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 1^st and 2^nd , 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!