Posts Tagged ‘work’

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The cost of getting things done

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

I guess there wasn’t a lot of note that happened in February, seeing as I didn’t manage an update all month long. I’ve been busy, but not with any one thing in particular. I also haven’t been sleeping well. It’s a Sunday afternoon and I could easily go back to sleep now for another few hours except that I have places to be all too soon.

Work is good overall; progress is slow but definite. The other people on my team are busy putting out fires on other projects, so I don’t see or hear very much from them. I flew to San José for some meetings over a couple of days back in February, a routine I am getting used to, although I still dislike flying. I think I am doing some good stuff behind-the-scenes on this project that will be very appreciated when the spotlight is back on me and what I’ve been up to.

In the meantime, construction has continued on my condo and it’s been nice to see some progress being made. There is actual siding on one of the buildings now and I’ve had three of my windows replaced with new ones (the remaining should be done this coming week). It’s annoying because of all of the noise early in the morning, and I’ve had to remove all of my blinds and deal with construction workers coming inside from time to time, but that’s clearly the cost of getting things done. We have our annual homeowner’s association meeting coming up this week and while I usually dread it, it will be interesting to hear the state of the union as far as the construction project goes.

Next weekend should be interesting. It’s the Emerald City Comicon and as a result of affiliations between Theatresports friends of mine and the guy running the event, I will be performing there as a part of “NERDprov”: improv themed around nerdy subjects from TV, movies, comics and wherever else popular sub-culture takes us. I’m also doing a special Saturday Theatresports with two of the Internet-celebrities from The Guild (and before you ask, no, it’s not Felicia Day, it’s Zaboo and Vork, both of whom have excellent improv backgrounds and should be fun to play with). Today I am going to a “research party” of sorts with the rest of the cast where we will be boning up on our geekdom in preparation for the two events.

Also coming up in a couple of weeks is the wedding of two friends, for which Elizabeth and I will be flying out to North Carolina. While there we’re going to drop in on my parents who are vacationing in Hilton Head. It’s a long way to travel for just a few days, but you gotta take the opportunities you can get, I suppose.

We’ve been having some insanely nice spring weather, with sunny, bright skies and mild temperatures hovering around the fifties (that’s the tens for you Celsius folk). I don’t know if it’s global warming or just random spurts, but it’s been very welcome.

Dan.

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Knee-deep in nostalgia

Friday, December 11th, 2009

My pages of Night Zero are out! I am positively tickled by them, in particular how I am left begging my associates to kill me on the page immediately following their callous and lethal betrayal of me. (I was given a summary of each shot we were taking, but didn’t fully comprehend just how spectacularly undignified my character’s end would be.)

I went to San José for two days last week on business. It was a pretty productive trip, although we have an intense road map ahead of us. My return to Redmond was graced with my new work computer finally arriving: a beautiful 27″ quad-core iMac (with a secondary 24″ cinema display). The story behind these computers is that they were introduced a couple of months back as the latest-and-greatest iMac entries, but in doing so they killed the 24″ model line which I had been using at my previous job, leaving me the rather undesirable options of either going down to 21″ or up to 27″. If I wanted the quad-core, though, there was no choice but to get the 27″ model. Which means I now nearly have to strain my neck in order to read the time in the menu bar. Man, is it beautiful though, especially with Parallels technology that lets me run my Mac on one screen and Windows simultaneously on the other.

Turning thirty has been on my mind as of late. My birthday is barely a week away, and I can feel it creeping up alongside the various holiday business that otherwise occupies my free time. I wouldn’t exactly say it’s been bothering me a whole lot, but it’s hard for me to ignore the milestone, no matter how contrived it may be.

My parents sent me a very nice care package to celebrate which had me wading knee-deep in nostalgia. Among its contents were an outlandishly Canadian tuque and mittens, a block of 6-year-old Balderson cheddar, Mennonite salami from the St. Jacobs’ Farmers Market, President’s Choice white cheddar macaroni and cheese, and perhaps most interesting a wall calendar of various gorgeous shots of Ontario, including places like Webster Falls that I used to go to back in university.

Tonight I return to Theatresports with my team that won last week. It’s been terribly hard to get cast in the show with all of the new apprentices and my general dislike of manually setting up teams, so it was a relief to win last week and get a chance to play a second time. There is also talk of returning to the randomized teams one night a week, which would make me very happy. Next week regular Theatresports is being preempted by a special show, so it doesn’t really make a difference if my team wins or loses tonight.

The temperature has been below freezing all week. It mercifully hasn’t rained and as such the city remains functional, but there’s talk of it snowing tomorrow in which case I might as well batten down the hatches and hunker down until spring arrives, as there’ll be no hope of going anywhere or doing anything until it does.

Dan.

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All kinds of logic and business sense

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

I am attempting to cram in as much relaxation as possible into the final eighth or so of the four-day Thanksgiving weekend. Which isn’t to say it’s been overwhelmingly busy, but I’ve been out for a lot of it, and it’s nice to chill at home and take some time to do things like update this journal.

A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to do something fairly unique by guest-filming in Night Zero, which is a photography-based comic book about the zombie post-apocalypse. The shoot took place at an outdoor warehouse facility full of shipping containers… that alone was kind of cool, getting a glimpse inside Seattle’s large industrial zone. It was raining hard and extremely cold, which made for a very physically uncomfortable experience, but it was a lot of fun in spite of that and led to some terrific-looking shots.

I have no idea when the episode is coming out on their website, but we’ve been sent some early returns that we have been given permission to share, and they are in my gallery:

Night Zero 01

They are shot using a technique called HDR, and I think the photos look pretty awesome. My character is named Hoolie, a low-level grunt for an organization that collects bounties on zombie-heads, and (sadly) does not live past the episode in which he is introduced. I might have an invitation forthcoming to come back to shoot the cover (!) though, so that would be exciting.

My new job is going well. I didn’t have to travel much at first but last week I had to spend a couple of days out in Portland, and later this week I will be flying to San Jose again. I take the train when I go to Portland and it’s quite comfortable for about 3.5 hours, although I expect in the future I will pay the extra $14 or so for business class seating on the Cascades train, as you really take your chances with the quality of seating that you’ll get. I also need to make sure to take the Cascades train and not the Coast Starlight whenever possible… the Cascades is a shorter trip and each row of seats has an electrical outlet you can plug your toys into. The Coast Starlight is a double-decker which is kind of neat, but there’s no extra outlet so it’s easier to get bored, especially considering the trip takes an extra hour.

I also went a little crazy on my way to the station because it was my first time staying overnight in Portland, and there is no long-term parking to be had anywhere near the Seattle train station. That, to me, defies all kinds of logic and business sense, and I spent the trip quite anxious my car would be towed from the lot I parked in by the time I returned. I was relieved when it wasn’t, although the overage fee was hefty.

I’ve never been much of a Black Friday shopper, but I did take the opportunity to invest in a couple of ReadyNAS Duo units: one for myself, and one for my parents back in Toronto (whenever I can get it to them). I’ve been a fan of network-attached storage for quite a while, because you can access your stuff from any computer on your network and even across the Internet if you’re clever. These devices are the next step up, though, because they actually permit access and modifications to the software running on-board of them so you can have your device do much more sophisticated and even more clever things, like host web pages and download files for you from the Internet while your computer is off. My ultimate plan is to have my unit at home and the other running at my parents’ place, and have mine periodically back itself up to theirs over the Internet such that if there were ever to be anything catastrophic at my place there would be backups readily available 2000 miles away.

Sometimes it’s nice to be living in the future!

Dan.

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Best described as “impossible”

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

The past few weeks have been busy, and the next few weeks don’t show any sign of slowing down. We are attempting to meet some deadlines that are best described as “impossible”, but I’ve always liked a challenge. I’m getting used to working from home; starting to enjoy it even (not commuting rocks). I set up my new desk and created myself a proper office space:

New Desk

I’m currently working on my personal laptop, with what would today be considered an ancient 17″ external monitor hooked up to it (yes, it’s a flat-panel LCD, but hey, I brought it all the way from Toronto more than five years ago!). I have a much sexier work computer coming my way eventually but Apple has yet to ship it.

I’ve got some photos of Cannibal that I’ve posted to my gallery. It’s not a thoroughly representative selection but it’s nice, and I think the cast photo looks great:

full_cast

I will miss the show, but we had a good run (three shows for five weekends with almost no small houses!) and I’m pleased to have left it on a high note. I still catch myself singing the tunes from it, and probably will continue to for a while. There is talk about us mounting again next year, which I would definitely be up for.

In other news, at long last the reconstruction of the exterior of our condo complex is underway. I had serious doubts it would ever actually happen, and I’m relieved to see actual progress being made after more than a year since we finally voted to approve the project and assessment. I’m a little anxious because I want to take advantage of this opportunity to add some connectivity to the living room… when I first moved in the living room didn’t have any cable TV access whatsoever, and there was no unobtrusive way to wire it from either the bedroom or the den. I had a cable run through the walls outside my condo from the den to the living room, and it was just tucked away under the siding in a very haphazard fashion. I know I’ll get a chance to improve it when they strip off the siding on my unit, but what I want to do is add two new cables: an Ethernet and an HDMI cable, so that I can have both wired Internet (instead of relying on wireless) and a high definition TV signal from my computer. This is tricky because I may have a fairly small chance to act, and a lot will depend on the attitude of the construction workers. It certainly helps that I’ll be working from home… when the siding comes off I know there’s plywood underneath, but am I even going to be able to go around things like beams and columns? I can’t really tell just by looking at it.

Another timing factor is that I want to upgrade my living room electronics in general. This primarily means a new (read: bigger) television, but it also might mean a sound system, something I’ve never considered in the past. If I want to install rear speakers, it would be a good idea to attempt to run speaker wire outdoors at the same time, but I don’t know if that will be possible, and won’t even know if it’s relevant until I get a new TV, which is still a tentative matter at best. It’s all so confusing and hectic, and with the holidays coming up is unlikely to get any less so.

Dan.

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Fairly big life change

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

The thinly and not-so-thinly veiled allusions to big changes in my life can finally be put to rest. My last day working for Ubermind was on Friday; on Monday I began working for deCarta, a company that provides various mapping services (“location-based services” or “LBS”) for both embedded devices and the Internet.

If it seems like a bizarre manoeuvre in navigating the path of my career, well, it is, but it’s not without rhyme or reason. Location-based services is a hugely growing field in technology with the advent of so many location-aware (ie. GPS-equipped) network devices like the iPhone. I strongly believe it’s the next frontier of the digital age, and we’ve already seen the initial wave, but the quality of the existing software lags tremendously behind what the hardware is now capable of. DeCarta is giving me the opportunity to change that, and to hopefully be a really influential player in this emerging marketplace. Which rocks. I am leaving Ubermind with something of a heavy heart, but the timing is right and it’s too good an opportunity to pass up.

So I have begun work as a Senior Software Engineer there, where I will be putting my game development skills to work on redefining the user experience when interacting with maps on various handheld devices.

DeCarta is headquartered in San Jose, California, but rather than uprooting my life for a third time I will be telecommuting from my home in Redmond. This is a fairly big and slightly scary change for me; I’ve worked from home before but it’s never been my main workplace. I’ve had to give away the futon in my den, one of the pair of matching futons that has loyally and obediently followed me since I first moved out to New York City in 2004; I can assure you my heart was pierced at that sacrifice. I’ve replaced it with an L-desk from Fry’s that required a borrowed pick-up truck and (if we’d been adequately prepared) a third person to move it into my condo, but we had to make do with only two of us. It currently sits on the floor in its two unbelievably heavy boxes; I hope to assemble it this weekend and finish turning my den into a proper office that will solidify the line between my home space and my work space.

In the meantime, deCarta flew me down to San Jose yesterday for my first week. It is the first of what will no doubt be many such business trips, especially for the immediate future, as I am diving into a project that has a major milestone next month. I generally dislike flying and the stress it causes me, but the company’s travel policy is a good one and keeps me comfortable when I’m away, and it doesn’t hurt that the weather here is immeasurably nicer than Seattle this time of year. They also have a smaller office in Portland which I may occasionally visit; it’s about three hours away by train.

So: fairly big life change there. My second job switch in under a year. I’m hoping it’s my last one for a while.

I went out for drinks with the Ubermind folks on my last day. It was a good time, and I will miss them and the work I was doing there. (I won’t miss commuting to Fremont or competing for parking around that crowded block, though.)

Cannibal is closing this weekend. We’ve had some spectacular houses, and I won’t be at all surprised if we sell out on Halloween. It’s one of the few shows I’ve done where people are actually coming back to see it a second and third time… which isn’t to say it’s necessarily good, but at the very least it’s enjoyably bad. You should get tickets if you haven’t already; it closes this Sunday, and if you miss it, you miss it.

Dan.

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