In Sickness and in Health & My Employment Situation

The moun­tains were really amaz­ing today, with a snow-line that was as pre­cisely drawn as any ele­va­tion curve on a topo­graphic map. I was lucky enough to be near the north­ern tip of down­town near the Con­ven­tion Cen­ter so that I could cap­ture some­thing. The view in the morn­ing from our bal­cony was spectacular.

Pam has had a really bad cold for about three days now. Actu­ally, it’s a bit worse than a bad cold, but not as bad as the flu: accord­ing to the doc­tor she saw today, it’s ‘Flu-like Symp­toms’ (which reminds me of that ridicu­lous phrase: ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction-Related Activ­i­ties’ that was the reason-of-the-week that the US was invad­ing Iraq). She’s still cough­ing a bit on this third day, but her tem­per­a­ture has returned to some­thing more approach­ing nor­mal, and she’s up and out of bed. We were relieved that it wasn’t pneu­mo­nia, which is some­thing that she had many years ago (and laid her up for nearly a month). I’ve been cook­ing and clean­ing and doing most of the run­ning of the house, but she’s nearly back to nor­mal and hopes to return to her job by the end of the week.

This is very unusual; I’m the one who gets sick more often (although I’d say I’m pretty much aver­age; Pam begs to dif­fer). I did have a cold a few weeks ago and it was very bad, mak­ing me mis­er­able for the first week. I’m hop­ing that I don’t catch what­ever she has (espe­cially if it’s not the same bug I fought off ), espe­cially with the 3^rd Annual North­ern Voice Blog­ging Con­fer­ence com­ing up this week­end (actu­ally, start­ing Thurs­day night, if you count the kick-off dinner).

This year I have not one but two blogs to flog. (Did I actu­ally write that? I should take my own tem­per­a­ture.) There’s this one, and a new blog that I’ve just started. I’ve decided to sep­a­rate my writ­ing on per­sonal mat­ters from pro­fes­sional issues — User Inter­face, Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture, Design, and all of the other sub­jects that fall under the broad moniker of ‘User Expe­ri­ence’. Rather than give it a clever name, I’ve decided to take the oppo­site approach. The name of the blog is drucker.ca . The URL is, well, what you’d expect.

Actu­ally, for awhile I did write a blog about User Inter­face issues when I had the con­sult­ing com­pany called The Kendall Group, but back then I didn’t know much about writ­ing a good blog, gen­er­at­ing traf­fic or even fil­ter­ing out Com­ment SPAM. (It ran on Type­Pad, which I was only begin­ning to learn). I stopped writ­ing in it right when I left the US, and now I’ve decided that it’s time to resume some­thing like it. Espe­cially when look­ing for work.

Yes, that’s right, although I’m not unem­ployed per se, I am down to part-time at my pre­vi­ous employer, and am look­ing for a com­pany that needs a full-time UI Archi­tect, or per­haps a com­pany that needs one in a con­sult­ing capac­ity, at least for the time being. There just wasn’t enough work at my employer for some­one who does what I do (although I still am needed from time to time) on a full-time basis.

So I have my new busi­ness cards, my new URL and new blog, and I’m com­pletely legally able to work in Canada (or the US, although for there, it would have to be via long-distance and/or telecom­mut­ing). If North­ern Voice doesn’t turn up some­thing inter­est­ing, the Mas­sive Tech­nol­ogy Show returns in a few short weeks, and that’s what lead not only to my first job here in Van­cou­ver, but also our beau­ti­ful condo here that looks north­ward toward those phe­nom­e­nal moun­tains. I have high hopes for either of these net­work­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to bear some fruit.