We’re back! (From vacation.)
Whoa. 1012 articles in my RSS reader. Yikes.
Maybe I’ll go back on vacation.
Tag - travel
We’re (Teresa, Gabrielle, Ethan, and Aidan) currently on vacation, so don’t expect a ton of posts here for the next bit.
Right now we’re in Osoyoos …. 30 Celcius at 8:00 PM!
Water, sun, fun, etc.
Dave Loeppky, the president of the company that I work for, invited a bunch of people to his and his wife Sharon’s beach house for a barbeque on Saturday. The house is on beautiful Lummi Island, just off Bellingham, WA.
It was just an absolutely amazing day – here’s Gabrielle and Ethan on the ferry ride out to the island:
The Loeppky’s house sits below the road, right on the beach, and no other house is visible for hundreds of metres. They have 3-4 kayaks, and I jumped in one and took this shot of the house from the water:
Gabrielle, Ethan, and Aidan all wanted to ride in the kayak too, so they took turns coming out. Here’s Ethan with me … we went out and found some kelp bladders, floating to the suface.
When I took Gabrielle and Aidan out, we paddled to a little island – a rock in the sea – that Gabrielle prompted christened ‘Barnacle Island,’ for fairly obvious reasons.
Then she went out with another girl who was visiting at the beach, and they promptly attemped to run me down:
When out in the kayak by myself, I took my life in my hands and took the digital camera with me. My rear end got soaked – the kayak had rubber plugs or sea cocks that were leaking – but fortunately the camera didn’t get wet at all. I took this shot of a rocky point near the Loeppky’s:
And of the shore just down the beach that had an interesting geological pattern.
Here’s the kayak, Pacific ocean, and a stunning view of the tips of my toes:
Aidan really took to the whole kayaking thing … it was all we could do to prevent him from setting out to sea all by himself:
Meanwhile, the older kids were having the time of their lives in the motorboat …
… or tubing. I hadn’t ever seen anyone go tubing in the ocean before, but that didn’t stop any of the kids, even though it was later in the day, and the water was seriously cold.
While the kids were having fun (Dave and Sharon’s son Steven was absolutely great, taking various lots of kids on rides for well over 90 minutes), some of the older kids played some impromptu netless volleyball on the beach. (That’s me in the white shirt and hat.)
Aidan didn’t spend a ton of time in the boat – he was far more interested in chowing down. Fortunately there was a chair just his size …
Aidan also specializes in giving his mother heart attacks ….
Then it was time to eat, and we all participated in the ritualistic massacre of live shrimp. They were absolutely enormous – bigger than my hand. Teresa and I and the kids had gone along with Dave to pick them up – 10 pounds of the biggest, most fresh shrimp you could imagine.
Dave gets them from a local fisherman who has an amazing complicated set-up in his home/business, right on the water, where he continuously pumps in fresh seawater to keep the shrimp that he’s caught live and fresh. He even chills the seawater to approximate the conditions 400 feet below surface, down where the shrimp live.
I shelled a shrimp myself, if that’s the right word, and actually ate one later on as well. As things turned out, it was a singularly adventurous culinary day for me, as I had both shrimp and oyster – yes, oyster – for the first time. (Perhaps you’ve guessed I’m not a big seafood guy.) The oysters, believe it or not were alive that morning – Dave pulled them right off ‘Barnacle Island’ at low tide. Amazing. It seriously is a different life down on the water.
We also picked up a crab at the fisherman’s place where we got the shrimp, and his destiny was no different:
Ethan, Gabrielle, and Aidan all spent literally hours in the sand and the waves – I managed to catch this particularly good shot of Ethan in between hops over waves:
Speaking of waves, they picked up every 20-30 minutes after a huge ship would pass by, 5-6 kilometres out in the water. During one particularly vicious set, the Loeppky’s boat pounded the beach a bit. Fortunately, it’s a very light Boston Whaler, and can withstand this kind of treatment with no real side effects:
I captured just a small part of the essence of this flower for David Burke, one of Premier’s regional sales managers, who particularly like the red-on-blue contrast, and made me promise to email it to him …
And near the end of the day, we were blessed with a glorious sunset over the water:
We took the 10:00 ferry back to the mainland, got home at 11:30, and fell exhausted into bed after a wonderful, wonderful day. If they were all like this, life would be too good to be true!
While in Winnipeg recently, I spent a day with Arie Veenendaal and some of the crew at i to i interactive, a new marketing/image/branding/graphics consulting firm.
The firm is so new, Arie doesn’t have a website yet, but they do have an office, which I kind of liked. It somewhat reminded me of my office, but adds a variety of nice touches. Here’s a brief photo essay …
New word: PodSwitching. Or phrase: pod switching.
The scenario: two people on a airplane, both pull out their iPods, and exchange them so they can check out each other’s music.
Since I took so few pictures in Winnipeg – a 9-hour meeting and a 6:30 flight out will do that to you – I took a few on the way home.
This one is of the airplane as we lifted off from Regina, Saskatchewan, where the flight had a stop-over:
And here’s a shot I’ve wanted for a while: straight down the runway as the plan is lumbering onto it, just before the pilot executes a sharp turn to line up down the centre:
I kinda like that one, to be honest.
I had very little time on my trip to Winnipeg – today was the only full day I had on the trip, and now I’m back home.
But I like to take a little pictorial memento of every trip, so here’s one of Winnipeg at night, with a little long shutter and drag for dramatic effect:
I hate hate hate when propellor-heads take the easy way out. Like not taking the time or trouble to initialize this date-picker at WestJet’s website with the current date.
I’m on a trip to Winnipeg right now and found this beauty while investigating flight insurance for my airline tickets. Actually it’s probably RBC’s site with the error, since they provide flight insurance for WestJet.
Whoever it is, it’s lazy, lazy, lazy.
Yesterday was BC Day, a civic holiday in British Columbia, and Teresa and I took the opportunity to go to Steveston, a little fishing village-turned-seaside-destination in Richmond, BC.
Tagging in action – a physical folksonomy:
The kids rode their bikes; Teresa and I walked. After lunch (fish and chips, of course) Gabrielle, Ethan, Aidan, and I checked out the docks …
Then we got down to the real business of the day: enjoying the beach:
Something about kids, wherever you go, they love water (and sand and muck and other assorted messy stuff). Gabrielle and Ethan …
And Gabrielle alone:
Aidan and I climbed a massive log and stayed there until Teresa snapped a picture:
What a wonderful day!
You know the sushi that you see on a conveyor belts running around the whole sushi bar on movies?
Well, no need to spend the 8 bucks. Herro of Japan (is that like Lawrence of Arabia?) has posted a video blog entry of precisely this fascinating phenomenon …
I happened to check the Fog Creek Software intern midterm report a week ago or so, and was struck by a number of the thoughts.
This was the first trade show Fog Creek had ever attended. The truth is, a trade show is not a very cost-effective way to reach potential customers. Given the cost of travel, hotels, the booth, a thousand bucks for nice brochures, and everybody taking a week off of work, it’s a really expensive way to get in front of prospects, especially since I can write an article on my website and get in front of 1000 times as many people.
But that’s not really the point: the point is to have interactive experiences with your customers. You can try out lots of different pitches and really listen to how people respond to them, which is something you can’t do in non-interactive marketing like web sites and magazine ads. I learned this from Eric Sink, who wrote a great article on the topic, Going to a Trade Show.
This is incredibly unbelievably true. I just did the exact same thing at the National PTA conference in Columbus Ohio. And the value is incalculable.
Why?
Because you fail fast.
Ok.
Air travel is slow because security is high, and therefore inconvenience is enormous.
What do you do? Go back to buses, baby.
But this ain’t your daddy’s bus!
OK, this is pretty cool.
More people should do stuff just to do stuff. It’s better than zoning on teevee.
Had the cool experience a couple of days ago of meeting Alexandra Samuel on a flight back from Minneapolis to Vancouver.
She’s a freelance writer/academic/and more, and a fellow Mac user. I saw her pecking diligently away at her 12″ iBook on an early trip back to the lower-class WCs in the back of the plane early in the flight, and was so surprised to see her still working away 2 hours later on a stretch-the-legs perambulation that I mentioned the fact to her.
Turns out her iBook battery is good for easily 4 hours or more – to my PowerBook’s 2 hours on a good day with nothing to do but type slowly in BBedit.
The nice thing about meeting another Mac user is that there’s an immediate connection, and we started chatting about all kinds of geeky things like tagging, folksonomies, iBook hacks to get around Apple’s artificial differentiation of not allowing iBooks to connect to external monitors, and more. Very cool.
I took a look at Alexandra’s blog tonight, and while I’m devastated to not make her top 10, it is seriously worth a look.
A careful analysis of her blogroll, however, has convinced me that Alexandra is MUCH more interested in politics than I am. Perhaps I should introduce her to my sister. (Yes, I’m aware that’s a ghost site right now … be patient!)
As I was wandering around downtown Columbus, Ohio last week, I ran across this life-size replica of the Christopher’s ship, the Santa Maria.
Notice how bluff the bow is … this ship would have had a lot of fun (NOT) sailing dead-on into seas of any significant size at all. I wonder if it would have made forward progress at all!
Not to be outdone by the bow, the stern is also extremely vertical and flat.
The amazing thing is that people sailed a boat this size (it’s almost too small to be dignified with the honorific ship) halfway around the world, especially in tempestuous waters such as the Atlantic Ocean.
Don’t let anyone tell you unicorns are mythical creatures. I’ve seen the evidence, in Columbus, Ohio.
And the culprit herself (note the shape of the hoof, near the bottom of the shot):
I ran acros a weigh scale for buses – I kid you not – near the Columbus, Ohio, science center. (I suppose their bridges are so bad, they need to weigh the buses to know where to go!)
It was enormous … filling up half the road. The driver, presumably, can glance at the digital readout, and know how much his/her bus weighs. Since the scale was there, I thought I’d use it.
Before (off the scale):
And after (on the scale):
The mathematically inclined among my readers will now be able to determine my weight – to within about 20-40 pounds.
While I’m here in Columbus, Ohio, to attend the national PTA convention (we’re exhibiting a new product here), I’ve been exploring the city a bit.
Can’t say I see a ton of these in downtown Vancouver:
Is it just me or do Ohioans not count too well?
The Ohio Supreme Court is a great new-old building … old, but refinished recently, without changing its essential character:
Another view, from the back of the building:
A city without water is an impoverished city, in my opinion. This is COSI, or the Columbus Science Center, from across the Scioto River. The lands around the COSI are part of Genoa Park. Genoa … Columbus … hmmm …
A close-up, after I crossed the bridge. Note that this used to be a high school … Center High School. Wow – what a building for a school.
Yet another COSI shot. A seriously cool old building … I wonder what it would have been like to be a student there, 60 years ago. The architecture here is very Genoese, come to think of it …
I crossed the Scioto River (what an odd name, by the way), on this bridge:
Perhaps I was fortunate to get across ….
I have to say, Columbus has a lot of character. I like this city.
Tonight I had the pleasure of watching the 1930s silent film Metropolis in Columbus’ old Ohio Theatre, built in 1928. The theatre is incredible – probably seats around 2000 or so, and is decorated to the nth degree inside.
Perhaps 1000 were in attendance, all us having having paid the non-princely sum of $3.50 for the privilege. (Thieves, all of us.)
The Ohio Theatre is very rococo … detailed, rich, and elegant. This shows the upper balcony, where I was sitting, and part of the main floor seating. Apologies for the blurriness … it was fairly dark in there, and I had no tripod.
This shot is from higher up in the balcony, and captures some of the wall relief a little better:
One of the immense pleasures of going to see a ‘silent’ film is the organ accompaniment. The organ at Ohio Theatre is built into the walls and surrounds of the stage, and Clark Wilson played it tremendously during the three parts of the movie: the long prelude, the short intermezzo, and the fast and, well, furious, furioso.
The film itself was intriguing as it blazed a trail for seminal pictures like Blade Runner in its dystopic vision of an industrial world. It was shot in Germany in 1928, and movies are still borrowing from its images. The 5th Element lifts a scene right out of this film, and many other past and recent science fiction movies owe something to this movie.
NOT, however, its sophomoric ending: the heart must be the mediator between the head and the hands. Exclamation mark, exclamation mark, in all caps, printed on the last frame of the movie. Ok, maybe I’ll take a Greek chorus instead, thanks very much.
And not the anti-Semitism that you can see lurking below the surface. Rotwang, the mad scientist who creates a robot that aides and abets a workers rebellion (that ends badly) gets blamed for everything. He is the only character who dies, and guess what: he happens to be a Jew (or an staunch Aryan with dark hair who really, really likes hanging Star of David motifs all over his creepy house).
It’s really kind of eery to see this movie today, knowing what happened in the 1940s, and realizing that this kind of imagery help pave the way for that kind of mass evil.
However, overall a wonderful evening – a step back in time. It’s interesting that a ‘silent’ movie seems to be a much more social experience than today’s movies, particularly in a theatre like this one. The live musical accompaniment, in this case organ, and the occasional applause, make it seem much more personal. It’s a shared experience in a way that few, if any, of today’s movies can provide.
I highly recomend it!
The more I read instructions, the more I realize my native tendency to NOT read instructions is intuitively and definitively correct.
Check out these wireless internet access instruction cards I found in Minneapolis/St. Paul airport. With a tiny bit of editing for brevity the first reads:
How to connect
Start with your notebook computer off …
Launch your web browser
Okaayyyyy …
Disregarding the nagging question of why people need TWO instruction cards for exactly the same thing in exactly the same place at exactly the same time, the second card reads:
Step 1
Use your notebook computer to check email and surf the net.Step 2
Launch your browser and log or register to pay for our service, after which you can use the internet to check email and surf the net.
Interesting.
Where do they find the people who write these things? I’d really, really like to know.
I’m in Columbus, Ohio for the National PTA convention …
Funny how the Northwest airlines logo, with the stylized NWA, reminds me of the old rap group. I’m sure they’d be amused to see their initials flying all over the skies:
I saw these lights by the exit sign in the airplane that I don’t think I’ve seen before … I’m not sure if they’ve been there all along or if they’re some kind of hijack warning system. Fortunately, they stayed green the whole flight.
Once we touched down in Columbus, I wandered the downtown for a while, snapping the odd picture. Columbus looks like a great place to live – in the spring, summer, and fall. Not too sure about the winters.
Local flavour:
The Key Bank (notice the red key at the top of the building):
I managed to get this pic of the Ohio capitol building, finished in 1853:
More on the trip and convention later …
A few months ago I was in Florida for a conference.
One day (a Sunday) I didn’t have much to do, so I got in the car, and decided to drive all day, arriving back at my hotel in the evening, without looking at a map once.
I wanted to take a picture every five minutes or so while driving – right out the window of the car, or out the front windshield, or however I could.
I called it a transect, which is what scientists, usually biologists, do when they want to get a sense for what flora and fauna lives in a certain geographical region. But transects are usually straight – mine was wiggly. And they’re usually long – mine was mini. But since it was mine, it was great …
If you are brave of heart (it is 8 megs), click on the picture below, which will open a QuickTime movie of my trip:
Oh and, by the way, I didn’t look at a map.
P.S.
I could have hinted the movie for quick streaming, which would have made it start quicker in your browser. Unfortunately that would have made the file twice as big (paradoxical but true) and degraded the quality of the pictures. So in the interests of my bandwidth, and your viewing pleasure, I left it as iPhoto exported it.
I’ve had a little hiatus here for the past 3-4 days: I had a sudden trip to Moose Jaw, which is about as far into the Canadian hinterland as it sounds, though not quite as far as you can get.
Getting into and out of the city was interesting, consisting of a hop from Abbotsford to Edmonton to Regina, and then a shuttle ride into Moose Jaw.
For some reason, the Education Research & Development Institute (ERDI) decided to have its spring session in Moose Jaw. ERDI is an organization that you pay a lot of money to in order to come and talk to a bunch of top school administrators, usually superintendents, about your new products and services. Then they give you their opinion: it’ll sell, it won’t, add this to your product, take that out, or: what are you smoking? We went there to get some feedback on two new initiatives, and got it in spades – mostly positive.
The interesting thing about this ERDI is the number of companies attending is up, way up, and the number of technology companies is skyrocketing. Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and IBM were all there, and there were a number of other smaller players as well, all pitching new products and programs. Very interesting.
I hardly had a chance to see anything in Moose Jaw: I arrived Thursday night, presented at our panel Friday morning, and flew out early Friday afternoon.
I did take a brief stroll at night and what I saw of Moose Jaw is actually pretty cool: historic in places, hip in others:
On the way back to Regina (you fly into and out of Regina, the nearest ‘big’ city – Moose Jaw is about 45 minutes driving west), we saw thousands and thousands of snow geese. The name is especially appropriate, because, at a distance, they looked exactly like snow and ice:
Oh, and just because everyone is probably wondering … in fact there is a huge plastic moose on the road into Moose Jaw. Unfortunately I couldn’t grab a pic of it, as we were speeding along the highway going the wrong direction.
Ah well. That and the fact that it was actually quite a bit warmer in Moose Jaw than in Vancouver will be my two abiding memories of the city.
Going back through some of my photos from my recent trip to FETC, I came across some that I had to publish ….
I’ve seen quite a few McDonald’s all over North America and Europe, but I’ve never seen a ‘golden arch.’ As far as I know, it’s usually the ‘golden arches.’ This poverty-stricking Mickie-D’s is somewhere in central Florida … probably around Lakeland.
There’s a boat ramp right around that same area …. with a sign that tells boaters that they have reached (oops!) the end of the ramp:
My hotel, the Hilton Grand Vacation Suites right near Sea World in Orlando, had a walkway around a little lake left in the used-to-be-swamp-before-it-became-hotel land … and some enterprising dude thought he’d engage in a little guerrilla marketing:
Too bad the entire effect is spoiled by a lousy Geocities web address!
Ever thought of taking a hike … and not coming back for 4 months?
A business associate of mine, Dave Baggenstos, is doing exactly that. Very cool.
Flipping through the channels at the Hilton Grand Vacations Club in Orlando, I came acoss this interesting screen that would warm the hearts of any Microsoft-hating Linux fanatic worth his salt:
Oddly enough, ‘mtiltree’ does not turn up any Google results at all, but it’s obviously an info screen for the movies-on-demand system they’re running, and it was just as obviously not working quite properly. One usually does not want to show one’s underwear in public – it messes up the carefully cultivated grey poupon image.
In any case, the incorrectly configured system was giving away free movies. I couldn’t choose movies, but if someone else was watching (and, presumably, had paid for) a movie, I could watch too.
So, I watched most of Sean of the Dead. I had already seen Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and frankly wasn’t too interested in seeing it again. There was some Harry Potter movie on which bored me to tears after 20 minutes, so I called my mom and sobbed on the phone for a while (not really), and I also got to see a good bit of Troy.
Not bad – but if you work for Hilton, you might want to let them know.
Apple was very visible at 2005 FETC … and that was just the people carrying the laptops …
I’ve been renting a 2005 Cavalier for the past 4-5 days, and I am not impressed. In fact, I am seriously unimpressed.
Why? Read on …
Beautify manhole covers and a couple of others things I noticed in and around the 2005 FETC conference in Orlando ….
Grass in Florida is very odd for someone from the west coast of Canada.
It’s thick, big, chunky … very different from the smaller-bladed, delicate stuff we have near Vancouver.
I feel like sitting down beside and yelling “FORK! SPOON! FORK! SPOON!”
That won’t be funny if you haven’t see the appropriate ad for Campell’s thick and chunky soup.