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 13th has always been lucky for me, and this June 13th 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.