Random Thoughts

I have a fraught relationship with the country of my birth. I love it dearly. Inasmuch as one can love a country. Or rather the idea of a country. I expect better from it. Nearly every time, it lets me down. And yet, I have faith, respect and love for what is, possibly the most amazing idea on earth today. Not to put it above Alexander the Great's empire, or the British empire for that matter. Not to compare it to the Greeks or previous incarnations of a unified nation under various rulers, local, foreign (are any really foreign though?) or a mixture of something in between. No. Just the current and present form of the nation.  You may wonder why I say that. I am biased. I have spent more time outside of that country now, than I have inside the country. I have spent more time being aware of who I am (or at least watching myself evolve into who I am today) outside of the country rather than inside. I do live in a vast country. In some ways, it is a lot more diverse than the R...

I've been on a bit of a cycling kick lately. In the three months or so of constant cycling (coincidentally, that is most of Vancouver's summer), I've amassed nearly 1000km in the saddle on three different bikes. I've watched most of the highlights to the grand Tour, and find myself looking up broadcast schedules for the Vuelta which started this weekend. Along the way, I have learned a lot. The hardest bits likely were the things I had to un-learn.  Probably the hardest of the stuff to adhere to while cycling are the rules . Some of these are funny, but most have at least a grain of truth in them. For years, I thought people who wore spandex and rode their bikes around were, well, similar to what Clarkson calls Audi drivers . Turns out, they are onto something. Ride on your saddle for a couple of hours without those things and try it with them and you will see the difference. They are vastly more comfortable than anything else you could ride in. The same goes for j...

On a whim, at the end of last year, I decided to keep track of what time I make it into work on a daily basis. Keeping a record of the time I walk into the door was as far as I got in terms of coming up with a resolution for the new year. The assumption there was that I would try and make it into work prior to 9am. Along the way, I decided to add the time it takes me to get to work. This gave rise to the below graph. I am not certain what I am to take away from this. I have yet to miss keeping track of one day. I obsessively follow the same routine. I get on the elevator going down from my apartment and by the time I walk out the door, I note down the time I started at. I turn my phone's sound off, then I walk to work. About 20 minutes later, I get to work, depending on the traffic lights and the pattern I take to work. I wish desperately for there to be no line at the office elevator so I can get up as quickly as I can. Around the 9 O’Clock mark, there is a rush of people, s...

I am sure many of you consider yourselves responsible owners of your dog or whatever you call those things. But do me a favour and, for the love of god, please clean up after your god damned pet. I do not enjoy walking to work playing dodge-the-dog-poo on a daily basis. Seriously. Unfortunately for me, my eyes work together; so when I am looking down for the next possible poo spot, and am walking, I have a good chance of missing that car entering the intersection from just out of field of sight. And I don't trust those drivers either. So, do me a favour and clean up your dog's crap. It isn't like your dog can do it by itself.  Now, here's the fun part. We live in a place that is full of cameras. CCTV cameras. Mobile phone cameras. Yuppies with SLRs. Clowns with Instagram filters. They're everywhere. These cameras typically take videos and those end up on Youtube. And people, being what they are, they will go through videos and find the most random things. Toget...

I've documented my trials with mobile technology in my past few posts and the story hasn't been great. I was really hoping to move to a new BlackBerry this autumn when a) the BB 10 device would be released and b) my wretched contract with my provider would expire.  I have one more month to go for my contract to expire. After that, I fully intend to move away from my mobile provider because they cost far too much. However, I have no phone to move to. I looked at the Galaxy S III and it seems like an excellent phone apart from the giant size it comes in.  Research In Motion seems to have delayed release of their product until sometime in 2013. While I understand that moving to a new platform, re-creating everything and getting it right can be quite a painful process, I didn't expect this. Now, as most Canadians, I have a vested interest in this company's viability. Lots and lots of our financial instruments invest in RIMM heavily. Why? It is one of Canada's m...

I ran a relay race today. It was no ordinary race, you run uphill for 10km, then you do the grouse grind, then at the top of the grind, you run up the ski hill portion of the mountain, and run back down. The race is called the Seek the Peak and it is a challenging race indeed. My co-workers and I formed two teams and finished the race in a little over 2 hours and change . I did the grind portion of the race, which is the usual trail I hike most weekends.  I had to get up rather early (for a Sunday) to make the race but my team mates were there earlier (I was doing leg 3 of a 4 leg relay). Now, the race is open to solo participants as well and the majority seemed to be solo athletes. The first person to finish the race did so in under an hour and a half . Now, to give some perspective, here's what they accomplished: they ran a little over 3k on fairly flat terrain (an elevation change of 90m), then they ran 6km with an elevation change of over 500m and then hiked a mountain an...

Due to an unfortunate incident with some snow and a bout of silliness, my dear beloved BlackBerry's keyboard decided to give up on me. And along the way, after trying many older telephones and buying a new one even , one of my co-workers dropped off his Google (well, HTC) Nexus One. Life hasn't quite been the same since. On the one hand, this device is leaps and bounds better than my berry. It has a nice touch screen, and most of google's apps are front and centre. More importantly, it has a great browser and enough apps to satisfy anyone who has an app fetish. Incidentally, it doesn't have flash installed (I didn't install it on purpose), and that actually stops a great deal of terrible pop-up advertisements (one of the banes of the PlayBook). I installed Swype on it to type and am impressed by it. It seems to learn well enough and is quite forgiving with my fat fingers swiping over the wrong words. Prior to Swype, I was using the stock Android keyboard, a...

A week ago, something important happened in my life. I skied Whistler for the first time ever. If you don't count the time I sort of limped down the mountain on a snowboard, many years back. It was, by far, the best ski day of my short ski season. The conditions, terrain and my skill level allowed for a much better experience than before.  But that's not what this story is about. This is about my now crippled BlackBerry Tour. I've had BlackBerry devices since 2005. For a while, I had 2 devices; a personal phone, and a work BlackBerry. That changed when RIM released the Pearl 8100. I got mine in late 2006 and never looked back. This was still well before the iPhone and the madness that all these apps bring about. The Pearl still works btw. As part of my ski trip, we took a break for lunch. I noticed that the pocket where I had my phone  was not zipped up all the way. And I had many a tumble in knee-high pristine powder. Still, my phone seemed to work, mostly. I not...

In February, Research in Motion's much anticipated update to the BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 was released.  I have had my PlayBook for a few months prior to that and wanted to put down some thoughts I had on the update and what is still lacking. First, the keyboard. The Swiftkey powered keyboard's auto-suggest interface is a lot better than the previous iteration of the keyboard. It isn't quite the phone's keyboard yet, but I do find the full word suggestions (including non-standard words like my name) to be useful. I find it annoying that not every app uses it though, but that may be because developers didn't know they could. I am hoping they fix that. Startup time has gone up dramatically. I typically turn off my tablet as I hate fishing for the charger. I haven't measured this to mark out the differences in time, but I noticed that starting up from a full shutdown take a LOT longer than it previously used to. I am not so thrilled about this regress...

On Boxing Day, as I was wandering the stores looking for ski boots, I came across the BlackBerry PlayBook. Well, not quite. I sort of went looking for it in the hopes that one wasn't available.  I've been debating the place of a tablet in today's home and frankly, I couldnt find a reason one would buy one. But there I was, on the Feast of St. Stephen, walking out of London Drugs with a PlayBook. I justified getting it in many ways. It was relatively cheap (I paid $249 for the 32GB version; compare that to  $620 you would pay for the iPad 2), in fact, cheaper than my 32GB iPod touch I bought a few years back. It would be useful to test apps and things (I've been intending to build some apps for a while now) and I could use it at home to look up stuff when my computers were not on (which isn't as rare as I thought it would be). None of this really justifies buying one of these devices, but what can I say... I saw something shiny and nice... and I fell for it. ...

Some of you may know that I did something this November that I have not (intentionally) done ever before. I decided to grow a moustache for Movember. Along with some like-minded co-workers, we spent a month grooming our facial hair with the intention of raising funds for Prostate Cancer Canada. When I started the effort, I thought we would raise perhaps $100 a person if we were lucky. We started off with a team of 9 people I think and $900 seemed like a seriously lofty goal. Who in their right mind would donate money for my scraggly facial hair after all? This was my first time taking part in an event like this. I am not averse to taking up charitable causes, but it usually involves donating some money and getting on with life. Not so with this exercise. I had a team and team mates to cheer on. I had to grow hair for a month to show for it. I mean, it wasn't that hard (apart from remembering to not shave initially), but it still took some getting used to. We went thro...

I heard this quote attributed to Prof. Sam Keen on the television tonight: We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.  What is it that makes us go out and look for perfection when it may not be what we want?

Sometimes, you don't realise how nice life is. But when you are reminded of the past, it gives you some perspective. Not everything is like butter folks, not everything is like freaking butter.  I can't remember the number of phone calls and meetings I have been where the theme has been like this cartoon strip. I am glad that is in the past. 

As I sit here, staring at DurableSubcriber.java , I am drawn to John Denver and his song about sunshine. Sometimes, I forget that the world is a bit more wondrous, a bit larger than my little problems.  So, put your problems aside for a moment and appreciate the little things in life. That last cup of coffee you had. The last conversation you had with your friend or relative. The last time you had a home cooked meal at your mother's dining table. DurableSubscriber can wait...

Because of you, in gardens of blossoming flowers  I ache from the perfumes of spring. I have forgotten your face,  I no longer remember your hands; how did your lips feel on mine?  Because of you, I love the white statues drowsing in the parks, the white statues that have neither voice nor sight. I have forgotten your voice, your happy voice;  I have forgotten your eyes. Like a flower to its perfume,  I am bound to my vague memory of you.  I live with pain that is like a wound;  if you touch me, you will do me irreparable harm. Your caresses enfold me,  like climbing vines on melancholy walls. I have forgotten your love,  yet I seem to glimpse you in every window. Because of you, the heady perfumes of summer pain me;  because of you, I again seek out the signs that precipitate desires:  shooting stars, falling objects.  So says Pa...

It is early November and many of us Canadians are wearing the ubiquitous red poppies on our lapels. Those of you who watch the BBC likely have seen our British cousins wear a similar poppy on their lapels. We wear it of course, in honour of all those soldiers who died at all those wars. We wear it for Remembrance Day. Canadians hold the poppy very close to their heart. After all, the inspiration for it came from a Canadian. As I've touched upon before , In Flanders fields is a poem written by a Canadian soldier and physician, Lieutenant Colonel Dr. John McCrae. He penned that poem after seeing his friend die. The poem stirs up a great many emotions in Canadians I find. While we may not believe in war all that much, you can sense a wee bit of fierce pride when it comes to the wars of yesteryear and what many of our countrymen and women gave up for the world to be the way it is today. If you're into figures, know this: fully, one million Canadians went to fight in the second wor...

Those of you that have known me in the last few years know that I try and climb a local Vancouver mountain (Grouse Mountain) as often as I can. I hadn't tackled the grind since mid-September last, so I decided to have a go at it. And lucky for me, it was still open. The day was decent (no rain) and the trail wasn't busy. But then, by the half-way mark, there was ice. Everywhere. I fell a couple of times along the way and had a few more close calls. Suffice to say, I won't attempt it anymore this season. Of course, come Monday, they closed the grind for the season. So, I feel lucky that I got to go one last time this season. This brings us to the end-of-year summary of the hiking season. It isn't so much that hiking season is over as much as Grouse grind season being over. But we shall overlook that simplification.  At the beginning of this season, I had set myself a goal of beating my best time from before. I didn't really come close. Now, keep in mind th...

So, I'm taking part in Movember. As in growing a moustache for the month of November and trying my best to raise funds for Prostate Cancer Canada. I've actually got about 15 people from work to sign onto the campaign, although half have yet to sign up on day 1.  If you would like to donate to my awesome moustache (which will take time to grow since the rules state that I have to start today clean-shaven) or just feel like helping, go ahead and do so. If you're part of a team or doing your individual thing, let me know. I am curious who else participates.  This is the sort of thing I wish more companies encouraged. We're growing a moustache and having fun at it and raising funds for a good cause. Much better than the company buying me food, drinks and what not so I can bring a can of soup for the food bank. I never did understand how that made sense. If the intention is to raise money for charity, then why spend far more money/good than will be raised on the em...

I finished reading Prisoner of Tehran a while back and wanted to write up my thoughts on it here. I have to say that Iran has been a fascination of mine for a while. I am not sure why, but I find Persian history quite interesting.  The book goes over an interesting time in Iran; a despotic Shah gets overthrown, an Ayatollah comes into power. In between these events, the protagonist in the story goes through a lot.  Anyway, if you intend to read the book, stop as I will go into details of the book. The book was written by an Iranian Christian  who now calls Canada home. As a 16-year old, she was put in prison as a political prisoner, beaten, tortured and so forth. She seems to be in an impossible situation: being sentenced to death and then saved by a prison guard, with a caveat that she change religions, and get married to him. Oh and be in prison for life. As a 16 year old.  Most 16-year old children , for they are children, don't have to worry about s...