Category: Work

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me Slice of Life Work

Slice of Life: Official Photos from Techdays

For the TechDays conference’s stops in Vancouver and Toronto, Microsoft hired Vancouver-based photog extraordinaire Kris Krug to take photos of the Developer and Platform Evangelism team, which includes Yours Truly. The photos were taken during the conference, which meant that most of us were wearing the official TechDays shirts, which were colour-coded to match the conference track in which we were leading or participating. The track that I lead is Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform, and its colour is orange. Luckily the folks who made the shirts had a pretty snappy shade of orange (the label refers to the colour as “Spark”) that I can rock.

Most of our photo shoot was on the promenade outside the Vancouver Convention Centre, looking out over the water. He just had me play tunes on the accordion while he shot photos, so they’re all pretty candid shots. Here’s one of the photos that Kris took of me.

joey_devilla_on_accordion_kk

There are more of me and the rest of the DPE team in Kris’ Flickr photoset.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

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It Happened to Me Slice of Life Work

Slice of Life: Working Away at the Smart Mouth Cafe

Rick Claus working at the bar at the front of the Smart Mouth Cafe, Gastown, Vancouver.

My co-worker Rick Claus (that’s him in the photo above) and I have spent the morning working on the final preparations for Microsoft Canada’s TechDays Vancouver conference at the Smart Mouth Cafe in Vancouver’s Gastown neighbourhood. It’s a rather nice place the work, the staff are friendly, the coffee’s pretty good, and the bar at the front offers a nice view of the street.

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Geek Work

How to Get Office 2007 Ultimate for $64 if you’re a Canadian University / College Student

Package for Office 2007 Ultimate: "$64.00 (Canadian!) for students / Glossy reflective table not included)"

If you’re a student at one of the eligible Canadian universities or colleges, you can get the top-of-the-line edition of Microsoft Office 2007 for CDN$64. For more details, see my article in Global Nerdy.

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Life Work

The Road to Success

I saw the illustrated map titled The Road to Success on the Strange Maps site and thought that there can’t be a more appropriate day than today, the first day of school, to post it. Enjoy!

"The Road to Success" - an illustration made in 1913 showing the obstacles to success as a landscape map.
Click the illustration to see it at full size.

If you’re wondering who the “Caruso” in the “Caruso can’t touch you” line is – it’s spoken by one of the people in the Mutual Appreciation Society building, in the lower-right hand corner, just above and to the left of Hotel Know-It-All – it’s Enrico Caruso, an opera tenor who became a star thanks tp his embrace of then-newfangled recording technology, namely the phonograph (a.k.a. gramophone).

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It Happened to Me Slice of Life Work

Slice of Life: Conference Call

Here’s the view from a conference call I participated in on a recent sunny day:

conference_call

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The Current Situation Work

The Tragedy of the Coffee Shop

blocked_outlet

Over at my Coffee and Code blog, I write about a topic close to home for me: cafe owners in New York, fed up with laptops users lingering but not buying anything, are shooing them away.

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Life Work

The Job Opportunity You Can’t Refuse

Allen Stern blogs about a sign that’s outside Rice to Riches, a rice pudding place in New York City’s East Village:

Sign: "Help Wanted: Start a career in the fascinating, fast-paced lucrative pudding business. Long hard hours, very low pay, lots of heavy lifting, work for a ball-busting asshole, dead-end job, no benefits, no advancement, must be college grad. Start immediately."

The sign reads:

Help Wanted

Start a career in the fascinating, fast-paced lucrative pudding business

  • Long hard hours
  • Very low pay
  • Lots of heavy lifting
  • Work for a ball-busting asshole
  • Dead-end job
  • No benefits
  • No advancement
  • Must be college grad

Start immediately

It’s attention getting; Allen says that he saw a number of people read the sign and as a result step into the store. There’s more in his blog entry about the sign.

I wonder how many people read it and thought “Sounds great! Where do I sign up?”