Introverts Unite!

"Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?

If so, do you tell this person he is "too serious," or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out?"

That's a quote from this article. That pretty much sounds like me and to this I say: Introverts of the world unite!

Yesterday, I wrote this post in which I described how bad I am at chit chat and small talk. I thought that I was making a minor observation for amusement's sake only. What do you know, more people responded to that post in a single day then have responded to my posts in the last month. (Some responded by e-mail.) Many of the responses agreed that I need to do better with casual conversations and that I should get over myself 'cause it's rude.

I agree but only to a point. That is, after all, why I wrote my post in the first place. However, I would like to note that most people are extroverts and social conversations are therefore important to them. I am not an extrovert and it's somewhat chaffing to be squeezed into that box of social norms. Extroverts may take lack of small talk as a sign that introverts do not care about them, but introverts may take the judgment that we're rude as a rejection of who we are.

So I tell you what. When I have conversations, either in person or on the phone, I'll keep in mind that others value some unrelated pleasantries about life in general. In return y'all can recognize that it requires extra work for me to do so and you can either lead the conversation or allow me my space after a while. Heh. Good compromise?

Chit Chat

One of the few skills that I never really learned during my years at AV-Base is phone manners. Not to say that I'm not polite, it's just that friendly chit-chat on the phone has never been my forte. It seems that a lot of people spend at least a little time discussing the weather, or how tough work was in the past week, or some major event in their families' lives.

Me, I'm much more to the point. I regularly need to call our clients to ask them design questions or to answer a particularly difficult question about our software. I usually open with an introduction, ask if they have five minutes to talk and boom, I'm into the main subject. Once it's over, I offer my thanks and that's the end of the call. It's efficient but it's all business, no fun.

I find that I act that way during my personal phone calls as well. My main motivation is that I don't want to suck up too much time from someone. (That's right, I don't want to suck.) I have no idea what the other person was doing when I called them or when they called me. Perhaps they have someone standing there waiting for them, so who am I to take up ten minutes?

Of course, most people probably would like to chat for a while. Even if I allowed for this, I'm still not good at it. I don't know what to do with meaningless chit chat. I don't really care to discuss the weather. I don't know why anyone would care basketball was cancelled at the church yesterday because no-one showed up.

Granted, I have quite often taken the lead in opening up conversations with new people. Throw me into a group with one new person and I can easily strike up a funny "get to know you" conversation for fifteen minutes. I would say that this is a learned behaviour, though, so that the group doesn't sit there silently for a long time. I haven't really learned how to do this effectively with people I know casually.

However, once in a while I do have a friend like Richard or Joel Terry that calls for the sole purpose of catching up on things. These conversations easily stretch towards one hour and they're a pleasure for me. The difference, though, is that the intention is clear and these are my close friends. I still find it difficult to chat with an acquaintance for five minutes or more on the phone.

Funny enough, I can sit down and type up a blog post for more than a half hour. It's just these real-life conversations that are tricky. Heh.

Facebook & Failing

The count down has begun. Only three more weeks until I leave AV-BASE, the only company I've worked for in this chosen career of mine.

I got sucked into facebook.com a few weeks ago, quite by accident. I have a blog, a photo website, a mySpace site and a few other miscallaneous "social" sites. I like to set them all up just to make it easier to find me on the internet.

I'm impressed with facebook so far, though the interface is a mess. It's the new mySpace. I was already aware that university students tended to use facebook but high schoolers still prefer to use mySpace, from what I can tell. MySpace is better in that it offers your own URL and you can music samples and videos. Facebook is handy because it shows you all of the latest changes from your friends so it's easy to keep up to date.

Shout out to Ashleigh and her blog. She recently joined my cell group and is in the Christmas choir at church with me. Nice girl, she fits in well with our weekly group.

More Beef For Your Buck: Steve relates his experiences with the double-beef Big Mac - that's right, it had a total of 8 patties. He compares it to the triple-pattie bascon cheeseburger from Harvey's. He has a lot of nice stomache-churning details.

Congrats to all of my various licence-toting friends. Alma got her G2 licence last week and Joel Terry got his G1 licence last week. Catharina Terry got her G1 last month as well. Joel was always a little freaked out when I allowed Tara or Catharina to drive my van when we were all packed in there. Now the gas pedal's on the other foot and we'll see how he does.

Point of triva: I actually failed my first G test back in the day. I was still in Wawa at the time, one month before I moved down to London. In Wawa, the testers have to come in from Sault Ste. Marie so they only come once a month for a single day. There were no street lights in Wawa and there were no four-lane roads. It was the easiest test ever, and I didn't even do highway driving because the only two-lane highway out of town was under construction. And the main reason that I failed the first time? I didn't turn my head to look both ways while driving through intersections, though I did move my eyes to look both ways. Thankfully, I took my test again one week before I came to London and I passed.

My Life at AV-BASE: Part I

It has been more than seven years since I first joined AV-BASE Systems and now it's time for me to go. I have submitted my resignation and I will be leaving near the end of November to help found a new company. I wanted to give all of you a letter explaining how much I have loved being with this company all these years, and explaining why I am leaving. You can feel free to talk to me about all of this as well.

My Life at AV-BASE: The Beginning

Back in May 1999, I had just finished my first year at Fanshawe College in the computer programming course. I was looking for a placement with the co-operative education program and I had not succeeded in my initial interviews. The school term had ended and my interview with AV-BASE was actually scheduled for the next day. If I didn't land this co-op position, there was nothing else available. Not only that, but I was competing against one of the top students in my class at the time.

I had my interview with Bert and Helen at their office in Lambeth. After the usual series of questions (there were no interview tests back in those days), we began discussing my experience of creating a Room Booking program for my church. We discussed the fun and the problems of designing software and then having the user add a dozen new requests afterwards.
We really connected based on my real-life experience and a few days later I was informed that I had the job!

I complete my first co-op position over the course of that summer in 1999. Bert and Helen then allowed me to work one day a week while I completed my third term and then I returned for my second co-op term on December 20th, 1999. I then completed my fourth term at school and immediately started working for AV-BASE full time.

When I first started, AV-BASE was about six months into creating the new Windows-based version, which they called WinAir. We were rebuilding the AV-BASE DOS product from scratch, maintaining only parts of the original dBase DOS database. It took us about one year to create this new WinAir Professional version and we have been developing it ever since.

Visual dBase 7.01 was entirely different from dBase for DOS and it took a lot of learning on everyone's parts. Those were the early days when almost every co-op student tried to persuade Bert and Helen to switch to Visual Basic or Visual C++ with MFC or some other language. Despite the whining, no-one ever cared enough to prepare a business case proving that other languages would be more effective. Bert and Helen were the ones forking out the cash for one year of development without a sale for WinAir so they needed serious reasons to make such a drastic change.

For my part, I immediately loved dBase and I'm sure you all know that I love it to this day. The native integration for database support was phenomenal and it was so easy to use. Rapid Application Development (RAD) indeed. Within three months, I had ripped apart my existing Room Booking program. I converted it from a Visual Basic program using an Microsoft access database to a Visual dBase program with a BDE-driven dBase database. I even stole the treeview-style menu that we use in WinAir because I liked it so much.

So I came in with little experience but I had crazy ideas about Object Oriented Development and Relational Databases. One of my first projects was to design the databases and algorithms for the Template MCN Links system, which actually worked out very well and we use almost exactly the same system to this day in WinAir.

Back then, I didn't know much about anything. The "Reliability" screen that still exists in WinAirSQL was my design and I can't help but laugh at myself when I look at that screen. I had a long way to go in terms of my visual design, in terms of understanding true OO development and figuring out what a multi-tiered system actually looked like.

My Life at AV-BASE: Part II
My Life at AV-BASE: Part III

My Life at AV-BASE: Part II

It has been more than seven years since I first joined AV-BASE Systems and now it's time for me to go. I have submitted my resignation and I will be leaving near the end of November to help found a new company. I wanted to give all of you a letter explaining how much I have loved being with this company all these years, and explaining why I am leaving. You can feel free to talk to me about all of this as well.

My Life at AV-BASE: Professional Growth

I started as a student programmer and I've come a long way from there. I eventually took on various roles that included: junior programmer, senior programmer, design team, project manager, director, QA Team lead, with plenty of Tech Support and Training thrown in.
I have been Project Manager at least four times. That shows both the growing process for AV-BASE as a company and the growing process for myself. If there's anyone that is an example of what not to do, it's me. I used to come into work at 6:00 am and leave at 2:00 pm. I used to come to work in jeans and a t-shirt and put my feet up on my desk. I used to have really smelly pizza pockets that stunk up the whole office and I used to whip Skittles out the window in Lambeth. Heh.

The key that allowed me and AV-BASE to succeed in this growth process is that we did try to grow together. There were no problems so large that we couldn't deal with them. As long as I listened to my bosses and their advice, I would be fine. As long as I realized that there were better ways to do things and I improved, we were able to move on from there. My technical skills improved, my professional skills improved, my logical thinking improved, my interpersonal skills improved, my management skills improved...well, I doubt that there is any part of my professional life that has not improved since I joined.

I am eternally grateful to Bert and Helen for the opportunities that they have given me all of these years. I am the man that I today because of their generousity, because of their support, because of their corrections and because of their leadership.

I love this company and I love the people at AV-BASE. I joined the company when there were only five people. Within a year we had doubled in size and we had to start renting a second office in Lambeth. After a few more years we doubled in size again and we decided to move to Unit 10 in London. Then we had to expand and take over Unit 21 and now we're expanding again to take over Unit 13 as well.

Scott is the only one that has been at AV-BASE longer than me and he joined back in 1996 when Bert and Helen were still working out of the airplane hangar at their house. Soon after I joined, Dejan came in 2000 and Lindsay joined later in 2001. I've had numerous close friends come and go during that time. We have even seen babies born to many of our staff over the years. The growth of our company just hasn't stopped and I expect AV-BASE to keep going strong for many more years to come.

My Life at AV-BASE: Part I
My Life at AV-BASE: Part III