuahuas with some good ideas.

8. Maybe in order to understand mankind we have to look at that word itself. MANKIND. Basically, it's made up of two separate words "mank" and "ind." What do these words mean? It's a mystery and so is mankind.

9. It's easy to sit there and say you'd like to have more money. And I guess that's what I like about it. It's easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money.

10. I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world because they'd never expect it.

11. Whenever you read a good book, it's like the author is right there, in the room talking to you, which is why I don't like to read good books.

The Toronto Maple Leafs haven't been so hot this year, and they are on the verge of not making the playoffs, unless they can pull off a miracle.

They haven't won the Stanley Cup since 1967, so fans have been very patient with their team. I think most fans gave up on the Leafs a couple months ago, so if they do pull off a miralce and make the playoffs, the fans will go crazy and it will be a great battle.

If the Leafs want to win their fans back, they'll need to play their best for the final 8 games of the year.

Here are some fun pictures for fellow Leaf fans to sulk over.

A buddy of mine that lives in Vancouver heard about a scheduled public pillow fight and he managed to take a photo and a video of it when roller blading by.

Apparently what happens is there are these postings online that tell people to go to a central location for a pillow fight, and when the clock hits a certain time, everybody swarms and hits each other with their pillows.

It's pretty cool how laid back the west coast is, and the little things you can do to have a good time. You don't need to have money to have a good time. It makes me think I'd enjoy living on the West Coast, the lifestyle seems very easy going.

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