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 and the Biol­o­gy News we read at his office, 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). Just recent­ly we have been deal­ing with anoth­er health issue alto­geth­er, and it might also be due to the weath­er, we’re not sure yet. We’re deal­ing with a toe­nail fun­gus. I don’t who gave it to whom but in the mean­time we are already look­ing at clear nails plus reviews, and it seems like we’re going to need to buy some to get this fixed up.

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.