Andy Grove, Intel giant, has died

Sad news from the world of technology: Andy Grove, the former President, CEO and Chairman of Intel, has passed away at the age of 79.

He may not be a familiar name to most, but in the tech space, he was - and always will be - a rock star. He was the one who led the company's shift into microprocessors, and most of the computers we use today owe much to the architectures and technologies developed on his watch.

If you used any technology today, as I have done to share word of his passing, I hope you'll pause for a moment and think of him, and all those he led, who made it possible.

https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/andrew-s-grove-1936-2016/

On Einstein's Theory of Human Stupidity

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
Albert Einstein

I made the mistake of scrolling through my social media feeds this morning. Somehow, Einstein's words seem especially appropriate as I wish I could un-read what I've already read.

I'm guessing human stupidity was around long before Twitter (10 years-old tomorrow) and Facebook and their ilk came along. But it seems like it's so much more visible today as a result. Bummer that.

On giving thanks for the velo

"Whoever invented the bicycle deserves the thanks of humanity."
Lord Charles Beresford

I seem to be in a bike-focused mood this weekend, so please forgive me for posting quickly and running out the door. The road awaits, and I've got a few kms to log before the rain moves in.

I hope you're able to hit your proverbial road today, as well. Whatever you're up to, may it be fun, fulfilling, and safe.

Update - 4:10 pm: I'm back from being beaten up by 40 km/h winds. Despite spitting rain and a route that had a lot more uphills and downs, I managed to add another 30.26 km to the tally. Ridiculous? Sure. But holy cow did it feel good.

Where I get back on the bike

Where the rubber hits the road
London, ON
March 2016

The weather's been glorious for much of the week, so as the weekend approached, I found myself staring at the pink Specialized bike that's been parked in the living room for months - my wife is infinitely patient and lovely, and she puts up with my weird cyclist-parking habits - and thinking that it was time to roll it out and give it a workout.

The obligatory cycling selfie

So today dawned warm and greyish, and that was good enough to get it out of the house, give it a bit of a cleaning and tweaking and see if I remembered how to ride the thing.

Fortunately, my gyroscopic memory remains intact, and I managed to spin for 26.8 km without incident. I didn't set any speed records, but that wasn't really the point in the first place. Instead, I returned home with a grin on my face and a determination to make this cycling season count more than the last couple of years have. Since my little, ah, incident (here, if you're just joining us), I've admittedly been more than a little afraid to get on and ride. If we're being brutally honest, I've been a wimp, using any excuse in the book to stay out of the saddle.

I'm posting this today to remind myself, on those days when I'm [this close] to making another excuse to not take the bike, that cycling to me was in the not-too-distant past way more than a means of getting around town. It was my culture, my identity, and my passion. And it will be again, fear be damned.

For the record, I parked my wheels in the garage when I was done. My wife deserves a bike-free living room.

Your turn: Do you ride? Where will your bike take you this year?

Thematic Photographic 368 - Night

The lights are on, but nobody's home
London, ON
February 2016

There's never enough time in the world to do the things we want to do. Between running the daily minutiae of life and then recovering from said minutiae in anticipation of the next anticipated wave of minutiae, free time is a precious commodity.

We always tell ourselves we'll do X whenever we have a little bit of extra time. But that extra time never materializes. And X, whatever that may be, doesn't get done.

So my solution is simple: Change up our perception of extra time, or free time. It isn't a gloriously long two-week vacation. Or even a leisurely Sunday afternoon. Think shorter moments. Think in-between moments, when you're moving from one piece of minutiae to another.

This picture is a result of one of those in-between moments. As I walked across the Western University campus, from the parking lot to where the Little Man was attending a party, I slowed my pace and shot whatever I could. It was an icy cold winter's night, and I had the wrong camera for the job. But I shot anyway because that X thing I'd been meaning to get done was calling me.

I call this photography on the run, and if you haven't tried it, you're missing out on a whole lotta fun.

We may not be able to slow the universe down, but I'm pretty sure we can all be trying just a little bit harder to make moments along the way. They don't have to be spectacular. They just have to...be. Take the time.

Your turn: Take a picture that suggests, evokes or otherwise reflects this week's theme, night, and share it on your blog or website. Leave a comment here letting folks know where to find it. Visit other participants and feel free to pull in others, as well, because a busy Thematic is more fun than a quiet one. Head here for more background on how this works. And please accept our thanks - it's all about your vision, after all.

News through an ancient lens

Film and video
London, ON
February 2016
For more Thematic data, head here

The mechanics of journalism have always been tightly influenced by the evolution of technology. Newspapers have evolved from manual typewriters and ink-stained hot type to electronic workflows and vanishing printing presses. The typical radio studio of 2016 - now filled with flat-screens, social media and enough bandwidth to launch a space mission - is barely recognizable to anyone who came of age spinning vinyl and taking requests by phone. Likewise, television has evolved from film to video and now digital.

We'll leave the macro-economies of the Internet and its often frightening impact on the business of journalism for another day, but suffice to say the online/mobile/social wave of change will similarly leave the media space virtually unrecognizable within a few short years. Assuming it even survives in any recognizable form at all.

Which is why when I come across old data types like these - 40-year-old film and a 25-year-old video camera - I have to pause and wonder how they pulled it off with such seemingly ancient, ponderous and expensive technology. Today's video journalists shoot digitally, edit in the field on iPads and upload from wherever they can get the strongest signal. I can't even begin to imagine what it would have been like to shoot on film (sparingly, lest you bust the budget) and then have to build in enough time to drive back to the newsroom, get it developed, then edit it all together.

I realize the journalists of tomorrow will look at our tablets and smartphones with an identical sense of wonder. And assuming the industry survives in some form into the distant future, I hope every generation has the opportunity to look back and be thankful to have the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before. Because anything that advances the storytelling state-of-the-art deserves to be remembered fondly by those who tell the stories in the first place.

On loss, light, and Steinbeck's final work

"It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone."
John Steinbeck
The Winter of Our Discontent

I didn't appreciate Steinbeck as much in high school, when I first studied his work, as I do now. Another sign of the inevitable creep of time, I suppose. And yet here I find myself slowly nodding in agreement: I'd rather have and lose than never have in the first place.

That's just nuts

I have no explanation for this photo of peanuts beyond the simple fact that not everything needs an explanation. Life is short, and I'd hate to think I had missed an opportunity to be happily frivolous.

The question, then, is how are YOU are going to be happily frivolous, as well? Do tell...

Data from outer space

Safe travels, Commander Kelly
London, ON
March 2016
For more data-infused goodness, head here

The other day, I sat in the cozy comfort of my home office and watched the utterly surreal sight you see here of three spaceman helping three other spaceman get into their spaceship.

A few hours later, their Soyuz craft departed the International Space Station and fired its rockets to lose  286 mph of velocity and drop the far side of its orbit deep into the atmosphere. Not long thereafter, said Soyuz plunged through the atmosphere, trailing superhot plasma in its wake, and then the ship settled safely into a rocket-assisted landing on the Kazakh steppe. After almost a year in orbit, U.S. astronaut Scott Kelly and his fellow #YearInSpace cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko as well as Sergey Volkov, were finally back on the planet.

As routine as these flights seem to have become, I still - and likely always will - view them as nothing short of unreal. The building blocks of establishing human life on another planet are being built right here, right now, and we get to watch it in breathtaking HD from the comfort of home.

In a sense, the screen grab you see here is just data. Pixels on a screen. A video like so many others that we'll watch today and every day. But this data is special. It came 320 km above our heads, from a ship flying at 28,000 km/h through the most hostile environment humans have ever dared explore. It's been massaged and shared just so, through an impossibly complex global network that's existed in its current form for fewer years than most of us have been alive. And it finally makes it into our homes, and allows us witness history.

We live in an incredible age. Moments like this remind me of the need to stop what we're doing every once in a while and drink in the wonder of it all.

On the flip side of sorrow

"Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Yin. Yang. How do you know what happiness feels like without having experienced its polar opposite first?

Facebook's new emojis go beyond the "Like"

After months of testing, Facebook took the wraps off of its new "Reactions" emojis this week, and as expected the Internet melted down.

Users have complained for years that "Like" wasn't always an appropriate way to express non-verbal emotion - for example, when your friend's pet just died or she lost her job. So Facebook has finally expanded the list of emojis available to users. In addition to the traditional Like, users can now click on a Love, Haha, Wow, Sad or Angry emoji. too.

After piloting the new emojis in Ireland, Span and Chile, they've been rolled out globally on both the Facebook.com website and in its mobile apps. You'll want to update your mobile app to take advantage of the new capability.

Using them is fairly simple: Just long-press over the bottom of a post on mobile (or hover over it with your mouse on a desktop browser.) A panel with the six emoji options pops up. Select the one you want and voila, you're done! Notifications throughout Facebook have been updated to reflect the number of "Reactions" to a given post, and Facebook displays how many of each a given update has received.

On the surface this seems like a simple extension of the Likes that we've been using for a few years. But behind the scenes, there's a longer-term plan.

Facebook says it "counts" all of the new emojis as Likes. For now. But that doesn't mean that over time it won't start tracking them individually - and then using that knowledge to more closely target ads and other marketing. The fact that Likes (and Wows, and Angry, and...) exist off of Facebook, on partner sites, gives Facebook another powerful avenue to collect user data.

That data is lucrative, and these new emoji are little more than a long-term data play. That's smart business, and we should never be under the illusion that Facebook is doing this to be nice. Facebook is always focused on growing audience, deepening engagement and selling the results to advertisers.

With this firmly in mind, this is another brilliant move by the company to keep us in its world for more time, and to interact with it, and each other, more profoundly.