Fireworks and Fiscal Ruin

This past Sat­ur­day we enjoyed the sec­ond night of the Fire­works com­pe­ti­tion from yet a new van­tage point, my friend and fel­low blog­ger MJ’s condo in Yale­town. With our view from the 30^th floor, it had to be the high­est ele­va­tion from which we’ve ever seen the show. (Pam and I have been lucky enough to have seen it from 4 dif­fer­ent loca­tions over the last 3 years). This year was marked by plenty of talk and munchies, as well as Tanya (NetChick) and I both try­ing to snap pic­tures of the plumes with our iPhones. Best of all, we man­aged to post them on Face­Book just about as fast as we snapped them. Nerd paradise.

The fire­works this evening of the com­pe­ti­tion the USA’s entry (last Wednes­day had been Canada’s). Nor­mally, the phrase ‘Amer­i­cans shoot­ing rock­ets over Vancouver’s Eng­lish Bay’ is not what any­one here wants to hear, but in this case, I guess it was OK.

Were We Rats Flee­ing a Sink­ing Ship?

While we’ve been observ­ing the third anniver­sary of hav­ing moved here, at the party, appro­pri­ately enough, I got to speak to an Amer­i­can cou­ple who had just made the move here. In fact, they had just arrived a week or so ago, roughly in the same state of con­fu­sion and excite­ment as we had in 2005 (MJ is help­ing them to find a per­ma­nent place to live). The main dif­fer­ences between them and us is that they are mov­ing from San Fran­cisco (vs. our Boston), and our tim­ing was, we all agreed, a lot bet­ter. In the last 3 years, the US Real Estate mar­ket, the US Stock Mar­ket and the US Dol­lar have all fallen markedly in value, leav­ing Pam and me in much bet­ter shape than the cou­ple who unfor­tu­nately didn’t have the nerve to move ear­lier. They even had a place picked out, and just didn’t move on it.

As we com­pared notes, the topic of why we left came up. While it was true that in 2005, we couldn’t stand the direc­tion the coun­try was going (and note that we felt that way before the Tor­ture, Ille­gal Wire­tap­ping and other scan­dals became pub­lic knowl­edge). Despite all that roman­tic stuff about vot­ing with your feet,  the most con­crete dis­as­ter that loomed on the hori­zon for us was the US Pub­lic Debt. Dur­ing the Clin­ton era (our 8-year night­mare of peace and pros­per­ity), the US Gov­ern­ment actu­ally ran a bud­get sur­plus, eras­ing the deficits cre­ated by the Reagan/Bush I years, open­ing up the pos­si­bil­ity of pay­ing down the National Debt. Then along came WPIUSH, and an all-too-brief period of fis­cal respon­si­bil­ity was quickly reversed. So, the real rea­son that we decided to leave the US was that we were con­cerned that the coun­try was going down the drain fiscally.

Yes, it’s easy to see where most of it went (the war in Iraq, for one thing, along with the tax cuts for the top 2% rich­est Amer­i­cans, as well as a mul­ti­tude of fund­ing and over­sight deba­cles, some that have yet to see the light of day). Today, the sit­u­a­tion isn’t get­ting any bet­ter. In fact, it’s get­ting even worse now than it was 14 years ago, when the Fed­eral Deficit (and Debt) first appeared on our radar, accord­ing to Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The Bush admin­is­tra­tion on Mon­day pro­jected the U.S. bud­get deficit will soar to a record of nearly half a tril­lion dol­lars in fis­cal 2009 as a housing-led eco­nomic slow­down cuts into gov­ern­ment revenues.

The eco­nomic and fis­cal dete­ri­o­ra­tion will com­pli­cate efforts to bring the bud­get to bal­ance and pose chal­lenges for who­ever takes over the White House in Jan­u­ary, either Repub­li­can Sen. John McCain or Demo­c­ra­tic Sen. Barack Obama.

“I believe who­ever becomes the next pres­i­dent will have a very, very sober­ing first week in office,” pre­dicted Sen­ate Bud­get Com­mit­tee Chair­man Kent Con­rad, a North Dakota Democrat.

React­ing to the White House’s new pre­dic­tion that the bud­get deficit will hit $482 bil­lion in the fis­cal year that starts Octo­ber 1, Con­rad said that num­ber eas­ily could rise by an addi­tional $80 bil­lion when the full costs of the Iraq war are tal­lied next year.

The econ­omy has been hob­bled by the hous­ing mar­ket col­lapse and soar­ing food and energy prices. In Feb­ru­ary, the Democratic-controlled Con­gress and Pres­i­dent George W. Bush approved a $168 bil­lion, two-year stim­u­lus plan to ward off recession.

With the slow­ing econ­omy and the cost of the eco­nomic stim­u­lus plan, the White House said it thinks the deficit will hit a record $482 bil­lion in fis­cal 2009. How­ever, it cut its fore­cast for the cur­rent fis­cal year to $389 billion.

Even if we ignore where the money went or is even going now, the prob­lem (the Debt) is still out there, like a tick­ing time bomb. Just as there were fore­clo­sures on bad mort­gage loans through­out the US, there will come a day when some­one has to come up with a way of pay­ing that debt. When will that day come? I’m not sure, but I can pretty much count on it being within the next 20 years, and the fur­ther out the US Gov­ern­ment can push it out, the bet­ter for who­ever is in power. Whether the Pres­i­dent in that era is Barack Obama, Chelsea Clin­ton or per­haps one of the Bush Twins, there will come a day when the US Debt reaches some sort of a break­ing point. What effect this will have is also hard to guess, but I can’t imag­ine a sce­nario where it will be a good thing. More than likely, the qual­ity of life in the US will suf­fer, as it has suf­fered dur­ing the past eight years. Peo­ple will work harder with less time for them­selves for less pay, and under poorer work­ing con­di­tions. Decent Med­ical care will be harder to get and also be more expen­sive (again), Aver­age Life Expectancy will get shorter (again), and daily life in gen­eral will get more bru­tal, vio­lent, unfair and unpleas­ant, par­tic­u­larly if you are not very rich. There’s a good pos­si­bil­ity that this event (call it a crash, a cor­rec­tion, a default, or what­ever you like) will come at a time when Pam and I might wish to be retired and liv­ing on a fixed income, per­haps includ­ing some sort of a Gov­ern­ment Pen­sion. You can bet that those will get hit. Rather than end up poor and liv­ing in a coun­try fil­ing for bank­ruptcy (or some­thing worse), we opted for a coun­try that looked to be more sol­vent in the com­ing 20 years, at least.

So, once again, if this lat­est news (which came as lit­tle sur­prise) my instincts about where we went, and when we went have remained on track. I hope my good sense (and per­haps luck) holds. After all, part of ‘good for­tune’ is being in the right place at the right time

Rogers About to Get Something they Didn't Want: Competition

I got a news-flash email from the CBC today (I’m no one spe­cial; I’ve signed up for alerts like this):

The fed­eral gov­ern­ment is $4.2 bil­lion richer with the con­clu­sion of the cell­phone spec­trum auc­tion on Mon­day, while cus­tomers stand to win as five new com­pa­nies are now well posi­tioned to launch ser­vices over the next few years. The wind­fall is con­sid­er­ably larger than the orig­i­nal $1.5 bil­lion many indus­try ana­lysts had pre­dicted before the auc­tion began on May 27.

I linked to the related story on the CBC web site, and 3 pas­sages caught my eye. (in all cases, bold and ital­ics are mine) First:

The big win­ner — and biggest spender — among poten­tial new entrants was Toronto-based Glob­alive Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc., which cur­rently sells home phone and inter­net ser­vice under the Yak brand. The com­pany has emerged from the auc­tion posi­tioned to launch a national cell­phone ser­vice with 30 licenses broadly dis­trib­uted across the country.

Sec­ond:

The new entrants are widely expected to build third-generation net­works based on global sys­tem for mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tions (GSM) tech­nol­ogy, which is what Rogers and its Fido sub­sidiary use, or its newer fourth-generation off­shoot, long-term evo­lu­tion (LTE).

and Third:

Iain Grant, pres­i­dent of the Seaboard Group telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions con­sul­tancy, said a national car­rier could be up and run­ning by Easter at a cost of $500 mil­lion, although other esti­mates say a launch could take a year or two. The trick­i­est part of start­ing up will be nego­ti­at­ing rights for trans­mis­sion sites, many of which will either be on top of tall build­ings or on tow­ers owned by Rogers, Bell and Telus.

So here we are, look­ing at a Spring of 2009 roll-out for at least one com­peti­tor to Rogers/Fido Wire­less, and did Rogers posi­tion them­selves well for such a sit­u­a­tion? In my hum­ble opin­ion, absolutely not. Any­one in Canada has seen this com­ing (any­one who was not in Rogers man­age­ment, that is). In the past years, months and weeks, Rogers has made so many Cana­dian con­sumers so angry that they can count on no cus­tomer loy­alty what­so­ever. Their brand may very well be dam­aged beyond repair. Any new cell­phone ven­dor who sup­ports a GSM 3G net­work will be able to grab a large pool of cus­tomers ready to switch imme­di­ately, or when their con­tract with Rogers is up (and you can bet that they’ll put that date on their calendar!)

How did Rogers screw this up so badly? The recent his­tory of Rogers, par­tic­u­larly with respect to pric­ing and mar­ket­ing tells some of the story. If you live in Canada and have had any deal­ings with Rogers, you’ll know much of this, so feel free to skip to the end…

First, over the past 3 or 4 years, Rogers charged some of the high­est data and call rates in the world. Then, in 2007, con­sumers and tech watch­ers crit­i­cized them for being slow to bring the iPhone to Canada after it was avail­able in the U.S. for a year.  In April of 2008, Rogers chief exec­u­tive Ted Rogers told investors the iPhone would arrive in Canada some time later in the year. In June, Rogers set the iPhone’s debut for July 11 (along with sev­eral other coun­tries through­out the world), but were quickly met with harsh crit­i­cism about the data pric­ing plan, which was per­haps the sec­ond high­est in the world (with Swe­den being the high­est) . Some high-profile tech per­son­al­i­ties in Canada went on tele­vi­sion to announce that they were going to jump ship (in some cases pay­ing a siz­able penalty). Only after thou­sands of cur­rent and prospec­tive cus­tomers signed online peti­tions protest­ing these rates,  encour­ag­ing Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs to put pres­sure on the com­pany, did Rogers relent with a drop of the high­est rate to a rea­son­able level ($30 per month with a usage limit of up to 6 GB per month), but this rate is avail­able only until the end of August. On the day of the roll-out, Rogers’ reg­istry net­works crashed simul­ta­ne­ously with Apple’s iTunes reg­is­ter­ing sys­tem after the new iPhone was unveiled. The Out­age lasted into the after­noon at some loca­tions and it wasn’t until the next week before some cus­tomers could acti­vate their phones. Rogers rep­re­sen­ta­tives said they expected record first-day sales, but declined to dis­close how many phones were shipped to stores or how many they had expected to sell. As I write this, Rogers (through­out Van­cou­ver, at least) is still sold out of the iPhone.

All in all it was a highly vis­i­ble fiasco. Rogers utterly botched the iPhone roll-out in just about every way it could be botched. They could have finally made many cur­rent cus­tomers happy with a new device and would be seen today as the sole provider of one of the most sought-after tech gad­gets. Instead, they gen­er­ated sev­eral days of bad PR, dis­played poor plan­ning, and missed immea­sur­able mar­ket­ing and sales oppor­tu­ni­ties. There have been numer­ous spec­u­la­tions that the rea­son they ran out stock is that Apple was so peeved at the high data rates that they actu­ally diverted iPhone ship­ments from Canada to more rea­son­able Euro­pean car­ri­ers. Whether or not this was true, Rogers’ lack of can­dor regard­ing avail­abil­ity, lack of under­stand­ing of the prod­uct, and com­plete screw-up of logis­tics and net­work vol­ume on the day of the roll-out is some­thing that will not fade quickly from the mem­ory of most Cana­di­ans (and prob­a­bly not by this com­ing Easter).

It will be inter­est­ing to see if the mass exo­dus from Rogers to what­ever new car­rier Glob­alive will fund will be as swift and mas­sive as I expect it will be. Rogers has run their busi­ness ‘like there’s no tomor­row’, but in the Spring of 2009, ‘tomor­row’ will arrive.

Whistler in the Summer

We got back on Sun­day from a few days at Whistler, where we spent some days of vaca­tion with my brother and his fam­ily. While we all never felt very rushed, we man­aged to get quite a few activ­i­ties in while we were there, includ­ing a gon­dola and chair­lift trip up to the top of Whistler moun­tain, a Zip­Trek tour in the for­est above and around the Fitzsim­mons river, a hike to Lost Lake, a cou­ple of movies (“Get Smart” at the local cin­ema, “Jumper” on DVD) and sev­eral lunches and din­ners out. My niece Renata also got in a cou­ple of ses­sions on the bungee tram­po­line, which helped her to bounce a cou­ple of sto­ries (at least) into the air. While I can’t doc­u­ment all of it in pic­tures and video, here are some high points (sic):

Pam wasn’t quite pre­pared for how cold it would get, but for­tu­nately, there were some blan­kets avail­able at the chair­lift, about 2/3 of the way up.):

I also thought I’d include a few Zip­Trek videos. This gave me a chance to try out Flickr’s video fea­tures. I’m not includ­ing one that I can’t seem to flip hor­i­zon­tally (my Sister-In-Law held her cam­era side­ways and no mat­ter what I do, includ­ing chang­ing the file and sav­ing it to a new movie, the uploaded file seems to revert to that orientation).

Here’s Pam slid­ing on the wire across the Fitzsim­mons River:

Now, from the point of view of a par­tic­i­pant. Need I add that this is a blast?

In addi­tion to the rides up in the trees (about 5 times over the river and back), you get a bit of an ecol­ogy lec­ture about the area and some tips on what you can do to be more ‘green’. I really like Zip­Trek, who seem to prac­tice what they preach, in terms of an ecologically-aware busi­ness. Aside from the vans that they use to trans­port peo­ple to and from their sites (and I heard that once there are elec­tric ones or per­haps hybrids that will serve in this capac­ity, they’ll switch to those), they are pretty gen­tle on the envi­ron­ment. They even have a small water-driven gen­er­a­tor via the river that pro­vides most of the elec­tri­cal power for the A-Frame where they house their offices, train employ­ees, and end some of the tours. Our tour lead­ers were col­lege stu­dents major­ing in Eco-tourism and Geol­ogy, and they made sure that none of us were ever in dan­ger or uncom­fort­able, despite what looks like an ‘extreme’ sport.

In addi­tion to some good meals together (Monks up there is very nice and beau­ti­ful to look at; Pam’s Hal­ibut dusted with porcini mush­rooms and sun-dried toma­toes was superb), Pam and I also had an excel­lent cel­e­bra­tory din­ner of our third Anniver­sary of com­ing to Canada on July 5^th at Il Caminetto , one of the restau­rants of Umberto Menghi (his Il Gia­rdino and Umberto’s are both down­town). He’s one of the three celebrity chefs in the White Spot com­mer­cials, (the other two are Rob Fee­nie and John Bishop) always talk­ing about ‘the sauce’. We ate a light din­ner; Pam chose a sub­tly flavoured Roast Cor­nish Game Hen atop chick­peas and mixed veg­eta­bles, and I had a sim­ple but per­fectly done home­made Fet­tuc­cine with cream sauce, peas and pro­sciutto along with some excel­lent wine: A good BC Pinot Gris made by the Pen­t­age Win­ery from Skaha Bench in the Okana­gan, as well as an intense Ital­ian Mus­cat for dessert . I’ve become a big fan of dessert wines, and some­times pre­fer them over a cake or tart.

So for try­ing of celebrity chef restau­rants in the area, we are now 2 out of 3. I guess a visit to a Cac­tus Club would now count for Rob Fee­nie, since he has become the ‘food con­cept archi­tect’ of that chain. That’s what the arti­cles say, at any rate.

A nice time was had by all (I think), and we feel pretty lucky to have this beau­ti­ful resort area so near to us (for those who don’t live in Van­cou­ver, depend­ing on traf­fic and con­struc­tion on the Sea-to-Sky High­way, it’s about a 2 1/2 hour drive from the city). My brother summed up Whistler by and large bet­ter than I could: “It’s a bit like Dis­ney­land for adults.”

Summer, Finally

Not so Hazy and Not so Lazy

Maybe it’s because we have our first bona-fide day where you could go out with­out a jacket. Maybe it’s because the sun truly doesn’t set until nearly around 8:30. Maybe it’s because Granville Mar­ket is brim­ming over with sweet local straw­ber­ries, most of the spot prawns and aspara­gus are past, and the heir­loom toma­toes are start­ing to appear. All of the above is con­tribut­ing to a feel­ing that we have finally passed into the sum­mer season.

For me, being between contracts/jobs and with some time on my hands, it means that I can enjoy some of this, although I’m cer­tainly not spend­ing my days at the beach. Next week, being the Canada Day and Fourth of July hol­i­day week, both Pam and I are going to get a lit­tle sum­mer break, with a trip to Whistler with my brother and his fam­ily. We’ve been look­ing for­ward to that for a long time.

Plan­ning for the Autumn Demise of Clas­si­cal Radio in Vancouver

Sum­mer is also the time when a few things end. This morn­ing was the last time that Tom Allen would do his ‘cage match’, a whim­si­cal fea­ture of ‘Music and Com­pany’ where he would pit one piece of music against another and call for a vote. This week’s final cage match theme was: ‘With a bang or a whim­per’, since it will be the last one of these bits of fun…forever. Rep­re­sent­ing an end­ing with a bang was Chabrier’s ‘Ah Hur­rah’ from the Opera, Le Roi Mal­gre Lui. The oppo­nent (rep­re­sent­ing a ‘whim­per’ or soft end­ing) was the last move­ment from Haydn’s clever Sym­phony No. 45, ‘The Farewell Sym­phony’ (where one by one, the musi­cians leave the stage until there are only 2 first vio­lins left to end the piece, a clev­erly chore­o­graphed hint to Haydn’s patron, the Prince Niko­laus Ester­házy that his court musi­cians as well as his com­poser were all home­sick and wanted him to close up the sum­mer palace so every­one could return home to Eisenstadt).

It was a typ­i­cal cage match; one part joke, one part seri­ous, one part drama. Like just about every­thing Tom Allen does on the pro­gram, it makes one think a lit­tle, and sets up the day. I will sorely miss this along with some of his other reg­u­lar fea­tures. Prob­a­bly my favourite comes at about 6:30 AM: This Day in… which observes some event in his­tory that shares today’s date. Today’s was the first solo cir­cum­nav­i­ga­tion of the globe in a boat by Joshua Slocum, a Nova Scot­ian sea­man who fin­ished the trip that he had begun in Boston three years ear­lier in 1895 on today’s date. Like so many other ‘This Day In…‘s, I didn’t know about this event, and felt the joy I often do from gain­ing a bit of knowl­edge just as I’m start­ing the day.

With­out going off on another rant about the stu­pid­ity and wrong­ness of the CBC get­ting rid of the best clas­si­cal music morn­ing pro­gram in the world, I’ve finally accepted the inevitable and made plans. A cou­ple of weeks ago I picked up (on sale) a curi­ous new device at Lon­don Drugs: a BLIK Inter­net Clock Radio. It’s a standard-looking radio (unfor­tu­nately with infe­rior speak­ers to the Bose Wave Radio that we’ve been using for the last 10 years or so) that ‘tunes’ to a stream­ing radio sta­tion on the Inter­net rather than local FM (although you can do that, if the Inter­net is down). I’ve tested it, and while there is about a 20-second delay while the sta­tion ‘resolves’ to the URL you’ve cho­sen, it will indeed allow you to awaken to over 9,000 dif­fer­ent sta­tions all over the world (although in prac­tice the num­ber one would want to tune to is a small frac­tion of that num­ber). I was able to set the pre­sets to the BBC’s Radio 3 (which I knew well from my days as a Grad Stu­dent), the local CBC Radio 1, NPR in Boston, as well as the national NPR sta­tion. I’ll look for some other sta­tions, as there are 8 pre­set slots. As you can imag­ine, retriev­ing and sift­ing through 9,000 sta­tions in a tree-like menu using a ter­ri­ble LED screen is a bit of a chal­lenge (oh, if only Apple would make one of these– I guess they do, it’s called a Mac Mini with mouse, key­board, speak­ers and a small flat-screen mon­i­tor run­ning a browser with some pre­set stream­ing radio sta­tion book­marks, but even some­thing like that is too large for a night-table). Most of these sta­tions have us wak­ing up at 9:00 AM East­ern on North Amer­ica, or 68(!) hours ahead in the UK. I fear that at noon 2:00 in the after­noon in Lon­don we may not get a com­pletely morning-friendly clas­si­cal music feed, so I’ll have to search fur­ther until I find a new place to tune to. Both Pam and I hope that we don’t have to resort to NPR, which always put me in a bad mood in the morn­ing, par­tic­u­larly now that it has moved so much far­ther to the Right polit­i­cally than it used to be (hear­ing the appalling Cokie Roberts sneer at the Democ­rats every Mon­day morn­ing got my blood boil­ing early in the week — funny, but that was my word, but appar­ently it’s still what she is doing, defend­ing Dick Cheney on the TV Pro­gram ‘This Week’).

While they are get­ting rid of Clas­si­cal Music on Radio 2, I do remem­ber the some­what encour­ag­ing news that the CBC said that they were going to add a stream­ing clas­si­cal music chan­nel on the Inter­net. I doubt if it will have the incom­pa­ra­ble Tom Allen on it, but at least there will be a Cana­dian alter­na­tive for our move from FM Radio to almost exclu­sively Inter­net radio from Labour Day on.

The CBC Taketh Away, the CRTC Giveth...

While I’ve been howl­ing and gnash­ing my teeth about the immi­nent demise of Clas­si­cal Music on CBC Radio 2 (and don’t tell me it’s not going away; 10AM-3PM week­days of Beethoven’s Fifth and Vivaldi’s ‘The Sea­sons’ is a deathbed), for once, there’s some­thing good to say about CBC Radio, although the CBC actu­ally has rel­a­tively lit­tle to actu­ally take credit for: Appar­ently, CBC Radio 1 has secured a license for an FM sta­tion in Van­cou­ver from the CRTC (the Cana­dian Radio-télévision and Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion). At some point in the near future, CBC Radio 1 will be avail­able at 88.1 FM in our area. Van­cou­ver is a bit out of date in this regard, as much of the coun­try already receives Radio One on both the AM and FM dial (the his­tory of CBC Radio One is detailed on Wikipedia).

Why is this worth not­ing? Well, in our condo and car, we don’t get any AM sig­nal at all. We’re on a lower floor, fac­ing north, and there isn’t a sin­gle AM sta­tion that we can pull in, it’s all FM. As for the car, I sus­pect there’s just not a very good AM antenna in it.

So, while we lose music, we do gain CBC Radio 1, which is news, cur­rent events, and some very inter­est­ing and fun shows, like Quirks and Quarks, a sci­ence pro­gram, and Def­i­nitely Not the Opera, a pro­gram about pop cul­ture. There’s no Clas­si­cal Music (but then again, as of Sep­tem­ber, there won’t be any Clas­si­cal Music on radio except for that sliver at lunchtime on week­days), and a large help­ing of pop­u­lar music, Blues, and Coun­try (which I won’t be tun­ing in for, thanks) but at least I will get some­thing else to lis­ten to on the air­waves in terms of the spo­ken word with­out hav­ing to resort to NPR back in the US via Internet.

Still, if I had my choice, I’d gladly sac­ri­fice Radio One recep­tion if I could keep get­ting the music I love on the radio, but as I’ve sadly come to accept, that won’t be the case for very much longer. For­tu­nately, Inter­net Radio is on the hori­zon, and I’ve already been mak­ing plans for ways to pipe BBC Radio 3 as well as clas­si­cal sta­tions else­where in the world (includ­ing back in Boston, NYC, Seat­tle, LA and Bal­ti­more) through the house when CBC 2 dies (for me, anyway).