I am happy, delighted, and otherwise tickled some certain shade of salmon to note that today I received a promotion.
My current role with Premier (US | CAN) has been Technology Solutions Manager, and I’ve been leading a team of web developers.
I can’t reveal my new role here until it’s officially announced, but it’s cool, it’s exciting, it’s brand-new, and it has a very hifalutin (I like that word a lot lately) title of Director in front of it.
😉
I just posted a piece over at The Linguist team’s blog that I rather like. It’s the introduction of our blog to the team, and part of the communication is: what the heck is a blog?
Especially this chunk:
A blog – short for web log – is a simple, easily updated website. It’s not corporate; it’s personal. It’s not formal; it’s blue jeans and an old T-shirt. It’s not PR; it’s people. It’s not the company line; it’s your line. It’s not insular; it’s connected to the whole world of information out there.
As recently mentioned, I’m doing some work for TheLinguist, the best (OK, I’m biased) place to learn English as a second language on the internet.
I watch The Apprentice and really enjoy it. Although of course Trump does get annoying from time to time … especially when at the beginning of this season every time he showed up on camera there was a massively cheesy royal-like musical intro bit. And I don’t think there’s an episode in which Trump has not managed to work the word “billion” in – he pronounces it “bi-yion.”
But I think I learn a lot from seeing how people interact, how they lead, how they follow, when they give up, how they persevere, and the ideas that they come up with in their impossible, 1-2 day business tasks. Some of the things I’ve learned are: ask the clients what they want, stupid. And, don’t be content with the most obvious means of marketing.
I’m trying to apply that now to my role with The Linguist. The learning methodology, and the technology Steve Kaufmann and Mark Kaufmann have built are unique in the field of language learning, and extremely effective.
The challenge is marketing a great solution from a tiny company to a huge world.
Stay posted for more …
I produce a lot of what the trendy now call screencasts: a movie of something happening on your screen, usually used to demo software or explain a process. The app I use is Snapz Pro, and it’s great software.
But it outputs movies in .mov format. I’ve posted a lot of those online over the past 4-5 years, and the problem is that not everyone has Quicktime installed. Or they’ve got an older version. Or another problem.
So I’ve often wanted to show the movies in Flash format … something that almost everybody has. And if they don’t, it’s a small (still less than a megabyte, I believe) download, whereas Quicktime is something like 30 MB last time I checked.
But getting .mov files into Flash is a major, major pain – one that was supposed to be solved by the lastest version of Flash MX. But it wasn’t, or so, at least, I thought. Importing the video was fairly easy. But Flash always dropped the audio, forcing you to export your audio separately and import it to another layer, and then futz with re-syncing audio and video. Painful.
But there is an easier way. Mike Skovgaard just alerted me to the key ingredient: .avi. Saving my movie files as .avi files allows easy import into Flash, which will automatically create the right number of frames and accepts the audio (in perfect sync, I might add) without a glitch.
Nice!
I’ve done a proof of concept tonight, just for fun, and it worked. There are some minor quality problems, but those are undoubtedly just settings I need to play around with to optimize the import and playing.
At work we recently finished the bulk of an incredibly taxing project that totally occupied our time and attention for something like 9 months.
Now that we’re through almost all the blood, sweat, and tears, and are no longer living with a gun to our heads, we can afford to enjoy our working lives a little more.
So I bought a little ping pong net with 2 paddles and a couple balls, and strung it up on my department’s main office conference table:
That’s Carl with the red paddle, just missing the return (the ball is that orange blob down at the bottom). I’m on the far side of the table, where Mike is patiently toiling away while we lounge. Rastin is taking the shot with my camera.
The table is great … it is so nice to get up after a couple of hard hours and take 10 minutes to forget it all, whack some balls around, and chill out.
The curved corners are an extra challenge, and the quick way to win the current game is to drop the ball through your opponent’s hole – each side of of the table has a cable port designed for those who might be using the table to hold a couple of computers.
Highly recommended for all those with suitable tables. The ping pong set was something like $10 – a very cheap way to make the workday more enjoyable, and probably increase overall productivity too.
I’ve recently met and starting working with a rather amazing individual.
Typically, most people are pretty impressed to find out that someone is bilingual. Trilingual, three languages, is amazing. Four starts to approach the realm of the unbelievable, or the savant.
But Steve Kaufman, a former Canadian diplomat, speaks and reads in 9, yes, 9, that is NINE languages! Those 9 include 6 European languages – English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Swedish – and three Asian languages – Japanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese.
Oh and by the way, in his spare time he’s learning Korean and Portuguese.
Steve and his son Mark have started up a website for teaching language learning. They’ve started with English. Where does a lowly English speaker like me fit in? I’m going to be helping with some guerilla marketing, perhaps some product and market definition, and a few other things here and there, all on a contract basis.
My biggest question is: how on earth can a person learn so many languages, and keep them all straight? I guess this is Steve’s answer: do what you enjoy doing.
That’s the philosophy behind The Linguist language learning site as well. The goal is to make language learning as fun and painless and possible – while delivering quick results.
I’ll post more about that in a couple of days.
I’ve recently welcomed a very nice addition to my office – a 23″ Apple Cinema display.
All I can say is: wow. This screen is amazing … it has totally changed the way I work, the windows I keep open on my desktop, and how I use my computer in general.
A completely unexpected benefit is that my persistent neck pain – a relatively common complaint for those of us that stare fixedly at computer screens all day long – has all but disappeared. I think that the simple fact that the display is larger, and I need to move my head around to see everything on it, added to the fact that it’s closer to my eyes than my PowerBook display and better positioned (despite my iCurve) make each day that much more pain-free and enjoyable.
Here’s a closer look:
The bad news is, it’s not mine. Product development bought it for proofing products digitally … but they don’t have a computer to drive it yet. So I get it for a while.
I’ve told everyone at the office that they can have it back … when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
I sell myself, slowly, a dollar at a time …
I have to write and express my appreciation for the Textile app put up by Dean Allen at Textism.
I had to do some work on our Quebec, I mean Québec website, and all my text for the site came from our Montreal, I mean Montréal office. Now, whether it comes in Word (as I’ve had it) or in notes in a PDF file (as happened to be the case this time) those pesky little accent aigues and accent graves are painful to have to search through and replace with HTML entities or UTF-8 or Unicode gobbledygook. Not to mention the circonflexes and cédilles.
While casting about fruitlessly in BBedit for some way to save myself many tears and not a few drops of blood, I turned to my forever friend, Google.
A few quick searches, and I was happily converting accented text to HTML with Textile, an app that does more than it says.
Tres, I mean trés cool, and much appreciated. I shall have to make use of that Paypal icon next to the text input box.
This is the first (and maybe the last) in a series that I am planning to write on that most horrible, boring, awful, and necessary (but black) art: project management.
(Actually, here’s the second sin.)
First Cardinal Sin
Starting before you are ready.
This pathetic platitude is amazingly often ignored by smart people who should know better (yes, that includes me).
Why? Human nature. We want to feel progress. We want to get going. We want to see some visible results. As Paul Graham says:
In fact, this is a constant problem when you’re painting still lifes. You plonk down a bunch of stuff on a table, and maybe spend five or ten minutes rearranging it to look interesting. But you’re so impatient to get started painting that ten minutes of rearranging feels very long. So you start painting. Three days later, having spent twenty hours staring at it, you’re kicking yourself for having set up such an awkward and boring composition, but by then it’s too late.
(source)
In fact, the first parts of a project should not show any visible progress at all. The first parts of a project should be spent on painful, tedious, and critical steps: project definition, specifications, details, outcomes.
Typically, the first answers that you come to when doing the pre-work for a project are the wrong ones.
So. Get away from the keyboard.
Start thinking. Sketch it. Put it away. Re-think it. Draw it again. Iterate until you have a breakthrough.
Now you’re getting somewhere.
I’ve had a little hiatus here for the past 3-4 days: I had a sudden trip to Moose Jaw, which is about as far into the Canadian hinterland as it sounds, though not quite as far as you can get.
Getting into and out of the city was interesting, consisting of a hop from Abbotsford to Edmonton to Regina, and then a shuttle ride into Moose Jaw.
For some reason, the Education Research & Development Institute (ERDI) decided to have its spring session in Moose Jaw. ERDI is an organization that you pay a lot of money to in order to come and talk to a bunch of top school administrators, usually superintendents, about your new products and services. Then they give you their opinion: it’ll sell, it won’t, add this to your product, take that out, or: what are you smoking? We went there to get some feedback on two new initiatives, and got it in spades – mostly positive.
The interesting thing about this ERDI is the number of companies attending is up, way up, and the number of technology companies is skyrocketing. Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and IBM were all there, and there were a number of other smaller players as well, all pitching new products and programs. Very interesting.
I hardly had a chance to see anything in Moose Jaw: I arrived Thursday night, presented at our panel Friday morning, and flew out early Friday afternoon.
I did take a brief stroll at night and what I saw of Moose Jaw is actually pretty cool: historic in places, hip in others:
On the way back to Regina (you fly into and out of Regina, the nearest ‘big’ city – Moose Jaw is about 45 minutes driving west), we saw thousands and thousands of snow geese. The name is especially appropriate, because, at a distance, they looked exactly like snow and ice:
Oh, and just because everyone is probably wondering … in fact there is a huge plastic moose on the road into Moose Jaw. Unfortunately I couldn’t grab a pic of it, as we were speeding along the highway going the wrong direction.
Ah well. That and the fact that it was actually quite a bit warmer in Moose Jaw than in Vancouver will be my two abiding memories of the city.
I attended the Vancouver Enterprise Forum tonight for the first time.
It’s a bunch of people who are related to the technology, venture capital, and entrepreneurial worlds who get together every month around different topics. This month was cleantech, or green energy. Not really my specialty, but the speakers were interesting. They included Jeff Moris, a particularly clueful representive in the Washington state legislature, Kirk Washington, who, in addition to having a cool name and being one of the people in at the ground floor of Ballard Power Systems, is a venture capitalist, and a really smart young venture capitalist, Christine Bergeron, who should really get that ‘Miss’ taken off her puff page at her current employer’s site, Chrysalix.
The coolest part, though, as usual, was schmoozing with all kinds of interesting people before and after the speakers.
I met the CFO of Actenum, Peiter Dorsman. Actenum is a high-end scheduling firm with several PhD’s on staff, who you’d really do well to talk to you if you need to solve the stereotypical travelling salesman problem, or if you have 700 trucks in your fleet, and need to figure out the most efficient way to get them all the places they need to go. Pieter is the only CFO I know (not that I know an incredible number of CFOs) who is also an amateur astronomer, which is kinda cool.
I met Thomas Dowad of BeforeTechnologyLimited, who is a veteran programmer working on ways of making smart embedded systems programmable by mere mortals for mere pennies. Very cool.
And I met a bunch of really smart grad students from UBC and SFU who were working on all kinds of cool stuff: alcohol-based fuel cells, automation and robotics control systems, you name it.
All in all, a well-spent evening. Hopefully next month’s topic will be just a little bit more up my alley: web application development.
Beautify manhole covers and a couple of others things I noticed in and around the 2005 FETC conference in Orlando ….
Whenever I see something cool at FETC, I snap a picture of it. Here’s four products that I was impressed with, for varying reasons ….
I’m attending the Florida Educational Technology Conference (FETC) this week, and took just a couple snaps of the Orange County Convention center …
I’m in Orlando, Florida for some client meetings and the Florida Educational Technology Conference, or FETC for short.
I have been trying to get my office redone for almost half a year … and finally, about 3 weeks ago, the last stages of it were completed.
And, since I just bought my digital camera, I can show off the results!
The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than it is in theory.
(This is from Carl, one of our developers.)
I liked this quote, so I blogged it. And yes, are just finishing a major, massive, site upgrade.
Ever need the sound of a wolf growling or snarling?
I just did, and I found it right here.
Very cool!
UPDATE:
This is much more cool … a search engine for sounds.
Wow. Love it.
Now why didn’t Google do this?
As the rumors build up for the next big Mac fest in France, and as the late, late, late next-gen iMac inches closer to a unveiling date sometime in September, I’m hoping to see something about an Apple tablet.
OK, I gotta get to the post, quick, before my titles drown me in waves of purple prose.
Anyways, David Boone, the webmaster at Premier, in the Technology Solutions department that I lead, posted a story on his blog about some pretty amazing automotive high jinks.
You must check it out . . . Decide for yourself if the story is true or not.
BTW, Dave is leaving Premier (for pretty good reasons: needs some variety, needs a break from what we’re doing, looking to learn new stuff, etc. etc.), and is looking for another job. If you have one in the area of web development, you would have to look hard to find a better guy. You might want to take a look at his resume.
I recently hired a new developer, and had to spend some time thinking about second interview questions.
The first interview is fairly straightforward: who is the person, what does he/she know, what have they done, etc. The second interview is harder: how would this perso perform if he/she were offered the position?
Here are the questions I used, which are less questions than discussion starters …
