The Lost Week

I remem­ber when I read ‘The Hot Zone’, Richard Preston’s non-fiction account of killer germs like Mar­burg, Ebola, and other hem­or­rhagic fevers. I was truly ter­ri­fied, but I remem­ber being less scared by his his­tor­i­cal back­ground mate­r­ial on the Span­ish Flu pan­demic of 1918. It’s true, it killed nearly 25 mil­lion in its first 25 weeks. ‘But that was so long ago, I thought, ‘with Med­ical Sci­ence not suf­fi­ciently advanced or able to deal with sim­ple things, like the flu. After all, we now have flu shots, peni­cillin and the like.’

If the con­stant scares about ‘bird flu’ haven’t given the term a new weight (and they recently killed thou­sands of turkeys in nearby Abbots­ford because one of them had been found to have con­tracted it), I have a new rea­son to be respect­ful.  I was infected with some strain of Influenza on Fri­day, Febu­rary 20^th, and I effec­tively dis­ap­peared from daily life until roughly today, 8 days later (and I can’t even be pos­i­tive that it has utterly, com­pletely and totally left me — I really hope that the SOB has). With­out going into the gory details, I was out of it for nearly the whole week and mis­er­able. This meant that I not only missed some busi­ness meet­ings (but no dead­lines, thank good­ness), but also the sec­ond day of North­ern Voice (which by many accounts was the best ever), a Blog­ger Meetup, and Launch Party Vol 6, all which I was look­ing for­ward to attend­ing. There’s truly no good time to come down with the flu, but a knock-you-on-your-ass case this week was truly unfortunate.

Last year, at this time, Pam was on her trip to Antarc­tica, and I came down with a case of the flu then as well (although noth­ing as severe and long as this one). That year, as with this year, I had got­ten a flu shot, but I lost the gam­ble that it cov­ered the strain that I caught. You only have a roughly 1 in 3 chance that the shots actu­ally will do the trick, and so far, over the past 3 years, I’m pretty much get­ting that hit rate. (1 hit, 2 misses)

I hope this (get­ting the flu, that is) doesn’t become a reg­u­lar,  last week in Feb­ru­ary event, because we are plan­ning on a trip in almost exactly a year’s time.

In the mean­time, I’ll write more when I get my strength back.

My Brother Hits the Big 10K (Patent, that is)

I got an email from my brother, that a patent that he was one of the four researchers work­ing on (and now, awarded) turned out to be the 10,000^th patent by his com­pany, Microsoft.

I had visions of stream­ers, party hats and the like, but his boss at the time, one of the other peo­ple on the team, ended up get­ting most of the atten­tion. I guess that’s how the media cov­ers things. There was some CNET cov­er­age which only referred to my brother as a ‘col­league’ (Boo, Hiss!) and this press release from Microsoft itself which men­tions him in a cap­sule area, but only because he was also the co-recipient (with the same boss again) of the 5,000^th patent. (How crazy a coin­ci­dence is that?)

This patent (10,000) was for a User Inter­face idea for Microsoft’s ‘Sur­face’ com­puter, which I’ve actu­ally writ­ten about in my other blog. Accord­ing to the Microsoft press release, the patent:

…applies to sur­face com­put­ing tech­nol­ogy and out­lines how users can place real objects — any­thing from cell phones to their own fin­gers — on the computer’s table­like dis­play and the com­puter will auto­mat­i­cally iden­tify the objects and track their posi­tion, ori­en­ta­tion and motion. This allows the objects to be asso­ci­ated with data or media, like a spe­cific col­lec­tion of music or photos.

The really big coin­ci­dence is that this past week, at the Inter­ac­tion Design Association’s IXD09 Con­fer­ence that I attended this past week in here in Van­cou­ver, there was indeed a Sur­face Com­puter from Microsoft (along with the Project Man­ager for that prod­uct, Joe Fletcher), and we placed our badges on the com­puter, which rec­og­nized us by our 3D Bar­code or QR Code on the back of the badge (which I’ve scanned here):

When the badge was ‘rec­og­nized’ by the Sur­face, we could con­nect to another user who placed their badge on the com­puter by drag­ging from one badge to the other with our fin­gers, prompt­ing the com­puter to send an ‘I want to con­nect to you’ mes­sage on the IXD09 web site. Kind of silly, when you think of it, since you were usu­ally right in front of the per­son you sup­pos­edly wanted to con­nect with, but it was a fun demo, all the same. The strange sen­sa­tion of see­ing my badge sprout extra graph­ics under it when placed on the glass cof­fee table com­puter was like a real world ver­sion of Who Framed Roger Rab­bit, with car­toon or 2D ele­ments seem­ing to exist seam­lessly and inter­act with the real things around them. Now, know­ing that it was my brother’s patent that was behind this piece of techno-magic makes it even cooler.

So, I hope he at least gets a T-Shirt or some­thing ( Maybe it could say, “I Got Microsoft its 5,000 and 10,000^th Patents and All I Got Was This T-Shirt”). Maybe his own Sur­face Com­puter?  C’mon Microsoft, the guy(s) who hit the 5 and 10K mark for you in the Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty race deserve more than a press release!

Update: Happy to see that ZDNet did a bet­ter job rec­og­niz­ing his contribution!

My Friend the Photoshop Goddess

While I worked at IBM, I met some pretty impres­sive peo­ple. A fel­low con­trac­tor, Maria Masiar, recently achieved what I’d call deity sta­tus, hav­ing been to Adobe’s Pho­to­shop Con­fer­ence, also known as the Art Direc­tors Invi­ta­tional Mas­ter Class in San Fran­cisco for two years, and both of those times, won prizes for her work dur­ing the con­fer­ence (First Prize the first year). Maria, who moved here recently from Toronto, has now just had one of here projects here appear on Pho­to­shop Magazine’s cover as a runner-up in the Fourth Annual Pho­to­shop User Awards. Because I know the artist, I not only got a copy, but also the orig­i­nal photo that she used to pro­duce the final one. It’s help­ful to see it, because it shows Maria as the model, and then her as a flesh-eating zom­bie, and a damned fright­en­ing one at that! Click on each photo to see larger, more detailed versions:

So not only is Maria a Pho­to­shop God­dess (or Guru), she’s also got to be her own model.

Hav­ing Pho­to­shop ‘chops’ like Maria’s means that you can pretty much do any­thing and make it look believ­able. The next time I need some syn­thetic real­ity (I’m think­ing, per­haps, of a photo for my wall of me sit­ting like For­est Gump at the White House with Pres­i­dent Obama), I know who I’ll call.

25 Short Things About Me

I’ve been tagged on Face­book with the 25 Things About You meme by my friend, Rebecca Salous­tros. I guess there’s only one thing to do:

Here are the Rules from this blog meme: Once you’ve been tagged, you are sup­posed to write a note with 25 ran­dom things, facts, habits, or goals about you. Then, at the end, choose 25 peo­ple to be tagged. You have to tag the per­son who tagged you. I was tagged, I’ve been told,  because they want to know more about me, and to those who I will tag, I’ll have tagged you because I want to know more about you.

As I said, this started on Face­book, but I am mov­ing it to my blog, so I am doing a post instead of a Face­book note. Noth­ing in the rules said any­thing about it hav­ing to be on Face­book. So in a sense, this virus has ‘jumped’ species. Ooh, scary.

After I am done, I will prob­a­bly not tag 25 peo­ple. I like to keep the num­ber of peo­ple I annoy to a min­i­mum, just like Rebecca.

1. Let’s start with the easy stuff first: My favourite colour is Beige. Yes, wheat, light brown, call it what you will. I like the feel of it on my eyes, and like to wear cloth­ing that color, espe­cially if it is soft, because it is sooth­ing in both the visual and tac­tile sense. Besides, every­body’s favourite colour is blue and they make fun of beige, or speak ill of it, as if it were bland or weak. (I even remem­ber an Apple Ad that said that Beige wasn’t even a colour.) Nah, it’s just subtle.
2. My first mem­ory was when my par­ents took me to the County Fair in West Vir­ginia and we hap­pened to be walk­ing by the pen when they took out the piglet for the ‘greased pig’ con­test (where con­tes­tants try to catch the quick, young pig cov­ered with grease). The piglet let out a high-pitched squeal. I’m told that when I was star­tled by it, I cried for hours.
3. I have a scar on my left eye­brow, from stitches put in when I was 3 or 4 year’s old and attend­ing the birth­day party for a neigh­bor­hood boy named Frankie (I learned later that it was really Rus­sell) Cyz­ick.  The stitches were from watch­ing a Mar­ble race game, try­ing to fol­low the mar­bles too quickly, cut­ting a gash above my eye. Rus­sell Cysick grew up to be one of the Marines who died when the bar­racks in Beirut, Lebanon were bombed on Octo­ber 23, 1983. Some­times I think of that scar when I hear about that inci­dent in history.
4. I wrote 2 books about per­sonal com­puter soft­ware. One was called ‘Cool Mac Stacks’, which was about Hyper­card, a ‘soft­ware erec­tor set’ from Apple in the late 80’s that per­haps antic­i­pated Visual Basic (and, I sup­pose in turn, .Net script­ing, the Web, Apple­script and Javascript). It had (get this:) a floppy disk in the back of it.  The other was co-written with Michael Murie, and is called ‘Quick­Time Hand­book’. I’ve con­tem­plated writ­ing a med­ical action thriller (Think 28 Days Later meets a hard-boiled Detec­tive Drama) and a cou­ple of recipe books, includ­ing one for Maple Syrup (with atmos­pheric pho­tog­ra­phy) or more recently, an updated cook­book for the Granville Island Pub­lic Market.
5. I’m not a big fan of cars, but I’ve always liked Corvettes, espe­cially the ones from the 70’s. It’s the design.
6. The only veg­etable I don’t like is beets, and I pre­fer mush­rooms cooked. The only fruits I’m not crazy about are Pineap­ple and raw apples (they are fine cooked, though). Man­gos seem too much trou­ble, with that big pit.
7. My favourite painter is the sur­re­al­ist Yves Tan­guy, who painted metic­u­lous but vast land­scapes pop­u­lated by strange, multi-coloured, vaguely bio­log­i­cal shapes, cast­ing long after­noon shad­ows on plains with the hori­zon far in the dis­tance. Seri­ously, it’s amaz­ingly trippy stuff.
8. I some­times have a freak­ishly accu­rate mem­ory, but at other times, seem to draw a blank. I fear that my accu­rate mem­o­ries are begin­ning to wane with age.
9. I also have a freak­ishly good sense of smell. This is actu­ally as good as is has ever been, and I now know that if I had known it was that much bet­ter than every­body elses, I could have got­ten a job as a ‘Nose’ in a per­fume fac­tory, or per­haps a whiskey blender in a Scotch distillery.
10. There are sev­eral places in the world that I want to visit. Hope­fully, in 2010, we will go to Viet­nam, Thai­land and Hong Kong.  I’d also love to tour Den­mark, Ice­land and Swe­den, as well as Prague, Budapest and Tallinn (Esto­nia). That last one because one of my favourite unknown com­posers, Eduard Tubin, is from there. (Tubin wrote 9 Sym­phonies and 2 Piano Sonatas, and much of his music is so good, I can’t believe it’s unknown. The Fourth Sym­phony should be a sta­ple of the lit­er­a­ture, and the Piano Con­certino is really fine.)
11. Some day I’d like to be able to get really good at mak­ing short pas­try crust from scratch. I always  panic when a recipe calls for this (i.e., any pie, pasty or tart).
12. I like cats. I appre­ci­ate that they decide to like you on your mer­its, rather than start out help­lessly depen­dent on you, just because you’re the per­son who shows up at the door.  I think that cats can sense this about me, per­haps through my body lan­guage, or the way I approach them or smell;  Fre­quently, cats that hiss and run away from oth­ers will cozy up to me. This is not to say that I dis­like dogs, but I have to admit that I really do dis­like that many dogs leave an odor on your hands after you pet them (or at least one that those with a freak­ishly good sense of smell — see above — can detect).
13. OK. About halfway there. Speak­ing of 13, unlike a lot of peo­ple from North Amer­ica and Europe, I have no fear of the num­ber 13. It’s a fam­ily thing; My brother and I were both born on the 13^th of the month, exactly 3 years apart. My par­ents were mar­ried on the 26^th of the month (twice 13). 13 keeps crop­ping up my life, but it never both­ers me as it would some.
14. I’m a fan of sin­gle malts, Port and small-batch bour­bon (Book­ers, Maker’s Mark, and Knob Creek). I rarely if ever drink gin, vodka or rye whiskey and I’m not really fond of Mar­ti­nis (Spe­cialty or Clas­sic). I do like a good Daiquiri, Dark and Stormy (Rum and Gin­ger Beer) or Mojito in the summer.
15. I’m an unre­pen­tant Mac Fan­boy. Prob­a­bly not as vehe­ment as some, but on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being a Microsoft Fanatic and 10 being a rav­ing Apple acolyte, I’m prob­a­bly a 8.75. Pam says it’s closer to 9.25. Let’s just say that hav­ing to use a PC run­ning Vista halves my pro­duc­tiv­ity and makes me grumpy. XP, not so much.
16. I’ve got a bit of fear of heights. For some strange rea­son, it appears to be get­ting worse as I get older, and I have no clue as to why.
17. I’m hop­ing that the next car we own will be one that runs entirely on elec­tric power (or at the very least, is a plug-in hybrid).
18. I never wear the colour blue (except for blue denim jeans), and espe­cially not Navy. I once had a Navy-blue blazer, and it made me look like a corpse. I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that hazel eyes and grey/brown hair just don’t go with blue, espe­cially with pasty-white skin. As I’ve often said: I don’t tan; I just try to get rid of the blue.
19. I only once voted for a Repub­li­can. It was for William Weld, the gov­er­nor of Mass­a­chu­setts (in 1990). He was run­ning against a lunatic who never should have been the Demo­c­ra­tic Nom­i­nee,  John Sil­ber.  Weld was later black­balled and kept from being ambas­sador to Mex­ico by Jesse Helms (the racist and homo­pho­bic Sen­a­tor of North Car­olina who died last year), and went on to prac­tice law in New York and write nov­els. He endorsed Obama over McCain after hav­ing backed and sup­ported Mitt Rom­ney, a later gov­er­nor of Mass­a­chu­setts. I stood next to Weld on the T (the Boston Sub­way) once. We didn’t speak.
20. Speak­ing of famous peo­ple I’ve met, as I men­tioned in an ear­lier post­ing, that includes for­mer Gov­er­nor and Pres­i­den­tial Can­di­date Howard Dean, who I had a mar­velous chat with while rid­ing BART to the San Fran­cisco Air­port last year, for­mer Gov­er­nor and Pres­i­den­tial Can­di­date Michael Dukakis (also on the sub­way — nice to see politi­cians rid­ding mass tran­sit, eh?) as well as com­posers Vir­gil Thom­son, Ned Rorem, Aaron Cop­land, Leonard Bern­stein, Elliott Carter, Toru Takemitsu, Olivier Mes­si­aen, Steve Reich, John Williams and a bunch of other less famous names (some of them teach­ers). I met con­duc­tors Michael Tilson Thomas, Andre Previn and Seiji Ozawa and had a friend­ship (through fam­ily) with Sergiu Com­mi­siona, the Prin­ci­pal con­duc­tor of both the Bal­ti­more and Van­cou­ver Sym­phony Orches­tras at one time or another (sadly, he died before I moved here). I have a ton of auto­graphs, some of the peo­ple men­tioned here.
21. I strongly dis­like South­ern Amer­i­can accents. Sorry, I know I shouldn’t pre­judge, but a thick Car­olin­ian or Alaba­man drawl grates on my ears like fin­gers on a black­board. If it’s any con­so­la­tion, I also cringe when I hear the accent from Rochester, New York, with it’s flat vow­els and tight-jawed pro­nun­ci­a­tion of the city’s name itself (which comes out sound­ing like ‘Rachster’)
22. The most unpleas­ant place I’ve ever lived was Rochester, New York, which arguably has the least amount of yearly sun­shine of the lower forty-eight US states due to the ‘Lake Effect’, which is the huge, dark canopy of clouds formed for about 9 months out of the year by masses of colder Cana­dian air meet­ing masses of warmer Amer­i­can air over Lake Ontario. There were sev­eral weeks when I looked out the win­dow, that I couldn’t tell whether it was 4 AM or 4 PM.  Not that it mat­tered; there was about as much to do in that city at either hour.
23. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but instead, often crave crunchy, salty things.  Melted cheese on top of or inside a crunchy corn, rice or bread thing is my undoing.
24. I require a really odd shoe size: 11 1/2 triple-A. That’s the nar­row­est size there is. It means that I can never get cheap shoes that fit, and for a while when we lived in Boston, I took the plunge and had cus­tom lasts (those are pieces of wood that are the same shape and size as your feet) made by John­ston Mur­phy so I could get shoes that fit with­out hav­ing to try on 10–15 pairs each time. They no longer do make cus­tom shoes, so I’m out of luck when the shoes I got back then wear out. You’ll never see me in san­dals because they sim­ply can’t stay on a foot with a heel as nar­row as mine.
25. If the rest of these minu­tiae don’t pro­vide a good enough over­all image of me, when I took the Myers Briggs per­son­al­ity test years ago, it pegged me as an ENTP, or Extraverted iNtu­itive Think­ing Per­ceiv­ing, or ‘The Vision­ary’ (I like the sound of that). Accord­ing to one descrip­tion of ENTPs:
    

    “…the ENTP’s pri­mary inter­est in life is under­stand­ing the world that they live in. They are con­stantly absorb­ing ideas and images about the sit­u­a­tions they are pre­sented in their lives. Using their intu­ition to process this infor­ma­tion, they are usu­ally extremely quick and accu­rate in their abil­ity to size up a situation.

    With the excep­tion of their ENFP cousin, the ENTP has a deeper under­stand­ing of their envi­ron­ment than any of the other types. This abil­ity to intu­itively under­stand peo­ple and sit­u­a­tions puts the ENTP at a dis­tinct advan­tage in their lives. They gen­er­ally under­stand things quickly and with great depth. Accord­ingly, they are quite flex­i­ble and adapt well to a wide range of tasks. They are good at most any­thing that inter­ests them.

    As they grow and fur­ther develop their intu­itive abil­i­ties and insights, they become very aware of pos­si­bil­i­ties, and this makes them quite resource­ful when solv­ing problems.

    ENTPs are idea peo­ple. Their per­cep­tive abil­i­ties cause them to see pos­si­bil­i­ties every­where. They get excited and enthu­si­as­tic about their ideas, and are able to spread their enthu­si­asm to oth­ers. In this way, they get the sup­port that they need to ful­fill their visions.”

    I guess that sounds good to me .

OK, tag’ees’, here I come!