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 4^th 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 17^th 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 18^th 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.