Walking with an iphone means I have a 2gb camera in my pocket, all the time. That means, I’m prone to taking pictures, all the time. Generally speaking, the total lo-res package is pretty bad but, still, a camera is what you make it to be. So here’s a couple pictures.

Went to Playland yesterday. Long day with a bunch of 13-yr-olds but it was plenty of fun. And there’s something I like about Playland. I think it has to do with the old, worn rides under their many coats of paint. It’s very honest, basic East Van. I’ve been going since I was a kid (but I didin’t grow up in E.Van). My Granpa used to have a booth in the midway during the PNE. He was a carnival man. But that’s a whole other story. Believe me.

Just finished a (mostly) complete arterial route ride. Didn’t really plan it this way but my usual crossing-light at Fraser St. was all clogged up with construction and I ended up at Prince Albert & Kingsway. What to do?

Well, the only thing that seemed sensible to do was: ride the arterials! So, down Kingsway I went. Then down Main street. Did I turn at 5th ave? No way! Straight on until Union St. and then over the viaduct and up Dunsmuir ’til hamilton. Next thing you know it’s an “all arterial” route. And, you know what else? It’s not so bad. I know lots of ink is spilled about safe riding routes (I’ve spilled some of that ink myself) but just taking a lane and going for it is the thing to do, sometimes.

While I was reading this , I read a sentence that got me thinking about why the web is both strange and sensible at the same time.

While Mike Johnston (whose is the proprietor of The Online Photographer ) was proposing a simple exercise to improve ones’ photographic skills (and which I should try to follow, one day), he wrote this,:

“If there are, say, 30,000 people reading this (approximately our average daily readership, an astounding fact that still mystifies me), a couple of thousand might think this suggestion is a sound one…”

I think, based only on his writings, that Mike is probably an honest, neither overly conceited nor overly modest, guy who knows quite a bit about his subject (much more so than the average: he had, afterall, been employed in the past as a photography journalist by specialty print magazines) and is very good and entertaining in his writings about said subject. That 30,000 people a day should read his site is a testament to two things. One is that, as we all know, by far the majority of that hugely vast amount of content on the web isn’t really of much interest to anybody else. Even discounting the dumb, evil, or designed-to-disgust content, most of it just isn’t anything special. So good, honest, thoughtful writings by someone who knows something about his subject is bound to, eventually, attract people who appreciate it.

Second is that there are so many people surfing and reading the web that even if this good content is really not gripping enough for most web surfers, the minority who are attracted are still an amazingly sizable chunk of people.

I think I’m making this sound more profound than it is or maybe it’s more profound than I can describe without sounding like a pompous twit (I’m not Mike Johnston, after all). But it does continually amaze me that good people with good skills who may have lost their niche in the analog world find a new one that looks completely different but which enables their skills to be out in the skills-marketplace, so to speak, and attracts the people who are looking for those skills. Even, in this case, if it’s just good writing about photography.

Had a funny net-day in Abbotsford today. I was at a couple meetings at University of Fraser Valley and I couldn’t get normal websites such as gmail, basecamp, or facebook. Not even plain old google. But I could get VPL’s super-weird user-unfriendly remote email connection where you have to go through a firewall with port 950, authenticate there with a generic login, leave that window open while you then go to an outlook-webclient page using a weird, hard-to-remember URL. It was astonishing. That weird email routine is usually hard to get inside the network of academic institutions; yet, today at UFV, I could get in using my laptop with a borrowed wireless authentication as well as using a library workstation and a guest-authentication.

I mean. That’s just not normal. I’m sure they must have been having some kind of dns/bandwidth/I-don’t-know kind of problem to prevent google and gmail but to have that stuff *not* get through when weird email firewall stuff does get through is very strange.

I was sitting in the coffee shop this aft; I should say “hiding” in the coffee shop because the wireless where I work wasn’t agreeing with Suse liveCD in my laptop (the wifi at the library is superbogus crappy: you have to scroll down below the fold of a page of straight text and the authenticate through a form that sometimes works), and then I had to try *two* coffeshops to get a properly working connection and I was totally grumbling and posted a snarky comment to my twitter when I suddenly thought of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jETv3NURwLc . So now I’m thinking: is free/cheap  public wifi that’s available pretty much anywhere something that, in  Louis CK’s words: “the world’s owes us?”

I mean, here in the downtown, there’s  almost free, good wifi pretty-much within reach of wherever we might be. That’s actually pretty good. So, even if it doesn’t work once in a while, maybe I should stop griping. I don’t know.

Interesting little post over at David Lee King’s blog about ten gadgets that are dead or dying (and will be impossible to find soon). One is the wrist-watch. Hmmm. I know that my phone will tell me the time. So will my Palm. In fact I’ve been carrying a device of some sort that will tell me the time for at least 17 years. But still, last time I spent the day without my watch, I kept noticing. So much so that that was the topic of my FB post for the day.

So we went to Park Royal mall today. Kind of a holiday weekend adventure. It’s way out of the way for us but the Family thought it might be a nice place to go. As for me, I hadn’t been there for 10 years and then that was only to the future shop and before that was probably over 20 years ago. So after some basic indoor mall experience K. says we should have lunch at the Whole Foods and I’d looked at the Mall directory and it’s waaaaay over the far end of the place so we hike about three blocks and cross a busy street and, lo and behold, it’s a whole “village” mall concept at that end of the place.

Now, that’s interesting because in my days at the Land Centre I’d spent plenty of time reading about and learning about the new shopping mall tricks such as making them into “village” high-street places and these Park Royal guys have really gone to town with the concept. And it’s pretty seductive, I have to say. Lots of people all over the sidewalks. Lots of places to sit. Lots of stores (some small, some big) with their doors on the “street”. Feels very comfortable and “human scale” to walk around. Only problem is that, it’s still a mall. There’s mostly chain stores. Many of the stores are big box stores that are, well, still big box stores even if you walk across a sidewalk to get to them. But I have to admit: I can see why people who don’t over analyze things like I do would be quite happy to park their car on the fake street and walk down the sidewalk into the front door of the fake village grocery store. Very interseting (and not wholly unenjoyable) experience, I have to admit.

I’ve been wondering why it is that the current rage for “useful” bicycles, which in itself is a marvelously Good Thing, is centred around bikes which, while being made of new materials, are shaped like very old bicycles. Hundred-year-old bicycles, in fact. When it’s been well-known (at least among cycle engineers) that the most efficient shapes for two-wheels-in-line transport are somewhat different. 

The unpopularity of recumbents is somewhat understandable, if unfair. They don’t “look right” and they can be harder to ride at first. And when people buy bikes after riding them around the bike-store’s block for ten minutes, that makes recumbents a really hard sell, I suspect. 

But small-wheeled upright bikes don’t suffer from this problem. They ride like a “normal” bike and you can tell that as soon as you start to turn the pedals. It’s also reasonbaly well-known by bike engineers that a little bit of suspension at both of those small wheels makes for the most efficient bike of them all. (I know I’m biased. I’ve got an old Moulton.) Still, I don’t really know the answer to my question: why don’t the regular (and nicely outfitted, I might add) Dahons, have suspension? I’m puzzled buy this.

And I’m also puzzled that there aren’t more companies marketing a wider range of bike shapes (small wheels, spar frames, etc.) to capture the audience of new utility cyclists?

After a Sunday afternoon lull sitting reading our books in JJ Bean’s on 14th & Main we were driving along past Main & Kingsway and I remarked to the wife: where did people hang out on Sundays in the winter when we were 20-somethings?

It occurred to us that there was almost nowhere to go: I remember once or twice going to the SoftRock Cafe and once going to the old Vienna tea house on Robson. K remembers going to Beanos. Ugh. I can’t deny I went there too. But it got me thinking.
I realize now that I spent a lot of time visiting friends. At their houses. And that reminded me of what people used to say: Vancouver was a very difficult place to break into the regular social life. There were no ubiquitous coffee shops. No hip hangouts. There were bars, a few nightclubs. And during the day there was Beanos. So almost everybody visited their friends at someone’s house and that meant that if you didn’t know anybody in town, you didn’t meet any locals. And if you didn’t like your friends, it was very hard to meet new ones.
(My perpective is limited, I know. I grew up with a very close set of friends who I still see. I realize now that we didn’t admit newcomers easily. Although I don’t think that was on purpose as much as it was a function of having known each other from such an early age. But that’s another story….)
I hate to admit it (because people are probably sick by now of hearing about the “before Expo/after Expo”story) but this *was* something that changed after Expo 86. For one thing, before Expo, very few places were open on Sunday. Certainly bars weren’t. Most stores weren’t. And I seem to recall that many many cafes were not either. That’s compounded by the fact that there weren’t many cafes in the first place.
I guess this is something we can be thankful for now that we have a grownup-like city. Traffic may be a constant hassle. Rent may be insanely expensive. But at least there’s somewhere to go and something to see on any given day. It sure wasn’t like this when I was growing up.