Anybody who's met me knows I have a metabolic rate of which supermodels would be envious. While that is convenient in many ways, it does cause me undue hardship when buying pants. I have a 28 inch waist so it's generally been tricky to find pants that will fit me. Living in the US, however, has made this even harder. A pair of pants I purchased at ( Read more... )

One of the User Experience people and I were putting together a wireframe UI proposal yesterday and we needed to show a couple of sample USB devices in it. Feeling whimsical, I suggested using an iPhone Nano. No sooner had the words left my mouth than 5 other UI developers had crowded around us wanting to know if Apple had just announced such a

Paying for lunch today was interesting. The VMware cafe lets us pay with credit cards so I always do. Today, however, the cashier tried swiping my card twice before informing me that it wasn't being accepted. We both stared at the card for a few seconds before I realized what the problem was: I had handed over my driver license.

Every couple of weeks I get contacted by random recruiters looking for software engineers. Recently I had a pretty amusing conversation with one of them.

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In honour of yesterday's festivities, I wish to write about ignorance. And stereotypes. As human beings we all rely upon stereotypes as a means of dealing with the cognitive burden of information overload. The sophistication of those stereotypes depends upon the breadth of knowledge we have about the world. Yesterday I was at an independence day ( Read more... )

I was at a Canada Day party last night and one of the other guests, an American co-worker, showed up with a gift he'd assembled himself and asked us to figure out what it was supposed to be. Peeking inside revealed a bag of frozen french fries, diced cheese, and gravy.

Poutine!Apparently he'd scoured the Interwebs for a uniquely Canadian dish and ( Read more... )

Sometime this morning the much vaunted Facebook platform fell flat on its, er, face. It began with error messages warning of site maintenance but eventually devolved into the server being unreachable altogether. There was no advance warning and, even after several hours, there's no official word on what happened or when we can expect it to be fixed ( Read more... )

The real reason that he's a bear of very little brain...


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I was at a super bowl party yesterday afternoon and at one point there was a guy who, for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, was poking himself in the arm with the point of a mechanical pencil. The following brief conversation took place as a consequence ( Read more... )

I was at The GAP today afternoon looking for some new pairs of pants. After wading my way through hordes of frenzied shoppers for several minutes, I found a few that I liked and decided to try them on. That's when I discovered that they had buttons instead of zippers for the fly. Whose brilliant idea was that? "Let's take something that's really ( Read more... )