Performance Zen

Author: spierzchala

  • Resume/CV Update

    Yehaa! MSFT Word and PDF versions are now up!

  • Why I fear for this nation, PART DEUX

    Posted on shel israel’s blog this morning.


    A Case for Slavery

    Ummmm, when’s the next convoy headed north?

  • Creative Burnout and the Future

    NOTE: This was written in 2006. I achieved 1.5 of the 3 items.

    • I am working for a different company – 3 different companies counting acquisitions.
    • I am working in the Pacific Northwest, just not in one of the major cities
    • I am not living in Canada, but I can see it from my desk while I work.

    Scott Berkun has an excellent essay on creative burnout.

    For those of you who read this and may know me, this is a hard thing to accept. That I have gone so hatd at something for so long that it no longer excites me. Yes, there are elements of it that do motivate me, but the day-in, day-out work of taking apart companies’ Web performance data, answering the same questions, and hearing the same questions is no longer fun.

    I used to live for this sort of thing. I would work from 06:00 – 00:00 because there were so many cool and interesting problems to solve. Now I heat those some questions and almost roll my eyes.

    I have been immersed in this field for so long that I have lost a lot of my focus. But now I am asking questions that are the foundation of my life.

    • Where do I want to be in 5 years?  Short Answer: Working in Canada, consulting and speaking to an international audience on trends in Web performance from a technical and process standpoint
    • Will I be working for the company I am working for now? Not likely.
    • Where will I be living? At minimum in one of the Pacific Northwest’s triad (Vancouver/Victoria, Seattle or Portland). Preferably near but not in Victoria, where I can easily get flights to my gigs.

    I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and thinking how much better I would feel being closer to home. I accepted this move as a way to get out of one backward, dead-end job, but I often find myself questioning if it was a good move, or simply one of convenience.

    Last night, I updated my resume/CV. Tomorrow, I will transfer it to Word, Text and PDF formats. Time to hit the pavement again.

  • And they wonder why I fear for this nation sometimes…

    Read this article, and you will understand.

    Help America.

  • Interesting theme appearing — US Foreign Service Not Helpful

    One of the themes I keep reading about in the stories from the Southeast Asia Disaster Zone is that Americans are all reporting how ineffective and/or invisible members of the US Foreign Service are in dealing with citizens trying to get replace documents, find loved ones or simply get home.

    I hope that the Canadian Foreign Service is doing a better job.

    Faye Wachs said she was impressed by the efforts of the Thai
    government and the International Committee for the Red Cross, but “she was appalled at the treatment they got” from the U.S. government, her mother said.

    At the airport in Bangkok, other governments had set up booths to greet nationals who had been affected and to help repatriate them, she said.

    That was not the case with the U.S. government, Wachs told her mother. It took the couple three hours, she said, to find the officials from the American consulate, who were in the VIP lounge.

    Because they had lost all their possessions, including their documentation, they had to have new passports issued.

    But the U.S. officials demanded payment to take the passport pictures, Helen Wachs said.

    The couple had managed to hold on to their ATM card, so they paid for the photos and helped other Americans who did not have any money get their pictures taken and buy food, Helen Wachs said.

    “She was really very surprised” that the government did so little to ease their ordeal, she said.

    http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/12/28/tsunami.diver/index.html

  • Donate what you can — Tsunami Relief & American Red Cross

    Scoble points us all to the Amazon homepage.

    Amazonmaindec292004

    Give what you can.

  • Updating my CV/Resume

    Spent the last couple of hours looking over my CV and examining all the things that I have done over the last six and a half years. I have gone from a pretty mundane tech-support position that was not challenging me in Victoria, BC, to Silicon Valley during the boom, and landing a job in the 128 Corridor in Massachusetts.

    Not bad for a kid from a small town, where the grad class only had 65 students.

    If you are a potential employer (or basically curious or voyeuristic), drop by the updated document; there is a link in the left-hand column of this page.

  • GrabPERF Renamed

    The site formerly known as GrabPERF has be re-branded (yuck!) as WebPerformance.

    The GrabPERF measurement system is a component of the WebPerformance site. There are also libraries of articles on Web performance, caching, and compression.

    I will be making more tweaks, as I have this week off from my real job.

  • Craig’s List Costing Newspapers

    Report: Craigslist costing newspapers millions

    Well, this is no surpise. It’s fast, cheap and easy-to-use. THe classified industry has changed so substantially as a result of the online world that traditional classifieds almost seem quaint…at least to me.

  • Southeast Asia Tsunami Aid — Who’s Giving?

    The CBC has a great list of which countries are giving and how much.

    Given the size and scope of the crisis, the response from the world community seems particularly small. Individual contributions will likely grow this number, but give what you can.

    Especially in the US. I would like to see private donations in the US vastly exceed government contributions to send a message to the Bush Cabal — the United States has not forgotten the rest of the world.


    UPDATE

    It seems that the US has decided to kick in another $20M. I gave my $100 to the Canadian Red Cross this afternoon.