Michael R. Barrick's blog
Fri, 2009/07/10 - 10:54pm


Cathedral Place (left) has only just replaced the old Art-Deco glory of the Medical Arts Building as a monument of fibreglass, post-Modern crap (can you tell I don't like that building?) There is no Olympic countdown clock in front of the VAG. Eaton's is still Canadian and spelled with capital letters. There are no towers in Yaletown and the Expo '86 site is still a vacant wasteland while Concord Pacific and the provincial government argue over who should pay for the site remediation. And if you look at False Creek at the far right of the picture you can just make out a white smudge that is the ill-fated McBarge, which now floats derelict in the Burrard Inlet. Oddly enough I happen to own a complete set of blueprints to the McBarge.
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Fri, 2009/07/10 - 12:52pm
This new gig is mind-numbing. I at least have a couple of things to do today, but nothing taxing. On the one hand it is easy money, too easy really - it feels like theft. But on the other hand it feels like a tiny murder. I'm going to lose three months of my life here. I felt kind a desperate last night to do something and found to my horror that after spending three days in an almost bodhisatva-like state of perfect blankness I couldn't get my mind sparked up enough to come up with anything.
Thu, 2009/07/09 - 10:41pm
Tue, 2009/07/07 - 10:39pm
I just started a relatively short contract job today. It's pretty much on the level of the sort of work I was doing about 10 years ago, but these days underemployed beats unemployed, so I took the gig. And one day in I have to wonder how a lot of people occupying I.T. positions stay employed at all. I have a baseline criteria for evaluating a workplace: if my home network is technically superior, they fail.
Mon, 2009/06/29 - 10:46pm
The Basics
Let me start by glossing over some of the classic arguments against extraterrestrial visitors:
Mon, 2009/06/22 - 2:25pm

Below is a snippet of marketing twaddle from the web equivalent of a chain letter/Ponzi scam, promulgated by an SEO snake-oil salesman. The business model is an "affiliate program[me]" where one earns commissions for suckering people into buying crappy, cookie-cutter websites for $20/mo.
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