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The Morgan Freeman Chain of Command
The Millennium Falcon bed is a great gift for the Star Wars fan in your life. Think of the new, sordid wrinkles that classic lines from the movies take on when uttered in it!
- Han Solo, at Mos Eisley Spaceport: "She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid. I’ve made a lot of special modifications myself."
- Obi-Wan Kenobi, upon seeing the Death Star: “That’s no moon!”
- The Death Star attack briefing: “The approach will not be easy. You are required to maneuver straight down this trench and skim the surface to this point. The target area is only two meters wide. It’s a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. A precise hit will start a chain reaction…”
- Han Solo, during the attack on the Death Star: “You’re all clear kid, now let’s blow this thing and go home!”
- Princess Leia, upon first seeing the Millennium Falcon: “You came in that thing? You’re braver than I thought.”
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Working in the Kitchen
Microsoft Ottawa’s Kitchen. It has a decent view.
Every Microsoft office has a “touchdown area”, a place filled with cubicles where visiting or mobile workers can work. I avoid these like the plague.
Thanks to all the work I’ve done in cafes or coworking spaces, I prefer to set up in Microsoft’s “kitchen” spaces. The wifi is just as accessible there, but the lighting is natural, the tables are larger. the fridge with all the free Diet Coke is nearby by and it doesn’t feel so boxed in. Unlike cafes, you can leave your stuff at the table when you go for a bathroom break.
So, when I hung out in Microsoft’s Ottawa offices on Friday while waiting for my coworker and travelling buddy Damir to finish his meeting, I eschewed the touchdown cubicle and set up shop in the kitchen. These photos show what my “office” looked like, and believe me, it’s a lot nicer than a veal-fattening pen-like cube.
A lot of office workers might balk at the idea of working in a kitchen space, but consider this: people have been working in kitchens for millennia. Its centralized placement in homes and workplaces as well as its layout and design are the product of countless generations doing work that sustains life.
On the other hand, the modern office has its roots in the Industrial Revolution. Its design is based on the concept of employee as interchangeable production unit and the hypothesis that people are naturally lazy and must be coerced into being productive.
Hence in the absence of a workshop-like environment (such as the Hacklab, where I often work), I opt for the kitchen.
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Next Stop: Winnipeg!
At long last, we come to the last city in TechDays’ seven-city conference tour: Winnipeg! The combination of venue availability and perhaps a little masochism puts me and my coworkers in a city notorious for brutal winters in mid-December. Take a look at the weather forecast for the days I will be there:
(If you’re American, the high for Monday translates to –9 degrees F; the low is –26 degrees F. There’s a reason the city has the nickname “Winterpeg”.)
Fortunately, we were given our official TechDays-branded winter jackets at the Ottawa conference last week, and when they’re worn with the fleece lining, they’re incredibly warm. In fact, I found myself boiling in my jacket in Ottawa’s just-below-freezing temperatures when I wore it with the lining, which means that it should keep me toasty in Winnipeg’s deep freeze. Still, I’m glad that the walking route from the hotel to the conference venue can be done mostly indoors, with the notable exception of one street crossing.
In spite of the temperatures, I’m looking forward to the trip to Winnipeg later today. See you there!
Before the “Bush 43” years, and especially during the early ‘90s, when I was at Crazy Go Nuts University, I often voiced my observation that:
- Conservatives were people you didn’t necessarily agree with politically, but found likeable and would gladly invite to a party, wedding, kegger or road trip, and
- Liberals were people with whom you might agree on a political level, but were tiresome and always threatening to invite you to some rally or other tiresome crashing bore of an event.
I miss the Barry Goldwater conservatives of yore and look forward to the day when they oust the Fox News/End Times-insane among their ranks. I don’t know if any of the Republican Party interns in the photos below posing with Chairman Michael Steele are the more sensible sort, but at least the poses in these photos – which are rather like the poses I’d do with my boss and coworkers – are a glimmer of hope that not all conservatives have gone tragically, completely and humourlessly off the rails.
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Demo Night in Canada
The TechDays conferences that we’ve been holding across Canada span two days and have no evening events. This means that the venues are “lying fallow”, with plenty of A/V, presentation and demo equipment doing nothing on the evening of the first day. That seemed like a waste.
“Why not,” we thought, “open up our venues to community events on the evenings of Day 1?”
We were able to do this in four out of the seven TechDays cities this year:
- We had Demo Ignite Camp in Vancouver in September
- followed by Failcamp Toronto 3 in Toronto, also in September
- and then Career Demo Camp in Montreal a couple of weeks ago
- and just this past week, we had Demo Night in Canada in Ottawa.
We put together each event with local people in order to make sure that each one had its own “local flavour” and fit the needs of the local audience. For Ottawa, we decided to approach two very different groups: the Ottawa IT Community, which comprises a number of .NET user groups, and Startup Ottawa, who are the Ottawa analogue of DemoCamp Toronto.
The event had two hosts: Glenn Schmelzle, from Startup Ottawa:
and Colin Melia, representing Ottawa IT Community:
The first presentation of the evening was This is My Language by Charles Wiebe and John Hansen, who showed us their programming language, Jetfire, which is built on top of the .NET Dynamic Language Runtime:
Next up were Scott Lake:
…and Craig Fitzpatrick:
…who presented Swix, their social media marketing metrics system. It looks both useful and beautiful (its UI shows the sort of rich interfaces you can build with jQuery), and Christian Beauclair and I both agreed that we could make us of it in our developer evangelism work.
After the Swix presentation came Islam Gomaa, who took us into the land of enterprise IT by talking about implementing ISO 27001 security:
The event went smoothly thanks to Christian, who once again provided invaluable assistance by helping the presenters get their machines hooked up to our A/V setup quickly:
Scott Annan talked about Techdrifters, a system for road warriors, cafe coders and people who work in coworking spaces to find an interact with each other. I must admit that it’s a topic close to my heart:
Jean-Rene Roy did the final presentation, a look at Microsoft’s Sync Framework – nope, not the car audio system, but the file synchronization system that bears the same name:
With the presentations wrapped up, we made our way to the Clock Tower brew pub on Clarence Street, where we enjoyed good conversation and a few drinks, including a round bought on my corporate card.
I’d like to thank Colin Melia, Scott Lake and Glenn Schmelzle for providing all the local help in getting Demo Night in Canada together, the presenters and the attendees who made it out to the event, in spite of all the snow. Let’s do this again soon!