Urban Vancouver

We currently don’t have cable. I’ve been putting the decision off to the fall, when I’d judge how much I was missing regularly watching the Canucks. At the moment, I’m thinking Shaw will go without our $50/month. It’s hard to be hopeful at the moment

He was inactive on draft day, but I was willing to give new Canucks GM Mike Gillis the benefit of the doubt. Then he turns around and offers a Mats Sundin an absurd amount of money–at least $3 million over market value (it feels to me like Sundin is done with the NHL). And before that he makes a cheap, ineffectual play for a restricted free agent.

In short, unless Mr. Gillis has some brilliant strategy that none of us can see (and that’s definitely a possibility), it’s going to be a rough year at GM Place.

That’s no big deal. The team has been quite good for nearly a decade, and you can’t go to the playoffs every year. The organization ought to embrace the idea that this is a rebuilding year. They should give as many young players as much playing time as possible, and try to trade some veteran assets while they’re still desirable. Roberto Luongo isn’t going to win a cup in this town in the next two years, and he could bring serious value in a trade.

The Canucks likely won’t make such changes in 2008, but assuming the team tanks, look for a fire sale on veterans at the trading deadline next spring. And I think that would be terrific. The current crop of players was good, but rarely great.

I didn’t hear until late last night (ferry trip plus Mark Knopfler concert kept me away from sports news), but yesterday longtime Canuck Markus Naslund signed a two-year deal with the New York Rangers for what works out to $4 million a year:

“It wasn’t hard to keep playing because I knew a few weeks after the season I wanted the chance to play again and maybe redeem myself and play the way I know I can play,” Naslund said last night from his home in Ornskoldsvik.

I’m glad to see the backside of Naslund (as, I’m sure, were many Vancouverites when he was walking around town). Don’t get me wrong–he could play. In his prime he had a Brett Hullesque release from the slot, cunning hands around the net and terrific outside speed. Also like Hull, he has that ability to sneak into the bare patches of defensive coverage to make room for a shot. He had three forty-goal seasons here in Vancouver, and was obviously a key component to the team’s success during his tenure. For a couple years, the West Coast Express line of Naslund, Morrison and Bertuzzi was the best in the league.

Still, his production has been systematically tailing off in recent years. He may enjoy a boost with a more attacking-style team and a more capable centre, but that was never going to happen in Vancouver. The team hasn’t had the personnel for the past two or three years. Last year the Canucks paid Naslund $6 million for 25 goals from Naslund last year, which was about 15 goals too few.

Naslund was never the kind of player I really admired. His commitment to defense was, at best, spotty and he was reasonably timid on the ice. Mike Keenan’s decision to hand Naslund the captaincy after Messier left was a brilliant tactical decision, but I think its effectiveness has long been exhausted. Naslund always struck me as too cool to be captain. It was hard to imagine him getting angry at his teammates for underperforming, or standing up for them physically on the ice.

It’s a common pattern as players age: they don’t necessarily want to decline in the same city where they rose to prominence. I’ve enjoyed watching Naslund over the years in Vancouver, but his expiry date had, for me, already passed.

If I have the Swedish correct, the title of this post means “we’ll miss you, Naslund”. Cue the cheesy tribute video:

This is a third in a series of posts about the process of building a house on Pender Island. If you’re just joining us, you may want to read the first and second entries before this one.

We recently got a series of sketches from John, our architect. These were the first drawings he’d done–really just starting points to foster further discussion and narrow our options. In theory, John has parsed and processed our site visit, conversations, questionnaire answers and his observations, and distilled it into an approximation of the house we might like.

John presented the sketches without a lot of interpretation or recommendations. He explained how they worked, and the general ideas, but left them with us to mull over. I appreciated this–it enabled me to turn my largely uninformed eye to them without a lot of preconceptions.

To begin, John proposed that we put a single-car garage (we really hope to stay a one-car family) a good distance–60 or 70 feet away from the main house. The two buildings would be connected by a walkway, built with a retaining wall into a slope of the land.

This appeals to me at some fundamental level. Our property is on Hoosen Road, a typical rural BC road. It’s densely lined with tall cedars, and the walls of green are only occasionally interrupted by narrow driveways. Our driveway is one of these. Turning into it, the trees close in as you mosey another eighty or a hundred yards to the proposed site of the garage. With this layout, you’d have a final green-walled leg to your journey as you walked up to the house.

In terms of the main house, our architect provided three options to work with–two narrow, two-floor designs and a squarer, three-floor floor plan. We immediately rejected the three-floor option. We want big, airy rooms, and splitting our limited square footage between three floors seemed counter-intuitive. Plus, our house in Malta had five floors (though it probably wasn’t 1500 square feet). Vertical distance feels different from horizontal distance, and I see no need for more than the minimum number of stairs. This is also a minor consideration for resale. We’d likely be selling to an older couple, and they’d probably want fewer stairs.

The ground plans that follow are from the two-floor design we prefer. We’ve got changes in mind, certainly, but our architect has done a great job of capturing and responding to our requirements.

Some notes on aspects of the design that appeal:

• The pathway ends with a kind of tunnel that runs through the house to a terrace or deck on the far side. This invites visitors to meander through to check out our view before they even enter the house. This extends the gradations of public and private space that begins back on Hoosen Road. You’re on our property, ‘in’ our house, but not inside yet.
• Whether joined by a roof or not, the office section has the feel of separate building. I’ve never needed to ’shut the door on work’, but I do like the sense of a house composed of more than one ‘pod’ or structure.
• Separate office spaces for Julie and I, stacked on top of one another. We have different lighting requirements for our work spaces (I want a cave, she doesn’t), and this solution satisfies those nicely. We could probably put a hole in the floor of some kind so that we could talk to each other without the phone or one of us moving.
• A big, fluid kitchen, dining room and living room space and only one eating area. We both grew up in big houses where the dining room was, at best, used once a week. None of our houses since then have had breakfast nooks or other secondary eating locations, and we’ve never missed them. We really don’t want unused space in our home.
• An indoor/outdoor fireplace. In temperate BC, this might extend the sitting-on-the-deck season a bit.

Next Tuesday, we’re going back the our property with our architect to have a look at it again. We plan to roughly figure out where the house would sit, and Julie and I will provide feedback on these initial ideas. Then, ominously, we talk about what we can and cannot afford.

Guideal (a curious, non-English-in-origin name that has me thinking of GUIDs) is a website that connects tourists and tour guides:

If you want to show a part of your neighbourhood or your entire city to travellers or if you want to visit a place like never before with of one of its residents; welcome to Guideal!

Each tour guide creates his/her own tour according to his/her knowledge and personality and can, if desired, be paid for each tour accomplished.

So, for example, you could get a historical tour of Chicoutimi in English or French for $50. Or a free tour of Belfast in the seventies.

I’m not one for guided tours myself, but I could see a place for Guideal in the long tail of tours. I’m thinking of smaller towns and remote locations that may not have fulltime tours that are advertised offline. Alternately, in big cities, there’s probably a demand for guiding in less popular languages like, I don’t know, Tagalog or Xhosa

Maybe it’s just been a bad week, but VOIP feels like a rare Concorde-esque backward step in technology. In the past week, I’ve had three separate conversations (all, coincidentally, with software startups) interrupted by lousy phone service. In each case, the person I was speaking to blamed their dodgy VOIP service.

We were reasonably happy with Skype (and SkypeOut) when living in Morocco and Malta (the Maltanet VOIP service was awful). Yet, counterintuitively, it’s been much more unreliable when making calls from BC. Maybe a busier network is to blame?

On the other hand, Shaw has provided the most reliable VOIP service I’ve ever used.

In short, making a phone call used to 100% reliable. Thanks to VOIP, we’re down to about 85%. What gives?

Irish blogger Damien Mulley devised a generous and clever means of increasing the visibility of Irish tech companies:

The premise is that everyone talks up a company (if they think it deserves to be) on a particular date. Every second Tuesday at it happens. Everyone tech and non tech alike are encouraged to talk about the company so that hopefully a tipping point is reached and a potential investor or journalist or partner hears/reads about the company.

Happily, the first candidate for this bloggy bake sale is our client, PutPlace. The response has been mighty, mighty impressive. For all you Catholics, Eirepreneur suggests that a better name might be ‘Shove Tuesday’.

I was thinking that we ought to do this for Vancouver (or British Columbia) startups. Maybe Techvibes or Bootup Labs could sort that out?

In related news, we’re running a photo contest for PutPlace. All you have to do is photograph yourself making a silly face, submit it to our contest, and you could win an annual subscription to PutPlace for 100 GB of data + $200 USD Amazon gift certificate. Go forth and panic for the camera.

We were briefly in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. We didn’t get much of a chance for sightseeing, though we did take an enjoyable architectural boat tour on the Chicago River. That’s where we took these fifteen odd photos. They’re unremarkable. This is probably the best one:

Our climate action dividends arrived today. For non-British Columbian readers, the provincial government has seen fit to bestow CAN $100 on every person with a British Columbian address. This cash-in-hand accompanies new taxes and new tax cuts. From the brochure that accompanied our cheques:

New tax reductions, new programs and the Climate Action Dividend are all designed to support your climate smart choices. Whether you purchase energy-efficient light bulbs, shop locally for produce, or use your dividend to help purchase eco-friendly upgrades in your home, your decisions can make a big difference.

First, a couple of petty complaints about the brochure itself:

• There are photos of nine people on it, and eight of them are women and girls. Subtext: men can’t be bothered with the environment.
• The English side of the brochure prominently features a photo of a (forgive me) very dorky, glasses-wearing girl clutching a sapling. Subtext: only nerds care about the environment.
• The phrase ‘global warming’ is three times as popular on the web as ‘climate change’. Yet the brochure only uses the latter term. Subtext: the government’s PR firm set the messaging instead of picking terms that people actually use.

I think this is an idiotic program. The vast majority of British Columbians are going to spend this money the same way they spend every other dollar. If the government wants to make the environment a priority, then they ought to invest the $440 million in measurable initiatives that are in the public interest.

However, I’m prepared to be convinced otherwise. Who wants to mount a rational, evidence-based argument in favour of the climate action dividend? I think I was out of the country when this announced, so I missed the initial flurry of punditry.

I tried to do this for myself. My first point was the citation of the Canada Child Tax Benefit or ‘baby bonus’. I did find some (hardly definitive) evidence that it increases the birth rate. Still, I’m not sure that comparing it to this one-off cheque is an apples to apples argument.

Via email, I got a link to this remarkable (if academic) video demonstrating a series of Photoshop-esque effects as applied to video. It’s from a group at the University of Washington–here’s a blurb from the accompanying paper:

We present a framework for automatically enhancing videos of a static scene using a few photographs of the same scene. For example, our system can transfer photographic qualities such as high resolution, high dynamic range and better lighting from the photographs to the video. Additionally, the user can quickly modify the video by editing only a few still images of the scene.

If you watch to the end, you’ll see how they remove an irksome No Parking sign by cutting it out of a single video frame. It’s pretty cool.

Via Reddit, I read this Variety article (written in a peculiar style) discussing a study released by Magna Global. It reveals that, for the first time, the average age of a TV viewer has reached fifty:

Fueling the graying of the networks: the rapid aging of ABC, NBC and Fox. The three nets continue to grow older, while CBS — the oldest-skewing network — has remained fairly steady…

For the just-completed 2007-08 TV season, CBS was oldest in live viewing with a median age of 54. ABC clocked in at 50, followed by NBC (49), Fox (44), CW (34) and Univision (34). When live-plus-7 DVR viewing is factored in, the nets (except CW and Univision) drop by a year — which still reps the oldest median age ever for the nets.

Don’t confuse Fox with the Fox News Channel like I did. At 65 years old, the latter’s daytime and primetime programming has the oldest average viewer among the cable networks. I’d expect that for the Hallmark Network, but that seems pretty old for Fox News (and I have no way of appraising the legitimacy of the study).

The writing seems to be on the wall for live television. As producers and advertisers react to this, expect some creative and hyper-irritating new advertising strategies.

Caution: Whingey post concerning trivial complaint ahead.

I’m sitting here on the ferry, and a middle-aged woman a couple of seats away from me is painting her nails. This is something I witness once in a while, on a ferry, in a cafe or some other public space.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always found nail polish fumes pretty noxious. They instantly give me a slight headache.

I’d add public nail painting to a list of olfactory infringements–too much perfume or cologne and smoking would be others–on our personal space. Maybe women who do it are more accustomed to the fumes, so they don’t notice them as much?

The person who invents an odor-free nail polish is going to make a mint.

On a related note, do you think people wear more, less or roughly the same amount of perfume and cologne as they did twenty or thirty years ago?

On Wednesday, I heard a short CBC piece about an architectural exhibit in London, England on the topic of Vancouverism. It was the first time I’d head the term, so I listened with some interest. The host Jian Ghomeshi interviewed Bing Thom about the exhibit and the concept of Vancouverism. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s a spirit about public space. I think Vancouverires are very, very proud that we built a city that really has a tremendous amount of space on the waterfront for people to recreate and to enjoy.

At the same time, False Creek and Coal Harbour were previously industrial lands that were very polluted and desecrated. We’ve refreshed all of this with new development, and people have access to the water and the views. So, to me, it’s this idea of having a lot people living very close together, mixing the uses. So, we have apartments on top of stores. In Surrey we have a university on top of a shopping centre. This mixing of uses reflects Vancouver in terms of our culture and how we live together.

I did a search in Google, and couldn’t find a Wikipedia article on Vancouverism. I resolved to create one when I found the time. Happily, on Tuesday, somebody already started one. I’ll add this quote.

I also found this short film about Vancouverism:

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I also note that Richard has been tagging things with the term for a couple of years.

Some old family friends gave my Dad a couple of photos from the summer of 1985. They’re of a family day out on, canoeing on a lake. We can’t remember where we were. We thought they might be photos of Alta Lake, near Whistler. Does anybody recognize these mountains (and, uh, that clearcut)?

I was trying to judge based on this Google Maps view, but it’s hardly conclusive. I searched through some Flickr photos that purported to be of ‘Alta Lake’ but, then, you know, got bored.

In another photo from that day, you can see an eleven-year-old Darren in an over-sized cap enjoying New Coke. That particular addiction (to Coke, regardless of taste) started early.

UPDATE: This is, indeed, Alta Lake. Thanks to Brent and Jason in the comment, who verify our suspicions. Jason found this image on this page from 2005, and the vista looks nearly identical to my photo.

I heard through the grapevine that acclaimed Hollywood photographer Kevin Abosch is in Vancouver preparing a feature film project. He’s offering a super deal on getting headshots done for locals:

While Kevin is in Vancouver doing some pre-production work on his movie, rather than charging his usual fee of $2500+, he is only asking local Vancouver talent to pay $300 which helps cover the expense of the trip and his suite at The Sutton Place Hotel which becomes his mobile studio. The shoot lasts about 1/2 an hour — You come ready to shoot with up to three changes of clothes if you like. Kevin shoots approximately 200 images from which he edits down and you receive a proofsheet with 90 images. Then you pick your favorite 2 images which will be professionally retouched and made reproduction ready for you on CD. If you should want more than two images, that is fine but each additional image would cost $25. It’s that simple. If you would like to set up a time slot for either July 11th, July 14th or July 16th.

If anybody is interested, drop me an email and I’ll pass on the contact details.

Kyle MacDonald, of Red Paperclip Guy fame, emailed to say he’s looking to trade in his house in Kipling, SASK:

That’s right, Dom and I are trading the red paperclip house. With who? For what? Well that’s where things get interesting: We have no idea yet.

I’ll be accepting trade offers from now up until 5pm on Friday July 11th and will be in Kipling the week of July 14 to make the trade….maybe with you! I’m not looking for anything in particular in exchange for the house…

He doesn’t actually indicate if he’s looking to upgrade. What do you trade a house for? Another house? A houseboat? Mind you, Kipling housing prices aren’t the same as Vancouver. I doubt you could even get a studio apartment in Vancouver for the value of that house.

Kyle wrote a book about his paper clip odyssey. Regular readers may recall that I have some random synchronicity with Kyle. For his next project, he’s trying to determine who these fancy gentlemen are.

Last week I had a very forgettable meal at Kelsey’s (Caution! Cheers theme music ahead!), a restaurant at the Calgary airport. It’s apparently a chain of restaurants with over 100 locations in Western and Central Canada.

The entire place has this weird, indirect connection to the TV show Cheers. The Kelsey’s logo is similar to the Cheers branding. The restaurant is apparently named after Kelsey Grammer, the actor who played the stuffy Frasier Crane. And the interior of the restaurant was all brass taps and wood panelling, with the walls were covered in cheesy 8 x 10 photos of celebrities (notably, there were no photos of the cast of Cheers). Plus, of course, when you visit the website, it plays the theme song from Cheers.

Here’s what’s weird: I can’t find any direction connection between the restaurant chain and Kelsey Grammer or Cheers. It’s like they manufactured a Cheers-like franchise brand without ever actually acknowledging what they were doing. Does anybody know the back story of this chain?

UPDATE: Hurray for crowd-sourcing. We have more information. As Jason writes in the comments below, he emailed Kelsey’s to enquire about the origin of the name:

Paul Jeffery was the founder of Kelsey’s Restaurants International Inc. and the first restaurant opened in Oakville Ontario, in 1978. Currently we have 125 stores across Canada and 1 in the US in New York. The name Kelsey’s comes from the fact that our founder Paul Jeffery and his brother frequented a roadhouse on Kelsey Rd in Barrington, Illinois while traveling in the U.S.A - hence the name Kelsey’s.

Andrea writes with links to several trademark filings for Kelsey’s. The most germane one is from 1993, where they seemed to adopt a logo similar to the Cheers brand. Andrea points out that 1993 is also the year that Cheers ended and Frasier began.

Seeking some mediocre television that wouldn’t interest my wife (we tend to watch the good shows together), I downloaded a couple seasons of “How I Met Your Mother”. It’s an ordinary, post-Friends sitcom, whose redeeming features are the hotness of Vancouverite Cobie Smulders and the awesomeness of Neil Patrick Harris. I didn’t actually know that Harris had such an extensive theatre career./p>

That’s probably why Joss Whedon has cast him in his new, web-only musical entitled Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Here’s a teaser trailer:

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Here’s the empty but official page, and the most prominent fan site. It also stars the excellent Nathan Fillion and the charming Felicia Day.

Something occurred to me the other day: I hardly ever worry about data loss on Capulet’s computers anymore. Why? Despite having no coherent backup plan, 90% of our work is safe. It lives out there, in the magic Internet cloud:

• The majority of our documents are in Google Docs.
• For other documents, we’ve probably emailed them to each other, ourselves or our clients.
• We use Gmail for email.
• We use Blinksale for invoicing, Harvest for time-tracking and Google Calendar for scheduling.

The same goes for the personal side, where 95% of our photos are in Flickr, and all of my MP3s are backed up to MP3Tunes.com. Personal email is on Gmail, too.

I’d like to claim responsibility for this distributed strategy, but it’s totally accidental. The only thing I really worry about is historical data from before, say, 2005. We’ve got an external hard drive for that, but I will eventually back it up to a remote location as well.

It’s a bit ironic that I write this post on the day that our online storage client comes out of the private beta closet.

From the New York Times, things are going from bad to worse for the purveyors of ink-stained tree bark:

For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.

Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.

The article goes on to explain that the San Francisco Chronicle is losing US $1 million every week. Every week. The primary cause of this downturn is “the Internet’s siphoning away of ad revenue”.

Would I care if the physical version of every newspaper in the world went away? Nope. The real question is whether newspapers can work out a way to survive as Internet-only entities. I’d really like to see a balance sheet for, say, the Vancouver Sun, to understand how much they’d save (and how much ad revenue they’d lose) if they moved to an exclusively online format. That’s certainly not viable today, but it looks like the writing is on the wall.

After arriving in Chicago, we spent a quiet evening in at the swish and oddly-gothic Hotel Sax (”Monsieurs Lestat and Impaler, your table is ready in the Crimson Lounge”). We watched a movie in our room (reasonably priced at $10): “Rendition”. I’m going to borrow a plot summary from Roger Ebert’s very positive (and highly politicized) review:

Director Gavin Hood’s terrifying, intelligent thriller “Rendition” puts a human face on the practice. We meet Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), an Egyptian-born American chemical engineer who lives in Chicago. He and his wife, Isabella (Reese Witherspoon), have a young son, and she is in advanced pregnancy with another child. After boarding a flight home from a conference in Cape Town, South Africa, Anwar disappears from the airplane, his name disappears from the passenger list and Isabella hears nothing more from him…

The movie sets into motion a chain of events caused by the illegal kidnapping. Isabella, played by Witherspoon with single-minded determination and love, contacts an old boyfriend (Peter Sarsgaard) who is now an aide to a powerful senator (Alan Arkin). Convinced the missing man is innocent, the senator intervenes with the head of U.S. intelligence (Meryl Streep). She responds in flawless neocon-speak, simultaneously using terrorism as an excuse for terrorism and threatening the senator with political suicide. Arkin backs off.

Meanwhile, in the unnamed foreign country [where El-Ibrahimi is held], we meet a CIA pencil-pusher named Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal), who has little experience in field work but has taken over the post after the assassination of his boss. His job is to work with and “supervise” the torturer Abasi.

Canadians will, of course, be reminded of the unfortunate Maher Arar. Coincidentally, I misspelled his name when I searched for him, and the first result is entitled “Extraordinary rendition”.

The film has a lot in common with Syriana–multiple plot lines featuring government cover-ups, a large and impressive cast and plenty of violence and torture. It isn’t as accomplished as Syriana, mostly because of a hokey third-act plot trick, and a far less ambiguous attitude toward its subject matter.

Still, I enjoyed it as an exotic thriller, and appreciated the very relevant theme of the fluidity of individual morality. I also liked seeing Morocco again. Much of the film was shot in Marrakech, and, remarkably, one scene was shot in Essaouira, the small town where we lived for three months.

Rendition got average reviews from the critics (Metacritic: 55, Rotten Tomatoes: 47) and, like other films about Iraq, failed miserably at the box office. I can’t wholeheartedly endorse the film, but it’s worth a look.