Electionbuddy will be down from 10:00am – 11:00am MST on Thursday Feb 17th.

The down time will be used to roll out a number of new features and bug fixes, including some new integrations.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

The other day my co-worker Chris and I were discussing the differences between young minds and old minds and we came up with a simple yet foolproof method for determining what type of mind you have.  The method we have devised allows for a clear determination of your mind through one simple question.  Read the question below and answer truthfully from the options provided, then scroll down to see your result.

Question:

You come to a waist high chain-link fence that is blocking your path. Do you:

A. Try to jump the fence and stick the landing.

B. Awkwardly climb over the fence, since this is a fence that doesn’t really require climbing.

C. Look for a gate to go through and if there isn’t one walk around the fence.

Answers:

A. You have a young mind and you want people to know it.  By jumping the fence you show that nothing gets in your way and you expect everything to always work out for you.  Note that even if you fail in your attempt and end up doing a face plant into the ground, at least you tried.

B. You have a moderately aged mind and care a little that other people see you as at least somewhat young.   You want to go over the fence and not waste more time by diverting your route, yet you know that jumping fences is something only for young foolhardy people – so you resign yourself to looking a little foolish, but a lot less so than the person who tries to jump the fence and ends up doing a face plant.  Plus this option is usually far less painful.

C. You have a old mind and don’t care that people will see you as such.  As soon as you see the fence, you immediately know that you have to divert from your path, but that’s ok since you have lots of time and hey, the extra exercise is good for you, right?

I hope you enjoyed this little thought exercise and that you do not have a bout of crippling indecision (brought on by worrying about your type of mind) the next time you come across a fence.

Hello,

Electionbuddy will be down from 2:30 pm to 3:00pm MST on December 30, 2010.

We will be using this time to deploy our new code which contains many new improvements.

Most notably with the new release you will now be able to integrate email address from CampaignMonitor and BatchBook.

Thank you for you patience during the upgrade process.

Hello,

Electionbuddy will be down from 1:00pm – 1:30pm today in order to allow us to deploy some of the new features we have finished.

These features include the ability to add up to 5 email voters after an election has started and the ability to extend the closing date after the election has started.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Hello,

ElectionBuddy will be unavailable for approximately 30 minutes starting at 2:00 pm Mountain Time on November 03, 2010.

This down time will allow us to release new features and implement some code fixes.

If you have any questions please contact us at support@eventiq.com.

Thank you for your patience during these upgrades.

On Tuesday October 12th from 9:30 am to 10:00 am ElectionBuddy will be unavailable as we will be performing an upgrade.

This upgrade contains many new features, most as a direct result of feedback from you our customers.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you and thank you for your patience.

One of my favorite sports is Baseball.  I love to watch it even though it can take upwards of four hours to complete a game.  However, this year I have yet to see a complete game as I seem to always be busy with something.

I got into Baseball very young and  I played hardball (traditional Baseball)  until I was 12 and then I switched over to slow pitch.  I find that slow pitch is very much an offense-based game but if your team is solid defensively it certainly gives you an advantage.  When I lived in Lethbridge I played for my Uncle’s rec league team and then also for a team from my mom’s work.  Playing for both teams meant I played roughly 4-5 times a week and while I enjoyed it immensely it also left little time for anything else.  I play for a team in the Edmonton Sport and Social Club leagues called the Wonderbats.

Slow pitch is a really great way to meet a bunch of people and get some exercise as well as enjoy the Summer weather, although this year the weather in Edmonton hasn’t been so good for outdoor sports.  If you are interested in playing slow pitch or really any sport head over to the ESSC website and check out what they have available for the fall season.

(That's me in the black shirt!)

There are a lot of fun things to see and do around Edmonton during the summer — this past weekend my girlfriend and I went to two corn mazes, which I’ve never done before.  The first corn maze we did was just west of Bowden and was a combination corn maze and sunflower maze.  It’s quite a sight as long as you are comfortable with having bees all around you.

The second corn maze we did was about half an hour north of Edmonton and is one of the largest ones I have ever seen.  The object of the maze is to find sign posts within it that contain letters, and then if you find all of the letters you can try and unscramble them to get a phrase.  If you are successful in finding the letters and unscrambling the phrase, you can enter their contest to win a trip.   We spent about 2 hours in the maze and were able to find all the letters and unscramble them too.  This corn maze was part of a farm that had a number of other attractions including a u-pick and a greenhouse.

If you are looking for a good way to spend an afternoon I suggest checking out a corn maze as there  are plenty to choose from here in Alberta.

As you may or may not already be aware, we have a foosball table in our office that sees almost daily use.  Lately we have begun forming teams from a core group of 5 players and keeping score.  Chris built a website for the purpose of displaying the scores and also added a handy feature to help us decide who plays who.  For the most part, the teams are fairly even, as everyone can play at least one position well.  Myself, I am a hybrid player and I can switch between defense or offense.  My foosball ability comes from playing a lot while I was growing up as my parents had a table which saw a lot of use. 

Now that we are keeping score, the competition has picked up a bit but it’s all in good fun, and with the constant switching of teams no one really loses that much.  So if you are around the LeMarchand Mansion one lunch hour and you hear a bunch of screaming and hollering, why don’t you come up and enjoy a game or two with us?

Hey everyone! Mike Coolidge here, one of the developers at eventIQ.  Just wanted to try my hand at this blog and share a few things that I’ve been working on myself.

Most recently I have been doing a bunch of work on ElectionBuddy.   ElectionBuddy is an online voting system that is built using Ruby on Rails (a framework we use to create our web applications).  I am fairly new to Ruby on Rails and as such I am constantly learning new things every day.  For anyone interested in getting started with Ruby on Rails, I would suggest checking out http://guides.rubyonrails.org/.  I have also found http://api.rubyonrails.org/ to be invaluable when dealing with Rails database calls or looking for a particular Rails function.

We have also just released version 3.0 of ElectionBuddy which now includes functionality for limiting the number of candidates a voter could select.  This feature was something a lot of users had requested and we always like to hear feedback from our users so we can keep improving our products (and this particular feature was the first major addition I personally made to ElectionBuddy).

I am currently working on version 3.1 of ElectionBuddy, which will include some more new features such as the ability to have voters enter comments for referendum questions.  There are lots of other exciting things we’re all working on here at eventIQ but more on that later…!