February 2008 Archives

Our lead engineer, Colin Surprenant has a "fetish" term he uses for testing the search functionalities: "Kickin Chickin".

I found him a nice inspirational video:

Enjoy!

This is how I feel today.

Forget second life or second cup, today we have a second office, thanks but no thanks to Hydro-Québec, we are still powerless (electricity-wise) so we are doing a friendly takeover at the Second Cup on Square Phillips next to our office (yeah, that one).

Not really, but we're one block away from the MusiquePlus studios (Quebec's MTV), Simple Plan will be live from their studio tonight and we can hear a frenzied crowd of Simple Plan fans from here...

"2007 was the year of networks. 2008 is going to be the year of communities. (...) Microcommunities are going to explode. Etc. Why? Because at the edge, love is more powerful than hate - a lot more powerful."

From Bubble Generation

Oh yeah, there's onion baji in the 'hood... tasty, kinda MoR, large Indian buffet down the street with an unfortunate name (don't let that discourage you). At 71 Sainte-Catherine Ouest near le TNM.

Our favorite audio engineer recently went to the local Second Cup and got more than just coffee in his coffee, he got himself a piece of coffee machine too. When asked if it enhanced the coffee drinking experience he said "it tasted a bit screwy towards the end".

A portion of the team has recently taken a fancy to these Sumsuma Sesame Squares produced by Montreal-based Prana.  As the web site describe, " The flavor of roasted organic sesame combined with the light sweetness of organic evaporated cane juice make our squares a crunchy delight !"


Miam!  They're ggggrrrreeeaaatttt and they're locally-made!

Busy day at the Praized H.Q. today, a "making of" of the photo shoot for the Gazette, I just HAD to take a snapshot of that one (sorry guys)! And with all that zombie talk, I'm off to bed!

Got my hair cut for our Montreal Gazette photo shoot today. That's photographer Phil Carpenter in the foreground and the three founders behind the room divider/ neighborhood map (peering through the streets). It should be part of a Gazette article to be published this Saturday by Roberto Rocha on Web 2.0 companies in Montreal.

Rock, kitsch and fun... And in spanish (even more kitsch) :

Here's another for Praized. Just opened down the street from the office, this place was already full at lunch today. Colin brought a Combo B (California 6pcs, Sake Maki 6pcs and Kamikaze 4pcs) to the office and it looked too good to pass up. What a different fresh makes - they make it on order, not pre-made.

Getting to find a good server naming convention is one of the treats of being the CTO of an internet startup. We had some heated discussions around the green table and also during the week from behind our 22" monitors... TV Series characters? Star Wars names (I am not a trekkie)? Planet names so we can make fun of someone doing penetration testing on the planet following Jupiter (anyway, not enough names for our needs).

Then it hit us : energy drink names! I found a huge list and we picked a few of the initial names. Our main production server had to be called Guru, that's our official drink at the HQ. But what about the dev server? Of the many options, Duff was found to represent quite well the team's spirit (and catch a bit of our TV/Comics roots). Our NAS is Rockstar (guess why) and we have Base, Spark, Amp and Rage lined up for a few other servers we have (most in the cloud, we are almost a serverless internet company, almost).

Next up : release/version names!

Note to self: Praize this place when the app is ready. They have some excellent pre-made sandwiches and I'm told good made-from-scratch soup (not the homemade like that comes frozen in a plastic bag). They also make pizzas, but I haven't tried them yet.