- Music
- Manji
- Bread
- Running
- TO Pride run
- Swimming
- Gym
Hobbies have been very important this year. More and more I need to have a variety of interests going in order to feel complete; I prefer to be good at a lot of things though I'm a master at none. Food-related hobbies continue to engage me, partly because there's always room for improvement, partly because I like to control what goes into my food, and partly because I prefer my own cooking to what I can get in most restaurants, and it's a lot cheaper. I've taken advantage of the "local food" craze (next best thing to growing your own which isn't an option in my condominium) to do a lot more unprocessed-food cooking.
I bought a grain mill and wheat from a local farmer and have been learning how to bake excellent bread with flour that hasn't gone through any factory processing, and also have really focused on sourdough and hearth-style baking.
Not all my culinary hobbies are as granola as this. I continue to be interested in chocolate making, and took a three-day course at the Barry Callebaut factory outside of Montreal. I was the only person in the class without immediate plans to open a business, but I certainly kept up. I'm now at the stage with this hobby that I need ingredients and equipment that aren't easily available to non-professionals, so looking for ways to obtain what I neeed.
Besides chocolate, I also took a two-day sugar sculpture course at the Cordon Bleu Ottawa. I learned many of the basic skills involved in decorating with sugar. Sugar sculpture is its own art, but my interest probably focuses mostly on a desire to create better decorations for gingerbread houses. Gingerbreading is another hobby I want to get serious with, though I haven't done much material with that this year, as it's a big time investment. There is an Ottawa gingerbread competition that I'd like to get into; unfortunately they do terrible PR and it's hard to find out about the competition in time to enter it. Hopefully I've been added to a mailing list for next year.
I didn't travel as much this year, partly because of less meetings due to the economic recession, and partly because the physical process of travel (airports, airlines, and jetlag) is getting more and more uncomfortable and I limit trips as much as possible. I do always jump on an opportunity to go to London so did a couple presentations at the Techshare Conference, and spent a few days with Colin and Anthony before returning with them to Montreal and Ottawa, joined by Chris and Trevor. I had a huge set of meetings in San Francisco and got to see John and meet August, and went to Sacramento to catch up with Chad and Eric, another London-originating friendship. Before all this I went to Boston and had an impromptu mini family reunion along with Jacob, seeing David, Carol, and Charlie from my mother's side, and then on my father's side the same weekend saw Carolyn, Catherine, Barry, Ruth, Ken, and met Amy for the first time. In March I had presentations in Austin and Los Angeles, and stopped by Tucson to see my mother and John.
This year, my work has been mostly focused on the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) technology. The technology is somewhat complete but is in formal finalization stages that have taken the entire year and will hopefully be complete sometime next year. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 continues to be a responsibility even though we finalized it last year, as there is the need to maintain the support materials to keep pace with technology change. One of my working groups is also charged with ensuring accessibility of all W3C technologies, and HTML 5 has been a major focus for the year.
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