Photo courtesy of Alex Brown Photography.
Month: February 2009
From 1998 to 2000, I was self-employed. Lacking the funds to rent office space, I ended up working outside the boundaries of cubicle-land or even anything that looked like an office. I worked out of my kitchen, my business partner Adam’s living room and often by the bar at the old location of the Queen Street cafe known as Tequila Bookworm. Being a gregarious and social guy, I enjoyed working at “The ‘Worm”, mixing work with mingling with both the people who came to the cafe and the people who worked there (which led to a story I call Worst Date Ever, which was actually a lot of fun, even back then).
Today, I’m a Sith Lord – er, Developer Evangelist — at Microsoft. In addition to the cool red lightsaber and the ability to hurl lightning bolts, I also have the benefit of being a remote worker, which means I can choose where I work. I’ve got a nice home office setup and I can go hang out at the Evangelist Corner at the Mississauga office, but neither of these locations puts me anywhere where you can come up and talk to me.
That’s why I plan have a “Coffee and Code” day at least once a week. On these days, I plan to work from a wifi-equipped cafe, where you can walk right up to me and talk.
This brings me to my question: Where should I set up? A better way of putting this question might be “Where should I set up so that it’s convenient for you to drop by and have a word with me?” As long as it’s got wifi and it’s somewhere in Toronto, if it’s at a place that’s convenient for a lot of developers and techies, that’s where I want to be.
If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments!
The nice thing about working in high tech, as the caption for the photo above says, “mod styles are an accepted way of life”. I have got to grow me some serious muttonchops like the gentleman pictured above!
Categories
In Transit
Pictured above is an Embraer 190, the exact type of plane I’m flying today from Seattle back home to Accordion City this morning. Air Canada’s seat layout for their Embraer 190s is two on the left side of the aisle and two on the right, each seat has its own entertainment unit and each pair of seats has a power outlet. I expect to be far more comfortable than I was in United’s “Economy Minus” section, where I sat on the way here.
Regular posting should resume this evening.
The following photos explain why I probably shouldn’t ever be allowed free roam of the Microsoft Campus. Click any photo to see it at full size.
(For the background story of the gnu, see my entry titled Winning the Gnu.)
Categories
HackLabTO’s Lisp Machine Keyboard
After years of sitting in storage, my deadbeat ex-housemate’s old Symbolics XL1200 Lisp Machine has found a new home: HackLabTO, located in Accordion City’s Kensington Market neighbourhood. I thought I’d post a couple of pictures of its keyboard, which is a little different from the ones we see every day.
The keyboard is bristling with modifier keys. Yes, we’ve all got shift and control, but most of us don’t have hyper, super, and meta keys. I have a guess as to what the network and local keys do.
Well before the Sony Playstation, Lisp machines had square”, “circle” and “triangle” keys:
And here’s a look at the right side of the keyboard. Today’s keyboards have an auto-repeat feature, which made the repeat key obsolete:
White collar conservative flashin’ down the street
Pointin’ their plastic finger at me, ha!
They’re hopin’ soon my kind will drop and die but uh
I’m gonna wave my freak flag high, high!— lyrics from If 6 Was 9 by Jimi Hendrix
Yeah, C# is pretty decent, but if you really want to hold the freak flag up high, the Dynamic Language Runtime and IronPython and IronRuby are where it’s at, baby!
