Given that I’ve been with my current company for the last four years, I haven’t really had to think about salaries for quite some time. That being said, I’m actually curious how Vancouver is doing in terms of salaries in the high-tech department. I know it’s fairly easy to acquire a +100k job in the Bay Area, and in New York you can easily approach 200k in some fields (Math+Programming in the stock market for example). By talking to various people over the last few months, I gather there’s a pretty big spread amongst most companies in this city. I’ve thrown together a few quick and ...

It’s here, Northern Voice 2008. Tonight is the big social down at the Tiki Lounge in East Vancouver. I’ll be heading down with Rebecca, John, and Keira for some drinks and a full roast-pig. I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to say at PhotoCamp, but I’ll spend some time thinking about it during the day and see what I can come up with. Photo by Gary on FlickrEvery camera in my house is currently dead, so I’m frantically bouncing between doing laundry and charging equipment. I went to the mall to pick out some new clothes tonight, but turns out I’m just way too picky. I’ve ...

So a friend of mine pinged me online the other day and told me he had been laid off from a local company. I didn’t ask too many details because I was a bit busy at the time, but since then a larger picture has emerged. Apparently the local company decided to pack up and head south of the border. And while a lot of permanent employees were laid off, they also slaughtered the co-op students as well. As someone who used to be involved in the co-op program, I can tell you that this is a pretty low blow. These students have precisely four months to earn enough money to get them through another full ...

Toshiba just withdrew their support, which basically means it’s completely empty over in the HD-DVD camp right now. Remind me never to be an early adopter again. So, stay tuned for the HD-DVD burning party at a campground near Chilliwack. ...

Yes, I think it’s true. HD-DVD, my friends, is dead, or at least in the last of its death throes. Being an early adopter, I went out a few months ago and picked up a HD-DVD player, thinking that at the bare minimum both formats would exist for a year or more. It turns out my timing was rather poor. A few of the major studios moved from HD-DVD to BluRay last month, and the move was so dramatic that the HD-DVD guys cancelled their talks at the CES show in Vegas (which actually probably did the most harm to their effort). Reuter’s is reporting that HD-DVD is basically dead, and a leak from WalMart ...

I love Digg. I surf it at least a couple times a day, usually when I’m bored, sitting a work waiting for something to compile. I would say that without a doubt the majority of my “cool” news actually comes from Digg. Lately I’ve begun submitting the odd story on my own to Digg. No matter how many times I try to submit something though, I always seem to get stuck on the same old problem — what category does the story fit in? The main problem I think is that Digg categories are more mainstream news oriented and less about the things I actually am interested in (even though I think most ...

Wow, what can I say. That is a pretty impressive sum of money. I read this before going to bed last night on Digg, but I thought it was fake. Turns out that Microsoft has just extended a 44 billion dollar offer for Yahoo! To be honest, Google has really handed Yahoo! their hand in search. I personally don’t know anyone that uses Yahoo to do search, although I’ve been told it’s still fairly popular in Asia. I have friends over at Yahoo!, and I once showed them my web logs from my blog indicating that something like 98% of all searches originate from Google. They refused to believe they were ...

This is a rather interesting move made by Facebook. Apparently on Friday they announced a new javascript library that would let you put Facebook applications on your own web page. Facebook announced Friday a new JavaScript client library that will allow Facebook apps to be displayed on any website. The client library allows users to make Facebook API calls from any web site and create Ajax Facebook applications on that website. Wei Zhu from Facebook explains the benefits: Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can ...

As of October of 2007, Apple has sold approximately 120 million iPods worldwide. At approximately $250 each, that’s $30 billion dollars in revenue. It is without a doubt one of Apple’s crowning technical achievements, both for the ingenuity of the hardware and for the revolutionary integration with software on several platforms. And yet lately, as I’ve trekked the 30 minute walk between my home and work with my iPod blaring away, I’ve started to wonder what the impact of this technology really is. For starters, those of us who listen to iPods frequently are subjecting ourselves to potential ...

I have, for the last few years, had an idea about something I’ve wanted to do involving technology. I was talking to Boris about this a while ago, and I’m pretty certain this actually has a real name and has been done many times before in various cities. But for now, I’m just going to describe what would happen, and we’ll decide an official name later (until of course Boris wakes up in whatever country he is in and chimes in). The idea is that over the course of one full weekend (that is, starting Friday at 7pm until Sunday at midnight) you get a team of people together to develop a product/service/technology ...

About four years ago, the push for new television technologies first emerged, supported primarily by advances in LCD and plasma technology. Many of these new televisions supported high definition (HD) content, at least in the traditional 720p variety. While Europe is ahead of North America in this regard, we have slowly been migrating most of our North American television services to digital, and in most cases, HD. I believe the US has a target date of around 2013 to be completely digital. HD content looks, quite simply, amazing. Which is why Hollywood has spent the last few years humming and ...

In 1977, the same year I was born, NASA launched the Voyager 1 spacecraft with a mission to explore our solar system. It is still operational, and is located some 9.3 billion miles from the sun. At that distance, light (including radio waves) takes nearly 14 hours to reach our planet. By comparison, light from the sun takes about 8 minutes to get to earth. 17 years later, as voyager passed beyond the edge of our solar system, engineers at NASA turned the Voyager 1 spacecraft around, pointed it towards earth, and took a few shots of our planet. This is one of them. We’re that little speck on ...

This is an obvious play, but I’ve been waiting a long time for it to happen. Samsung has announced a new dual format (HD-DVD/Blue-Ray) DVD player, which basically means it will play everything on the market: Samsung’s HD disc player was going to be the first to do both HD DVD and Blu-ray completely right. But now, it’s perfect: Samsung just sent us an alert saying the dual-format BD-UP5000 Duo HD player will come hardware-ready for BD Profile 1.1—at least 256MB of internal storage, secondary audio and video decoders, virtual file system. You realize that the rest of the Blu-players ...

Yesterday Apple released verison 7.2 of iTunes which finally gives users the ability to download DRM free versions of songs from iTunes. The added bonus is that you can also download 256 kbps AAC versions of the files instead of the 128 kbps AAC versions. So, before I actually go into the experience, I’d have to say I was slightly hesitant about this. When people think 128kbps, they automatically think of the old MP3s. And at 128kbps, MP3 files are fairly close to CD quality (for most people), but on my stereo at least, I can notice slight distortions. However, AAC is part of the MPEG4 standard ...

I remember back around Christmas, Sony announced that they were unable to meet the holiday demand for the PS/3. I suspect part of this may have been artificial, since the resulting huge line-ups across the country showered the company with press everywhere. Unfortunately, those events lead to the deaths of a few people in incidents that occurred while in the long line-ups in sometimes cold, outdoor conditions. During that period, I had passively walked into whatever electronics store I could find, and asked if they had a PS/3 for sale. The answer was always no. So here we are, nearly six months ...

I’ve had an iPod now for probably at least two years. On my birthday, Des picked me up one of those iPod Minis back when they first came out. And as I sit here, on my couch, patiently waiting for it to charge enough so it will make the rainy walk to work, I thought I’d reflect a bit on the iPod. Since I usually walk wherever I go downtown, I pretty much take the iPod with me when I can. I’m sure I’m going to be part of that generation that goes prematurely deaf since I’m somehow genetically inclined to listen to my iPod on max or near-max volume all the time. In fact, if it could go ...

I’m just gonna jot this here in case anyone is interested in this sort of stuff. On saturday night, there will be a total eclipse of the moon, visible from all seven continents.. Set aside some time this weekend for sky watching. On Saturday night, March 3rd, there’s going to be a total eclipse of the Moon. This means the Moon will glide through the heart of Earth’s shadow and turn a beautiful shade of sunset red. Totality can be seen from parts of all seven continents including all of Europe and Africa and the eastern half of North America. Check out spaceweather.com for more details. ...

I thought I’m chime in with my thoughts and feelings so far now that it’s been a few days without a PC. First, I’m definitely really happy with my purchase. For the most part everything has just worked, and I haven’t had to mess with very many things so far. Sometimes I lament not having more control over cetain elements (for example, trying to figure out which WiFi connection to use in a public space isn’t exactly obvious — in Windows at least you can see signal strength and public/private all at once. I haven’t figured out how to see all that on the Mac). The windowing manager ...

When I started redoing my blog about a month ago, I thought it would be cool to add an area where somebody could SMS me if they wanted. That way, if you were on my blog and you wanted to get a hold of me quickly, you could. For some reason, it really did seem like a good idea at the time. However last night, somebody from Spain decided it would be a good idea to SMS me and let me know that my plugin wasn’t working for him. Unfortunately for me, it was about 4am in the morning, and my cell phone was about 4 inches from my head. So, I woke up wondering what in the hell was going on, only to see ...

As i mentioned in one of my previous posts, tonight I went down to Future Shop and picked up a new MacBook Pro. Before I detail what the buying experience was like, I’m going to talk a bit about me. I do stupid things. Quite often actually. And maybe Forest Gump would say it’s because I actually am stupid, but I think it’s mainly because I’m absent minded from time to time. One good example is the day I went to work with my short not only on backwards, but also on inside out. It didn’t really have any distinguishing features on it, and after three weeks of late nights working on my master’s ...