A Walk on the Beach and A Strange Sign in Front of MIT

A Cold but Sunny Stroll
We took a walk on Kit­si­lano Beach today. After all, we couldn’t let this sun­shine go to waste. How­ever, the wind had other ideas. It was very chilly, remind­ing us that despite the fact that it is spring and all of the trees are bloom­ing (and the city is show­ing some of its most gor­geous aspects), it’s still early spring, and we are, after all, in Canada, not Fort Laud­erdale or Puerto Val­larta. I did bring the cam­era, though, and we even doc­u­mented another brush with a Bald Eagle. The large bird even roosted for quite a while on a boat (called ‘Free to Roam’, of all things) in the False Creek Marina, where crows seemed to treat it with no respect what­so­ever.

Inter­est­ing Items Back on Mass. Ave.
I some­times read the blog infos­thet­ics (mean­ing Infor­ma­tion Aes­thet­ics) for my other blog, drucker.ca, because I often deal with some of the same issues and sub­jects (visu­al­iza­tion, infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture, info­graph­ics, etc.)

A cou­ple of days ago, how­ever, they made note of a very odd piece of per­for­mance art that’s located at a spot that I often went by for about 15 years. It seems in front of MIT Build­ing 1 (the one with the columns out front), on Mass Ave. in Cam­bridge, an artist named Leonardo Bonanni posted some­thing that looked like a bus sched­ule. Except it’s not a bus sched­ule: It’s a “framed piece of paper list­ing the lat­est results on untimely deaths/suicides at MIT university.”

It looks like Mr. Bonanni has been busy. He’s a 1^st Year PhD Stu­dent in the Tan­gi­ble Media Group at the Media Lab, and was recently a final­ist for the Kendall Square Inter­ac­tive Design Com­pe­ti­tion, which appears to have been spon­sored by Lyme Prop­er­ties, the devel­oper who build many of the Biotech Pow­er­houses that now dom­i­nate so much of East Cambridge.

Here’s a video of his pro­posal.

Kind of cool. Looks like the receiver of the very pub­lic cell phone text mes­sage on a huge text crawl was in a room at the Mar­riot, as far as I can tell from the ani­ma­tion. Many other projects of his are hosted by the Media Lab’s site.

It’s too bad that our paths never crossed while I was liv­ing so close by. I would have liked to met him.

M&M (Massive and Meetup)

John Boll­witt did an excel­lent job of describ­ing (and pho­tograph­ing) the Mas­sive Tech Con­fer­ence this year. I took no pic­tures, as I was not in Jour­nal­ist mode. I did take some notes, though. The only thing I’d add was that some of the Con­fer­ence ses­sions upstairs (where I’d never been before at the Con­ven­tion Cen­tre) were pretty good. Open­ing remarks were by Leonard Brody, the founder of Now­Pub­lic (the impres­sive local startup that I learned about way back at my first North­ern Voice — actu­ally, Moose Camp 2006, to be pre­cise), and also the author of “Every­thing I Need to Know About Business…I Learned from a Cana­dian” as well as “Inno­va­tion Nation: Cana­dian Lead­er­ship from Java to Juras­sic Park”. The main thrust of his talk? That Canada is one of the most inno­v­a­tive, entre­pre­neur­ial, and fis­cally well-positioned coun­tries in the world, but often are our own worst enemy because of our self-image (mod­est, self-effacing, per­haps even self-deprecatory). He felt that Canada needs to get over this low self-esteem, make the most of our com­ing wealth from being the num­ber 1 oil pro­ducer in the next decade (which I have to say I’m not com­pletely in agree­ment with), and bet­ter reward small busi­nesses and investors in those busi­nesses. He offered equal parts praise and crit­i­cism for Canada, and prob­a­bly got many atten­dees think­ing about what we have here, as well as what we might have. The sta­tis­tics and find­ings he quoted alone (and I wish I’d taken down more of them) were sur­pris­ing. Exam­ples: Canada has twice the rate of entre­pre­neurs as the US. Canada is in the best fis­cal shape of the G8. Canada’s rep­u­ta­tion among other coun­tries, or rather, it’s ‘brand’ is ‘peo­ple’, and is decid­edly more pos­i­tive than that of the USA (sur­prise, surprise).

Cybele Negris, who I know from work as the COO of Web­names, gave a very good overview of the new .mobi domain for cell phones; not too tech­ni­cal, not too sales-y. This is a hard thing to do, since it’s a rel­a­tively new top-level domain (like .com or .net) and still within the realm of techies, but shouldn’t be. The main issue is that North Amer­ica has to catch up with Asia in both adopt­ing it, and offer­ing wire­less data plans that don’t charge by the byte. At the end of her talk she announced that Web­names was offer­ing every­one at the show a free domain reg­is­tra­tion (a nice pro­mo­tion as this could in some cases be worth the cost of going to the show).

As for the show floor for me, I was extremely pleased with the reac­tion to my search for employ­ment. I have a stack of busi­ness cards in front of me from var­i­ous poten­tial employ­ers and recruit­ing firms , and many of them have ‘Send Resumé’ writ­ten on them. I handed out about 6 or 7 copies of the resumé to var­i­ous peo­ple on the show floor. It was not a ‘feed­ing frenzy’, but I def­i­nitely heard the mes­sage many times that many busi­nesses were hun­gry for hi-tech work­ers, and that my skills and expe­ri­ence were extremely valu­able. In the com­ing weeks and months we’ll see how that plays out. For now, the morn­ing after, I’d say that I’m very encour­aged by what I saw, the peo­ple at the booths who I talked to, and the gen­eral employ­ment pic­ture of Vancouver.

Party at the Fin­ish Line
After a long day of meet­ing strangers (for the most part), it was nice to relax and talk to some friends. The monthly blog­ger meetup was at The Whip, a bar/restaurant at Main and Sixth (East Sixth, just barely). Despite the S&M sound­ing name, it was com­fort­able and a good venue for the 9 of us who met at about 7PM.
The top­ics included the lat­est fad(?): Twit­ter, how to main­tain (or doc­u­ment) your good rep­u­ta­tion online, google bomb­ing, the Streisand effect, and what one post ever got the most traf­fic (whether you’re happy about it or not). Notable in her absence was Isabella, the group’s orga­nizer, because she was attend­ing to her daugh­ter giv­ing birth (which some of us learned via twit­ter!). After imbib­ing and talk­ing till about 10, we all shuf­fled off, in some cases to con­tinue the con­ver­sa­tions via blogs or twitter.

Now that I think about it, it was quite a con­trast from the day I went to Mas­sive in 2005. At the party after that show, I didn’t know a soul (but did my best). Last night, I knew every­one around the table, either online or offline. What a dif­fer­ence 2 years can make.

On Your Mark, Get Set, Network!

Tomor­row, at the Van­cou­ver Con­ven­tion Cen­tre by the Water­front, the Mas­sive Tech­nol­ogy Show returns to Van­cou­ver. This show means a lit­tle bit more to me than other trade shows. When we were con­sid­er­ing mov­ing to Van­cou­ver, it was the Mas­sive show that was the rea­son that we made our first exploratory trip here from Boston, so that I could get the feel of the local busi­ness cli­mate, and per­haps even find a job. We also used the visit to look for a place to live. It’s a good thing we did. The show not only ended up putting me in touch with my first employer (and Provin­cial Nom­i­nee spon­sor), but a chance chat with some­one in the Beer Gar­den at the end of the show resulted in us locat­ing (and even­tu­ally pur­chas­ing) the condo where we now live. It’s rare that an indus­try show can become a life-changing event, but that’s exactly what the 2005 Mas­sive Tech­nol­ogy Show ended up being for me.

So, now it’s two years later, and I’m once again look­ing for a job, but this time I’ve got lot more knowl­edge about the area, Cana­dian work expe­ri­ence, and most impor­tantly, Per­ma­nent Res­i­dent sta­tus. I’m hop­ing that this year’s show proves as help­ful as it was in 2005.

I’ve got a cou­ple dozen print copies of my resumé, have printed up new busi­ness cards, and even estab­lished a busi­ness blog (in which I’ve got a few entries already) in my area of exper­tise. Today I got a hair­cut. Van­cou­ver Busi­nesses look­ing for a User Inter­face Designer, here I come!

Best Company Video Ever

I never had much respect for Kodak, espe­cially when I lived in their com­pany town of Rochester, NY (in fact, I used to say that the rea­son they located there was sim­ply the fact that the city is so dark that it’s the one place in the US where you can develop film outdoors).

How­ever, I have to admit, this video done for employ­ees absolutely blew me away:

Turn the Schmaltz up to 11! Genius!

What Were They Thinking?

I know I’m of a tiny minor­ity of peo­ple who lis­ten to CBC2 in the morn­ing. There­fore this is prob­a­bly going to be irrel­e­vant to most peo­ple. Oh well, I’m going to shout anyway.

WHAT THE HELL HAVE THEY DONE TO CBC2?

This past week, there have been big changes in CBC2. For those not famil­iar, this is the FM CBC, which, up until now, was Clas­si­cal music and some talk in the morn­ing, more Clas­si­cal and some Jazz in the evening, and var­i­ous dif­fer­ent pro­grams in the evening with an empha­sis on Jazz. On Sat­ur­day morn­ings there is the ven­er­a­ble Vinyl Café, which sounds sus­pi­ciously to these NPR-raised ears like A Prairie Home Com­pan­ion, but that’s not rel­e­vant here.

Some­where in the CBC, they decided that CBC2 was to be about music. Music, music and lit­tle else. In fact, they have a new slo­gan, CBC2: Wher­ever Music Takes You (which is not only mean­ing­less, but smacks of focus-group tested mar­ket­ing pablum).

So how does this new com­mit­ment to more music play out? It used to be that you got a good deal of music, prob­a­bly about 40 min­utes worth per hour, but you also got a lit­tle local news, national news, weather, some sports scores, and a pleas­antly chatty Arts Report with Joe Cum­mings as he ban­tered with Tom Allen over the cur­rent Arts scene or event.

That’s all changed. Now, there is 57 min­utes of music, fol­lowed by an unbe­liev­ably short National news report on the hour. There is no local news or weather, no sports scores, no arts cov­er­age. There is no Joe Cum­mings, which means that for the vast major­ity of each hour, Tom Allen is left to carry Music and Com­pany on his own. Now, I think the world of Tom Allen. In fact, I’ve lauded him in many of these pages as prob­a­bly the best Clas­si­cal DJ on the planet. But I can tell that he is hav­ing a hard time with the new for­mat. He can’t do as much research on the selec­tions, and it shows. What’s more, it just gets too intense. You need more of a break in the morn­ing from solid music. At the end of the 2 minute and 50 sec­ond news­cast, you get a mes­sage say­ing to tune into CBC1 to hear more news. Oth­er­wise, it’s another 57 min­utes of music before any relief. There’s no bal­ance whatsoever.

So that’s the new seg­re­ga­tion­ist approach to the CBC. If you want talk, tune into CBC1 (which is, of course on the AM dial, and all but impos­si­ble to receive in our build­ing, so I have to stream it from the Inter­net; the sound qual­ity is hor­rific because of all the com­pres­sion from the AM band plus dig­i­tal con­ver­sion and down-sampling.) Oth­er­wise, you’re out of luck. You’ll get music and lit­tle in the way of voice ‘inter­rup­tion’, aside from Tom’s DJ work.

Was the CBC think­ing that peo­ple who lis­ten to Clas­si­cal music in the morn­ing don’t want to hear the news of the day? That they don’t care what the weather fore­cast is? That they don’t care who won in hockey last night? That they don’t want an Arts Report?

I’m afraid that CBC2 is falling into the same trap that so many Amer­i­can Clas­si­cal music sta­tions fell into over the years, that Clas­si­cal music should be treated as a pleas­ant wall­pa­per for peo­ple, a lulling doctor’s wait­ing room for the day. If that’s the case, I’ve got news for you, CBC: Those sta­tions usu­ally don’t last long. You’ll need the sup­port of some set of posh car deal­ers, car­pet mer­chants, and other lux­ury mer­chan­dis­ers who’ll want some recog­ni­tion, and you’ll steadily nar­row the pro­gram­ming diet until it’s nearly all Vivaldi’s The Sea­sons and Pachelbel’s Canon as you die a slow death.

I learned a few weeks ago from local CBC reporter Todd Maf­fin that the CBC hasn’t got­ten a raise in the bud­get for a long time. I don’t know if these changes are budget-driven. If so, I hope that they are not dri­ving the CBC2 into obliv­ion the way that NPR has made Clas­si­cal music almost nonex­is­tent (that net­work is nearly all News and Cur­rent Events). I would like to think that these were just mis­guided changes and that they will see the error of their ways. I’m not hold­ing my breath, though.

So now, we have to do all sorts of work just to find out the weather fore­cast and a lit­tle bit more about what’s going on in the world. It would be nice to do this with­out hav­ing to dive into top-40 or all-talk-all-the-time. And, of course, there’s TV, but that just seems mind-numbing so early in the day.

All in all, this is def­i­nitely a change for the worse, at least for our mornings.