Archive for November, 2006
I figured a while ago that I would do a free workshop with FASS and KWLT to do some “intro to stage combat”. I was thinking that I would try to make it more actor focused… I didn’t do a great job at that, it’s hard to focus on character representation and exploration in the area of stage fighting. I’m not quite sure how I got reasonably good at it, but I must have done something useful in all those courses I took. Anyway, I had a ton of weapons and had people interact with each other as the characters they would be given the weapon styles they were wielding. Then we got to the bits that everyone loves, the swish-swish ting-ting, the actual attacking and parrying bit. Overall, it was a fun three hours and I am out of practice. I *must* spend more time apprenticing with someone to learn more of their approach. The adventure really began when the class was over and I lugged 200+ lbs of swords to the car. Turns out it had been towed by the UW police because, well, I had parked not really on a spot and not really even on a road. It was a walking path in the middle of campus. I wasn’t overly surprised. Karen came and rescued me from my fate and we loaded up the hatchback and then headed to the police office to get my car back. $70 later, we were heading home. It was a long day that really started yesterday morning at 4am and I’m very tired.
November 29th, 2006
Stuck in Chicago again. I hate travelling through this airport because when a gopher farts the airport shuts down — seriously, there’s nothing going on, but flights are being cancelled. Mei (co-worker) and I are staying over night and have to leave to check-in at airport again at 4:30am. Means we’ll hopefully be home tomorrow by 10-11am. Sucks because it means my day is partially shot (especially if I want to get clean before I go to the office). Ah well, at least I still have better luck than Pete.
November 28th, 2006
Not sure if people have seen this before, the first is done by Jonathan Dietrich representing me at play (done just recently) and the second was done by James Storm representing me at work (years and years ago; colourized by Mike Leatham). I think both of them do a good job of capturing the stereotypical me. It is kind of fun to imagine what your daily life might look like as a South Park or Simpsons episode.
November 27th, 2006
Tonight was the annual holiday party! Karen got a new dress and had her hair all redone and looked absolutely stunning! I put a tie on and trimmed some beard and at least looked somewhat acceptable beside her. There were a ton of people there this year and just personal friends alone would have taken up two tables (had they all shown up), let alone all my work friends and co-workers. Kirk (my EVP) sat at our table with his wife Peregrine which was fun because we got to talk more in a causal atmosphere and others who don’t know him too well got to see him outside of an office context. All in all, the party was reasonably good (Karen and I had a few martinis which were fantastic) and it’s always a nice excuse to dress up and get together with lots of people we know. We left at about 11pm only because the music wasn’t really doing anything to get us to want to dance. Hope the rest of the guys all a good time as well, I’ll have to bug them in the office on Monday.
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November 25th, 2006
Today, after 10 years of father-in-law bonding around having the same kind, I bought new black dress shoes for tonight’s shindig. My black shoes that I have been wearing have been to the ends of the Earth and back and just weren’t holding up very well anymore. I bought a second more formal pair just because I didn’t want to do another ten years on one pair of shoes. Bought some new black pants as well (3 pairs) because I’m travelling so much and black dress pants seem to be the requirement of the day. So, even though I don’t buy clothes very often, I should be set for a while now (at least another couple of years).
November 25th, 2006
Took Karen’s new car to get gassed up and washed. I was both dumb and smart… I forgot to check to see which side of the car the gas input was on before I got in, so when it came time to pick a side at the station, I was clueless. Then it came to me in a dazzling brilliant white light of my own brilliant dazzlingness… if I pop the gas door, I can just look in the mirrors and see which side it is! So, the answer, is, opposite to the Honda, right side. Probably not as thrilling as it was for me, but nowadays, I’ll take my little wins.
November 25th, 2006
The social committee today arranged an Ottawa office meet and greet (where they got the people from both offices together). It was very fun, had a big pizza lunch and beer which was a great bonding experience. They had a fantastic idea for a fun activity… they grabbed all the management people that were there (there were approximately eight of us at the lunch) and they made us compete against each other (two teams of four) in doing a few rounds of Pictionary with technical words. Badly interpreted drawings of words like “spam”, “firewall” and “source safe” made for great laughs for all. Overall, a very well executed social event.
November 23rd, 2006
Landed in Ottawa today and went promptly to the British High Commission. First thing was being questioned heavily by the main gate guard, but once he heard what I was doing and whom I was meeting it was through security (leaving belongings behind). Waited to turn in my UKM application form along with showing Mom’s expired UK passport, full birth certificate, my full birth certificate and my passport. Whole process took about 15 minutes once the person showed up (Claire McKeown) and in about 3 months apparently I’ll likely be a citizen of Britian.
November 23rd, 2006
Finally I’ve found what I’ve been looking for. All the Web 2.0 apps out there have tagging (Gmail, Flickr and even Wordpress) that is very easy to do and lets you tag up any content (photos or email) with categories of information. I got a plug-in called Taglocity that lets me do the same thing for Outlook email which means I can very quickly and easily tag up emails. It also allows auto-tagging based on Bayesian filters as well as tagging email that gets sent (so when people reply it comes back pretagged by you). Finally you can do the tag-cloud kind of filtering which shows you how many emails have been classified with which tags. Overall, I think it will be fantastic and should improve my email management by leaps and bounds.
November 22nd, 2006
… oh no, a Shae! We have been sitting together to try and work through all the future plans around expenditures for R&D. It’s lots of fun to sit down and work it out, although Shae has the worst of it as she is the one manipulating the spreadsheets. It is interesting to see the issues come up… next time we think standard templates will be the order of the day and pulling out all the common items (like MSDN or Perforce licensing) so that everyone doesn’t have to cover that in their own budgetary recommendations.
November 21st, 2006
Now back from LinkUp, it’s all about finishing up org structure! Cost centre realignment! Go go go! All very complicated to get settled out, that coupled with a few dynamics around resignations makes it just that much more fun to sort out. I went out for dinner with Russell tonight and it turns out that he has similar kinds of issues in his workplace that I do and we face the similar kinds of challenges. Very fun talking with him and we had a quite enjoyable dinner talking technology and work perspectives.
November 20th, 2006
Craig’s film is done and there is a public showing. It’s actually a triple bill with two other local films (Kindred and Escalation) — all three are showing at the Breithaupt Centre starting at 4: 20pm with an admission price of $10 (on both Dec. 2nd and Dec 9th). More information can be found on Craig’s website for FBN Multimedia.
November 19th, 2006
Chad found something really neat — this little line rider application which has a tobogganer sledding down hills that you create. Very neat. Apparently lots of people have spent a significant amount of time creating intricate toboggan paths and posted them up on YouTube.
November 19th, 2006
A friend of Chad’s took a photo of something that sounds interesting… Bullfrog Power is an energy provider in Canada that only provides power sourced from renewable sources - it’s a bit more expensive than conventional power (9.1 cents/kwh = +$360/year overhead), but seems like a good thing. Truthfully there should be more tax incentives for things like this and solar as well as feeding back into the grid system.
November 19th, 2006
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