I Get To Attend an Opening…Again

Ah yes, I remember it well: The long lines in the Cambridgeside Galleria Mall, the T-Shirts for those nearer to the front of the line, the excitement as the doors finally opened… The Apple Store opening in Cambridge, Massachusetts was one of the first ones that Apple had. We were used to the fact that although we weren’t Cupertino (or even San Francisco), Cambridge was one of the East Coast centres for Apple’s presence. After all, in the early days of Macworld Expo (and I doubt if many people who own an Apple product know this at this point), there was a West Coast Macworld Expo in San Francisco in January and an East Coast Macworld Expo in Boston, usually during the hottest week in August. It wasn’t until that fateful day when Bill Gates’s 20-foot face appeared on the screen behind Steve Jobs during his keynote (and it was hissed by the crowd) that Steve made sure that there would be no more MacWorlds in Boston.

I know, I know, there were probably other reasons, but Jobs’s annoyance at the disagreement of the Boston crowd with his strategy of having Microsoft invest in Apple during their darkest hour probably didn’t help the show. In the following year, Jobs refused to give the keynote, and the show moved to New York City. It continued on a few years there at the Javitts Center, but attendance at that venue quickly petered out. As many have pointed out, the Internet can now disperse information about products far faster and farther than any show floor could. There is now only one MacWorld Expo, each January, and it remains a San Francisco tradition.

When we moved to Vancouver, I missed that sense of being on Apple’s radar. Despite the fact that many here use the Mac (in fact, in recent years it’s increased), I found the local Certified Apple Dealers a bit ramshackle, with relatively small variety of peripherals and messy, poorly maintained display areas. My first job was working for someone who hated the Mac, and he was relieved when I didn’t insist that I use one in his small office (I would have been the only Mac user in the shop). At IBM, we all were assigned Thinkpads, of course. The consultants from Victoria often had Macs. At Blogger and smaller business events, the Mac was predominant. Nevertheless, the absence of the iPhone in Canada, the higher prices for products, and constantly hearing the rumors that Apple Hated Canada didn’t help matters.

Our days of living in a relatively less important spot in the Apple universe are about to end. On this coming Saturday morning, I hope to be in line for the opening of the first Apple store in Vancouver. We’ve been waiting for this for some time. Its going to be in the heart of downtown, at the Pacific Centre Mall (actually the previous location of Holt Renfrew, a high end Department Store, who have moved into new digs nearby). I believe that it’s only the fifth store in Canada, with the other three in Toronto and one in Laval.

To put things in a bit of perspective, another Apple store opened in Boston (across the river from Cambridge, but certainly near our old home) last week. It’s the largest Apple Store in the world, taking up three floors and sporting an all glass facade, on Boylston Street. Oh well, I guess Boston still looms larger in Apple’s realm, but at least we’re no longer off the map.

Our Jeweler on the Lam

When I proposed to Pam, I had already gotten a ring at Alpha Omega Jewelers in Cambridge. It was a small shop in Harvard Square, family run, with not spectacularly high or low prices. In the years since then, we used them for not only our wedding rings, but other bits of jewelry.

So, I was not without a fair amount of shock when I read this headline on the web site boston.com:
Alpha Omega liquidation sale set to start tomorrow

What was even more shocking was why they were liquidating our old family jeweler:

The investment consortium that bought the assets of Alpha Omega Jewelers in a bankruptcy court-approved sale said that the liquidation sale of the chain’s inventory will begin at its four stores tomorrow.

Everything must be sold before Ross-Simons, a Rhode Island-based chain, assumes the leases of Alpha Omega stores at Natick Collection and the Prudential Center in Boston, and items will be discounted to ensure fast sales, the consortium said.

The chain’s other two stores are located in Harvard Square and at the Burlington Mall.

According to stories in the Globe data base, Alpha Omega Jewelers filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code last month. The filing came after owner Raman Handa unexpectedly left the country with his wife, son, and daughter, prompting the company’s bank to seize Alpha Omega assets and temporarily close its stores just before Christmas.

That’s right, they were going bankrupt because the owner fled the country with his family. Suddenly my mind filled with all the plots of Jewel heists, with the thieves heading for Mexico, having deposited some of their misbegotten wealth in a Swiss Bank Account…

And to think I was served by Mr. or Mrs. Handa (I never learned their names, nor do I remember them particularly well), who might have been planning their disappearances for years!

Or perhaps it was something less glamorous and far more depressing, like mounting debts and “a threat to himself or a member of his family”.

You Can Take the Boy out of Fenway…

…but you can’t take Fenway out of the boy.

This evening, Pam and I ate hot dogs, drank beer and watched the Boston Red Sox utterly dominate the Colorado Rockies in a wicked first game of the 2007 World Series. It was curious to see the Sox not only do so well, but do so well in so many ways. They finished off with a score of 13 to 1, tying the record of 13 doubles in a world series game. But it wasn’t only the hitting. They pulled off a beautiful double play, and pitcher Josh Beckett only allowed 6 hits. The Rockies, on the other hand, went through 5 pitchers.

Old habits do die hard, though. All the way up to a score of 7 to 1, Pam kept saying ‘They could still screw it up! Don’t let yourself be fooled!” It’s also hard to get used to seeing our old Boston team as the favourite, and clearly not the underdog. That said, it is fun to see them win handily, even if we aren’t within a stone’s throw of the Green Monster any more.

Go Sox!

A Walk on the Beach and A Strange Sign in Front of MIT

A Cold but Sunny Stroll
We took a walk on Kitsilano Beach today. After all, we couldn’t let this sunshine go to waste. However, the wind had other ideas. It was very chilly, reminding us that despite the fact that it is spring and all of the trees are blooming (and the city is showing some of its most gorgeous aspects), it’s still early spring, and we are, after all, in Canada, not Fort Lauderdale or Puerto Vallarta. I did bring the camera, though, and we even documented another brush with a Bald Eagle. The large bird even roosted for quite a while on a boat (called ‘Free to Roam’, of all things) in the False Creek Marina, where crows seemed to treat it with no respect whatsoever.

Interesting Items Back on Mass. Ave.
I sometimes read the blog infosthetics (meaning Information Aesthetics) for my other blog, drucker.ca, because I often deal with some of the same issues and subjects (visualization, information architecture, infographics, etc.)

A couple of days ago, however, they made note of a very odd piece of performance art that’s located at a spot that I often went by for about 15 years. It seems in front of MIT Building 1 (the one with the columns out front), on Mass Ave. in Cambridge, an artist named Leonardo Bonanni posted something that looked like a bus schedule. Except it’s not a bus schedule: It’s a “framed piece of paper listing the latest results on untimely deaths/suicides at MIT university.”

It looks like Mr. Bonanni has been busy. He’s a 1st Year PhD Student in the Tangible Media Group at the Media Lab, and was recently a finalist for the Kendall Square Interactive Design Competition, which appears to have been sponsored by Lyme Properties, the developer who build many of the Biotech Powerhouses that now dominate so much of East Cambridge.

Here’s a video of his proposal.

Kind of cool. Looks like the receiver of the very public cell phone text message on a huge text crawl was in a room at the Marriot, as far as I can tell from the animation. Many other projects of his are hosted by the Media Lab’s site.

It’s too bad that our paths never crossed while I was living so close by. I would have liked to met him.

So You Want to Vote to Change the Massachusetts Constitution?

Back in Boston, Governor-elect Deval Patrick this morning called on legislators to skip taking a vote on an amendment that could ban gay marriages in Massachusetts.

“I believe that adults should be free to choose whom they wish to love and to marry,” Mr. Patrick said. “… Never in the long history of our model Constitution have we used the initiative petition to restrict freedom. We ought not start now.”

Nevertheless, a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage survived a second vote in the afternoon afternoon after 62 lawmakers moved to advance the initiative to the next legislative session, ensuring that the battle over same-sex weddings will continue for at least another year.

A friend of mine back in Boston, Michael Femia, has a great blog called Bunko Squad. Today he masterfully skewered the political discourse in a Poll of his own that suggests:

If there is a public vote on same-sex marriage, what should we vote on next?

__ Banning Divorce

__ 3-Child-Per-Couple Minimum

__ Black People Eating At Lunch Counters

__ Women Need Husband’s Permission to Drive

__ Abolish Child Labor Laws Down to Age 4

__ End Tax Exemption for Politically-Active Religion

Good one, Michael.