Happy Canada Day 2010!

It’s that day of the  year again, when we all wear red and white T-shirts with Canada on them, head down to Granville Island to get tem­po­rary maple leaf tat­toos and cel­e­brate Canada Day (or as it was orig­i­nally called, Domin­ion Day).

Thanks to Heather for some pho­tos of us in our regalia (well, the T-shirts any­way). The island was jammed, despite less-than-perfect weather. It sprin­kled on and off all day, but that didn’t dampen the spir­its (and appetite) of peo­ple, who chowed down on all sorts of good­ies: we got some oh-so-traditional bar­be­cued squid and tofu and bub­ble tea; oth­ers had Chow Mein noo­dles and Pork Dumplings, Viet­namese cof­fee, hot dogs, shaved ice and But­ter Chicken. I’m always thrilled at how so many peo­ple born in Canada and  immi­grants like us cel­e­brate and share in the good fel­low­ship of ‘Our Home and (nearly) Native Land.‘

Google Nexus Phone Joins the List of Technologies Not Available in Canada

I know, I know, I shouldn’t even be sur­prised, but once again, Google tells Canada to wait. Just like they did with the Street-level view in maps and Google Voice (which still isn’t here).  The Kin­dle is now avail­able in Canada, but with­out the key fea­ture (for me, at least) of a built-in browser. The TiVo is dying because the CRTC is block­ing adop­tion of Cable­Card. Pan­dora, Hulu, and Mint aren’t here either. So, Google’s new phone joins the grow­ing list of tech­nolo­gies that are start­ing to pile up due to a com­bi­na­tion of the CRTC and other road­blocks, keep­ing Cana­di­ans back in the pre­vi­ous decade. I hope the Apple Tablet makes it up here, but now I’m begin­ning to won­der. I had to hack my 1^st gen. iPhone just to get it work­ing up here.

All the same, it looked pretty sad when I saw, the first day it was released, this screen:

Is it just me, or does that phone bear a resem­blance here to a mid­dle finger?

Good-bye to the Oughts

While the past year has been good, I must admit that I’m in com­plete agree­ment with those like Time Mag­a­zine, who dubbed the first 10 years of 2000 as The Decade from Hell. It was a decade that belonged to Bush, whose ascen­dancy to the White House I have often said was the worst sin­gle event in US His­tory. It was for us, a great leap into the unknown, leav­ing the city of Boston and the coun­try of our births. It was def­i­nitely scary in the begin­ning, but we’ve slowly climbed back, at least in terms of our finances, to where we were when we left, more or less. We dodged much of the hous­ing bub­ble, and although Pam and I both saw time out of the work force, I sus­pect that would have been just as bad (or worse) if we had stayed.

After the elec­tion of Obama, many peo­ple have asked us if we were con­sid­er­ing return­ing to the US. After all, we were ‘Bush Dodgers’, accord­ing to some. Well, the ridicu­lous debate on Health Care reform had us con­stantly shak­ing our heads in bewil­der­ment. The fact that the US still fails to acknowl­edge health care as a human right (like the ones of reli­gion and guns that they extoll so often), is some­thing we’ll never under­stand. The lack of acknowl­edge­ment that the pro­lif­er­a­tion of guns is caus­ing more and more vio­lence and death through­out Amer­ica is also baf­fling to us. When­ever we see peo­ple being inter­viewed on the US evening news con­stantly refer to God, their belief in reli­gion and other mag­i­cal think­ing also seems fur­ther and fur­ther from us. Nope, we’re not going back to all of that.

Good-bye to 2009, Then

Look­ing back on just this year, I do have some events that I’ll remem­ber fondly. Here’s a brief list:

1. The Con­cert of works for and by Dutch com­poser Louis Andriessen for his 70^th birth­day. Back in April, I got to see and hear him (and one of his works), as he rem­i­nisced about per­for­mances by air­port run­ways and mused that the bass line in Bach Chorale Pre­ludes is “like a cow moo­ing, inter­rupt­ing chirp­ing birds”.
2. Rid­ing the brand spank­ing new Canada­Line all day on my Birth­day, and play­ing Foursquare (and ‘tourist in my own town’) as I went all the way from the south of Rich­mond to North Van­cou­ver with­out burn­ing any gaso­line (not count­ing the fuel on the Seabus).
3. Actu­ally not one but sev­eral fun and stim­u­lat­ing Mee­tups for blog­gers, graphic design­ers and Social Media folks. Sev­eral were at Caeli’s Pub, which has become one of the most pop­u­lar social watering-holes in town.
4. An after-hours tour of the newly-renovated Arc­tic Ocean exhibit of the Van­cou­ver Aquar­ium as part of the local chap­ter of the Inter­ac­tion Design Asso­ci­a­tion (IXDA)
5. Excel­lent meals at Provence at Mari­na­side, a tea (thanks to Tiny Bites) at the Fish House in Stan­ley Park and this past week, a warm­ing Hot Pot (Shabu Shabu) at a new Korean Restau­rant, Dae Bak Bon Ga, on 4^th Avenue in Kitsilano.
6. The Inau­gu­ra­tion of Barack Obama (of course)
7. Bar­Cam­p­Van­cou­ver, which was a blast this year at Dis­cov­ery Parks.
8. Help­ing to run and par­tic­i­pate in UXCam­p­Van­cou­ver, the first User Expe­ri­ence ‘uncon­fer­ence’ in the Van­cou­ver area. Many thanks to Karen Parker for pro­vid­ing the lead­er­ship and guid­ance. Next year, it will be even big­ger and bet­ter. This was, per­haps, the big high­light of the year for me.

And a few sad losses:

1. The loss of Work­space, a mar­velous public/private space that hosted many great techie get-togethers. It was the clos­est thing to a ‘par­lor’ that the Geek Scene in Van­cou­ver had. I’m hop­ing that another will come, but some­times these things take time to replace.
2. The clos­ing of a bunch of restau­rants: Chow (which I reviewed in this blog), O Thai (which was replaced by another Thai restau­rant in the same spot that is decid­edly poorer), The Fish Café (on 4^th Avenue in Kit­si­lano), and a few oth­ers that I for­get at the moment (maybe for that rea­son, they should have closed).

When I look back on 2009, I know that I will sadly have to note that it was the year that Becca Ham­mann died (see pre­vi­ous entry), and it will be some time before I am used to that fact.

I also note the birth of many babies by friends and rel­a­tives, and once again, our orchid is blooming.

My next post, will be about next year. Oh look: the clock says that it’s here already. Well, come in, 2010. Make your­self at home.

End of the Season and Kat Kam MIA?

Like many Van­cou­verites, last night I watched one of the most painful and edge-of-your seat hockey games in years. Backs against the wall, the Van­cou­ver Canucks, the last Cana­dian team left in the NHL Stan­ley Cup play­offs, man­aged to once again snatch defeat from the jaws of vic­tory (some­thing I tweeted a cou­ple of days ago re. the game that brought them to the brink). To quote Char­lie Smith of the Geor­gia Straight:

The only ques­tion left for the Canucks is who won’t be return­ing to the squad next year. After the sign­ing of Mats Sundin ear­lier this year, there were high hopes that this would be the year that Van­cou­ver would finally win its first Stan­ley Cup. But once again, the fans’ hopes have been crushed.

Some things never change.

This morn­ing, on the radio, I heard many say­ing ‘Wait till next year!’. Well, Hope does spring eter­nal, but the Black­hawks (among other teams the Canucks played against this year) were notable for the num­ber of young play­ers in their 20s just begin­ning to come into their prime. Unless Van­cou­ver can get some ris­ing stars of their own, as Buzz Bishop pointed out on Twit­ter, the win­dow is clos­ing or per­haps even closed on it being their year in 2010. I felt par­tic­u­larly bad for Roberto Luongo, who after a very strong sea­son, picked last night to have an off game. For some­one with the rep­u­ta­tion of being per­haps the best goalie in the NHL, let­ting 7 goals through is just not a way any goalie wants to end a sea­son. In fact, the game felt more like Bas­ket­ball (a sport I’m not very fond of) because of the see-saw of scor­ing for either side.

I remem­ber these feel­ings, that of every other year or so, the home team get­ting close but ulti­mately los­ing, from the 1980s and 90s in Boston for the Red Sox. Anx­ious to blame it on any­thing but the play­ers, Bosto­ni­ans attrib­uted it to ‘The Curse of the Bam­bino’, but in the end, it was just a mat­ter of time. So my advice to Van­cou­ver fans might be: Just hang in there for another 20 years or so, and your time will come.

The Kat Kam, Stuck?

Speak­ing of win­dows clos­ing, is our vir­tual win­dow on False Creek also clos­ing? For about 13 years, there has been a cam­era pointed West South­west on the Bur­rard Bridge and the view beyond it of Eng­lish Bay from the offices of Tele­mark Sys­tems in the West End of Van­cou­ver,  post­ing the live image on the web­site: The Kat Kam. Before I moved here, I used the Kat Kam as a way of accli­ma­tiz­ing myself to the weather and gen­eral look of this city, like a new aquar­ium fish look­ing out of it’s plas­tic bag­gie into the new aquar­ium it was about to enter. It turns out that ‘Kat’, the per­son who ran the web­cam left Tele­mark Sys­tems at the end of last month to pur­sue a career in Culi­nary Arts. While I’m thrilled that she is start­ing out a new chap­ter in her career and life, I won­der if per­haps this might spell the end of the view of False Creek on my desk­top. For­tu­nately, there are now sev­eral other cam­eras on Van­cou­ver on the web, although this was per­haps the best known and cer­tainly the old­est con­tin­u­ous view (not to men­tion, it was a pretty one, espe­cially later in the day). I sus­pect that sev­eral peo­ple planned their com­mute based on the traf­fic on the bridge, and I enjoyed see­ing the Sun Run run­ners as they were caught by the Kat Kam. So, here’s the last view we got, 15 min­utes past 9 PM, May 11, 2009. Let’s hope that’s not the image of False Creek I’ll get from my win­dow­less home office:

I’m hop­ing the view gets ‘unstuck’ soon, but until then, there are other cams:

• The Wes­t­end Cam
• Views from the new Shangri-La tower (the new, high­est build­ing in down­town Vancouver).
• Look­ing north­west at Down­town from Kit­si­lano, a Java-based Vancam.ca (I don’t like Java in my browser, but it is faster than your usual refresh of a cou­ple of minutes)
• The Westin Bayshore’s cam­era, which also oper­ates at night.
• My sec­ond favourite view from down­town, which looks at the Seabus as it comes and goes towards North Van­cou­ver from Vancouver.com.
• A rather gritty view east­ward of the cranes that load and unload the con­tainer ships and trains from the Port of Vancouver
• Finally, there is a lit­tle of False Creek show­ing, but mainly there’s a view look­ing South and East at Sci­ence World, BC Place and GM Place, also from Vancouver.com.

Gee, maybe this office really is a room with many win­dows. Too bad I don’t get a breeze from any of them.

Update: Well, after about a 16–20 hour break, the Kat Kam started updat­ing again. Hope­fully it will keep going for a while yet to come.

Higher Ground

I got out­side today, for the first time sev­eral days, since for a long while I was too weak even to get much fur­ther than the bath­room. The air was mild, and despite a good deal of clouds, there were what they call here ‘Sunny Breaks’, which are those (some­times brief) moments when the sun­beams break through and every­thing lights up. Today, they lit up the cro­cuses. Yes, March 1 and Spring has Sprung in the Lower Main­land. Despite some snow on the moun­tains (and I heard that some friends even went cross-country ski­ing on Cypress Moun­tain today), we are soon going to be back to ‘The Other Van­cou­ver’, which is just fine by me. The good weather also was appre­ci­ated by the Real­tors who were run­ning a cou­ple open houses on our street today.

We Were Lucky to Move Where and When We Did

When Pam and I moved to Canada, we said that it was because of Bush (who I often refer to as WPIUSH). I also wrote that it was because I looked ahead to a future that looked to be unpleas­ant, because of poor deci­sions by the US gov­ern­ment in the near term hav­ing an effect on our sit­u­a­tion as future retirees. While that dim future referred mainly to the US Fed­eral bud­get deficit, it also was due to the greed and cor­rup­tion that we saw, and I def­i­nitely could feel some sort of col­lapse com­ing. Mind you, I had pre­dicted that a great eco­nomic dis­in­te­gra­tion would be com­ing (cue Sarah Con­nor look­ing at the com­ing storm at the end of the first Ter­mi­na­tor movie), but my tim­ing put it roughly around 2015, so I was off by a few years, but it looks like I got pretty close. I’m not that thrilled that the chick­ens have come home to roost a half a decade or so ear­lier than I thought.
While I feel that we were smart to leave when we did (as we could now prob­a­bly not afford to), what I didn’t count on was the fact Canada was also the right place to go, in many ways.

This past week, Fareed Zakaria wrote a piece for Newsweek, called The Cana­dian Solu­tion. Warn­ing: I’m going to get dan­ger­ously close to smug here, but will try to hold back if I do.
Accord­ing to Zakaria, our new home is in sur­pris­ingly good shape these days:

Guess which coun­try, alone in the indus­tri­al­ized world, has not faced a sin­gle bank fail­ure, calls for bailouts or gov­ern­ment inter­ven­tion in the finan­cial or mort­gage sec­tors. Yup, it’s Canada. In 2008, the World Eco­nomic Forum ranked Canada’s bank­ing sys­tem the health­i­est in the world. America’s ranked 40^th, Britain’s 44^th.

Canada has done more than sur­vive this finan­cial cri­sis. The coun­try is pos­i­tively thriv­ing in it. Cana­dian banks are well cap­i­tal­ized and poised to take advan­tage of oppor­tu­ni­ties that Amer­i­can and Euro­pean banks can­not seize. The Toronto Domin­ion Bank, for exam­ple, was the 15^th-largest bank in North Amer­ica one year ago. Now it is the fifth-largest. It hasn’t grown in size; the oth­ers have all shrunk.

So what accounts for the genius of the Cana­di­ans? Com­mon sense. Over the past 15 years, as the United States and Europe loos­ened reg­u­la­tions on their finan­cial indus­tries, the Cana­di­ans refused to fol­low suit, see­ing the old rules as use­ful shock absorbers. Cana­dian banks are typ­i­cally lever­aged at 18 to 1—compared with U.S. banks at 26 to 1 and Euro­pean banks at a fright­en­ing 61 to 1. Partly this reflects Canada’s more risk-averse busi­ness cul­ture, but it is also a prod­uct of old-fashioned rules on banking.

The arti­cle goes on to laud Canada’s bet­ter hous­ing mar­ket (and it doesn’t even have to note that there was no ‘Sub-Prime’ mess here, either). The other day we learned that Obama’s “Amer­i­can Recov­ery and Rein­vest­ment Act” deals with Health Care, because the num­ber 1 rea­son that an Amer­i­can goes bank­rupt is because of a major med­ical prob­lem. Not needed here, and as I found dur­ing my recent ill­ness, the sto­ries that some US politi­cians and oth­ers make that we have to wait for­ever to get to a doc­tor or get sub-standard health care are utterly false, in my expe­ri­ences. Just this past week, I walked (slowly) 3 blocks to our local clinic, waited about 20 min­utes to see a doc­tor the first time, and 15 min­utes on my return visit. My blood tests were done in 3 days, and didn’t cost me a penny.
Zakaria goes on to notice the other good news for those of us in Canada:

The gov­ern­ment has restruc­tured the national pen­sion sys­tem, plac­ing it on a firm fis­cal foot­ing, unlike our own insol­vent Social Secu­rity. Its health-care sys­tem is cheaper than America’s by far (account­ing for 9.7 per­cent of GDP, ver­sus 15.2 per­cent here), and yet does bet­ter on all major indexes. Life expectancy in Canada is 81 years, ver­sus 78 in the United States; “healthy life expectancy” is 72 years, ver­sus 69. Amer­i­can car com­pa­nies have moved so many jobs to Canada to take advan­tage of lower health-care costs that since 2004, Ontario and not Michi­gan has been North America’s largest car-producing region.

Of course that last bit about Ontario pro­duc­ing most of North America’s cars is also not such good news, as the dire straits of the auto indus­try have hit that province at least as hard if not harder than Michigan.

Even the immi­gra­tion poli­cies that Pam is learn­ing in detail these days, as she stud­ies to become an Immi­gra­tion Con­sul­tant, get some atten­tion by Zakaria:

The U.S. cur­rently has a brain-dead immi­gra­tion sys­tem. We issue a small num­ber of work visas and green cards, turn­ing away from our shores thou­sands of tal­ented stu­dents who want to stay and work here. Canada, by con­trast, has no limit on the num­ber of skilled migrants who can move to the coun­try. They can apply on their own for a Cana­dian Skilled Worker Visa, which allows them to become per­fectly legal “per­ma­nent res­i­dents” in Canada—no need for a spon­sor­ing employer, or even a job. Visas are awarded based on edu­ca­tion level, work expe­ri­ence, age and lan­guage abil­i­ties. If a prospec­tive immi­grant earns 67 points out of 100 total (hold­ing a Ph.D. is worth 25 points, for instance), he or she can become a full-time, legal res­i­dent of Canada.

Zakaria notes that com­pa­nies have begun to notice, and that Microsoft sit­u­ated their lat­est research cen­ter here in Vancouver.

At any rate, I’m not try­ing to gloat or hold our good for­tune over the old friends and fam­ily we left behind in the States, but per­haps they can now under­stand why we don’t seem to have the same level of dread and panic when we talk about our eco­nomic prospects that they do. Cana­di­ans right now seem to be more con­fi­dent, and less likely to respond emo­tion­ally to the news (partly because our news is also less sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic). Given that we have bet­ter safety nets, includ­ing health care, a sta­ble bank­ing sys­tem, and even our food inspec­tion sys­tem, which caught the bad peanut but­ter when it came to the bor­der, that’s not all that sur­pris­ing. Pam and I find our­selves con­tin­u­ally shak­ing our heads as we watch the Evening News from the major US TV Net­works, some­times in relief, and some­times in bewil­der­ment that things in the coun­try we left have got­ten so bad.