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Well, my one month anniversary at work went by without a hitch. I am getting stuff done, slower than I want, but probably at an OK pace.
We are settling in, slowly but surely. We have a couch now, and the home office is setup. I haven't really done anything in there though.
I want to do a longer post later, but for now, let's leave this here.
So, I meant to write something longer, but I don't think longer is really necessary.
After finishing my masters, I have started a new journey, working for IBM Canada in JIT compilation. This blog continues, but, as expected thoughts are my own (though I expect rarely to speak as an IBMer).
I'm on the bus now, headed towards my sixth day of work. Week one went well, if a little slow due to setup and catchup. I hope this week I will hit a good working speed.
Onwards I go!
I thought about writing a blog post about the move. But why do that, when Andrea has done it much better?
Here's my photos though!
Another view, more boxes.
A nervous Andrea enroute to Toronto
Mall attached to our hotel in North York.
One of the places we saw; Gorgeous, but with a deal breaker of a paint job.
More insane paint.
Walking into the place for the first time
I can't recall, but I think Andrea had just about decided to take it already by this point.
We had the pleasure of spending some time with Stefan Sagmeister at the recent FITC Toronto conference in April, 2014, and he had some things to say. See Sagmeister in Calgary at the CAMP Festival Calgary, Alberta • Sept 8-9, 2014 • http://campfestival.ca Stefan Sagmeister Partner, Sagmeister & Walsh Stefan Sagmeister formed the New York based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993 and has since designed for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO and the Guggenheim Museum. Having been nominated eight times, he finally won two Grammy Awards for the Talking Heads and Brian Eno & David Byrne package designs. He has also earned practically every important international design award. In 2008 Stefan authored a comprehensive book titled “Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far”, published by Abrams. Solo shows of Sagmeister Inc’s work have been mounted in Paris, Zurich, Vienna, Prague, Cologne, Berlin, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul and Miami. Stefan teaches in the graduate department of the School of Visual Art in New York and lectures extensively on all continents. In 2012 young designer Jessica Walsh became a partner and the company was renamed into Sagmeister & Walsh. A native of Austria, he received his MFA from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and, as a Fulbright Scholar, a master’s degree from Pratt Institute in New York. After his studies he worked as a Creative Director for Leo Burnett in Hong Kong and for M&Co. in New York. http://www.sagmeisterwalsh.com/
A bit of swearing, but I love this place.
Ever so gently too late for my own defence, but seems like great advice.
The plan is to eventually write a post about the move. However, life is still busy, and so I haven't had the time.
In the mean time, look at the sunrise off our balcony:
Good new piece from Nick Hanauer about inequality and the way and why the rich must fight it.
I adore the final two paragraphs:
My family, the Hanauers, started in Germany selling feathers and pillows. They got chased out of Germany by Hitler and ended up in Seattle owning another pillow company. Three generations later, I benefited from that. Then I got as lucky as a person could possibly get in the Internet age by having a buddy in Seattle named Bezos. I look at the average Joe on the street, and I say, “There but for the grace of Jeff go I.” Even the best of us, in the worst of circumstances, are barefoot, standing by a dirt road, selling fruit. We should never forget that, or forget that the United States of America and its middle class made us, rather than the other way around.
Or we could sit back, do nothing, enjoy our yachts. And wait for the pitchforks.
-- The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats - Nick Hanauer - POLITICO Magazine
What Caught My Eye will be coming back, eventually. In the mean time though, here's an interesting piece on the idea of triggering, and the politics contained therein.
Fifteen to twenty years ago, books like Wendy Brown’s States of Injury(1995) and Anna Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief (2001) asked readers to think about how grievances become grief, how politics comes to demand injury and how a neoliberal rhetoric of individual pain obscures the violent sources of social inequity. But, newer generations of queers seem only to have heard part of this story and instead of recognizing that neoliberalism precisely goes to work by psychologizing political difference, individualizing structural exclusions and mystifying political change, some recent activists seem to have equated social activism with descriptive statements about individual harm and psychic pain. Let me be clear – saying that you feel harmed by another queer person’s use of a reclaimed word like tranny and organizing against the use of that word is NOT social activism. It is censorship.
Emphasis mine.
Maybe this is the myopia of youth, but it seems sometimes that politics has fractured in the past decade or two. We see this to an extent on the right with the divisions between the Tea Party and mainstream Republicanism, social conservatives and fiscal conservatives etc.
It seems however on the left, the split has become fractal. I count myself among the left, weakly-learned though I may be, and so it seems to me as a member of this group that we have split the moral atom. To me it seems that of late that there is not group that isn't divisible into smaller pieces. Post-modernist theory has allowed this to divide even a person, breaking us down even further into our privilege, our oppression, and intersectionality.
Where this seems to leave us, as pointed out by the above linked article, is a place where groups big and small, each fighting for a similar vision of a better future, spend all their energy demonizing each other rather than fighting for the bigger cause. It seems that the project is so clear to each group that it blinds them to their common goals.
I'm unfamiliar with the term neo-liberal, and so will have to do some reading. However I have watched the rise of the trigger warning, and wondered... what exactly does that mean for personal strength, and freedom of speech. I'm certainly sympathetic to the aims of trigger warnings, but what happens when we build the apparatus for people's filter bubbles? What happens when polite warnings of triggers turn to censorship, both by the triggered and using the warnings as cause.
I will be re-reading the linked piece eventually: I don't think I have nearly finished digesting it. I can't recommend enough that you try to digest it too.
Black Lives Matter