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.