Tag: Work Posts

Those of you that follow my Twitter feed probably noticed that I almost made it to Serbia about a week ago. I was scheduled to fly over there to spend a month helping out our software development team, but at the last minute it all fell apart. It appears that all the stars at work have realigned, and I’m most likely heading to Serbia this week. I’ll be gone most likely for around four weeks, and will be getting a small apartment out there. My flight will most likely take me from Vancouver to Frankfurt, and then onwards to Belgrade. From Belgrade, I’ll be taking a car or a train up to Novi Sad, which is the second largest city in Serbia, and home to the Exit Festival. All in all, that’s probably around 20 hours of traveling, so it’s quite a long ways to go. Photo by Niels van […]

Well, thus marks the end of my first two-week vacation stint. This vacation saw me bounce from San Francisco, to Los Angeles, back up to Vancouver, to a Matthew Good show, then to the North Cascades, up to Whistler, and then back home. Not bad for just over two weeks. Golden Gate Bridge, taken during my trip It was great getting to hang out with my sister, brother-in-law, and their two kids down in Disneyland. Despite only being an hour and a bit away, I don’t get a chance to head home that often. Plus, I haven’t really spent much time with my niece and nephew (although I was there in Chilliwack Hospital when my niece popped out), so it was a good bonding experience with both of them. I gave up caffeine again a few days ago, and already I feel a ton better. To be quite honest, most […]

I’ve always been a big fan of four day work weeks, or better yet, working at the rate which you are most productive. That’s why I have always gravitated towards jobs that don’t have fixed hours. Where I currently work, I really don’t have a fixed schedule. If I wake up early, I’ll stroll in at 8:30am. If I have a rough night sleeping, nobody cares when I stroll in at 10:30am. Given that flexibility, I’ll often do a bit of work at home during the evenings when I’m listening to music or whatever. Utah recently announced that they are switching their government employees to four day work weeks. A four day work week has a lot of advantages. First, it gives people every Friday off to spend time with their families, or catch up on errands. Second, since you’re already at work and have already commuted there, it just […]

Ok, ok. I’ll take a break from writing about the iPhone. But business has been great lately – my traffic has nearly doubled in the last few days. Not like I really pay attention to those things, but it’s pretty clear when there’s a big prolonged spike — clearly people are excited about the iPhone. To be honest, while talking about web traffic, I’m actually surprised mine has stayed up. I used to host all my plugins here and sort of assumed when I finally moved them over to BraveNewCode that alot of my traffic would disappear. But for whatever reason, my traffic has actually increased quite a bit since then. Strange things, these tubes. Anyways. As I pointed out, Bell Mobility finally lost the battle against me. I could rant endlessly about the disappointment I have that every business nowadays seems to just be looking to screw you as […]

I have, over the course of my career, given a pile of interviews. One of the trends I’ve seen a lot in recent years is people who feel the need to lie or exaggerate on their resumes. There’s nothing wrong with wording your experience in such a way to promote you a bit better, just so long as you don’t lie or stretch the truth to the point where it’s unbelievable. In fact, when I started in the realm of software development, I had basically zero real world experience in the area, and that was often looked as a complete detriment to me (even though I had been coding since I was about 15 years old). So in that case, I had to really stretch things a bit on my resume to make it look like I could handle a software engineering job. But the reality was I could back […]

I got an email this morning asking if I’d like to speak at a university technology conference in Venezuela in May. All expenses would be paid for. Caracas, Venezuela, photo by josemazcona Fun party in Caracas, photo my rmendez Hell yah baby. Hell yah. I just have to come up with something to talk about. Maybe I’ll talk about the cute group of women pictured above.

In 1997, I decided to mix things up a bit and took a summer job up in Whitehorse, YT, working at the weather station up there for Environment Canada. It was really my first time away from home in any capacity, and also marked the first time I was in a long distance relationship. Needless to say, when I walked off the plane way up north, I was a bit bummed, and a bit out of sorts. I spent the first three days living in a hotel room, desperately trying to find a place to live, since Environment Canada only offered to pay for three days of hotel. I finally found a small room in a trailer living with this 30-something year old german lady and her crazy dog. The rent was pretty cheap, but the place was a good 45 minute walk to work. Since I had no other […]

Chad’s party last weekend was the first of the Christmas bashes, but they are coming hard and fast starting tomorrow. I just picked up a new pair of dress pants and my altered jacket from the tailor, and tomorrow I’m spiffing it all out down on Granville Island. There should be a small little pre-party at my pad near False Creek, and then a small little ferry ride over to Bridges, which is a fairly nice seafood restaurant right on the edge of the marina. Kasia won’t be coming to my place beforehand because she apparently needs a gazillion hours to get ready before hand, so we’ll just have to manage without her. Should be about 100 people or so, taking over the entire upper floor, so it’s bound to be a pretty fun time. This year they up’ed the ante a bit and set up a dance floor along […]

This is a pretty important week in the life of Duane. On Tuesday I’ll meet up with my plastic surgeon which might potentially be the last meeting I have with him regarding this whole affair. My first meeting was about twelve months ago and resulted in two surgeries to my eye socket. I’ve spent this last year bouncing between doctors offices, getting eye exams, several CT scans, and will meet this week to probably wrap everything up. In terms of my vision, it’s still not perfect. I see pretty much everything perfectly below the midline (i.e. looking straight or down), but as I look up I tend to see double of everything. I have sort of naturally adjusted by automatically raising my head when looking up so the object I’m looking at is straight on, but it’s a fairly big pain in the ass for me, especially when it’s dark […]

Not much new to report. Work is going fairly well, and I’ve met most of our Ontario company now. Derek and I hit “downtown” Kanata and hit a few local establishments tonight, which was actually a lot of fun. I have two more days here, and then I get on a plane and head to Toronto for Matt’s concert. I’m actually getting pretty excited about the whole ordeal. I talked with Tony briefly tonight and he’s in the same hotel as me, which is cool. The next time I probably blog will be in Toronto, a few hours before the pre-show meet-up.