Northern Voice 2008

I always have a hard time concentrating on trying to blog in the middle of an event, even if in this case, it’s an event about blogging.

All right, let’s fill in the when and where: It’s lunchtime, and I’m sitting in the atrium of the Forestry Sciences Building on the UBC Campus. I like this space. It has 3 levels of balconies and bridges, as well as a glass roof, where this year, the sun is streaming down. Being the Forestry Sciences building, there is wood everywhere, from supporting beams and a system of structural supports to desks and paneling that covers most of the walls. Despite the fact that it’s clearly a modern building (and a little bit utilitarian), it has some natural warmth, which is also enhanced by the crowds of people all taking pictures, chatting, and writing on their laptops (in other words, acting like students).

The morning’s sessions that I attended were mostly about blogging in corporate environments: how to cultivate Wikis inside of companies, navigating the IT Department, dealing with a technological decision, and finding someone who can be an effective ‘Wiki Gardner’ (Now there’s an interesting title for a business card!)

I’ve seen many old friends, and am trying to keep from spreading whatever may be left of the my cold (which has been around me so long that I almost feel as if we are on a first name basis). The technology I’ve spied is not all that surprising: mostly Macs, both MacBooks and Macbook Pros (plus a sprinkling of a few Vaios and Dells). I’ve seen at least 4 iPhones.

Which brings me to my good news: After a period where I thought I had ‘bricked’ it (i.e. turned it into an expensive paperweight), I got my iPhone working. It is Jailbroken, Unlocked, and seeing the Rogers network (Rogers, incidentally, announced their massive earnings today, which doesn’t surprise me in the least given that our phone bills are the highest bills of anything we pay in Vancouver, surpassing electricity, cable TV, Internet and gasoline ) Everything is working fine except for the ‘where am I’ feature, which I haven’t been able to get at all. Fortunately for me, I know where I am without having to consult the phone.

This afternoon will be some more ‘techie’ sessions (I think). I’ll write about those and put in the few snapshots that I’ve taken, this evening.

In the Blogger’s Lounge

After a grueling morning that included waiting in a 3 block line to get our preregistered (hah!) badges, as well as a chaotic set of directions that sent Pam from one line to another once we got inside, we are finally taking a breather at 4:50 pm. It’s almost five?!! Wow, day 1 went by fast.

MacWorld is bigger and more crowded than I remember, for this decade, and I’ve been here nearly every year since 1987. It reminds of the shows I used to attend in the late 80’s and early 90’s, when Apple was on its second wave of success (if you count the Apple II as the first wave). There are 2 halls: the first one we made our way through was the ’small hall’. It turns out that this one was more of an appetizer, and this hall is about twice as big, both area and height.

We’ve run into a few old friends, and the theme of this year’s expo, at least according to what Pam tells me is: I’m getting old. Even my friends have grey hair.

As I sit in this relatively quiet lounge of white upholstered chairs, modern lamps and bowls of M&M packets (with extra printing of the icons of each of the Microsoft Office products on them), Pam is sitting next to me and also taking a break. Nevertheless, she can’t help but edit me as I write this, so it may read a little better than my usual posting.

OK. This took enough time, and despite the relative trendiness of uploading a photo of us as I do this, I think I’ve spent enough time while the multitudes of vendors and products await. I may be getting old, but this Expo hasn’t beat me yet!

Weekends Were Made for What?

In order to create a feeling of esprit de corps, business managers employ a variety of different techniques. I can remember attending a session of MacHack, the Macintosh Programmer Retreat at a motel in Michigan many years ago where I attended a session held by one of the Project Managers for OS X (or was it OS 9?) regarding how they achieved the management of such a complex and important software project. The bouncy woman wearing jeans and a T-Shirt offered reminiscences like: “I remember that next we did ‘Peanut Butter Sandwich Day’ on that Thursday, followed by “Hot Fudge Sundae Day” on the following Friday…” The rest of the talk was much like this, with all sorts of cute and eccentric activities that were added to the grueling work schedule to add some breaks, loosen up the workforce, and keep things playful and light-hearted, even as tempers were growing short (and deadlines were growing near). Her talk was far more about an approach to human psychology than business theory or resource management.

At this IBM office, the visiting manager for the current project I’m working on has a military background. Her idea of ‘rallying the troops’ (or in civilian terms, motivate employees in the face of an important deadline) are three words: “Co-location, co-location and co-location”. What this means, is that she thinks the best way to get a project done faster (or better) is to literally put everyone in the same room, or nearly everyone, at any rate. For the most part, the people working on my end of the project, the ‘Information Architects’ haven’t had the same requirements to work in the crowded (yet curiously, extremely cold) cafeteria. The result may have been some more efficient communications and knowledge-sharing (as she explained), but with it came the high rate of absenteeism from colds and flu, which ran through the building as fast as a kindergarten. This co-location (think co-habitation but just for work) has now, with the upcoming holiday season, translated to ‘Everybody’s working on the weekend.’ Yes, on Dec 1st and 2nd , the entire project team (all 200 or so of us) will be here at the office. That includes the Information Architects, along with all of the Business Analysts, Programmers, HTML Programmers, Database Administrators, Testers and various other people on the project. Never mind that for us Information Architects, there’s very little for us to do. After all, our major role in drawing up the wireframes of the user interface for the project was months ago. It would be like a building architect being asked to hang around while the contractors work on the electrical wiring, or perhaps even the carpeting of the building. But that’s the way things work in her manual, so that’s what we must do. Aye aye, captain.

So, I’ll be here on the weekend. Will I sit at my desk, waiting for a call from the programmers in the cafeteria about what default value a field should have, or how a particular button is enabled or disabled depending on the value of some other drop-down menu…? Or, will I be writing in this blog? We’ll just have to see.

Winter Coping

Even though it isn’t officially Winter, the rain, early darkness and damp chill definitely arrived in the Pacific Northwest. Nevertheless, there are ways of dealing with the (not entirely expected) inclement weather. I’ve often written about Vancouver’s dual personality, and fortunately, there is plenty of the ‘city of the mind’ these days:

Two weeks ago, Bill Moggeridge, the founder of IDEO (one of the world’s foremost Industrial Design companies), and the designer of one of the first laptop computers gave a public talk, at the Emily Carr Institute because he is joining the school’s Design Department as an Honorary Professor. His talk was mostly material from his recent book, Designing Interactions which is available, chapter by chapter, on the web site. Nevertheless, I enjoyed his talk, which was to an absolutely packed hall (about 80% ECI Students, who were fun to watch as well - quite a few of them obsessively scribbling and sketching or playing with their Macbooks as we waited for him to begin). The only downside to the evening was missing the Blogger Meetup, which was going on at the same time. Sometimes there are too many of these winter events to cram into too few days and nights.

Today, we got a little break from the gloom, and Pam and I took part in another Winter event, the Eastside Culture Crawl. For about 3 days, artists and craftspeople in the neighborhoods of East Vancouver all open their studios (and homes), so that the rest of us go can visit and talk, admire sometimes buy art, pottery, furniture and fashions. It was a beautiful day, and we wandered around, taking photos of some of the art and the neighborhood, which was almost glowing in the sun.

Another way of coping with the Winter gloom is food (of course). But rather than just the usual comfort food, we capped the day with one of my favourite yearly indulgences, Cassoulet. The Oyama Sausage Company on Granville Island has an annual Cassoulet festival, and you have to get your order in early. We topped ours off with Toulouse Duck Sausages and some herbed Duck Confit. Some good red wine and a salad, and we were good to go. Oh, and not to mention, for dessert, a little ‘Juliet’ Goat (Camembert style) from Salt Spring Island (the other food festival at Granville Island this weekend was for Cheese).

And then there are the evening events: Next week is another DemoCamp, one of the recent spate of entrepreneurial coming-out parties for local startups and techies. I’m glad that I got into it, as I was unable to get into next week’s Third Tuesday, the local monthly get-together for online marketing, public relations and social networks. As I said, too many events, too few days and nights.

But it sure beats getting bummed by the weather!

Sleepless in MySQL

It’s not often that you wake up in the middle of the night with the solution to a problem. In this case, the problem was this blog. If you’ve read anything between yesterday and today, you’d have either seen nothing, the out-0f-the-box Wordpress ‘Hello World’ posting, or something from me about Blog Amnesia.

What follows is somewhat geeky, so if you don’t care about databases, domain names or any of that, feel free to skip to the end:

The situation was that in the middle of the move from one ISP to another, the export file I had from the previous copy of the blog refused to be imported by the new copy. I had downloaded a backup of all of the files, graphics, and other data, but all of the posts, comments, categories, blogroll and any other text were still locked up in the MySQL database on the old system. What’s worse, in order to install the new copy, I had edited the DNS records to point loudmurmurs.com to the new ISP, so I had literally lost my connection to the old site.

Then, at 3:51 AM, I awoke with a start. Maybe I could connect to the old site, through its IP address. But where would that be? Of course! The FTP program I had used to upload files when I first set it up at that address! Fortunately I had never bothered to replace the IP with the domain name after the site went live.

So, I crept over to my office, (not wanting to wake Pam) fired up the browser and copied the IP address in: It worked! I connected to the web-based Control Panel for the site on the old ISP, and launched PHPMyAdmin. Through that web interface, I managed to export the database of postings, comments, and other data to a MySQL export file, which I downloaded to my computer.

Then I went to import that file into the new, empty blog: No dice. I kept getting errors. ‘OK, at least I have the data’, I told myself, and went back to bed.

In the morning, as I examined the errors, it became clear that the SQL export file that I was creating needed to overwrite the existing data, even if it had some duplicate entries and needed to create some new tables. Why was I creating new tables? To make matters worse, I discovered that I was moving data from a version 2.25 WordPress database, to v 2.3 and data tables had different names, different relationships, etc. - Oh great…

After about 3 or 4 tries, I succeeded in importing all the data.

Then I looked at my new blog. I was very relieved when I saw the first page, looking pretty much as it should, but then I saw that none of the links worked, and that there were no Categories. So, I brought up the new blog’s Dashboard. ‘You need to upgrade your WordPress Database’, it said. I clicked on Continue. After a minor glitch reported by the upgrade script, I saw the standard blog Dashboard. I gulped, and clicked on the ‘View Site’ link…

This time, everything from the past 2 1/2 years was there, and as far as I can tell, it all seems to be working. My dreams of IP addresses, PHPMyAdmin and MySQL ended up getting back my 265 postings and 419 comments. I guess that it really is true that you continue to work on problems in your sleep. This is first time, however, that I ever awoke with a ‘Eureka’.