Vancouver Saved by Hippies in 1967

I was too young to remem­ber it, but in the fall of 1967, the char­ac­ter of my adopted home under­went a sig­nif­i­cant change. At the time, I was actu­ally vis­it­ing Canada for the first time with my par­ents, attend­ing Expo ’67 in Mon­treal. Mean­while, back here in Van­cou­ver, a large pop­u­la­tion of hip­pies (or at least, that’s what they were called back then) descended on the town, much to the dis­may of the mayor, Thomas J. Camp­bell. An ‘Evening Mag­a­zine’ clip has recently sur­faced on YouTube, and I’ve included it below.

The best part of it for me is Campbell’s fear and hys­te­ria regard­ing the hip­pies. Camp­bell hates them pas­sion­ately, almost like a char­ac­ter in National Lampoon’s Ani­mal House: “If these young peo­ple get their way, they will destroy Canada. From what I hear across the world, they will destroy the world!”

Camp­bell was a big pro­po­nent of tear­ing down older build­ings to make room for rede­vel­op­ment (he’s shown pos­ing glee­fully atop a wreck­ing ball) and spear­headed the move to bring an express­way into the city. He had those hip­pies he hated so much arrested for loitering.

For­tu­nately for us (or unfor­tu­nately, if you like free­ways), the hip­pies, by ally­ing them­selves with the more straight-laced peo­ple who wanted to pre­serve their neigh­bor­hoods won in the end. No super­high­way was built through Van­cou­ver. One his­to­rian in the piece says that this was the time when Van­cou­ver ‘found its voice’, and hence owes a lot to the spirit of that era. Like Haight-Ashbury in San Fran­cisco, I see echoes of that era in Kit­si­lano, which was appar­ently Hip­pie Cen­tral in ’67. Both the Haight and Kits are now largely yup­pi­fied, but still retain some of that charm. We cer­tainly saw some of it in the farmer’s mar­ket we went to a cou­ple of weeks ago. I even got some gra­nola from the Gra­nola King.

Now, with free­ways all over North Amer­ica clogged with com­muters flee­ing cities at 5PM and head­ing for sub­urbs, burn­ing $4 a gal­lon gas and burn­ing hydro­car­bons (while Van­cou­ver con­tem­plates fur­ther eco­den­sity as a way of deal­ing with the Cli­mate Cri­sis and Peak Oil), Campbell’s vision seems all the more wrong-headed. Maybe (per­haps through dumb luck) the hip­pies had it right all along. On the other hand, they were right about Viet­nam, too…and Iraq. OK, maybe it wasn’t dumb luck.

Summer, Finally

Not so Hazy and Not so Lazy

Maybe it’s because we have our first bona-fide day where you could go out with­out a jacket. Maybe it’s because the sun truly doesn’t set until nearly around 8:30. Maybe it’s because Granville Mar­ket is brim­ming over with sweet local straw­ber­ries, most of the spot prawns and aspara­gus are past, and the heir­loom toma­toes are start­ing to appear. All of the above is con­tribut­ing to a feel­ing that we have finally passed into the sum­mer season.

For me, being between contracts/jobs and with some time on my hands, it means that I can enjoy some of this, although I’m cer­tainly not spend­ing my days at the beach. Next week, being the Canada Day and Fourth of July hol­i­day week, both Pam and I are going to get a lit­tle sum­mer break, with a trip to Whistler with my brother and his fam­ily. We’ve been look­ing for­ward to that for a long time.

Plan­ning for the Autumn Demise of Clas­si­cal Radio in Vancouver

Sum­mer is also the time when a few things end. This morn­ing was the last time that Tom Allen would do his ‘cage match’, a whim­si­cal fea­ture of ‘Music and Com­pany’ where he would pit one piece of music against another and call for a vote. This week’s final cage match theme was: ‘With a bang or a whim­per’, since it will be the last one of these bits of fun…forever. Rep­re­sent­ing an end­ing with a bang was Chabrier’s ‘Ah Hur­rah’ from the Opera, Le Roi Mal­gre Lui. The oppo­nent (rep­re­sent­ing a ‘whim­per’ or soft end­ing) was the last move­ment from Haydn’s clever Sym­phony No. 45, ‘The Farewell Sym­phony’ (where one by one, the musi­cians leave the stage until there are only 2 first vio­lins left to end the piece, a clev­erly chore­o­graphed hint to Haydn’s patron, the Prince Niko­laus Ester­házy that his court musi­cians as well as his com­poser were all home­sick and wanted him to close up the sum­mer palace so every­one could return home to Eisenstadt).

It was a typ­i­cal cage match; one part joke, one part seri­ous, one part drama. Like just about every­thing Tom Allen does on the pro­gram, it makes one think a lit­tle, and sets up the day. I will sorely miss this along with some of his other reg­u­lar fea­tures. Prob­a­bly my favourite comes at about 6:30 AM: This Day in… which observes some event in his­tory that shares today’s date. Today’s was the first solo cir­cum­nav­i­ga­tion of the globe in a boat by Joshua Slocum, a Nova Scot­ian sea­man who fin­ished the trip that he had begun in Boston three years ear­lier in 1895 on today’s date. Like so many other ‘This Day In…‘s, I didn’t know about this event, and felt the joy I often do from gain­ing a bit of knowl­edge just as I’m start­ing the day.

With­out going off on another rant about the stu­pid­ity and wrong­ness of the CBC get­ting rid of the best clas­si­cal music morn­ing pro­gram in the world, I’ve finally accepted the inevitable and made plans. A cou­ple of weeks ago I picked up (on sale) a curi­ous new device at Lon­don Drugs: a BLIK Inter­net Clock Radio. It’s a standard-looking radio (unfor­tu­nately with infe­rior speak­ers to the Bose Wave Radio that we’ve been using for the last 10 years or so) that ‘tunes’ to a stream­ing radio sta­tion on the Inter­net rather than local FM (although you can do that, if the Inter­net is down). I’ve tested it, and while there is about a 20-second delay while the sta­tion ‘resolves’ to the URL you’ve cho­sen, it will indeed allow you to awaken to over 9,000 dif­fer­ent sta­tions all over the world (although in prac­tice the num­ber one would want to tune to is a small frac­tion of that num­ber). I was able to set the pre­sets to the BBC’s Radio 3 (which I knew well from my days as a Grad Stu­dent), the local CBC Radio 1, NPR in Boston, as well as the national NPR sta­tion. I’ll look for some other sta­tions, as there are 8 pre­set slots. As you can imag­ine, retriev­ing and sift­ing through 9,000 sta­tions in a tree-like menu using a ter­ri­ble LED screen is a bit of a chal­lenge (oh, if only Apple would make one of these– I guess they do, it’s called a Mac Mini with mouse, key­board, speak­ers and a small flat-screen mon­i­tor run­ning a browser with some pre­set stream­ing radio sta­tion book­marks, but even some­thing like that is too large for a night-table). Most of these sta­tions have us wak­ing up at 9:00 AM East­ern on North Amer­ica, or 68(!) hours ahead in the UK. I fear that at noon 2:00 in the after­noon in Lon­don we may not get a com­pletely morning-friendly clas­si­cal music feed, so I’ll have to search fur­ther until I find a new place to tune to. Both Pam and I hope that we don’t have to resort to NPR, which always put me in a bad mood in the morn­ing, par­tic­u­larly now that it has moved so much far­ther to the Right polit­i­cally than it used to be (hear­ing the appalling Cokie Roberts sneer at the Democ­rats every Mon­day morn­ing got my blood boil­ing early in the week — funny, but that was my word, but appar­ently it’s still what she is doing, defend­ing Dick Cheney on the TV Pro­gram ‘This Week’).

While they are get­ting rid of Clas­si­cal Music on Radio 2, I do remem­ber the some­what encour­ag­ing news that the CBC said that they were going to add a stream­ing clas­si­cal music chan­nel on the Inter­net. I doubt if it will have the incom­pa­ra­ble Tom Allen on it, but at least there will be a Cana­dian alter­na­tive for our move from FM Radio to almost exclu­sively Inter­net radio from Labour Day on.

Will the Flickr Founders Return?

Recently  I learned that Stew­art But­ter­field — who along with his wife, Cate­rina Fake,  co-founded one of the most inter­est­ing and excit­ing star­tups to usher in the ‘Web 2.0′ era — has resigned from Yahoo, the cur­rent own­ers of that busi­ness. His let­ter of res­ig­na­tion was posted on Jon Gruber’s Dar­ing Fire­ball, and I couldn’t resist reprint­ing it here; It’s a scream:

From: Stew­art But­ter­field
Sent: Fri­day, June 13, 2008 10:57 AM
To: Brad Gar­ling­house
Sub­ject: Resignation

Dear Brad,

As you know, tin is in my blood. For gen­er­a­tions my fam­ily has worked with this most use­ful of met­als. When I joined Yahoo back in ’21, it was a sheet-tin con­cern of great momen­tum, growth and inno­va­tion. I knew it was the place for me.

Over the decades as the com­pany grew and expanded, first into dyes and punches, into cop­per, cor­ru­gated steel, syn­the­sized rub­ber, pip­ing, milling equip­ment, engines, instru­ments, weaponry, and so on, I still felt at home, because tin was the core of the business.

After the war, as we con­tin­ued to branch out in elec­tron­ics, all man­ner of aero­nau­ti­cal frames, hulls and bod­ies, com­put­ing and tab­u­lat­ing machines, pre­ci­sion con­trols, and later, far­ther afield — real estate, brew­ing, con­sumer finance, grain pro­cess­ing, light­ing and salty snacks — I took it in stride, for there was still a place for me.

Since the late 80s, as the gen­eral man­u­fac­tur­ing, oil explo­ration & refin­ing, logis­tics, and hotel & casino divi­sions rose to promi­nence, I have felt some­what side­lined. By the time of the inter­net rev­o­lu­tion and our expan­sions into Web Sites, I have been cast adrift. I tried to roll with the times, but nary a sheet of tin has rolled of our own pro­duc­tion lines in over 30 years.

I don’t know what you and the other exec­u­tives have planned for this com­pany, but I know that my abil­ity to con­tribute has dwin­dled to near-nothing, and not entirely because of my advanc­ing age. There­fore, with a heavy heart, I rec­og­nize that it is time for me to and the com­pany to part ways.

In my 87 years ser­vice, I’ve accom­plished many feats, shared in the ups and downs, made great friends, and learned a tremen­dous amount (who would have thought that Elec­tronic Mail would come to sup­plant the nation’s own great and ven­er­a­ble post!?) but there is a new gen­er­a­tion now and it would be unfair not to give them a chance. Those that started in the make-work pro­grams of the depres­sion, on the GI pro­grams in the late 40s, and even those young baby boomers need their own try, with­out us old ‘uns stand­ing in the way.

So, please accept my res­ig­na­tion, effec­tive July 12. And I don’t need no fancy par­ties or gold watches (I still have the one from ’61 and ’76). 1 will be spend­ing more time with my fam­ily, tend­ing to my small but grow­ing alpaca herd and, of course, get­ting back to work­ing with tin, my first love.

Your old tin-smithing friend and colleague,

- Stew­art Butterfield

(In case you didn’t get the gag, Stew­art But­ter­field is 35 years old)

It’s worth not­ing that a Face­book group has been formed, called Bring­Ca­teri­naAnd­Stew­artHome. The Web site Strutta is han­dling the domain http://www.BringCaterinaAndStewartHome where peo­ple are post­ing pho­tos of our beau­ti­ful city and point­ing out the strengths of the place, hop­ing to woo these two back.

Frankly, I’d like to see them return as well. They are, in a way, the prodi­gal son and daugh­ter of the tech scene here.  Flickr has always been held up as The Great Van­cou­ver Tech Suc­cess Story, and I would imag­ine that it has embold­ened its share of star­tups in Yale­town and Gas­town. Since I arrived shortly after they left, I always felt like I missed out on some of the joie de vivre that Ludi­corp brought to Van­cou­ver. Indeed, I even had given some thought as to show­ing up on their doorstep while we were mak­ing plans in Cam­bridge, and I remem­ber my dis­ap­point­ment as I saw the pho­tos of the good-bye party a few months before we were to make the move (Doh!).

With a let­ter of res­ig­na­tion as witty and clever as that one, and a track record unequaled by most of the techies of Van­cou­ver, we could use a guy like that around here.

A Final Reckoning on WWDC '08

Now that I’ve had some time to think about last week (besides the event I reported on in the pre­vi­ous post­ing), I thought it would be good to offer some last­ing impres­sions. While I’m not a com­puter pro­gram­mer, I under­stand most of the con­cepts behind the dis­ci­pline. That said, much of Apple’s Devel­oper Con­fer­ence was geared toward pro­gram­mers for whom code is sec­ond nature. Many of the ses­sions I attended dealt with code, whether or not the descrip­tion of the ses­sion said so or not (I was par­tic­u­larly dis­ap­pointed when a ses­sion which was described as ‘Build­ing User Inter­faces for the iPhone with Inter­face Builder’ was really more about when you should load some of those User Inter­face ele­ments into mem­ory, and how to achieve this in your code.)

I was able to under­stand nearly all of what was said in the main User Inter­face ses­sion for the iPhone, which was, in a way, more about the scope and scale that one should expect for appli­ca­tions writ­ten for it. Not sur­pris­ingly, the key con­cept that so many devel­op­ers miss now and will miss in the com­ing months and years is that it makes no sense to bring all of what a desk­top appli­ca­tion does to the iPhone. Try to do that, and you’ll end up with a prod­uct that is hard to use, not all that use­ful, and full of fea­tures that sim­ply don’t fit in such a small foot­print (in mem­ory or screen). I don’t think I’m vio­lat­ing any NDAs here when I relate this, because its so patently obvi­ous. Nev­er­the­less, I’m sure there is already some cor­po­ra­tion out there that is faith­fully try­ing to cram 20–30 screens of func­tion­al­ity into this hand-held device, because they have the mis­con­cep­tion that a com­puter is a com­puter, no mat­ter how small.

The over­ar­ch­ing prin­ci­ple that Apple made sure was men­tioned in nearly every ses­sion, was that pro­gram­mers should use the model-view-controller (MVC) archi­tec­tural pat­tern for build­ing their soft­ware (I won’t go into much detail about it, but it’s essen­tially a way of orga­niz­ing what your soft­ware pro­gram does, so that you sep­a­rate the logic and data from user inter­face, mak­ing it is eas­ier to mod­ify either the look of the pro­gram or the under­ly­ing busi­ness rules with­out one affect­ing the other. For more infor­ma­tion about where MVC comes from and who uses it besides Apple [Java Swing, JSF, Microsoft Foun­da­tion Classes — who call it “Document/View archi­tec­ture”, DRUPAL, Joomla, the list goes on and on.], check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller).

The other thing that Apple made sure was the case in every ses­sion: Every­one had to be very well pre­pared and extremely pol­ished. Unlike some con­fer­ences and con­ven­tions that I’ve attended, the level of qual­ity con­trol for this one was extra­or­di­nary: Nearly every sin­gle pre­sen­ter was an Apple employee, and I learned from one of them just prior to their ses­sion that each pre­sen­ter had sev­eral weeks of rehearsals, some­times twice a week in the months lead­ing up to WWDC. Since nearly every pre­sen­ter had a lot of infor­ma­tion to share, the result was a break­neck pace for all ses­sions. For­get about try­ing to dupli­cate their demos of devel­oper tools, much of this was worked out to the last sec­ond with­out any pauses, with snip­pets of key pro­gram­ming code at the ready to paste in at key moments, like one of Julia Child’s fin­ished dishes sit­ting in the oven, ready for the final min­utes of the show on The French Chef. Noth­ing was left to chance; No demo ever failed to work. At the end of each ses­sion, the entire team who worked on that piece of soft­ware or area went to the stage, and answered ques­tions from atten­dees, who were directed to 4 micro­phones at very places in each room. Each and every ses­sion, both pre­sen­ta­tion and all ques­tions and answers, were recorded and should be avail­able as pocasts on the Apple Devel­oper web site for atten­dees to review (and you can bet they’ll need to).

Besides the ses­sions them­selves, it was an exhaust­ing expe­ri­ence from the sheer num­ber of atten­dees (as I’ve men­tioned before, over 5,000 of them). That meant wait­ing in line for every­thing, be it food, get­ting into ses­sions (when it paid to be lined up about 30 min­utes before the start), tables, desks or chairs through Moscone West, or even the esca­la­tors between lev­els. It was about 95% male, and the stan­dard attire was jeans and black t-shirt. Just about every attendee had a lap­top (99% Mac­book Pro), and an iPhone. What does a wire­less net­work serv­ing that many wire­less cus­tomers look like? Check this geek porn out (as usual, click each to see a larger image):

For all but the largest pre­sen­ta­tion rooms, there were power strips duct-taped to the chair legs at reg­u­lar inter­vals, and there were sev­eral ‘lounge’ like spaces with bean­bag chairs, tables, desks, iMacs (if you didn’t have yours with you), and Industrial-Strength Wire­less Net­work repeaters, set up at the perime­ters of the inte­rior of the build­ing like force-field gen­er­a­tors you see in Sci-Fi movies.

While I did meet up with a few peo­ple I knew (or knew of, by rep­u­ta­tion or from get­ting in touch with them prior to the event), for the most part I was among strangers. I did my best so social­ize, but it goes with­out say­ing that Soft­ware Devel­op­ers, for the most part, are not exactly ‘peo­ple’ per­sons. Many of them would prob­a­bly much rather code than chat, or if they do chat, it’s through a keyboard.

The sec­ond to last evening fea­tured a huge party at the nearby Yerba Buena Gar­dens, one of my favourite places in San Fran­cisco. It’s a large open park bounded by the Yerba Buena Arts Cen­ter, the Moscone Con­ven­tion Cen­ter, and the Metreon, Sony’s attempt at a sort of Enter­tain­ment Mall which is start­ing to show its age. The food con­sisted of sev­eral sta­tions serv­ing every­thing from Sushi to Foccacia-Pizza to Chi­nese Stewed Short-Ribs and Stir-Fried Noo­dles. The enter­tain­ment was The Bare­naked Ladies, which must have cost Apple some sig­nif­i­cant amount of money. Given their suc­cess lately, I guess they could afford it. It was nice to see some recog­ni­tion that they were Cana­dian, and they made some nerdy jokes about those of us to the north with iPhones being crim­i­nals. They started with their arguably their biggest hit, One Week, which even I rec­og­nized. I’ll bet they are sick of play­ing it, but the crowd was appreciative.

In the end, I’m not sure if I’ll attend WWDC next year. While I did get some valu­able infor­ma­tion, I’d say that about 50% of what I got was in the ‘nice to know’ cat­e­gory, and it’s a pretty expen­sive (and drain­ing) event for that sort of knowl­edge. Still, I don’t regret hav­ing been to this one, and I’m hop­ing that what I learned and who I met will trans­late to some work at some point in the future. You can never tell.

A Memorable Journey

I’ll do a wrap-up post on my time at WWDC, but I felt that I had to write about this first. On the way back to Van­cou­ver from San Fran­cisco, I had sched­uled a shut­tle, but at the last minute, can­celed and decided to use BART again. It was one of those deci­sions that I’ll no doubt look back on and think, it’s a good thing, because oth­er­wise I wouldn’t have had the expe­ri­ence that I had. Fri­day the 13^th has always been lucky for me, and this June 13^th was no exception.

After board­ing the train at Civic Cen­ter, after 2 or 3 stops, 2 men in suits got on the train. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Navy blue suit, blue eyes and gray hair, a US Flag lapel… it was Howard Dean. Yes that Howard Dean, the for­mer Gov­er­nor of Ver­mont, front-runner can­di­date for Pres­i­dent in 2004 (whose cam­paign I worked on) and cur­rently, the Chair­man of the Demo­c­ra­tic National Com­mit­tee. ‘I’m never going to have another chance like this,’ I said to myself. In a moment or two, I got up the nerve and intro­duced myself to him, telling him that I had worked on his cam­paign (He imme­di­ately said ‘Thank you’ for that) and that I was a great admirer of his. He was on his way to some meet­ings at hotels at the air­port, and to avoid the traf­fic, had decided to take BART. I told him where we had moved (and why). He had many ques­tions about Van­cou­ver; he hadn’t vis­ited the city for 40 years. He did men­tion, that he loved Canada, and often went to a fam­ily house in Nova Sco­tia, near Bras d’Or Lake (since Ver­mont is so close to the Cana­dian bor­der). Pam and I had gone to that area for our hon­ey­moon. He talked about how cos­mopoli­tan a rep­u­ta­tion that Van­cou­ver has, and that he could absolutely under­stand our move here. He asked if we were going to get Cana­dian cit­i­zen­ship, and that obvi­ously, being a techie, I would have had no prob­lem get­ting landed immi­grant sta­tus. We chat­ted about a num­ber of sub­jects: the Pri­mary, What Pres­i­dent Barack Obama will do to help put the coun­try back on the right track (and whether we’d return after that), even a bit about our land in Ver­mont (“You should hang on to that”, Dean said. “When we get out of this Real Estate slump, that’s going to be worth some seri­ous money.”). We rem­i­nisced a bit about when I had last seen him on the cam­paign, in Portsmouth, New Hamp­shire, when he spoke by the river, with boats with his ban­ners float­ing back and forth behind him. When I com­mented on the flag pin on his lapel, he said that it was “to show the Repub­li­cans that they don’t own the flag”. He laughed when I sug­gested that per­haps the Democ­rats could have a slightly dif­fer­ent (and maybe a more ele­gant) design for it.

To prove that this is not what it sounds like, a ‘tall tale’, I got his assis­tant to take a pic­ture of the two of us, seated on the BART seat:

We parted as he went off to his meet­ing, and I headed to my check-in for the flight home, feel­ing as if I were in the air already. At the gate, I imme­di­ately called fam­ily all over North Amer­ica to tell them of my good for­tune and began this post.

My last­ing impres­sion of Dean is pretty much how I imag­ined him one-on-one. He seemed inter­ested and charm­ing, intel­li­gent, a good lis­tener and a smart busi­ness­man. He was very gra­cious, and seemed gen­uinely inter­ested and engaged. In short, I was not disappointed.

I sus­pect that the aver­age per­son has a shot at meet­ing and talk­ing to, per­haps 1 or 2 famous peo­ple in their life­time. You hope that those celebri­ties are peo­ple that you’d also like to meet and per­haps even some­one who you admire. I’ve actu­ally had more than my share of meet­ings with famous peo­ple in my life so far. I’ve met and even had some con­ver­sa­tions with sev­eral com­posers, includ­ing Olivier Mes­si­aen, Aaron Cop­land, Vir­gil Thomp­son, Ned Rorem, Elliott Carter, Steve Reich and Leonard Bern­stein, play­wright Edward Albee, the writ­ers Isaac Asi­mov and William Gib­son, and some brief moments where I shared a tran­sit ride with Michael Dukakis and William Weld (It’s odd how I always meet the politi­cians when rid­ing on mass tran­sit) I’ve even met some lumi­nar­ies in soft­ware and busi­ness, includ­ing John Scul­ley (the first CEO of Apple Com­puter while Steve Jobs was in exile) and Bill Atkin­son, one of the more inter­est­ing fig­ures in the his­tory of com­put­ers (he invented 2 early pieces of soft­ware for the Mac, which became the first of 2 cat­e­gories of soft­ware, Mac­Paint, which begot bitmap edi­tors and Hyper­Card, which it may be argued, was a pre­cur­sor to the World-wide Web and has been said to be the inspi­ra­tion behind the con­cept of the Wiki). As Nearly-Canadians (and as I’ve noted in pre­vi­ous posts in this blog), Pam and I even shared a pic­nic table with actress Nancy Robert­son (who plays Wanda on “Cor­ner Gas”) and briefly met Roch Car­rier, the author of The Hockey Sweater, a clas­sic story, ani­mated film and key­stone of Cana­dian identity.

Nev­er­the­less, it was great to finally be able to tell Howard Dean how much I had looked up to him. On June 13, 2008, with­out any warn­ing, I got a chance to talk to one of my per­sonal heroes, and I’m thrilled.