What’s Chris Doing?

Yesterday we saw Stanley park and the Aquarium. We had previously seen many of the species from the tropical section, like the jelly fish to the right, while diving. They also have a section of species from the BC coast. It really showed that no matter where in the ocean you go, there is some really interesting form of life. It’s not the fact that lakes are cold that makes lake life uninteresting, it’s just the lakes themselves.

The best part were the big water mamals like the dolphins, the sea otters, baluga whales and sea lion. The sea lion was huge! You can get a bit of an idea of the size from the picture, but it still pales in comparison to standing beside it popping out the water like that.

There was also a Amazon rain forest section. Apparently there are about 200 species of fish that feed on fruit and seeds when the Amazon rain forest floods. In North America there are none. As part of the Amazon section there was a little aviary that had ibis and butterflies(left).

After the aquarium we took the free Stanley Park bus which circles the 5.5 mile perimeter of the park. A stop at Prospect Point finally gave me an opportunity to take a half way decent picture of the Lionsgate Bridge. A very tasty dinner at Joe Fortes finished the day for us. Exhausted we returned to the hotel room for our final night before our 11pm flight tonight.

We are having a bit of a lazy morning since we have to give up the hotel room soon, and will not have the option of returning for a rest. This afternoon the plan is to head to Gastown, Chinatown and Canada Place. I don’t know if we are going to make it to Granville Island. At the end of what is sure to be a full day, we will have to make our way to the airport for our 5 hour flight. I have to go pretty much directly from the flight to work, at which I am sure to be well rested and alert :)

Kate and I are in Vancouver. It’s a business trip for Kate and I am along for the ride. We arrived on Sunday in time to spend our anniversary here and on Monday night we went out for a fancy anniversary dinner at Provence Marinaside.

While Kate worked the last two days, I was out taking pictures. I have been walking all over downtown but have yet to make it to the North-East part, which means I havn’t yet been to Gastown, Chinatown or Canada Place. I also haven’t been to Granville Island yet.

Starting today I have Kate with me for the whole day. We’re off to see more of Stanley Park, including the Aquarium, and then it is off to dinner, probably at Joe Fortes. We passed by Joe Fortes last night and it smelled really good.

Tomorrow we are going to see Gastown, Chinatown and Granville Island.

Our first baby is due mid February. Finally I can talk about this here. If you didn’t get an email from us, I probably have an old address and the email bounced back.

So far so good. I had a computer, a phone (which worked) and a cubicle when I arrived on Tuesday. What I didn’t have was a functioning user account. There are always these sorts of hickups in the first little while of working anywhere.

I seem to get along with the team pretty well and and I got to email some people I know on Friday, after I got my email address sorted out. I think Kamran and I are going to get together for luch on Monday. We’ll see if I can manage to meet up with Brian some time next week too.

The stuff I will be working on seems interesting, but very much software only. I say that in contrast to what I was doing at Evertz and on internship with Nortel, which was embedded development and very tied to hardware. I am going to get a demo of everything that they are doing on Monday morning. That will be good for getting a more thourough understanding of what I am doing.

This weekend is all about finishing up with setting up the house. We have no air conditioning so it can get a bit hot, which is why I am taking a break to write this. I hope that we also get out to go for a walk somewhere I can take my camera and get some pictures. I haven’t taken any in a couple of weeks and I am starting to get withdrawl :)

I think we will get through the majority of the rest of the house setup this weekend.  The only big tasks left are: hang curtains in the spare bedroom, frost the glass on the front door and hang the mirror that goes over our dresser.  The last one is the worst.  It has hooks embedded into it, so I will have to have the screws in the wall in exactly the right locations, or it won’t work.  There is not a lot of margin for error.  It took Kate and I at least an hour to put it up in the last place.  The rest is just hang pictures and put away the last remnants of stuff that needs to find a home.  It will be really nice to be done with it.

Friday, Evertz had their IPO.  I had my last day on Thursday, so I haven’t found out from anyone there whether there was any hubub, or if anything got done work wise.  Looking at the trading summary they had a pretty good day.  It will be interesting to see what happens.  I had some stock options, but since I didn’t stay with Evertz, they no longer apply.  Maybe some of my friends who still work there will be able to pay off their mortgages after their options vest.  Good luck guys.

Last weekend all(most) of our worldly possessions got packed into a truck and taken to Ottawa. On Tuesday I will be starting work at Nortel Networks. This is a big change for us. We now live a 5 hour drive away from most of our family and friends. This page blog has been mute about it because I wanted to get everything sorted and finalized.

Last week I stayed with my Mom while I finished my last week of work at Evertz in Burlington. The sale of our condo closed on Friday. I came up to Ottawa last night to join Kate, who has been here with her mom all week, and fought some crazy traffic.

I stopped at my Oma and Opa’s place on the way. Travelling up the 400 was crazy. All the way from Toronto to Barrie was stop and go traffic. It took me more than twice as long as it normally would.

After my visit with them, I coninued on to Ottawa, taking 12 from Orillia to Whitby, continuing on a very busy 401. In all I spent 8.5-9 hours in my Mom’s overloaded van with no air conditioning.

The townhouse we are renting is still in a bit of dissarray. There is a bunch of stuff they needed me to do, manly heavy lifting stuff, in order to continue on in the putting stuff away.

Besides being my first day of work on Tuesday, it will also be the day we, hopefully, finalize the first round of upgrades we are doing to our house. Thats right, be bought a beautiful, expensive, unbuilt house in Kanata. It won’t be ready until November 2007 so we will have to make due until then in the 3 bedroom townhouse we are currently renting.
Obviously the reason we came up here is the job opportunity plus the fact that we really like Ottawa. I hope that the job turns out as well as I imagined it. We’ll find out more about that on Tuesday.

I am Chris Lambacher. Welcome to my blog.

I am a programmer living and working in Burlington, Ontario, Canada, which is between Toronto and Hamilton. I mostly do embedded C and C++ programming, but also get to work with Python.

I interested in photography. I got a Canon EOS Digital Rebel (300D) almost a year ago and have improved a lot since then. You can check out my best pictures on flickr.

I am recently married to Kate, our 5 month anniversary was yesterday. I have known Kate since my second year of university. We didn’t get together until my second year of grad school, 6 years later. We were really good friends before that. Many of the people were surprised by our getting married and many were not. Wedding photos are on my other photo page.

This blog will likely be mostly technical, a little bit photographic and a little bit personal. I hope whoever reads this finds some kind of amusement.