Archive for September, 2006

I used to work for…

Saturday, September 2nd, 2006 | Personal | Comments Off

Xansa. I haven’t bothered to blog at all about my time there as I only lasted 6 months, and it was two years ago. The account I worked on had a particular culture to it that I found I couldn’t work with. I’m not going to expand on that here for the same reason I haven’t blogged about it before – there are some great folks there trying really, really, hard to do some great stuff, but there’s a lot of difficulties that make it difficult for them to.

So, why am I posting this now? Well, this strange thing keeps happening; every few months or so I get a clump of searches for Xansa and variants of it showing up in the logs – from inside Xansa’s network.

So… Hello Xansans (or whatever the correct plural noun is). I wish you all well. May your god smile on you and shower you with good fortune. :->

hey, nostradamus

Friday, September 1st, 2006 | Fiction Book Review | Comments Off

This book is a great book. I started reading Douglas Coupland when a friend handed me Girlfriend in A Coma and I couldn’t put it down. That was several years ago and, building software for a living, I had to read Microserfs. I guess I’ll get around to reading JPods soon enough.

But this book get a strong eight-out-of-ten. It’s different; in the way that Pulp Fiction was different and Isaac Asimmov’s The Culture series is different. It doesn’t feel like anything else I’ve read. Ever.

So what’s it about? Well, Cheryl, Jason, Heather and Reg. These four people form the chapters of this book and each chapter is written as a stream of consciousness from each of them. They don’t overlap the same events in the same way as the Gospels, they kind of move on in time gently, and sometimes less gently. I guess the most obvious thing is that each character is talking about losing people. This could be depressing and dark, and in parts it is a little dark, but I found it made me wonder more and more about what goes on in other’s heads.

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