Mini Vacation Time

Tomorrow evening the lady and I are headed to Victoria for our first “vacation” since March. The weather is projected to be awful but I don’t really care. It’ll just be nice to get out of town for a couple of nights, and as a bonus, there’s a burlesque show on Saturday night in the provincial capital that I think we’ll take in.

In my spare time I’ve been putting together a portfolio site. I haven’t done this in about four years, and the new one is much more bare-bones than any portfolio site I’ve done in the past. Gone are flash animations and music, replaced by simple images and short text descriptions. This is partly a conscious effort on my part, because part of me believes any future prospective employers don’t really want to sit through long animations and transitions (I know in the past, when looking at other people’s portfolios, I didn’t want to see that kind of thing). I’m also keeping it simple so that it can be easily updated over time; creating a flash-based portfolio doesn’t leave a lot of flexibility for alterations or additions. Plus, I just don’t have the time to put into something heavy on animations. The last portfolio site I made was when I was collecting EI for seven months and had nothing but time. I might post the link when it’s ready, or I might not. Chances are I’ll keep it “private”, to be used only for job hunting, whenever that might happen.

2007 Fall Festival of Nerds

This weekend was the annual nerd gathering known as Hockey Pool Weekend. A time to get together with other loser-types and pretend we know something special about hockey, drafting players to put on our imaginary teams, paying considerable amounts of money in the hopes we defeat our nerd brethren in fierce hockey statistics gathering. It’s because of this event that I can’t make too much fun of the people who play Magic or D&D. My nerdity is just used for different interests.

Hockey Pool Weekend also involves copious amounts of playing video games and making countless racist jokes until the wee hours of the morning. In this aspect, 2007’s HPW was a huge success. This weekend’s game of choice was Guitar Hero, which I’m not particularly good at, but still had lots of fun playing.

The proverbial wrench in the works

A couple of days ago I got a call from the owner of our apartment, telling me she intends to sell it. Needless to say this came as quite a shock to me — when I heard it, I could feel the blood drain from my face and I felt nauseous. We’d really only started to feel settled in over the past month or so, and with the wedding done, we were finally clearing ourselves of related clutter. In the brief phone call, the expectation was that our unit’s owner would give us 60 days notice of when the unit would be put on the market. This is the usual procedure for rental units, except that we’d signed a one-year lease upon moving in (which was just over three months ago). I was pretty upset over the issue and had to leave work early, as there was really no way I would have been able to concentrate on anything for the rest of the day. In fact that night was spent in a depressed funk.

The next day, after talking to the Residential Tenancy Office and reading over the Tenancy Act, it turns out the situation is less dire than I’d thought. Essentially our lease has to be honoured until it expires. So while the owner of the suite might change, we’re entitled to live there until next spring. What this gives us, thankfully, is time. As the end of our lease approaches we can start looking for somewhere to move, rather than having only two or three months from now to do so. So, it’s a relief in some ways, but still disappointing, as we’d hoped to stay in our apartment for more than just a year. There’s still the chance that if the unit is sold, the new owners will want to continue renting it to us, but I don’t really see that as a likely outcome. Any future owner, if they don’t want to live in it themselves, could probably find new tenants to pay more in rent than we do right now (or would after our lease, when the increase is limited to 3 or 4 percent).

At the end of the day I just hope this situation doesn’t turn ugly. There’s well-defined rules in place to protect the tenants in a situation like this, so it really shouldn’t. But who knows. I would just like to get on with our lives, at least until after Christmas, without any more problems.

Another rant

Since I haven’t had anything interesting to write about, I’ll take this time to rant about something that really cooks my goose. I’m sure most of us have heard the term “web 2.0″ at some point. It’s meant to represent the increasingly community-driven aspect of web activity today — blogs, user created content, commenting, ratings, and so on. As companies like Google and Yahoo snap up little bits of community-based applications or portals, more developers are jumping on the “web 2.0″ bandwagon hoping to be the next company to be handed a lump of cash by one of the internet’s big boys.

So we have hundreds of community-based portals or websites all competing to be the same, only different. Whether it’s video sharing, music sharing, news gathering, link sharing, or what-have-you, they’re all based around the same concept of having people visit often and leave little remnants of nothing important. This in itself bothers me; I don’t think there’s any value to these sites. Even the uber-community of Facebook is a shallow experience, a bunch of silly applications meant to keep one occupied for a day or two (Scrabble notwithstanding).

But the commonality of “web 2.0″ has gone beyond just the application or portal service; it’s spilled (or rather vomited) into the identity and graphic design branch of the web. Take a look here and you’ll get the idea in about ten seconds. There we have ample evidence of the “me too” methodology of the internet, with respect to branding. Taking a look through the hundreds of examples shown, there are common themes when it comes to branding or identity, just as there are common themes to each attempt to capitalize on the online community bucket-of-nothing.

1. Think of a name that borders on nonsense. Try phonetically spelling something involving the concept of people getting together. Maybe throw the word “my” onto it as a prefix or a consonant on the end. “r” is a good one.

2. Choose two bright colours. If you can’t think of two, just choose one. You can use black as your second colour.

3. Find a nice sans serif font, preferably with rounded edges. Helvetica Rounded is the gold standard for this.

4. If your name consists of two words smashed together — or if you took step one to heart and used “my” or the consonant suffix — use your two colours to separate the words visually. Don’t actually use a space, that’s clearly a retarded idea.

5. (Somewhat Optional) Apply a glossy effect to your new wordmark. If you’re really hip, you’ll also add a reflected copy of your wordmark just below it.

You’re done!

In lieu of actual content

I haven’t got much interesting to say for this weekend. Instead I want to suggest my readers check out Erwin’s blog, specifically his story of seeing, from the front row, David Letterman during his visit to New York City. I can’t say I’ve watched Letterman since the beginning, but I did start watching his show when he was still on NBC — I think it was around his eighth season that I started to watch. Anyway, Erwin fulfilled a dream of his (and two of mine) while in NYC, taking in a taping of Dave’s show and seeing a Grand Slam tennis match.

When you’re done reading Erwin’s tales, please enjoy another episode of Hinterland Who’s Who. Today’s educational minute involves the beaver.

Finally, some photos

It took me a couple weeks but I finally gathered some photos from friends and family of our wedding. The professional ones are still in the works, but in the meantime, here’s a smattering of images for you looky-loo types to, uh, looky-loo at.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gknights/sets/72157602014527347/