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!

Back and More

I’m really tired as I write this — it seems I’ve been tired a lot lately (lack of sleep per­haps due to the unusual hot nights we’ve been get­ting this week, etc.). Nev­er­the­less, I wanted to try and update this blog before it got much more stale. And it was get­ting quite stale indeed. No crunch left at all. (See, I told you I was get­ting tired).

So what has hap­pened in the past 3 weeks or so?

1. The rest of the trip went with­out any trans­porta­tion prob­lems (aside from a cou­ple of hours on the run­way at Laguardia, but from what I hear, that’s par for the course for most US travel this summer.)
2. I got to hear my Nom­i­na­tive Pre­lude: Cas­tles in the Air played by the pianist to whom it was ded­i­cated, Pat Plude, and it was a great expe­ri­ence. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard any­thing that I’ve writ­ten, and I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that I have to try to write more music. It’s just a hard thing to do, requir­ing a lot of time and energy, so I think I’ll only do it, for the time being, unless I know I’ll get a per­for­mance. I have enough unper­formed music (an Orches­tral Tone Poem, a cou­ple of cham­ber works — one for Vio­lin, Viola and Piano, a short work for Piano, Celeste and Vibra­phone, a study for 2 pianos that I wrote in col­lege, and a half of a Cham­ber Opera — all that have never been heard out­side of my mind or their notes banged out in a prac­tice room or piano some­where) to last me for quite a while, thanks.
3. I saw a few old friends at the Walden School Reunion, but sur­pris­ingly, the years that I attended (the late 70s) were some­what under­rep­re­sented. I saw plenty of peo­ple who were older than I was by about 20 or 30 years, and also sev­eral who were 20 years my junior, but few who were my age. It made for a unique social situation.
4. I had a great time vis­it­ing my par­ents, and was able to enjoy some quiet hours surf­ing the web on their back deck. Warm, breezy after­noons in the shade with hum­ming­birds and wi fi, as well as gourmet meals (both out and at home) are what I will remem­ber the most from this trip.
5. That missed oppor­tu­nity on the road was yet another of those times in life where you think you’ve missed the boat, only to find a much bet­ter ves­sel float in behind it. Yes, another oppor­tu­nity pre­sented itself a week and a half ago. I had an inter­view at IBM (yes, that IBM) for a 6-month con­tract as an Infor­ma­tion Architect/UI Designer. There was a mes­sage from them in the affir­ma­tive before I made it home from the inter­view (!). A new record, the guy at the agency plac­ing me said. So in about 11 days, my life changes sig­nif­i­cantly, as I say good-bye to my cur­rent part-time employer, and hello to a new con­tract in Burn­aby. It’s a bit of a dis­tance from here (about an hour’s com­mute on the buses and sky­train). Hope­fully I’ll be able to use that time to catch up on pod­casts and books on tape. Too bad that I can’t com­pose on the sky­train. I think I’ll ded­i­cate my next blog post­ing to my old employer, who deserves some men­tion (I’ve always been really care­ful about the work vs. per­sonal life vs. loud mur­mur thing.)
6. We cel­e­brated Canada Day this year with some (tem­po­rary) tat­toos of the Maple Leaf (see above). We’ve even had a chance to cel­e­brate my new con­tract with a lovely din­ner at Bridges with a view of the sunset.

Have I got­ten caught up? Well, a few other things:

In 4 days, we’ll have been liv­ing in British Colum­bia 2 years. We took out a 2-year mort­gage on this condo, so with any luck, we’ll be all paid-up in about 6 days. We haven’t thought about a mort­gage burn­ing party (It sounds so won­der­fully 1960-ish, doesn’t it?) but maybe we’ll do that.

The time spent trav­el­ing truly showed me that I do indeed belong here in Van­cou­ver. Despite some nice expe­ri­ences on my trip to the East­ern US, I did really miss this place, and was extremely happy to return to the beau­ti­ful city and moun­tains I now, with­out any doubt, call home.

In the South & The Incredible Disappearing Contract

The other big dif­fer­ence here in the south­ern US (and when I say ‘south­ern’, I mean ‘Mary­land’, which is as far North as you can get and still be below the Mason Dixon Line — which runs between Mary­land and Penn­syl­va­nia) from the Pacific North­west is the heat. It has finally started to cool off a lit­tle since I got here, now at about 26 C, which is a lit­tle warm but tol­er­a­ble. Prior to today, I pretty much had to stay inside with the air con­di­tion­ing going all day. The same was true of going out — all stores, cars and restau­rants have their air con­di­tion­ing blast­ing so hard that you fre­quently have to take a jacket with you to keep from get­ting too cold when inside! I can’t bear to think what the elec­tric­ity usage is here. The Onion made fun of the whole global warm­ing and rise in air con­di­tion­ing story this week.

The heat means lots of insects, plants (my par­ents live in a lush area to the north of the Bal­ti­more belt­way), birds and ani­mals. We’ve seen car­di­nals, finches, hum­ming­birds, mourn­ing doves, mock­ing­birds, wood­peck­ers, chip­munks and if course, squir­rels. I missed the visit of a semi-regular vis­i­tor to the prop­erty, a red-tailed fox, who my par­ents spied this morn­ing as he loped across their back­yard and woods.

It’s a Done Deal. Or Not.
I’m still deal­ing a bit with the time change, and try­ing to stay in touch with work and life back home. The day before I left, I had an excit­ing poten­tial con­tract that I responded to imme­di­ately with a major web com­pany (whose name I’ll with­hold for the time being) that looked like it was about to go through. While I didn’t burn any bridges back at my cur­rent job, it looked like upon my return to Van­cou­ver, my old part-time job would be more or less over (with a few things to tidy up, some good-byes, etc.) and I’d be start­ing a new 6-week con­tract. Resumés, sam­ples and a follow-up phone call had all gone through with encour­ag­ing words from my con­tact, a staffing per­son with the company.

Some­how all of that went ter­ri­bly wrong while I was on the road, and the staffing rep’s emails got sketch­ier and vaguer with each pass­ing day. Now it looks as if that per­son over­stepped their author­ity in offer­ing me the job, and that some­one else was referred to the com­pany. Since I was out of town (and our phone voice mail was still MIA), I was too hard to reach, and the whole thing has now van­ished and another staffing per­son from that com­pany is telling me to ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you’. I’m really dis­ap­pointed about this, and feel like I was treated pretty shab­bily (The orig­i­nal con­tact has still not con­tacted me with a defin­i­tive ‘no’ and any sort of apol­ogy.) If I had got­ten the nib­ble at any other week of the year I could have been able to push for it (or at least I thought I could — this is, in all hon­esty, just spec­u­la­tion). Such is the way life goes. Some­times it is indeed, all in the timing.

Catching Up

How to cover so much that has hap­pened since my last post? As is often the case, I hold off on new entries when I’m about to upgrade Word­Press, and then put off doing the upgrade, which makes the gap wider, which makes me put off the upgrade, mak­ing this a vicious cycle. Well, cycle bro­ken. Now, on to what went on dur­ing the gap:
A Wed­ding
Our friends Matt and Oana got mar­ried. We feel par­tic­u­larly priv­i­leged to have known both of them through all of the stages of courtship, engage­ment, and now get­ting hitched (they are on their hon­ey­moon as I write this). The Roman­ian Ortho­dox cer­e­mony was unlike any­thing either of us had ever seen, com­plete with chant­ing, incense, tin crowns, and all sorts of other eth­nic touches that one doesn’t encounter in most mar­riage cer­e­monies. We were both a lit­tle thrown off by the absence of any music for the pro­ces­sional or reces­sional, the talk­ing, pass­ing out of candy, and other eccen­tric­i­ties dur­ing the cer­e­mony by many of the rel­a­tives, and a cho­rus of women women singing a repeated refrain to the priest (which I later found out was roughly the equiv­a­lent of the Latin ‘Kyrie Elei­son’ ). As I also found out later, we could have also been treated to magic tricks, sto­ries, and bear train­ing, so in ret­ro­spect, it was a pretty restrained event. But get those Roma­ni­ans danc­ing at the recep­tion! That was another thing entirely. The recep­tion was a blast. Matt and Oana had char­tered a boat that cir­cled in and around the Van­cou­ver area, includ­ing points as far north and west as Light­house Point, as far east as the Ironworker’s Bridge, into False Creek and all the way down to the Sci­ence Cen­tre and out again. Despite a lit­tle driz­zle, it was quite smooth and com­fort­able, and we all enjoyed an absolutely spec­tac­u­lar din­ner includ­ing salmon (of course), chicken, veg­eta­bles and a piece of an enor­mous wed­ding cake pro­vided by one of Oana’s rel­a­tives. We all had a great time and were glad we could be with them for the event, which I’m sure will be remem­bered fondly by all who attended for a long time.

The Blog­ger Meetup
This monthly event been cov­ered by many oth­ers, includ­ing Jan and John, so I’ll keep this brief. We con­gre­gated at Cuppa Joe on Broad­way and Main, who pro­vided cof­fee, pas­tries and free wifi. At one point it almost seemed as if we would out­grow the room but we moved chairs around and some of us adapted. It’s nice to be a part of a group of so many clever peo­ple and we often find the con­ver­sa­tions mov­ing from one topic to the next at furi­ous speed: the state of James Doohan’s (Scotty from Star Trek) ashes to video­con­fer­enc­ing to ‘The Secret’. A few new atten­dees also livened things up, and cam­eras caught a lot of us in mid-sentence (or laugh!) I regret that I’ll have to miss next month’s meet­ing, as I’ll be back East vis­it­ing friends and fam­ily then.

Eat! Van­cou­ver
We made it for the sec­ond time to the food show that takes over BC Place (the air-supported dome that had a bit of a defla­tion prob­lem this last win­ter). Once again we tasted, sipped and nib­bled on all sorts of free sam­ples and got tons of recipes and coupons. I noticed a big growth in the num­ber and type of bev­er­ages, includ­ing not only teas and soft drinks, but vitamin-waters, juices, con­cen­trates, smooth­ies, and cof­fees. I won­der if the fast pace of people’s lives is favor­ing liq­uids as they are eas­ier to take with you in a bot­tle or can, and hence, a grow­ing mar­ket in that sec­tor.
We man­aged to make the demo by Rob Fee­nie, Vancouver’s most famous chef, who is actu­ally quite a local celebrity. He demoed a recipe for minia­ture ham­burg­ers made from shred­ded short rib meat, which I have to say was not a very unusual dish, at least in terms of ingre­di­ents and cook­ing method; Pam was shocked as I con­sis­tently knew what he was going to say or do next (‘now he’s going to add some mire­poix — chopped onions, cel­ery and carrots…now he’s going to deglaze the pan with some wine or broth’…etc.)

My New Strate­gist
After my trou­bles with my Career Man­age­ment com­pany didn’t improve (and in fact, they seemed to me to get worse), I told them that things weren’t work­ing, and that I needed a dif­fer­ent strate­gist. They agreed, and tomor­row I meet with the new strate­gist. Here’s hop­ing they can help me and can work with me a bit bet­ter. So far I’ve been hit­ting a series of brick walls, and I’m try­ing really hard not to get dis­cour­aged dur­ing this period.

Com­ing Up
Besides my meet­ing with my new strate­gist tomor­row, that evening I’m plan­ning on attend­ing the big mul­ti­me­dia con­cert and Con­tem­po­rary Shadow Play, ‘Semar’s Jour­ney’ by the Game­lan I used to play in, Madu Sari. Since I’m still on their mail­ing list, I’ve been see­ing the amount of rehearsals they’ve been sched­ul­ing and frankly I don’t know how I could have done it. I hope it goes well; they cer­tainly have worked hard to pre­pare for it.

The weather con­tin­ues to be gor­geous, and the sun­shine stays until just after 9:00 at night. Van­cou­ver sum­mer is just about upon us, and it’s always worth the wait.

A Beautiful Day and Career Counseling from the Pointy-Haired Boss

Pam and I made every excuse we could for one more errand out in this sparkling, crisp (sounds like a soft drink) day. All of that rain has resulted in flow­ers and green every­where, and we could see moun­tain ranges to the North from Broad­way that I don’t think we’d ever seen before, or at least not this well.

We got lots of odds and ends, and in gen­eral, pre­pared for Pam’s trip that will take her to our old haunts in Boston, her brother’s fam­ily in West Spring­field, Mass­a­chu­setts, and a final stop in Min­neapo­lis for the STC (Soci­ety for Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion) Con­ven­tion. She’ll be on the road for nearly 3 weeks. I hope none of her Koi die while under my care.

As for me, I get to con­tinue my job search, which has con­tin­ued with help from friends and a new career man­age­ment com­pany that I’ve signed on with. The lat­ter has involved lots of def­i­n­i­tion of career goals, com­pil­ing ‘nar­ra­tives’ of my work accom­plish­ments to date, and meet­ings with my assigned con­tact at their offices. I leave off names and com­pa­nies here for a rea­son: The meet­ings, and my inter­ac­tions with this per­son are not going as well as I would hope. Why? As it turns out, the per­son who is to be my advo­cate, coach and adviser at this com­pany is decid­edly non-technical. Really non-technical, as in not know­ing much about the Inter­net, Com­put­ers, the Web, or any­thing remotely related to Tech­nol­ogy. This has proved…challenging to me and is fairly trou­bling. After all, how can some­one advise you on your career if they have absolutely no under­stand­ing of what you do to begin with?

Case in Point: At our last meet­ing, they brought up their Sav­ings and Loan’s web page on their screen, turned it to me and asked point-blank: “Is that all you do”? I was a lit­tle taken aback. “Yes, I answered, after a moment of silence where I held back the urge to lean across their desk and punch them in the face, “But that’s not all of it. It’s like ask­ing a Fur­ni­ture Designer if all they design is chairs.”

While it’s a good thing for me to make sure that I can relate to a non-technical per­son (which is not some­thing I usu­ally have a prob­lem with; I’m a self-admitted geek but I am a result of a Lib­eral Arts Edu­ca­tion), I have to say that rewrit­ing my resumé so that all of the tech­no­log­i­cal ref­er­ence are either elim­i­nated or sim­pli­fied is not some­thing I would have done on my own, and I won­der if it’s going to serve me well. Will I have a ‘David for Dum­mies’ ver­sion of my resumé that I trot out for some­one who I think will give me a blank look if I men­tion the words ‘User Inter­face’? Then again, how would some­one like that ever be inter­view­ing me for a job in the first place?

On Tues­day, I am to appear for my meet­ing in for­mal job inter­view attire. Accord­ing to their rules, that’s a dark suit and tie.

Techies in Van­cou­ver: When was the last time you appeared for a meet­ing in suit and dark tie? It’s not that I don’t have one, or haven’t worn one in my life, but it seems to rein­force the idea that these peo­ple have no freak­ing clue what­so­ever what tech cul­ture is like.

If this con­tin­ues to irk me and inter­feres with my job search, I may request a dif­fer­ent per­son to work with, which may prove a bit uncom­fort­able for all con­cerned. Nev­er­the­less, I’m going to give that some seri­ous thought. In the mean­time, it’s back to my old resumé, which I’m try­ing to use to cre­ate more ‘nar­ra­tives’: “Once upon a time, there was a need for a click­able HTML pro­to­type…” (*Doh!*)