A Life In Motion

One of the rea­sons that I haven’t been post­ing as often this month as last month, is that it seems that I’m always in town, busy attending/watching/participating in some­thing. You’d think that being on the job hunt and not tied down with a 9-to-5 com­mit­ment would mean that I have tons of free time to spend on blog­ging, clean­ing up my office, and doing all of those other ‘things I’d do if I had time’. No such luck.  It seems my calendar’s clut­ter increases to fill the allot­ted time. I do want to at least men­tion, and pro­vide a snap­shot or per­haps a snip­pet of video (because I can) of some of what’s been going on for the past 2 1/2 weeks or so:

Sep­tem­ber 13^th: To cel­e­brate my (and my brother’s) birth­day, we took a week­end trip down to visit him and the rest of the fam­ily down in Belle­vue, Wash­ing­ton. This included a trip to the Sculp­ture Park:

and a cel­e­bra­tory Din­ner out at Wild Gin­ger, a favourite Seat­tle restau­rant of theirs:

Sep­tem­ber 16^th: I had lunch with a friend and attended the Mol­son Brew 2.0 event, which I had writ­ten about a lit­tle earlier.

Sep­tem­ber 17^th: Met with sev­eral peo­ple dur­ing the day and attended Launch Party 5 at UnWined.

Sep­tem­ber 20^th: Attended Bar­Camp­BankBC, a real eye-opener about the con­cerns of the peo­ple in the Bank­ing and Credit Union busi­ness (Ques­tions included: “If increas­ingly, every­body does most of their bank­ing online or at ATMs, what’s the new design/experience of a Bank branch sup­posed to be?” ):

Sep­tem­ber 21: Made it to the first Annual Canary Derby in Gas­town, a fundrais­ing race of soapbox-style rac­ers, mainly to cheer on the team of Web­names, who regard­less if they won or not (they didn’t), still had the classi­est look­ing race car of the day. Here’s one of the ear­lier tri­als that they won:

Since that was mov­ing pretty fast, here’s what the car looked like stand­ing still:

(Note: The child at the wheel in this shot is not the dri­ver in the race)
Sep­tem­ber 23: Thanks to the gen­eros­ity of a dear friend, Pam and I were able to get to one of the Pre-Season games of the Can­nucks. They were play­ing Edmunton, and despite that team’s (appar­ently well-known) speed, the Can­nucks won! Here’s a snip­pet:

Sep­tem­ber 26: The Party for Bar­Cam­p­Van­cou­ver 2008, the yearly uncon­fer­ence, took place at Work­space. This year I helped out in the plan­ning as well as the food prep (and even played bar­tender a bit).

Sep­tem­ber 27:We lucked out, and the weather was gor­geous, which helped since Bar­Camp was held on Granville Island, at 3 sep­a­rate loca­tions includ­ing the Revue Stage, Emily Carr Uni­ver­sity, and the Playwright’s The­atre. I had pre­pared a talk on Ubiq­uity, the fas­ci­nat­ing Fire­fox plu­gin that extends some of the ideas about inter­act­ing with infor­ma­tion on the Inter­net. Unfor­tu­nately, I was bumped because the con­tract for the room had us there until 5PM, not 5:30 as we had been led to believe. Moral of the story: Never resched­ule your ses­sion to what you think is a bet­ter time (orig­i­nally I was early in the morn­ing and oppo­site sev­eral other ses­sions that I wanted to attend myself!) I am work­ing on refor­mat­ting the pre­sen­ta­tion and slides so that I can put them online on my other blog and will try and let folks know when it’s done. Here’s me pitch­ing my ill-fated presentation:

Sep­tem­ber 28: Word on the Street, the Annual fes­ti­val of books, writ­ers and other things lit­er­ary took place down­town, around the library. Pam and I man­aged to make a talk by the enter­tain­ing and inspir­ing Colin Moor­house, a free­lance speech­writer that Pam had man­aged to hear at a BC Edi­tors Meet­ing last year.

That brings me to today. I nearly feel out of breath just recount­ing this. And it doesn’t include a cou­ple of job inter­views, meet­ings with friends and col­leagues, and the usual day-to-day stuff. It has been a busy month, to say the least.

I think that what’s been going on is a grad­ual accrual of yearly events. We noticed a cou­ple of years ago that there seems to be a tacit agree­ment that in Van­cou­ver, any­thing worth doing is worth doing annu­ally. Our year is get­ting busier, which is prob­a­bly OK, but soon we’ll have to pick and choose what we can or can­not make and say instead that we’ll catch what­ever we miss ‘next year’.

Brew 2.0: Molson Throws a Sudsy Event for Bloggers in Vancouver

The event: A 50^th Anniver­sary Cel­e­bra­tion of when the Mol­son Com­pany pur­chased the ‘6^th’ Brew­ery in Van­cou­ver (that would be in 1958). The crowd: Van­cou­ver Blog­gers. The pro­ceed­ings: Well, we got to taste a lot of great food, took a tour of the brew­ery, met some of the top peo­ple within the com­pany, and even downed glasses of some spe­cial 50^th Anniver­sary Beer cre­ated just for the occasion.

I under­stand that most of the atten­dees also got a deliv­ery of a case of beer from Mol­son (Mine never came; I sus­pect there was a bit of a snafu since I entered by a dif­fer­ent door than most — even though I was fol­low­ing the instruc­tions of the invi­ta­tion to the letter).

Update: The case of beer, with a hand­writ­ten thank-you note for attend­ing the event, came about a week or so later. Mol­son def­i­nitely sweats the details. Colour me impressed.

Post­ings include:

Miss604, who cov­ered the event with some nice pho­tos by her hus­band and also fel­low blog­ger, John. Arieanna of Blo­ga­holics also got some great pics from her hus­band, Ianiv. Tanya (aka, NetChick), Ryan, new blog­ger Danny Dang , Tris Hussey, Colleen Coplick, Duane Storey and Hummingbird604 all did a fine job describ­ing most of what went on, and took tons of photos.

So what do I have to add? Ah, I do have a video of some of the begin­ning of the event, thanks to the Flip Video Cam­era:

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.

Syd Mead and Third Tuesday

A Bet­ter Blade Run­ner and the Designer Behind its World

Before I got started on redesign­ing this blog, I did get to spend an evening hear­ing sto­ries from a real designer. Last Wednes­day evening’s talk by Syd Mead was a mind-blower.

Before his talk, how­ever, the SIG-CHI Chap­ter of Van­cou­ver, who were host­ing the evening’s event, made some announce­ments, and then… well, the best descrip­tion of it might be a ‘happening’.

Here’s a video that some­one took of it:

(For those who can’t see the video, essen­tially, the lights went off and 2 light­weight balls of stretched fab­ric enclos­ing multi-coloured lights were tossed over the audi­ence. They were about 7 or 8 feet in diam­e­ter, and changed hue every few sec­onds or so. The crowd hap­pily bounced the balls around the hall, remind­ing me of those beach balls that get bounced around over the crowds at polit­i­cal con­ven­tions. Accom­pa­ny­ing the bounc­ing balls, which were called ‘Zygotes’, cour­tesy of Tan­gi­ble Inter­ac­tion Design was a sort of processed audio, from sen­sors respond­ing to impacts as the balls bounced off the crowd or the walls and ceiling.

The main event fol­lowed: Syd Mead. Mead is the designer of a half a dozen films, includ­ing the sci­ence fic­tion clas­sics Tron and Blade Run­ner. He spoke about his work, using a Quick­time movie to show sev­eral decades of illus­tra­tions of futur­is­tic cars, build­ings, cities and other arti­facts of the future that were inside his head and now, per­haps, inside our own as well. There is a DVD of his work as a ‘Visual Futur­ist’, con­tain­ing much of the mate­r­ial from his lec­ture, as well as inter­views with oth­ers about him and his work. Here’s the trailer, from his web site (check out the high def­i­n­i­tion ver­sion there, it’s well worth see­ing at a larger size):

He’s not only a bril­liant designer, but he was a good speaker as well, com­ment­ing on his work and influ­ences. He showed prob­a­bly 50–75 exam­ples of his work over the past 50 years or so in var­i­ous games, car­toons, movies, cars, and indus­trial design projects. I was sur­prised to hear that the two artists who influ­enced him the most were the Baroque painter Car­avag­gio and 19^th/early 20^th cen­tury illus­tra­tor, Max­field Par­rish. As one per­son inter­viewed in the trailer put it, Syd Mead is essen­tially an ‘18^th Cen­tury Man moved to the 20^th and 21^st Cen­tury’. Many oth­ers spoke of the ‘real­ity’ of his vision, that it had gone through much of the evo­lu­tion and test­ing related to a prod­uct, build­ing, or tech­nol­ogy, but entirely in his own mind.

After the talk we saw a screen­ing of the Final Cut (or so it’s now known) of ‘Blade Run­ner’, a film that . That screen­ing, in and of itself was fas­ci­nat­ing as well. The ver­sion has none of the film noir, Ray­mond Chandler-style voice over by Har­ri­son Ford, and there are quite a few scenes either length­ened, added or in one par­tic­u­larly crit­i­cal case, omit­ted (I won’t spoil it if you don’t already know). As I was watch­ing it, I kept mar­veling at the con­sis­tency and rich­ness of the visual envi­ron­ment. The only give­aways that Mead’s vision (like Kubrick’s) of the future wasn’t 100% cor­rect was the appear­ance of the Pan Am logo on a few elec­tronic bill­boards. Boy, nobody saw that air­line as going away, and its logo still looks fine in all of the visu­al­iza­tions of our future.

Third Tues­day

Last night was the monthly meet­ing of Third Tues­day, a com­bi­na­tion pre­sen­ta­tion and mixer, focus­ing on (but not entirely lim­ited to) mar­ket­ing, web 2.0 and the new ‘social media’ that takes place, when­ever pos­si­ble, on the third Tues­day of the month. Last month, Writer and Social Media Evangelist/Consultant, Mon­ica Ham­burg intro­duced many who attended (myself included) to the con­cept of crowd­sourc­ing. This month, Local Van­cou­ver Tech­nol­o­gist, Writer, Racon­teur and Mis­cel­lanist (that’s how his web site puts it) Dar­ren Bare­foot gave an excel­lent ‘case study’ that explained how his mar­ket­ing com­pany, Capulet Com­mu­ni­ca­tions got the atten­tion of the web’s movers and shak­ers through an online demo of his client’s prod­uct. Most sur­pris­ing detail of the cam­paign? To invite key peo­ple to the online demo (actu­ally, a faux company’s Intranet Wiki), they sent invi­ta­tions to about 35 of them via snail mail. That’s right, email has pro­duced so much noise and clut­ter (read: SPAM) that the best way to get to some peo­ple is the old fash­ioned way. It reminded me of an Isaac Asi­mov short story where a bunch of mil­i­tary sci­en­tists real­ize that the best way to com­pute some mis­sile tra­jec­to­ries is through some lost ancient tech­niques, known as ‘mul­ti­pli­ca­tion’ and ‘long divi­sion’ per­formed by a sol­dier with (*gasp!*) a pen­cil and paper… There was no men­tion of telegrams or sig­nal­ing fires, so I’m going to assume that those ‘Employee kits’ sent via Courier were as far back in tech­nol­ogy as he was will­ing to go.

I met up many friends and acquain­tances, and am glad to see that the sum­mer sea­son (and mostly sunny skies) has not meant that every­one is head­ing for the beach, only to recon­nect up in the fall. At least, not yet.