Weekends Were Made for What?

In order to create a feeling of esprit de corps, business managers employ a variety of different techniques. I can remember attending a session of MacHack, the Macintosh Programmer Retreat at a motel in Michigan many years ago where I attended a session held by one of the Project Managers for OS X (or was it OS 9?) regarding how they achieved the management of such a complex and important software project. The bouncy woman wearing jeans and a T-Shirt offered reminiscences like: “I remember that next we did ‘Peanut Butter Sandwich Day’ on that Thursday, followed by “Hot Fudge Sundae Day” on the following Friday…” The rest of the talk was much like this, with all sorts of cute and eccentric activities that were added to the grueling work schedule to add some breaks, loosen up the workforce, and keep things playful and light-hearted, even as tempers were growing short (and deadlines were growing near). Her talk was far more about an approach to human psychology than business theory or resource management.

At this IBM office, the visiting manager for the current project I’m working on has a military background. Her idea of ‘rallying the troops’ (or in civilian terms, motivate employees in the face of an important deadline) are three words: “Co-location, co-location and co-location”. What this means, is that she thinks the best way to get a project done faster (or better) is to literally put everyone in the same room, or nearly everyone, at any rate. For the most part, the people working on my end of the project, the ‘Information Architects’ haven’t had the same requirements to work in the crowded (yet curiously, extremely cold) cafeteria. The result may have been some more efficient communications and knowledge-sharing (as she explained), but with it came the high rate of absenteeism from colds and flu, which ran through the building as fast as a kindergarten. This co-location (think co-habitation but just for work) has now, with the upcoming holiday season, translated to ‘Everybody’s working on the weekend.’ Yes, on Dec 1st and 2nd , the entire project team (all 200 or so of us) will be here at the office. That includes the Information Architects, along with all of the Business Analysts, Programmers, HTML Programmers, Database Administrators, Testers and various other people on the project. Never mind that for us Information Architects, there’s very little for us to do. After all, our major role in drawing up the wireframes of the user interface for the project was months ago. It would be like a building architect being asked to hang around while the contractors work on the electrical wiring, or perhaps even the carpeting of the building. But that’s the way things work in her manual, so that’s what we must do. Aye aye, captain.

So, I’ll be here on the weekend. Will I sit at my desk, waiting for a call from the programmers in the cafeteria about what default value a field should have, or how a particular button is enabled or disabled depending on the value of some other drop-down menu…? Or, will I be writing in this blog? We’ll just have to see.

Winter Coping

Even though it isn’t officially Winter, the rain, early darkness and damp chill definitely arrived in the Pacific Northwest. Nevertheless, there are ways of dealing with the (not entirely expected) inclement weather. I’ve often written about Vancouver’s dual personality, and fortunately, there is plenty of the ‘city of the mind’ these days:

Two weeks ago, Bill Moggeridge, the founder of IDEO (one of the world’s foremost Industrial Design companies), and the designer of one of the first laptop computers gave a public talk, at the Emily Carr Institute because he is joining the school’s Design Department as an Honorary Professor. His talk was mostly material from his recent book, Designing Interactions which is available, chapter by chapter, on the web site. Nevertheless, I enjoyed his talk, which was to an absolutely packed hall (about 80% ECI Students, who were fun to watch as well - quite a few of them obsessively scribbling and sketching or playing with their Macbooks as we waited for him to begin). The only downside to the evening was missing the Blogger Meetup, which was going on at the same time. Sometimes there are too many of these winter events to cram into too few days and nights.

Today, we got a little break from the gloom, and Pam and I took part in another Winter event, the Eastside Culture Crawl. For about 3 days, artists and craftspeople in the neighborhoods of East Vancouver all open their studios (and homes), so that the rest of us go can visit and talk, admire sometimes buy art, pottery, furniture and fashions. It was a beautiful day, and we wandered around, taking photos of some of the art and the neighborhood, which was almost glowing in the sun.

Another way of coping with the Winter gloom is food (of course). But rather than just the usual comfort food, we capped the day with one of my favourite yearly indulgences, Cassoulet. The Oyama Sausage Company on Granville Island has an annual Cassoulet festival, and you have to get your order in early. We topped ours off with Toulouse Duck Sausages and some herbed Duck Confit. Some good red wine and a salad, and we were good to go. Oh, and not to mention, for dessert, a little ‘Juliet’ Goat (Camembert style) from Salt Spring Island (the other food festival at Granville Island this weekend was for Cheese).

And then there are the evening events: Next week is another DemoCamp, one of the recent spate of entrepreneurial coming-out parties for local startups and techies. I’m glad that I got into it, as I was unable to get into next week’s Third Tuesday, the local monthly get-together for online marketing, public relations and social networks. As I said, too many events, too few days and nights.

But it sure beats getting bummed by the weather!

When Chefs Attack

In Vancouver, we have a few of own Celebrity Chefs. One of them, like other Celebrity Chefs, is well known outside of Vancouver. He’s handsome, dashing, charismatic, and one expects, probably a bit of a prima donna (or in this case, that would be primo uomo). The guy is called ‘Rob Feenie’, and he’s particularly well known for his win over Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto on the Food Network’s Iron Chef America. He’s also known (around here) because he also appears (along with 2 of the other celebrity chefs in town) in commercials for the ‘White Spot’ restaurant chain.

So you can imagine the headlines that appeared today when he broke ties with the two restaurants he runs in Vancouver, effectively quitting from the role of Executive Chef at Lumière and Feenie’s. Yes, that’s right, the restaurant that bears Rob Feenie’s name, as of this past Friday, no longer serves his food.

Pam and I have been to a few of the good restaurants in town, including 2 visits to West, a lovely meal at Bishop’s and a quite a few less high-end establishments. We never made it to either Lumière or Feenies, partly because we are suspicious of the mark-up that the caché of a famous chef can add, and that one can often do better for less elsewhere.

As the article in the Vancouver Sun reports, this falling-out between Feenie and his backers is amounting to a series of ‘he-said’, ‘they-said’ statements, and I have to wonder if in the end, there aren’t going to be too many losers in this game:

Feenie, whether he gets his restaurants back or not, is assured of a spectacular opening, should he decide to open a new restaurant (Feenie’s II - The Real Thing, perhaps?). The backers of his original restaurant, David and Manjy Sidoo, also have little to lose in terms of customers, unless Feenie can get them to boycott his old restaurants as a show of solidarity. I expect, instead, that some people will go to those eateries out of curiosity, to either see if they have slipped in quality or flair since Feenie’s departure, or if they’ve never been to either of them before, to see what all the fuss is about. Restaurants in Vancouver in general will probably also reap a benefit; this squabble will only help to bring the whole subject of fine-dining (and colourful chefs) in Vancouver to water coolers all over the city and Province. After all, it’s made the front page of the Sun already.

I’ve often talked about how great the restaurants (and the food in general)are in this town. It’s going to be interesting to see how this very public breakup affects the community, especially as we near the onslaught of millions of high-end tourists for the 2010 games. If I were Feenie, I’d certainly want to be serving expensive, once-in-a-lifetime dinners to those crowds. This gastronomic soap opera is definitely not over yet.

Upgrade/Cat Scratch Fever

Rob Cottingham’s excellent cartoon is part of my subject for this posting: My OS X 10.5 Leopard install: The Wrath of Shere Khan. (I know, I know, Shere Khan was a Tiger, not a Leopard, but the Star Trek Pun was just too good to pass up, and besides, my upgrade to ‘Tiger’ was just fine, and happened years ago.). Last Sunday I thought I’d try and install this brand new Mac OS on my desktop system, a Dual-processor G5 that used to be the King of the Hill, back when Mac’s used the PowerPC chip…(oh well…).

Well, it didn’t go so well. The first attempt at an upgrade started, and then after a minute or two aborted itself. When I brought the machine back to life, it wouldn’t boot off the internal drive any more, but would boot off the new system install DVD. The upgrade installer now said that in order to install the new OS, I would need to first erase the hard disk and then install. ‘OK’ , I said. ‘Good thing I had a backup of everything.’ (I’d had the good sense to duplicate everything to an external drive on Saturday night, which I could now boot off of. So no panicking, I hadn’t really lost anything.) ‘All right, I’ll install a new system, and then migrate all of my applications, files, etc. to it using the Migration Assistant program from Apple. That usually works.’

So, Install attempt 2 began. It worked with no apparent problems. It wiped the disk and installed a brand new, virgin copy of OS X 10.5. I registered the software, and then ran the Migration Assistant. Some 3 hours later, I rebooted the Mac to find a computer that was essentially running like a slow-motion movie. I could start it up, click on things or double-click to open them, but they responded minutes later. *Sigh* This wouldn’t do. So, with the hour growing late, I went off to bed.

The next evening (after work), I resigned myself to the fact that I’d have to install the virgin system again (Install 2, Attempt 3, for the record), and then, rather than running the Migration Assistant (which had moved all of the old junk over from my old system effectively bringing my new system to a standstill), I’d have to rebuild my system bit-by-bit, the old fashioned way. That was Monday.

Today is Thursday, and I’m nearly back. Most apps have been reinstalled, with a few notable exceptions (Adobe Creative Suite Version 2, which is a behemoth and Microsoft Office for Macintosh have yet to be put in, and ‘The Missing Sync’ – which I use to sync my Treo and Audio Hijack – which I use to record radio shows from Boston via the Internet, will be the last additions). However, iLife and iWork are on there, along with my iTunes library and iPhoto pictures. The fact is, I’m running out of disk space pretty quickly. I think the time has come to migrate my iTunes library to an external drive, as my ‘Music’ Folder now takes up nearly 100 Gig. While I love many features of the new OS, it would have been nice to have been a quick and simple upgrade. The fact is, I’d simply accumulated too much digital grime in the old system, and the new one was probably incompatible with 1 (or maybe more) things running in the background that I might not have even been using any more!