Geek Philosophy

(This post is a part of my series on volunteering at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. If you’re new here, feel free to start at the beginning)

I’m far too tired from working a shift yesterday, attending the dress rehearsal last night, and doing another shift today, so no post from me today. Luckily, my wonderful wife has prepared a guest post that outlines the role that she’ll be playing during the games. Enjoy!

Another volunteer!

My Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics volunteer position is in Event Services (…or EVS, if you’re a fan of TLAs like the IOC). They call our team the face of the games because we interact directly with everyone and are usually the first & last people anyone sees throughout their Olympic experience. We are ambassadors and informants, helpers, and hosts.

As a Team Leader for Event Services, I will supervise 6-12 Hosts at a venue, mainly when things are in full swing for competition but also during athlete practice times and during other operations. Hosts are the dedicated volunteers who perform any or all roles like Spectator Marshal, Ticket Taker, Pacer, Usher, Access Monitor (and 4 more!) and work in all the public & common operational areas of the venue, interacting with all groups: Ticketholders, Security, Athletes, Officials, Media, Olympic Family, and pretty much all of the operational Functional Areas.

These are tough, tiring, and sometimes tedious jobs, but there are lots of great rewards and many memorable moments to be had. That said, for events of this scale & scope, the challenges are almost limitless – but from what I know of the Hosts I’ve met throughout my training so far, I will have a great team with many talents to work with. Like me, many of them will be working long hours for many days on end during the Games, and it is my task to make sure they get breaks, help them stay motivated, and serve as their escalation point for pretty much anything that happens on shift.

So, armed with a radio and a clipboard containing a a military-like schedule and lots of other fun paperwork, I will encourage & support my team toward meeting three main goals for each shift:

• Think, Say, Do: Customer Service Excellence for all groups

• Have Fun: Motivation & Rewards

• Be Safe: Worksafe, Incident Reports

If you’re attending the Olympics, please remember to smile and thank the volunteers in the bright blue uniforms – lots of locals from the Lower Mainland, but also fellow British Columbians, Canadians and International folks too – who gave up many hours of their free time for training and weeks of their vacation to work overtime for nothing (and in some cases, even spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on travel & hotel costs) to be involved in these Olympics and work so that you and everyone else watching around the world will enjoy it. It will definitely make my job a bit easier if you do, anyway

Let the Games begin!

(Click here to read the next entry in the series.)

(This post is a part of my series on volunteering at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. If you’re new here, feel free to start at the beginning)

Yesterday I had my second shift, although it was supposed to be my fourth. Weighing on my mind for most of the day was the thought of attending the Venue Specific Training (VST) for Canada Hockey Place (CHP) that I had scheduled later that evening (making for a 14.5 hour volunteer day). This shift was somewhat similar to my first shift, in that I was moving around printers and TVs and doing other initial setup that won’t be needed come games time, but there were a few differences as well.

First of all, security is now in effect. On my last shift, I just walked into the compound, although I had to show accreditation before entering any buildings. Yesterday, I had to go through the full security procedure – walking through the magnetometer, having all metal possessions go through X-ray scanning, and gawk at the huge number of police everywhere.  I don’t think I saw a single officer on my last shift, but on this shift I don’t think there was a single time when there wasn’t a cop in sight. It was quite interesting – they’ve flown in police from all over. I didn’t get any pictures of the myriad uniforms (O.P.P., RCMP, York, Montreal, and many more) – something about taking covert photos of uniformed officers inside a security zone made me queasy.

Coke had a greatly increased presence as well – they’re in the process of stocking the dozens (hundreds?) of Coke vending machines strewn around the compound. This is definitely not a comfortable place for a Pepsi-lover, but I was able to rustle up something besides Dasani.

Costco would be proud (those are pallets of Coke in the background)

As mentioned, I spent yet more time moving giant printers and large TVs around. No 58″ monsters this time, although I did help mount 5 42″ plasmas and drag another 3 into storage (along with several 26″ screens). I hope by the time my next shift comes around that all TVs are set up, although I guess I should be thankful that they aren’t CRTs. I also got to walk into Canada Hockey Place for the first time in order to deliver some toner – exciting, I know.

All plasmas, no LCDs - greenest Olympics ever?

Lunch was soup and a sandwich – not near as tasty as last week’s vegetarian pizza, although we did get fresh buns and a drink was included. Afterward, while waiting for another task to do, I was quite happy when my supervisor suggest that I attend an earlier session of VST – effectively cutting 6 hours off of my volunteer day. I arrived in the parkade of CHP (miraculously transformed into a suite of offices over the past few weeks) just in time for training.

CHP is quite an impressive venue – much newer than BC Place, although smaller. There will be over 3000 people working there over the Olympics, about 1300 of them volunteers. Apparently this is the first Winter Olympics where figure skating isn’t located in the premiere venue, and I feel quite lucky to be able to be in and around the building during some awesome events (including the Men’s Hockey gold medal match!). I can’t say too much about what I saw inside, but I will say that it’s very strange to see the interior of this venue with no advertising (an IOC rule). I’m sure I’ll be able to share more as I learn a bit more.

Next up is a shift this coming Wednesday, when I start a gauntlet of 5 shifts in a row (contributing to 12 straight days of either work or volunteering). Until then, I’m taking it easy.

(Click here to read the next entry in the series.)

(This post is a part of my series on volunteering at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. If you’re new here, feel free to start at the beginning)

Update: Now with pictures!

Today was my first real shift as an Olympic volunteer, and it was certainly interesting. That is to say, the experience was interesting – the work alternated between somewhat interesting and pretty tedious, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Here’s a time line of my day.

5:00AM I wake up. Boo. I could have definitely used more sleep, but I’m also looking forward to seeing how my first day goes.

5:45AM The transit ride downtown. Even though this is the very first bus in operation on a Sunday morning, there’s plenty of people at almost every stop.

6:45AM I’m here! I arrive at the TEC trailer, situated just behind Canada Hockey Place and Stadium. Unfortunately, no one else is here yet save for one confused security guard, so I just end up standing out in the rain for a while.

7:00AM My manager arrives, along with a few other volunteers, and we shuffle into the trailer. We learn that there’s safety orientation for BC place at 8AM, so another volunteer and I wander off in search for coffee. We can’t find the volunteer lounge that our supervisor suggested, but a helpful security guard suggests checking out the casino for coffee. After winding our way through a maze of security fence, we find our way into the casino (only after getting ID’d by the huge security guard at the door – what can I say, I have a baby face!) We pick up our free coffee, have a quick look around, then head back to get ready for our safety training.

8:00AM The other volunteers and I get our safety training. This is only necessary because Stadium is currently an active construction zone, and is only required up to February 4th (which is, interestingly enough, my next shift, meaning this training will only be useful for this one day). After a quick run through, we head back to the trailer and pick up our hardhat and safety vest, change into some steel-toed gumboots, and then it’s time for work!

It's safety Chris!

8:45AM The next 3.5 hours involve:

• pushing a 100+ pound printer a half mile down the road
• loading a van with 6 printers, 4 computer + monitor combos, 2 26″ TVs, and 3 58″ (!) TVs.
• unloading said van at 3 separate locations around the compound

The 3 58″ TVs were especially annoying. After loading them onto a dock at Stadium, we spent the better part of a half hour scouring ring road (the wide track that surrounds level 1) for a dolly. Once we tracked it down, we circled the entire stadium trying to find a freight elevator. Eventually we got it done, and it was time for lunch.

The %#*$ 58" plasmas

12:30PM To say I don’t do much physical labour at my job would be an understatement. What can I say – I have programmer hands. Worse yet, I have development manager hands – my hands are so dainty that I get others to program for me! After a morning full of lifting, hauling, balancing, and wheeling, it was time to partake of the free (to volunteers) catering. I was much hungrier than I thought, and devoured a huge plate full of vegetarian pizza, fries, gravy, and bag of chips.

It's hard to describe how awesome this was.

1:00PM The rest of my day was spent helping out some Bell employees test the network drops in the press area. This was cool for two reasons. First, I got to hang out inside the main part of the stadium, getting an NDA-covered view of some of the opening ceremonies goodies. Secondly I got to check out where the press is going to sit to cover all the events taking place at the venue (Opening/closing ceremonies, victory ceremonies). If Reuters complains that their network doesn’t work, don’t blame me – it worked when I saw it last!

Well, that’s my first shift. My subsequent shifts will likely be quite different; a lot of the labour I did today was helping out other departments as there wasn’t too much tech-specific work left. Any questions about day 1?

(Click here to read the next entry in the series.)

… because this is only 1/6th of the way into my moustache:

From Movember

Remember, it’s easy to donate and help fund prostate cancer research!

(This post is a continuation. Please read part 1 first.)

In my last post I briefly discussed the “kanban-lite” system that I had been using over the past year or so. I adopted this system for several reasons:

• As a team working on multiple projects, there were often multiple stakeholders with different goals who wanted some of my team’s time

Each of these stakeholders had valid reasons for their selections of issues that we should tackle. By getting together and having a weekly meeting to see what was really pressing, I could ensure that I was working towards what was best for the company, not just trying to placate whoever was yelling the loudest. In lean terms, this is known as “seeing the whole”.

• My team was known as the “Fast Track” team, since our primary mandate was to respond rapidly to customer reported defects and small features that could close deals

Project teams at Sophos often undertake projects that are anywhere between 3 and 24 months in length. My releases are more on the order of two weeks. Since I’m releasing software so frequently, I wanted a system that encouraged flow and ensured that we were still delivering high-quality releases. Having a visible board where each item’s state was clearly displayed made it very obvious when we should finish and polish in-progress stories instead of starting new items.

• I’d been reading quite a bit about Lean Software Development, which encourages flow and the elimination of waste (another term for non-value added activities)

A key technique of Lean is value stream mapping – identifying where and when value is added to your product, and pointing out areas that can be removed since they don’t add value. The visual card board is an easy way to show at least part of the value stream (the value stream really begins when a customer files a defect or a product manager thinks of a new feature), and I had thought about (but not gotten around to) recording the amount of time issues spend in the various states.

So, you may ask, why would I switch to Kanban if my system was already working? I’ll discuss that in the next post.

The month of November is known for a lot of things – snowfall, leaves falling, and presidential elections. Around my office, it’s known as Movember – a time when the guys can get together, grow horrible moustaches, and raise a bunch of money and awareness for men’s health issues, particularly prostate cancer.

I have never attempted to become a Mo Bro and grow a moustache – until now! Below is my day 1 photo, clean shaven (well, clean shaven as of last night). Expect it to get much, much worse.

From Movember

So, how can you help with men’s health issues? By donating to my moustache campaign, of course! All of the funds go to Prostate Cancer Canada, and qualify for tax deductions – you can’t afford not to donate! I will be updating photos ever few days throughout the campaign so you can view my horrible, horrible progress.

Thanks in advance!

I’ve actually had a chance to play some games in the last little while (being sick has its benefits!), so I thought I’d go over some recent highlights.

Guitar Hero: Metallica

The formula is pretty simple – a Guitar Hero game featuring songs from Metallica and other hard / metal-rock bands. Guitar Hero (and its various incarnations) have been discussed to death, but I will say that this game was an awesome workout for the hands. Trying to play along with these songs, even on a fake plastic guitar, has given me a new appreciation for Metallica, and before I had beaten the game (which I managed to do on expert guitar!), I had taken out my old electric guitar that’s been gathering dust since high school. Some new strings and a guitar -> USB connector later, I’m playing Metallica (very poorly) in real life – now that’s an inspiring game!

Lost Odyssey

I’ve seen mixed reviews on this traditionally-styled JRPG, but I really quite enjoyed it. The art is beautiful, probably one of the prettiest games I’ve seen, and the characters, while being a bit cliche, develop nicely. The battle system has quite a bit of depth, combining elemental matching with real time events, and at almost every point in the game you would encounter challenging enemies that could be defeated with the right choices. Probably the most unique thing about this game was the various dream segments, where the lead character remembers bits of his forgotten past through short stories presented as text. Although the presentation of these dreams are simple, the music, text styling, and content of the stories were compelling – a mix of Zen koans, depressing tragedies, and funny anecdotes. The plot is long and engaging (40+ hours of gameplay, and there were plenty of unfinished sidequests), and the ended was pretty satisfying. A great game, especially for the story-driven RPG lovers out there.

Fable

This game was pretty hyped when it came out several years ago for the original Xbox, so I was excited to finally get around to playing it. Unfortunately, while it had some fun parts, it didn’t live up to its high expectations. The music was decent, the world was well-imagined, and the graphics were okay for their time, but the much-touted alignment / cause-and-effect system left a lot to be desired. There were some neat aspects to it – your character’s appearance changed based on how strong, weak, good or evil you were, and people reacted to you differently as well – but a lot of the interactions seemed superfluous. So, my character can drink beer, get drink, then throw up – what does that gain me? Why would I bother to do that except to see the animation? Apparently eating too much food made your character fat, but my character ate a lot of food throughout the adventure (food resulted in healing) and I never gained a pound – too much running I guess. The entire marriage / dating / sex subsystem was equally lacking – sure, it was there, but there was no motivation at all for me to take part in it. The plot was also a bit thin, a “previously unknown super bad guy is now the last boss” type of thing, but the game ended up being good enough that I am looking forward to trying out Fable II for the Xbox 360.

As the winter comes I’ll have time to play a few more games (currently looking at Jade Empire, Gears of War, Tales of Vesperia, and a few others), so I may continue to write about them. At the very least it’s getting me writing

… at least it is in Vancouver. I can’t really complain, since only a couple of months ago people were complaining how we weren’t really getting summer weather, so instead of talking about the Vancouver heat I’ll talk about a few other areas of my life that are heating up (yes, a lame segue, but really it’s too hot to think of anything more clever).

Yesterday, the team I manage at work grew by 60%, going from 5 members to 8 (not counting myself). We are now wholly responsible for 4 complete products, 1 internal and 3 external, and with any luck we’ll be the most efficient team in the company in terms or revenue per person. That said, efficiency isn’t what I’m striving for – while the team growth and priority shifts are causing me a bit more work in the short term, I think we’ll be able to maintain a comfortable pace that allows for slack.

Last night I went to Vij’s for Jen‘s birthday, and the food was as fantastic as the last time that I was there. We didn’t have any cricket bread this time, but the dishes we did have were perfectly spiced for the weather – we were all sweating a little bit and our mouths were tingling, but nothing was too hot. If anyone out there is a fan of Indian food and hasn’t yet been to Vij’s, hit up Jen’s review for a strong argument for you to go as soon as possible.

I’ve played relatively few team sports in my life, at least by choice (I’ve tried to forget about junior high gym class). I did 6 years of martial arts throughout high school, which I found very enjoyable, but I never was one to pass a ball, shoot a basket, or score a touchdown. That’s changed this summer, as I’ve been playing Ultimate with a team consisting mostly of workmates. While I’m relatively fit (not fat, not athletic, was biking to work a few times a week before moving), my lack of disc-throwing experience combined with an almost complete absence of team play made the first few outings quite difficult. Over the summer, however, I feel like I’ve improved to a level that I’ve never before reached in a team sport. That’s not to say that I consider myself “good” at Ultimate, nor am I one of the better members on the team – I just feel that I’ve never had this level of team strategy combined with skill in the sport. I’m seeing plays materialize, I’m going to where the disc is going to be, and I’m actually getting some of the more interesting throws to go where I want them (hello, outside-in). It’s pretty fun, and I’ll very likely play another season next summer, but before that – playoffs! We don’t exactly feel a lot of pressure, but there’s still going to being a lot of excitement on the field, and given that we have a game this week, we’ll definitely be feeling the heat.

There, that’s three things that are (very) tangentially related to heat – increased workload, spicy food, and the pressure of playoffs. Hopefully if I keep thinking of other heat-related things, I can forget the fact that my daily commute to work is more like a pressure cooker than a bus ride. Stay cool out there!

In the spirit of my February Wrapup, here are some things that have been going in the last month or so.

An explanation of some recent entries on my Twitter feed:

I am the Jenga king (April 4)

We had an end-of-fiscal-year party at work, which ended up being a ton of fun. I was part of a 3-person team who ended up winning the giant-jenga tournament. One of my turns took about 5 minutes, but I got that brick out! Here’s what it looked like:

Very proud of my wife right now (April 8 )

In the past few months my wife Melanie has taken the training to become a doula, gone to additional training courses, and become involved in the Doula Services Association of B.C. – it’s been a busy spring! I believe this tweet was made about an hour after she went to work her first shift as a doula, which happened to be an overnight shift.

I held a 320-year-old book this weekend. It was *cool* (April 14)

Visiting Mel’s grandparents’ place on Vancouver Island is always a treat – good food, interesting stories, and the chance to explore their awesome old house. After looking through various bookshelves, I found a copy of The First Book of Architecture,  by Andrea Palladio, an original copy from 1692. There were also a lot of early-print Kipling books, some cool war books, and a lot more that I’ll look through on my next visit.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. (April 24)

This turns out to be a quote by Voltaire, though I didn’t know it at the time. I hadn’t heard it before, but it immediately appealed to me, and since hearing it I’ve seen how applicable it is to many situations. The main thrust is not to let the difficulty of perfection prevent you from improving. For example, take a look at the whole STV issue currently going on in BC – some people say that because it’s got some flaws we shouldn’t adopt it, and instead wait to come up with something perfect. If you always strive for the perfect without allowing yourself to settle for the good, you may not accomplish much.

Going to see a ‘ukulele grandmaster tonight. James Hill’s gonna rock! (April 30)

James Hill and I go way back – we were in a musical together in my first year of university, and I was in a short-lived funk band with him (check here for a review of the band’s only album, under “The People vs. Funk” – I can probably get a copy of the tracks for anyone who’s interested). He’s a musical genius, a string virtuoso, and an all-around nice guy, so I was pleased to hear that he was coming back to his native Vancouver to rock out on the ‘ukulele (yes, it’s possible). A great show!

How has your spring been so far?