HNT - Nekkid Fores

Last week was the tenth anniversary of Chapters.ca.

A gathering was held last Friday night at The Charlotte Room in Toronto, one of the regular watering holes many employees who worked at the Peter Street location in Toronto (which, for a brief period of time during the dot.com boom, expanded into the adjacent building on Charlotte street) Getting to this bar was a quick escape down the stairwell -- after our Charlotte street office area closed down, we had to walk ALL the way around the block to get to the bar.

And let me tell you, during the dot.com bust, where this huge, fast-growing online company suddenly hit the brick wall that most dot.com companies faced and then we dealt with the merger of the online, retail and warehouse divisions of the company, then a takeover from Indigo, the endless waves of layoffs (the first of which saw my team go from 65 people down to 21 in one frightful afternoon), we certainly escaped to that bar on a regular basis at the end of the day.

But last Friday was an incredibly fun night (Thanks, Sean) And I got a chance to see many people that I haven't seen in ages -- a great evening chatting with a truly wonderful and dynamic group of people I used to work with. Not everyone I'd hoped to see or chat with was there, so it would be really cool if there was some sort of annual gathering (Hint, hint, Sean Chard, the wonderful organizer of the event, and one of the original team members who was there at the beginning and is still there holding the fort down and managing several different teams)

In any case, Leonard, one of the most brilliant people I have ever had the pleasure of working with, and the genius behind the main database infrastructure that is still a critical part of the data feeding www.chapters.indigo.ca, snapped a whack of pictures of people at the event, and posted them on Flickr.

Here's a fun shot of me talking with Chris Woodill and Michael Bowles, where Leonard caught just the fore-parts of my body -- namely, my forehead, hand and forearm.

Perfect for this week's Half-Nekkid Thursday post wouldn't you say?