personal

My pal Chris wrote a moving post about an experience he had growing up in South Africa, a white boy who went with his church to talk about Jesus in the “coloured” townships.

Which made me think about traveling and the relationship we rich, “white,”[*] educated people have with the rest of the world. I commented on Chris’ blog, but here’s what I wrote:

I was in Cuba some years ago on holiday and I recall reading before I went about how Cuba had been “spoiled” by tourism, and how you couldn’t have a genuine interaction with people any more because they see Westerners only for their wallets now. It’s true, as far as it goes – those Cubans did see me as a wallet.

But these days (even then), that kind of talk makes me angry, because built into it is this assumption that we deservea certain kind of treatment, as if the world is a kind of park, where we can go visit various places to get wonderful experiences: Bhutan for the mountains and the sage monks & yak-milk tea; Philippines for the sunrise while visiting tropical islands in a skiff guided by a wiseacre biologist; Hong Kong where we can do commerce with the shouting market people, who get such a kick out of Gweilos straying beyond Kowloon. Drinking beer late at night in the veld listening to stories of African leopards. Cuba for sexy music and smiling, dancing people.

I’ve experienced all these things and loved them, they are experiences I cherish. But I have done these things, am able to do these things because I am wealthy and white, and the world, truly is my oyster. I remember being in university, thinking: I will travel the world, I will undertake adventures, I will see distant land and do great things. And for a few years I did. I loved it; it was dashing and daring and exotic and all the things it’s supposed to be. And granted to me with ease, and no sacrifice, because of who and what I am.

I hated that trip to Cuba, not because Cubans see me for a wallet — which actually is “annoying” — but rather because of what I, as tourist, saw Cuba as: a place filled with people who should like me for who I am, give me the benefit of the doubt, people who should see beyond my colour and my new running shoes and instead have a conversation with me about what life is really like for them, because, well, I’d be happy to do the same for them if they came to Canada. That is, I saw Cuba as: entertainment. I’d paid for it, and didn’t get what I wanted.

And it pissed me off, not that Cuba didn’t deliver; but rather that I had put myself in that position, of “he who has paid to be entertained.” I don’t mean that on a surface sense, but at a deeper level. Tourism puts us in such an odd dynamic with people: you are there to get something out of an “experience” … joy, wisdom, commune with nature, commune with another culture, history, something…And the exchange? What do we give up? Our time and our money. Only one of which is worth anything to anyone.

I have this odd feeling that tourism and it’s thinly veiled cousin, “international development,” are about as colonial as a military invasion: the real beneficiaries are the tourists, the NGO’s and their rich, adventuresome consultants; just as the beneficiaries of military invasions are rarely those under whose name invasions happen, these days at least.

I say all this because I am conflicted by Chris’ story of the townships … I have been treated well by people all over the world, treaded poorly by others; i’ve been robbed and cheated, threatened and bored to death. All of it great, and I wouldn’t trade it. Saying I’ve had yak’s milk in Bhutan gives me great pleasure (I was there to “help” the Bhutanese, naturally).

But it’s curious when our own innocence or blindness is caught out — as I guess the young Chris Hughes’ was — by something so moving, which is the twin realization that:
a) we do not belong somewhere
and yet:
b) we are welcomed nonetheless.

I think that might be just the thing that irks me about our modern white fascination with “doing” Asia, or “doing Columbia,” … this assumption that we do belong there. It’s our world afterall.

So I find Chris’ story very moving because, I interpret it something as a recognition that he did not belong where he was … and yet….and yet…there was kindness, despite his naivete, despite where he came from, despite the preposterousness of the situation, and not because of it.

* Re: “white” I use this term broadly, and really it’s the wrong term. It’s not “white”, so much as “affluent middle-class, educated westerner…” I’m using it as a cultural marker, not a racial one; though the two are not totally unrelated.

My friend and colleague Suw Charman-Anderson launched an Ada Lovelace Day initiative (site, twitter) getting bloggers to pledge to write a blog post about women in technology.

To honor my pledge, I am writing about Danielle Zaïkoff, P. Eng.

But first, a little introduction about my more recent experience with women in technology. Every project I’ve worked on on the web has had women playing integral an role in making it happen:

LibriVox started growing with the help of Kristen (designed the site) and Kara (pretty much ran the forums, and continues to do much of the heavy-lifting on cataloging), and later Betsie (developed the structure for the cataloging system), Annie (developed the structure for the cataloging system), Cori (helped develop the community podcast, and general internal systems), Gesine (designed much of the internal systems workflow), and Kristin (numerous wordpress improvements and php hacks). Of course many more people, men, women and children contributed to all of this, but it’s fair to say that LibriVox never would have succeeded without the efforts of these, and later, many other women.

Collectik (RIP): was designed and turned into html/css by Kristen.

Earideas, and the Canadian Podcasting Directory (RIP): were designed by Marie-Eve, with html/css integration done by Patricia and Madeline.

Datalibre: is driven mostly by Tracey.

The Atwater Digital Literacy Project: is run by Miriam.

The Atwater Library’s computer centre: is run by Jun.

BookCampToronto: is being organized by a team including Lex, Erin and Julie.

Book Oven, my biggest and most ambitious project, was co-founded by my business partner, the extraordinarily talented Stephanie (read the Ada Lovelace post about Steph here) who is CTO, product manager, production manager, project manager, UI designer, and countless other things, every day. Marie-Eve does the design; and Suw Charman-Anderson is developing our community management approach, managing user testing, and generally helping us think better about that grey zone where people and technology intersect.

So it’s fair to say that my life in web technology has been spent surrounded by dedicated and skilled women who have helped me build some things that I am proud of.

But back to Danielle Zaïkoff.

My first real job out of university, was with a group called the E7 (now E8), a non-profit group funded by electric utilities from G7 (now G8) countries. The mandate of the group was twofold: to develop joint policies about sustainable development in the electricity industry, around pressing issues such as climate change; and to do knowledge transfer projects about best practices and environmental management in developing countries. I worked in the Secretariat (permanently based at Hydro-Quebec in Montreal), which consisted of a senior engineer, nearing retirement, and a small team of junior engineers just out of university. The Managing Director (I worked for two, both women) was generally a senior executive from Hydro-Quebec, who was winding down a successful career, and wanted to spend a couple of years doing something challenging, but not necessarily tied to central operation of Hydro-Quebec.

Danielle Zaikoff was my first boss at E7. She had started as an engineer at Hydro-Quebec in 1972, I believe she was the first female engineer on staff at the company. Not content to stay in the offices in Montreal, she worked as a project engineer on the huge James Bay hydro installations, a post she was initially refused, because the company did not think women should work in in remote field operations. She went on to become the first female director of Hydro Quebec, the first female president of the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec and the first woman president of the Canadian Council of Professional Engineers.

I learned many things from Danielle, mainly the importance of precision and clarity in work, and the dangers of sloppiness. She was a generous boss, who spent much time mentoring the young engineers and others under her command. She demanded excellence and promptness, was exacting, fair, tough and dedicated.

Like many of the women I’ve worked with in tech over the years.

One in a while I get together with some friends and make home made sausage. An important phase in the process is what we like to call the “Meat Sink.”

Here is a pic of the links. And the drying sausages.

UPDATE: The meat sink is the key to all good start-up pitches.

I wrote my political platform the other day, with Health being one of my ten planks. One of the problems with Health is that it’s in provincial jurisdiction, so my federal platform would have difficulty really affecting health here in Quebec.

This province has the lowest rate of citizen access to family doctors, which you would think would be a priority problem for the government. It’s not. Having access to family doctors is the best way to keep healthcare costs down, by providing true preventative medicine that catches problems before they spiral out of control. Having health issues dealt with in the Emergency is the most expensive way to run a health system. (I suspect the government has a better economic equation: just letting people die is the cheapest course of action).

Why do we have so few family doctors in Quebec? Here’s one reason:

Medical students from out-of-province are REQUIRED to sign an agreement saying that they will leave Quebec after their residency. If they choose to stay, they must pay a significant fine.

So one of the reasons that we have a lack of doctors is that doctors who have gone to medical school in Quebec, and trained in Quebec medical residency programs, all at taxpayer expense, but come from other provinces are REQUIRED to leave when they are done their training in Quebec.

Make sense?

There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time….Steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.

Lord Chesterfield, quoted by Christine Rosen.

From an article by Andy Rutledge, about design & martial arts, but applicable to anything related to life, I think:

In short, it is simply not enough to be highly competent under the best of circumstances, when you’re filled with inspiration and all the gears are turning. What matters most—and most often—is how competent you are when things are not going well.

[more...]

I worry for the children …that with all of this information, they will not have the chance to be aware of their own lives… Head for the hills! Go to the woods, get away from all these people! Go to a place where boredom is available to you; there’s where you will start to remember all the things that have ever happened to you.

– Garrison Keillor, on the Book Show.

Indeed. There is so little time to really think these days, what with the constant processing processing processing processing of information. New, surface, ephemeral information, constantly updated and replaced by more.

Mike and I and a few others had dinner with Jon Udell the other night, and Mike raised, convincingly, this big spectral question:What are we really doing, we digital do-gooding evangelists? To what degree will these “improvements” we wish to bring to people’s lives actually bring improvements? Mat’s complainging about the SNR on the web.

Ursula Le Guinn thinks books are doing OK (subscription only), and while I agree with her, I haven’t finished a book in months (this happens occasionally).

So: Is your life improved by the web? By your mac? Your iphone? I mean, I know you love the web and your mac and your iphone, but have they truly improved your life? For me the answer is a very big yes, and a very big no, and they compete furiously. (Though I don’t have an iphone yet, so maybe I should wait to make final judgments).

When I worked in New York in a financial brokerage house in 2000-2001, my colleagues (I think it was Manus, a short funny Italian from New Jersey; and Bill, my office-mate, from Texas; and probably a few others) told me that in the banking/finance business – at least their end of it – “Canadian” was a code word that actually meant “black.” I had the impression the term had been used like that for years.

I think we were at lunch, and they were all talking about someone or other, and Manus said, “Oh, he’s Canadian,” and I perked up and said, “Oh really, where is he from?…” and of course they all laughed and told me it meant black.

I guess it was so you could say nasty things about “Canadians” without anyone getting pissed off.

I totally forgot about that, till I just saw this in the Boing:

The Canadian National Post looks on with mild horror as American linguists report on the growing trend in the American south to use “Canadian” as a masking euphemism for black people, so that white racists can say socially inappropriate things without tipping listeners off about the cancer in their souls.

I would point out to Cory Doctorow, though, that (I hope) he’s got his definition of euphemism wrong. Since a euphemism is: “the substitution of a mild, indirect, or vague expression for one thought to be offensive, harsh, or blunt….”

I can buy that the term “Canadian” is mild, indirect, & vague; but I think that calling “black people” offensive, harsh or blunt … is not what Cory meant. Presumably he meant Canadian as a euphemism for more offensive words for black people (you know, like the n-one we’re not allowed to write).

But even there, it’s not really a euphemism, but rather a way to disguise direct racial insults, eg. “Oh, don’t work with him, he’s a Canadian.” Etc.

Anyway funny when little quirks of language pop up 8 years later in the newspaper as “new” linguistic habits. Funny in a sickening sort of way.

So I was on the silly quiz show, Test the Nation, on CBC, as a member of the blogger team (the questions were on 21st C trivia, with a focus on tech, gossip and news … guess which team won?).

It was nice to meet some new cyber scribes from around the country, and I had a good time talking to the fellow-misanthrope cab driver Gord at the pub afterwards. But I just read this review of the experience from James Viloria, a Montrealer with the blog, Gay Person of Colour. It’s strange when you live in one sort of environment, and realize that others – because of who/what they are and who/what the rest of the world is like – have such a different experience of the universe. Says James:

I was apprehensive about wearing a t-shirt that had printed on it the words “gay persons of color,” but I managed to muster up the courage to wear the garment on the show and enter proudly for the first time in my life into a situation where everyone would be immediately aware of the fact that I was gay. Wow! For me, this was significant, and even more important than my insecurities that were somehow resolved was the fact that I was welcomed by so many of my fellow bloggers and other contestants on the show as their equal, as a human being, as me.

I didn’t talk much to James, but I’m glad he had the kind of experience I would expectmost of us take for granted – but clearly is not a given even in liberal cities like Montreal.

[via Teamakers]

I will be on CBC TV tonight (Sunday, Jan 20, 8pm) on Test the Nation if anyone wishes to watch.

I’m on the blogger team.

This shocked me:

Nearly half of Montreal’s 63,000 immigrants [from] Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia arrived here after 2001 and they’re quickly making their presence felt.

What a change in seven years! I haven’t noticed, though the guy who installed my Videotron modem was from morocco and we had a good chat about life back there, and the Moroccan poufs in our house (that we bought from that great little Moroccan store on Duluth). Well …

Walk a few minutes east from Saint-Michel metro and you’ll find yourself in one of Montreal’s most recent ethnic neighbourhoods: the Petit Maghreb, a 15-block strip of North African business along Jean Talon Street between St. Michel and Pie IX boulevards.

Anyone fancy a tagine sometime soon?

[I'm loving Spacingmontreal.ca, by the way].

1. i will prioritize
2. i will focus
3. i will complete

I’m suffering a bit from social media fatigue, like everyone I guess. All this stuff – twittering, and building your audience, and debates about whether facebook is good or bad, and linkbaiting and SEO and new tools and old tools, widgets and do-dads: just making my head hurt.

All of us, and all of you (and me), should just forget about all that stuff, and ask ourselves: What is important to me? What do I really, truly care about? If I could improve something in the world, what would it be?

And then think about ways to do that. If you do it well, I am convinced that the audience, and the living-you-need will come.

If you are not convinced that what you are doing is important in some way, then why are you doing it? Why don’t you spend your time on something you think is important?

And by the way, lest I sound like a preachy jerk, I’m talking as much to myself as I am to anyone else.

from BaghdadBrian in the twittersphere:

Alive in Baghdad correspondent Ali Shafeya was killed on December 14th, details are still coming in. He was 24, survived by mom and sister.

and:

but is that worth even one human’s life? We are still not 100% sure its not the assignment we gave that killed him.

and:

We’ve raised $90, can anyone else help Ali’s family pay for the funeral? his brothers and father are all dead. survived by one sis & mother

and:

you can make a donation to suport his family to smallworldnews@gmail.com via paypal, please note that it is for Ali’s family.

for more details, see:
* alive in baghdad

UPDATE: Following brian’s posts on twitter over the past 18 hours or so has been pretty intense. Blow-by-blow of a guy both updating as the info comes in, and struggling with the hard reality of death all around the amazing citizen journalism project that he started in a war zone. Further, he’s been wondering whether the investigative assignment that Ali was on may have been the cause of his death (he was shot 31 times by the Iraqi National Guard). He’s considering closing the project down.

I can’t even imagine. I keep thinking about the safe little projects I work on, imagining what it would be like to have a web project where people started dying. It’s so easy to start good web projects. But it takes so much courage to continue in the face of reality this bloody.

I met Brian briefly at Podcamp Boston. I wish I had met him sooner – I was just leaving. I would have loved to talk more with him – of all the projects at that conference, his is – to me – by far the most important. AiB is exactly why the web changes things – even if it has been mostly ignored.

So a while back I started using iGTD, mac software to implement the Get Things Done project management methodology. I reported on the software and the method a few times, with this “final” assessment.

Well, time has gone by and the famous black clouds of GTD guilt (as Maurizio calls them) started gathering slowly, then eventually exploded into a couple of months of total inability to … get things done.

I sat down two weeks ago and went through all my projects. Turns out I have sixteen (16) project on the go, on ice, in development, or in disarray, including a number of “real life” non-profit things I do, away from my cmputer. So part of my inability to get things done, I think, was the sheer number of things I ought to get done. But so often I would sit down and go thru the interminable list of things and projects, most of them still on the list because they are unpleasant (eg. sorting out Collectik finances, god help me). And because of the sheer number and sheer range i would sort of catalog thru all of them, stomach turning at each new undone-thing-to-do, and finally … not get anything done.

I became oppressed by iGTD (an old story I am told).

Every six months or year or so I reorganize everything, to try to get projects back on track. So it’s time for that again. And I’ve identified what I think is a major problem with GTD for people like me: too much choice. The philosophy behind GTD is that you separate things into contexts (things you do by email, things you do by phone, things you do online/offline etc … you make up your own contexts). You can sort by project (eg LibriVox or Collectik etc), or context (email or phone etc): and another principle is that anything that can be done in less than two minutes should be done NOW. Those are the worst. Phone calls are my absolute least favourite thing in the world, and so I just don’t get them done even if they will take 2 minutes.

But the big problem is too much choice. iGTD turns into one of those massive menus at mediocre restaurants, where there’s a huge page for sushi, a huge page for pasta, a huge page for burgers and twenty other pages. Lots of options, none of them appealing. And you *know* none of them will be very good.

When I was in university I wasn’t the most conscientious student. I was doing a BSc in Mathematics & Engineering, and a BA in Philosophy at the same time. Which meant that the month around finals was crazy: I usually had 2-3 big philosophy papers (plus all the reading), and since throughout the term I usually was not studying or doing many of my engineering assignments, by the time finals came around I had to learn whole courses in the space of a couple of weeks; and since my mid-terms and assignment marks were weak, I had to ace my finals to get thru.

So in order to make sure I passed everything, I would break all my tasks down into hour-long chunks (learn chapters 1-3 of Fluid Dynamics Text; reach ch 6-9 of Kant; write 2 pages of paper on Nietzsche; do practice exam #2 from Abstract Algebra). Then I would schedule everything into a 9-hour study day, with nice long breaks for lunch and dinner.

The last month of each term was so intense, but also thrilling – my mind was running on high-octane, I was processing so much, and it was exhilarating (tho I wouldn’t recommend this as a good-practice study habit).

Fast-forward to 2007, and last month I had a mild breakdown, well, not a breakdown, but I realized how totally ineffective I’ve been for the past few months, and it was starting to drive me crazy. So I went back, for the first time, to my university study plan, and reproduced it for November and December.

I attacked all my projects and sorted out things needing to get done in discrete chunks (eg. edit chapter 2 of Boundary Conditions; record War and Peace, chapter 20 for LV; organize Collectik finances and taxes; write copy for new start-up site … etc). So far so iGTD.

But I *also* estimated time required to do these things, something that iGTD is missing.

The I made out a calendar of November & December, broken into 1-hour chunks, and started slotting things in, trying to keep things variable (writing, finance, web), and making time for coffees, lunches etc. This was my first week on the new plan.

I didn’t get everything done, but I have a much better handle on what needs to be done, and how long all of it will take. And instead of a huge list of iGTD staring at me, I know, at least, that at 10am on Tuesday, I am supposed to be going thru Collectik contract bugs, and from 1pm to 3pm I am supposed to be editing my novel.

I feel better … let’s see how long this lasts.

Security Guard: What is in this tube?
Me: Prescription skin cream.
SG: What is it for?
Me: ?
SG: What is it for?
Me: … Um… a skin condition.
SG: Did a doctor prescribe this?
Me: Yes.
SG: Do you have a note from the doctor?
Me: The prescription label is on the tube. Right there [pointing].
SG: So you don’t have a note from the doctor?
Me: The doctor’s name is on the prescription label.
SG: [reading] …
Me: [waiting] …
SG: Do you need this cream?
Me: Yes.
SG: So you are saying you need this cream?
Me: Yes.
SG: But the prescription label says: “Apply to affected areas twice a day *if* needed.”
Me: [silence]
SG: It says, “If needed.”
Me: Yes.
SG: So do you need it or not?
Me: Yes.
SG: You need it?
Me: Yes.
SG: OK, but next time get a note from a doctor.

The people who comment here tend to be thoughtful and interesting even if I don’t agree with them, so whenever I see discussions about commenters on blogs acting like tools, I think, oh well, don’t seem to have that problem here.

Then every once in a while I post something that seems to attract attention from strangers. This post about Steve’s experience trying to delete a Facebook account, for instance, keeps getting new commenters (four months later), some of them apparently clueless, and some of them just jerky.

I’m glad I don’t have to deal with jerky commenters every day

Westmount Rugby Club is having a friendly match against a team from Gatineau this weekend, Saturday, 12pm, at Westmount Park. Come and watch. Better yet, bring your boots and have a run around.
*what: post-season friendly match
*when: saturday oct 20, 12pm
*where: westmount park

Also: we’ll be watching the World Cup Final – England vs. South Africa after the match:
*what: rwc final – england-south africa
*when: Saturday, 2pm (kick-off 3pm)
*where: peel pub, 2nd floor (new location, 1196 RUE PEEL, below ste-catherine)

I’m not sure why, but I’ve been thinking lately about conservatives and progressives, and the problems of our current climate of political debate, heightened exponentially by cable news pundits in the USA. I have a trip to Saskatoon coming up, and I was thinking of contacting a few Sask bloggers, and Small Dead Animals comes pretty high in the search. It’s well-known right-leaning mostly-political blog from a woman in Saskatchewan, and a couple of the posts I read were … well they really turned me off. They seemed so pointlessly hostile to the “left.” And I landed on a couple of other Sask blogs, and had the same reaction (later I found some more comfortably lefty-like Sask blogs).

And yet much of the stuff on the lefty blogs is the same sort of thing (here too, probably): juvenile name-calling etc. But it steams us when we disagree; when we agree, it’s usually pretty funny stuff.

And further, I betcha if I met Kate of SDA, we’d probably get along fine, even if I don’t like her politics, and she doesn’t like mine, she’d probably not an idiot* (see below), and we’d probably have a fine discussion about healthcare or terrorism without wanting to punch each other.

We have some friends, Bruce and Michelle. Bruce is about as far at the other end of the spectrum of my political beliefs as you can get – and every time I read his political blog posts, I get all red-eared. Yet when we meet, and even when we talk about politics, I realize how close we are about our various frustrations with the state of the universe. We just have different explanations, often, for why things are messed up (I blame evil corporations; he blames corrupt governments; I blame the Conservatives, he blames the Liberals … we’re both right and we’re both wrong).

And I’ll bet you that most of us, lefties and righties – the non-idiots, at least – want more or less the same thing: a healthy country/planet, where we can leave things better for our kids, and where everyone gets a fair shot at having a decent life, where the rivers run clean and everyone’s got a job that lets them get the stuff they need; where the chances of getting killed by SARS or cancer or car crashes or corrupt police or terrorists or nuclear explosions are minimized.

On just about any issue (health care, security, environment etc), most non-idiot lefties and righties want the same sorts of outcomes.

And the real problem is not so much that we all want different things for the planet, but rather that we have some fundamental disagreements about how to get there, and what sort of impacts the different decisions about our course of action will have. Which are, sort of, testable differences: that is, some of them work and some of them don’t, and over time reasonable people should be able to look at policies, and outcomes, and decide based on the outcomes (rather than the philosophies behind them) whether they’re good or not.

Oh, one other thing I find strange about the political left-right split is that a belief about one subject is often directly correlated to a belief about another totally unrelated subject, eg. War on Terrorism, and Climate Change … and the other strange thing about those two threats in particular is that both sides use the same logic to argue one, and discount the other: climate change is a significant risk, therefore we must do extraordinary things to protect ourselves; terrorism is a significant risk, therefore we must do extraordinary things to protect ourselves. Yet no one on the right *wants* climate disaster, they just don’t believe we can or ought to do what’s being proposed; and no one on the left *wants* the “terrorists to win,” they just don’t believe what we are doing is the right strategy to deal with the threat.

Anyway, I think there are a couple of big problems: righties and lefties don’t talk much together about what they do want for the world, and the reasons they think actions A are better than actions B to get there. And further, the discussion between left and right is mediated – more in the US than here, but here too – by people who *are* idiots, and are paid to be idiots, because that makes people mad, and that sells advertising.

*All this brought to you by a quote from Marjane Satrapi (via Matt):

‘The only real divide in this world is between the idiots and non-idiots.’

Amen.

Some nice photos of Italy:

See the set here.

i just saw a mouse in the kitchen. we have mouses in our new house.

gah.

Just had a recent spate of flamey acrimony on LibriVox (which is usually an oasis of kind and pleasant discussion). It’s amazing how draining these things are for people. I didn’t get too worked up personally, tho I spent too much time trying to convince people to stop being so … imflamatory. And I did lose my cool at one point and violated my How to Deal with Difficult People tract.

But: I wonder why it is that the Internet flame war/acrimonious debate is *such* an emotionally intense experience. I certainly never in my daily life get involved in such stuff, I can’t remember the last argument I had with someone in real life. But on occasion I’ve been in some pretty tense internet stuff. I understand why they happen (the missing subtext, humour missed, inference of mean-spiritedness, when often humour was the intent etc).

But it’s curious that they are so …well…enraging.

Often when you think/look back at them, you ask yourself, why was I so riled up about *that* discussion? What was it about that sentence that made steam come out of my ears? Or at least I do.

And when your involved in these things, you craft these long-winded, debate-ending, brilliant pieces of unanswerable prose. And then wait panting for the response! And the whole thing starts over again. I’m ususally pretty reasonable in my approach to these things – I rarely lose my temper – but still, they are really emotionally draining.

What is it about text, and especially internet/forum mediated text, that makes the hot debate so so so emotionally intense?

and tired… but glad to be home.

A more detailed rendition is on the way, but here is my most recent love letter to Bell.

You cut off our phone, although the problem was yours (billing said we owed money; credit dept said we did not, and said we should ignore the bill recieved).

After HOURS on the phone with 5 different departments on Thurs, aug 9, a payment was made (conf#: 009***), and we were PROMISED that service would be restored by Fri August 10 at 3:30pm. IT WAS NOT.

We called again August 10, in the late afternoon, and were told that nothing could be done until Monday. We are away for vacation, next week.

We would like:
a) our phone service restored
b) a written apology for the DISMAL customer service that Bell provides.
c) compensation for our missed service AND for the hours of frustration your company has put us through.

You should all be ashamed of yourselves.

Next time you host a big party with many different people, why not set up a web page with URLs of attendees, so people can figure out if there is anyone they’d like to talk to?

Was just at a wedding this weekend, and luckily ended up chatting with Jason and Kirsten … (whose blogs I found only afterwards, merci google). But I would have liked to pop by to say hello to Todd Swift: I knew he was a poet, but even better, I just discovered that he writes a weblog called Eyeware: Poetry, Politics & Culture in the Digital Age, which sounds like it’s right up my alley.

How many other people at that event, I wonder, have interesting web presences that would have helped me emerge from my usual “sit in corner with Christine and consume alcohol with a wry smile” approach to big events?

Pledgebank.com:

What is PledgeBank for?
PledgeBank is a site to help people get things done, especially things that require several people. We think that the world needs such a service: lots of good things don’t happen because there aren’t enough organised people to do them.
Can you give me some examples?
Sure. ‘I will start recycling if 100 people in my town will do the same’; ‘I will organise my child’s school play if 3 other parents will help’; ‘I will build a useful website if 1000 people promise to contribute to it’.

[more...]

My pledge:

I will think of a good pledge to make. but only if 10 other people with internet access will do the same.

Sign up here to fill my quota: think of a pledge.

iGTD … iGetThingsDone is the light project/action management app, based on the Get Things Done productivity approach. I’ve been using it for about a month now, and I can report that I am happy with it (here are my first, and second posts about it).

As I said somewhere, in a comment maybe, it’s not much more than a to-do list on your hard drive… but the added little bit of sweetness, which really is useful, is that you can sort by:

* project (eg, for me: LibriVox, personal, Collectik, rugby, writing … etc)
* context (eg, for me: urgent, email, online, offline, phone, outside, inside … etc)

That’s a simple but powerful rejig of the good old fashioned to-do list I used to post on my fridge… and has the added benefit of being on my computer, where many of the things I need to get done spend most of their time.

My life has not changed all that much, but I feel like I am keeping track of stuff much better now. So:

iGTD = good.

(Does anyone know of a similar free software app for PC?)

if anyone would like to watch a rugby match tomorrow (saturday, june 16), I’m playing at 3pm in westmount park. Deets (incl link to a map).

Just a quick note on my experience thus far with iGTD … seems like I’m getting lots of the little things done, and agonizing over the bigger ones, as usual. Mike linked to a good review of the problems with GTD and a smart way to look at your list:

“When you put a thing on your to-do list, you are making a committment to do it,” he says to me. “Meaning you aren’t going to do some other things.” He pauses. “So you have to choose between those things. Now, why do you have to choose?”

I think about this for a second. “Because your time is limited?” I venture hopefully.

“BECAUSE YOU ARE GOING TO FUCKING DIE,” he responds.

Right. And while some things you really must get done, others … you can keep dreaming about.

If you start to notice me being hyper-productive, it might be because I have started using a neat little productivity/management software, iGTD:

The software uses the Get Things Done productivity methodology, which apparently will solve all my constant procrastination problems and turn me into a man of unlimited energy and robot-like (almost frightening) efficiency, while allowing me to maintain space for creativity, to cuddle my wife, improve my cooking, my on-field rugby performance, take up opera singing.

The nice thing about the approach, and software, is that it separates tasks into both projects (eg, LibriVox, Writing, Collectik), and contexts (email, phone, outside, inside, online, urgent).

A bit late, but here is of objectives for 2007, focusing on the next, say, 5 months. I have been waffling a little, dipping toes into too many things, and I need to focus on some key professional objectives. Here they are:

primary objectives:
1. finish novel #2 (draft 1) (august)
2. redesign collectik (august)
3. launch “edited collectik” (july)
4. launch new start-up (sept)
5. pitch book on LibriVox (sept)

secondary objectives:
6. get 2nd contract for collectik
7. publish novel #1 online (audio?) if I don’t hear back from Anansi (october)
8. get funding for atwater media project (sept)
9. post on huffington 2x per month

From Shawna, of me, at BarCamp. I had actually just pressed “save” on the presentation, when I heard my name announced, and had to go up to present. Nice timing.

I’ve always been a big fan of Jon Udell’s stuff – he writes not just about tech things that interest me, but he’s also got a great sense that web technology ought to be good for society as well. Jon was one of the first “famous” people I contacted when I started LibriVox, and he’s been a fan, and written about the project a number of times. So I was really happy when he asked me to join him on his IT Conversations podcast, Jon Udell’s Interviews With Innovators (you might need to register to see that page). This was a long (47 mins) and great interview, really getting into the meat and bones of how and why LibriVox works, but also touching on much other interesting stuff as well.

Here’s the page.

Listen here: mp3 link.

***

In other exciting news, Jon whipped up a script (tweaked and built on by the ever-effective Chris), that allows you to add a LibriVox book directly to iTunes. Here’s how Kri describes the new addition to the site:

Thanks to Jon Udell and our resident catalog development guru tis (Chris Goringe) we have a new feature that has been added to all catalog pages. Check out the most recent Short Poetry Collection to see an example of the following…

1. A “Subscribe in iTunes” link. If you regularly use iTunes for podcasts, or would like to, this link will be very helpful to you. Just click on the link, and allow it to launch the external application (iTunes) if it asks

2. An RSS feed for the 64kbps files. What’s the point of this? For some this makes it easier to download all of the 64kbps MP3 files at once. For example, if you listen to podcasts and have a podcatcher, use this link to download them all more easily.

I used to travel a lot for work:

create your own visited country map

(via Patrick & Bosko).

(cross-posted at TextoSolvo)

One of the problems in the Western world right now, in my estimation, is that we see “freedom” as an artificially good thing in an abstract & idealized sense. humans, whatever else we are, are animals, and we have developed biological and cultural systems to deal with the universe. and nothing is “free” in the universe. you must obey the laws of physics: when you get punched in the nose it hurts, and when you eat rocks, they taste bad and make you sick, and break your teeth. that they are painful helps you try to avoid getting punched in the nose, and discourages you from eating rocks instead of apples, both of which are helpful if you wish to survive in the world. that is what the universe is “like,” yet in the western world we have abstracted out “freedom” as some kind of thing which is good in itself. I too think freedom is good, but not “in itself.” i think it is good because increased freedom for a larger number of people results in a better ability to solve important problems (firstly, how do we feed and clothe ourselves, and protect our families, and then other more complex, but less important issues).

so librivox is a kind of demonstration that says: here are the rules. everything *else* is free, but the rules are not negotiable. and they are not negotiabale BECAUSE librivox has an objective that defines everything we do: “to make all public domain books available in audio for free.” the rules have been/are set in order to help us achieve that objective. everything is weighed against the objective, not against some abastract “freedom.”

that is very powerful. i believe one of the driving evolutionary forces that has made humans successful is our desire to build and pleasure at building things.

but building things takes discipline and dedication. it is always easier to sit on your ass and do nothing. and you are – in our very rich, and very easy world, “free” to sit on your ass and do nothing, but I don’t believe you will ever be happy if you take that approach. In order to be a happy human, I believe, you must build things.

and *that*, to me, is what freedom means: the freedom to build the things you want to build. not freedom to do whatever you want, wherever you want, because “freedom” per se is sacred, but the freedom to pursue objectives you believe in.

we have lost our sense of discipline, and I think that makes people very unhappy. I don’t mean that in any draconican sense, I just mean that in western world, we are told (by psychologists, parents, media, etc) that we can do whatever we want, that we are the centre of the universe, that our freedom is the most important thing and we have a *right* to it, that just believing in ourselves is enough to succeed. all of which is, frankly, bullshit.

and that kind of thinking makes, I think, for unhappy people, and a disfunctional society, because we are NOT the centre of the universe able to influence it with our belief in how important we are; we are just a little part of it, subject to its laws. among which is, not much ever gets done without work.

A few people have gotten involved with LibriVox, been impressed by the anarchist underpinnings, and argued that we needed to allow full freedom (ie to rant, to be disruptive etc). but librivox as a system works in part because of the laws of our little universe, some of which we understand, some of which are mysterious. I’ve been careful to try to defend and protect those mysterious things – even if I do not totally understand them (hence my defense of the “disclaimer” – I don’t want to mess with something that’s worked unless it is very clear that messing will make LV work better).

I read recently somewhere that real freedom only comes from the pleasure of succeeding within constraints. Which seems to me to be about right.

Yesterday, I had coffee & a great talk with Matt Forsythe. He was the 5th? 6th? person in the last two weeks to make a comment about dose, dosemagazine, and the really awful CanWest rag, Dose.ca. His comment was something: “It took me a long time to read your blog without cringing because I always thought of Canwests’ dose.” Other comments I’ve had were, “Oh, you write for dose?” and “Hey, are you going to lose your job? I heard dose was cutting back on writers.” etc. etc. Enough is enough.

The last nail in the coffin. I guess. I just moved here from dose.blogsome.com (tho I have owned dosemagazine.com since 2002), but I just have to move again. I can’t take the association any more.

I’ve registered: hughmcguire.net … and will be moving there shortly I have moved. I’ll keep you all posted.

which means starting all over again, but at least it’ll be done with for once and forever.

(by the way, hughmcguire.com is a lawyer in New Jersey, and has nothing to do with me).

Let this be a lesson to all you kids: Choose your URL wisely.

I’ve always been an diplomatic sort, and I’ve learned a fair bit recently in some internet dust-ups. Experience at LibriVox and elsewhere has taught me some invaluable lessons in dealing with jerks. Everyone deserves at least one thoughtful and detailed explanation, but often people then push for more. And more.

A friend just had a problem with a work colleague, who was sending complicated and accusatory emails about an issue she had little or no control over. My friend was in a state of great agitation, and was composing a long point-by-point email to explain what happened, and why it happened. I told her to stop. And gave her this advice (which worked like a charm):

First, some poppsych background:

1. difficult people want attention, they write long complicated and inflamatory things in emails or forum postings in order to get other people to write long responses.
2. irrational people will not be made rational by rational explanations. they are inherently irrational … and you cannot convince them to behave like adults.
3. there is no value in getting yourself worked up about how irrational someone is. it’s their problem, not yours, so don’t let it get to you.
4. You will never win by trying to convince difficult people to agree with your position.
5. You will win with the following advice:

Now the specific advice:
1. make your response brief
2. make your response polite
3. acknowledge the other’s frustration
4. do not accuse or imply that they are in the wrong
5. state the situation precisely and firmly
6. do not offer detailed explanations, specific examples etc.
7. make your statement firm and final, so that there is no more room for unreasonable arguing

Here is a good example:

Dear So-and-So:

I understand you don’t like such-and-such, and I’m sorry about that. But after looking at all the options, we have decided that’s the way it’s going to be.

Here is a bad example:

Dear So-and-So:

Look I understand you are pissed off, but I just wish you would try to see this from my view. It is so hard to do such-and-such and it seems like no one ever understands why we have to do it this way. You are always complaining about this – remember back in decemer when you said that thing? – well then as now there were several factors that made it totally impossible for … etc.

I had one run-in that I lost badly on Wikipedia, which is famous for it’s cantankerous wiki-wars. The issue was adding LibriVox links in Wikipedia, and whether we were linkspamming by adding the links ourselves. The debate lasted a whole day — the other guy was a jerk, but I didn’t help myself either — and it was one of the most draining days in my internet life. Finally a solution was reached, more or less (after the intervention of someone else), but I wanted to get an apology out of the guy. So I wrote a long, complicated and impassioned message, saying “I know that I did some things wrong, but you know you were not being totally reasonable, you made many people at LibriVox unhappy etc etc…” It was a long long message, and I thought it a model of magnanimous mea-culpa and an open door for the other guy to apologize, and everyone would make good, and I would have come out on top because I had reached out a olive branch, being the wise man that I am. His response?:

Oh, good grief.

Nothing more. It was devastating and brilliant, and taught me everything there was to know about myself and him and that agrument. The main thing is this: he won. I tried to convince him (to no purpose whatsoever) of his wicked ways, to get him to agree to something that was irrelevant to the actual problem, while showing how good and reasonable I was. I was, in short, being unreasonable (he was too of course, but no matter). What I wanted was for him to recant. And to answer my long impassioned plea with his own. And he wouldn’t. And I felt like an ass.

Brevity and clarity are the most powerful tools in communications, and will save you many headaches.

Christine & I had a great trip:

More pics here.

I’ve had a few verbal (written or out loud) jousting matches with a number of academicy people of late. Curiously, all the debates were with women doing interesting things, mostly with an academic background: data liberationist, and GeoGal Tracey and I had a discussion about theory and practice as it relates to rethinking how politics happens. You can see most of that conversation over at the old dose. Web maestra and Atwater Media Centrist Miriam and I had a long debate about lists of people doing things on the web, and women, and technology, and various things like that. We’d previously had a more drunken exchange about the relative merits “meritocracies” and … well I’m not sure what the alternatives are, but maybe “fair-ocracies” or something. I’m all for meritocracies, as long as you define merit in interesting ways. Then I got into a heated exchange with mcluhan scholar, netizen and new media pioneer Liss Jeffery, about… well I can’t quite remember what, but it was interesting. It was partly about podcasting as one-way (rather than two-way) media (which I disagree with); and partly about open projects and getting things done. We’d crossed paths on the civicaccess mailing list, and Dr. J told me she thought I was a “60-year-old schoolmarm.” Which I am not. I am, however, a keen believer in anarchy with an iron fist, otherwise, in my opinion, things just don’t get done. But we had a spirited exchange about my apparently heavy-handed approach to things in civicaccess. I wasn’t conscious of being so … agressive … but looking back I can see why it might have seemed so. I’m keen to find out how civicaccess can be made into something more than a mailing list, and to date it’s been hard to marshall troops in any one direction. Which is frustrating. But we seem to be converging, with the instigation of Stephane on one small project, which is a good start. Finally, Charlotte and I had a conversation about clarity and linguistics.

Anyway, why the post?

Well I’m not quite sure what I’m getting at. I think part of why I got in all these fights (nice fights, but fights) is my distrust of academic language, and academic approaches to things. I think that academics are by definition removed from the real life of things. The institution of the university promotes something quite different from the rest of life: one is encouraged to think, to write, and to invent theories, much of it geared towards academics and students, much of it self-reflexive, and much of it totally removed from citizens. And nothing has to work in practice. It makes me angry when I read obtuse academic language when it is discussing life out here. And it makes me angry when I hear theories (such as those against meritocracies) which really make no sense if you are interested in actually getting things done. Academia is cloistered and removed, by design, and that has some good parts, but other dangerous sides to it. Or rather, an academic approach is not necessarily a good one, if your objective is to get things done with many people.

By the way this is not a reactionary critique of academia, but a progressive one. I admire much of the intention behind academia, but it seems to me a system where publishing in specialist journals is the main criterion for advancement encourages everything but hands on engagement in the real world. Which is fine, but limits academia’s usefulness. It limits academia’s ability to change society and solve problems (tho maybe that’s not their role?).

And also, by the way, this is in no way a critique of any of these women or the work they do – I just find it interesting that I butted heads so frequently over the past couple of months, often around the same issues of language and approaches to solving problems.

I posted my 10-point no-jargon pledge a while ago, regarding things I promised never to write. After watching some of the vids of me at Podcamp Toronto, I’m going to make a 10-point speaking promise.

I can’t promise to erase these verbal ticks the way I can with text, but I promise to try to erase them.

Because I value clear concise language, I promise to try to erase the following 10 words or phrases from my spoken vocabulary:

1. sortof
2. kindof
3. youknow
4. um
5. ah
6. like
7. actually
8. now
9. I mean
10. mebbe

i heard the poor bastard rattling around in the trap at around 6am…but I fell back asleep. woke up at 6:45. more rattling. ugh. so I came down to finish the poor guy off. but either we feed our mice well or the poor guy was a poor gal, and preggers to boot. so if you take a strict utilitarian view of things, maybe the suffering that one mouse had to endure will result in less suffering overall. still, pangs of guilt for the ordeal of my fellow-mammal.

Ben’s the once-great Montreal smoked meat resto, is no more. I took some photos there late one night a couple of years ago.

See the rest here.

Jargony text & talk drives me crazy. I wrote previously pleading with you, dear readers, never to use the word “utilize” when all you mean is “use.” This stuff infects the pages and html of techies, marketing people and academics, and unsuspecting citizens as well. It’s contagious and dangerous.

I am going to do my part. I’ve decided to take a no-jargon pledge.

Because I value clear concise prose, I promise never to use the following 10 words or phrases when I write:

1. concretize
2. modality
3. paradigm
4. stake out (a/its/your/my) position
5. drill down
6. leverage (unless I am talking about moving rocks)
7. utilize
8. empowerment
9. is informed by
10. flesh out

This list can be lengthened, please suggest words and phrases to add.

I was at the Montreal web entreprenneurs breakfast, and was talking with Robin, Alex Eberts, Sylvain, and a couple of others about language, the web, Montreal, and politics. It’s funny, though I am an Anglo born and bred, a Westmounter if you can believe it, it’s been a long time since I’ve been a typical Anglo when it comes to Quebec/Canada politics (not sure if typical Anglos exist anymore, at least not this side of the city). Maybe part of that grew out of my stint at university in Kingston. I enjoyed my time there, more or less, but I never quite felt at home in the Anglo Canada of Ontario. My allegiance was always more with the world of Montreal (the French, the English, the everything else) than it was for some idea of Canada. Of course when push comes to shove I’ve voted federalist in referendums, but given the choice of talking to a random Canadian stranger in Tokyo, I’ll feel more at home talking with a Franco-Quebecker than a Torontonian most times (not that I have anything against Torontonians). I’ve long had a certain intellectual sympathy for the separatist movement, partly because I have great respect for Rene Levesque and much of the social democratic vision the PQ had in the early days. (They have abandoned that vision, mostly, and I am not very interested in them as a result – though the rest of the clowns don’t do anything to inspire me either). Certainly as Canada moves more to the right, I am less and less interested in tying myself to the country of Canada as an idea, especially as the elements of the idea I do believe in are fast disappearing.

In the world of web that I live in now, though, the idea of national boundaries are mostly irrelevant. LibriVox, for instance, is populated by people from all over the world, a huge number of Americans, a tiny number of Canadians, and almost no Quebecers (that I can think of). In my commercial web life, I have a British partner in Sydney, and an American partner in Tokyo, and a billingual Franco-Quebecker partner here at home. On another brand new proto-project, LibriLinks, the one guy who has contributed so far is, I think, in England, but I’m not even sure. It doesn’t matter where he’s from.

The only relevant borders for me – at least online – are borders of interest. This is old news, but it’s interesting in the context of Quebec, and especially with the the explosion of new Web projects these days and the increased interaction at events. The ones I’ve been to tilt slightly to English, but the mix is pretty liberal. The money, love it or leave it, is in the US market, so the tendency will be for English. We’re peanuts in Canada, and 1/10 of a peanut in Quebec. As a for instance, 1.2% of the traffic for LibriVox (about 12k visitors a day) is from Canada; vs 32% from the US (the balance being mostly unresloved/unknown @ 26% and network (?) 32%).

English is (so to speak) the lingua franca of the net. No news there either, but the web world that I inhabit in Montreal is pretty bilingual on both sides of the table, and it has to be. Working together on various projects tends to erase the political misconceptions we might have had about each other. There’s not much choice about working together: Anglos have an in because English is our native tongue, and so we’re immediately comfortable in the space where much web action is happening; and it turns out that many of the people doing cool things are Francos.

Not sure what I am getting at, but it was inspired by this discussion chez Martine, and the idea that when you work together on a web project (really any project) with people, just about everything except for the work gets erased from your evaluation, and in the end political barriers break down. In the case of LibriVox something interesting happened. I came to trust and like people not for who they were, what they were (I had no idea of either thing), but for the concrete things they did in that open project. My friendships with those people was built entirely on their actions, and nothing else…And that, it seems to me is the best possible basis for a friendship – accross thousands of kilometers, across language, political, and national divides. There is an interesting web project in there – getting people from different sides of some heated politics to work together on a project with a common cause.

we have mice. they have started to make squeaky noises. when it was the odd rustle in far the pantry, or the much less common skitter across the floor, it was OK. but when they start sqeaking in the walls, that’s really too much.

This is the new & improved (?) dose. I am fiddling, tweaking, playing and trying to get it all to work properly. Comments welcome.

J’ai l’intention de participer à ces evenments:

• WikiWednesday (aujourd’hui, 16h30)
• Yulblog (aujourd’hui, 20h00)
• petit déjeuner des entrepreneurs web Montrealais (le 13 fev)
• podcamp toronto (le 24-25 fev)
• democamp montreal #1 (le 27 fev)
• democamp montreal #2 (le 29 mars)
• barcamp montreal #2 (april 28)

Wonderful. CanWest, the media giant that owns 11 major Canadian daily newspapers, including the horrendous Montreal Gazette, the right-wing National Post, as well as the Vancouver Sun and the Calgary Herald; and the Global Television Network has launched a new magazine/website/portal aimed at “urban, intelligent, and fun 18-34 year-olds.”

Title?? Yes: Dose.

Quoth my (upstart) doppelganger, Noah Godfrey, Publisher of Dose (v2):

“Built by young Canadians, Dose is designed specifically to serve the unique needs and enhance the lifestyle of this media-savvy demographic.”

“Through multiple touch points, Dose will provide information and services from the perspective of our peers. We will empower our audience with ideas that will engage them in thought, conversation, and activity, all packaged in relevant formats that are free and convenient. Our objective is to make Dose a media brand by which our peers define themselves.”

Sounds delish.

You know it would have been cool if this had been in the UK or something, but what are the odds of seeing these guys pop up in Canada? For now they do not plan to spread their magazine anywhere east of Ottawa (much to my relief).

Well what can you do? Let’s hope there are no lawyers letters in the mail telling me to change the name of my weblog. (Speaking of which I noticed a recent uptick in hits, coinciding strangely with no posts from me. An explanation I guess).

For some reactions, here’s UBC’s Thunderbird once and twice.

I suppose I shouldn’t be such a skeptic (after all they are planning to offer ring tones on their site!), but I must admit I feel a little violated. Maybe I can make a few thou off of dosemagazine.com now though?