Things to Do When You are Between Jobs

It’s been a lit­tle over a week before my last day at IBM. I was frankly blown away by the good-bye that I got from cowork­ers that Fri­day. We all went out to a Thai feast in Burn­aby (and by Thai feast, I mean it just kept com­ing and com­ing until we started gig­gling as each dish was brought to the table; Pad Thai? Sure, Crispy Fish with sauce? Why not!? More Stir-Fried Veg­eta­bles? Of course!)

I packed up my desk (I had spent over a week mov­ing books and toys from it to home in half a dozen trips). It was a strange time, with my time alloted to the project over, and work still need­ing to be done the project I’ve been work­ing on. I hope that I haven’t left too much hang­ing; Some of it was depen­dent on details of fea­tures that had not been defined yet, but where I had to leave wire­frames (which are essen­tially dia­grams of how screens should look and what should be on them and where) par­tially fin­ished, I tried to make it clear how they could be com­pleted. I said many good-byes to friends and col­leagues, and drove home from Burn­aby, a lit­tle dazed (hey, it was prob­a­bly all that food at lunch).

On Sat­ur­day, we decided to play tourist all over again. We went to the open house of CityTV and took a sta­tion tour, meet­ing most of the crew of Break­fast Tele­vi­sion (which I must con­fess, we’re not reg­u­lar view­ers of, but it was fun, nev­er­the­less). I won a CityTV Umbrella, and we got some Cold Stone Cream­ery Ice Cream at the end of the tour. I like the sta­tion; It’s small and has a lot of per­son­al­ity, and they run Jeop­ardy each evening (and also carry Reaper, which is a lot of fun and another series filmed here).

Sat­ur­day Night, I went to the ticket office at the Orpheum just before the Sym­phony Con­cert, and got a last-minute seat for the con­cert (only $15!). I heard the VSO play one of my favourite pieces, Prokofiev’s Third Sym­phony. I love it because it’s mostly loud and fast, and almost never lets up. In par­tic­u­lar, the third move­ment is some of the wildest and most vivid music that Prokofiev ever wrote, and much of the drama of the piece is due to the fact that it’s taken from his opera ‘The Flam­ing Angel’, which chron­i­cles a young nun’s psy­chotic break­down and pur­suit of a man she believes is an angel, com­plete with an on-stage exor­cism and chase through the streets. Not your usual opera fare, and cer­tainly not your usual Sym­phony. The orches­tra did a fine job, but I sus­pect that it was too racy for the crowd, who didn’t give it as much of a stand­ing ova­tion as they did for the Tchaikovsky Piano Con­certo in the first half. Ah, when will they stop doing this?! Once again, peo­ple, when every per­for­mance gets a stand­ing ova­tion, it ceases to mean anything!

The rest of the week­end was a bit qui­eter, but things picked up again today, with a job inter­view. I’m not going to write more about that until things set­tle down either way. Pam also has a lead on a con­tract, so it’s prob­a­ble that the free time between engage­ments for both of us is prob­a­bly going to come to an end soon.

Tomor­row evening is a spe­cial SIGCHI event: the film designer Syd Mead (who was respon­si­ble for the rev­o­lu­tion­ary sets and scenery of Blade Run­ner) will be in town speak­ing, fol­lowed by a screen­ing of the final cut of the movie.