1Y 1Q into Return to Work

It’s been a successful year and quarter for my return to work effort, and I like to believe I have had a positive impact at the company I work for ‒ Ambient Activity. While there have been challenges it’s been exciting to refresh and renew the technology infrastructure and product technology platform at Ambient Activity, with more in the works.

We’ve made some incredible progress in improving the tech situation inside the company as well as made important strides in our goal to develop world class kiosks/activity centres for seniors in care. We advanced the cause significantly by using Windows kiosk mode, and now we are ready for developing the platform on an embedded SBC (single board computer) platform running a custom firmware and application. While we determined the method we initially hoped to use is not practical, we still made relevant progress through that exercise, and are now working on the next phase which builds on what we learned (both from the Electron attempt as well as the years of developing and improving the Ambient Activity platform).

This effort, and its relation to the Route 93 Innovation Hub grand opening even got us mentioned by a local news outlet, although I am not sure how I feel about being in a ‘real’ news article.

And that’s just the employment side of my life. I’ve continued to work on a volunteer technology project for a local non-profit, participated as a member of the board of the Midland Public Library, volunteered for the Sweet Water Festival at the Wye Marsh Wildlife Centre, and puttered around with my websites (Wild Tech ‘Garden’ and this one).

On the website front I discovered that the website theme I was (and currently still am) using had some significant flaws (the worst of which I have fixed for my sites) and have a little-worked-on project to create my own theme (although at this point I am debating switching to a platform like Webflow, which is a website builder I learned about while offering some volunteer support to the Canadian Future Party).

I am not sure how I feel about this party, even though I became a member. The leader says quite a few of the right things, but the question is what the party actually does and says as it grows. I joined in part in hopes of helping it grow the way I hope it will.

I’m not sure how much impact that effort will have, but for now I am hopeful, despite the opinion of at least one person I talked to that it is “a fringe party whose leadership is interested in any party they can lead”, rather than standing for what they say they do (the part after the comma being my interpretation of their remark, which I have paraphrased). The irony of that sentiment from a person connected to the People’s Party of Canada should not escape anyone.

There is much more I could write about, but I think this covers the items of most significance and relevance to this ‘personal professional’ blog of mine.