Naked branches

Trees meet sky
London, ON, March 2008 [Click to embiggen]

The scene: a bitterly cold, brilliantly sunny late afternoon. I've dropped my daughter off at a program and have returned to the parking lot. I hear the wind rustling through the trees, so I look up and feel very small in the process. The little voice in my left ear concludes that the resulting motion means I won't be getting any sharp pictures today. But that's why fast shutter speeds were invented, counters my right-eared voice.

The right side wins out. These branches will be full of leaves before long, and when they do they'll be telling a different story. Maybe I'll reshoot them at that time, but for now I can't take my eyes off the yellowish light painting the bare branches against an impossibly blue sky.

Your turn: This was one of the last pictures I shot before the calendar turned from winter to spring. How did you mark the changing of the season?

One more thing: Earlier this week, I was interviewed by Jonathan Montpetit of the Canadian Press for a piece on the declining fortunes of land line telephones. The piece published March 19th under the headline, Quebec study offers snapshot of rapid decline of the land-line telephone. It was also picked up in a bunch of interesting places, including the CBC, CTV, the Kingston Whig-Standard, the Calgary Sun and the Peterborough Examiner. Here's what I said:

Analysts see a trend sustained by a demographic shift hardly unique to the province.

"As Generation Y increases its influence on the market these numbers will only continue to grow," said Carmi Levy, a technology analyst with AR Communications.

"The understanding of what phone service is is very different among the generation that has grown up among the Internet."

[Snip]

Relatively small upstarts like U.S.-based Vonage Holdings are targeting consumers with offerings - from phone-number guarantees to responsive customer service - that the giants have difficulty matching.

"Their biggest challenge is inertia," Levy said of Bell and Telus. "They're so big and so entrenched that they can't move fast enough to bring innovative new technologies to market before smaller, more agile competitors."