Tim Ginn’s Personal Blog

Wow, Leader Training was awesome. Mark and I got there at about 8:15 and started setting up things. It was around noon when the faculties (and non-faculties) started coming in. There was the predictable cheering and rivalries that there usually are. Commerce wasn’t anywhere near as late as they were last year (which is a good thing). The introduction part was nice (the COMPSA people decided to chant my name in Hexidecimal, which was pretty cool). My part of the speech about Orientation Week in the 1960’s went off without a hitch and then I video taped the rest of the leader training stuff so that it’s available for the people who missed it (Studio Q will digitize it). Videotaping was good, it really would have helped to have a tripod (my arms/legs went a bit numb after a while). I’m not too sure how things will look once they’re replayed; but, hopefully it’ll be tolerable. I went through two hours of tape and only missed about 3 minutes of Councillor Patterson’s speech (the tape ranout midway through) and the POSSE presentation at the end (we’d exhausted the second tape right before that).

This Sunday is Orientation Round Table Leader Training day at Queen’s. I get the opportunity to show off the website prototype that I’ve made to a couple hundred of the most enthusastic people you’ll ever cram into historic Grant Hall. It should be quite fun, and hopefully everything will go as planned. Each of us on ORT is doing part of the History of Frosh Week at Queen’s speech. The section I’ve got is the 1960’s. It’s crazy how different some things are now than they were then in some ways and how in others nothing’s changed. I should really start blogging more during the week (things just often seem too busy, though).

Yesterday I migrated the openFIRST www module from CVS to Subversion. I haven’t used Subversion much before and after the switch it definitely seems like things are much faster and more efficient than they were with CVS. Doing updates/checkouts of only single directories (and their subdirectories) is a lot more straightforward (and that’s the sort of thing we need for the subsites like Bugzilla). So far I’m quite impressed and think that this improvement will help the project significantly by saving developer and administrator time and just generally making working on the project less painful.

It looks like a few new teams have registered for the FIRST Contacts Database since we put it up. That’s great, as the more people who use it the better a resource it will become.