My Friend the Photoshop Goddess

While I worked at IBM, I met some pretty impres­sive peo­ple. A fel­low con­trac­tor, Maria Masiar, recently achieved what I’d call deity sta­tus, hav­ing been to Adobe’s Pho­to­shop Con­fer­ence, also known as the Art Direc­tors Invi­ta­tional Mas­ter Class in San Fran­cisco for two years, and both of those times, won prizes for her work dur­ing the con­fer­ence (First Prize the first year). Maria, who moved here recently from Toronto, has now just had one of here projects here appear on Pho­to­shop Magazine’s cover as a runner-up in the Fourth Annual Pho­to­shop User Awards. Because I know the artist, I not only got a copy, but also the orig­i­nal photo that she used to pro­duce the final one. It’s help­ful to see it, because it shows Maria as the model, and then her as a flesh-eating zom­bie, and a damned fright­en­ing one at that! Click on each photo to see larger, more detailed versions:

So not only is Maria a Pho­to­shop God­dess (or Guru), she’s also got to be her own model.

Hav­ing Pho­to­shop ‘chops’ like Maria’s means that you can pretty much do any­thing and make it look believ­able. The next time I need some syn­thetic real­ity (I’m think­ing, per­haps, of a photo for my wall of me sit­ting like For­est Gump at the White House with Pres­i­dent Obama), I know who I’ll call.

A View with a Room

Last week’s Best of 604 Awards, a cel­e­bra­tion and awards cer­e­mony that brought out many of the local blog­ging com­mu­nity, con­firmed my the­ory that Van­cou­ver is becom­ing a key cen­ter of what’s being now gen­er­ally called ‘Social Media’*. I’m going to write a much longer and more com­plete post­ing on why I think this is the case, why the con­di­tions here are so favor­able for this move­ment and activ­i­ties and how well they mesh with our lives, but one clear rea­son for the social media com­mu­nity being so close-knit and active in Van­cou­ver is some very strong and charis­matic lead­ers like Miss 604, who planned and hosted the event. Many thanks to her and those who helped and spon­sored the affair. Pam and I really enjoyed our­selves, and I was thrilled to see so many peo­ple who I knew (and read) be rec­og­nized for their efforts by their peers and read­ers. Like many suc­cess­ful fêtes in this town (like the Fringe Fes­ti­val, Film Fes­ti­val, Bar­Camp, the Fire­works Com­pe­ti­tion, etc.), it will surely become an annual event.

Another Busi­ness Using Social Media

It hasn’t taken very long for com­pa­nies (both large and small) to pick up on the mar­ket­ing poten­tial of social media, and many of my friends and fel­low blog­gers now make their liv­ing help­ing to bring their clients up to speed on the rapidly chang­ing and grow­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for mak­ing use of blog­ging and other online ‘con­duits’. Some of them clearly ‘get it’. In fact, one of the cat­e­gories of the Best of 604 awards was the cat­e­gory of ‘Best Com­pany Blog’, and this past fall’s Mol­son Brew 2.0 event showed that even large cor­po­ra­tions can indeed be very savvy regard­ing this new medium. Case in point:

High Tech Com­pa­nies, Mar­ket­ing Shops, and Large Brew­eries aren’t the only com­pa­nies blog­ging.  Van­cou­ver has some great hotels, and one of them, the Opus Hotel, has a blog.  How did I know about that? The Opus Hotel is also on Twit­ter, the microblog­ging plat­form. What’s more, they posted a ‘tweet’ of their blog post about one of their guest’s reac­tions to stay­ing in their rooms. The ‘review’ (whether it is the real thing or not) is not only laugh-out-loud hys­ter­i­cal, but I also think it’s a bril­liant piece of mar­ket­ing and won­der­ful use of a blog to talk about their busi­ness with cus­tomers.  While I’ve not stayed at the Opus Hotel and haven’t even been to their well-known bar or equally well-known restau­rant Elixir, I have to say that this piqued my curiousity.

*For those who aren’t famil­iar with the term, Social Media include blogs, micro-blogs like Twit­ter, social net­work­ing sites like Face­book, LinkedIn and MySpace, and even web sites made up of con­tri­bu­tions by their mem­bers like YouTube and Flickr. The Wikipedia arti­cle sums up Social Media well, and I par­tic­u­larly liked this sen­tence: “Social media depend on inter­ac­tions between peo­ple as the dis­cus­sion and inte­gra­tion of words to build shared-meaning, using tech­nol­ogy as a conduit.”

A Boyhood Friend, Now a TV Star (and in a commercial)

Like many peo­ple, I’ll bet you, dear reader, grew up with a few peo­ple who ended up being in the pub­lic eye, either as a celebrity or just some­one who got their ’15 min­utes of fame’. As for me, one of my clos­est friends when I was about 16 was Lance Red­dick, who shared my love of music — he was a fel­low com­po­si­tion stu­dent, and just as a pal through many of the tri­als and tribu­la­tions of being a teenager. Lance and I also ended up as fel­low stu­dents years later at the East­man School of Music in Rochester, New York, a place that both of us left before grad­u­at­ing back in the 80s. After that he went into act­ing, and I went into com­put­ers. His act­ing paid off big time; He starred as a reg­u­lar char­ac­ter, Lt. Cedric Daniels, in one of the most crit­i­cally acclaimed shows of all time, The Wire, which Pam and I watched reg­u­larly before we moved here (it was on HBO, and we didn’t get that after the move). Lance’s height, strik­ing looks, and nat­ural but intense act­ing style all made for a great fol­low­ing, and besides his roles in some movies (The Siege, Don’t Say a Word, I Dreamed of Africa) as well as either small parts or or reg­u­lar roles on other TV shows (West Wing, Law and Order: SVU, CSI: Miami, Oz, Fringe and Lost), he’s now attained the sta­tus of an iden­ti­fi­able star. No red car­pet appear­ances at the Emmies or Oscars that I’ve seen yet, but I’ll bet there are some.

So last week, on CNN, his face shows up in a Cadil­lac com­mer­cial:

I asked him (via Face­book) if they gave him one, and nope, they didn’t. I hope he gets a chance to shoot a movie or TV show up here, as it would be great to see him again (we got caught up at a friend’s wed­ding about 4 or 5 years ago). I’d say it’s only a mat­ter of time.

Generosity

When Pam and I first moved here, I remem­ber writ­ing about how nice every­one was to us, from the real­tor who helped with the pur­chase, to the banker who set up new accounts for us and got us credit cards, to our new neigh­bors and even the law offices who helped with our immi­gra­tion issues. The postal car­rier for our build­ing was help­ful and friendly, as was our build­ing man­ager and var­i­ous trades­peo­ple who came dur­ing our ini­tial months of setup. I took some of this to be, per­haps, partly the West vs. the East coast, partly the Canada vs. US, and partly just being lucky.

These days, a lit­tle over three years later, I’m now con­vinced it wasn’t luck, because the kind­ness and gen­eros­ity that we ini­tially met with have con­tin­ued. This past month, a friend of mine sur­prised me with lunch and Canucks tick­ets out of the blue (I won’t embar­rass him with nam­ing him, but he knows who he is). For Pam’s birth­day a few weeks ago, our neigh­bor Estelle brought in sev­eral vases of flow­ers, because she was leav­ing town and though Pam would enjoy them. She also gave Pam tick­ets to see the Speed Skat­ing tri­als at the Pacific Col­i­seum today. Yes­ter­day, my friend DaveO, who was work­ing at the happyfrog.ca booth at the Health Show, gave us free tick­ets. Last week I vis­ited with two of the first friends I met just as I moved here, Matt and Mak­taaq (in fact, I’m happy to have known them even knew them before they were mar­ried!), and at their Hal­loween party, Ryan offered to lend me one of his bicycles.

The fre­quent gen­eros­ity of my friends has been seen online in this blog, with offers from Mon­ica and oth­ers to twit­ter that I was look­ing for work (as well as oth­ers who have put the word out on their blogs), mes­sages of good will on birth­days and anniver­saries, and even flat­ter­ing blog posts about me (com­pletely unex­pected as well, I might add. Thanks Raul.). Com­ments from fel­low Bush Refugees Bob and David fre­quently make my day. They also gave us a bot­tle of their own wine.

I’ve seen the fire­works from a fab­u­lous van­tage point in Yale­town with MJ and laughed myself silly at a com­edy night hosted by Tanya. I’ve got­ten patient iPhone con­sult­ing from John and the oppor­tu­nity to write an op-ed piece for the LA Times, thanks to Travis.

I’m only scratch­ing the sur­face. With both Pam and I look­ing for work and liv­ing off of our sav­ings, and all the scary eco­nomic news (on CNN, mainly) I still sub­mit that like George Bai­ley in It’s a Won­der­ful Life, I am truly a rich man, because of friends, and they keep remind­ing me of this fact.

Political Youth

It’s no secret that the youth of Amer­ica have embraced Obama as their can­di­date, and I’m thrilled, but also a lit­tle sur­prised, that for the first time in my life, there is the dis­tinct prospect of the US Pres­i­dent actu­ally being younger than I am (although by less than a year — 10 months and 22 days, to be exact).  Barack Obama is at this moment, fly­ing to see his ail­ing Grand­mother in Hawaii. Mine is long gone. His age is on my mind, because I can relate to him as a mem­ber of my age group, Gen­er­a­tion Jones.  Not a boomer, much as they would like to lump us in with them (and I always think of Clin­ton and yes, Dubya as quin­tes­sen­tial boomers, rep­re­sent­ing much that was both good and bad about that gen­er­a­tion), and not a Gen-Xer, Gen­er­a­tion Jones doesn’t get as much press, but it I’m begin­ning to pon­der what it will be like with one of us actu­ally in charge. To quote Wikipedia’s definition:

Gen­er­a­tion Jones is a term that describes peo­ple in cer­tain English-speaking coun­tries born between the years 1954 and 1965. Amer­i­can social com­men­ta­tor Jonathan Pon­tell iden­ti­fied this gen­er­a­tion and coined the term to name it. Gen­er­a­tion Jones has been referred to as a hereto­fore lost gen­er­a­tion between the Baby boomers and Gen­er­a­tion X, since prior to the pop­u­lar­iza­tion of Pontell’s the­ory, its mem­bers were included with either the Boomers or Xers. The name con­notes a large, anony­mous gen­er­a­tion, and derives from the slang term “jonesing”, refer­ring to the unre­quited crav­ings felt by this gen­er­a­tion of unful­filled expectations.

From Then to Now

Another age-related topic was on my mind: When I vol­un­teered to work on the Dean cam­paign in Mass­a­chu­setts, we used to have many peo­ple who were younger than us over to work on the Mass-for-Dean web site. Chris, Emily and James’s lap­tops would be out at the kitchen table suck­ing down bits on the still fairly new wi fi net­work. We worked on the web site, on hand­outs, signs, coor­di­na­tion of resources and meet­ings, and a bunch of other activ­i­ties.  I still keep in touch with a few mem­bers of the group that Pam affec­tion­ately referred to as ‘The kids’. So it’s with a lit­tle pride that I view the Dean ’50-state strat­egy’, the stun­ningly effec­tive use of the Inter­net as a fund-raising tool, and the sign­ing up of all of those new vot­ers as per­haps hav­ing ‘fetal’ begin­nings in our town­house in Cam­bridge. Nev­er­the­less, I don’t think any of us had any idea of how sophis­ti­cated the online com­po­nent of the cam­paign would become.

There is also so much vital­ity and cre­ativ­ity of those who are now involved in the Obama cam­paign, which I can plainly see, even from a dis­tance. Even though I’m not a fan of the music, this online ‘grass-roots’ web ad struck me as so pol­ished, so ‘pro­fes­sional’, and so emo­tion­ally appeal­ing that I felt that I had to embed it here. Some of the newest gen­er­a­tion of vot­ers in the US (and who are, of course, even younger than the kids who crowded around the kitchen table 22 Lilac Court) have made a very impres­sive get-out-the-youth-vote video: