Toronto Waterfront Triathlon (tentative)
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Toronto, Ontario
Related (key) info
Monday, January 31, 2005
going, going...
"We have to face that there are two types of American programmers who are doomed to extinction. First, the bad ones. Traditionally, there have been more exceptionally bad programmers than exceptionally good ones. It's well known that there is something like an order-of-magnitude gap in productivity between the very best programmers and the very worst, but it's less known that the distribution of talent is quite asymmetrical, with a long-tail toward the less-than-competent. The untalented have long survived by coasting in larger teams and being the only game in town for smaller concerns. These are exactly the scenarios that the offshore shops already have firmly in their sights and where the "How much worse could offshoring be?" seed is most likely to find fertile soil.
As the "tail" of unproductive-but-employed programmers is chopped off, the productivity demanded of an employed programmer is going to increase dramatically. Programmers complacent in their skills and tools because they've met programmers who are less productive will quickly find themselves on the edge of the cliff. "
As the "tail" of unproductive-but-employed programmers is chopped off, the productivity demanded of an employed programmer is going to increase dramatically. Programmers complacent in their skills and tools because they've met programmers who are less productive will quickly find themselves on the edge of the cliff. "
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Thursday, January 27, 2005
ESPN.com: Page 2 - Yup ... these are my readers
"Q: I think EA Sports should add a feature to NBA Live: 2006 that would allow players to attack the fans. Imagine being the Heat and taking Shaq into the crowd to kill 15 people?--Dan, New Brunswick
SG: Couldn't they just merge NBA Live and Grand Theft Auto and set it in Portland? Not only could you try to win the NBA title with the Blazers, but you could have missions between games: Raise pit bulls to fight against Qyntel Woods and his dogs; steal pot from Damon Stoudamire; fight the Portland police when they catch you asleep in your car at 4 a.m.; frame Ruben Patterson for a felony assault; switch your urine with the ballboy's urine before an unexpected drug test; assassinate Dick Bavetta before he referees your game against the Knicks; and so on. And during games, you could inexplicably charge into the stands and start punching spectators -- it would be just like randomly attacking people in Grand Theft Auto. Of course, the ultimate goal would be to overthrow David Stern and take over the league.
SG: Couldn't they just merge NBA Live and Grand Theft Auto and set it in Portland? Not only could you try to win the NBA title with the Blazers, but you could have missions between games: Raise pit bulls to fight against Qyntel Woods and his dogs; steal pot from Damon Stoudamire; fight the Portland police when they catch you asleep in your car at 4 a.m.; frame Ruben Patterson for a felony assault; switch your urine with the ballboy's urine before an unexpected drug test; assassinate Dick Bavetta before he referees your game against the Knicks; and so on. And during games, you could inexplicably charge into the stands and start punching spectators -- it would be just like randomly attacking people in Grand Theft Auto. Of course, the ultimate goal would be to overthrow David Stern and take over the league.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
The alarm clock that physically drags you out of bed
Brilliant.
When the alarm chimes in the morning, you must reach up and tap the Sfera to silence it. Which triggers the snooze function and makes the alarm rise higher. As it slowly rises away from your reach, you must stretch higher each time to gain another ten minutes of snooze.
When the alarm chimes in the morning, you must reach up and tap the Sfera to silence it. Which triggers the snooze function and makes the alarm rise higher. As it slowly rises away from your reach, you must stretch higher each time to gain another ten minutes of snooze.
Globetechnology: Microsoft to restrict fixes
Not that I'm admitting or denying anything here, but oh uh.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Monday, January 24, 2005
First Nonsmoking Nation - Bhutan banned tobacco
This, to me, makes more sense than the creeping encroaching ban on smoking that Canada is taking. Seriously - why is tobacco banned in most enclosed public places? The whole marijuana vs tobacco false dichotomy? Bah. But once again, good on Bhutan for following the path of its own drummer. First there was GNH vs GDP, and now this...
Friday, January 21, 2005
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Thin edge of the wedge?
From Canada.com
Just weeks before it introduces divisive same-sex marriage legislation, the federal government has launched an urgent study into the legal and social ramifications of polygamy. Critics say the study
underscores a deep concern in the Martin government that legalized homosexual marriage may lead to constitutional challenges from minority groups who claim polygamy as a religious right.
It also suggests that the government is suspicious that multi-marriage is more commonplace in Canada than widely realized. Polygamy, outlawed in Canada but accepted and practised in many countries, typically means a man having several wives at the same time. "In order to best prepare for possible debate surrounding Canada's polygamy policy, critical research is needed," says a Status of Women Canada document. "It is vital that researchers explore the impacts of polygamy on women and children and gender equality as well as the challenges that polygamy presents to society."
Conservative party justice critic Vic Toews says there is a direct link between the Status of Women concern and the same-sex marriage legislation due to be introduced by the government in February.
"This government understands it has a problem on its hands," said Mr. Toews, a former Manitoba
constitutional lawyer. "What they are looking for is evidence to demonstrate that polygamy is inconsistent with Charter and Canadian values. If I was a lawyer prosecuting a polygamist that's the type of evidence I would be looking for."
Sayd Mumtaz Ali, president of the Canadian Society of Muslims, said he opposes same-sex marriage but said if it is legalized in Canada, polygamists would also be within their rights to challenge for their choice of family life to be legalized. "This is a liberally minded country with regards to equal rights," said Mr. Ali. "And literally millions live common law." Multiple marriage is legal in most Muslim countries, he said, but a Muslim man who takes more than one wife must prove to a court that he is capable of treating them all equally. He said he knows of some "but not too many" Muslims who live in
Canada with more than one wife but knows of no situation where the wives are unwilling, or unhappy, participants in the arrangement. But Mr. Ali said he has not detected any significant support among Muslims for a constitutional challenge. "To my knowledge there is no plan to push for this,' he said.
But when same-sex marriage becomes legal, the door will open to more Charter challenges, said Conservative critic Mr. Toews. "Once you change the definition of marriage from one man and one woman and you move to two persons," he said, "what then is the distinction between two persons, or three or more persons? If I was a lawyer defending polygamists, I'd say 'hey this is a constitutional
right, a freedom of religion.' Why can't freedom of religion trump this new definition of marriage?"
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Beastiemania Lyric Archive
Just a little obsessive, but if you wanted to know just which DJ dropped a 'lil Thurston Howelling in which song on which CD, well, now you know...
NYT :: Skiers Risk Answering the Call of Their Wild Side
This is a relatively balanced article on the risks of out of bounds skiing. I liked hearing from those who were irked by the disasters because it stood a chance of endangering other people's access rights.
Really, it's too bad that people are so litigious these days. We should all have the right to launch ourselves off cliffs without other people being afraid :)
January 19, 2005
Skiers Risk Answering the Call of Their Wild Side
By KIRK JOHNSON
ARK CITY, Utah, Jan. 18 - The solo skier or snowboarder cutting virgin tracks through the deep powder on a steep mountain slope has become a signature and symbol of the Western tourism industry - heady with its mixture of freedom, beauty and rugged individualism.
But that seductive image may be encouraging more and more people - many without much experience or training - to venture beyond the relative safety of the big resorts, risking harm to themselves and others, skiers and backcountry experts say. Seven people have died in backcountry avalanches in Utah alone since the season started, more deaths than there have been in any other year since 1950.
"They built the lifts and they pushed the powder," said Bob Athey, a backcountry veteran who was preparing Tuesday morning, as he does just about every day, to ski by himself into the woods near the Alta Ski Resort. "But then you have more skiers, which dampens down the powder, and that means the people who do want it have to go out of bounds to get it."
In the past few years, the ski industry has responded to a hunger for untrammeled terrain. Alpine touring, which allows a skier to hike like a cross-country skier, or lock the boot down for traditional downhill skiing, has become one of the fastest-growing categories in winter sports, industry officials say. Traditional ski makers like Atomic have expanded into the new market, and boot makers that once served only mountain climbers have retooled as well. The American Alpine Institute, a climbing school and guide service in Bellingham, Wash., estimates that off-road skiing, as it might be called, is growing three to five times faster than the traditional downhill sport.
But there is a deep culture clash at the heart of this new phenomenon. Many people who identify themselves as backcountry skiers - knowledgeable about the risks, trained in survival skills and never without an electronic homing device to help people find them if they are buried by snow - look with barely concealed disdain at what they call the "out of bounds" skier, who simply rides the chairlift up, disregards the warning signs and ducks under the rope.
The 27-year-old man who died here Friday, Shane Maixner, found still on his snowboard under four feet of snow near the Canyons Resort, was an out-of-bounder who apparently reached the place of his death through a gate on the resort boundary marked with a prominent skull and crossbones. The gate, which leads onto public land, is unlocked and unguarded, and its location is clearly marked on resort maps.
Mr. Maixner was not carrying any of the recommended backcountry survival gear. "You can't sugarcoat it or people will never learn," said Patrick Ormond, a mountain guide who lives here in Park City. "Once you cross that gate, if you're unprepared, you cross the line from ignorance to recklessness."
But other backcountry skiers, dyed deep with the free-will ethic that imbues their sport, say that individual decisions and their consequences are all that matter. Life is a calculated risk, they say, and an out-of-bounds skier, however unprepared, has made a choice. That fact must be respected, they say.
"They got killed doing something they like," said Charlie Sturgis, a ski tour guide who manages an outdoor outfitting store here called White Pine Touring, referring to the recent skier deaths. "That beats hanging out the front of a windshield."
Other backcountry skiers are simply angry. Access into national forests and other public land is already tighter than ever, they say, as private property and resort development have encircled mountain areas in the West. Reckless people, they say, give careful people a bad name - and create an excuse for landowners who might want to close roads or trails. "Besides putting rescuers in danger, our access could be hurt," said Brent Sherry, a college student in Salt Lake City who skis both the backcountry and the resorts. "I think that could be a real issue."
Avalanche experts say that the recipe for a snowslide is simple: different storms deposit different layers on a mountain, some with wetter snow and some with drier powder, and the terrain is safe only when the layers bond, like a layer cake, usually with a few days of warm sun. Experienced skiers say they venture out only after digging a snow trench to see how well the pack has congealed. And any slope steeper than 30 degrees is double prone to slide, they say. Dutch Draw, where the slide occurred last Friday outside the Canyons Resort, has a slope of 37 degrees to 38 degrees.
Other skiers say it is not about the snow or the slope, but about decision making. Some people have a hard time backing away, or backing down, even if they are able to read the dangers. It is a problem that men, in particular, are apparently prone to. Of the 629 people killed in the United States by avalanches since 1950 whose sex was determined, only about one in 10 were women, according to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center in Boulder.
"Ninety-nine percent of the problem is testosterone poisoning," said Larry Guild, a skier from Amherst, Mass., who was on vacation in Utah and preparing on Tuesday to depart for Utah's backcountry for the first time. Mr. Guild said he was going with a guide and would not have it any other way. "There's no way I'd go up there by myself," he said, nodding his head to the mountains towering above the road where his group had parked.
Other people said that intuition was what could save a person in the wild and that there was only one way to get it - through years of experience. Sex does not matter, they say. "My husband has tried to develop a sixth sense about avalanches, and I usually defer to him," said Julie Cooke, who lives in Alta and was walking Tuesday morning past the backcountry access trailhead near her home. Ms. Cooke, who said her husband had been skiing the backcountry for 30 years, has not felt right going out since the last big wave of storms and said she would probably just wait a bit longer still, until she and her husband were sure.
With their grooming equipment and ever-present ski patrols, mountain resorts project an aura of safety that can obscure the risks beyond the borders of a flimsy fence, some skiers say, especially when the snow might look, to the untrained eye, about the same on either side. Others say that in the blur of warnings and precautions that modern society requires on so many things it is easier than ever to dismiss an avalanche danger sign as the work of lawyers or fussy government monitors, however dire the language. "There's a lot of stuff that can get you killed, but when you're in a ski resort, you don't have that expectation," said Mr. Sturgis, the tour guide and store manager.
Referring to the backcountry access point near the summit at Canyons Resort, he added that he thought that most of the people who went past the gate believed they were merely extending the resort experience.
Police officials say there is also the question of how to enforce the rules. The Summit County sheriff, Dave Edmunds, whose jurisdiction includes the Park City resorts, said that leaving a resort to ski onto someone's private property, for example, was an easy one - that is trespassing. But public lands outside a resort, like the Dutch Draw area where the big slide hit last week, are far trickier. The public has a right to be there, Sheriff Edmunds said, unless individuals have violated some other law along the way.
"If you're an adult and you want to go and risk your life, it's your business," he said. "We just have to clean up the mess."
Really, it's too bad that people are so litigious these days. We should all have the right to launch ourselves off cliffs without other people being afraid :)
January 19, 2005
Skiers Risk Answering the Call of Their Wild Side
By KIRK JOHNSON
ARK CITY, Utah, Jan. 18 - The solo skier or snowboarder cutting virgin tracks through the deep powder on a steep mountain slope has become a signature and symbol of the Western tourism industry - heady with its mixture of freedom, beauty and rugged individualism.
But that seductive image may be encouraging more and more people - many without much experience or training - to venture beyond the relative safety of the big resorts, risking harm to themselves and others, skiers and backcountry experts say. Seven people have died in backcountry avalanches in Utah alone since the season started, more deaths than there have been in any other year since 1950.
"They built the lifts and they pushed the powder," said Bob Athey, a backcountry veteran who was preparing Tuesday morning, as he does just about every day, to ski by himself into the woods near the Alta Ski Resort. "But then you have more skiers, which dampens down the powder, and that means the people who do want it have to go out of bounds to get it."
In the past few years, the ski industry has responded to a hunger for untrammeled terrain. Alpine touring, which allows a skier to hike like a cross-country skier, or lock the boot down for traditional downhill skiing, has become one of the fastest-growing categories in winter sports, industry officials say. Traditional ski makers like Atomic have expanded into the new market, and boot makers that once served only mountain climbers have retooled as well. The American Alpine Institute, a climbing school and guide service in Bellingham, Wash., estimates that off-road skiing, as it might be called, is growing three to five times faster than the traditional downhill sport.
But there is a deep culture clash at the heart of this new phenomenon. Many people who identify themselves as backcountry skiers - knowledgeable about the risks, trained in survival skills and never without an electronic homing device to help people find them if they are buried by snow - look with barely concealed disdain at what they call the "out of bounds" skier, who simply rides the chairlift up, disregards the warning signs and ducks under the rope.
The 27-year-old man who died here Friday, Shane Maixner, found still on his snowboard under four feet of snow near the Canyons Resort, was an out-of-bounder who apparently reached the place of his death through a gate on the resort boundary marked with a prominent skull and crossbones. The gate, which leads onto public land, is unlocked and unguarded, and its location is clearly marked on resort maps.
Mr. Maixner was not carrying any of the recommended backcountry survival gear. "You can't sugarcoat it or people will never learn," said Patrick Ormond, a mountain guide who lives here in Park City. "Once you cross that gate, if you're unprepared, you cross the line from ignorance to recklessness."
But other backcountry skiers, dyed deep with the free-will ethic that imbues their sport, say that individual decisions and their consequences are all that matter. Life is a calculated risk, they say, and an out-of-bounds skier, however unprepared, has made a choice. That fact must be respected, they say.
"They got killed doing something they like," said Charlie Sturgis, a ski tour guide who manages an outdoor outfitting store here called White Pine Touring, referring to the recent skier deaths. "That beats hanging out the front of a windshield."
Other backcountry skiers are simply angry. Access into national forests and other public land is already tighter than ever, they say, as private property and resort development have encircled mountain areas in the West. Reckless people, they say, give careful people a bad name - and create an excuse for landowners who might want to close roads or trails. "Besides putting rescuers in danger, our access could be hurt," said Brent Sherry, a college student in Salt Lake City who skis both the backcountry and the resorts. "I think that could be a real issue."
Avalanche experts say that the recipe for a snowslide is simple: different storms deposit different layers on a mountain, some with wetter snow and some with drier powder, and the terrain is safe only when the layers bond, like a layer cake, usually with a few days of warm sun. Experienced skiers say they venture out only after digging a snow trench to see how well the pack has congealed. And any slope steeper than 30 degrees is double prone to slide, they say. Dutch Draw, where the slide occurred last Friday outside the Canyons Resort, has a slope of 37 degrees to 38 degrees.
Other skiers say it is not about the snow or the slope, but about decision making. Some people have a hard time backing away, or backing down, even if they are able to read the dangers. It is a problem that men, in particular, are apparently prone to. Of the 629 people killed in the United States by avalanches since 1950 whose sex was determined, only about one in 10 were women, according to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center in Boulder.
"Ninety-nine percent of the problem is testosterone poisoning," said Larry Guild, a skier from Amherst, Mass., who was on vacation in Utah and preparing on Tuesday to depart for Utah's backcountry for the first time. Mr. Guild said he was going with a guide and would not have it any other way. "There's no way I'd go up there by myself," he said, nodding his head to the mountains towering above the road where his group had parked.
Other people said that intuition was what could save a person in the wild and that there was only one way to get it - through years of experience. Sex does not matter, they say. "My husband has tried to develop a sixth sense about avalanches, and I usually defer to him," said Julie Cooke, who lives in Alta and was walking Tuesday morning past the backcountry access trailhead near her home. Ms. Cooke, who said her husband had been skiing the backcountry for 30 years, has not felt right going out since the last big wave of storms and said she would probably just wait a bit longer still, until she and her husband were sure.
With their grooming equipment and ever-present ski patrols, mountain resorts project an aura of safety that can obscure the risks beyond the borders of a flimsy fence, some skiers say, especially when the snow might look, to the untrained eye, about the same on either side. Others say that in the blur of warnings and precautions that modern society requires on so many things it is easier than ever to dismiss an avalanche danger sign as the work of lawyers or fussy government monitors, however dire the language. "There's a lot of stuff that can get you killed, but when you're in a ski resort, you don't have that expectation," said Mr. Sturgis, the tour guide and store manager.
Referring to the backcountry access point near the summit at Canyons Resort, he added that he thought that most of the people who went past the gate believed they were merely extending the resort experience.
Police officials say there is also the question of how to enforce the rules. The Summit County sheriff, Dave Edmunds, whose jurisdiction includes the Park City resorts, said that leaving a resort to ski onto someone's private property, for example, was an easy one - that is trespassing. But public lands outside a resort, like the Dutch Draw area where the big slide hit last week, are far trickier. The public has a right to be there, Sheriff Edmunds said, unless individuals have violated some other law along the way.
"If you're an adult and you want to go and risk your life, it's your business," he said. "We just have to clean up the mess."
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Production and Overproduction
* the challenge facing academics today is how to “overproduce with dignity”.
* A big part of the problem is the way that academic institutions think about and measure productivity. It’s become increasingly common for state legislatures to hammer public institutions for more and more quantitative evidence of productivity, but even at institutions which do not have to answer to legislators, various metrics of productivity have become more and more common.
* What ends up being measured, however? First, the productivity of scholarship: numbers of things published and disseminated, grant monies secured, quantities of fellowships and memberships. In suggesting that the status quo of such productivity lacks (and needs) dignity, John Holbo is pointing to the core of some of academia’s worst ills. The drive to scholarly overproduction which now reaches even the least selective institutions and touches every corner and niche of academia is a key underlying source of the degradation of the entire scholarly enterprise. It produces repetition. It encourages obscurantism. It forces overspecialization as a strategy for controlling the domains to which one is responsible as a scholar and teacher.
* You can’t blame anyone in particular for this. Everyone is doing the simple thing, the required thing, when they publish the same chapter from an upcoming manuscript in six different journals, when they go out on the conference circuit, when they churn out iterations of the same project in five different manuscripts over ten years. None of that takes conscious effort: it’s just being swept along by an irresistible tide. It’s the result of a rigged market: it’s as if some gigantic institutional machinery has placed an order for scholarship by the truckload regardless of whether it’s wanted or needed. It’s like the world’s worst Five-Year Plan ever: a mountain of gaskets without any machines to place them in.
* You could try to contest this if you wanted to measure academic productivity by looking to the importance or significance of particular scholarly work. But even that inevitably will lead to some ghastly results, whether you use a citation index or Google Scholar.
* So my simple suggestion is this: stop. Administrations and faculties need to stop caring how much someone writes or publishes or says, or even how important what they’ve published is according to some measurable or quantifiable metric. Not only because trying to measure productivity in terms of scholarship destroys scholarship, but because it detracts from the truly important kind of productivity in an academic institution.
* What really matters is this: how different are your students when they graduate from what they would have been had they not attended your institution, and how clearly can you attribute that difference to the things that you actively do in your classrooms and your institution as a whole? What, in short, did you teach them that they would not have otherwise known? How did you change them as people in a way that has some positive connection to their later lives?
* It’s the only productivity that matters, however we try to measure or account for it. What do we do by design that we can reasonably say produces a positive, identifiable difference in the lives of our students and our wider community? Scholarship enters that question somewhere, but hardly at all in the ghastly spew of excess publication that contemporary academia demands.
* A big part of the problem is the way that academic institutions think about and measure productivity. It’s become increasingly common for state legislatures to hammer public institutions for more and more quantitative evidence of productivity, but even at institutions which do not have to answer to legislators, various metrics of productivity have become more and more common.
* What ends up being measured, however? First, the productivity of scholarship: numbers of things published and disseminated, grant monies secured, quantities of fellowships and memberships. In suggesting that the status quo of such productivity lacks (and needs) dignity, John Holbo is pointing to the core of some of academia’s worst ills. The drive to scholarly overproduction which now reaches even the least selective institutions and touches every corner and niche of academia is a key underlying source of the degradation of the entire scholarly enterprise. It produces repetition. It encourages obscurantism. It forces overspecialization as a strategy for controlling the domains to which one is responsible as a scholar and teacher.
* You can’t blame anyone in particular for this. Everyone is doing the simple thing, the required thing, when they publish the same chapter from an upcoming manuscript in six different journals, when they go out on the conference circuit, when they churn out iterations of the same project in five different manuscripts over ten years. None of that takes conscious effort: it’s just being swept along by an irresistible tide. It’s the result of a rigged market: it’s as if some gigantic institutional machinery has placed an order for scholarship by the truckload regardless of whether it’s wanted or needed. It’s like the world’s worst Five-Year Plan ever: a mountain of gaskets without any machines to place them in.
* You could try to contest this if you wanted to measure academic productivity by looking to the importance or significance of particular scholarly work. But even that inevitably will lead to some ghastly results, whether you use a citation index or Google Scholar.
* So my simple suggestion is this: stop. Administrations and faculties need to stop caring how much someone writes or publishes or says, or even how important what they’ve published is according to some measurable or quantifiable metric. Not only because trying to measure productivity in terms of scholarship destroys scholarship, but because it detracts from the truly important kind of productivity in an academic institution.
* What really matters is this: how different are your students when they graduate from what they would have been had they not attended your institution, and how clearly can you attribute that difference to the things that you actively do in your classrooms and your institution as a whole? What, in short, did you teach them that they would not have otherwise known? How did you change them as people in a way that has some positive connection to their later lives?
* It’s the only productivity that matters, however we try to measure or account for it. What do we do by design that we can reasonably say produces a positive, identifiable difference in the lives of our students and our wider community? Scholarship enters that question somewhere, but hardly at all in the ghastly spew of excess publication that contemporary academia demands.
s p a c i n g : : : whose space is public space?
On a related note, played shinny at Christie Pits on Saturday. There were only 8 people out there.
Disc Withdrawal
Check out the final moment of this clip. Sweet grab, but I hope he has health benefits for that separated shoulder...
Monday, January 17, 2005
Bloody Sundays - PittsburghLIVE.com
Bloody Sundays - PittsburghLIVE.com: "'You want to know how hard you're hit? If you're a running back, and you're hit full-speed, he can literally knock the feces out of your bowels. You lose all feeling in your limbs. That's how hard they hit in the NFL,' said Merrill Hoge, a former Steelers and Bears running back forced out of the game in 1995 because of a devastating series of concussions. "
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Research :: itbusiness.ca
The, umm, highlights?
Most enterprises customers, however, will likely take the same approach to market research as they have to establishing vendor partners: they'll winnow them down as much as possible, and in many cases will seek out those with the broadest portfolio of expertise. That doesn't mean there isn't any room for differentiation. I tend to see IDC, for example, as the best place to find overall market statistics on IT spending, including hardware and software sales. Gartner seems better at assessing industry trends like utility computing. Forrester, meanwhile, has some highly sophisticated practices aroundWell. I have no comment. None. Nada. Rien. Let's the facts stand. Yep. No idea what he could mean by "No obvious replacements." That's crazy talk. As Bill the Cat would say, "Cough. Oop Ack."
specific vertical markets like finance. All of them offer everything, but each has subjects in which they stand out. More than most industries, analyst firms are truly a product of their employees.
Nurturing those employees and maintaining morale may be the most important element in the integration process at Gartner and Meta, which probably ruffled feathers when they said their merger
is intended to achieve "operational efficiencies" -- you don't have to be an analyst to know what that means. Even at IDC Canada, which so far has stayed away from acquisition activity, several long-standing analysts have fled, with no obvious replacements. These are people, after all, who are used to assessing the future. In the short-term, the forecast doesn't look good.
Monday, January 10, 2005
Googling Malcolm Gladwell :: Better Living Centre
One of the better easy-to-read pop/tech/sociology/anthrolopogy authors out there - and he's from Canada too!
How to Take Down a Christmas Tree :: Bow. James Bow
Doesn't apply to me this year, but brings back fond memories of Xmas' past. Including the story I heard about two of the nicest, kindest, most considerate people I know dropping their xmas tree of their balcony, which was 8-10 stories up.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Recently Read:: Lorraine Adam's Harbor
I liked it. But then again, I'm still at work at 8:30 on a Wednesday. So, while I sit on hold, trying to get Budget Rent-A-Car to mail the CDs I left in the car, I'll tag the following reviews that articulate why it was a good book.
The characters:
List of reviews:
Oh - I did reach someone in Calgary. But, no, they've gone home for the day.
The characters:
He and his friends go clubbing in shoplifted suits, fall in love, try to figure out American body language and slang and often get it wrong. They get fake papers, commit minor insurance fraud, live on the edge, always terrified of the authorities. Adams draws her characters with compassion and humor, taking us inside their heads by means of an invented idiom crafted from her protagonists' fractured English and fluid Arabic cadences, at once poetic and deliberately ungainly: "But Rafik this early was asleep," Aziz thinks. Or "the acrid of bus bellied up to them."A review by a Muslim blog
List of reviews:
Oh - I did reach someone in Calgary. But, no, they've gone home for the day.
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Requiem for a Cop :: Dana Stevens
Seems sort of silly that I'm focusing on Orbach in light of global events, so this is the second last post on the topic.
Monday, January 03, 2005
Flit on DART
A variety of commentators have snapped at the Cdn government's seemingly slow response time to the tsunami tragedy. This is an excellent explanation of the historic policy choices that serve to constrain our possible actions now. It also offers up an interesting dilemma for the Liberal party - historically, the Grits have been fairly anti-CF (dating right back to the decision to smush the arms of the military into one). This goes along with their theories about violence (they're against the state's use of violence - with the possible exception of using it against other Liberals). However, the downsizing of the Canadian military now serves to limit Canada's ability to 1) matter in the world (not a big deal to most Grits, who have managed to come up with a number of clever theories to get around the "feet on the ground" maxim, such as Axworthy's "soft power"); and 2) to have a humanitarian influence in the world - which is part and parcel of the Canadian mythology/iconology.
Anyway, worth reading. The nut graf is here:
Similarly, I liked Paul Wells' evisceration of the media's fixation of cdn cabinet meetings as a viable response to this tragedy. I mean, do you really think that Joe Comuzzi is going to help the Sri Lankans? Will Liza Frulla want to defer this to the relevant Quebec minister (actually, given that Alberta, BC and Ontario have all beaten the feds to the mark - don't answer that)? Can Stephane Dion pen a stiffly worded missive to Mother Nature, reminding her of her statutory duties? Does this mean that Judy Sgro will now have Thai strippers working in her office and on her re-election campaign instead of Romanians? Can Ken Dryden get his Dad to send more sleeping kits?
Seriously, I realize that Blackberries are banned in Cabinet meetings - but one would think that they are still used outside the Langevin Block. Face to face meetings weren't and aren't necessary in this case.
Anyway, worth reading. The nut graf is here:
Starting with the McCallum years, we officially became "hotspot" averse. (Regarding strategic airlift, his now famous line was "No one has yet been able to give me a single instance where the absence of this capability stopped us or significantly delayed us moving people or equipment from point A to point B." Well, we've got a single instance now.)
Unfortunately, as was commented on at the time, that mentality makes it now effectively impossible to deploy in natural disaster scenarios, as well. DART, an Eggleton "first-in" project, has atrophied to the point where it proved undeployable even to Haiti during the hurricanes last year. If all this makes you wonder how effective the CF might be if that earthquake had been off of Vancouver Island, instead of Aceh, well, you probably should wonder. It's certainly not encouraging. Hopefully the Americans will have an aircraft carrier free then, too.
The good people of Port Alberni might want to flinch.
If I have time, I might skim through the army.ca forums to see what the people who actually know think.Similarly, I liked Paul Wells' evisceration of the media's fixation of cdn cabinet meetings as a viable response to this tragedy. I mean, do you really think that Joe Comuzzi is going to help the Sri Lankans? Will Liza Frulla want to defer this to the relevant Quebec minister (actually, given that Alberta, BC and Ontario have all beaten the feds to the mark - don't answer that)? Can Stephane Dion pen a stiffly worded missive to Mother Nature, reminding her of her statutory duties? Does this mean that Judy Sgro will now have Thai strippers working in her office and on her re-election campaign instead of Romanians? Can Ken Dryden get his Dad to send more sleeping kits?
Seriously, I realize that Blackberries are banned in Cabinet meetings - but one would think that they are still used outside the Langevin Block. Face to face meetings weren't and aren't necessary in this case.
Sunday, January 02, 2005
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