About This Blog

Who Wrote This?

I’m David Drucker, a musician-turned tech­nol­o­gist, inter­ested in how new devices and soft­ware can make peo­ple more pow­er­ful, cre­ative or con­nected to oth­ers. I’m also an unapolo­getic Amer­i­can lib­eral who became dis­gusted with the Bush régime, the reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives who hijacked the gov­ern­ment, and the ris­ing tide of will­ful igno­rance among its citizens.

In short, Amer­ica wasn’t any longer the coun­try that I grew up in.

So, What Did I Do About it?

As you can see by the quote from Gandhi that I’m very fond of, I decided to be a small piece of the change I wished to see in the world. After a long bat­tle try­ing to stop the cat­a­stro­phe that was George W. Bush, I voted with my feet. My wife and I moved to Canada. It may not be utopia, but I believe that Canada is a lot closer to my idea of how a coun­try should be run and how its cit­i­zens can live. Things have changed a lot in the US, but we’re not plan­ning on return­ing, partly because so much dam­age was done, so many things wrong with the coun­try are deep and sys­temic, and I think that our qual­ity of life will con­tinue to be bet­ter here in Van­cou­ver.  I’m con­tin­u­ing to write about my expe­ri­ences now, as of July 18, 2012, from the point of view of a new Cana­dian cit­i­zen. I hope that it may offer some insight and tips to oth­ers who might be con­sid­er­ing leav­ing the US, as well as per­haps pro­vid­ing a glimpse into our every­day expe­ri­ences and concerns.

We’ve heard and met other Amer­i­cans who have con­tem­plated the same. To all of you who are ready to make the leap, I’ll say to you what all the peo­ple in Van­cou­ver have said to us when we tell them where we’re orig­i­nally from: Wel­come. For those of you who are stay­ing to help Pres­i­dent Obama clean up ongo­ing mul­ti­tude of dis­as­ters and ruin left by eight years of Bush and Cheney, good luck. You have my heart­felt sym­pa­thy, and I like to think that I may have helped in a small way toward Obama’s reelection.

Other Blogs I Write

Besides this blog, I write another blog that cov­ers tech­nol­ogy and User Inter­face Design, which is what I do for a liv­ing. It’s enti­tled with its URL, drucker.ca, which also shows that I’m proud of my Cana­dian home and have adopted a .ca address for my pro­fes­sional life.

Why the Name “Loud Murmurs”?

I’ve always found the con­cept of blog­ging to be some­what at odds with itself. Are these pri­vate thoughts? Are they pub­lic ones? For me, the act of blog­ging is kind of like grum­bling (or mur­mur­ing) out loud. It’s not that I hadn’t planned on voic­ing these par­tic­u­lar thoughts, or am embar­rassed that they are now pub­lic, but the act of enter­ing them into a blog seems to amplify them. So, the posts here are often just that; mum­bles with a megaphone.