Searching for Tao, 7573 Kilometres from Home

February 12, 2005 23:02 +0000 | Employment Personal Life 0

i got a call from tan the other day regarding a "business idea" she had in mind. when i returned her call, i found out that she wanted to get her employer to hire me to come in on the weekend and help her with learning basic html stuff. the idea was 2 saturdays, 5 hours each @ $50/hr = $500 (yay!). i love teaching and that kind of money is always nice to have so i accepted and showed up today (dreadfully tired after a long night @pavel's) ready to get her learn on.

first of all, her office is just amazing. she's got her own office, a huge window and a killer view. the company fridge is stuffed with free pop and juice and the entire workspace is really well laid out. it's a very welcoming environment. kinda makes me look at my current job and ask: "hey, why don't we have that?"

tan didn't have much of a problem letting it all sink in. after a while she was wanting to jump in and do new stuff just to see what it would look like. that's the kind of enthusiasm you like to see in the people you teach. after a while though, we got to talking about how nasty the code base of the company site is... and how much they paid for it.

i'm SO in the wrong line of work.

for the crappy site that this guy's done, he charged almost more money than i make in a year... BEFORE taxes. and now he wants more money (about the same as last time) to do an upgrade!

i remember when i was unemployed, that there were a lot of out of work geeks geeks around complaining that their competition was lowballing salaries just to get jobs. and while this was certainly the case (if you want a php/mysql developer for $22k/year, you're on crack there friend) there are obviously avenues to find better cash flow. this guy obviously found one, and from the looks of his work, i could write better code blindfolded with a 3-day hangover.

i like my free time (what little i have) but sometimes i think i should really be doing more contract work...

February 08, 2005 19:15 +0000 | Employment 5

i tend to talk about how much i like my job in here, but i think i've forgotten to mention something that just bugs me about this place: it's too corporate.

sure, as companies go, this one isn't very corporate at all. we have cubicles (sort of) but the boss has an open-door policy that makes the atmosphere very friendly. all to often though, i get this feeling that no one here knows how to enjoy their time on the job... at least not like i like me.

i'm sitting here writing code for this new site, and i'm listening to some fun ska-like tunage on my headphones and i'm in reasonably good spirits sorta grooving to my own world between those earphones... and i look around. everyone else is staring blankly at a screen lost in numbers and screen resolution and i can't help but wonder: am i in the right place?

moshpit was definitely more my kind of place.

January 06, 2005 22:01 +0000 | Employment Geek Stuff 7

first of all, i reserve the right to take back anything i say here. you never know, maybe one day i'll get passed all the problems i'm having with it right now and think that *somehow* freebsd doesn't suck. ...but that day is not today.

i've spent the last 3 days trying to figure out how to make an install cd that we can use to automate the installation of a system, as simple as:

put disc in
turn computer on
watch it install and configure itself asking only for the network configuration

you'd be surprised at how very difficult this is.

it's not the fault of the o/s so much as the community around it. mounds and mounds of documentation and not a shred of something useful. the release engineering manual has one of my favourite phrases:

To successfully build a release, you must first populate /usr/obj by running make world or simply make buildworld.

but it doesn't explain where make world should be run! i mean, 'cmon. not all of us are old-skool unix geeks. we need actually useful documentation, like the stuff you find with the gentoo project.

3days. that's how much time (and company money) has been poured into this. i got 3 responses from the freebsd-questions mailinglist, all of which appeared helpful at first, but lead to equally useful dead-ends. one guy pointed me to a bunch of not-so-helpful howtos, another had me download 500mb of a knoppix-like freebsd setup that was documented in portugese (very useful).

sigh. the stupid part of all of this is that i could have gotten this up and running under gentoo in no time. but bsd is special. it's different, and as far as i can tell, about as elitist as it is stable.

December 11, 2004 22:47 +0000 | Employment Personal Life 3

so the company christmas party happened last night. the only people with cameras this time through though were colin and myself, so we were sorta expected to be the designated shutterbugs for the evening. standing in sharp contrast to the christmas party i went to last year (for the porn company) the atmosphere was friendly and less stressful (this time i know everyone) -- this time i even got presents from the bosses! i brought nastia with me as my date, and plan to have fun with pavel later when i show him the pictures of us ;-) sephron got ahold of my camera a couple times throughout the night, and went nuts with the thing shooting anyone who happened to be around (including me... i love how i look in a suit). i also had a shot of jack daniels, something markus insisted was o-so-amazing... it tasted like ass and i could feel it kicking me in the stomach for about 20minutes after (ew). nastia was great company and everyone there was cool and friendly, so i had a nice night. here's some pictures from the evening.

November 23, 2004 02:26 +0000 | Employment Geek Stuff 0

i borrowed my work machine over the weekend and got to rebuild it so i'd have newer, shinier software to play with during the week. this may sound insane to those ofyou who keep work and your real life as separate as possible, but for me, it's just fun. i'm now running kernel 2.6, gcc3.4 and xorg6.8. (that's good)

i'm also rebuilding this very blogger to remove fusebox completely. i found that integrating smarty along with a body of my own code will make things better and finally remove that ugly security flaw that's preventing me from releasing the code.

the last geek thing is pretty cool too. pavel introduced me to half life 2. at $60cdn, he says "it's worth every penny". and he's right. it's awesome. not really my kinda game, but if you fancy the though of being the star in your own action movie, then you should definitely buy this game.

and on the "i like money, give me money" front. i got a message from an old coworker of mine the today. he wants me to do some contract work for him, so i'll likely be busy the next couple days with that. and i need to get that (and the following post) out of the way before this weekend 'cause sheena's invited me out to her place in guelph this weekend for a housewarming party. ...one more post and then i'm done.

November 18, 2004 02:58 +0000 | Employment Nifty Links Society & Culture 0

every once in a while i have to stop and ask myself: "where are we going? and what're we doing in this handbasket???" i have two depressing links for you today, one more dire than the other, but they're both just plain disturbing.

a lot of people have been downplaying Canada's involvement in the american ballistic missle "shield". the argument being that we need to keep close ties to our "we have a war every 4years and have a tendency to elect morons" neighbour at any cost. who cares if we help them build this thing? it's not like it works, right? what harm could it have?

well here you go. russia has started development on a new nuclear missle capable of evading the much-hyped shield. thank you very much america. you're single-handedly spurring another god-damn arms race. here's hoping we're just as lucky this time around and we don't kill every living thing on the planet. "go team". fuck.

pavel gave me the second link, through msn today. apparently, it's caused quite a stir all over the place, even on slashdot. whatever you do, don't work for electronic arts. they'll use you up, spit you out, and replace you without a second thought.

September 09, 2004 18:24 +0000 | Employment Geek Stuff 2

my company got a deal to run a yahoo ad campaign using a flash banner that would let you put some text into a text box and submit it to a search on their site. but they did it in the most convoluted and cryptic way -- all to make sure that they could track clicks on the ad etc. for the technically inclined, the setup is using flash to call javascript that writes it's own vbscript AND more javascript... it's voodoo i tell you.

July 30, 2004 21:07 +0000 | Employment 3

i am now an official employee of the company i started at 6months ago. i just had my review (can you imagine? a company that not only says you're going to get a review in three months, but actually gives you one!) and all was good. (i'm working on my diplomacy). my official graduation entitles me to benefits (yay dental!) and a $60/mo raise... which after taxes, puts me at about +$20/mo... sigh.

but i like this company. and i'm not just saying that because this post is public and my boss could read it anytime (not that he does... i can see you all you know). but everyone here's been really straight with me with regard to what they expect from me and what in turn they offer as compensation. sure, it's an advertising gig, but given the ultimately evil nature of capitalism holding food for ransom in exchange for labour, can you honestly say that any job is all that moral? ...i don't know about that statement, and i'm not defending advertising -- gods know we need less of it, not more. but when it comes to running a company morally... these guys are about as cool as i've seen.

...especially considering companies like trytel which, under it's previous ownership was by far the worst managed company i've ever worked for. i mean, what kind of "ceo" verbally attacks one of his employees in front of everyone else regarding that employee's political beliefs. that guy was a dick. oo! and then there was the company that canned most of us without severance. that was a treat.

May 11, 2004 18:48 +0000 | Employment 0

turns out the job is for a frontend designer at a .com in downtown toronto. $50k/year for design? at a .com? and i have to work in windows? ACK! if the job was for a "noble" company or had something exciting/interesting about it, maybe then i mght consider it. but the company i'm working for now is just too cool to me and i get to do so much more interesting stuff. o well. anyway, if you're a web designer/developer who for some reason likes windows and lives in the downtown toronto area, i might be able to hook you up with a guy. maybe. i dunno. but i'm not going anywhere.

May 06, 2004 20:42 +0000 | Employment 3

i just got a call here @work on my cell from a guy who wants to offer me a job rolling code for $50k/year. contract at first he says, but permanent after 3months... it's in missasauga (ew) and i already really like my current job so i'm not likely to take it, but this is the second unsolicited call i've gotten in just a couple months and i stopped spamming people with my resume about 5months ago! i'll talk to the guy a bit more, 'cause i'm not an idiot, but this is just plain amazing. it's almost got that .com boom feel to it all...

so yeah, if you need work and you're a geek, toronto seems to be the place to be.