seven years!

Posted on August 17, 2010
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Leah

Leah, in Halifax

Today is Leah’s & my seventh anniversary. These, without any shadow of a doubt, have been the best seven years of my life. It’s hard to describe just how much I love Leah, but, fully aware of how sappy this sounds when actually read, are some of the many reasons that we work so well:

Happy Anniversary Leah! I love you!

Review: Wolf Parade & Moools at the Vogue Theatre

Posted on July 26, 2010
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I was pretty stoked about last night’s concert. Each of Wolf Parade’s albums have made into pretty high rotation with me, and when I last saw them live, opening for…I want to say The Walkmen, but I’m not sure that’s right, their energy was great. That carried through to last night’s show as well, although it wasn’t without fault.

Those dots in the lights? That's Wolf Parade

I had never heard of The Mools before. They’re an indie-rock trio from Tokyo who play complicated, jazz-infused rock. I loved it. Last night I tweeted that they were lead by a “stealth puppet-master drummer”. Which I think needs clarification. Their drummer was very understated, a surprisingly still drummer. At first, I wasn’t that impressed. But then they started messing with time signatures, and the lead singer/guitarist went off on these crazy, amazing solos and I noticed, like in all truly great rock bands, it all started and ended with the drummer. So thus the puppet-master, reeling out the other parts of the band, then, as the solos come to a close, bring them back in. Definitely see them live if you can, and check out their music.

After a short intermission which really only served to heat up the theatre even more as sweaty bodies milled about in uncomfortably close quarters, Wolf Parade came out. And they rocked hard. They really, really gave it a lot, which, as an audience member is always really rewarding when you can tell a band is really bringing it. Towards the end of the night they talked about this – that playing Vancouver is sort of like playing a hometown show and historically they had choked but were really happy with this show.

The pacing was pretty good, mostly alternating older & newer tracks. If I have a quibble, and I do, but it’s a minor one,  is that they don’t yet seem to know how to run a concert. They’re still  a fairly young band, and haven’t been headlining for that long, and it shows. There were some overly long silences, some awkward-odd as opposed to awkward-hip interactions with the crowd.

The Great Canadian Ultimate Game

Posted on July 19, 2010
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On Saturday night I participated in the Great Canadian Ultimate Game, a 25-hour, cross-Canada ultimate relay organized by Ultimate Canada where players in 23 communities across the country each played a single ultimate game to raise money for 2 really worthy charities, Right To Play and Boys & Girls Clubs of Canada. The Vancouver leg was scheduled to run from 10-11pm at Andy Livingstone field. I showed up expecting the game to be played much like a lot of pick-up ultimate is played – sort-of half-assed, with a lot of hucking, and not terribly serious. Boy was I wrong! Instead it was highly-skilled, hard-fought and really spirited, in the best of ways. I played on Team Red, representing Right to Play. In our particular leg, Team Red beat Team White 13-11. However, after the final leg, played from 11pm-midnight in Surrey, Team White won the overall game, 253-251.

The game was setup so that each player donated at least $10, and then the charities would receive the money in a 60-40 split. While the total funds raised isn’t known yet, it should be around $7000. A great amount for the inaugural year of this fundraiser. I certainly hope that this will become an annual event where we can raise even more money and awareness.

Blogs, Contests & Comments

Posted on June 22, 2010
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The Vancouver Blogger scene is incredibly well tied-in with the Vancouver PR Community. I generally think this is a good thing – they scratch each other’s backs, and I get to stay informed via voices that I know, trust (or not) and are consistent. And more often than not, this leads to contests, wherein a blog reader wins stuff, or tickets to events or whatnot. Both Miss 604 & Hummingbird 604 run contests regularly. I recently won a contest on Outdoor Vancouver‘s blog. So these are good things. Usually, entering the contest consists of a)tweeting a specific message b)leaving a comment and sometimes a third option on Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc. The tweeting I get – it makes the contest (and thus the message) viral. Most of the time, I don’t mind abusingmy twitter account to do this, but just recently I’ve decided to create a separate twitter account that I’ll use just to enter contests – while I might want to enter all sorts of contests, my friends might not be so interested (I differentiate between followers & friends – I tweet for & with my friends – followers can come and go as they please), and I don’t want to spam them. But I understand, from the point of view of the blogger & sponsor why tweeting for a contest entry is good.

But then we’re often asked to comment on the blog itself. And this seems odd to me. I’m of the opinion that blog comments are for conversation, for response to ideas put forward. But contest-entry comments are inane and usesless – the vast majority exist solely to fulfill the requirements of the contest, and add nothing to the conversation. This is especially true if the contest winner will be drawn at random, rather than via a subjective evaluation of the ‘best’ response. Look at the ‘Cirque Du Soleil KOOZA: Win Tickets” post on Miss604 (I’m not, it should be noted, picking on her in particular – this is just a great recent example) – there are (as of time of writing this) 178 comments – each one an entry into the contest. The contest runs for 3 weeks, and we the public are allowed to comment once a week for an additional entry. So there’ll likely be well over 500 ‘comments’ on the post – but all will be simple contest-entries rather than any substantive content. So what’s the point? It many ways, it (for me at least) reduces the appeal of the blog as a whole – while I’ll read the posts, there’s no point in reading the comments because they’re more or less spam. And comments, retweets, Facebook links, trackbacks make up your blog’s social sphere. There’s power in having that sphere be ‘clean’ I think, which having useless contest-entry comments simply detracts from.

But, again looking at Miss 604′s site, read her post prior to the contest “A Does of Vancouver” It has but one comment, but it’s a real comment, a response to the post itself. And useful – adding something to my experience of the post. But and so, what is the answer to all of this? Here’s my suggestions to blogs that run contests, to keep your blog’s social sphere “useful”:

  1. If your contest-winner will be drawn at random via a number-generator, don’t use your comments for entries. Use a polling system perhaps – but make people register to “vote” on the poll just like leaving a comment. Then choose 1 or more votes to win.
  2. If you require specific content to be in the post, but it’s still a random-draw, use  a separate data store for that – so it’s clear throughout your archives what are contest entries, what are comments.
  3. Just use the external viral engines like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc.

If you’re someone who runs contests on their site, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this – not running contests, I’ve never had to put my own ideas into practice, so maybe there’s valid reasons for using the comment system that I haven’t thought of.

MEC Paddlefest 2010

Posted on June 20, 2010
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My Kayak

Looking across the bow of my kayak

A few weeks back I won a tickets to 2 events at MEC Paddlefest, courtesy of Karl Woll (and by his announcing the contest on twitter). Today was the big day!

I signed up for one dry-land course, “Navigation for Sea Kayakers” and one on-water course, a guided tour. I arrived, bright and early for my Navigation class, and was really looking forward to it. I’ve taken a bunch of land-based courses in the distant past, and am pretty good at guiding myself by landmarks, as I have lots of lake-and-river canoeing and kayaking experience. But I know nothing about reading tide tables, current tables, and what the various buoys all mean. But it seemed reasonable to get at least an intro to that in an hour, right? Sadly, no. Instead what I got was a 55-minute lecture on gear, why the Pleasure Craft Operator Card exam is useless, some personal reminiscences about sailing and then, crammed into the last 5 minutes, 10 slides about navigation. So it was pretty useless. But despite that disappointment I was still looking forward to my guided tour.

The West End

The West End

And I’m very happy to say that I was not disappointed at all – it was marvellous, although much, much too short. I was a little apprehensive before I started because it has been so long since I last kayaked – probably since before Liam was born. My fears were totally unfounded – it felt completely natural and I was comfortable and at home the moment I sat down in my kayak, put my skirt on, and started to paddle. All those years at summer camp kayaking, doing whitewater training and what not came back to me right away. We headed off, going east from Jericho towards the RCYC. Much like I used to do when younger, as soon as I started paddling, I sort of zoned out. The same way I do when I run – I disappear, my mind empties and there’s nothing but that beautiful repetitive motion, my breathing, the soft susurrations of the water alongside the boat. Faintly, I heard my name – just enough to bring me from my reverie. I turned around to realize I’d left the rest of the group far behind me, so I stopped paddling and had a nice rest floating out there. After they all caught up, we continued on round to look at the big houses along the water, than turned around and headed back to Jericho. We saw a sea otter diving near the RCYC pier, which was really cool. It was only about 20 feet in front of me. Then, suddenly, too soon, I was beaching at Jericho, hopping out and heading home. A great day. Thanks to everyone who made this possible!

Things that Liam has said he’d like to be when he’s grown up

Posted on June 16, 2010
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One of my favourite conversation threads with Liam is to talk about what he’d like to do when he grows up. I thought I’d share a few of the more recent ones with you (in no particular order other than my memory):

It should be noted that Liam’s new invisible friends, ‘Iron Boy’ & ‘Iron Girl’ also have aspirations, but slightly different: Iron Boy would like to be a “Super-bad-guy” and Iron Girl would like to be a “Super-good-guy”. However, they’ll still be friends even when one is a good guy and one is a bad guy.

LCD Soundsystem at Malkin Bowl: my review

Posted on June 1, 2010
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Glowing mirrorball

LCD Soundsystem: not as brilliant as their mirrorball

My first show of the year last night (wow – so sad that that’s true!). But I waited for a good one. Well, an ok one,  seeing LCD Soundsystem last night at Malkin Bowl. Holy Ghost! opened. They were fun, but eminently forgettable – they mined the 80′s sound, but didn’t really do too much with it. Which is a shame – I’d listened to a bunch of their stuff before the show and it had been fun. Possibly they just don’t translate live well. Or at least not in a setting like Malkin Bowl. In a tightly packed sweaty nightclub it would’ve made me want to dance.

The weather all day had been terrible, so I was expecting to get soaked, but fortunately the rain stopped on our way down, and we even saw a little blue sky. Pre-show we went for a drink at Stanley’s Park Bar & Grill, which was fun – completely full of concert goers, they a good system of a beer garden with  smokies & corn-on-the-cob grilling on the barbeque.

LCD in lights

In the gloaming

LCD Soundsystem opened well, apologized for being so far back on the stage (they’d moved all the equipment under cover given the uncertainty of the weather – although I’ve yet to see a show at Malkin Bowl where that wasn’t the case), and got on with it. I’m a huge fan, and they played 2 of 3 songs I really wanted to hear during the set (“Daft Punk is playing at my house & “New York I love You” to end it, they didn’t play “North American Scum”), but I’m not sure I’d call it an particularly inspired set. They hit the notes, they did their thing, but they never went off the rails in either a good or bad way. It’s odd to be disappointed because an act is tight and on their game, but I want something more from a live show. Particularly from an act like LCD Soundsystem where they could so easily play with their songs a little. This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it, because I really did enjoy it, but it wasn’t stand-out by any means.

Parenting & the ephemerality of possession

Posted on May 7, 2010
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I struggle mightily with materialism. On one hand, I am an inveterate early-adopter gadget-hound. I want the latest, greatest, shiniest toy. On the other hand, I hate buying things. At some level I don’t even particularly like owning things. I’m all over eBooks for the same reason I very quickly embraced digital music (once I figured out I didn’t have to rip at 128k) – it reduces physical clutter, but allows me to still partake in a passion – discovering new music, new books.

aside: I’m not yet down with physical media-less video simply because the quality of a Blu-ray disc generally FAR exceeds anything I get online – sound, video, extra features. Give me all that in a digital-only download & I’ll switch in a heartbeat. Until then, I’ll keep renting & buying the physical media.

And so of course imparting this sort of internal struggle to Liam is important to me. I want him to cherish his possessions, recognize the value of them and derive happiness from receiving and interacting with them. At the same time, I don’t want to raise a hopeless materialist who only derives happiness from buying new things, and always wants new things. And I want him to understand how liberating and joyful it can be to get rid of possessions. I know some of this is just being a child, but a small part of me gets really unhappy that Liam looks longingly at the dollar toy-in-an-egg machines, that he’ll choose a kinder egg over other candy because it comes with a toy every time. And that if and when we get these toys, he’ll play with them for a little while – sometimes an hour, sometimes a day, and then they’re tossed in a toy-bucket never to be played with again. I feel very much to blame because we have been willing to buy him things if he asks for them.

aside #2: Liam has this thing which drives both Leah and I nuts where he’s incredibly passive about things and won’t come out and ask for them. He’ll say things like “I was thinking about a kinder egg” when what he means is “I would like a kinder egg”. It drives me up the wall. I’ve now taken to being flippant (if I’m in a good mood) or sarcastic (if not so much) in response to this. Liam doesn’t deal very well with rejection, it must be said, so I suspect that this is his defense mechanism – he’s not as disappointed if what he’s thinking about doesn’t happen compared to if what he’s asking for doesn’t happen.

So we’re working on the idea that a)we don’t buy everything we want just because we want it (about which I do admit to feeling quite hypocritical) b)that we cherish and value the things we have and take care of our possessions c)it’s a good thing to share with our friends and not be too possessive. So these are somewhat contradictory ideas that really, for the most part, Liam seems to be getting. I think. I’m not sure. He certainly gets the idea of delayed gratification, which is great. But I admit that we’re struggling with this and I do worry that I’m raising a materialist who always wants more stuff, regardless of if he actually wants the item, or just wants to satisfy the act of wanting….

Bleh. This post kind of went off in a different direction than I’d intended. Oh well.

The Single-Serving Internet of the Future

Posted on April 21, 2010
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Thinking about the internet – at least the internet since the invention of the web – it strikes me as a long journey from general-purpose to highly specialized uses. The first websites were broad, serving lots of purposes. They were muddled & messy, very amateurish – much like the industry was. We first few web developers did not have a vocabulary to work with – we had to make it. And the early web reflected that. In many ways, more than anything else, this is what the Web 2.0 “revolution” was about – standardizing the vocabulary of the web. This lead to web standards, common conventions. It is no coincidence that around this same time, the publishing industry was rife with books like “Don’t Make Me Think!” (2000) and “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” (1998) – we as industry were maturing. Along with this came specialization. Until the late 1990′s, it felt to me that everyone working on the web could, and did, do a little of everything. While I was already primarily a programmer, it was expected that I would do some design work. Designers were expected to markup and code as well. This is much less the case now – this is specialization comes with industry maturity as we all learned the particular roles and skill-sets that make up a web-team (this is not to say that people do not work more than one role now – lots of people do. But it is less common, and people now will identify more by a particular role (designer, programmer, front-end devloper) than as a generic “web developer”, which was an insanely common title in the 90s).

There was an axiom (that probably still holds true) that in order to make a good web app, you just needed to “look for a unix command-line tool & slap a web-interface on top of it”. Many, many useful web applications grew out of this ideal: Do one thing, and do it well. Sure, there were, and are, sites that do lots of things. But looking around at my fellow web professionals, we all are completely comfortable with using best-of-class tools for each problem – whether or not they interrelate particularly well. Just as we have specialized our skillsets, we are specializing our tools as well – but, all to be done in our browser. Our time-tracking software is different (though it may well talk to) our invoicing software which is different from our project management software. In many ways, the 37 Signals suite of apps embodies this the most. The trend of the “open” web (by this I mean the low-barrier-of-entry of web apps (intuitive, cheap, ubiquitous, interconnected via APIs) has in some ways run counter to the professional development of those of us working in the medium (most programmers can no longer design at a high level and vice versa). But we have gotten, thanks to an increasingly sophisticated & shared vocabulary gotten very good at inter-skill communication, much like websites have gotten very good at sharing data between themselves.

The Mobile Internet is taking specialization a step further, and in a very different direction from the web itself. Due in no small parts to the design constraints of the GUI on current-generation smart phones (Android, iPhone, Palm, Blackberry), most apps tend to do one thing, and one thing well. But here’s where things are different again – while our browser was historically a very-general tool, single-serving apps are replacing the browser. For instance, I use the New York Times app to read American News, The Guardian app to read European News, The Globe & Mail app to read Canadian news. I use the I Can Haz Cheezburger apps for that suite of blogs, etc. I use Now Playing to check theatre times & buy tickets. I use Tweetie to interact with Twitter ,the Facebook app to interact with Facebook, and so on and so forth. Each time I want to perform a different action online, I now use a different app, not just a different URL. And there’s a very good reason for doing this: each app has a highly-specialized UI that is designed to optimize my experience using it. Each app, while drawing from the same general syntactical rules of the Apple iPhone HIG (I expressly say the Apple HIG, because, from the few other smart phone apps that I’ve seen, they are all reading from this same playbook), may have it’s own dialect of interaction rules, but overall,  I know what to expect. But this specialization allows for my experience to be improved more than any web-app (to date) has been able to do. Content producers love this because it creates lock-in. In order for me to switch phones now, not only would I want every single app I commonly use to exist on my new mobile device, but I’d want there to be a better experience with some of them to make it worth my while.

We have reached a curious point in the development of our industry: To build a good mobile App, look at an existing web app and wrap a more-customized, specialized UI around it, and you’ll have a good mobile app. But, while on the surface this sort of looks like a continuation of the old unix-command-line axiom, there is a difference: For the most part, mobile apps tend to exist in silos, unaware of other apps, similarly to how web apps used to exist. There’s also the matter of lock-in. Because these apps are almost always platform-specific, it locks their consumers onto a particular platform. And because the languages used to create for each platform are (and will most likely remain) different, there’s a huge expense in porting an app from one platform to another. And, much like cross-platform development tools for the desktop create experiences that somehow fail to work great on any (see: any Adobe AIR app), the same will happen on mobile platforms (this is a very good argument in favour of Apple’s infamous section 3.3.1 update). I’m not sure what this means for the future, but I have a feeling that with the exception of “utility” apps that will be ubiquitous, we might see shaking out in the mobile environment what happened in the desktop environment. One platform will become thought of as particularly “good” for a certain segment of apps. Blackberrys might be good for “business”, Android for “development”, WebOS for “social”, iPhone for “gaming” – who knows. Right now, the iPhone(/iPod Touch/iPad) app market is so dominant that it shows up in all catgories. But already, friends who are sysadmins or in the support/service side of IT seem to be all buying Android phones (and the number & diversity of IT-related apps for Android is stellar). My colleagues in sales & HR seem to be happy to just upgrade their RIM phones. I really don’t know anyone who’s buying the Palm Pre, to be honest, but hopefully it’ll find a niche soon.

We, as an industry, still seem unsure about when to build an app, when to build a mobile website. I don’t believe the answer is always “build both”. But I’m not sure that as an industry, and more importantly, we as a culture of users of the mobile web (which already has a different flavour from the desktop web) have developed a strong enough syntax to know how to answer that yet. But I do see an continuation of this trend of specialization in skill sets & in what web sites and apps do.

My belief is that Single Serving Web Sites which today exist as mostly joke sites may actually be signs of the future to come: ever-more-specialized web sites & apps. My hope is that this, combined with semantic markup, structured data and smart APIs will actually benefit the user: I may use 200 different beautiful, optimized, specialized apps & websites  in a day, but hopefully they will exchange data in a manner that I control (via things like 1Password (which if you aren’t using – why aren’t you)), but I suspect will be controlled via things like the existing authorizations schemes of Twitter, Flickr, Facebook & Google.

The new bedtime routine

Posted on April 14, 2010
Filed Under Books, Comics, Magazines, Wicked Little Critta! | View Comments

Since buying the iPad, Liam, of course, loves it. He loves the double-scaled iphone games that now have larger buttons that he finds it easier to press. He adores (and is astoundingly good at) Labyrinth 2 HD. He appears to prefer watching movies on the iPad to watching them on TV – again, because he can hold it in his hands, rotate it, zoom it in and out – all the fidgety things that kids like to do.

And now he’s discovered how awesome iBooks is. The past 4 nights, I’ve been reading to him chapters from Winnie the Pooh, the included book. We turn of all the lights in the bedroom, shut the door so it’s completely dark, and snuggle under the blanket on his bed. He generally leans his head on my chest for a pillow, and I lean the iPad on my legs. I read and he turns the pages. Sometimes we zoom in on words or pictures, or rotate the iPad for a few pages.

Then last night we tried out Alice in Wonderland (AKA the Alice App). He immediately loved the typography of it. But then we got to the page where the March Hare’s pocket-watch sways gently back and forth. And then Alice shrank and grew as we tilted the iPad around. It was a great, great experience. I currently only have the lite version, but we’ll be purchasing the full one shortly. And Liam wants us to find more kids books on the iPad, of course. Because reading, in the dark, purely by the light of the iPad is again, one of those minor, but somehow transformative experiences.

Parenting Aside: I love that I can tap a word to get the dictionary definition of that word. But you know what would be great? What would be so awesome for Liam, who is reading a fair number of simple words, and figuring out how to sound out longer ones? if from that same pop-up I had the option for the iBook to read me that word aloud. Or, more to the point, read that word aloud to Liam.

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