spark a little snooping

In October of 2000 I was working at a dotcom. It was me, 12 computers, 12 phones and a whole lot of conference call webcasting. It’s what eventually got me over to Boston a couple years later, and then back home a while after that. The way it all started, as some liked to say, was with shoelaces and bubble gum. The system was rickety, duct tape was often involved, and I would soon realize that the Burger King on Main Street, near 2nd didn’t serve breakfast at 4:45am, just dinner.

I got into the whole deal through some old friends that I’ve known since I was 8 years old. We kept in touch until my mid-teens then we didn’t see each other for a while. After couple years passed, one of them happened upon me online, recognizing my handle on Audiogalaxy (this was before the days of Napster and Kazaa). We then did a little catching up. They talked about this online broadcasting project that they’d just begun, I signed on and the rest is my geek history.

Currently, one of them is doing contract work over at Telus. John met me after work today and we Skytrained out to Joyce (since we’re cheap and only wanted to pay the 1 zone fare at the time) then walked over to ‘The Boot’ [GVRD].

‘The Boot’ is rather intimidating. Sitting atop the hill on the corner of Kingsway and Boundary is the multi-googo-mega Telus Corp. We went inside and got a tour of his new workspace – basically the encoding centre. Man, encoding centres have come a LONG way since my days of duct tape, Real Media editor and gentner switches.

I almost had to stop John from drooling over all the audio equipment (and the on-site fitness club), man we gotta get him a job soon.

From there we headed over to Lynn Valley to catch the game, since it was Pay Per View and the guys have the whole pre-paid package deal. Boy, it was well worth the money tonight… well okay the 3rd period was well worth it.

The following is a photo tour of our afternoon and of things I was comfortable snapping shots of in ‘The Boot’ before we vacated the premises.

We felt the love

Where some of the magic happens

“That’s not good enough! We want MORE asbestos! MORE asbestos!”

HOT

The escape route

Alternate escape route

The reward