Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Sunday morning coffee shop and OLIVE

I went down to get coffee. As I was waiting in line I over heard two people exchanging job leads. I got my coffee (and doughnuts of course ;)) on my way out I noticed a mature looking guy wrapping up a job interview, which seemed to have gone very well!

The face of how we conduct business is changing, it is a change for better --I think. We are making an effort to look outside of the box --jobs advertised in the newspaper (a very dry and impersonal approach) vs career discussions over coffee on a Sunday morning.

As I was sipping my coffee, I leafed through pages of January edition of IEEE Spectrum magazine. The first few sentences of an article caught my eye:

"CODE THREE! Code Three!" shouts a police officer over a radio. "There's been an explosion at Global Financial Trust!"

I looked for the author's name. David Kushner. I know him, not personally, but through the articles he occasionally writes for Spectrum magazine. Just last month, he wrote a piece on making (serious) amount of money through on-line video games.

This article, is about SimHospital, a simulation used for medical training through the application: On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment, or OLIVE.

"The answer is simple", Kushner writes, "in a simulation you can learn to drive a car with out crashing, trade securities without breaking your company's bank, manage complaining customers without alienating them, treat patients without killing them."

Or perform a job interview without bombing it!

Next stop is report on COG, "Canadian Organic Growers", and Toronto's 3Rs Working Group.