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.