Category: Uncategorized Page 62 of 76

I wasn’t sure I could be any more proud of my daughters than I was a couple of weeks ago in Boston, at the Head of the Charles regatta.

But this weekend, I might just beat that record.

A year ago at this time, we were in Montreal, watching Jaime compete in the Canadian University Rowing Championships, where her UVIC varsity 4 took the gold medal.

Now, here we are one year later, and Jaime and her crew are defending their championship at the CU’s in Victoria this weekend. I don’t think there are any live feeds of results, but I’ll be sure to post something when I know how she did. They’re feeling very good about their chances of repeating, after the great showing they had in Boston.

Last week, the senior member of Jaime’s boat, who is a former World’s Doubles Champion in the Under 23 Lightweight Women, told Jaime that she has never been in a faster boat. Needless to add, Jaime is “over the moon” about how well things are going, as are Heather and I. (And while I’m waiting anxiously by the phone this weekend, Heather will be watching the event live! She’s out in Victoria this weekend, “on business,” she claims, although the timing worked out really well. I’m quite jealous.)

But that’s only Part 1 of the Proud Papa update this weekend. As I mentioned a couple of posts back, Kelly is off this weekend in Washington, visiting the University of Washington and Washington State. We sent her off yesterday, and I have to admit it’s all starting to seem very real to me all of a sudden. In just a few months, Kelly will have made a decision about where she’s going next year, and then she’ll be gone! And we’ll be true empty-nesters! I’m not sure I’m ready for that.

Anyway, this weekend’s trip will be followed by next weekend’s visit to Louisville and the week after that Kelly is heading back out west to Sacramento, California. Then she has to settle down and figure out just where she wants to be for the next four years. It’s a tough decision and I really don’t know what she’s going to do. Louisville has a great program, and she knows some of the other rowers there, so they are probably the front runners. But of course, we’re going to be out on the west coast, with Jaime, and we’d all like her to be closer. And Seattle is just a short ferry ride from Victoria.

No matter what she decides, I know she’ll do well. To have four top US Universities competing to have you join their program (and offering her full scholarships, no less!) is a great honour and a real credit to Kelly and all the hard work she’s put into the sport. It almost makes up for all the hassles she’s putting up with on her basketball team — but that’s another story.

You know the type…a favourite columnist or personality disappears from view and all that’s left behind is the vague reference that they’re “on assignment.”

“Doing what?” you wonder to yourself…”It must be pretty important.”

That’s my hope. I’ve just dropped out of sight after that long car trip back from Boston and I’m sure you’ve all been thinking I must be off doing something really important.

Alas, it’s not really that exciting and in the interests of full disclosure, I’m going to offer you a glimpse of what my reality has become each day.

I’m back in the commuting fast (or slow!) lane. I am up at 4:30 each day to walk the dogs and grab a bit of breakfast, then it’s off to the Go train station. I catch the 6:29 out of Aldershot (just outside of Hamilton), and ride it to Union Station, then stay on it for another three stops, finally pulling into Eglinton station in Scarborough at about 7:51 am.

If all goes well, there’s a shuttle bus waiting for me, to take me (and the other commuters) to Aviva, which is about a 10 minute drive from the station. That’s the morning…if all goes well. Leave the house about 6 or so, arrive at work at 8:15. Lots of sitting around, but not too bad.

Coming home is a different story. I usually catch a shuttle from work at either 3:35 or 4:15. If I catch the 3:35 shuttle, I get on the 4:18 Go train, which takes me to Burlington, hope on a Go bus and arrive at Aldershot at 5:52 pm. Then I drive back home, arriving about 6:10 or so…Leave work at 3:30, arrive home at 6:10 or so. Just about 3 hours!

If I catch a later Go train, my time getting home jumps to about 6:45 or so…

Sometimes I catch a Via train instead, which is a bit more money, but is comfortable and you spend less time in the train. But it doesn’t really get me home any earlier…

So…in order to book about a typical 7.5 hour day, I’m away from home for over 12 hours each day. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for anything else, unfortunately.

I remain optimistic that once I settle in, working from home will become a bit more of a viable option, but I’ll still be travelling plenty of the time. But it’s worth it. I doubt I could do this in the long term, but as a short-term contract, it’s worth it. The people are good to work with and I’m enjoying the work. So, aside from the commute, it’s working out well.

And at least I get to catch up on all my podcasts during those long hours on the train!

This weekend is The Head of the Charles regatta in Boston. And I’m happy to report that both Jaime and Kelly are participating. How about that?

The head of the Charles is one of the largest regattas in North America and it’s a pretty cool event. Heather and I, along with Kelly and her boyfriend, Spencer, are heading out tonight on our way. We’ll stop somewhere along the way tonight and head into Boston by noon tomorrow (I hope.)

Jaime is already there with her Varsity 4 teammates from UVIC. So we’re looking forward to seeing her again and watching them both race.

I hope to have a good connection in Boston, so I’ll plan to post some updates while I’m there this weekend. You can also follow along with the results on-line, if you like. I’m not sure what they’ll have on the weekend, but check and see.

More later…

One of the terms that keeps popping up on blogs, in podcasts and occasionally in more conventional media is Web 2.0. While I’ve kind of figured out what the term refers to, I admit that exactly what was being discussed remained a bit of a mystery to me.

There is a fairly extensive entry in Wikipedia, and I got this from a Technorati search. (What’s Technorati?

But the other day I happened to pick up a copy of Discover Magazine, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a special issue. There are a lot of interesting articles in the mag, but one of the pieces that caught my eye was the Emerging Technology column, written by Steven Berlin. The piece is called “Web 2.0 Arrives.”

It’s a good piece and it helped me understand what’s meant by the term. More importantly, I started to get a glimpse of what it means for companies to embrace the idea and how they might begin to gain footholds in this market. The part of the story I liked the best was Berlin’s metaphor of the Web 2.0 as a rainforest.

The difference between this Web 2.0 model and the previous one is directly equivalent to the difference between a rain forest and a desert. One of the primary reasons we value tropical rain forests is because they waste so little of the energy supplied by the sun while running massive nutrient cycles. Most of the solar energy that saturates desert environments gets lost, assimilated by the few plants that can survive in such a hostile climate. Those plants pass on enough energy to sustain a limited number of insects, which in turn supply food for the occasional reptile or bird, all of which ultimately feed the bacteria. But most of the energy is lost.

A rain forest, on the other hand, is such an efficient system for using energy because there are so many organisms exploiting every tiny niche of the nutrient cycle. We value the diversity of the ecosystem not just as a quaint case of biological multiculturalism but because the system itself does a brilliant job of capturing the energy that flows through it. Efficiency is one of the reasons that clearing rain forests is shortsighted: The nutrient cycles in rain forest ecosystems are so tight that the soil is usually very poor for farming. All the available energy has been captured on the way down to the earth.

Think of information as the energy of the Web’s ecosystem. Those Web 1.0 pages with their crude hyperlinks are like the sun’s rays falling on a desert. A few stragglers are lucky enough to stumble across them, and thus some of that information might get reused if one then decides to e-mail the URL to a friend or to quote from it on another page. But most of the information goes to waste. In the Web 2.0 model, we have thousands of services scrutinizing each new piece of information online, grabbing interesting bits, remixing them in new ways, and passing them along to other services. Each new addition to the mix can be exploited in countless new ways, both by human bloggers and by the software programs that track changes in the overall state of the Web. Information in this new model is analyzed, repackaged, digested, and passed on down to the next link in the chain. It flows.

There are a lot of very smart people who think that we’ve only just begun a revolution in how the Web is going to shape the way we live. I’m starting to think they’re right.

Like most of you, I imagine, I watched a lot of coverage of Hurricane Katrina. I saw the problems with the way the federal government, along with State and local authorities handled the immediate aftermath. And I listened to the criticism of the various authorities involved.

There was a lot of media attention focused on the issue and a lot of commentary. But yesterday, when I picked up my copy of The Atlantic Monthly, I learned something new about this story — and I’m shocked that I hadn’t heard it before.

Imagine if, in advance of Hurricane Katrina, thousands of trucks had been waiting with water and ice and medicine and other supplies. Imagine if 4,000 National Guardsmen and an equal number of emergency aid workers from around the country had been moved into place, and five million meals had been ready to serve. Imagine if scores of mobile satellite-communications stations had been prepared to move in instantly, ensuring that rescuers could talk to one another. Imagine if all this had been managed by a federal-and-state task force that not only directed the government response but also helped coordinate the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and other outside groups.

Actually, this requires no imagination: it is exactly what the Bush administration did a year ago when Florida braced for Hurricane Frances. Of course the circumstances then were very special: it was two months before the presidential election, and Florida’s twenty-seven electoral votes were hanging in the balance. It is hardly surprising that Washington ensured the success of “the largest response to a natural disaster we’ve ever had in this country.” The president himself passed out water bottles to Floridians driven from their homes.

The author is Richard Clarke, who had his own run-in with the Bush Whitehouse after he published his memoirs about security concerns pre and post 9/11.

But what really floored me is that I hadn’t heard anyone else compare the response to Florida a year earlier with Katrina. Why is that? It doesn’t seem like it should have been that tough to point out, given that the Florida hurricanes were a significant news event. I do remember them. But I didn’t realize just what kind of a response had been laid out in advance, and how that same level of preparedness had not been cranked up in advance of Katrina.

Looking at the steep decline in President Bush’s approval ratings in recent days, one can’t help but wonder whether the US public is beginning to see through the transparency (at least what appears that way to some of us in Canada) of how “homeland security” gets parcelled out. If it’s a state in peril, with an election win in the balance (and your brother is the governor), that appears a lot more important than the fact a Category 4 or 5 hurricane is threatening a million people.

But it also makes me wonder about the apparent short-term memory of the media. In retrospect, the comparisons between Florida one year ago and Katrina and Rita this year seem like a natural. But I don’t recall seeing or reading any stories about that. Do you? Perhaps I missed them, or maybe there’s more to this than Richard Clarke is willing to admit.

I decided I should try to find out, so I went searching for articles that might have made the same link. Turns out there were a few. Here’s one that talks about FEMA’s response to Frances and Katrina. It also contains links to a number of other items about the same issue.

So there were stories out there, but they certainly didn’t get the kind of play that I expected they would. But then again, hindsight is always better, isn’t it?

By the way, if you want to read the rest of the Atlantic article, you’ll need to subscribe to the Atlantic, or pick up a copy at the bookstore (or, what the heck, send me a note and I’ll send you a copy. As long as you promise to never, ever, tell!).

This is a really cool video. I don’t know what it is, but I like it.

I’ve no idea where it came from or anything about it.

Happy Thanksgiving!