A Memorable Journey

I’ll do a wrap-up post on my time at WWDC, but I felt that I had to write about this first. On the way back to Vancouver from San Francisco, I had scheduled a shuttle, but at the last minute, canceled and decided to use BART again. It was one of those decisions that I’ll no doubt look back on and think, it’s a good thing, because otherwise I wouldn’t have had the experience that I had. Friday the 13th has always been lucky for me, and this June 13th was no exception.

After boarding the train at Civic Center, after 2 or 3 stops, 2 men in suits got on the train. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Navy blue suit, blue eyes and gray hair, a US Flag lapel… it was Howard Dean. Yes that Howard Dean, the former Governor of Vermont, front-runner candidate for President in 2004 (whose campaign I worked on) and currently, the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. ‘I’m never going to have another chance like this,’ I said to myself. In a moment or two, I got up the nerve and introduced myself to him, telling him that I had worked on his campaign (He immediately said ‘Thank you’ for that) and that I was a great admirer of his. He was on his way to some meetings at hotels at the airport, and to avoid the traffic, had decided to take BART. I told him where we had moved (and why). He had many questions about Vancouver; he hadn’t visited the city for 40 years. He did mention, that he loved Canada, and often went to a family house in Nova Scotia, near Bras d’Or Lake (since Vermont is so close to the Canadian border). Pam and I had gone to that area for our honeymoon. He talked about how cosmopolitan a reputation that Vancouver has, and that he could absolutely understand our move here. He asked if we were going to get Canadian citizenship, and that obviously, being a techie, I would have had no problem getting landed immigrant status. We chatted about a number of subjects: the Primary, What President Barack Obama will do to help put the country back on the right track (and whether we’d return after that), even a bit about our land in Vermont (”You should hang on to that”, Dean said. “When we get out of this Real Estate slump, that’s going to be worth some serious money.”). We reminisced a bit about when I had last seen him on the campaign, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when he spoke by the river, with boats with his banners floating back and forth behind him. When I commented on the flag pin on his lapel, he said that it was “to show the Republicans that they don’t own the flag”. He laughed when I suggested that perhaps the Democrats could have a slightly different (and maybe a more elegant) design for it.

To prove that this is not what it sounds like, a ‘tall tale’, I got his assistant to take a picture of the two of us, seated on the BART seat:

We parted as he went off to his meeting, and I headed to my check-in for the flight home, feeling as if I were in the air already. At the gate, I immediately called family all over North America to tell them of my good fortune and began this post.

My lasting impression of Dean is pretty much how I imagined him one-on-one. He seemed interested and charming, intelligent, a good listener and a smart businessman. He was very gracious, and seemed genuinely interested and engaged. In short, I was not disappointed.

I suspect that the average person has a shot at meeting and talking to, perhaps 1 or 2 famous people in their lifetime. You hope that those celebrities are people that you’d also like to meet and perhaps even someone who you admire. I’ve actually had more than my share of meetings with famous people in my life so far. I’ve met and even had some conversations with several composers, including Olivier Messiaen, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thompson, Ned Rorem, Elliott Carter, Steve Reich and Leonard Bernstein, playwright Edward Albee, the writers Isaac Asimov and William Gibson, and some brief moments where I shared a transit ride with Michael Dukakis and William Weld (It’s odd how I always meet the politicians when riding on mass transit) I’ve even met some luminaries in software and business, including John Sculley (the first CEO of Apple Computer while Steve Jobs was in exile) and Bill Atkinson, one of the more interesting figures in the history of computers (he invented 2 early pieces of software for the Mac, which became the first of 2 categories of software, MacPaint, which begot bitmap editors and HyperCard, which it may be argued, was a precursor to the World-wide Web and has been said to be the inspiration behind the concept of the Wiki). As Nearly-Canadians (and as I’ve noted in previous posts in this blog), Pam and I even shared a picnic table with actress Nancy Robertson (who plays Wanda on “Corner Gas”) and briefly met Roch Carrier, the author of The Hockey Sweater, a classic story, animated film and keystone of Canadian identity.

Nevertheless, it was great to finally be able to tell Howard Dean how much I had looked up to him. On June 13, 2008, without any warning, I got a chance to talk to one of my personal heroes, and I’m thrilled.

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).

Our Neighborhood Walk Score

A couple of months ago, I came across a web site that works with Google Maps to evaluate how pedestrian-friendly our address is. The more amenities (shops, restaurants, grocers, parks, libraries, fitness centers. etc.) that you can reach within a reasonable radius, the higher your ‘walk score’. Up until recently, there was a glitch in the system that kept it from doing an accurate plot of where addresses were in Canada, but after I alerted them, they’ve fixed the problem (it involved some incorrect conversion of kilometers to miles, an issue that has been known to crash Mars probes, among other things). Now, it’s spot on, and I was pleased to see that our address has a walk score of 88 out of a possible 100.

When I checked our old address, Lilac Court in Cambridge, MA, at Walk Score, we actually had a slightly higher score of 95 (again, out of 100), but that decrease by 7 points hardly feels very significant. When I lived at 2 Chester Street, also in Cambridge, the score was 91, and in undergraduate school, when I lived at 616 Straight Street in Cincinnati, my score was 72. I think my all-time low score (a 0, of course) must have been when I lived on Forest Lawn Road, just outside of Rochester, New York. The closest place to there, on foot, was a bar, well over a mile away along a road with no sidewalk.

As Walk Score points out, “Buying a house in a walkable neighborhood is good for your health and good for the environment.” It’s probably worth adding that these days, with the price of gas being what it is, that it’s clearly good for your wallet as well.

When we first moved here and didn’t have a car, I lost a lot of weight, mainly from the amount of walking we did. We walked everywhere, both for shopping and to get to know the area. Despite not getting to see as much of Vancouver as we might have, I certainly was healthier. After nearly a year of commuting (mostly by car) to IBM, I really put on the pounds, and it’s tough to get them back off again.

Try out their site, and see how your neighborhood fares. In most cases, you’ll probably be able to predict the score, but once or twice I was surprised by either how much lower or higher the score was from what I’d thought it would be.

The other thing you can be sure of in Life, besides Death…

That does it. From now on, I stop trying to do this myself and get an accountant.

When we lived in Boston, we had a complicated tax situation. I was frequently working as a consultant, and worked with an accountant who knew us like family, but eventually left the business (Genevieve, wherever you are and whatever you are doing, I hope you’re happy) to make sure that I could make the right deductions, amortize the depreciation of equipment purchases, and figure out when it was best to pay estimated tax vs. go nearly broke in late April.

I though that after we moved to Canada it would get simpler, and up until this past year, it was. I had mostly income from one employer, and we didn’t do much in the way of retirement investing (hey, when you don’t have much income from a previous year, you can’t sock much away in an RRSP - what used to be a 401K for us). There was no notion of a joint return here and the forms even looked a little simpler, I think.

In 2007, that all changed, and I should have realized this fact a while back, but procrastination of tax prep is something I’ve done all my life. When you’re a self-employed person and keeping your money in your account as long as possible is your goal, filing taxes early never makes much sense, unless you prefer the pleasure of not scrambling on April 14th (the tax deadline day for the US) . So, after 7 or so hours of agony, I’ve decided that it is just too damned hard to do my own return any more. I used some software, TaxTron - which was pretty hard to use, but which did the calculations, but the questions were still cryptic (CNIC? QPP/CPP pensionable earnings? Cotisations de l’employé au RPC? Huh?). I’m probably going to file an amended return for this past year’s mess after May 1, and for sure next year it will be under the careful guidance of a CGA (That’s what a CPA became after the move). I’ve learned my lesson. Now, if I could only get my Sunday refunded back to me, since I worked yesterday, albeit for the last time for a while. So much for a Spring weekend.

Taking a Break

It’s been a while, since I wrote here, and that’s partly because I was often too tired in the evening after work to write anything. I’m recovering from a nasty illness that was fairly painful and at the worst point a little tiring, but now I’m nearly back to normal.

This past Saturday, Pam and I took a little picnic to the beach. We packed the car with food, folding chairs and a picnic blanket/tarp. While it was a little chilly, Locarno beach, the mountains and the city all made for a beautiful view:

Later, we went to a housewarming for my friend Tanya, who has gotten a great place on the opposite shore of False Creek from us (we joked that we could probably wave at each other across the water). While it took a little while for us to locate her new place, it did give us the chance to see a little more of the city as dusk began to fall.

It was a break from the stress of work, but that stress is probably going to let up fairly soon. It looks very likely that my contract at IBM will be ending next month, and I’ll be free to relax a little before I am working full-time once again. May is a great month to have some time to enjoy Vancouver, when it is the ‘city of the senses’ rather than the intellect, as I often have written here. A few more days like this past Saturday will definitely be something to look forward to.