the corollary to spending literally all of your time working for two months is that you have literally no time to exercise. add a three-day cold at the end of your two months of stressful overwork, and you get weakness... truck-fulls of weakness.

i went for a run on christmas day as a gift to myself. it had been almost two months since my last run, and i felt that i had given my plantar fasciitis enough time to heal up. it has not been bothering me much lately, and i've tried to stretch it out when i could, so i felt that it would be a good idea. i could only go 5k though before my legs and lungs both screamed at me to get real and let them stop. full-on corporeal  mutiny.

today, i went to the gym to take a more measured approach to getting back into shape. i got on the exercise bike for a warm-up, but couldn't ride for more than 10 agonizing minutes before feeling like i was going to puke. i worked out on some weak-ass resistance machines to get a measure of where my tolerances where - and it turned out that i have the strength of a 14-year old girl. i stretched out my poor broken heel and started a jog on the treadmill to end the workout... i ran for 15 minutes, and i couldn't go on. after only an hour in the gym, i was done.

this is the worst shape i've been in... in years, but the weird part is that... well, i don't look it. i still have the same approximate shape - i can see that there are muscles under my skin - they just don't have any of their former strength or endurance.

so now i'm faced with a choice. i'll be turning 40 next year. maybe i should just resign myself to a pedestrian level of health, rather than constantly priming myself for urgent battle-readiness. if i had a family or a hobby or something distracting, i might not have 20 hours a week to devote to training, and that would be okay. i don't think that there is anything more frustrating that having to start over from such a diminished condition through hours and hours of sweat and agony just to get back to the same level of fitness that i had just this summer. i've done it more times than i can count, and i'm just a little bit tired of it.

sigh. i plan to go back to the gym tomorrow to work my legs and arms. i know full well that i'll try and climb this grease-pole of fitness once again. it's just incredibly frustrating, and i think that i can certainly understand and appreciate the decision people make to "let themselves go" from their former 14-year old selves.

- g

song of the day for working hard, even when you aren't at work: work hard, depeche mode (yes, this is the b-side to the last DM song of the day - whatever)

in april of 2008, i was sent to the GEL ("good experience live") conference in new york. it was a life-changing experience because (a) it was my first trip to new york city and all that that experience entailed; (b) as a corporate perk, it supplanted the previous best trip ever of spending a week in vancouver in an incredible penthouse hotel suite to train on software that i would become expert in for years and years of my professional career; and (c) because i got to meet kelly dobson.

before i left for the conference, i surveyed most of the conference presenter's websites, but kelly's was the most interesting to me - i remember sending links to some of my friends to express my excitement! kelly is a technology artist who works at MIT's media labs where she explores how we interact with machines and through machines, with each other and ourselves. it's a pretty esoteric subject, but one that is very significant to me, having come into a career in technology from the field of graphic design.

i fell in love with her wearable devices first. anyone who has been around corporate culture lately knows the impact of the blackberry and smartphones that put their users in constant communication with the stream of information that drive their businesses. that simple fact has basically swept away the standards of a 9-to-5, five-day-a-week work day making work - or rather making the worker - accessible 24-7-365. all one has to do is look around a major metropolitan corporate centre to understand the impact that this has had on humanity. you will see men and women focussed on a hunk of plastic in their hands, oblivious to their surroundings, hooked into an artificial reality that no one else can see or hear. kelly has been researching a different kind of technology that allows its users to manage emotions and interpersonal relations an analogous way with her "screambody" invention, and the "omo" synthetic being.

i think that it's her work with "reappropriated domestic appliances" that has the most impact for me. kelly as taken common appliances like a blender, coffee maker, or a vacuum, and created "empathetic interfaces" for them... the user growls along with the appliance to "encourage" it to perform its function, and thus, creates a relationship with the tool rather than the unconscious "master-slave" or "user-tool" relationship. while this might seem pretty superfluous, kelly gives this initiative incredible significance with this statement:

"they're whole organisms... they're kind of normative - they try and act normal...this idea of normal is maybe i don't that is that necessary. i know that when i was a kid, my grandmother liked that we acted up and we acted kind of wild and unpredictable, because by not being normal, you open up a creative space for people to re-perceive interactions. where if you create a machine that are for human-machine interaction, and they call for a certain interaction, you're training that person to have that kind of interaction with not just the machines, but with people too, and so if you have a robot who is pretending to be a person, and that says "i love you , kelly" even if you're a total jerk to it, you might think that you can be a jerk and people will say "i love you, kelly", so i wanted to make machines that complicated that and acted neurotic like we did too."

this is so incredibly true. our world is so insular in that we spend so much time watching television, watching movies, playing video games, surfing the internet, watching youtube, and generally having abstracted interpersonal experiences where our intent and attitude towards the subject are completely separated from the experienced outcome of that interaction. kelly's work is singular in the sense that she is creating a brand of technology in which the way that we interact with it has a direct result in its response to our treatment. in a way, her work forces us to treat technology with respect, which might extend to our interaction with other types of technology and ultimately, with one another.

it was a thrill to watch kelly's presentation at GEL. it was an even bigger thrill to have kelly sit in the row in front of me for the rest of the day's presentations! it's rare to meet people who are interested in the kinds of deep philosophical questions that you love to ponder, and to meet people who have the opportunity to investigate them as part of their careers, and to meet people who love lululemon clothes enough to wear them to their conferences! i took the opportunity to say hi to kelly during a break and take the photo above. but in true george-style, i gushed in front of her about how fantastic i thought her work was until i was pretty sure she was going to call security to have me ejected from the conference! i saw her at the social after the presentations, and i felt so horrified at having been such a fanboy that i completely avoided talking more with her, even though she was by far the most interesting presenter i saw.

so what is the point to this whole experience? i think that all of us need to be mindful of how technology influences our interactions with it and with other non-technological beings. our generation, more than any other, is the best equipped to become dehumanized and solipsistic and it is work like kelly's that can help to change that trend.

- g

ps. watch kelly's full presentation here: http://gelconference.com/videos/2008/kelly_dobson/

i just put the finishing touches on some of the most challenging work i have ever had to do. i've had work that was more technically challenging, more complicated, and even work that had to be done faster. but i've never had work that was as demanding and requiring of as much adaptability and flexibility.

why was this work so challenging? constantly changing requirements and objectives. typically, when you plan a project, you determine in advance what you are going to do, what you need to get it done in the time and budget that you have to do it, and then you execute according to that plan. this last project has been constantly shifting, changing scope, amplifying effort, redirecting attention, demanding that we alter our approach and our solution, right up to the very last minute. i had to lead the project, so i had to demand the sacrifices of all of my teammates, coerce them to work late nights and weekend, and require their full participation. all the while, i had to try and manoeuver the impossible path to completion that had us reworking, revisiting and redesigning our solution over and over again.

two months of overtime and weekends have passed and i am finally on the other side of the project, close to being on time and not quite as close to being on budget. the client and my company feel that the project was a success. however, i crossed a line for myself in work-life balance that i promised myself never to cross again, so was i, personally, successful? more importantly, if this is the cost of professional success, is that a price that i should be willing to pay? is there a way that i can ensure that i don't repeat this same kind of mistake again in some other similar project?

i am sorry to my friends and family for not being better able to fulfil my personal commitments over the past few months. i have some time now to get re-centered and re-focused, here at the end of the year. i'll have some thoughts about the year in retrospect, and about how next year will be different.

happy holidays everyone!

- g

song of the day for putting too much of yourself into things: everything counts, depeche mode

thanks to my sponsors for mo-vember, RV and LR (you know who you are)! i managed to get through the harrying month of movember with the terrible pokey barbs of my facial hair jabbing at my upper lip and i think that i managed to raise a little bit of awareness about prostate cancer in our society. mostly this took the form of curious and often pitying second-glances at my face as i boarded or exited a subway car. but one encounter stands out in my mind as a success for the entire movember campaign. i was in a starbucks, ordering my coffee (a recurring theme, it would appear, in my life) when the barista remarked of my face, "hey - so you're growing that out" and gesturing towards his clean-shaven chin. this was around mid-movember when i still had some chin-hair, trying to salvage some sense of personal dignity and a modicum of self-image. i replied, "hey - it's movember - guys around the world are growing their moustaches to raise awareness of prostate cancer - it's real, you know!"

i derived a huge sense of satisfaction knowing that i had DIRECTLY raised awareness in exactly ONE other person about the disease the predominantly strikes men and is a huge mortality risk. it hardly compensated for the awkwardness i felt sporting a porn-star 'stache when i went to my yoga class, but it was something.

our company raised about a thousand dollars for the cause, and that's something that i am immensely proud of. but more than that sense of pride, i'm relieved to be back to my clean-shaven self, feeling far less self-aware, and not having pokey, wirey beard screwing up my complexion.

so thanks again to those of you who supported me emotionally, philosophically, or financially, in my cause. i promise that next year, i will do a better job of fundraising and construct a far more creative facial hair artpiece!!

- g