The keynote presentations were all excellent.  In his upbeat opening keynote presentation, Fight the Traffic, Chad Fowler
shared his career transition from musician to software developer; his
experience forming a software group in India; and, despite the ever-increasing trend towards software offshoring, his considerable optimism about
the future of software engineering in North America.

Friday morning, in his keynote entitled Modular Concurrency,
Dr. Grogono introduced us to the problems that he and his friend found in the
object oriented programming paradigm and proposed a new programming
paradigm that features “strong encapsulation, full concurrency,
malleability, and scale-free design.”

Early Friday afternoon, Connie Heitmeyer
discussed formal methods and tools for the capture and verification of
software requirements in high assurance systems such as missile
navigation systems.

For the Friday evening keynote, Kathy Sierra, co-creator of the O’Reilly Head First book series, gave a very energetic talk about  how to use brain science to create passionate software users.

On Saturday morning, David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the popular Ruby Web application framework, Ruby on Rails, was scheduled to give the closing keynote presentation entitled, Ruby on Rails:  The Whirlwind Tour. 
Unfortunately, we were disappointed to learn that David was snowed-in
in Seattle and could not make it to the conference.  So, Chad
Fowler kindly agreed to fill in for David and gave a talk called, Rails is Boring, and Ruby is a Toy. 
Though Chad’s talk was interesting, I felt a little cheated because I
really wanted to hear David’s keynote and had hoped to meet him in
person.

Aside from the keynotes, I also enjoyed Chris Laffra’s tutorial on Ajax and Laurent Seiter’s tutorial, Software Start-up.

On the downside, the rapid-fire academic paper presentations were a good idea,
but flopped due to the short time limit format.

The final unscripted, round-robin panel discussion was entertaining, but its random question and answer format caused it to
suffer somewhat
from a lack of coherence.  Questions or topics chosen in advance
might improve this fun and informal segment.

Despite the bugs, overall I enjoyed CUSEC 2006.  The keynotes
were great and I was pleased to have the opportunity to meet with
future Canadian software engineers.

Unfortunately, as I was slow going through the museum and I arrived
just three hours before closing, I was unable to see the entire
exhibit.  I plan to return another day to see the rest.

So what’s new in the apartment?  Well, pretty much
everything.  After the fire, the landlord gutted every apartment
leaving just floors and vertical beams.  He had every apartment
slightly re-modelled, moving and removing some closet space while
adding a washer and dryer outlet in the kitchen.  (No more trips
to the laundromat!)  He laid attractive grey ceramic tile in the
kitchen and main hallway, white floor and orange-yellow shower ceramic
tile in the bathroom, and new hardwood floors in the livingroom and
bedroom.  In the kitchen, he installed new cabinets, counter, and
sink, and in the bathroom, a new bathtub, toilet, and vanity.  The
kitchen tile is particularly nice because it replaced this dark, old,
and ugly linoleum tile.

In addition to it’s interior newness, the apartment is far more secure
than before.  Originally, the apartment had a hollow, wooden front
door, but now the front door is very heavy and solid with strong, thick
hinges, two locks (a door handle lock and dead bolt) and is surrounded
by a metal reinforced frame.  The landlord assures me that the
door is also fire-proof, so should the building again catch fire and
burn down, at least the doors will still be standing.

Halifax was the first stop on my trip to the Canadian Maritime provinces.  At 18:30 on Saturday, May 14, I boarded a train in Montreal for the long and mostly uncomfortable seventeen hour train ride
to Halifax.  When I arrived on Sunday, my uncle Dave
met me at the train station and after picking up my aunt
Shirley, we drove to their home in Hubbards, outside Halifax. 
When we arrived, Shirley cooked a pasta dinner and served fresh,
homemade blueberry muffins for dessert.  After dinner, I booked a
flight on the Internet to St. John’s, Newfoundland.  I stayed
overnight, and the next morning (Monday), Dave drove me to YMCA International House.

For most of my stay in Halifax, the weather was cloudy, cool, and wet, so I spent a lot of time time indoors at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic at the Waterfront.  I also visited the Citadel, the Public Gardens, the Grand Parade, and passed by City Hall, Government House, Province House, and the Old Burying Ground.  During my stay, I learned much about boats and ships, the Halifax Explosion, Halifax Harbour and its fortifications, and the history of Nova Scotia and New England during the War of 1812.

Early Thursday morning, I caught a shuttle bus to the airport to catch
my flight to St. John’s, Newfoundland.  During the ride, the
shuttle bus driver served not only as captain, but also as tour guide,
pointing out various Halifax historical landmarks.  I must have
learned more about Halifax on that one trip than I did during my entire
stay.

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