Work

1 week and 1 day ago I started working with NowPublic, a local startup. I've more or less stopped doing the freelance thing (still finishing up contracts and doing the odd thing until the end of the year) and am working for them full time now. I'm really excited to be working for NowPublic and I'm looking forward to getting deeper into stuff here. I'll hopefully be writing a bit more about what NowPublic /is/ in the near future, but for now, here's the official one sentence summary :)

NowPublic is a participatory news network which mobilizes an army of reporters to cover the events that define our world.

I kind of forgot how different managing/scheduling development is than actually doing development. It feels a bit like a totally different profession, actually. But I get to talk/research technology and development all day, which I love doing, probably as much as doing actual coding :).

EDIT: This video seems oddly appropriate for some reason.

So as some of you may know, last week I handed in my letter of resignation. I'm counting down the final days until I'm done work at SFU. It doesn't seem like this long, but apparently I've almost been there for 5 years (since I did my first co-op). I guess it's seemed a bit surreal so far, but now that my job's been posted it just seems all that much more exciting! I figure I'm 26 now... so time for the good life. Retirement. Ok, well I suppose I've got at least a few more years before I can retire, but for now I'm going to be focusing on my own business (which has yet to be officially launched) and my grad program.

Anyone know of any good benchmark software that runs on Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows? I'm putting on a demo for the SFU Open House coming up next Saturday (June 3rd). We've got some equipment donated from Dell and Apple and I'll be running benchmarks on them throughout the day to compare between Linux, OSX, and Windows. I've looked around a bit but not found anything that's good that runs on all three.

I've given up on looking for now and am writing my own in python, I just basically need something that will look flashy to the user. Maybe have some kind of "billboard" type thing projected on a screen to display the scores. If you've got any ideas for me to make it cool. Oh yeah, and you're welcome to come by the open house and check stuff out, there should be lots of give-aways throughout the uni.

So many new things this year, it's sweet... this is the third post in a row that has started with 'new'! Hah! Yesterday I started my temporary promotion to operations manager which will last until the end of February. I'm pretty pumped about this as I've never managed anyone before, though it's still really crazy as I'm trying to balance both my development job and this job at the same time. But hey, at least I've got two wicked offices to work out of because of it, though neither with a properly set up phone. This should at the very least give me a chance to see how much I like this kind of position... or if I should find another work goal to strive for (such as starting my own company :-)).