Summer, Finally

Not so Hazy and Not so Lazy

Maybe it’s because we have our first bona-fide day where you could go out without a jacket. Maybe it’s because the sun truly doesn’t set until nearly around 8:30. Maybe it’s because Granville Market is brimming over with sweet local strawberries, most of the spot prawns and asparagus are past, and the heirloom tomatoes are starting to appear. All of the above is contributing to a feeling that we have finally passed into the summer season.

For me, being between contracts/jobs and with some time on my hands, it means that I can enjoy some of this, although I’m certainly not spending my days at the beach. Next week, being the Canada Day and Fourth of July holiday week, both Pam and I are going to get a little summer break, with a trip to Whistler with my brother and his family. We’ve been looking forward to that for a long time.

Planning for the Autumn Demise of Classical Radio in Vancouver

Summer is also the time when a few things end. This morning was the last time that Tom Allen would do his ‘cage match’, a whimsical feature of ‘Music and Company’ where he would pit one piece of music against another and call for a vote. This week’s final cage match theme was: ‘With a bang or a whimper’, since it will be the last one of these bits of fun…forever. Representing an ending with a bang was Chabrier’s ‘Ah Hurrah’ from the Opera, Le Roi Malgre Lui. The opponent (representing a ‘whimper’ or soft ending) was the last movement from Haydn’s clever Symphony No. 45, ‘The Farewell Symphony’ (where one by one, the musicians leave the stage until there are only 2 first violins left to end the piece, a cleverly choreographed hint to Haydn’s patron, the Prince Nikolaus Esterházy that his court musicians as well as his composer were all homesick and wanted him to close up the summer palace so everyone could return home to Eisenstadt).

It was a typical cage match; one part joke, one part serious, one part drama. Like just about everything Tom Allen does on the program, it makes one think a little, and sets up the day. I will sorely miss this along with some of his other regular features. Probably my favourite comes at about 6:30 AM: This Day in… which observes some event in history that shares today’s date. Today’s was the first solo circumnavigation of the globe in a boat by Joshua Slocum, a Nova Scotian seaman who finished the trip that he had begun in Boston three years earlier in 1895 on today’s date. Like so many other ‘This Day In…’s, I didn’t know about this event, and felt the joy I often do from gaining a bit of knowledge just as I’m starting the day.

Without going off on another rant about the stupidity and wrongness of the CBC getting rid of the best classical music morning program in the world, I’ve finally accepted the inevitable and made plans. A couple of weeks ago I picked up (on sale) a curious new device at London Drugs: a BLIK Internet Clock Radio. It’s a standard-looking radio (unfortunately with inferior speakers to the Bose Wave Radio that we’ve been using for the last 10 years or so) that ‘tunes’ to a streaming radio station on the Internet rather than local FM (although you can do that, if the Internet is down). I’ve tested it, and while there is about a 20-second delay while the station ‘resolves’ to the URL you’ve chosen, it will indeed allow you to awaken to over 9,000 different stations all over the world (although in practice the number one would want to tune to is a small fraction of that number). I was able to set the presets to the BBC’s Radio 3 (which I knew well from my days as a Grad Student), the local CBC Radio 1, NPR in Boston, as well as the national NPR station. I’ll look for some other stations, as there are 8 preset slots. As you can imagine, retrieving and sifting through 9,000 stations in a tree-like menu using a terrible LED screen is a bit of a challenge (oh, if only Apple would make one of these- I guess they do, it’s called a Mac Mini with mouse, keyboard, speakers and a small flat-screen monitor running a browser with some preset streaming radio station bookmarks, but even something like that is too large for a night-table). Most of these stations have us waking up at 9:00 AM Eastern on North America, or 68(!) hours ahead in the UK. I fear that at noon 2:00 in the afternoon in London we may not get a completely morning-friendly classical music feed, so I’ll have to search further until I find a new place to tune to. Both Pam and I hope that we don’t have to resort to NPR, which always put me in a bad mood in the morning, particularly now that it has moved so much farther to the Right politically than it used to be (hearing the appalling Cokie Roberts sneer at the Democrats every Monday morning got my blood boiling early in the week - funny, but that was my word, but apparently it’s still what she is doing, defending Dick Cheney on the TV Program ‘This Week’).

While they are getting rid of Classical Music on Radio 2, I do remember the somewhat encouraging news that the CBC said that they were going to add a streaming classical music channel on the Internet. I doubt if it will have the incomparable Tom Allen on it, but at least there will be a Canadian alternative for our move from FM Radio to almost exclusively Internet radio from Labour Day on.

Pam’s Photos, March Flowers and Disturbing Radio News

After many hours culling through the over 1,000 photos that she took on her trip to Antarctica, Pam has put together just under 200 of them in a slide show on Flickr. Many are very impressive, and she went to some pains to annotate them as well. If you want to read the descriptions, you can access the individual photos as well. I’m glad that she can share her trip with so many friends and family.

Spring has Sprung Forward
One of the things I do love about the climate here is the fact that our winters, while being plenty wet, dark and dreary, are not very long. During our walk last weekend, Pam and I spied many clusters of crocuses, and I expect that we’ll be seeing daffodils and tulips either this week or next. This is very different from the winters I remember in Boston, which seemed to stretch on and on. Groundhog Day, as Garrison Keillor used to say about Minnesota’s Winter, was for us, ’some sort of cruel joke’.

This weekend is also the starting gun that seems to set off a rush toward Spring, with the switch to Daylight Savings time (which the Province suggests might be more aptly called ‘Daylight-Saving Time’, following the pattern of ‘man-eating’ tiger or ‘mind-expanding book’). At any rate, I’ll now leave work in full sun, and we’ll be getting up before dawn for just a little while longer.

CBC Radio Two to Change Programming Again?
I’ve learned that in September, CBC Radio 2 will once again be changing their programming, and unfortunately for people like me, it will no longer include Classical music before 9AM, and will no longer have any Classical music after 3PM. As they slowly whittle away at the programming that I would like to listen to, I’m going to be eventually forced to turn to the Internet (and, if I take the plunge, XM Satellite radio) for music that’s not in my collection (and my collection is huge!). That’s a shame, since I’ve found that Tom Allen’s wonderful ‘Music and Company’ to be the only morning radio show that has consistently made my day better. I fear I will be writing him a fan letter as they cancel his program in September.

It was bad enough when the CBC banned news longer than 3 minutes from Radio 2. Now they are going to be banning Classical programming from much of their schedule. Not much left for me to listen to, I guess. I keep telling myself that with the growth of the Internet to wireless devices, it won’t be long before the WiMax (or other) cloud will make standard analog radio a quaint memory. Still, I foresee a bumpy road before small constituencies like the one I’m a member of are squeezed off the dial, at least until we find our new broadcast medium. Too bad you blew it, CBC.

Holiday Cheers

It’s understandable that some people get depressed around this time of the year. There is the uncomfortable weather, lack of sunshine, and incessant reminders of how we should all be out shopping, etc.. Fortunately, the flip side of that is that we can get cozy at home (with a tasty stir-fry of lemongrass-marinated beef), meet with friends in the evening (the blogger meetup was this Thursday night), give and get gifts, and perhaps even make plans for the new year. Pam has the jump on me this year in several ways: first, with one of the coolest gifts that you can give a nerd, an OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO computer. Although it hasn’t arrived yet, I got the email confirmation of the gift so the cat is out of the bag. The way the OLPC purchase works is to ‘give one and get one’, so in getting me this interesting piece of technology, Pam’s also insured that some child in another country (like Uruguay and Rwanda) also gets one. It’s a project started by Nicholas Negroponte, the flamboyant and charismatic founder of MIT’s Media Lab, and now the of the Non-profit organization (OLPC) that has created the device with the idea of getting an inexpensive (the original goal was <$100, the real price is now a little less than twice that number) laptop in the hands of children in poorer countries all over the world, with the hope of bridging the information divide). Here’s an ad with Heroes’ Masi Oka for OLPC:

You can be sure that future postings will be about this new gift, and given that it has a pretty long wi-fi range and is one of the few laptops that has a screen that is visible in full sunlight, as well as long battery life and lightweight design, I’m hoping that there will actually be some postings for this written on it (perhaps from the park out back?) as well.

Big Travel Plans

I mentioned that Pam had the jump on me in the gift department. She’s also out ahead on plans for next year. She’s going to do something that she’s wanted to do for years now: see Antarctica. In February (the end of summer for that part of the world), she will first fly to Santiago, Chile, then board a charter flight to the southern tip of Argentina at Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego (the world’s southernmost city). At that point, she’ll board the ship Explorer II, a “Double bottomed Ice Class vessel with an ice rating (Italian RINA Class 1-D) that exceeds the requirement for operating safely in Antarctica” (thank goodness for that, with the recent sinking of a vessel from Gap Adventures, the M/S Explorer) The ship cruises for 2 days through the Drake Passage to the Antarctic peninsula. She’ll spend about 4 days there, making excursions in Zodiac rafts to the ice,where hopefully she’ll see penguins like these. There are plans to land on the South Shetlands, including Half Moon, Cuverville, Paulet, Penguin, Goudier and Deception Island, depending on the weather conditions. I’m hoping that she’ll be able to send some of the day-to-day details of her voyage, although I’m not sure how easy email will be.

Before all of this starts, there are a few other (less impressive trips), including a visit to my parents’ house in Baltimore, and a week in San Francisco for MacWorld Expo. Looks like 2008 is going to get off to a busy start.

Winter Coping

Even though it isn’t officially Winter, the rain, early darkness and damp chill definitely arrived in the Pacific Northwest. Nevertheless, there are ways of dealing with the (not entirely expected) inclement weather. I’ve often written about Vancouver’s dual personality, and fortunately, there is plenty of the ‘city of the mind’ these days:

Two weeks ago, Bill Moggeridge, the founder of IDEO (one of the world’s foremost Industrial Design companies), and the designer of one of the first laptop computers gave a public talk, at the Emily Carr Institute because he is joining the school’s Design Department as an Honorary Professor. His talk was mostly material from his recent book, Designing Interactions which is available, chapter by chapter, on the web site. Nevertheless, I enjoyed his talk, which was to an absolutely packed hall (about 80% ECI Students, who were fun to watch as well - quite a few of them obsessively scribbling and sketching or playing with their Macbooks as we waited for him to begin). The only downside to the evening was missing the Blogger Meetup, which was going on at the same time. Sometimes there are too many of these winter events to cram into too few days and nights.

Today, we got a little break from the gloom, and Pam and I took part in another Winter event, the Eastside Culture Crawl. For about 3 days, artists and craftspeople in the neighborhoods of East Vancouver all open their studios (and homes), so that the rest of us go can visit and talk, admire sometimes buy art, pottery, furniture and fashions. It was a beautiful day, and we wandered around, taking photos of some of the art and the neighborhood, which was almost glowing in the sun.

Another way of coping with the Winter gloom is food (of course). But rather than just the usual comfort food, we capped the day with one of my favourite yearly indulgences, Cassoulet. The Oyama Sausage Company on Granville Island has an annual Cassoulet festival, and you have to get your order in early. We topped ours off with Toulouse Duck Sausages and some herbed Duck Confit. Some good red wine and a salad, and we were good to go. Oh, and not to mention, for dessert, a little ‘Juliet’ Goat (Camembert style) from Salt Spring Island (the other food festival at Granville Island this weekend was for Cheese).

And then there are the evening events: Next week is another DemoCamp, one of the recent spate of entrepreneurial coming-out parties for local startups and techies. I’m glad that I got into it, as I was unable to get into next week’s Third Tuesday, the local monthly get-together for online marketing, public relations and social networks. As I said, too many events, too few days and nights.

But it sure beats getting bummed by the weather!

Back and More

I’m really tired as I write this - it seems I’ve been tired a lot lately (lack of sleep perhaps due to the unusual hot nights we’ve been getting this week, etc.). Nevertheless, I wanted to try and update this blog before it got much more stale. And it was getting quite stale indeed. No crunch left at all. (See, I told you I was getting tired).

So what has happened in the past 3 weeks or so?

1. The rest of the trip went without any transportation problems (aside from a couple of hours on the runway at Laguardia, but from what I hear, that’s par for the course for most US travel this summer.)
2. I got to hear my Nominative Prelude: Castles in the Air played by the pianist to whom it was dedicated, Pat Plude, and it was a great experience. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard anything that I’ve written, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to try to write more music. It’s just a hard thing to do, requiring a lot of time and energy, so I think I’ll only do it, for the time being, unless I know I’ll get a performance. I have enough unperformed music (an Orchestral Tone Poem, a couple of chamber works - one for Violin, Viola and Piano, a short work for Piano, Celeste and Vibraphone, a study for 2 pianos that I wrote in college, and a half of a Chamber Opera - all that have never been heard outside of my mind or their notes banged out in a practice room or piano somewhere) to last me for quite a while, thanks.
3. I saw a few old friends at the Walden School Reunion, but surprisingly, the years that I attended (the late 70s) were somewhat underrepresented. I saw plenty of people who were older than I was by about 20 or 30 years, and also several who were 20 years my junior, but few who were my age. It made for a unique social situation.
4. I had a great time visiting my parents, and was able to enjoy some quiet hours surfing the web on their back deck. Warm, breezy afternoons in the shade with hummingbirds and wi fi, as well as gourmet meals (both out and at home) are what I will remember the most from this trip.
5. That missed opportunity on the road was yet another of those times in life where you think you’ve missed the boat, only to find a much better vessel float in behind it. Yes, another opportunity presented itself a week and a half ago. I had an interview at IBM (yes, that IBM) for a 6-month contract as an Information Architect/UI Designer. There was a message from them in the affirmative before I made it home from the interview (!). A new record, the guy at the agency placing me said. So in about 11 days, my life changes significantly, as I say good-bye to my current part-time employer, and hello to a new contract in Burnaby. It’s a bit of a distance from here (about an hour’s commute on the buses and skytrain). Hopefully I’ll be able to use that time to catch up on podcasts and books on tape. Too bad that I can’t compose on the skytrain. I think I’ll dedicate my next blog posting to my old employer, who deserves some mention (I’ve always been really careful about the work vs. personal life vs. loud murmur thing.)
6. We celebrated Canada Day this year with some (temporary) tattoos of the Maple Leaf (see above). We’ve even had a chance to celebrate my new contract with a lovely dinner at Bridges with a view of the sunset.

Have I gotten caught up? Well, a few other things:

In 4 days, we’ll have been living in British Columbia 2 years. We took out a 2-year mortgage on this condo, so with any luck, we’ll be all paid-up in about 6 days. We haven’t thought about a mortgage burning party (It sounds so wonderfully 1960-ish, doesn’t it?) but maybe we’ll do that.

The time spent traveling truly showed me that I do indeed belong here in Vancouver. Despite some nice experiences on my trip to the Eastern US, I did really miss this place, and was extremely happy to return to the beautiful city and mountains I now, without any doubt, call home.