Corvus Consulting

Brian over at West Coast Logic has called me out on a web meme: 5 Things You Didn’t Know About Me. Though I often avoid these things by artful diversion, how can I pass up the request from a man who treated me to a beer just last Friday?

The Beginning of the End of Last Friday

And so, I am ensared by conscience to tell you:

5 Things You Didn’t Know About Me

-1- My first paycheque was for a restaurant job. I had that job for about 3 years, and it taught me that people can be very mean and very kind, that they’ll eat almost anything when they’re from out of town, and that more happens in restaurants than you would ever want to know. Unless you plan to cook for yourself for life.

-2- I can stare at rain and moving clouds for an hour. Not a figurative hour, either.

-3- Clothes from the Gap, for some reason, always fit me perfectly. It’s sad I don’t often like their clothes.

-4- My only childhood hero that I haven’t met is Neil Armstrong.

-5- Many of my opinions about the culture of technology were forged while listening to Ursula J Franklin’s Real World of Technology lectures while recovering from surgery and alternatively lucid, courtesy of the painkillers.

There you have them, for better or worse. And now, to inflict this upon five more, I’d like to hear from:

• Bill MacEwen, founder of WorkSpace
• Michael Klassen, a local fount of experience and knowledge
• Sarah Pullman, a fellow WorkSpacian
• Theresa Putkey, a colleague from back in the day
• Fred Stutzman whom I’ve never met, but has a great blog on all things social software

Burnaby, BC-based D-Wave is among the most unique computing companies in the world, providing access to the emerging science of quantum computing.

Translating the esoteric science into real-world uses and benefits is a major communication challenge for D-Wave, one that they are meeting with a set of demo applications that show how complex, real-world problems can be addressed by quantum computers.

D-Wave contracted me to help design interfaces for the demonstrations that would make the problems being solved accessible to a variety of audiences. We also addressed the need for these demonstrations to perform in a highly simplified manner, so that presenters would not need to divert their attention from interacting with the audience.

Working on a tight schedule, we met to talk about the way the demonstrations would be used, who would be seeing them and thinking about the constraints of a presentation and working in that context. The final report contained a number of recommendations, including a proposed re-design of the interface for one of the demo applications.

It’s exciting to not only work with people doing things on the leading edge of science, but to also see the applications in action, knowing that a whole different kind of computer is behind the work being done, in real time.

This weekend, as some bloggers quicker on keyboards will tell you, saw BarCamp land at Vancouver among other places around the world.

The event, an un-conference of web enthusiasts, was held at WorkSpace and came off amazingly well. I have to hand it to the WorkSpace guys for pulling this off in their opening week. I’m unsure if they sleep.

This was my first BarCamp, and it’s exhausting to say the least. Every time you turn around there’s someone new to talk with, brimming with ideas to share. You burn a lot of glucose trying to keep up and assimilate everything that comes your way.

Things I talked about with other attendees:

Ma.gnolia, and social bookmarking in general, of course

Judo and kung fu, after Sarah Pullman’s Yoga For Geeks session that left me refreshed

Bringing web 2.0 and its advantages to family-oriented web surfers

Managing online identities

The sometimes shady world of search engine optimization and how to play fair in search

Dating for geeks, which had a very strong product sales angle

Career transitions

A crash course on tagging, with Alex who tag-teamed me in (love that pun) to talk about the thinking process behind tagging and why it just works.

Tag spam, what it is and just how much it does indeed suck

And it really just keeps going. Darren has posted a roundup of afterparty blogging, along with a link to Flickr photos of the event.

I have to admit I’m not the most comfortable person at these events, but every time I go I forget my apprehensions as soon as I start talking with people. The level of informatlity can be hard to reconcile with your work, but like many new things it takes a bit of courage and the willingness to give up your ego a bit to make it work. The nice thing about it is that the trust you put in the event pays off, and before long you can be among new friends where you only saw strangers an hour ago.

Just a wave back to the WorkSpace guys for their kind pointer to my post about them, and a welcome to anyone reading from the WorkSpace blog. These are early days for the redesign of the Corvus site, so please excuse any junk you find still floating around.

To local friends and clients, I’m really looking forward to showing you what they’ve got going, so get down to Gastown some afternoon and give me a call!

For the past three years I’ve worked primarily from my home, making outings to client offices for meetings. When I explain to people that I work this way, they almost universally say one or both of the following:

1. Wow, that must be nice.
2. Wow, you must be really disciplined.

Most of the time, I smile and nod, then turn and bite my knuckle, praying they don’t realize that working from home is not a utopia, and I’m not always that disciplined.

Truth be told, working from home is a mixed blessing in which often you find yourself distracted by the very little things in your own life, and sometimes losing touch with the human interactions that we need to stay sane, not to mention create great software.

So imagine my interest when, in the doldrums of winter, I heard about "www.abetterplacetowork.com" target="_blank">WorkSpace starting construction in Vancouver’s Gastown neigbourhood.

The gang there describes it best:

WorkSpace is a shared work environment in downtown Vancouver. Our Gastown loft has meeting rooms, a lounge & a café surrounding a beautiful open concept work environment. We provide memberships (not leases) to independent professionals and small firms looking for a better place to work.

Dane gave me a tour while the site was still concrete and drywall dust, with paint just starting to go on the walls. As we talked, I could see that the Working Space vision was the kind of thing I was hoping for. Now that I’ve seen the finished product, I’m convinced that Bill (WorkSpace’s founder) and Dane are going to succeed.

Why? Here’s the biggest clue: the cafe bar. When you walk in, you’re likely to see one of the WorkSpace staff behind a bar where they not only do their own administration work, but also serve up some very nice coffee drinks. Bill pulled a fine espresso shot that made my afternoon, and I always feel more at home with good coffee.

They also positioned an iMac for use by people visiting without a computer to check email, burn some idle time, that sort of thing. But here’s the key – they also put some bar stools there for members to sit down and chat a little. This is the genius touch, as it uses architecture to bring their clients to them in a natural, comfortable way where they can hear back what works and what doesn’t in simple conversation.

No comment cards, no management office to find – feedback is a natural part of the environment at WorkSpace.

And so this week, after an unveiling party in which the rolling chairs got a little wild, I understand, WorkSpace is open and I’ll be in there afternoons and evenings.

That’s right, I’m here right now, and here are a few pictures to give you an idea of what’s going on.

Some of the simple desk/tables, roomy for one and comfortable for two.

More tables, this time with people.

Just a small part of the awesome North Shore view

Who’s the happy camper? Yours truly flashes a smile.

I talked a long time about doing it, and then I finally did it – the Corvus Consulting site has been remade.

Out: Static pages, heavy nav bars, and Bash – the irascible but lovable crow.

In: Dynamic content, feeds, tag-driven navigation, a lighter look and feel.

This change retires the original Corvus Consulting design, done by the talented Sheila West. Her original work is still strongly in play, as you can see from these shots of the original design.

(Click ‘Read More’ to see other pages from the original design)

The spirit of the site is lighter now, and in being such will be more current and conversational. Damien Tanner of New Bamboo did the re-design and put together the site to my specifications, perfectly.

If you’re interested in the details, read on.

All content on the site is handled by a typo 4 blog with custom templates, hosted at Planet Argon. The items in the navigation bar are linked to categories of blog posts, and the minor categories are accessed through tags shown in the sidebar.

I chose this approach because I find updating static pages to keep them current, even on a small site, can be a task that gets forgotten too many times. It doesn’t take long to be out of date with clients, good portfolio samples, and so on. I also wanted to have a blog where I could talk about my work, and realized that my problem with static pages was just what blogs were made to solve.

So, I asked Damien to first re-design the site into two templates – a multi-article page and a single article page. By using categories as the navigation bar items, I can easily build and add to key information just by making a blog post. The Contact category, for example, only has one post. Services has as many as I need to describe what I can do, and so on. The rest of the site is accessed via tags. By relying on tags, I don’t have to worry about finding an architecture for content that is constantly evolving.

More Historic Views

There were two interior page styles in version one – a three column and a two column layout. The three-column allowed me to make summary content very tight, and the two-column was suited for more extensive writing.