Last week, I went to a conference called the "Canadian Undergraduate Technology Conference" (cutc.ca. It went from Thursday to Saturday, pretty much all day. That meant that I'd miss school and precious homework time. I'm still trying to regain those three days. Anyway, it's my last year as an undergrad so I thought I might as well take the opportunity.
I had a good plan. I wanted to leave from Waterloo Thursday morning after the rush hour traffic and make it to Toronto in time for the first seminar. Just my luck, there's traffic due to accidents and we're stuck bumper to bumper for 30 minutes. My hopes bank on unorganized organizers so they'll start the conference late.
...yadayadayada...
we're (gus,nick,andrew,and eric) officially 35 minutes late and I was supposed to pick up my digi from my mom, but there's no time.
We enter the Holiday Inn and are "greeted" by tired looking univerisity student organizers. We walk over to the sign in table and we meet CUTC's official version of "geeky", "sleepy", and "dopey" dwarf genetically combined. His speech was slurred, one eye half looking at us, the other eye half looking at the laptop in front of him. I ask to sign in. His other half-open eye glazes somewhere close to my vicinity. Something verbal starts to leak out of a droopy mouth, but before I can begin to translate, a more conscious organizer comes and rescues the ominous start.
I did, however, miss the bus that goes to my first stop at CUTC, the Bell Tech Tour. Bell was a big sponsor of CUTC and they wanted to change their image among young techies (more about that later). I have a car so I can just drive to the Bell building, but I need directions. I ask 5 different people for the address and get 5 "I don't know"'s. I really want to go on this tour and all I have is persistence. I finally get the answer I'm looking for and drive my butt down to Queen's Quay.
This is turning out to be a really long entry, so let's get some pictures here.
As I mentioned before, Bell is trying alter what young people think about the company. I think I share the same view as most students. Bell job postings are filtered out of my search in co-op. What do they want me to do? Plug some phone cables, write a silly app for sympatico? I don't think so. The picture above shows some of their applications. They are beginning to offer services such as voicemail email-notification with a sound file attached. That's mildly impressive. They were also touting their "make your own ringtone and upload it to your cell phone" feature. I think they were making way too big a deal out of. In any case, they were starting to change my view of them as more of a technology company. One of the speakers, however, couldn't get the remote to work on the Media Center.
The picture above shows the "Bell living room" complete with a 70" monster plasma worth just over $12K. This display demonstrates their Satellite services. One of the presenters started talking about one of the classic battles which rank near the VI vs EMACS battle: cable vs. DSL. He said cable focuses on throughput while Bell concentrates on quality of service. That's why Cable is faster, but DSL is apparently more reliable. I asked if their choice for quality of service was by technological contraint rather than by free will. He said they could start a bandwidth war and start offering 7Mbit connections, but there isn't any money there. He did admit that state of the art bandwidth for DSL is only 7Mbit while Cable can offer 25Mbit. Of course we won't see those speeds soon, but those are the possibilities.
The picture above shows the "Bell kitchen". There's a pull down TV over the counter which hosts some no name operating system. They also have one of those Internet/TV fridges. These fridges are absolutely absurd to me. No matter how much money I'll have in the future, I'll refuse to buy a fridge with a TV on the door. I'd rather buy a toilet with a lawnmower attached.
The next stop on the tour was an HR meeting. They gave us food and HR made a presentation. They gave the regular Human Resource spiel. You know "go to our website and apply. Even if you don't get an interview, your resume is kept on file and you can still get a job". Once she said that, I raised my hand and called "bullshit". I didn't actually say that, but I said, "I don't believe you. Online applications are the equivalent to a resume black hole." She insisted that people actually search resumes that haven't passed the first round, but I could read from the slight tremor in her voice that I exposed the truth. They also did the "we hire the best". bullshit. That goes for all companies. They don't hire the best, they hire one of the best that applied.
Crap, it seems like I'm hating on Bell. I'm not, it's just easy to point these things out. They have changed my view positively. They fed me lunch and they're in a really nice building...great I'm patronizing....
OK the Bell Tech Tour was over and I think the conference has gotten off to a good start. I arrive a little late for the Keynote speaker from the one and only Bell. The speaker was the Chief Technical Officer of Bell Systems and Technology, Eugene Roman.
He's a great and entertaining speaker and talked mainly about mainstream issues and buzzwords: broadband, multimedia, wireless. Although he discussed the blatantly obvious, it was a very entertaining speech. His main focus, however, was to get us to want to work at Bell. He said something like, "here's $1.6 billion for research, what do you want to do?". Hmmm...Interesting.
The next seminar was by Alan Ganek from IBM about Autonomic computing. Autonomic systems in a biological sense is like the systems that keep you breathing without you noticing. The goal is to apply these kind of systems to computers. The state of the art is still infantile, but Alan discussed designs on all levels, from chip design to middleware to applications. The coolest thing he talked about were microchips which could dynamically rewire themselves. The chips can actually burn new wires into the silicon for reprogramming, configuration. That's cool. The rest, however, was boring. Luckily I was right in the front while my head was bobbing as if I was at a hip hop concert. What's that saying? "Learning by Osmosis"
Next was my favourite part and yours, dinner and show (techshow that is).
The picture above shows Nick on the left and Andrew.
The picture above shows from left to right, Eric, Gus, and Bianca.
This dude above is the man. He looks a little scary in his head shot, but this guy is incredible: Michael Furdyk. He's a year younger than I am, but he started two successful companies at the age of 16 and sold it off before the Internet bubble burst. He appeared on Oprah, CNN, and all that. He's really genuine and wise and was one of the higlights of the conference. Google him to find more about him.
That pretty much ends my day and like Nick, I was tired.
Congrats on makin
g it down to the end...if you didn't skip...
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