iPhone Hysteria Hits Vancouver

Despite the protests here that Rogers is charging too much for data (even after dropping the high-end price by a third, it’s still not unlimited), and despite the fact that current customers must wait a week before they can get one, the lines to buy an iPhone are predictably around the block downtown in Toronto and Vancouver.

While I’m not thrilled that I have to wait yet another week, as the coming of higher speed 3G networking, and GPS is a big deal for us, but best of all is actually being able to get software that will not make the phone buggy or suck bits from the net down to the phone while I’m unaware, which was what happened with one of the pirate programs I had gotten a while back. I’m particularly interested in how the new software (most of it free) take advantage of the synergy between the phone knowing where it is and being connected to the Internet at decent speed. Imagine:

• You could take a tour of a museum or garden and had access to not one but several multimedia tour guides all at the same time? Entering an art work’s number might show related works, or offer other biographical information.
• In a bookstore you might get all of the competing prices for the same book after you take a picture of its bar code with your camera. Your current store could offer to match that price if they can keep the sale.
• A special ‘Lunch 4-1-1′ program/network that would not only tell you which friends were near and available for an impromptu lunch, but also a restaurant that all of you had said was either good or they wanted to try out.

I expect a lot of those sorts of applications to show up soon. The best part is that this is entirely an open-ended situation; the limitation is now no longer on the hardware or the infrastructure, but the imagination of developers and entrepreneurs. For Vancouver and its decidedly extroverted blend of tech and love of leisure, cuisine and entertainment, today is sort of a starting gun for a race to the next big social application, and it’s not just Facebook and Twitter this time.

Follow up: According to Twitter and news stories around the web, it was not a very, ahem, smooth launch of the iPhone or 2.0 software. Servers got overloaded, phones got bricked, iTunes version 7.7 took forever to download, and in general the whole process slowed to a crawl. I haven’t heard a story yet that wasn’t full of drama, waiting and headache. I’m sure there are others who can provide more detail. Suffice to say I’m glad that I decided to wait a day or two before dipping my toes in the iWater.

Vancouver Saved by Hippies in 1967

I was too young to remember it, but in the fall of 1967, the character of my adopted home underwent a significant change. At the time, I was actually visiting Canada for the first time with my parents, attending Expo ‘67 in Montreal. Meanwhile, back here in Vancouver, a large population of hippies (or at least, that’s what they were called back then) descended on the town, much to the dismay of the mayor, Thomas J. Campbell. An ‘Evening Magazine’ clip has recently surfaced on YouTube, and I’ve included it below.

The best part of it for me is Campbell’s fear and hysteria regarding the hippies. Campbell hates them passionately, almost like a character in National Lampoon’s Animal House: “If these young people get their way, they will destroy Canada. From what I hear across the world, they will destroy the world!”

Campbell was a big proponent of tearing down older buildings to make room for redevelopment (he’s shown posing gleefully atop a wrecking ball) and spearheaded the move to bring an expressway into the city. He had those hippies he hated so much arrested for loitering.

Fortunately for us (or unfortunately, if you like freeways), the hippies, by allying themselves with the more straight-laced people who wanted to preserve their neighborhoods won in the end. No superhighway was built through Vancouver. One historian in the piece says that this was the time when Vancouver ‘found its voice’, and hence owes a lot to the spirit of that era. Like Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, I see echoes of that era in Kitsilano, which was apparently Hippie Central in ‘67. Both the Haight and Kits are now largely yuppified, but still retain some of that charm. We certainly saw some of it in the farmer’s market we went to a couple of weeks ago. I even got some granola from the Granola King.

Now, with freeways all over North America clogged with commuters fleeing cities at 5PM and heading for suburbs, burning $4 a gallon gas and burning hydrocarbons (while Vancouver contemplates further ecodensity as a way of dealing with the Climate Crisis and Peak Oil), Campbell’s vision seems all the more wrong-headed. Maybe (perhaps through dumb luck) the hippies had it right all along. On the other hand, they were right about Vietnam, too…and Iraq. OK, maybe it wasn’t dumb luck.

Will the Flickr Founders Return?

Recently  I learned that Stewart Butterfield — who along with his wife, Caterina Fake,  co-founded one of the most interesting and exciting startups to usher in the ‘Web 2.0′ era — has resigned from Yahoo, the current owners of that business. His letter of resignation was posted on Jon Gruber’s Daring Fireball, and I couldn’t resist reprinting it here; It’s a scream:

From: Stewart Butterfield
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2008 10:57 AM
To: Brad Garlinghouse
Subject: Resignation

Dear Brad,

As you know, tin is in my blood. For generations my family has worked with this most useful of metals. When I joined Yahoo back in ‘21, it was a sheet-tin concern of great momentum, growth and innovation. I knew it was the place for me.

Over the decades as the company grew and expanded, first into dyes and punches, into copper, corrugated steel, synthesized rubber, piping, milling equipment, engines, instruments, weaponry, and so on, I still felt at home, because tin was the core of the business.

After the war, as we continued to branch out in electronics, all manner of aeronautical frames, hulls and bodies, computing and tabulating machines, precision controls, and later, farther afield — real estate, brewing, consumer finance, grain processing, lighting and salty snacks - I took it in stride, for there was still a place for me.

Since the late 80s, as the general manufacturing, oil exploration & refining, logistics, and hotel & casino divisions rose to prominence, I have felt somewhat sidelined. By the time of the internet revolution and our expansions into Web Sites, I have been cast adrift. I tried to roll with the times, but nary a sheet of tin has rolled of our own production lines in over 30 years.

I don’t know what you and the other executives have planned for this company, but I know that my ability to contribute has dwindled to near-nothing, and not entirely because of my advancing age. Therefore, with a heavy heart, I recognize that it is time for me to and the company to part ways.

In my 87 years service, I’ve accomplished many feats, shared in the ups and downs, made great friends, and learned a tremendous amount (who would have thought that Electronic Mail would come to supplant the nation’s own great and venerable post!?) but there is a new generation now and it would be unfair not to give them a chance. Those that started in the make-work programs of the depression, on the GI programs in the late 40s, and even those young baby boomers need their own try, without us old ‘uns standing in the way.

So, please accept my resignation, effective July 12. And I don’t need no fancy parties or gold watches (I still have the one from ‘61 and ‘76). 1 will be spending more time with my family, tending to my small but growing alpaca herd and, of course, getting back to working with tin, my first love.

Your old tin-smithing friend and colleague,

- Stewart Butterfield

(In case you didn’t get the gag, Stewart Butterfield is 35 years old)

It’s worth noting that a Facebook group has been formed, called BringCaterinaAndStewartHome. The Web site Strutta is handling the domain http://www.BringCaterinaAndStewartHome where people are posting photos of our beautiful city and pointing out the strengths of the place, hoping to woo these two back.

Frankly, I’d like to see them return as well. They are, in a way, the prodigal son and daughter of the tech scene here.  Flickr has always been held up as The Great Vancouver Tech Success Story, and I would imagine that it has emboldened its share of startups in Yaletown and Gastown. Since I arrived shortly after they left, I always felt like I missed out on some of the joie de vivre that Ludicorp brought to Vancouver. Indeed, I even had given some thought as to showing up on their doorstep while we were making plans in Cambridge, and I remember my disappointment as I saw the photos of the good-bye party a few months before we were to make the move (Doh!).

With a letter of resignation as witty and clever as that one, and a track record unequaled by most of the techies of Vancouver, we could use a guy like that around here.

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.