Beating the Rush

I was surprised, but not all that much by this article, published today in the Vancouver Province:

Brain Drain a Thing of the Past as Americans Flood In
(To quote Norma Greenaway of the CanWest News Service:)

OTTAWA – The number of Americans admitted to Canada last year hit a 30-year high, fuelling a pattern that suggests the drain of Canadian brains south of the border may be a shrinking phenomenon.

The number of Americans accepted in Canada reached 10,942 in 2006, almost double the number admitted in 2000. By contrast, the number of Canadians admitted to the United States in 2006 dropped sharply from the previous year, falling to 23,913 from 29,930.

The data were gathered and analysed by the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies. Executive director Jack Jedwab says an analysis of the numbers shows Canada is enjoying an upswing as a preferred destination for Americans, many of whom are increasingly well educated.

Also, the trend is reflected in the reverse (i.e. Canadians moving to the US) as well, and leads to the following net numbers:

Jedwab cited figures that showed the U.S. accepted 4,447 more economic immigrants from Canada in 2006 than the U.S. accepted from Canada. That was down from 14,223 in 2005, a year the U.S. opened its doors wider to immigrants, and down from 6,916 in 2004.

I’m going to assume that first sentence should have read: the U.S. accepted 4,447 more economic immigrants from Canada in 2006 than Canada accepted from the U.S. (otherwise, it doesn’t make sense).

If this is the case, immigration could be following the same route as the dollar, leading to at least parity, and then perhaps the situation where there are more people moving to Canada from the U.S. than the other way around. Also, the people who are moving are typically the kind who would have moved the opposite direction in the past:

In 2006, 4,498 people were admitted as economic immigrants, which means they need to collect sufficient points to gain entry. This narrowly also outpaced the 4,468 immigrants brought in under family-reunification rules.

“Canada is undoubtedly narrowing the brain drain,” Jedwab said. “The most educated class of immigrants we’re getting right now is coming from the United States.”

We suspected this might be the case from anecdotal evidence, but now it looks like it’s borne out in the actual numbers. It will be interesting to see if the ’surprise’ I sometimes get from Canadians when I tell them our story will fade.

My First Week Working for Big Blue

It’s going to be tough to blog about work, mainly because I’ve signed an NDA about everything I’m working on, and frankly, IBM seems to have something to say about much of what the people who work there (as employees or even contractors) say or do online. I’ve always tried to be mindful that anything written here can be seen in all sorts of places I hadn’t expected (murmurs can be very loud indeed). So let’s see what I can talk about this first week.

First of all, re. the trips to Burnaby and back: The first 2 days we drove there (or rather, I drove Pam to her work and then on to my office, which is thankfully, a very short distance after dropping her off). That wasn’t bad, but driving in Vancouver is never what one would call ‘fun’ (despite the Nissan commercial — was it Nissan? — that has a car smoothly cruising at high speed across what is very clearly the Granville Bridge toward the high-rises of Downtown). From the new perspective of our new (used) car, the roads seem to be perpetually congested, and the construction work on the CanadaLine as well as all of the buildings being built all over the city make for a challenging collection of choke-points in traffic flow. The oil spill closing the Barnett highway this past week didn’t help matters, even though it was nowhere near our commute (but we think the extra traffic from there might have made a difference). I’m not sure I’m going to like having a car here all that much, except when I can get somewhere that I couldn’t have gotten with the bus. Perhaps a trip out to some gorgeous spot in the coming weekends will help in that department. For the rest of the week, we followed the plan that we had for good weather vs. bad weather: If the sun’s out, it’s buses and the Skytrain; If it’s cold and/or raining, it’s the car. So, with the typical Vancouver July sunshine, we headed out to the bus stop (me a bit earlier than Pam because I had further to go and intend to get in at or before 9 AM most days). The #84 bus leaves from nearby 4th Avenue and Fir street at just about 8AM on the nose. It dropped me off right by the new Vancouver Community College(VCC)/Clark station in about 20 minutes, and the Skytrain from there to Brentwood station was about 15 minutes. A final bus, the #123 from the Brentwood station goes down Willingdon Street and takes a left onto Canada Way, and after about a 7 minute ride, reaches a stop fairly close to IBM’s offices. I’m in by 8:50 or so, having listened to almost an hour of ‘The Assault on Reason’ by Al Gore on my iPod. Books on tape or podcasts will be increasingly handy for the commute. I saw a lot of people on the Skytrain reading ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’.

There, I guess I’ve dissected the commute in detail. What else can I describe without breaking any laws about secrecy?

I work on the first floor. This has advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that it’s a very pleasant, open environment, and not a cubicle farm at all (which is the case with the other 3 floors). Every chair is an Aeron (how 2000!) and other attractive office furniture and 3 floating flat-screen TVs flank a round meeting room, glassed-in conference room areas, and a bunch of stretched fabric accents at the corners of spaces. The mountains in the North are clearly visible from the floor-to-ceiling windows, and because there are few offices, everyone can see them. It’s beautiful now to look out, but it might get a little depressing with the full view of the rain in December, January and February. The main disadvantage is security, or perhaps I should say SECURITY.

• You may not leave a single paper with anything relating to work on your desk when you are away from it.
• All laptops must be bolted with cables to each desk.
• This laptop must be locked away in a steel cabinet before you leave at the end of the day.
• After you turn on your computer , you typically have 5 passwords to enter at various screens before you can actually do any work.
• Finally, when you leave your desk for a meeting and don’t bring your laptop with you (which is rare), it must be screen-locked and often have the lid down.

There are spot-checks by security personnel and if you fail 3 of those, you are summarily fired, with no hope of a reprieve.

The software situation isn’t so hot either. Did I mention that they use Lotus Notes for mail? Geez, I never thought I’d see a mail program that makes Outlook seem…’elegant?’… They’ve standardized all of their UI diagram and wireframe work on Visio, the worst drawing program I’ve ever had to use (and unfortunately used at 2 of my last 3 jobs).

And as for hardware, of course, everyone must use a ThinkPad. My ‘new’ one (which arrived on Friday, forcing me to use a loaner for most of the week) was a T60. Lenovo has not changed the design much, and this model has a curious battery pack sticking out of the back hinge like a big plastic ridge. I have to say that I’m not a big fan of ThinkPads. If only they had different colours, or tried to smooth the edges a bit, because their dull black has a certain drabness, especially when you get a whole roomful of them in meetings. It’s conformity resulting in an almost funereal dullness; perhaps the one remaining piece of the ‘old’ IBM culture.

Of course, trying to get this ThinkPad to actually work, even though it was brand new, was a challenge. Here we ran into the usual disastrous combination of Windows and Corporate software policies. I was not able to get Visio actually installed on the laptop from the corporate servers. There is a complex license rental that must be invoked and the rental software, Tivoli License Manager refused to load. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it done next week. Trying to connect it to a printer also failed the first 2 or 3 times, requiring multiple installs of the driver software. I was amused to see that several obscure software packages were preinstalled on it, including Lotus’s Lotus-123, Organizer and Freelance Graphics. I guess it’s nice to know that those relics of the pre-Internet era are still on hard drives somewhere. Much of IBM’s desktop software (for logging time and getting access to documents, for example) is so ugly and clumsy that it’s almost laughable. I challenge any IBM employee to contradict me there.

Despite those low-points, I can only say that the project that I’m on is really interesting, and I actually feel that it’s worth working on for the good of everyone, rather than just getting a paycheck. Oh, excuse me: paycheque.

It’s nearly 11PM, so I’m going to turn in early. TGIF.

Perhaps We Left at the Right Time

Before we left the US for Canada, we participated in some war protests. In 2003, Pam and I marched, along with thousands of other Bostonians, against the Iraq war. We had been against the war from day 1, and were particularly upset that our niece (who we had recommended the US Military as a great place to get free health care and college funding, back in the saner Clinton era) was actually stationed in Kirkuk. So one overcast day in March, we marched from Boston Common to somewhere else in the city (I can’t remember where). The march was peaceful, and there were no arrests.

It appears that this past week, according to the Independent Media Center of Winnipeg:

In one of his most chilling moves to date against his own citizens, the American War Leader has issued a sweeping order this week outlawing all forms of protest against the Iraq war. President Bush enacted into US law an ‘Executive Order’ on July 17th titled “Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq“, and which says:

“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, George W. Bush, President of the United States of America, find that, due to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq and undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq and to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, it is in the interests of the United States to take additional steps with respect to the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 of May 22, 2003, and expanded in Executive Order 13315 of August 28, 2003, and relied upon for additional steps taken in Executive Order 13350 of July 29, 2004, and Executive Order 13364 of November 29, 2004.”

While IMC-Winnipeg does sound a little shrill, it is arguable that political protests like the ones that we participated in are now against the law, and we (along with everybody else) would now be rounded up and thrown in jail. According to the rules of this law we would be forbidden from talking about it with anyone, including lawyers or the press (who might very well paint us as ‘people who hate America’ if they were from Fox)

Lately I’ve seen a lot of speculation online that the US is just one ‘incident’ away from Martial Law, suggesting that the Bush administration is putting in place the tools to actually avoid the next election and stay in power due to a ‘National Emergency’. Whether that incident was real or actually a staged event has also been mentioned. I would have dismissed this as alarmist imaginations run wild, but they keep cropping up.

I can’t help thinking that if there were such an event, with public protests being illegal (or cast as ‘undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq’), the possibility of this definition being expanded to include: “and interfering with the US government’s attempts to restore order” or something similar is not inconceivable.

Road Trip to Springfield (sort of)

“OK, we’ve got a new car. I know it’s mainly to make the commutes to our jobs a little earlier and gas is expensive, but whaddayasay we take a little drive?”

“Great idea! Where shall we go?”

“Well, we’re in Beautiful British Columbia, surrounded by mountains, beaches and parks. We could drive to the Ferry and take a trip to the islands. Or we could take a trip to the south of the city to the berry fields and pick some loganberries or blueberries.”

“Um, it’s raining. Pretty hard, too.”

“Drat.”

“I know, let’s take a trip to the only Kwik-E-Mart in Canada!”

And with that, we packed our bags with cameras and were on our way.

The Kwik-E-Mart, for those who aren’t familiar with this bit of pop culture, is the fictional Convenience Store chain in the Simpsons TV Series (now in it’s 18th season). The store in the show is run by Apu Nahasapeemapetilon (No one can ever pronounce his last name, so he just goes by Apu). In ‘the real world’, the 7/11 chain has picked stores sprinkled throughout North America and redecorated them, in many cases renaming their own products, so that they closely resemble the fictional stores. It’s part of a tie-in with The Simpsons Movie, which is due to open in theatres in 6 days. The result is…a 7/11 with some fun, often hilarious decor and signage, and a steady stream of smiling people, either customers or like us, tourists. It’s truly, marketing genius. On the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons mentioned that the Kwik-E-Mart transformed 7/11s were the first time he’d ever seen ‘happy people’ in those stores. Our Kwik-E-Mart is in Port Coquitlam, a suburb to the east of Vancouver. It was a bit of a drive, but we did some shopping on the way back, and generally enjoyed our new freedom. The traffic, on the other hand, I could have done without. Doh!

The End of a Chapter

The small company where I have been working for the past year and a half or so (at first full-time, later part-time) had some traditions. Whenever someone had a birthday, there was a birthday cake (usually chocolate) and a card signed by everyone. On Fridays, a bunch of us would go out for lunch together at a local pub or restaurant (usually the Lions Pub near Coal Harbour). On Chinese New Year, we would all go out for Dim Sum at a local restaurant. There was a summer picnic, often at Kits or Jericho Beach, and during the holiday season, a nice Christmas buffet dinner downtown. I did make it for one non-annual tradition, an ‘offsite team-building event’, which was mainly an excuse for us all to indulge in go-cart racing (which was a blast!) The first day I started with the company, I experienced one of the traditions the company had for anyone leaving (which was fairly rare), a farewell lunch at a nearby restaurant. Following a certain circular pattern, today, at the company RIPE B2B, I attended a farewell lunch, only this time it was for me.

While there were some times when I found it painful not to have not enough to do at RIPE (and I have no idea why it was always spelled like an acronym), and it’s a shame that it didn’t pan out as the place where I would be able to spend the rest of my career, I’m still glad to have worked there. In retrospect, the familial scale of the company (about 12-15 people) in an old converted building in Gastown meant that I was able to work on some small projects while the rest of our life in a new city, coast and country began to sort itself out. The bus commute was short and easy, and I could frequently leave work and go straight to a concert, Gamelan rehearsal or lecture.

I got to meet and work with a lot of smart, friendly people. I hope they all do well, and the new project that they are working on ends up becoming a big success. Even if it’s not a huge smash-hit and they don’t get bought out by some bigger company, I hope most of all, that they keep having those little traditions.