If you were to sit and ponder for a lifetime on the absurd, you would never come close to the ridiculousness of reality. If, however, you were to sit and ponder for a hundred lifetimes you could not come close to the absurdity of south asia. Of course, I speak of Sri Lanka and its immediate neighbour, Mother India.

Let me catch you up on the news of this week. In India, a holy man had his leg stolen. Apparently the man professed that he had healing powers in his leg and people had come from all over to be healed by said leg. Unfortunately there are two things which should apparently never go together, a love of alcohol and ability to heal with ones leg. Two man approached this living miracle and offered him a few drinks after which the men sawed off his leg. I wonder if the men considered whether the leg retained its holy powers after being severed. I’m also thinking that the Indian police should have no problem finding two men performing street healing miracles with a severed leg.

Thankfully the holy man did not claim to have the ability to heal by touching people with his forehead.

The second story involves two absentee god-lords. Basically two temples are fighting over land and the local people have insisted that the land belongs to the gods. Having no other alternative, the judge in question petitioned the gods to show up by sending them letters. Due to the letters being returned with an incorrect address  the judge decided as a matter of last resort to place ads in newspapers to make sure that the gods present themselves in person to solve the dispute. Oddly no report seems to indicate whether the gods actually heeded the summons.

Meanwhile in the three-ringed circus of Sri Lankan politics today an election was averted. All week each of the parties have been swapping players. So quickly that not even the news casters could keep up with the changes in Parliament. Members of one party quickly undressed, changed to the other party while others were passing them in different directions. In this game of musical chairs though an entire country hung to see which party came on top when the music ended, and whether a budget would pass or a government fall.

So important was this vote that they forced a member of parliament suffering from a heart attack to get into a wheelchair and get himself to parliament post haste. As the minutes ticked, the political landscape had shifted faster than quicksand and resulted in a deadlocked parliament: 112 opposition members to 112 government members. The people were glued to their radio sets (actually we were stuck in traffic with nothing better to do) and the country was awash in furious futility. By this time everyone was throughly confused as to which party which politician actually belonged to, if any or none.

Then finally, the vote and the result. Most of the opposition abstained from voting, the government survived. The nearly dead parliament member was quickly wheeled back to the hospital and the country heaved a collective sigh of relief: no one would have to sort out which party anyone belonged to until after the holiday season. I must admit, either Sri Lankan politics is of such amazing complexity it is akin to a game of chess being played on four planes of existence or the bearded lady of the circus has finally found a way to run a country.

I constantly wonder what my former co-workers would say if I popped into work wearing what I have been accustomed to wearing since I joined MySQL AB in July 2007. Would they actually get used to me showing up in nothing but shorts, sleepily stretching out in front of the computer, boiling a a cup of tea and then trundling into the office laptop in one hand and hoping that no video conference would be required today?

It’s the beauty of MySQL: 80% of the company works on a distributed basis, as in out of their homes. With IRC, phone and email, if you can avoid video, you can pretty much be sitting naked while you work if that is your preference. But wait, there’s more. It means that you can work from anywhere in the world: An airport, in the car, in the train and ultimately in a completely foreign country.  I promised that six months after I joined the company I would reflect on this lifestyle change and see how it’s gone, and here I am.

The bad stuff: There are definitely things I miss about an office environment. I no longer have the luxury of bouncing ideas around people as easily as I used to. I certainly miss the camaraderie of the BioWare IS Team, but then they might actually have been “special”. Certainly if you can’t handle self motivation and self discipline in organization, distributed employment is not for you. It’s just too easy to get pulled into the “Hmmm I’ll take a couple of hours to watch a show” routine.  I also miss the regular peer reviews that are endemic to office culture. There are days when I might not talk/email/chat with a single one of my co-workers (who themselves are distributed in the Western US, Australia, Austria and Russia), and there is a sense of loneliness sometimes.

However, I do believe that this sort of employment is the way of the future.

If you are looking for a way to reduce the environmental impact to the world, imagine if you removed the need to commute from the majority of the office-going workforce. It means not having to drive into work in morning rush hour, it means less need for both office and home heating, big office buildings and so on. Obviously this won’t work for every job, those in laboratories will probably still need to go in. I doubt you will be able to check out a sample of plutonium “for some home experiments so I can watch the kids”. However, with more workplaces adopting such a lifestyle, companies could massively reduce their carbon footprint, with an added benefit of a much better personal lifestyle.

My life these days revolves around me and my personal life and less about the office. I can’t just get up and go for a beer with my colleague in Melbourne, but it does mean that when I leave my work, I don’t go pour over it ad nauseum. It means on bad weather days I roll out of bed, look out the window, give a sigh of relief and go into my office room with a cup of tea. It means that I am able to visit my family in Sri Lanka, sit in a chair and work for many hours and enjoy the evenings with family I rarely get to see anymore. All I need is a net connection and my laptop. Sometimes I’ll even put on some clothes.

Of course there are the days that you are woken up in the middle of the night (like last night) because someone didn’t realize that you’re now 12 hours ahead of where you normally are. But you groggily take the call, answer the questions and go straight back to sleep.

Perhaps more companies should consider restructuring to take advantage of such distributed technology. The old problems of communication and collaboration are slowly evaporating…

By the way, there are quite a few job openings with MySQL… just in case you want to join the madness.

I’ve been in Sri Lanka a little over three days and I’ve already composed my tombstone a dozen times. Despite the lack of training with my mother’s food, I am not referring to being “spiced out” (in fact I’m doing quite well thank you), I am instead referring to the traffic. It is a continuous wave of speeding cars, vans and buses captained by horn-blaring, gesticulating, light-flashing, swerving and incomprehensibly-still-alive drivers.

I have to be honest, I’m not entirely sure why I’m surprised. It isn’t like this is my first time in Sri Lanka after all, but it’s still a shock to the system.

After arriving in the wee hours of the morning and escaping the clutches of immigration and baggage handlers with a surreal amount of ease (take that Air Canada), I entered the chaotic and warm climate of a nation in a rush to get somewhere despite  the fact that getting somewhere takes a much longer time than what distances would indicate. Our drive later on Friday to my parents’ small coconut plantation a mere 130km from Colombo lasted a staggering 4 hours.  The journey back on Sunday (we made a few detours along the way) was 230 km in 8 hours, which is a mind boggling 30 km/h.

Despite Montrealers’ pride in their ability to drive nonchalantly disobeying every vehicular law, they would probably find themselves at a loss in this country. Here, red lights really are suggestions, in fact stopping at them might put you in an accident as the person behind you (quite probably a colour-blind bus driver who thinks you’re a gnat on his windshield) will not be expecting you to stop. Changing lanes is something to be avoided at all costs as lanes are in fact obscured by the cars that sit astride them at all times. Never mind signaling. That would simply indicate or give too much information about what you are going to do and hence impede your own journey. This must be an incredibly easy driver’s test to take.

In Montreal people told me that no matter the width of the road or the number of marked lanes, there are always at least two working lanes. In Colombo, it seems that there are three. Trishaws (three-wheeler tuk tuks), more cautious cars, and then the crazier vehicles which dodge oncoming traffic on either side of the road. Oh yes, perhaps I forgot about the special lane designed by the mind of the motorcyclist weaving in and out in a pattern of ever-increasing complexity.

Forget about crossing the road without protection of the armour-plated kind or being a pedestrian, this is trench warfare.

There are the oddities as well. Today we discovered a very large intersection in Colombo during the busy rush-hour period whose traffic flow was being handled by a single, almost invisible policemen at the centre of a four-laned carnival merry-go-round. An admirable goal if it wasn’t for the fact that he was merely pointing out the traffic pattern being dictated by the very visible traffic lights. I hope he survived the hour.

Perhaps as the days wear on, the craziness will become common place and I will think nothing of this barrage of lights, horns and movement while ensconced in an ever more fragile-seeming tin can. More likely, however, I will continue to compose literal masterpieces for my tombstone, close my eyes and pray to divine providence that allows traffic to flow in Sri Lanka with harm.

As I entered my 13 hour flight I realized that letting the ticket agent pick my seat had been a mistake. I was seated on the aisle alright: I was seated in the very front row with babies to the right of and babies to the left of me. On a 13 hour flight. For crying out loud! Literally.

In reality though Emirates as usual surpassed their hospitality and the babies controlled the vocal chords enough that the closest to me (an 11-month old on her way to northern India) slept literally like a baby all the way to Dubai. Thank heavens.

However, I am now pooped. My brain is all mush, so much to the point that I left my belt at the security counter. Later as I was walking through the terminal in Dubai I was astounded that after so many hours seated doing nothing my pants seemed to be falling off me. Quickly realizing my stupidity, I grabbed the top of my pants for fear that I would embarrass myself and the entire country of Canada with an international incident. I ran back to the security area and grabbed the belt that had been tossed underneath the xray machine. Since the guards forced me to crawl to get my belt, I hope I am not glowing.

All the while I was thinking of the story of my good friend Eddie who was asked to remove his belt on the one day that he decided not to wear underwear.

I am again astounded by the connected world. I have free WiFi in the airport, I have checked my email, dropped my brother a note and now have a good two hours to kill before I board the Srilankan flight to Colombo. I am loving Dubai Airport, so many different languages and the shock of having a name like my last name being called over the intercom as a matter of course and then quickly realizing that this is not a western mispronounciation of my name but just another person with a similar last name.

I am truly invisible here.

Now, a quandary, do I go shopping? Visit the Irish pub? Ah well whatever. Tune in next time for more adventures. Will Dups be married off to an unsuspecting girl when he gets out of the airport? Will my mum exclaim “Oh my poor boy has gone soft” as she feeds me spiced curry which will have me gasping for air and crying? Will a coconut fall on my head? Tune in to this same Dups Channel…

So I’ve been living in Canada for 15 years. I’ve travelled from one coast to another. I’ve gone to the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, climbed the Rockies, slept under pub tables in Newfoundland, kayaked on both coasts. Today was the first day I was beyond the security posts at Pearson International… meaning I can finally say, I’ve been to Toronto!

It’s odd, you hear so much negative stuff about Toronto when you live elsewhere in Canada that you  expect to find a land seething with devils, hot pits of lava and work gangs headed by Beelzebub. I was expecting to be hounded by Bush supporters, Canadian capitalism gone awry, signs in nothing but English and an avowed hatred of French, and a huge pipe sucking up the oil reserves of the west to pay for infrastructure of the east. I think there’s even a movie about how Canada loves to hate Toronto.

I’m glad to report that there are no work gangs, I was not shouted at, I was not told to leave for being from Newfoundland, living in Quebec nor for having just left oil-rich Edmonton. Union Station is right downtown and around the corner from the CN Tower. And today, having left my luggage at the Via Rail luggage counter, I explored just a tiny bit of our behemoth city. Oh yes, and I took the elevator to the top of the CN Tower.

Toronto, is, sad to say, like every other city in Canada, just bigger. If I can make even claim to make an impression by walking around for a couple of hours and seeing three streets, it’s just that, downtown Toronto is Canada. The streets are clean, the buildings well-kept, the staff polite. Truly Canadian. If I can even claim to say it made a first impression, then that impression is that where Montreal immediately screams life, change, irrelevance (and a certain crumbling nature of its infrastructure), Toronto screams order and cleanliness. I saw more security guards today than anywhere in a three block radius!

Well, I can no longer claim to be a Toronto virgin. Now on to Pearson and further to Dubai, the land which is building the successor to the CN Tower.

The Montreal taxi driver is honking his horn, having a phone conversation, digging into his McDonald’s breakfast sandwich and driving through the clogged downtown streets. I’m on my way to the train station. The streets aren’t clogged with traffic necessarily but with snow. Montreal has just gone through a record 32 cm snowfall with more predicted. Luckily a few weeks ago when I planned this journey, I had decided to take the train rather than fly to Toronto. Oh, right, you might not know where I am off to: Sri Lanka, the land of my birth, the island they call Serendib.

Today I woke up at Mike Mannion’s house which is closer to the train station than my place. In two days I hope to be feasting on my mother’s cooking in sweltering Sri Lanka, far from the snow and ice and swatting at mosquitoes while drinking King Coconut. In two days Montreal might be facing another snow storm which I suspect might as well turn Montreal’s side streets into a snowy version of Venice using ski’s, snowboards and skidoos instead of gondolas.

From Toronto I will travel on my favourite airline Emirates directly to Dubai. A flight of just over 13 hours before a short stint basking in the glory of Dubai International Airport’s Irish bar before five hours to Colombo, Sri Lanka. Total travel time: around 36 hours. Egads!

Now let me tell you a little bit about this journey… For me it’s a chance to use my new found freedom of working for MySQL and work wherever I choose. It’s a chance for me to see my parents and family who I have not seen for three years and only five times in fifteen years. However, more importantly, this Christmas, I’m dragging four of my close friends (Mike, Keli, Niall and Rebecca) to the beautiful (if slightly chaotic) palm-ridden shores of Ceylon. Truly the worlds of Newfoundland and Canada (home) will collide with that of my Parents’ and that of my heritage. So I hope that this blog will be the story of this journey to distant shores and adventures unpredicted.

I’m just glad that this journey does not begin with Air Canada. Keli this morning said “well it could be worse, you could be flying Air Canada to Colombo!” At which point I exclaimed, “Are you trying to curse me?” And so, before the journey had even begun, we have come up with a new curse to inflict upon this world.

“May you fly Air Canada to Colombo!”

Thankfully, I will not.

Back in late 1997 on a Memorial University web server called “Morgan” this site had its ignominious birthing. At the time it was called the “Illusionist’s Wardrobe” and I did it primarily to try and convince a really small company by the name BioWare in far flung Edmonton to hire me. It would take another four years of convincing for that campaign conclude happily. You might therefore have noticed that in the last 24 hours, the site shed it’s white background and a few other things changed as well.

Ironically, I am mimicking parts of the original Illusionist website.

The site has come a long way from being a resume site to a photography site, to a blog site and finally back to both photography and blogging. On the way I’ve amassed 1700+ photos and well over 100,000 words of pure drivel (which is why Craig’s ability to write more than 100,000 words on his latest novel impresses me so much!)

So here then is a quick look back through the site of the last ten years courtesy of the Way Back Machine. The following is a portfolio image of the Illusionist’s Wardrobe which survived most of my purges:

In 2002 we had the debut of “The Cat’s Eyes”:

In 2004/2005 the site changed over to a blog site with the primary focus being my increasingly sporadic writing.

In 2006, I was inspired by Joe’s New York photos to start having a Photo Blog and moved to Wordpress for the blogging:

In July of this year I moved to Montreal and in celebration I created a new site design, which if I may say, was a bit ass. I was unhappy with it from day one and I was eager to see its death.

But there’s more than a site design change happening. The code of the site, much to my dismay has stayed the same for 5 years. So behind the scenes I switched over to a much more robust system and recoded the entire underpinnings. For the geeks, I have decided to run the Zend Framework with Smarty as a templating engine. In the next little while I will incorporate MediaWiki to manage my static content and the Yahoo! User Interface tools (amongst other JS libraries) to handle the main AJAX portions. So yes, finally I am bringing the site forward into the new millennium.

Some of the things I’m going to try include Geocoding the photos and combining with GoogleMaps and other fun things to do with the many photos I have and the huge number that I have not had time to work on! No promises though, the features will come as I have time!

As always, your opinions and thoughts are welcome, there is a lot of dust here…I have quite a few things left to clean up!