Category: Work

"You'll need a snorkel to breathe underneath the pile of groupies that will sack you."

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My wife sent me this link titled How to totally fake being a geek (which I assume she found through some sort of google search that scours the web for any mention of Buffy The Vampire Slayer). I’m glad it’s tongue-in-cheek, ’cause I’d hate to think that knowing Assembler is the ne plus ultra of geekiness. Why? Because I know Assembler. At least, I knew it. At least, a I knew a little bit. When I first moved here my job was mainframe programming; don’t ask me why, ’cause I had no programming experience.

It was tough to learn, since writing Assembler is what I imagine it’s like to talk to a retarded robot, but from then on every other programming language seemed like a treat. The first time I tried COBOL I was ecstatic because it could do, you know, math like a human. It was like when my brothers and I learned to drive; we didn’t learn on a car, or on any automatic…we learned on the 2-ton stick-shift farm truck. Once you can work with that, a Ford Tempo’s a pussycat.

That said, it’s been so long since my foot’s touched a clutch, it’d probably be pretty comical to watch me try.

[tags]geekery, buffy, assembler, cobol[/tags]

I am not afraid of you and I will beat your ass

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Just when I was getting my music inbox under control, it’s ballooned again, mostly because I finally got around to reading an Esquire article that I’d ripped out and left on my desk a month ago. It listed a few bands — the Cold War Kids and Murder By Death — whose myspace pages intrigued me enough to download their albums; if I like them (and early indications are that I will) I’ll begin the search for way to buy their obscure albums.

There are still more myspace pages in that article too; for now here’s the current playlist (including what might be the greatest album title of all time, courtesy of Yo La Tengo):

  • johnny cash – a hundred highways
  • yndi halda – enjoy eternal bliss
  • yo la tengo – i am not afraid of you and i will beat your ass
  • mates of state – bring it back
  • ladyhawk – ladyhawk
  • murder by death – in bocca al lupo
  • cold war kids – up in rags
  • cold war kids – with our wallets full
  • cold war kids – mulberry street

.:.

Connections seem to be popping up for me all over the place on LinkedIn.com. My brother invited me…more than a year ago, I think, and I didn’t pay attention until recently, and suddenly everyone seems to be using it. My friend Joe pointed out that it’s almost as gay as Friendster. He’s right…but it’s still funny to see all the ex-Delanoids and remember some names from the past.

[tags]esquire, johnny cash, yndi halda, yo la tengo, mates of state, ladyhawk, murder by death, cold war kids, linkedin, friendster, delano technology[/tags]

Snakes on a [your industry here]

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I cross-posted this to my blog at work. It seems to apply equally to the outside world.

This blog post from the CTO of Cap Gemini got me thinking. He references something propethic Peter Drucker said years ago, about the first technology innovation being all about printing (I can’t find the original Drucker quotes, so I assume he meant Gutenberg) and how it displaced monks as the sole source of knowledge management. Publishers now held all the distribution power, but the general public had much freer access to information.

Fast forward a few hundred years and things haven’t changed much; a tiny minority of publishers hold all the power in deciding what gets bound, distributed and sold. Sure, there are underground ‘zines and such, but their reach is miniscule. Drucker’s afore-mentioned comments were about the PC, which signalled changes to the way information was gathered (like Gutenberg’s movable type machine supplanting the monk’s pen), but he probably didn’t know about the internet (still called Arpanet at the time) which would go on to provide an incredibly efficient distribution network reaching practically everyone (which Gutenberg couldn’t have even conceived of). In recent years we’ve seen personal publishing tools like blogs get us past the PC limitation; even five years ago to get any content online you pretty much needed to know how to write HTML and secure web hosting, but now anyone can fire up a blogger or wordpress account and let ‘er rip. Continuing the analogy, this is not unlike Gutenberg delivering one of his presses to every household who wanted one, complete with a team of messengers who could run printed copies around the world in a few seconds.

So what does this mean? Who cares if everyone can now blog about their cat or what they ate for dinner last night or whether Ubuntu Linux is better than OSX? Well, it goes beyond that. Consider this other example I found this morning on Church Of The Customer: given the interesting way in which Snakes On A Plane has developed, Samuel Jackson is advocating an open-source, script-by-committee movie.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia‘s been judged to be about as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, artists are posting their music on MySpace and winning over fans they would never have found living under the thumb of the recording industry (just ask the Arctic Monkeys) and products like Dell and Kryptonite bike locks are finding out the hard way that bad news travels fast.

Think this doesn’t apply to you? Wrong. It applies to everyone. As of today, no one controls their own marketing.

[tags]cap gemini, peter drucker, gutenberg, social marketing, social computing, wikipedia, snakes on a plane, dell hell, arctic monkeys[/tags]

rrr

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Let’s Get Out Of This Country, the new Camera Obscura album, is pretty good. I bought it last night. Downloaded it on Soulseek around 8:00, listened to it between 8:30 – 9:30 while I did work, liked it, signed on to eMusic and downloaded the real version around 9:35.

.:.

Also good (so far…I’m only a few songs in) is Or from a Japanese band called Spangle Call Lilli Line. I don’t know what it is with me and Japanese bands (or at least Japanese lyrics) lately. I heard about them on an old 75minutes podcast; I’m several months behind but doing my best to catch up.

.:.

It’s fun to meet and talk to people who’re smarter than you, but it’s a little intimidating when they’re a freaking student. I mean, I’d like to think I’m a pretty smart guy; I read Wealth Of Nations, and I think I even understood it. It was about girls, right? Just kidding. Anyway, I should just never google people before I meet them; it’s depressing how little I’ve accomplished at the age of 30, let alone 20-whatever.

[tags]camera obscura, emusic, spangle call lilli line, 75minutes, wealth of nations, paraphrasing high fidelity[/tags]

An apology in point form

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Sorry, I’ve been too busy to blog anything terribly interesting because:

  • The course I’m doing right now is killer. I was talking to a classmate today, and he concurred: the workload for this one is much, much heavier than anything else we’ve done. It’s interesting, but it’s time-consuming. I guess I was due for one of these; too many so far have been crazy easy.
  • It’s the summer. Days that aren’t hotter than the hubs of hell draw me outside.
  • Family’s been visiting, and family trumps blogging.
  • I seem to be reading (for fun, in addition to for school; I finally finished Cluetrain, Planet Simpson and No War: America’s Read Business In Iraq) again, not to mention finally putting a dent in our Zip queue.
  • Work is busy…not so much because I have impending deadlines, but because I feel a bit rejuvenated. It’s just as frustrating and bureaucratic as ever, but I seem more determined than ever to kick bureaucracy’s ass. I’ll let you know how that goes.

However, I can report some things that grabbed my eye today, but only in point-form:

Music:

  • I’m going to miss Asobi Seksu at the Horseshoe in September as I’ll be away on course. Frig.
  • There’ll be a new Trail Of Dead album in October.
  • The Mercury Prize shortlist has been announced, and I couldn’t give a toss about any of the finalists. The only one I liked at all is the Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan album, and even that wasn’t great.
  • The Weeds theme song next season will be sung by a different artist every week. Lined up so far: Death Cab For Cutie, Regina Spektor, Elvis Costello and Jenny Lewis. Cool. “Little boxes…”
  • The new Johnny Cash disc, American V…magnifique.

Movies:

Sports:

  • Bill Simmons has picked a favourite English Premiership League team. He settled on Tottenham Hotspur, because “If London was the Corleone family, Manchester United was Sonny and Arsenal was Michael, then the Spurs would be Fredo with a little more street smarts.” Brilliant.

Right, that’s it. Back to work for me.

[tags]cluetrain, planet simpson, no war, asobi seksu, trail of dead, mercury prize, isobel campbell, mark lanegan, weeds, johnny cash, clerks ii, lady in the water, arrested development movie, all your snakes are belong to us, bill simmons, tottenham hotspur[/tags]

Vodka, caviar, and suicidal novelists

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

What’s a humid Sunday after a night of fitful sleep good for? Movies! We watched two yesterday:

The Squid And The Whale (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was good, but I don’t know if it was 94%-on-Rotten-Tomatoes good. It was actually one of those rare movies that I wish was longer; they could’ve spent another 15-20 minutes pushing through those stories and I wouldn’t have minded. There’s no doubt about it: those parents screwed those kids up in ways that only two highly-educated neurotic egotists could.

Lord Of War (imdb | rotten tomatoes) seemed to have a weird theatrical release; it got almost no advance marketing but still did $24 million on what seemed to me like just a few screens, but that still seemed odd given the presence of Nicholas Cage in the lead role. I liked the movie, but it never quite seemed to make me feel quite as bad as I think Andrew Niccol wanted me to. He hit the macro discomfort level (pointing out that most arms dealing is done by the five permanent members of the UN security council), but didn’t effectively hit the micro level: no one I cared about really seemed to experience any personal loss because of their actions. Still, it’s worth watching.

.:.

More and more at work I’ve become interested in marketing…of sorts. I still view traditional marketing as this morbid evil, but my job has become less about using technology to deliver our company’s services and more about reinterpreting what those services should be; technology is simply becoming the standard method of delivery. Attending the mesh conference, reading Cluetrain, taking that recent marketing course (and shaking my head with disgust through nearly the whole thing), regular conversations with my boss (who also gets it), daily articles showing up in my feed reader about social marketing, blogs, wikis, podcasts, pinko marketing…and on and on. I feel like there’s real change to be had here, but I never fancied myself a marketing kind of guy. I was a guy who could straddle the line between technology and business — having decent background in both — but marketing never seemed to be a real (or honorable) aspect of business.

But is marketing changing? Or is the change that’s coming something bigger than marketing, something big enough to fundamentally change the way companies operate? Well…probably not, but things could get more interesting as they get more transparent, but I sometimes find myself wanting to lead that change.

I just don’t know if I could stand the hypocrisy. God…next I could be saying that I want to go into sales…

[tags]squid and the whale, lord of war, social marketing, cluetrain, pinko marketing[/tags]

Hell all

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That subject line is a lot funnier if you worked at Delano.

.:.

Word of advice: if you should find yourself drinking a chocolate chiller from Second Cup (or any other similar frozen drinky thing), restrain yourself from sucking it all back in one or two gulps. Today I inhaled so much ice in one go that I temporarily incapacitated myself. I’d hate to see it happen to you too.

.:.

My music “inbox” is getting out of hand again: Be Your Own Pet, Danielson, Danny Michel, Jesu, John Frusciante, Jolie Holland, Primal Scream, Thom Yorke, Tilly & The Wall and a few others that wouldn’t fit on my memory key. Is there some part of my music habit that I can outsource? Perhaps my evaluation of new music can be offshored?

[tags]delano, second cup, enjoyment outsourcing[/tags]

Personally, I think she may have lots of babies in lots of places

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I had a pretty good day. I got a lot done at work this morning (partly because I did a lot of prep work last night), and then at noon our department had a barbecue and team-building thingy outside. Ate a burger, drank some water, found some shade and then took part in the little team competition. I caught and returned a soccer throw-in, identified some flags, figured out the world jumble (the trick: don’t look at it for a few seconds) and kicked a penalty shot (using a winnie-the-pooh ball) past my VP. Alas, my team came in second, but we won some chocolate medals. Score.

I then had coffee (well…frozen icy chocolate beverages) with my friend Amy. She was the first person I met at this company, back in 1997, and after all the different roles and different departments for both of us (including a two-year stint at another company for me and a year of mat leave for her) we’ve ended up working on the same project. She’s like a big sister to me, but she also happens to be a very trusted colleague, so it’s great that we’ve ended up working just a block apart.

.:.

From Yahoo: Britney Spears may have baby in Namibia.

If you care about this story at all, I fucking hate you.

.:.

I am both excited and guilt-ridden about what I am about to do: turn off the computer and just watch a movie. How sad is that?

[tags]team building, britney spears, namibia, protestant work ethic[/tags]

Je suis fatigue.

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My wife just told me I haven’t been posting much lately. I guess it’s ’cause I’m busy. And tired. I can tell the tired bit ’cause this morning, when she got up to go to the gym, I didn’t wake up at all. Normally I’m a very light sleeper and wake up at the slightest bit of noise, but this morning I was dead to the world — slept through her alarm, through her getting ready, through the cats being pains in the ass…everything. That tells me that I must be exhausted, and no wonder; usually after a course I take the weekend (if not the entire next week) to recuperate, but this time I had the laptop on from morning to night working on the paper that’s due Thursday. That’s almost done, but I’ve already started reading the next textbook because of how heavy the workload looks, so I haven’t had any break.
That’s to say nothing of trying to catch up on work after a week away.

I don’t mean to whine. Part of me kind of relishes tough situations like this, but I know that I’m no longer able to propel myself along on caffeine with no sleep for weeks on end like I could when I was at Delano. I just need a little rest. Friday evening can’t get here fast enough.

Steeeeeeee-rike!

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The sudden TTC strike this morning is really throwing the city into traffic chaos. My office is half empty, partially because regular TTC riders can’t get to work, and partially because the resulting car traffic has overloaded Toronto’s streets and highways — which are stretched paper thin on a good day — causing substantial delays in getting anywhere by car. It’s going to be a weird day.

[tags]ttc, strike, toronto transit commission[/tags]