Welcome
So this is simonwex.com. This is the collision of my personal and professional life. I have been struggling with this for some time.
Most of my humour and writing here is crude, rude and lewd. This doesn't lend itself well to applying for jobs and keeping up my professional life that I have worked very hard at over the past ten+ years.
My conclusion has been to let this sit not as a dichotomy, but instead let the two sides of me confront eachother on what is really my personal and professional playground: Teh Interweb™.
Recent Posts
My Girlfriend Loves The X-Files (July 27, 2008)
Karilyn is also very excited to see the movie. All I have to say is this:
Chop Shop (2007) (July 21, 2008)
I was trying to sleep last night just outside of Portland Oregon and, to be honest, I wasn’t doing a great job of it. So instead of shutting my eyes and ignoring the strange sounds coming from the woods, I watched Chop Shop [IMDB]
It was real to the point of feeling voyeuristic. It didn’t have a rocketing trajectory to a massive climax, but instead depressingly trudged on like the main characters’ lives. – Though my description doesn’t sell it, it was a very enjoyable watch and I highly recommend it.
Something funny I just noticed... (July 15, 2008)
So here’s something sort of funny that I just noticed. When on my mac clicking on “Get Info” for my friend’s desktop (‘doze), you get this appropriate little preview…
Good old windows blue screen. It has been a while and I don’t miss you.
Contentment (July 04, 2008)
I’m a happy kinda guy. I think a lot of this comes from generally being happy with what I have, not lusting after what I don’t. I think this explains my stance on things like plastic surgery and suicide bombings.
Around a month ago I blew out my back. I was well on my way to recovery – something you measure differently when you’re unable to put on your own socks – when I tweaked it and I’m now pretty much back to square one. So there I was, teetering on my rickety legs reaching down to the second shelf for a yogurt in one of those big multipacks. I was hoping for a strawberry as my hand touched a pack. I realized it didn’t matter. I was going to get what I got and the pain was not worth going back for a replacement. Mmnnn tasty yogurt.
Resurrecting the Electric Car (June 24, 2008)
I suppose today I'm playing the optimist. I was playing with Google Trends this morning and noticed something I found promising. There are no brilliant insights I have to contribute, I'll let this graph representing the popularity of search terms related to "oil prices" and "electric car" speak for itself:
Scale is based on the average traffic of electric car from United States in the last 12 months. Learn more
| oil prices |
|
1.32 |
| electric car |
|
1.00 |
Your Right to Make Decisions about Medical Treatment (May 17, 2008)
I’m sitting in a hospital in Southern California. I found myself here after a good friend of mine passed out for no apparent reason and hit the pavement head-first. Fast-forward a few firemen, and ambulance and a few hours later and here we are in Los Alamitos Medical center. We’re both Canadian. He may, or may not be covered for travel insurance stateside, this plays heavily in the mind.
He was given a three page document to read. It describes his rights to make medical decisions. Here’s a little excerpt:
“Your doctors will give you information and advice about treatment. You have the right to choose. You can say ‘Yes’ to treatments you want. You can say ‘No’ to any treatments you don’t want-even if the treatment might keep you alive longer.”
I agree with the right to choose the best path for personal care. I definitely agree with the right to choose to pull your own plug to maintain your dignity and quality of life that’s left. But the reality of this situation is that the major concern with making any decision is cost. How on earth can one of the most wealthy countries on earth allow their citizens to live like this?
“We’re going to run a few tests to see what’s going on”
“Is that going to be expensive?”
“Yes”
Of all the times I’ve been admitted to the hospital, the cost has never been an issue. The number one concern of everyone involved is always getting better. It seems secondary right now, and that is wrong.
The Email Inquisition (February 16, 2008)
I am, and have for some time been, a Thunderbird user. And while it has met most of my needs for an email client, I have been relying less and less on it for communicating. Instead, IM clients and things like Facebook messaging have been taking over for me. I thought it was a problem with the set of standards and protocols that make up email itself, but after a few conversations with David Ascher and spending some time thinking of messaging in general, I think I’ve changed my mind.
In the past decade and a half of using email, I can’t think of any feature other than spam filtering that has made a significant impact on my experience. This is probably why web-based email clients continue to grow in popularity as they close the functionality gap with the rich-client variety. Some people might think that rich clients such as Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird should see the writing on the wall. I don’t—I think that Thunderbird should fight back and do some of the things that a server-side solution just can’t reasonably scale to.
I was out for lunch with David the other day. Succinctly, David is the man who has been tasked with “fixing email”. I often like to ask David questions about what he’s got in mind for Thunderbird. He always has some very interesting and insightful things to say, which is probably how he found himself in his current position at Mozilla. One thing that came up was a sort of question parser for messages. If done correctly, when replying to an email it could find all of the questions asked. This could serve as a to-do list when replying. You could also be presented with things like “all unanswered questions from your boss”.
I took a little crack at it as sort of a proof of concept. The code written in ruby isn’t worth examining too closely, but it is available here. My approach is very crude, especially when you consider that Thunderbird is localized to 34 different locales, but I still find the results interesting. My girlfriend and I had our first exchanges through email, so I pointed it at an IMAP folder with the first eleven emails she sent me and here are the results:
Do you do lots of fun writing? What do you do at work? Where in Ontario are you from? What brought you to Van? Are you home watching movies today? Are you a downtown kid too? And you skate in from kits? I'm off at 4:30 most days, so how about Monday? Do you have a plan? You're somewhere near Hastings & Granville, aren't you?
I'm Going to Work for ActiveState (September 26, 2007)
After almost two years, I will be leaving Teligence to go work for ActiveState. I have really enjoyed working for Teligence. I have especially over the past few months working on some great projects such as our new Facebook application Call Me Now. I am especially going to miss my boss Rob and the IVR boys. I’m leaving on a good note and leaving Teligence in good shape with some solid underpinnings to their mobile and social networking efforts.
That being said. I am incredibly excited to be working for ActiveState. All of the people there are incredibly sharp and the energy and atmosphere is a perfect fit for me. Look for some cool work in the coming months from us.
I thought it would be appropriate to leave on a note that would be expected of me. I also wanted to get a laugh out of Rob. And wanted our ape overlords to have a laugh when they open the time capsule that will be my HR file years from now.
It just so happens that today I got a new HR representative. And they (who will remain nameless) needs to receive a letter of resignation from me.
So I went up to blank’s office and spent some time doodling while we discussed my leaving. She has no idea what she’s about to receive in inter-office mail. I think it is a work of art.
Need I say more?
A little on the flickr photos above (January 31, 2007)
This is simple really, but it just makes me happy.
Any of my photos or my contact’s photos tagged “simonwex.com” will show up above. Randomly.
This is simply done in a batch whenever I feel like updating it. Doing it in a batch ensures that I’m not adding a run-time dependency on Flickr. It also lets me do a bit of moderation – not that it’s required.
I wrote it using ruby and this site is written in Ruby on Rails. For anyone that knows me professionally you know that’s a redundant statement.
Pastie is a wonderful thing, here are links to the batch script and the FlickrPhoto model definition.
Enjoy.
Time for some "Soul Work" (January 31, 2007)
I used to find so much more time for doing what I like to call “soul work”. For the past year, I have been overly consumed by corporate bureaucracy at work. The last thing that excites me when I get home is spending more time thinking about work-like things.
This used to be my favorite hobby.
I think I need a job that excites me again.
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