My Long Weekend: Day 2 of 3

From the “Canada Day Long Weekend” Dept.

Well, it’s 11:30pm Sunday night. It is Day 2 of my 3 day long weekend.

I have to admit, it’s very difficult to work when you’re suppose to be on holiday.

I’ve managed to complete 1 1/2 reports of the 4 reports that are suppose to be done. Not as productive as I would have hoped, but hey, it is the weekend, right?

I cut my hair today. A little on the short-side, but in a week it will be fine.

I’m always amazed at how much hair I’m managed to cut away. It’s a very liberating experience—I liken it to shaving (another infrequent past-time for me). Very cleansing; almost spiritual.

My contract at Critical Path ends soon, so I’ll be looking for a new job.

Hmm…I hope I am more focused than I was in my prior sabbatical. I am fearful that I might move into that blue-funk again….Especially with the release of such games as Neverwinter Nights (D’n‘D RPG —the way it was meant to be on the computer) and Warcraft 3 (hey, it’s made by Blizzard, so it has to be good, right?), I am worried that I may be spending the summer playing video games rather than looking for full-time work.

Now, I know I’m too smart to let something like that happen, but man…I’ve been waiting for these games to come out for such a long time. Especially, Neverwinter Nights. However, I have to admit, I don’t own any computer hardware that could play these games (not even on my 6-month old iBook). So the likelihood of such a summer is not in the cards.

From the “What do I do when I get Paid” Dept.

I am getting paid soon, and I’m wondering what should I spend my money on?

Next to paying off bills and debt, I’m thinking one of three toys:

• a Digital Still Camera,
• a Digital Video Camera, or
• a computer upgrade for my PC

Now I know I don’t need a computer upgrade. There’s no reason for me to spend the 800 dollars and move my K6-3 550 MHz to an Athlon 1800+ (w/ an ABIT KR7A mobo, 512 MB of PC2100 DDRAM, and a RADEON 7500 64MB + misc hardware). My computer does everything just fine (except for games…).

So it’s a toss up for Digital Video or a Digital Still Camera. I know it would be more affordable for the Digital Still Camera (probably a Canon Powershot S30 or G2— while my co-worker Peter isn’t a fan of either camera’s aesthetic, even he admits that they’re both good cameras with competitive features). As for a Digital Video camera, I’d probably go with either a low end Canon or Sony.

I don’ t know. I don’t own a camera, so I’m not “picture crazy” like some of my friends who INSIST on documenting our lives on film. Moreover, what would I do with a DV Cam? Make ASB #3?

From the “Books that inspire Right-Side of my Brain” Dept.

I found an interesting book called “Batman :: ANIMATED“ in Indigo Books last Friday. Fascinating. It’s about Batman: the Animated Series. I’ve always liked the series. I’ve seen every episode and most of the feature-length, animated movies. I love the art design and the direction of each episode—very adult sometimes. The book talks about the series, how the characters were developed, and the inspiration for some of the better known episodes. It has a really rich, graphical layout too. Perhaps, the most amazing thing about it are the full page spreads of some of the storyboards used in the series. Fabulous. I’m always amazed at how an cartoon or movie can be manfuctured from a sequence of still pictures.

I’m kicking myself for not buying it. Damn. It WAS $45 CDN, so it wasn’t cheap. However, in hindsight, it’s one of those books that really can inspire the atrophied right-hemisphere of my brain.

If any of you do find that book and like it, I would also suggest “Batman Collected“ by Chip Kidd.

Anway, I have to hit the sack and wake up early to do some major work.

Cheers,

-T

Working Brain

From the “Infrequent Blogging” Dept.

It’s sunny, no humidity—a nice day. It’s a very comfortable 27ºC.

I don’t want to work…I don’t think anybody in the office want’s to work.

Lots of stuff has happened over the past two-plus weeks that I since wrote in my log. My work at Critical Path has gotten much more intense (which is why I haven’t written), the ASB#2 video has been filmed (thanks for Mendel and Dave flying from Tokyo and Milwalkee for the shoot, respectively), and Eric and Aneil came back from Asia with amazing stories and pictures.

My heart goes out to Arthur and Angela’s father. He suffered his second heart attack, but fortunately all indications are that it was small, and that his high fitness-level (he was playing tennis at the time) will lead to a quick and full recovery. Sometimes when you do everything right, something bad still happens.

Jen and I are still good. Jen, Florence, Cris, and Kevin went to Boston for the long weekend. To be honest, I wasn’t that hyped on going. Several reasons really:

1. Quoting Aneil, “I think it’s only appropriate that we spend Canada Day in Canada,
2. I don’t have any money, because I don’t get paid until the end of my contract (mid July),
3. and the biggest reason: I have a sh*tload of work to do (deliverables are due).

I worked at home last Wednesday. I had a tough time trying to explain to my father that I could use the extra 2 hours of time working, rather than commuting from Markham to TO and back. I went for a run down the Rouge Valley with my Brother and Eric. The run really kicked-my-ass. Sore joints…had to stop at the 25 minute mark, and start walking-running intervals for the rest of the leg. Sorry, Eric, i couldn’t give you something more competitive.

Well, all the frequent running, and regular work outs…I’ve lost 3 pounds.

I still have to do more Abdominal work though. Got to get rid of the roll of fat.

I was reading a report that I wrote for Critical Path last year (it’s the template of the reports that I’m using now). Wow. I’m the type of person that tends to dismiss the stuff that I had written in the past…but I have to admit, the report was solid. Very solid.

Have you ever written something back in high school or university that you thought was great, but when you read it now, you shudder at how infantile it sounds? That happens to me all the time.

This weekend is basically work, work, work, and more work. I’m going out with Clement, Leo, Ann, and John to On the Curve for dinner and drinks. After that, I’m skeptical that I’ll be able to go fishing on Sunday or up to Jamie’s cottage as I had initially planned.

Life is like that sometimes. It sucks, so I’ll get over it now.

There. I’m over it. 😀

Cheers guys. I hope all of your weekends will be more eventful than mine.

Back to work.

-T

The Barenaked Circus Debacle

From the “How could we of known” Dept.

So I went to the “Barenaked Circus” Concert at the Molson Amphitheatre with Jen, Natasha, Cris, Mae, Jamie, Karim and Sarah.

The tickets said 4pm, so we arrived at the gates at 3:10pm, lined up and went in.

The concert did start at 4pm, but it wasn’t the Barenaked Ladies. We were like, okay, cool, it’s just the opening act.

The band ended playing a full 40-minute set.

Three bands after the first act, at 9:30pm, the Barenaked Ladies finally played. The concert ended at 11:00pm.

Okay, I was disappointed. Jen and I both had work to do, and we had expected the concert to end at around 6:30p. Jen was suppose to go into work. I wanted to finish off stuff for next week.

That didn’t happen.

Natasha missed her bus back to Guelph.

Even thought BNL gave a great show, it was tainted by my overall dissatisfaction of the four mediocre bands that played.

To add insult to injury, I still didn’t have a chance to go running, I had to eat McDonald’s for Dinner, and Natasha lost the clothes that she had purchased at the Eaton’s Centre.

Man, I’m trying to get healthy but things like this suck.

Cheers,

Tai

Coolness factor, I did save Mike’s iBook, and the Bier Market.

From the “I am 2 times more cool now” Dept.

I woke up today and packed my clothes up because I was to spend the night at Jen’s House today. We also promised that we’d go running tonight too. So I packed my shooes and stuff.

Today i decided to wear a thumb ring and bowling shoes—instant cool factor.

Shannon was very distraught to hear that I didn’t know about the change in venues last night. I’m like, “Uh, Shannon, I can’t check email without an Internet connection. Next time call, please.”

Looks like wearing a thumb ring and red bowling shoes makes me more cool but less of a nice guy. Hmmm.

From the “If I’m so amazing, why don’t you hire me?” Dept

So Mike came in this morning. He thanked me for the install disks that helped rebuild his computer. I said, “No problem Mike, just think of all the wonderful stuff that I could do if I was here full-time!”

Mike laughed, but I decided not to joke around about my employment anymore. That’s just bad taste, and CP has done a lot of for me already.

Ironically, Mike made a similar joke a long the same lines in the afternoon. I told Mike that we shouldn’t joke about that….

From the “Honest Conversation” Dept.

I had a really great conversation with Sasa. He’s a developer at CP. He has a real inquiring mind…which can be annoying because he questions everything. Anyway we had a great conversation about What we think about Design, how I fit in on the scale of things and where I think Design in New Media is heading.

My conclusion:

• Mike and Peter were in the right place at the right time
• I came into the industry right on the tail-end of the dot.com bubble
• I should have taken more out of my time here at CP (I don’t know if that’s even possible)
• If the job market is any indication, New Media Designers (HTML, Flash, Multimedia, etc.) will be required to know more backend functions, rather then just doing front-end work, and
• If you don’t have a degree (which gives credence to your profession) or previous work experience—you’re in for a tough time.

Good conversation, I felt spoke eloquently—I guess that’s what happens when your speak honestly.

Bier Market

Left work to go to the Bier Market—a tap house with over a hundred different types of beer. The last time I was there, was 3rd-year University. Saw Dan, Florence, Susana, Cris, Le, Carolyn. Good fun—until the waitress spilled beer all over Flow and Sue. At least we got a free round of drinks…unfortunately there isn’t a drink called a “Virgin Martini”. If there was, I suppose it would be water.

We waited for Jen for a long time. She didn’t get there until about 10:30p. So I didn’t go running today. We all had dinner at Marche.

It sucks that I didn’t have a chance to run. I was really looking forward to it.

Cheers,

-T

Saving the Day, Apple Driven by Design, Ditched, and Dinner with Jen

From the “Thought you might need this” Dept

So I woke up this morning and said, you know what, Mike might need my install disks and restore disks for OS 10.1. So I pulled out my box for my iBook and through it into my back pack.

In the morning I gave them to Mike, who still was trying to fix his laptop. That scored major points.

Blaine asked me to borrow my disks. I said no problem man, “Share the wealth.”

Shannon set up a dinner at Kalendar Restaurant for a whole bunch of CP people. She invited me, and I said i was going to be late because of the seminar I was going to, but I said I’d be there by 8:00 pm with Jen.

From the “This speaker is way too happy” Dept.

I went to the Apple Driven by Design Seminar today. It was okay. The speaker was a little too happy, I thought. The crowd there was a little too easy to please—they’d clap at anything:

Speaker: I love OS 10.1. It’s so easy to use. Look at the bouncy icons at the dock

Crowd: [Clap, Clap, Clap]

Overall, the Adobe presentation was awesome. Lots of integration between products. All the products recognize native file formats (.psd, .ai, etc.), so you don’t have to export your files into EPS or jpegs/gifs. Just insert as an AI file, and PSD file. When you publish, it publishes it in the right format. One advantage of this is that editing and resizing images is much quicker.

InDesign supports transparency, dropshadows, and because it recognizes .ai and .psd, you no longer need clipping masks or slices. Absolutely awesome. Amazing text handling and table management features. I was very impressed by the Adobe presentation.

My criticisms include:

• Not enough peripheral demonstrations (no imaging or printing technology demo’d
• Everything was demonstrated on the fastest available computer—not convincing since most people don’t own a Dual 1 GHz PowerPC Desktop
• Nothing on Font Management
• the display booths were lacking

Over all I was impressed.

From the “I can’t believe you ditched me” Dept.

So I leave the Apple Driven by Design Seminar at around 7:15p and I buy a book on PHP4.

I get to Kalendar just after 8:00pm.

No one is there.

I’m like, “Where are they? They didn’t ditch me did they?”

I called, but no luck.

Jen came about 5 minutes later. We had a nice dinner at a restaurant called Langolino at 50c Clinton Street. It turns out, it was our 3 Year, 2 month anniversary, so it was nice to see her and have great conversation over fetuccini alfredo.

Mike’s iBook Troubles and How I saved the Day

From the “iBook update Bomb and How I saved the Day” Dept.

Well, I kind of saved the day….read on.

Today Apple released a large OS update weighing in at 22 MBytes. It was suppose to offer a whole whizzbang set of functionality to the OS.

In particular: Quartz Anti-Aliasing of fonts—So Now I have smoothed fonts all away around.

I updated immediately as soon as I found out about the update. It went fine for me. Unfotunately for Mike, his update crashed his computer. It would no longer boot.

We had the other OS 10.1 gurus take a look at Mike’s computer. No dice.

Coincidentally, I had brought in a stack of CDs containing software that I had acquired, and one of them was Tech Tools Pro—a disk repair utility. One run, and everything was OK, Mike could boot back in to OS 10.1.4 and do work.

Now this is the part that I thought was unwise. Mike tried to install the 10.1.5 update again. In fact, he tried doing it so many times, he ended up breaking his computer. Now, if this had happened to me, I would have never attempted to update my computer again…especially if it’s the computer that I use to do work. Mike was just so focused on getting this update. He kept mentioning: “I don’t have time for this shit.” I even told him maybe he should lay off of this until he get’s back to Calgary; he didn’t listen. I thought it was weird. He wasted the entire day rebooting, using techtools, restoring his drive, and reinstalling the operating system.

I left the office with him still fiddling with his iBook.

Lunch with Laura, the Return of Michael Kurtz

From the “I am losing weight” Dept.

I admit it. I was gaining a massive amount of weight during the last 3 months of 2001. I’m not going to deny that. So I had Lunch with Laura (ex-girlfriend/best friend) today and she said I had lost weight. That’s good. She said that I looked horrible the last time she saw me: Christmas of 2001.

Thanks Laura,

you Rock.

Right now I’m about 158 lbs. I’m trying to lose about 15-20 lbs of fat (running regularly, “resistance training”, and eating “within reason”).

From the “return of Mr. Michael Kurtz” Dept.

Well, my boss Michael Kurtz is visiting the office this week. That’s good.

Mike is brilliant at what he does. He’s an artist, an industrial designer, Human Factors specialist, programmer, and all around great guy. You don’t meet too many people like that anymore—kind of a digital man for all seasons. He typifies the “dot.com” era in my eyes.

I’m glad to have worked with him.

Cheers,

Tai

Getting in shape

From the “Holy Shit! I have to lose some weight” Dept.

Hi all,

Well last weekend I worked on the computer, did some house chores and the like. I wanted to go fishing, but alas, it was not to be. I suppose I will have to wait until bass season opens. 😀

This upcoming Saturday I will be going to watch the Bare Naked Ladies Live at the Molson Amphitheatre with Jen, Natasha, Sarah and her boyfriend.

Hopefully I’ll have time this weekend to see my chum Laura so I can wish her a happy birthday. She and I went to Europe together (with Cris and Jen).

Worked out today….that felt good. Went for a run with my brother…that felt, uh, well, it felt bad. My achilles tendon on each leg were acting up, and I felt crappy through most of the run.

My HR: 168 beats per minute ~85% maximum heart rate for a person my age. My time running: 16 minutes.

Eek. I know, horrible.

At least I’m brave enough to write it down.

I realise that respiration isn’t a limiting factor, but damn yo-I felt bad.

So what happened? It’s obvious that I had yet to reach steady-state.

Expanded explanation: When the body is forced to exercise, it overshoots the physical requirements needed to actually perform the work required. This overshoot (in respiration, heart rate, etc.) is really dramatic in people who have a low physical fitness (like me, I’ve been basically sedentary for the past 6 months). Thus, in the first five minutes, my respiration rate (the number of breaths I take each minute) and my heart rate jumped up to almost 80% max. This is why novice runners, or any low fitness person for that matter, can’t do a cardiovascular work out over long periods of time, because the ramp up is so suddent, it makes them feel like shit. Once they get past that “hump” or “wall” (at about the 12-15 minute mark), their body begins to ramp down; respiration decreases, heart rate drops—they reach “steady-state”. They get their “second wind” and can run longer.

Novice runners, who stick with it, and don’t give up will find that they’ll be running 45 minutes easily within a month. I trained for my first 10 km run in only 28 days back when I was 17.

Elite athletes’ bodies do much the same, but the hump is much less pronounced, and they reach steady-state much sooner.

So what does this mean for me? Having run at an intermediate distance throughout highschool and 1st year university, I know that it’s important to keep running and break that wall.

Besides, I have to get into shape for the “Albert Street Boys” Reunion.

There are of course strategies to cope with this, Interval training being one of them.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about sweating. Does sweating more = good or bad?

Cheers,

Tai

A Most Wondrous Shareware App

From the “Highly Technical and Esoteric” Dept.

Okay guys, you’ve been warned.

For the past few days, I’ve been using a most wondrous shareware app.

It’s a called LaunchBar, and it’s only for Mac OS 10.1.

What does it do?

It eliminates most of the mousing that I have to do on my iBook.

How does it work?

Well, it is so simple—brilliant actually—All I have to do is type press two keys on my keyboard (the command key + spacebar) at the same time, and type the name or the document, URL, application, or folder that I want open or switch to.

It doesn’t sound very impressive, but it eliminates two of the major bottlenecks in OS 10.1:

• too much mousing, and
• a poor application switching model.

One of the most impressive things about LaunchBar is that it lists possible objects as you type. The more you type, the closer you get to your intended goal (application, URL, Document, Folder). It also uses some sort of fuzzy logic to determine abbreviations and misspelled words as you type. The best part, is that i it remembers what you’ve type becoming more accurate the longer you use it (I’m not too sure on that point, I think it’s partly user induced).

For example, if I wanted to open Photoshop 7, I would open LaunchBar, and type “psh”, and I would get the following dropdown list:

I can refine the results by adding a 7 to it, to make “psh7”, I’d get the correct application.

It works for the following entries as well:

• ps7
• pshop
• 7
• photo
• pht7

I love this program!

Well, only as much as you can love technology. So, don’t worry Jen, technology will never be able to compete with you for affections.

I’ll probably keep using MaxMenus, simply because it does Fitt’s Law properly.

Life is good. I can use my iBook without the incessant mousing.

Things must be turning around.

Cheers,

Tai

Lunch, Tired Feet, Mental Clarity

Lunch

It’s Lunch time right now, for me at least. I realise that most people don’t eat lunch at 2:00 pm in the afternoon, but that seems to be the time I get hungry here are Critical Path.

I wish I could show you guys some of the stuff I’m working on. It’s light years ahead of the stuff that I worked on last year, really exciting.

Tired Feet

I’ve been walking to and from the Go Train Station near my house to make it downtown, and I usually take a walk during lunch just to clear my head. The walk to the Go Train Station from my house is a brisk 20 minutes, one way. (ASIDE: When Jen walks it, it’s close to 30 minutes) My lunch time walking, is probably about 15 minutes total. So those two things alone means I walk over an hour a day, not including walking around the house or in the office. Doing that in Italian Bowling shoes for the past three days, have made my feet really tired. Fortunately I decided to wear my Garmont Aroyas today which have faithfully brought me through Europe and Algonquin. Great shoes, although the grip isn’t what it used to be.

Mentally Sharp Today

I felt really sharp this morning; no fog-in-the-head today. I hope it carries through to the rest of day. I should be able to finish off the heuristics today, definitely by tomorrow.

Cheers,

Tai