Disseminate

writing lots, writing little

2008-05-05T21:04:00.002-07:00

May has arrived.

Officially a few days ago, but it really seemed like May in Vancouver today with the warmth, sunshine, and green. And it's been a very intensive few months at work. I'm leading a large website redesign project, have been writing quite a few proposal responses this spring, and am conservatively guessing my word count to be somewhere in the 60,000 to 80,000 word mark.

As such, writing anything of substance on this blog has suffered somewhat. To all of my 10 non-yacht-stalking readers, my apologies.

I have taken up a much smaller form of publishing on the web, with a Tumblr site that I setup last year and decided to dust off in March. I'm using it to capture quotes and ideas from books I'm reading and photos I'm taking. Less of what I'm writing and more of what I'm reading. Not sure it will be much interest to anyone other than myself really, but it places the ideas in time, in context with the images from my everyday life, the passing of the seasons, etc. I like the elegance of the publishing format, the minimal effort required to add something, and the end result. A bit of a scrapbook, really.

I've also taken to posting to Twitter on occasion, still questioning its utility and relevance.

Posting content like that probably isn't helping Twitter further the cause of relevance.

Certainly our recent Tubetastic marketing campaign for ThoughtFarmer has utilized it with a degree of success to communicate with enterprise 2.0 pundits and experts. It's a source of traffic referrals to our site that has grown over the past few months of use.

Of course, good old blog posts about the product, like the one on ReadWriteWeb and this evening's TechCrunch post are better for reach and acquisition. But I've been able to have a few quick exchanges on Twitter that I might not have had otherwise.

So that's that. At some point, when my writing for work wraps up, I'll try to be inspired enough to write something of substance here.

Or, when in doubt, I'll post something about bike racing. Like the fact that World Tuesday Night Championships are starting up tomorrow here in Vancouver or how Cycling Fans Anonymous is the best cycling blog going.

But perhaps it's just as well. As my Tang's Noodle House fortune cookie told me tonight: "Even a brief pause to rest should be worth taking now." Fair enough.

Burnaby Velodrome Six Day

2008-01-05T14:22:00.000-08:00

Spent a couple of nights this past week at the Burnaby Velodrome, watching the Six Day race. In 2005/2006, I was fit enough to ride the madison and suffered night after night against a lot easier competition than what's up for this event. Pearce & Friedman from Slipstream are the world ranked #2 madison pairing and they're currently 2 laps down on Symmetrics' Tuft & Bell -- a couple of amazing riders in their own right, Tuft the #1 ranked cyclist in North and South America for 2007 and Bell a seasoned World Cup track rider, as well as an impressive road cyclist.

Anyhow, one more night - if you have a chance, go watch. It's amazing.

And if you don't get a chance, here's what it's like to ride the boards of Burnaby. You too can take a Learn to Ride lesson and experience the thrill for yourself.

Edward T. Hall meets ThoughtFarmer

2007-12-18T14:50:00.000-08:00

I read the Hidden Dimension in second year university doing my undergraduate degree in Communications. Working in IT, it's not often you get to dust an anthropology book from the 1960's, but Hall's notion of proxemics seemed like a fitting backdrop for trying to put a structure to the social software problem of activity notifications and the potential firehouse of information you can be drinking from in a busy corporate social intranet, like those that ThoughtFarmer affords.

So it's a work in progress, but today I blogged about the proxemics of the intranet over at the ThoughtFarmer blog. I think it's got some legs and is a meaningful way of thinking about the gravity of content, interpersonal relationships in an enterprise 2.0 setting, and the problems of notification / activity monitoring in complex information environments.

Should be interesting to hear what people think.

on the giving of gifts

2007-12-15T13:03:00.000-08:00

Every year around this time, give or take a week or so, I head out to purchase gifts for Christmas. I try to stay close to home, accomplishing my gift buying on foot on Broadway or throughout Kits if possible. And if not, then within walking distance of my office in Gastown. I try to stay away from malls. They can be an efficient use of your time at certain periods throughout the year, but this is not one of those periods. I don't mind crowds that much, but supporting local businesses that make my neighbourhood so enjoyable during the other 11 non Christmas shopping months of the year seems important to me.

Santa visits OpenRoad

I also sit down and read a brilliant little essay by Clive Dilnot called "The Gift." It's an essay from the book The Idea of Design, edited by Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan. There are many brilliant essays in the collection, but this one and its opening few pages always prepare me for creating my list and heading out into the blustery December weather and the crowds.

Below is the first major passage of the essay.

A paradox of gift giving, often alluded to, is that when conducted as obligation, it is profoundly depressive. There is something wrong here. After all, the act of giving, if we disengage it from Christmas and its horrors, should be a positive thing. The gift ought to be that which, when proffered by the giver, induces a double joy -- that of the receiver in the object, and that of the giver at the receiver's joy. Neither of these joys is inconsiderable. It is worth analyzing them because they tell us something about how things work for us and, therefore, something about the character of design activity.

Ideally the receiver of the gift obtains a double joy. First, and most obviously, there is a joy in the thing itself, the object received. The proper gift gives happiness because it matches perfectly one moment of the receiver's needs and desires. Sometimes it even helps receivers discover and satisfy desires they did not know they had. Second, the gift gives joy because the successful gift affirms a positive relationship between giver and receiver. It is concrete or evident proof that the giver knows, and has understood, recognized, affirmed, and sought to concretely meet the other's most intimate needs and desires. Moreover, the receiver finds additional joy in being the subject of the imaginative work undertaken by the giver in securing and giving this gift. The successful gift proves to us that our relationship to the giver is more than merely formal or nominal.

For the giver, the joy is perhaps more subtle, but nonetheless significant. It is a joy, first and foremost, in pleasing others, in getting to know their tastes, interest, and character, in recognizing and accepting their needs and desires (even if contrary to our own). But it is also a pleasure in successfully finding a material thing that successfully concretizes these desires - that gives receivers "exactly what they wanted."

Note that the gift is not just the thing itself. If the nature of the object or product that we proffer is essential, it is, nonetheless, not all we give. What the giver gives beside the gift-object is recognition -- which both Lacan and Hegel recognized as the fundamental human desire, which we crave above all else.

- from "The Gift" by Clive Dilnot in The Idea of Design, MIT Press, 1996.

2007 Canadian Cyclocross Championships

2007-10-22T19:34:00.001-07:00

Headed up to Kamloops this weekend with EV'er Jason Thompson (yes, that Jason Thompson) to check out the Cyclocross BC Provincial and Canadian National Championships. A nifty course, in Riverside Park, put together by Cycling BC VP Mountain Bike Henry Pejril, who happens to have now organized a Mountain Bike Nationals, Road Nationals (twice in Kamloops) and now Cyclocross Nationals. Impressive.

I took some pics of the event and even some small videos on my phone. The anticipated Plaxton vs. Reain battle didn't materialize due to Plaxton busting his seat and not having a spare bike. And Reain didn't manage to defend his title, losing to a hard-charing Garrigan. No Kabush, no Tolouse, no Pinner -- last year in Nanaimo was perhaps a bit more exciting and hard fought, not to take away anything from the two man duel that did materialize.

In the women's race, the 3-way Bessette vs. Simms vs. Sydor race was pretty entertaining. Simms took it in the end, leading into the final run-up, which I managed to catch on video. It was anyone's guess as to who would win. Sydor looked to be struggling anytime she had to get off the bike and run, Bessette and Simms had tested each other the day before during Provincials as a warm-up. It was a close race.

Here's a few 30 second tidbits from the camera.

Elite Women Start:

Elite Women First Lap:

Elite Women Lap 2 Run-up:

Elite Women: Sand!

Elite Women: Last run-up (30 seconds from finish)

And the crazy-fast Elite Men start

Yes, that was the sound of a train in the background. Very apropos.

All in all, some great racing. And some very entertaining fans.

More cowbell! Ukraine is weak! More carnage!

information r/evolution

2007-10-12T14:49:00.000-07:00

Another good video from Michael Wesch. A shame I missed IDEA 2007 this year. Next year.

all persuasive influences

2007-10-10T22:02:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been binging...

When are binging and compulsive behaviors a problem?

Binging and compulsive behaviors are a problem when they:

Interfere with your recovery which includes trying to control consumption of a target element such as food, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, etc.
Are done in secrecy or are hidden because you don't want to admit they are a problem and don't want to remediate them.
Are denied by you and swept under the covers.
Are allowed to have an all-pervasive influence in the course of the lifestyle you choose.
from coping.org

And I figured it was time I came clean. No more sweeping these behaviours under the covers. No more secrecy.

The last six weeks have been characterized by some increased media consumption on my part. Sure, I read a fair amount of books during the course of a year, but the rate of consumption has intensified. And the volume.

Shocking as it may seem, I've actually read some fiction.

Even more shocking, I've watched TV. Or rather DVD's of TV. In marathon sittings.

It started innocently enough with a trip to Chapters. I picked up William Gibson's new book Spook Country, determined to give this whole sci-fi thing a try (if I'd known what Gibson wrote was like this I'd have started a lot sooner on his books). Then a non-fiction book: From Lance to Landis by David Walsh, the doping expose about the 7-time winner of the Tour de France. This conveniently coincided with Lance being in town here in Vancouver. No, I didn't go ride with him.

Then onto Pattern Recognition, another William Gibson novel. And then as I was finishing up No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life by Heather Menzies (non-fiction), I picked up J.G. Ballard's dystopic paperback Kingdom Come.

Whilst not burning the midnight oil turning pages, cable-free me watched all of Season 2 and Season 3 of Arrested Development (thanks Kate) in 3 sittings, each about 5 hrs or so in duration. After going through that experience, I think it's probably the best way to have done it, just to keep up with the intense narrative structure of the show... A year ago, Dan Hill had some things to say about this habit (apparently I'm not the only one to have done this). I recommend reading that if you have some time.

So 5 books and 2 seasons of a TV series in about 5 weeks. I guess it's not really that much, but everything was done all at once, without really pacing myself. Usually a book is a couple of weeks worth of bus reading, down times on the weekend, and before bed. This wasn't the case recently:

Lance to Landis: one 8 hour sitting
Spook Country: 3 days
Pattern Recognition: 2 days
Kingdom Come: 3 days
Arrested Development S2: 2 days (2 x 4 hr sittings)
Arrested Development S3: 1 sitting (6 hrs?)

This time of year definitely has something to do with my propensity to read: that back-to-school feeling in the air, mild academic cravings, riding the bus to work on rainy days.

But I think something else is at play here. Immersion into a given subject or storyline for 4 or 5 hrs at a time, deep focus on one thing and one thing only, has been intensely satisfying, if not a bit disruptive to getting to bed at a reasonable hour. I contrast that to my professional waking hours which, while satisfying at times, take the form of slices of projects, clients, employees, problems, solutions, messenger chats, emails, and voicemails all recorded in 15 minute increments in timesheets.

The impact of this modern working world, one which I help create and recreate through the magic of web-based software development every day, is not so ironically the theme of Heather Menzies' book No Time. And while I take issue with Menzies' critique of an increasingly scattered and symbol-based world (she fails to critique books in that symbol-based world, the very medium she choses to share her ideas which happen to be comprised of the very same symbols you're reading on the screen right now), I will admit that my continuous partial attention span is being stretched in funny ways by the technologies I choose.

True to October form, a quick book roundup of those listed above...

From Lance to Landis
David Walsh
Genre: Sports expose

There's a reason I read this book in one sitting. Pieced together from personal interviews and court testimony, David Walsh has published his evidence against Lance Armstrong and some of his teammates for doping throughout his career. Even if you don't believe the stories told about Lance and the US Postal team, the stories of the early to mid 1990's when the peloton was riding at two speeds, one group on EPO and the others not, and the general frustration from the "non-doping" (really non-EPO or blood doping) riders are pretty convincing. One year riders are in the best shape of their lives, seeing the best V02 and power numbers they've ever produced, and the next year, they're pack filler on the steep climbs of the Alps and the Pyrenees. A sad but engrossing read and no easy answers as to what to do for pro cycling to get any better.

9/10

Spook Country
William Gibson
Genre: cyberpunk? science fiction?

As I'm not a big fiction reader and when told the words "science fiction" I tend to think of stuff that happens in outer space, I wasn't sure what to make of the seemingly present-day, technologically plausible fiction of William Gibson. No galactic outer space battles here... At its heart, I felt the book was a good mystery story involving some interesting characters with a technological twist. Locative art, GPS devices, CIA agents: it all seemed pretty here and now to me - I'm going to have to look up what falls under the Science Fiction genre and reconsider my relationship to it. Loved having part of the book set close to home and Gibson's description of Vancouver through the eyes of someone who's just arrived. The beginning started a bit slow for me, the multiple story lines sometimes a bit hard to get a good flow going when reading. But enjoyable nonetheless.

8/10

Pattern Recognition
William Gibson
Genre: cyberpunk/science fiction

I probably should have read this one before I read Spook Country, especially given the books share a small plot line. A little more action-packed than Spook Country, I really enjoyed it and devoured it in 2 days, basically 120 page sittings at a shot. The London setting was good - especially the Camden bits, which were still fresh from my 2004 visit to the UK. In the story, Cayce Pollard, hired coolhunter/magazine writer, gets caught up in tracking down the source of mysterious video clips that appear on the web. Her allergic reactions to certain brands (oh no, not the Michelin Man!) was quite good and I enjoyed Gibson's sense of humour that ran through the book. Lots of plot twists and international travel. Great reading.

9/10

Kingdom Come
JG Ballard
Genre: dystopic fiction, Ballardian

I'd read Super-Cannes not that long ago, Ballard's novel about a swanky French business/tech park where things go a little sideways, and thought I'd pick up this novel set in a shopping mall in the London suburbs. Oh sure, sounds pleasant enough, but its... um... a bit on the dark side to say the least. A failed ad executive heads off to suburban London to investigate the murder of his father, killed in a shooting spree in the local mall. Hooliganism, consumerism and fascism figure prominently (simultaneously at times) as he digs deeper into the rotting underbelly of this seemingly forgotten place off a motorway near Heathrow. A bit over the top, I found the plot doing circles sometimes, repeating itself, and sometimes generally confusing me. Hard to like anyone in this book, no real hero to root for or even empathize with mildly. In the end, I finished it off, but didn't find myself enjoying it as much as the Gibson novels. Mixed feelings and wondering whether that's the whole point (mission accomplished?). Will have to read the interview on the Ballardian site for some perspective.

6/10

No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life
Heather Menzies
Genre: non-fiction, theory of technology/society

Completely at home within the pages of this book, Menzies reminded me of the sincere tones of many a Communications lecture at SFU during undergrad. She quotes McLuhan with ease, interviews Arthur Kroker and references Ursula Franklin (ps: Franklin's profile is on Barry's science.ca website which I secured the domain name for back in the day!). It's a good survey of some key themes as to how technology impacts our lives and how late-stage capitalism operates at an individual and societal level. It's quite chatty and anecdotal in its tone, telling stories, recounting interviews with actual snippets of dialogue. As such it made for an easy read and is a good on-ramp to the subject. I could see it on the shelf with Postman's Technopoly or something along those lines as a primer for a 100 level course at university. So not much new, but a good antidote to lots of screen time and computer stuff. A nice reminder to stop, pause, read a book, and connect with people (says the guy spending his evening typing a book review into a text box).

7/10

So that's it for September. We'll see how the pace holds up in October...

classic 80's cycling videos

2007-09-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

Hinault vs. Lemond, Tour de France, 1985

John Tesh voiceover + synth music, cheezy American commentary, oh yeah.

Bauer vs. Criquielion vs. Fondriest, World Road Champs, 1988

At one point, Criquielion's bike hung in a bike shop near Oak Bay in Victoria, if I remember correctly.

Lemond vs. Fignon, Tour de France, 1989

Roche vs. Delgado, Tour de France, 1987

7-11 Team Profile, Tour de France, 1986

Bad to the bone. Indeed. Alex Stieda in yellow.

Some great stuff on Youtube.

another fix of total absorption

2007-07-23T19:12:00.000-07:00

Better known for his environmental writing, author Bill McKibben (End of Nature, Deep Economy) wrote a short memoir in 2000 about a year he spent training as a competitive cross country skier called Long Distance, Testing the Limits of Body and Spirit in a Year of Living Strenuously. Skinny-writer turns into enduro-athlete in the memoir. McKibben becomes ensconced in his daily workouts, discovers the thrill of competition and learns a lot about himself along the way. While I'm not a huge reader of the sports memoir genre (other than the occasional cycling book), I enjoyed this quick read in that it explored the loneliness of the long distance skier from someone who wasn't a jock per se. Writer first, hobbyist second, his discovery of his body and his soul are well documented throughout a difficult year of his life, only partially thanks to his strict training regime.

McKibben is a good writer and captures the essence of his sport and endurance sports in general.

Describing how he felt after his first cross country race, he comes to a realization:

Even stronger, though, was the feeling of total clarity that had come over me in that small drama. For once in my life I was absolutely present, right there the whole time. For one hour, 56 minutes, 37 and 3/10ths seconds, almost every thought that flashed in my brain concerned that race, that moment. As I drove myself harder, my field of thought shrunk down to a a narrow focused tunnel. I was monitoring my body - legs, lungs, arms - trying to make sure I stayed close to the edge, going as fast as I could without draining my tanks too quickly. I counted the kilometer markers, I watched the tracks for every rise and corner that might give me some advantage, and that was that. None of the endless internal CNN. The stopless chatter that usually fills my brainpan, broadcasting my moods, fantasies, plans, regrets, and glories, ceased and only the moment existed. It wasn't entirely unfamiliar; sometimes when I'm writing that sense of flow kicks in, and sometimes in sex. Occasionally I've taken solo backpacking trips long enough that my mind has run short of junk food and quieted down. But the almost-desperate clarity of this race attracted me enormously. I stood up and cheered at the awards ceremony that night when John Broadhead collected his silver medal, but the clear fact that I was never going to win any hardware suddenly mattered very little. I'd like another fix of that total absorption, please.

Giro di Burnaby Warm-up

2007-07-19T22:33:00.000-07:00

One good way to get a warmup for the Giro di Burnaby.

Jeff takes a lap with the locals.

Chris Reid (Masi-Adobe) and I with our game faces on.

Even famous local photo Greg Descantes got in on the action.

Good times. I wonder if they make one with a Powertap or SRM?

the longest day ride

2007-06-25T20:39:00.000-07:00

I'd been thinking about it for a few years.

I'd been talking about it on and off during that time. And last weekend, riding up Seymour and Cypress on my birthday, I made the fatal mistake of mentioning it to someone who cared.

Someone who was motivated. Someone who was up for a challenge. Someone with a physics degree. Someone who liked maps. Someone who by the time I got home from that 150km ride up our two glorious local mountains in the fog and rain, had gone online and done some preliminary planning.

That man was Jason.

Oh sure. He looks nice enough. But once you plant a dangerous idea in a physicists head... well... you never know what will happen.

And to be sure, there were atomic undertones or overtones about the whole day. Nuclear was an apt word to use. At least for some of us.

So my bright idea went something like this: not satisfied with the fact that I'd conjured up a 210km long "circumnavigation of the Lower Mainland ride" that I've done the past 2 summers (Vancouver to the edges of Abbotsford and back, via the Albion Ferry to Ft Langley with White Rock and North Delta on the way home), I had often contemplated whether or not it would be possible to do a circumnavigation of the Sunshine Coast / Vancouver Island.

Or at least a large chunk of it.

In one day.

And preferably that day being Summer Solstice, where you had lots of daylight hours to attempt the journey and a day that seemed symbolically fitting for something so epic in nature.

And that's where things got out of hand. Eyeing the distances on a map was one thing, but being able to ride from Vancouver to Powell River, then from Comox back down the other coast to Nanaimo, then back to Vancouver... well... it just seemed a bit too ambitious. Average speeds of 40kmh were required to cover vast distances. Ferry connections were tenuous at best on the coast, even by car, let alone by bicycle.

But this is why it tweaked Jason's attention. And why that Sunday night he'd sent out an email with a preliminary itinerary to the Escape Velocity Cat 1/2 Men's team.

He informed us that in order to make it happen, we had a 5:45 AM departure from Bean Around the World on Cornwall in Kits. The first ferry departed at 7:20 AM from Horseshoe Bay to Langdale, followed by a 10:20 AM departure from Earls Cove at the northern tip of the Sunshine Coast over to Saltery Bay. Then the 12:00 PM ferry to Comox. Once in Comox, the near 120km trip back down to Nanaimo could be done at a leisurely pace, as the BC Ferries schedule was more forgiving - a 5:00 and 7:00 crossing were both available, bringing us back to Vancouver in time to ride back home from Horseshoe Bay in the daylight.

But it was all contingent upon those first 2 legs. Langdale to Earls Cove was estimated at 80 to 84km in distance. The ferry dropped us off at 8:00 AM. We had 2hrs 20 min to cover it, needing to average above 35kmh on a winding, hilly coastal road.

That wasn't the worst part. The second leg, Saltery Bay to Powell River had to be accomplished in 50 minutes. It was roughly 30km in length, needing an average speed of over 41kmh on a winding, hilly coastal road in order to make the 12:00 noon ferry that would take us across. The next sailing at the top of the Island is at 5:00 PM, meaning a 6:30 PM start time in Comox to attempt to ride down to Nanaimo before dark (9:30 PM or thereabouts) would have us doing 40kmh for 3 hrs. And of course it would be pitch black in Vancouver and 10:30 at night when we'd get off the last ferry (if we'd made it) to get back home.

So it was Powell River for high noon. Or bust.

Bust wasn't a totally bad option. We'd have to return back down the Sunshine Coast, with a couple of ferry options and some sympathetic scheduling. But still, that was Plan B. And we didn't really care for Plan B.

It took about 2 days of intensive emailing to get the crew together. Stepping up to the challenge were Jason and myself, Tim, Mike, Paul, and Damien. It would be the 6 of us attempting the challenge on Saturday, June 23rd.

--

We met at the Bean early. Earlier than need be. You could tell we were keen. And nervous. Rolling out at 5:40 something, we kept a brisk pace through a deserted downtown. No-one had had a coffee yet and it was go-time. Over the Lions Gate, through an empty Ambleside and Dundrave, we cruised onto the rolling hills of the low road to Horseshoe Bay. By 6:30 we were in Horseshoe Bay, completing our first 30km warmup in about 50 minutes. No messing about here. We weren't about to miss our first ferry.

After a quick trip to Blenz, where we bumped into Robin, another EV member who happened to be heading over to the Sunshine Coast on the early ferry, we bought our "round trip ticket" of the coast. Then it was onto the boat for our first sea leg of the day.

That ferry was on time. To the second. We left at 7:20 AM and by 8:00 AM, we pulled up and the gate went down in Langdale.

Waiting for the gate to come down, with Soames Hill looming in the background, I felt like it was the start of a crit. 35kmh or more. Is this for real? Who are we kidding? Do I have enough fitness to do this? What the hell was I thinking?

Before I knew it, we were charging off the ferry, and the climbing started as we took the road out of Langdale up towards Sechelt. Our warm-up ride had long since worn off and my legs and lungs felt immediately rough. I struggled to get a good pace going and the guys were motoring.

It wasn't long before we started onto some flat and then rolling roads. We had a favourable tailwind that was pushing us up the coast. The pace fluctuated between 40 and 55kmh as we sped through the first 20 minutes. The group got into a single paceline and pulled nicely. It felt like the start of Gary Lund, the early break trying to get away on the road out of Sooke, hell-bent for Port Renfrew.

Within 35 minutes we were in Sechelt.

"Average speed check!?!"

"37.3!"

"Okay, let's keep it going."

We were doing well. Our initial climbing efforts at 20kmh and less were evened out by the 45kmh and above steady pulls.

Then a momentary setback. Paul's derailleur went into his spokes, taking one of them clean out of the nipple. Stopping on a hill out of Sechelt, the guys fiddled for a bit as they got the wheel in shape to ride. Then we were back on, missing a few minutes, but anxious to get back to speed.

At the one hour mark, I felt like I was coming apart at the seams. I hadn't ridden that hard at that pace for a long time. And all of the guys were flying. I shuttled my way to the back, where I'd stay for most of the ride, taking the occasional guest pull, but mostly hanging on for dear life as the red, white, and black freight train ripped its way up the road. We came around a corner and a black bear high-tailed it into the bushes in front of us. Nothing was stopping this paceline...

Red Roofs Road hill sucked. As did every other hill of substance along the way. I passed familiar sights, having spent summer and easter vacations in Garden Bay for a few years during elementary and high school. We got to the Petro Can at the Garden Bay Road turnoff, saw the "25km to go" sign just around the corner and noted we had 50 minutes left to make it. We'd averaged over 37kmh so far. We eased off a bit, knowing that we could handle a 30kmh pace no problems for the remaining distance.

We pulled into Earls Cove in 2 hrs 9 minutes of riding time. We had 11 minutes to spare. We'd averaged 36kmh for the first major leg.

I pulled out my phone to take a picture of the proud group, when I heard a voice behind me.

"Who the f*ck are you guys?!?"

A man was walking towards us, camera in hand, with a big smile on his face.

"I've never seen anything like that! I stopped twice in my car on the way and passed you guys both times. You only got here 5 minutes after I did!"

A few other walk-on types greeted us, having seen us riding up the coast. We were pretty happy and amused by the reception.

Our amusement would wear off as the Queen of Tsawassen was 5 minutes late in loading and, by our guesses, 7 minutes late in leaving. We pulled away at 10:17 AM, eating into our precious minutes on the other side.

As Jason and Mike ate eggs and ham, we contemplated what we'd do.

We had a few options:

1. go for it - try our best to ride 30km in sub 45 minutes
2. ask the ferry to wait - call in a favour with the Chief Steward, get them to hold the noon ferry at Comox
3. find a friendly driver to motorpace us - we all agreed that the speed we were doing through the corners and down the hills, it would make much difference. And the uphills, we couldn't go much faster anyhow.
4. hitchhike. if getting to Comox was the goal, we could always cheat.

Tim tried to find the Chief Steward. "Sorry guys, the public gets upset if we don't sail on time. I'm afraid I can't do that. It's gonna be tough to make, especially with Heartbreak Hill..." (us: Heartbreak Hill!?! WTF?) "Good luck."

Hmmm. Hitchhiking defeated the purpose too. Well, we just had one option. Go hard.

We came off the ferry like the start of a BMX race. The first climb was rough. And Heartbreak Hill (our stewards nickname for the grinder just out of Saltery Bay) was long. And pitched a few times as our lungs and legs seared.

We put our heads down and hammered. I definitely slowed the group down on the uphills - my climbing just wasn't up to par with the 1/2 guys. I was costing us valuable seconds, if not minutes. We hammered the downhills and tried to make up for any lost time. I don't remember much of this 30kmh, other than 10 speed cassettes and quick glimpses as to what short roller was next. I was at my limit and I wasn't even pulling. It was, as cycling types like to call it, a proverbial death march.

We shot over a small bridge. Snow littered both sides of the road. What? Did I see that? We kept hammering.

About 5 minutes before getting into Powell River, the skies opened up. It started raining. Hard. Really, really hard. Like within minutes the roads were soaked, giant puddles appeared, so were we, and the spray off the wheels was making things hard to see. And added to that a max effort, it felt like your worst Enumclaw crit nightmare - when is it going to end?

Just then, we came into a straight stretch of road running into Powell River. I squinted to my left to catch the ocean, the squall, Vancouver Island with the sun shining on it in the distance, and... the ferry.

There it was! Yes! We'd done it! Hammer harder, let's go, it's right there.

Then, looking again, I sensed movement. Wait, is it backing in? Or going out? What's it doing?

No. We hadn't made it. It was leaving. Right on high noon, the ferry had left. And we were roughly 6 or 7 minutes late. We'd covered the leg in 49 minutes. A 38kmh avg, not quite the 41 or 43kmh we'd needed. And we were soaked.

We rolled past the dock and headed into the Rocky Mountain Pizza and Cafe. We sat dripping, soaked, tired, and annoyed. We'd come so close. And that was it. Gone. 145km of balls-out riding and we'd missed it by give or take 5 minutes. Would we have made it if the Saltery Bay ferry had been on time? If I could climb faster? If it hadn't totally poured rain coming into Powell River? So close...

We managed to kill close to an hour and a half in our soggy clothes, eating, and eventually laughing. We rolled out of Powell River at 1:45PM, heading back down to catch the 3:20 ferry back to Earls Cove and the Sunshine Coast. We took it easy this time, taking well over 30 minutes to regain warmth. I had stuffed newspaper down my jersey to keep warm, even though I had a goretex shell on. We faced a stiff headwind, which had been pushing up the coast all this time.

Eventually we rolled back, in 1 hr 6 minutes, hopped on the ferry, which had somehow equipped the top deck with a sauna or redirected the engine room exhaust up there, and stuffed our faces some more with an assortment of fries, cinnamon buns, stale rice krispie treats and other assorted ferry food you shouldn't be eating when doing max efforts on the bike all day long. Chocolate milk: not the best option if you're planning on going hard again in 20 minutes.

And so it was that at 4:15 PM, we started our way back down the Sunshine Coast. 80km of rolling hills awaited us. With 175km already in the bag, our legs were starting to feel it. At least mine were. Not sure Tim or Mike felt anything.

We stopped for a quick picture at a great viewpoint, one of the few times all day we'd taken to really enjoy the scenery.

And then it was back down the Coast towards Sechelt. At this point, Damien's efforts began to catch up with him. There was talk of abandonment, even a mock moment of waiting for the team car to arrive so he could get into it... People's stomachs were not happy, our legs even less so. Dairy Queen cravings, random food urges, sudden dizzy spells. It all started to get a bit weird around the 225km mark. And then, just after Damien stopped in to get some kind of strawberry smoothie at the beach in Sechelt and suffered a brain freeze headache, the rain returned. With a vengeance.

So for the second time that day, we were soaked to the bone. It lasted pretty much until we arrived at 6:55pm at the Waterfront Restaurant in Gibsons, just a half-block from Molly's Reach. There were 5 burgers and a plate of veggie pasta ordered, hot tea, and more soaking of furniture from our soggy chamois.

The 8 minute post-dinner sprint to the Langdale terminal felt pretty awful; an errant coyote eyed me up from a vantage point across the road, as I climbed a final hill or two just before the terminal.

It was getting dark as we boarded the final ferry of the day. The trip went quickly, all of us commenting on how hungry we were again, even though we'd just had a big dinner. Damien hit the M&M's and wine gums. I drank hot tea trying to get warm.

We'd just missed the rain in Horseshoe Bay and at 9:30 PM, 15 hrs after we'd arrived there, we landed. The low road on the way home was quiet and we nursed our legs across the final few rollers of the day. I hung back with Damien and Paul while Jason, Mike and Tim put in a last few hard efforts (just to cool down, I guess).

The lights adorning the Lions Gate never looked better as I headed back into Vancouver. Down Denman, over Burrard Bridge, and back to the Bean. A farewell to the remaining 3 Kits guys, then back home through the Saturday night streets.

I arrived back at my door at 10:15 PM. 290km later, 9 hrs of riding, 17 hrs of travel time, I'd made it back in one piece.

Sunday was a quiet day, as I dealt with the fallout of 290km of riding and 17 hrs of damp chamois time. I chuckled to myself several times throughout the day, wondering how we'd even thought it was possible, how close we'd come, and how I know that it probably won't be the last time that we attempt that ride...

categorization as political act: everything is miscellaneous

2007-05-21T14:35:00.000-07:00

Yes, I just finished reading a book about the many effects classifying information has on the world, meaning, and knowledge. And no, this is not the first of such books in my library...

David Weinberger's new book, Everything is Miscellaneous is a pretty gentle romp through the world of information, knowledge, meaning, classification, categorization, lumping & splitting, and taxonomies (if such a thing can exist). In describing it as "gentle," I guess I mean that it takes a pretty casual and chatty approach to a pretty complex topic. Which upon further reflection, I suppose is a compliment. Let's just put it this way: I didn't feel as intellectually beat up as I did when reading Wealth of Networks.

The usual suspects of Google, Amazon, del.icio.us, Flickr, and Wikipedia all make an appearance to demonstrate these ways of organizing information and metadata in action. It's categorized (ironically perhaps) as "Business" on the back of my edition and I think that's a safe bet -- those without a large grounding in philosophy, information science, classification systems, or library science can still appreciate this book.

In taking a quick look at the companion blog for the book, I found a link to Cory Doctrow's interview with David Weinberger up on the Wired blog.

It's interesting how something you read and something you listen to have two different effects. I like the fact the transcript is below on that post, as it allows me to cut and paste this little gem from Cory Doctrow, commenting on the political ramifications of how we classify things....

Cory: Right. Or, you say that it's a genuine religious experience of Numanis and I say that it's a hallucination triggered by a center of your brain left over from when some distant ancestor of yours discovered that by hallucinating a god figure, he was able to survive longer, catch more antelopes, and therefore have more babies. And so, I want to classify this as hallucination engendered by accident of evolution and you want to classify it as genuine religious experience. I have a feeling that both of us would be slightly peeved if the other's label were applied to it.

If you're wondering what the hell any of that means, I suggest you listen to the interview. And if any of that is of interest, go find yourself a copy of the book.

beautiful machines

2007-05-11T22:29:00.000-07:00

MIT's Technology Review magazine has some good reading and viewing this month with its featured "Beautiful Machines" articles. Apple's design philosophy is in there, along with a fun video segment that leads off with Bruce Sterling. Always entertaining and worth watching just for the 5 minutes of the closest thing the design community has to its own stand-up comedian.

Their Objects of Desire article (with apologies to Adrian Forty) has some great pictures of design of the recent past. I was pleased to see both NeXT and Netscape 1.0N making it into the mix, having spent a lot of hours sitting staring at both.

Always shocking to see how familiar much of that UI is in today's XP/MacOSX/Vista world of operating systems...

Some great objects that combine the visceral, behavioural, and reflective elements of design.

72 hours in London

2007-04-18T18:23:00.000-07:00

So last week I got on a plane and headed for jolly olde. OpenRoad recently brought onNESTA as a new client, a really interesting institution in the UK responsible for fueling innovation. They purchased our social software platform ThoughtFarmer and I was lucky enough to head over, meet their team, then spend a few hours with some of the leading thinkers and doers in the social software field.

NESTA's new intranet

Thursday and Friday were action packed and it was great to be able to meet with everyone and have some great conversations about social software in the enterprise.

I also managed to spend Saturday walking about and taking far too many pictures with my good old friend Matt. Last time I was in England was for Matt's wedding and it was great to catch up. I think we must have walked close to 15km around London, from Trafalgar Square over to the Tate Modern then to Tower Bridge back to St. Paul's, then off to Belgo the bierodrome for the start of our evening of beer. Not to mention then our slightly inebriated stroll around Soho and then back home. I took a lot of pictures.

The John Snow pub

One highlight was a pilgrimage to the John Snow, the pub at the corner of Broadwick and Lexington, home to where the Broad St pump was in the 1850's. I have Steven Johnson entirely to blame, having devoured his book The Ghost Map on the 1854 cholera outbreak during the Christmas holiday. Matt and I headed up there for some outside pints in plastic cups, then some real inside pints in glasses, and soaked in the ambiance (and cigarette smoke) of a real English pub. And two pints were only �3.40!

John Snow pints

Then it was back to Vancouver. No sooner had I arrived, then it was time to turn around and fly half way across the world. Cross-continental airline travel really is quite shattering, especially when it's a few days apart. Not recommended on a frequent basis, but every now and again it's a great thing to do. I think my head is still somewhere above northern Canada or the mid Atlantic...

benkler: we can do better

2007-04-03T17:27:00.000-07:00

After soaking in The Trap for a day or two, these great words from Wealth of Networks author Yochai Benkler caught my eye. From the short essay "Beyond state and markets:
Social cooperation as a new domain of policy" from Demos' collection "The Collaborative State," Benkler weighs in on the selfish, individual view of humanity prevalent in The Trap.

This binary view of policy has its roots in the view that human beings, left with the freedom to act alone or together, are selfish, calculating nasties. They must, so the thought goes, be ruled by government or provided with extrinsic 'incentives' through as near as perfect a market as feasible to get them to act in their own common good.

This is a profoundly distressing and demeaning view of humanity. And it is empirically unwarranted. Over a decade of research in experimental economics and game theory, anthropology and social psychology, neuroscience and human evolutionary biology all persistently point in the same direction.

No, we are not the self-sacrificing angels that utopian anarchists might once have imagined. But neither are we the nasty brutes of rational choice theory, Hobbesian political theory and market-based everything advocates. Some of us are selfish, yes. Others, true altruists. Many of us are reciprocators. We meet kindness with kindness, and meanness with meanness. We cooperate with those who cooperate with us, and seek to punish those who abuse us. Given the opportunity, we can police ourselves and our social relations by finding trustworthy friends and cooperators, and keep wayward members more or less in line.

There is nothing earth shattering about this to anyone who has lived some portion of their lives with eyes open. It should not have taken hundreds of experiments, several competing theoretical frameworks, and thousands of academic papers to make the basic diversity of human motivation and proclivity to cooperate clear. We have too long laboured under a powerful and negative view of humanity as requiring either control or crass incentives in the form of extrinsic rewards and punishments for closely monitored behaviour.

We can do better.

BBC's The Trap

2007-04-01T23:43:00.000-07:00

Adam Curtis's brilliant 3 part documentary The Trap can be found (for how long I'm not sure and cannot guarantee) on Google Video. Tackling some big ideas like the assumption of self-interested individuals in society, the mathematical purity of game theory, and the powerful effects of these freedom-loving ideas on modern notions of liberty, control, and society, this is worth taking a good 3 hrs of your time and soaking in it for a while.

The Trap Part 1: F*ck you buddy

The Trap Part 2: The lonely robot

The Trap Part 3: We will force you to be free

I managed to see the Century of the Self at the Vancouver International Film Fest a few years ago and love the montage and narrative style of Curtis to tell a compelling (and yes, opinionated and biased) story. He's up there with Errol Morris in my books.

As a lot of my thinking recently has been focused around a) the rise of the network as a dominant metaphor in viewing, understanding, and organizing individual behaviour within a large-scale group, organization, or societal context and spending a lot of time trying to understand b) how social behaviour actually works within organizations in particular (and if it's at all possible to really "understand" it), and therefore how to c) encourage certain types of interactions through the use of internet-based technologies (i.e.: intranet software in particular), I'll have to admit that this stuff sent all sorts of bells off in my head. I'm not immune to the political nature of the objects that I create. Far from it. But what are those politics? What are the fundamental effects of that which lurks behind the anti-authority / anti-hierarchy, meritocratic, individual-freedom-reigns-supreme rhetoric of the network-as-dominant metaphor for social organization?

This also falls squarely into the understanding of the known, knowable, complex, and chaotic.

Phew.

I hope to have something coherent to say in the near future on all of this. But for now, just enjoy the show.

(Thanks to George for blogging this and the magic of RSS for bringing it to my awareness - why did all those cool Flickr folks have to move away from Vancouver to San Jose anyhow?).

translink bus schedules on your phone

2007-03-20T21:32:00.000-07:00

The year was 1999. It had been a year since Karo and OpenRoad collaborated on launching the first BC Transit website with searchable bus schedules. The website we created had gained a ton of users instantly. Call centre volumes hadn't gone down, but web traffic was through the roof for BC Transit. The website won a Canadian Urban Transit Association award. It also wound up being referenced in Patricia Seybold's book, @Customers.com as excellence in customer service online. We were proud of our work and happy to know that BC Transit was providing customers with something they wanted, the answer to the question: "when is the next bus coming?"

It was around that time that the first Nokia WAP toolkit was available for download. The headlong charge into mobile was just around the corner and it looked just like the past. Text-based, menu driven, it was a return to the Gopher interfaces that I'd first cut my digital teeth on at SFU, working as a research assistant and mucking about on large Unix servers.

One day at the office, I asked a developer if he could create a really basic ASP page or two that allowed me to implement the design I'd mocked up for browsing bus schedules on a mobile phone using WAP. We had the dev database in our office and knew the secret ingredient to programming a very simple bus-stop mobile application: the stop ID. Every bus stop in the transit database has a unique identifier. If you know that, you can query the database on what bus comes past that stop. You can then select that bus, combine it with the current time, and show the next time that bus is supposed to come by.

Sound simple? It was. In less than 2 or 3 days of mucking about in our spare time, we had a working prototype that would tell you, from your WAP-enabled mobile phone, when the next bus arrived.

I demo'd the application at BC Transit, which may have become Translink by that point in its history. They were pleasant and polite, but didn't seem to grasp why people would want bus schedules on their phones. And of course, mobile web browsers on your phone were still a few months, if not years away. Bryan had one - his Qualcomm that he used at Telus was pretty shit-hot and bleeding edge. MyBC was getting into providing mobile content and everyone knows the two killer apps for mobile are a) when is the next bus coming (Translink) and b) movie schedules (MyBC)... what else do you need?

All quite funny now looking back at it, with our Symbian, Windows Mobile, and RIM devices, which I'm sure will be eclipsed by whatever crazy devices we'll have in another 7 years from now.

Anyhow. I've always had a pet peeve that this great and blindingly simple idea (tell people when the next bus is coming -- or a rough approximation -- on their mobile phone) had never happened. And as more and more phones came onto the market and adoption soared, I become increasingly annoyed it had never happened.

Fast forward to November 2006. I'm sharing a beer with a group of "innovators" at Steamworks, part of an informal Vancouver get together on a very snowy night. I meet two charming and enthusiastic kids from SFU comp sci, who like me are carrying around an over-powered Nokia N-Series phone which probably costs them way too much to operate to their fullest potential (especially on a student budget). We get talking, killer mobile apps, bus schedules come up, I rant about the lack of mobile Translink schedules, how easy it was to implement, how come it doesn't exist, etc.

I then try to head back home in the middle of a snow storm and get stuck for 2 hrs trying to catch a bus. Of which I took a photo of with my N70... Of course, my bright idea would have been SOL on a night like that, when you were lucky to catch any bus, let alone one on schedule. But I digress.

I bump into these guys again in a few places, then I read my old boss Barry Shell's article about them in the latest SFU Faculty of Applied Science newsletter. Then, today, I get home, tired from having waited at the bus stop for longer than I should have (or what seemed to be a long time, because I really didn't know when the next 22 was coming), I flip open the Vancouver Sun and what do I see?

Guess who's just come up with an SMS bus schedule screenscraper system for SFU students?

Well done gents. It's about bloody time. I should have done it myself.

Perhaps my formal corporate way of asking Translink to engage in a system like that was not the way to go about doing it (it was their data after all). Perhaps we simply should have written it, stickered every stop in Vancouver, and done it guerrilla-style.

So combine John and Igor's efforts with the recent failure of "electronic bus-stops" powered by GPS systems on buses (courtesy of Siemens and part of a $30 million project) and I hope that someone at Translink finally pays some attention to this basic need that could be implemented at such a low cost with such simple technology, most of which already exists today.

Always one to think ahead, I was thinking for the 2007 version of the 2000 WAP-app, you could use QR-coded bus-stops -- my N70 has the Kaywa reader on it, a nifty app that turns your cameraphone into a bar-code reader. Simply point, scan, and it does the rest, sending an SMS or launching a web link to retrieve the schedule information. No GPS, no huge infrastructure from Siemens required. Again, all using technology that exists today.

Here's to user-powered innovation.

Cory Doctorow's Leonardo Lecture at SFU

2007-03-08T16:22:00.000-08:00

In a couple hours time I'll be off to see Cory Doctorow talk at SFU Harbour Centre. Brought here and organized by my former boss at SFU, Barry Shell, I'm pretty excited to see what Cory has to say about technology and society, two topics dear to my heart and mind.

I just sent Barry a quick email letting him know how I was looking forward to it. His response was excellent:

Thanks. I'm with him now, and it's like being in a huge waterfall of modern thought.

I'll be sure to bring my rain slicker and umbrella.

Waterfall photo by flickr user fireramsey

game on: spring series 2007

2007-03-05T18:15:00.000-08:00

Race season 2007 gets underway. 17 years since I took out my first license. Still as excited as ever to own a red bike and go fast.

Looking forward to watching the guys do a great job this season.

Deloitte doesn't get it

2007-02-07T21:35:00.000-08:00

Experientia's blog, Putting people first, a great site for user-centred design types, posted an article that caught my eye today.

Unfriendly technology is creating a digital divide in the workforce, warns Deloitte

A lack of user-friendly technology in the marketplace is exacerbating a digital divide in the workforce between those who can use technology effectively and those who can�t and is likely to provoke a backlash among users, according to a new Technology Predictions for 2007 report from consultancy Deloitte.

The research predicts that technology vendors will focus increasing resources on the user interface in their products this year, and adds that "certain products have become unnecessarily complex and unusable, due to the incomprehensibility of their user interface"

"Businesses cannot afford to have a digital divide in their labour force," said Deloitte technology partner David Tansley. "They need to be in a position where the vast majority of employees interact with the vast majority of the technology needed to do their jobs with little need for training."

Can't say I disagree with any of that. So I decided to saunter over to the Deloitte site and download their 2007 Tech Predictions. I wish the rest of the content was as insightful.

About midway through the report, I found this description of social networking:

Social networking, one of the most talked about new media phenomena of 2006, has been going on for many years, ever since the Internet existed. Social networking evolved from Internet-based communities of interest called Usenets and was originally dominated by technology aficionados, a group that would generally be regarded as being on the wrong side of fashionable. But with the growth in broadband penetration, as well as digital cameras and higher performance processors, Usenets have evolved into social networking, a mass market, leisure and entertainment activity.

Okay. Perhaps I'm just getting hung up on language here, but "social networking" as being a phenomena that found its genesis in Usenet? I had presumed that social networks were the visual, written, or programmatic representation of the strong and weak ties that people have amongst each other. Social networking is the ability to travel through one's personal network and increase the strength between ties (or weaken them) or forge new ones and is something that's been with us since we were in caves. The computer-networked version of this phenomena perhaps relates back to the introduction of mailing lists or Usenet, where people used computers to strengthen and expand their existing social networks, but the way it's described here seems pretty poor.

Next page, we find some more questionable content.

Social networks are the reinvented form of the bulletin board, a previously unfashionable form of Web-based communication much loved by the technology and scientific communities. The original bulletin boards served as a means for professionals and enthusiasts to exchange ideas and request help on projects. Though their use was niche, the impact of bulletin boards was significant. Much of today's software is founded on the ideas and exchanges posted on bulletin boards.

Uh, okay. Let's describe some pretty interesting complex interactions mediated through software as "basically bulletin boards." Again, is it just me or does this seem really weak? And what is with this author and their issues about being "fashionable" anyhow?

Of course, nowadays, sites like Myspace are big bucks because of the zillions of teenagers that go there, use the site, and count for advertising impressions (I'm paraphrasing the next section of their report, and for good reason, which I'll get to in a second).

And this is where it gets even better.

One of the most significant challenges awaiting media companies is dealing appropriately with the posting of copyright-protected material on social networking sites. Unfortunately, a proportion of content posted on these sites has effectively been stolen from media companies. Until now, media companies have tended not to litigate against social network sites for infringement as in many cases there was too little capital for which to sue. However in 2007 the rising value of social networking companies, or the substantial capital of the parent corporations that own them, may make social networks worth pursuing. Technological solutions may provide the answer to this problem. Technology that can search through all uploaded content, including copyrighted music that accompanies user-generated video, is perhaps the only solution for reducing the risk of litigation through searching, identifying, and removing copyright material.

This statement just came from one of the world's most powerful and influential consulting firms, in the same week, that Steve Jobs of Apple, posted these thoughts about copyright and DRM'd music.

How out of touch is Deloitte?

Apparently they answer the question:

Doing so may also help social-networking companies preserve the integrity of their business models. Advertisers, likely to be one of the main components of the social networking business model, are unlikely to want their advertisement placed next to stolen content.

To further re-enforce their feelings about ~~stolen~~ protected content, the PDF that I was reading wouldn't even allow me to cut and paste that text into this blog post. No, their digital document was locked down. Nice. I had to type that drivel above by hand.

Everytime I go to a Myspace page (which isn't very often, I'll admit, but sometimes I get sent a link or stumble across a pretty good one), I have to quickly hit my speaker volume control, as music starts blaring immediately. It's an embedded MP3 of the page creator's favourite band, pictures of their favourite celebrities are plastered all over the site, the flashing blinking oversized signifiers of their consumption-heavy pop-culture immersed consumer lifestyle. It's digital detritus and deeply meaningful to the creator, co-creator, and their peers. Their webpage occupies the same significance as the teenager's bedroom or highschool locker, plastered with the same imagery of their favourite bands, brands, and celebrities.

And it's not just limited to teenagers. Hell, I'm doing it here on my website, with the list of links I provide, the books I'm reading, pictures I display, topics I write about, my list of bands.

The re-mixing, re-purposing, and re-production: the socially associative power of this symbolic game is the stuff advertisers (with their degrees in neo-Marxist thought and semiotics and art-school theory) are made of. Acquiring goods, be it media or otherwise, and then publicly displaying the results, getting the consumers to do the advertising for you (wear those Nikes, flaunt those white ear-bud headphones, swing that Chanel bag), is at the heart of this big messy capitalist marketplace crapola. So much so, people have written books against it.

It's the social construction of self. It's bricolage.

Copyright? Copyright-infringement-hunting search bots? WTF?

The marketers who have figured this stuff out are way ahead of the curve, attempting to exploit and co-opt (as any good hegemonic institution will - and no you don't need to read Gramsci to understand how that works, as advertisers hijack persuasive ideas all the time to try to sell you stuff you don't need) these newly discovered techniques. The whole Unilever / Bridezilla / Wig-out thing that's unfolded in the past few days, using everyone's favourite social networking meets user-created video content super site YouTube, got that company a ton of press (no press is bad press?) when it was revealed that it wasn't real. On the more "legitimate" use of the technology (whatever that means) that OK Go treadmill video has been watched over 10 million times since July.

Yeah, we don't need or want you watching / consuming our content on these social networking sites. We're too busy preparing our legal case against Google right now, thanks.

The genie's been out of the bottle on this stuff for a long time. I don't even know why I'm getting so worked up about it, as it just seems like a complete non-starter. And the fact that Deloitte is publishing this as futures-based stuff seems really backward looking and anachronistic. Next thing they'll introduce is a technology that permits kids from recording their favourite song on the radio onto a cassette tape... The age of mechanical reproduction has been with us for a long time. The age of digital reproduction has just got going.

Perhaps I've been reading too much about networks, how they work, and the proponents of a different kind of information economy. But this stuff really seemed narrow-minded and generally pretty weak.

Escape Velocity invades Discovery Channel Training Camp

2007-02-02T15:39:00.000-08:00

In the words of my friend Ben Jackson, "Controversial!"

Dave Broemeling, Escape Velocity club rider, UBC physics geek, and all-round good guy, decided it would be a good idea to head south to stalk Team Discovery Channel in Solvang, California. Unbeknownst to any of his teammates (well, at least I didn't know), I received a few very entertaining pictures last night while I was late at work.

Dave with some guy named Tom that he bumped into...

Other superstars of cycling that happened to be kicking around included US National Road Champ and spring classic hardman George Hincapie, Giro d'Italia winner Ivan Basso, and 7 time Tour de France Winner, Lance Armstrong.

Lance

Ivan

George & Johan Bruyneel

Well done Dave, you cycling groupie, you. That's a top-notch act of crashing the training camp. And the roads look amazing. Brilliant.

Yes, I'm envious.

You can see the rest of Dave's super secret spy shots of Discovery and their new bikes on Flickr.

on haptics, mobility, and the out-of-touch future

2007-01-23T20:37:00.000-08:00

Just got back in from an interesting session at UBC, featuring two speakers for an "HCI Industry Colloquium" -- UBC prof Karon MacLean and Nokia N-Series UX designer Ryan Opina talked about what they do for a living to an audience of UBC CS undergrads, grads, profs, and a few odds-and-ends "industry types" (of which I suppose I include myself).

A somewhat appropriate photo: my hand holding Matt's Nokia N91, one of the N-Series devices designed here in Vancouver

Karon's talk was entitled "Building a Haptic Language - communicating via touch" and highlighted her research into the area of interfaces that you touch and they touch back. Or as she so poignantly said on one of her slides, "What can 'feels' mean?"

Karon also pointed to much of the haptic interface research going on at the HCI and SPIN labs at UBC, including Colin Swindells' PhD thesis which attempts to answer the question, "What relationships exist between the kinesthetic feel & behavior of a rotary manual control, and visceral emotional responses?" -- or said another way, "What makes turning a knob feel 'right' or 'good' and how do you quantify that?" I've probably vastly oversimplified Colin's PhD thesis, but I found it interesting to see how the measurement and quantification of human emotion figured prominently in the abstract, a philosophically meaty topic to be sure.

With a background in engineering, robotics, and psychology, Karon provided a content-rich presentation that left me looking for more. Force-feedback video game controllers and vibrating mobile phones aside, haptics is clearly a rich area of investigation for designers as it allows for a third dimension, a third sensation (versus the standard auditory / visual modes) to provide information to the user. Karon used the metaphor of only being able to represent things in black and white and suddenly being able to use colour, also pointing out that no such verbal language for things like hue, saturation, brightness, and contrast have been invented for this new mode of representation. It's early days for touch-based interfaces.

And of course, what a timely seminar to attend, given all of the hullabaloo about everyone's most wanted touchy-feely device, the iPhone.

And who better to follow Karon's talk than a designer from a company very concerned with the introduction of such a device into the mobile marketplace, Nokia. Ryan Opina is part of the User Experience Group for the N-Series in Burnaby and talked a bit about what he did (not so much about what he's doing... as that's all very hush-hush as one can imagine) as part of that team.

As someone who's owned an N-Series device for the last 6 months, I was interested to see and hear Ryan talk about the process they go through, get a sense of some of the collaborative forces that have an impact on the design of such a device. Marketing, manufacturing, industrial design, software: the user experience group has to juggle all of the above in coming up with appropriate hardware and software designs.

Ryan asked the audience what they all wanted in their next phone, with some predictable responses: GPS, music, cameras, better battery life, etc. A few brought up durability, nearly no-one mentioned longevity. And no-one pointed out the number one feature that I want from my next phone: a reasonable data plan to go along with it.

I talked to Ryan after his presentation and shared some comments about the frustration of having an N-Series phone and not being able to exploit all of its network-driven / data intensive features. User experience, hardware design, and software design are all great and offer a lot of potential, but if you expect people to pay $500/month in data charges to carry one of these things around, you've really limited your market.

Of course, that really has nothing to do with the designer of the phone and everything to do with the carriers. And beating up phone carriers, especially here in Canada, is a bit like shooting ducks in a barrel. So I'll stop there.

Ryan had a Nokia N95 with him that I took a quick look at - lots of reviews out there and I've spent a fair bit of time reading them. Similar to the N80 in general form, it is what Nokia is touting as their "multimedia computer" platform. Certainly has all the bells and whistles you'd expect from a next-gen device.

The N95, photo: Nokia.com

We'll now have to wait to see if the carriers change their billing model and make owning one of these devices worthwhile. I'm not holding my breath...

why I love cyclocross

2007-01-22T10:33:00.000-08:00

From the World Cup #11 Cyclocross race in Hoogerheide, NL.

Wicked.

Thanks to Ryan for pointing that one out.

greg down under

2007-01-17T13:13:00.000-08:00

My good friend Greg Descantes, local Vancouver cycling photographer extraordinaire, is down in the scorching heat of the Australian summer (40 ° anyone?) shooting the Jacob's Creek Tour Down Under. This is a big event, the kickoff of the season for many big-name pros, and a huge race for the Aussies. Greg's got some great shots so far of the team presentation, the opening crit in Adelaide, and now Stage 1 of the race. Looks like he made it onto a motorbike today.

Head on over to Greg Descantes' Tour Down Under page for more great shots.

on ideology

2007-01-07T23:35:00.000-08:00

And now, for some philosophy...

Within a given society, political consciousness may be said to emerge through the realisation that certain opinions paraded as a priori truths by influential figures may in fact be relative and open to investigation. If they have been declaimed with sufficient confidence, however, these truisms may seem to belong to the fabric of existence no less than the trees and the sky, though they have been - a political perspective insists -- wholly invented by individuals with specific practical and psychological interests to defend.

If such relativity is hard to keep in mind, it may be because dominant beliefs themselves are typically at pains to suggest that they are no more alterable by human hands than are the orbits of the sun. They claim to be merely stating the obvious. They are, to use Karl Marx's helpful word, ideological -- an ideological statement being defined as one that subtly promotes a bias while pretending to be perfectly neutral.

For Marx, it is the ruling classes of a society that will be largely responsible for disseminating its ideological beliefs. This explains why, in those societies in which a landed gentry controls the balance of power, the concept of the inherent nobility of landed wealth is taken for granted by the majority of the population (including many who lose out under the system), while in mercantile societies, it is the achievements of entrepreneurs that dominate the citizenry's concepts of success. As Marx pointed out, "The ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class."

Yet somewhat paradoxically, these ieas would never come to rul if they were perceived as ruling too forcefully. It is the perfidious nature of ideological statements that unless our political senses are well developed, we will fail to spot them. Ideology is released into society like a colourless, odourless gas. It pervades newspapers, advertisements, television programmes and textbooks, always making light of its partial, perhaps illogical or unjust take on the world and meekly implying that it is only presenting age-old truths with which one but a fool or maniac could disagree.

Courtesy of Alain de Botton's book, Status Anxiety.

A big stack of books awaits me in 2007. I read some great ones in 2006, some of which are deserving of a mention. I've had to re-sort my bookshelf as a result of some recent purchases, evenly spread out across the categories of Design, Environmental/Societal Collapse, Theory of Technology, Urban/City/Vancouver themes, and (of course) Cycling. A few biz books are at work waiting to be read as well.

On the environmental/societal catastrophe/information design/urban-city front (all it's missing is Vancouver and Cycling themes), I cranked through Steven Johnson's Ghost Map in two days at Christmas. His London cholera whodunnit has been receiving favourable reviews (one appeared in the Vancouver Sun this weekend) and I found it a quick and enjoyable, if not a bit disgusting at times, read. Two thumbs up for that one.