Not having a BlackBerry now-a-days is tantamount to admitting you live in a cave and you carve out messages on stone tablets. But do you really need a BlackBerry (or other smart phone) to make it in today’s business world? Believe it or not, I had to negotiate carrying a company BlackBerry out of my current employment agreement.

You see, when I’m at work, I check my email on my desktop computer, talk to colleagues, go to meetings, and keep busy doing other work stuff – BlackBerry not required. But when I am in transit to or from work, I’d rather be sleeping, reading, or vegging out. At home, I’d rather spend time with wifey and the kids than be thinking about work, much less reading or writing emails to colleagues. It’s really that simple.

There are basically 4 classes of people living in Calgary.
1. The very, very, rich
Okay, you have crazy, crazy, crazy cash, I’m talking in the order of tens of millions to billions. You likely live in some 15,000 square foot castle on some acreage, you own a few cars each worth $250K, and you have no [...]

Engineers. If you live in Calgary, there is a good chance you are an engineer, you are married to an engineer, you work with an engineer, you know an engineer, you’ve seen an engineer, you’ve heard of an engineer, or you’ve thought about shit-kicking an engineer. The word engineer is a swear word in many circles. But why? Is it because we are are logical, precise, and objective? If so, since when are those considered character flaws?

So what if we start most sentences with “In theory,…” or commonly use the phrases “within an order of magnitude” or “as a first approximation”? Or who cares that our calculators have more buttons than a standard QWERTY keyboard, but no button with an equals sign? Seriously, does it matter that the salespeople at Best Buy and Future Shop cannot answer our questions?