Month of November, 2007

Wow... my favorite local grocery store is very dysfunctional

Posted November 18th, 2007 by mattm
in

I just happened across this post "Ottawa Grocery Chain Fires Employees Over Facebook Posting". The post seemed to have attracted a lot of mistreated employees. Here are a couple snippets:

From a supervisor:

"I can vouche that I have been specifically told by management NOT to give breaks during busy times, like Easter. Even if all of the cash lanes were up and manned, any person off cash was required to bag instead of taking their break. I told them that was against labour law and they blatantly said they don't care and not to ask any questions. I ran the breaks, anyway, but often did not have a chance to take one for myself."

Sounds pretty sketchy...maybe its boycott time??!!

mootools

Posted November 7th, 2007 by mattm
in

Yesterday in my quest for a calendar picker for Jistik, I came across mootools which is a lightweight javascript framework for building AJAX/Web 2.0 style applications.

Mootools is cool, but I want you to direct your attention to their download page! The guys at mootools have built a tool that lets you select which mootools features you want, compression style desired and builds the download for you. Also neat is how it automatically includes dependent modules, so you can't screw up your download.

Check it out.

Mmmm...Steak

Posted November 5th, 2007 by mattm



Nice handcut ribeye

Originally uploaded by mattm


I hand-cut this steak off of a nice prime rib, and took the first photo on my new 35MM prime lens of it.

The Canon EF 35MM lens (one of a couple of my collection that is NOT L series) produces a very nice bokeh similar to the also inexpensive EF 50MM. I love it already.

Web 2.0 Design Patterns

Posted November 5th, 2007 by mattm
in



Duane

Originally uploaded by mattm


Congats to my bro Duane Nickull on getting Web 2.0 Design Patterns published with O'Reilly (the best technical publisher, IMO).

Also, congrats to James Governor and Dion Hinchcliffe who co-authored with Duane.

Buy the book here. Now. Yes. Do It.

Vancouver from Grouse Mountain

Posted November 5th, 2007 by mattm



Vancouver from Grouse Mountain

Originally uploaded by mattm


Its almost winter, so here is something for anyone who has been lucky enough to sneak out of work midweek and get some skiing in at Grouse Mountain in Vancouver!

Twitter is ruining my blog

Posted November 5th, 2007 by mattm
in

I just realized today that since I have been using Twitter, my desire to blog has gone down significantly. In case you didn't know, Twitter is basically a "micro-blog", where you can submit very short < 200 character posts of what you are doing at any given moment. Some of us, like Andre use it almost like an IM replacement for communication that doesn't need to be private...kind of akin to shouting across the room "Hey Andre, what's up with ____?". So basically, Twitter is pretty cool...but it effects my blog negatively because when I am thinking about something I just type a terse summary on Twitter and move on, instead of fully developing the concept in a blog post.

I think that I want to start blogging more actively...but to do so I need an interesting theme. More to come on that front!