arlen / ritchie / . / com

When I’m down in Barbados, I often do a little boogie-boarding on the south coast. While down there a couple of weekends ago however, I decided it was time to once again try out my balance on a real surf board.

However, as any 2nd time surfer will tell you, it seems surfing has far less to do with sea legs than sheer determination to paddle your butt off. Especially in the calmer waters of the south coast, the waves don’t catch you…you have to catch them. However, I did find a cool “locals” spot to surf called Freights Bay, in the Atlantic Shores area just south of Oistins. Check it out, and dial up Barry Banfield of Surf Barbados if you’re looking for gear and a little help from a local pro.

freights bay, barbados, south coast

I attended BarCampToronto’s “DemoCamp 4″ last night. There were some great presentations. Thanks to David Crow for putting it together. If you’re interested in Toronto 2.0, check out the Mesh conference, coming up May 15-16.

I finally got rid of my Treo 600 last week. What a sad piece of engineering that was. It’s actually hard to say what was worse, the software (spontaneous reboots, OS freezes, etc) or the hardware (I went through 2 devices/warranties). I gather I’m not alone either from the rumours of Palm Treo class action lawsuits being pursued in the US.

Not that it matters now because I have a shiny new Crack-berry again (I had one of the original BB 957’s when they first came out). This new BB 8700 rocks (and is rock-solid too). Gmaps on the fly, instant push email, universal message center (email, sms, mms — finally all in the same mailbox!), and a really decent (speaker) phone too.

I just found out last week that it’s 10-year high school reunion time! Judging from the bio updates on the MBCI Grad ‘96 website, I think I was supposed to have had kids by now. I hope I’m not off pace for retirement too–I’m looking forward to shuffleboard.

If you’re an ex-MBCI-er too, leave your name in the improvised guestbook (aka comments).

Finally, after a few hours of fiddling, www.ArlenRitchie.com is alive once again. This time around, I’m going to include some photos (and of course some general banter). And, just for kicks, I’m going to bring back the “Contact Me” SMS portal. It’s so much fun getting sms messages from random strangers, isn’t it?