I've effectively switched gears from playboy to programmer again. I tend do that every once in a while just to maintain a healthy balance. I've been catching up on my tech reading and trying to get caught up at work. I never took any computer networking or systems courses in school and I'm starting to regret that. I've been trying to self-educate myself a bit by reading up on the basics of TCP/IP, experimenting with tools like tcpdump and Wireshark and skimming through RFC's although they're a little too detailed for me. I've also been reading up on the history of the Internet, bio's of Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Jon Postel. I've also been looking at the history of UNIX, Linux and open source and reading bio's of Ken Thompson, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and others. I'm also contributing to the Redmine project again and have been trying out Rails 3 and a NoSQL database called Riak. Whew! Lots of nerdy stuff.

I'm going to restructure my finances soon. Right now, I have a self-directed Investor's Edge account through CIBC that I was going to use to buy mutual funds. I never got around to picking any though so the cash has just been sitting there for months. I don't like having to pay management fees for mutual funds. With stocks I at least feel like I can go and look at the company's financial statements and do my own research, even though I'm really not qualified to be doing that. I've also got RSP money sitting in low-paying GIC's and (not-so-)high-interest savings accounts at both CIBC and Coast Capital Savings. Chelsea's got her RSP in a GIC at Coast Capital too. She's earning money now so I think what we'll do is both open RSP accounts at Questrade and get her a TFSA there too (I already have one). Then we'll consolidate everything there and put it into stocks. I'm hoping Questrade will pay most or all of our transfer-out fees.