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.‘

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?

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 70th 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 4th 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 4th 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.

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.

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 40th, Britain’s 44th.

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 15th-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.