Jeff Nadeau - Beyond Lektora & Microsoft

No, I'm not dead! Moving back to Quebec City has been more difficult than I previously thought... First, we're having a very hard time buying a house... Unlike the US, the real estate market is still in bubble mode here... We got tired of the situation and decided to rent... So, we will finally feel at home again in May... Because we sold almost everything before moving back here, we're in a shopping spree for appliances, kitchen stuff, bathroom stuff, living room stuff, etc. Well, we're almost starting for scratch! At least, I was able to move my computer! :-)

As for my job, I've been working at SSQ Groupe Financier for the last 4 months... I'm working in the investment division and they are rebuilding their legacy green-text business system in Adobe Flex and J2EE... It's a bit weird because I don't work with any Microsoft technologies... Also, we're using SCRUM as the project management tool and my team-mates nominated me as the SCRUM Master... As you can see, all of that is very different from what I was doing at Microsoft... I like to try new things, so I'm happy with the change... Also, Adobe Flex is super interesting and very fun to program with. It is seriously one of the nicest GUI toolkit I've ever used!

However, I miss my friends in Redmond... I also miss the gorgeous landscapes of the Northwest... But, even with all the crazy snow we had this winter (5 meters!), I prefer the Quebec city's weather... It so much sunnier here, it's incredible... And now that Spring is here, it's even nicer...

You stay for six weeks in youth hostels and you see every backpacker spending all their computer time on Facebook.

I have to play with the Facebook platform ASAP.

Our holiday is over but was so nice! 6 weeks is a lot of travel time and we had the chance to see so many great things. Over the next days, I will write a couple of blog posts describing our experience. I will also post our best pictures as soon as possible. (I have 2500 to choose from :-)

For now, let's begin with New-Zealand North-Island. Our itenary was Auckland, Tauranga, Tongariro, New Plymouth and Welllington.

The highlights were the Tongariro Crossing, Roturua and Wellington.

The Tongariro crossing is a very long (18km, 8 hours) hike where you walk across and climb active volcanos (one is LOTR “mordor”). Near the huge red crator, you even feel the heat and see the fumes. However, I was so exausted at the end and my legs were so sour I even woke up in the middle of night because of the pain! I had never done a hike a like this. Simply amazing!

Roturua is the heart of geothermal activity in New-Zealand. There we saw real geysers, boiling mud pools and bathed in natural thermal sources. Very impressive and unsual for someone from Canada! We also learned a lot about the native Maori culture.

Wellington is the capital of New-Zealand and a very unique city. It is an extremely compact town surrounded by very lush and huge moutains. It is located at the southern tip of the island on the shore of the emerald cook strait. The pretty suburbs are all located along a narrow valley across the moutains range. Overall, a very unique city with a definite european feeling.

I subscribe to a couple of mailing lists. Therefore, on my desktop, I was using some filters to move emails around into different folders. Now that I have an iPhone, that method doesn't work anymore because there is no filtering possible in the MobileEmail app. My iPhone inbox was cluttered and almost unsuable.

I devised a strategy with the free Google Apps for domains. I opened an acount for my jfnadeau.com domain and activated the Gmail part. Then, the only thing I had to do was to change the MX record of my DNS.

I now have a super web-interface to view my Inbox in a web browser (standard gmail) and instead of using Apple's Mail filters, I now use the Gmail ones. Each Gmail filter creates a separate IMAP folder so my iPhone mail is now as well organized as my regular desktop and web client. Neat!

Also, gmail IMAP is super fast. Much much faster than my web host!

Our plane tickets are bought and we're leaving on October 23rd! We'll spend around 1 month in New Zealand (2 weeks North Island/2 weeks South Island) then we're visiting mostly Queensland state in Australia and finishing in Sydney. We'll be back on December 5th!

After living in Redmond, WA for 2 years and a couple of months, my wife and I decided to move back permanently to our home town of Quebec City, Canada to be closer to our families…

Working at the headquarters of the largest software company in the world was definitely an extremely good experience. I shipped the best browser-integrated RSS reader in Internet Explorer 7 in addition to a shiny, more comprehensive Windows Live home page.

For the past nine years, I’ve experienced so many different companies, from the smallest to the biggest in three different cities and two countries. I also had the thrill to start and sell my own company, Lektora. Finally, I’ve traveled everywhere on the west coast of US/Canada, even Hawaii.

What will the next years look like? I don’t even know yet… I’m taking a sabbatical for the rest of year. We’re also planning an extended travel in Australia/New Zeland and definitely some much needed quality time with our families and friends back home.

On this, I’ll be in Quebec City in a couple of days and it’s with mixed emotions. I’m leaving very good friends behind and unique memories of two special years…

I just came back from a 10 days vacation in Southern California and Arizona! We visited: San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barabara, Pasadena, Grand Canyon National Park, Sedona, Phoenix. Click on the map to see my pictures!

I’m leaving the Internet Explorer team to join the Windows Live division. Working on IE7 RSS was a blast and I wish best of luck to the team for the next release. I will certainly miss my IE work buddies…

While my last 18 months were heavy C++/COM/Win32 programming, I will now be doing intense AJAX/JavaScript and C#/ASP.NET development.

It will certainly be very different and interesting!

I finally went back to Quebec City for a well-deserved one week Halloween vacation. I decided to spend a complete afternoon rediscovering my hometown. As one the oldest city in North America, Quebec City is really a beautiful and very special place. Judge by yourself by browsing through my latest pictures!

Halloween 2006 - Quebec City