A new pebble on the road of life

I am now installed in the basement of a young couple and their 10 years old daughter somewhere in a suburb of Ottawa. They’re nice people and everything would have been fine had it not been for the lack of a high speed Internet connection. I don’t know what they have, but it’s not high speed even though it comes out of a coaxial cable. However, it’s been agreed that this should be resolved as soon as possible, so I’m not overly concerned of being cutoff from resources I depend upon. There isn’t a Wi-Fi network either, but that’s easily resolved.

One may wonder why I would sacrifice the conforms of my home, the power of my desktop computer (which I could not bring with me) and the freedom of my unlimited high speed Internet connection for this internship. First of all, why do an internship during the winter semester (that isn’t a typical behavior), and second of all why so far? The answer is 4 letters long: WWDC.

The biggest one ever

It’s pretty easy to see that WWDC 2006 will be hugely important for Mac developers. It will be the first WWDC with retail Intel-based Macs in existence. Mac OS X 10.5 will be discussed in details. The very future of Mac OS X will be debated in bars and pubs after long days of learning and exchanging with fellow developers. It will be like a huge. And I certainly don’t want to miss out.

It takes dollars, among other things

Of course, going to WWDC isn’t free. Let’s make a small list of expected fees:

• Plane ticket, Quebec City to San Francisco and San Francisco to Quebec City: ~ $760 CD
• WWDC early registration badge: ~ $1300 USD -> $1534 CD
• ADC Student membership: $99 USD -> $116.82 CD
• One week lodging, shared: ~ $400 USD -> $472 CD

And the total comes at ~ $2882.82 CD. That’s a lot of money, and I was very conservative in my estimates for lodging, not to mention I completely excluded “operational fees” like food. Without being irrational, the total cost of going to WWDC is close to $3000 CD. That’s even more a lot of money.

Start early

Consequently, I decided to do a paid internship during the winter semester to insure my participation in the most important event of the year on my calendar. However, I took that decision relatively late into the fall semester, which limited my choices. Short of doing Windows MFC programming and condemning my soul to eternal damnation in a special hell, I hit the road to Ottawa.

Let go of reality

With my current situation explained, it’s time to leave the globe of Real Life behind for some time and concentrate on entries more relevant to the nature of this blog. Unafraid to repeat myself, I therefore sign off with the prospects of some much-awaited entries on Riven X and other ongoing programming efforts.