End of the Season and Kat Kam MIA?

Like many Van­cou­verites, last night I watched one of the most painful and edge-of-your seat hockey games in years. Backs against the wall, the Van­cou­ver Canucks, the last Cana­dian team left in the NHL Stan­ley Cup play­offs, man­aged to once again snatch defeat from the jaws of vic­tory (some­thing I tweeted a cou­ple of days ago re. the game that brought them to the brink). To quote Char­lie Smith of the Geor­gia Straight:

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.

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’.

A Long Walk, and iJerks(?)

With Pam home, and with me not work­ing this week­end (which won’t be the case next week­end), we man­aged to do some shop­ping and other errands on Sat­ur­day. Today, bet­ter late than never, we decided to start train­ing for the Sun Run next month (or, for us, I think more of a ‘Sun Walk’). Yes, we are plan­ning on doing a com­bi­na­tion of walk­ing and run­ning in that event. I have no expec­ta­tions about beat­ing any time; just want to fin­ish it in one piece.

At any rate, I sug­gested that we walk around the sea­wall of Stan­ley Park. We’d start around the Yacht Club near the Lost Lagoon, and walk around the park, end­ing up around Eng­lish Bay. After all, with the sea­wall now open again, and a sunny day expected, it would be a great way to sight­see and get some much-needed exer­cise. We started walk­ing around noon, and were doing pretty well until around the 2 1/2 hour mark, when we both real­ized the extent to which we both were out of shape. I’m not sure how far we actu­ally went in mileage (or kilo­me­ter­age — is there such a word? Hon­estly, since we’ve gone met­ric I still don’t know how to say some things…), but we were plenty tired, aching, and hun­gry by the time we got to Den­man Street for a late lunch. I hope I don’t regret this with too much of aching legs tomor­row, but obvi­ously we need a lot of work to get in shape by the time the Sun Run takes place.

Wait Wait, Don’t Trash Me
While we were doing the afore­men­tioned walk around the park, I lis­tened to pod­casts on my iPhone. Yes, that’s right, I got the iPhone fully func­tional, and like so many other Cana­di­ans, I’m using it unlocked, and await­ing the day when I can offi­cially ‘go legal’, and not have to waive off the attempts by iTunes to upgrade the phone (which would turn it into an iPa­per­weight as quickly as you can say ‘Rogers Wireless’. )

So here I am, feel­ing pretty good about my cool new touch-screen iPod/Phone/Wireless browser and lis­ten­ing to NPR’s Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me, the news quiz show, when the fol­low­ing bit comes up:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

For those who can’t hear the audio, the gist of it is that a US mar­ket­ing com­pany called Mind­Set Media claims that Mac­in­tosh users are 60% more likely to be “self-centered” and “arro­gant” and regard users of other oper­at­ing sys­tems with con­tempt and con­de­scen­sion. They are also more likely to see them­selves as “artis­tic” and “hip”, “excep­tional” and even “extra­or­di­nary.” Clearly, the report asserts, they have high stan­dards and are not very modest.

To which I say: “And your point is?”

But seri­ously, this cracks me up, par­tic­u­larly after I learned this from an arti­cle about the report on Ars Technica:

It’s dif­fi­cult to deter­mine if any of this is real…We tried to get details of the study from the company’s press con­tact (who is also its COO and cofounder), but were unable to learn much about the process. They could not pro­vide us with enough details to sci­en­tif­i­cally exam­ine the study.

Approx­i­mately 7,500 peo­ple were sur­veyed at Nielsen Online and grouped accord­ing to their choice of com­put­ing plat­forms. The sur­vey results were then fed into Mindset’s per­son­al­ity pro­fil­ing process, which is undoc­u­mented. The com­pany claims that it can cor­re­late per­son­al­ity pro­files with with brand choices: “a Mind­set­Pro­file will iden­tify the psy­cho­graph­ics that drive your brand, your cat­e­gory, and even your competitors.”

Given that there is no data on the sur­vey ques­tions or the eval­u­a­tion of the answers, it’s dif­fi­cult to ana­lyze the results. A company-supplied image, how­ever, pro­vides some indi­ca­tion of the per­son­al­ity cat­e­gories, which are arranged to evoke a peri­odic table, and hence hint at sci­en­tific cred­i­bil­ity (Mind­set appar­ently does under­stand mar­ket­ing). There are prob­a­bly fewer effec­tive cat­e­gories than are listed there, since a num­ber seem inter­re­lated. After all, it’s hard to imag­ine that some­one with a strong sense of supe­ri­or­ity could pos­si­bly score low in the self-esteem, or be easy to iden­tify if they were highly mod­est. Like­wise, it’s hard to imag­ine that timid­ity and bravado are com­pat­i­ble traits.

Still, this infor­ma­tion isn’t suf­fi­cient to eval­u­ate the claims, leav­ing us to rely on the cred­i­bil­ity of the com­pany itself. Judg­ing by the fact that the company’s COO is its press con­tact and its “In the Press” page still says “Com­ing Soon,” it’s likely to be a new ven­ture with a small staff. It’s entirely pos­si­ble that Mind­set is in a posi­tion to design Inter­net sur­veys, ana­lyze the result­ing data, and gen­er­ate accu­rate per­son­al­ity pro­files, but I’m some­what skep­ti­cal. My sense is that the press release was largely an attempt to tie its com­pany name to the Mac on the week of the Mac­world Expo as a way of gain­ing a higher pro­file and some free publicity.

So their game is to pick a group who often reacts with great (and vocal) hos­til­ity when there is an attempt to sully their name and come out with an unflat­ter­ing report on them. With this in mind, I’m expect­ing Mind­set Media to come out with their next report: Mar­ket­ing to the Over­grown Ado­les­cent, AKA Heavy Users of Digg… No, wait, bet­ter yet: The Typ­i­cal Per­son­al­ity of Those Sci­en­tol­o­gist Clowns.

Still, it tick­led me that I (and my imme­di­ate fam­ily back in the US) pretty much fall into every sin­gle pigeon­hole that the NPR panel could come up with : Macintosh-using, Obama-supporting, Prius-driving…

In the words of Woody Allen’s char­ac­ter played by Carol Kane in Annie Hall, Alli­son Portchnik:

Alli­son Portch­nick: I’m in the midst of doing my the­sis.
Alvy Singer: On what?
Alli­son: Polit­i­cal com­mit­ment in twen­ti­eth cen­tury lit­er­a­ture.
Alvy: You, you, you’re like New York, Jew­ish, left-wing, lib­eral, intel­lec­tual, Cen­tral Park West, Bran­deis Uni­ver­sity, the social­ist sum­mer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn draw­ings, right, and the really, y’know, strike-oriented kind of, red dia­per, stop me before I make a com­plete imbe­cile of myself.
Alli­son: No, that was won­der­ful. I love being reduced to a cul­tural stereo­type.
Alvy: Right, I’m a bigot, I know, but for the left.

Am I Really a Sports Jinx?

Back when I was work­ing at RIPE, I used to joke to my co-workers that I’m bad luck to any team that I root for. When the BC Lions were in the Grey Cup, some of them either dis­cour­aged me (or encour­aged me, depend­ing on their pref­er­ence) from watch­ing the game on TV, because some­how they would always win when I missed the game and lose when­ever I watched. It was almost uncanny how the act of observ­ing the game, like some sort of twisted Heisen­berg Prin­ci­ple, made the team lose.

This year, I didn’t watch a sin­gle game that the New Eng­land Patri­ots played in, except for one: The SuperBowl.

After win­ning every other game they played dur­ing the whole year, they lost this one game I watched in the last 35 sec­onds. It was prob­a­bly one of the biggest Super Bowl upsets in his­tory. In fact, ESPN.com is now hav­ing peo­ple rank and vote what they think are the biggest upsets in his­tory, and tonight’s Super Bowl XLII (42) is listed among the can­di­dates: (here’s a screen cap­ture for posterity:)

Oh, and by the way, after miss­ing their reg­u­lar sea­son, I also saw that ball go through Bill Buckner’s legs in the 1986 World Series, when the Boston Red Sox lost to the New York Yan­kees, which is, nat­u­rally, in the list.

Note to self: If your team is play­ing, and you’ve not seen them play in any other game, and they’ve won every other game, be sure to watch them, and bet against them, big time, par­tic­u­larly if it’s any team from New Eng­land vs. New York. At least you can profit from the mis­for­tune you seem to emanate.

You Can Take the Boy out of Fenway...

…but you can’t take Fen­way out of the boy.

This evening, Pam and I ate hot dogs, drank beer and watched the Boston Red Sox utterly dom­i­nate the Col­orado Rock­ies in a wicked first game of the 2007 World Series. It was curi­ous to see the Sox not only do so well, but do so well in so many ways. They fin­ished off with a score of 13 to 1, tying the record of 13 dou­bles in a world series game. But it wasn’t only the hit­ting. They pulled off a beau­ti­ful dou­ble play, and pitcher Josh Beck­ett only allowed 6 hits. The Rock­ies, on the other hand, went through 5 pitchers.

Old habits do die hard, though. All the way up to a score of 7 to 1, Pam kept say­ing ‘They could still screw it up! Don’t let your­self be fooled!” It’s also hard to get used to see­ing our old Boston team as the favourite, and clearly not the under­dog. That said, it is fun to see them win hand­ily, even if we aren’t within a stone’s throw of the Green Mon­ster any more.

Go Sox!