Damir at the wheel, looking for an opening on the Don Valley Parkway.
I’m blogging and tweeting from the road today! My coworker Damir Bersinic (IT Pro Evangelist) and I have been loaned a Ford Flex equipped with Microsoft’s Sync and I’ve got my laptop hooked up to a Rogers internet stick. The photo above was taken just before noon, when we were on the Don Valley Parkway, right around Richmond Street.
I’ll be posting quite regularly from the road, so watch this space!
Ah, Montreal, city of nightlife, all-round fun and source of much of my girl trouble when I was a younger man, I’m heading your way next week…
Every young guy from out of town takes a picture of this Montreal landmark sign.
I’m there to help run the TechDays conference and do a presentation at Career Demo Camp. For more details, see my article at Canadian Developer Connection or Global Nerdy.
Sooner or later, unless you’re going to hide in a monastery or settle for entry-level jobs for the rest of your life, you will have to speak in front of a crowd of people. It may happen in front of a small circle of peers, a boardroom meeting, online or in front of an auditorium with thousands of people.
Whether you’re like me — I enjoy public speaking; it’s one way I get my jollies — or whether the thought of standing in front of a crowd to deliver a presentation turns your blood to ice, I think you’ll find Scott Berkun’s book, Confessions of a Public Speaker, both helpful and entertaining. I’ve been reading this book for a handful of reasons:
At 240 small pages with decent-sized type and with Berkun’s storytelling style, Confessions of a Public Speaker is a pretty quick read. He provides insights, advice, tips and probably most important of all, true “road warrior” stories that come from his own 15 years of public speaking plus stories of disasters faced by other well-known public speakers. Topics covered in the book include:
Confessions of a Public Speaker is one of those rare books that’s both entertaining and immediately useful. I’m going to recommend it to my fellow evangelists, and I certainly recommend it to you as well! It’s available directly from O’Reilly in both paper and ebook formats (I went with the ebook, which is US$19.99 / CA$21.45 as of this writing) as well as from the usual suspects: Chapters/Indigo, Amazon.ca and Amazon.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.
Have you ever had a coach that asked you to “give 110 percent”? Judging from the infographic below, 193 is the new 110:
If you’re going for sheer entertainment value and nothing else, back Palin. It would be like watching a real-life, large-scale version of Marat/Sade.
Hey, American readers! Whether you celebrate with the smooth flavour of Camel cigarettes as shown in the ad below or if you’re one of those conspiracy nuts who thinks smoking is bad for you, I’d like to wish you a safe and happy Thanksgiving!
(Can’t read the text in the ad below? Click it to see it at full size.)
My friend Sacha Chua is not someone who you’d think of as an introvert, but she is. Hang out in Toronto’s tech scene and sooner or later, you’ll catch one of her presentations, which she does with all with the energetic bounce that is her stock in trade. She considers technology evangelism and outreach not just part of her job, but part of her life. She has hundreds of blog subscribers, Facebook followers and LinkedIn contacts, and her Twitter followers number in the thousands. Despite all her public appearances, blog entries, and vast social network, she’s still an introvert.
There’s a reason the saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” has endured: it’s true (so true, in fact, that Malcolm Gladwell has done quite well for himself telling stories based on this particular nugget of wisdom). Wonderful things arise from opportunities, opportunities often come from connections and the some of the best connections are “weak ties”: those casual acquaintances who exist slightly outside our regular circles and who thus have information that we might otherwise never acquire. For a madly-grinning accordion-playing extrovert like Yours Truly, gathering weak ties is quite easy, and I’ve parleyed many a weak tie into an opportunity.
But what if you’re not an extrovert? Can introverts make the connections that can make the difference between getting by and getting ahead? The answer is yes, by playing to introversion’s strengths, taking advantage of some tools and following the steps in Sacha’s presentation, The Shy Connector, which I’ve included below:
All I wanted was my dinner. After an early morning flight back to Accordion City from Calgary and enough work to keep me from getting a decent lunch, I was looking forward to a nice dinner with The Missus at Wasabi (1730 Bloor Street West, at Keele), the all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant that had opened a few blocks away from our home.
Wasabi’s menu is not unlike those at other local all-you-can-eat sushi places like Aji Sai. It comprises a selection of sushi, sashimi, tempura, donburi and other things that can be made quickly and cheaply and can provide a lot of bang for your twenty bucks.
It’s the busiest restaurant that’s ever opened at that corner. When we walked in on Friday night, we saw a full restaurant bustling with all sorts of people: groups of young friends having dinner before a night out, many young families with strollers in tow, solo diners who brought some reading material with them, couples out for an end-of-week meal and so on. At first glance, the place appeared to be the next neighbourhood hit.
It took a little while for someone to take our order. We chalked it up to the place’s newness; it often takes a restaurant a little while to work the kinks out of its system during its “shakedown phase” and get a sense of how busy they’ll be. They appeared understaffed, and the the staff they had clearly weren’t used to working in a busy restaurant.
The orders we did manage to get were, for the most part, decent. The seafood tempura was done right, the dynamite roll was tasty and the edamame was well, edamame. After that, no food came to our table for a good while.
After asking around, we discovered that our order had been sent to the wrong table. We were still willing to forgive this mistake and place another order, and the waitress apologized and told us she’d be right back with a notepad. Hey, it’s an all-you-can-eat place, and most of the stuff was the kind that other places can make quickly.
She never came back. A good quarter-hour, complete with a lot of waves to the waitress, has passed without any service. It was clearly time for plan B.
“Enough already. Pizza slice?” I asked Wendy, gesturing to the Pizza Pizza across the street.
“Sure."
We walked up to the front, told the staff that our order had been served to the wrong table and no one had attempted to correct the mistake. Another customer who was standing at the counter said “Yeah, they screwed up my order, too.”
We also told them that we weren’t paying, and walked out. They gave no reply other than confused looks, tilted heads and stunned silence – not even an “I’m sorry". This sort of reaction is the hallmark of complete incompetence and the front-of-house staff treat the place as many similar people do: the restaurant’s just a place that provides a paycheque in exchange for you just showing up.
As we walked towards the pizza place, we ran into our neighbours Chris and Wanda, who were heading to Wasabi to try them out, and warned them away from the place. Consider this blog entry the same warning to the rest of the world: Wasabi is run by scatterbrains, and if you’d actually like some service, go elsewhere.