Looking into infininity

Water, water everywhere
Grand Bend, ON
September 2013
For more cloudspotting Thematic, click here

Do you ever stand on a beach and wonder what's out there beyond the point where the sky meets the water? Does it make you feel small? Refreshed? Inspired?

Because I'm gradually building up my bike legs and am going to attempt a ride to a place just like this before long. And when I get there I want to make sure I squeeze the most meaning from the moment.

On not getting what you want

"Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck."
Dalai Lama

Something tells me most of us have more experience with this than we'd care to admit. I kinda like his perspective.

Field of weeds

Ominous
Hyde Park, ON
May 2014
Thematic. Cloudspotting. Here.

It's soccer season again, which means our daughter is back to defending her zone, harassing opposing players and taking no prisoners. It also means lots of evenings of sitting on the sidelines, cheering her on. It's a wonderful place to be - for her and for us - and we're already relishing the experience.

Well, maybe not so much this week, when the skies unexpectedly turned from warm and blue to cold and grey and threatening from the time we left the driveway to the time the game got underway. Keeping warm was somewhat out of the question, so I pulled out the smartphone during halftime and explored the weeds just beyond the pitch.

It's nice to know some things never change. And it's nice to know the world continues to serve up stuff worth looking at and thinking about, even if it doesn't necessarily merit inclusion on a magazine cover.

Your turn: Beauty is...?

BlackBerry: Not dead yet

For a company with dwindling market share, BlackBerry manages to have a bigger impact on the collective tech/business radar than you'd otherwise expect. And sure enough, when IDC, a leading global research company, released numbers earlier this week that predicted BlackBerry's already-small market share would nearly vanish over the next four years, it prompted more than a tempest in a tech-infused teacup.

BlackBerry's CEO John Chen responded in his usual straightforward manner - which I rather dig - saying the company is far from dead. And since I never miss an opportunity to look beyond the headlines and dig into what's really going on, I wrote an assessment piece for Yahoo Canada Finance. Here it is:

BlackBerry set to prove market share doesn't matter

On Maya Angelou

News just in that iconic American author, poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou has passed away. She was 86. I can't help but think of what is likely her most famous qoute, because her words have resonated in me, and helped shape my own world view, almost from the moment I first heard them:

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

May her memory always be a blessing, and may we all carry her lessons forward.

About those self-driving cars...

My phone's been ringing a lot lately with requests for comment on tech stuff. Beyond the growing volume and frequency, I'm noticing a change in the types of things folks want to talk about. Tech isn't just hard core tech anymore. It's spreading into everyday life, and the topics I'm being asked to weigh in on aren't necessarily the same classic tech issues that once dominated my workload. Total coolness.

To wit, Google's autonomous vehicles, more commonly known as self-driving cars, or robotic cars. They hold the promise of one day freeing us from the scourge of breakfast burrito-munching, text-addicted distracted drivers, and indeed the prototypes driving around parts of California are truly incredible pieces of technology.

The company introduced a new prototype for an autonomous vehicle yesterday (blog entry, The Guardian story, Car & Driver article). While earlier prototypes were based on commercial vehicles, like Toyota's Prius or RX, this one's purpose-built from the ground up. It also has no steering wheels, no pedals, and no provision for human intervention. A little creepy? Probably. But it's another step along the road toward a very different transportation-based future.

Al Jazeera quoted me in an article posted this morning: Google close to unveiling self-driving car. Here's what I had to say:

Technology analyst, Carmi Levy, told Al Jazeera that autonomous cars would be an "inevitable part" of the way people travel in the future. 

He added that the transition to autonomous driving would open up a "litany of legal, insurance and even ethical issues". 

Levy said that while there was a risk of vehicles being hacked, consumers and governments would have to accept that with any new technology "perfection may not be universally attainable".

Your turn: Would you step into an autonomous vehicle? Do you agree/disagree with me?

Stephen Orser. Once again, London deserves better

Last week I was privileged to give a talk to TechAlliance, a dynamic organization that supports and nurtures businesses here in London. I've admired this group from afar for years, so to be asked by them to speak at their season-closing breakfast was a real honour.

Both during my talk and in the hallway discussions afterward, we talked about what makes this city unique, how our business landscape is stacked with the right kind of talent, and why we need to do a better job connecting the dots and telling our story both inside and outside our borders. The experience galvanized me. Not that I needed any more reason to love this town, but I came away from it feeling even more committed to pushing our agenda forward.

Then I looked at my Twitter stream last night and noticed one of our city councillors had yet again stuck his foot in it. Stephen Orser represents Ward 4, and he's repeatedly exhibited behaviours that most reasonable individuals would classify as questionable, unacceptable or downright moronic - see my blog entry, Games politicians play, for a recent example where he posted a citizen's private information without his permission.

This time, Orser found himself in hot water after a graphic that was offensive to women was posted on his website. (The site, www.stephenorser.com, is now blank. Because apparently an "under construction" graphic featuring a dog leering at a buxom woman was for a time considered by at least one elected official to be preferable to nothing at all. Seriously...unreal.)

His excuse - because he always has a convenient one - follows the now-familiar theme of blaming someone else. According to Orser, his webmaster, who according to reports also owns a porn site, screwed up. Orser added he doesn't know much about technology, and called the response an "orchestrated campaign" against him. (London Free Press story here: Coun. Stephen Orser in another online mess)

Sorry dude, but this one's all on you. If you wouldn't put your foot into it so consistently and instead behaved like a mensch, maybe your political opponents wouldn't find it so easy to go after you for being the kind of person I'd never want my children to emulate. You might also want to try finding better friends and associates, because your current bunch also seems to fail the mentor-for-my-kids test.

Coming on the heels of what I thought was a really great talk with some of London's most notable business leaders - Orser wasn't there, but Mayoral candidate Matt Brown was. Mayor Joe Fontana was busy preparing for his fraud trial that's currently underway - this latest chapter in Orser's political career disappoints me to no end, and I'm guessing I'm not alone in throwing my hands up in frustration.

Because yet again, our city is tarred with bush league idiocy by a city councillor who seems to bounce from one blame-everyone-else-but-himself incident to another. Yet again our agenda is hijacked while other cities, professionally led by civic-minded councillors who seem to innately know how to earn respect, race ahead of us. Orser's latest mess-up was, like all of his previous ones, no simple mistake. It's not remotely acceptable, and this city deserves better.

At what point does London say "enough"? At what point do we take the morons who discredit us and bounce them, once and for all, from office? At what point does this city decide to it deserves a better class of leadership?

Bueller?

Learning from eBay's mistakes

By every definition, the eBay security breach - the one where hackers broke into the main database that stores personal information, including passwords, of the online auction company's 145 million users - is shaping up to be one of the most damaging in history.

Beyond the numbers, though, there's an emerging lesson of how victimized companies should never respond. And it's clear eBay is setting a new low thanks to its bumbling, stumbling response to the break-in.

I wrote an article for Yahoo Canada Finance that summarizes the kinds of behaviours other companies might want to avoid in future, and what's at stake if they fail to learn from eBay's dubious example. Here's the link:

eBay hack: Top 4 things the company did wrong

For what it's worth, this isn't strictly an eBay issue. You don't have to have an eBay account for this to touch you - currently or potentially - in some way. If eBay drops the ball, any company can drop the ball (cough, Target, cough.) Sooner or later, this compromises all of us.

Thematic Photographic 296 - Cloudspotting

Something's brewing up there
London, ON
May 2014

It only seems like a lifetime ago that I was lying flat-out on my front lawn, staring up at the sky and trying to see shapes in the passing clouds. It seems like a world away, as well, and considering I have kids of my own who easily do the same thing on our lawn here in London, it may as well be.

As the temperatures finally begin to feel like spring and even sort-of summer-ish, we're starting to see what the meteorologists call "active weather". Which gives the kid in me lots of stuff to watch for in the skies overhead. And lots to think about as I wonder why more of us don't take the time to enjoy the never-ending show from above.

Your turn: Find some clouds. Any clouds. Or something that reminds you of clouds. Shoot it, post it, and comment here. Visit other participants and return through the week to see what everyone's up to and, if you're game, add even more to the mix. Head here for more background on how Thematic Photographic works. And enjoy. Because that's why we do this.

Keep your feet on the ground...

Big stretch
London, ON
March 2014
Thematic. Trees & branches. Here.

I'm not one to follow the lives of celebrities. There are, after all, so many more things to discuss and learn from, and it seems like such a waste of energy to devote brain cycles to the Kardashians or the Biebers of the world.

And yet here I find my interest piqued by the life of Casey Kasem, the legendary radio host whose decline - he suffers from dementia - has been garnering headlines of late after he was reported missing by family members. He has since been located, but the incident laid bare a rather nasty battle between various family members.

Illness is tragic. Illness plus family strife is tragedy compounded, and I do hope the man finds some sense of peace amid all of this. In the meantime, his tagline - keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars - always seems to come to mind whenever I find myself staring at the canopy of a tree.

There's no way in heck that tree will ever come remotely close to the stars. But it reaches for them, anyway. Somehow, not trying in the first place isn't an option. For the tree, and, I'm guessing, for anyone who chooses to look at it.

Your turn: What are you reaching for?

On critical thinking

"One of the biggest problems with the world today is that we have large groups of people who will accept whatever they hear on the grapevine, just because it suits their worldview - not because it is actually true or because they have evidence to support it. The really striking thing is that it would not take much effort to establish validity in most of these cases. But people prefer reassurance to research."
Neil deGrasse Tyson

First in a very long series of quotes that individually and collectively reinforce why I believe Dr. Tyson is a voice we might want to be listening to.

Fruitography revisited

‎I spent my Saturday night not at some trendy club or a sold out show. No, nothing that exciting for me. Instead I went  grocery shopping. Because long after the umbrella in your overpriced drink has wilted and the curtain has fallen, you still have to eat.

The good news is I wasn't alone. I was with my wife and daughter, which very quickly turned the evening into something infinitely more exciting than any club or show ever could be.‎ In the end it's all about perspective. And it looks like I'm right where I need to be.

About this picture: I kind of went a little bonkers with the fruit-section photography - aka fruitography - again. It turns out that guerrilla photo bombing in the grocery store is easier to pull off when you're using a smartphone, as store employees think you're reading your grocery list instead of composing. Seriously, you can't buy this amount of family fun.

Telus, Mobilicity, Canada, the U.S., and you

In between throwing on a pair of cargo shorts, a t-shirt and sandals and walking the dog, I write. Wait, that's a lie. I often write after I walk the dog. Like late at night. Or early in the morning. Because that's the quietest time of day when the noise of the rest of the world seems to ease off and give me just enough head space to get some real think work done.

And so it was last night as I drafted an outline and threw together some disconnected snippets for Friday's deadlined article, then tucked myself in, only to wake up long before most other folks in our time zone so I could listen to the voices in my head churn various ideas and treatments. When the pieces finally seemed to start coalescing around something workable, I rolled out of bed and padded down to the office.

Before long, the article was done. It's about Telus's failed bid - actually, its third bid - to take over Mobilicity (think big wireless carrier fish trying to swallow smaller, flailing wireless carrier fish and you've kinda got it.) The Telus/Mobilicity flameout illustrates the challenges we continue to face in our rather expensive, less-than-optimally-competitive wireless market. For some bizarre reason, I find telecom-based stories to be infinitely fun to research and write, and I was particularly pleased with this outcome.

Here's a link to the resulting article on Yahoo Canada Finance:

Telus & Mobilicity: Why competitiveness hangs in the balance

Enjoy the read!

Don't auction this: eBay drops the security ball

Stop me if you've heard this story before: a big company reports being hacked, and millions of consumers are now at risk.

Surprised? Not so much.

This time, it's eBay's turn. The online auction company yesterday announced that hackers had broken into its systems sometime between late February and early March (nothing like a precise date, no?) and gained access to 145 million records.

A company spokesperson says the intruders copied "a large part" of that data, but could not confirm precisely how many users were affected. The records included email addresses, birthdays, mailing addresses and other personal data. They also included passwords, but the spokesperson said they were encrypted (all the other stuff was unencrypted.) You'll forgive me if I don't feel all warm and fuzzy here, as the company's reaction is, in a word, lame.

I ended up doing some pretty fascinating broadcast work around this story, including a visit to CTV London's studios that netted 5 interviews - 4 on this topic alone - by the time I was done there.

• CTV News Channel - interview with Marcia MacMillan
• CTV Toronto - reporter Colin Demelo (story page, with video, here)
• CTV Montreal - reporter Aphrodite Salas (video here)
• CTV London (newscast here, segment around the 27-minute mark)
• CTV National News - reporter John Vennavally-Rao (story page, with video, here, newscast here)

For funsies, this morning I was back at CTV London's studios for a live hit with Canada AM's Beverly Thomson (video here). Just before going to air, I did a phoner with John Moore on NewsTalk 1010 Toronto. The surreal journey continues, I guess. As long as I don't use eBay to unload my stuff.

Wishing for an Undo key...

I've been thinking a lot about the Undo key lately. It's a pretty powerful command that has bailed me out of more deep technological holes than I dare admit. On my Mac, hitting Command-Z lets me undo whatever mistakes I made. It gives me the ability to go back in time and pretend I never made the mistake in the first place. Then I can rewrite the moment as I had originally intended.

Pretty powerful stuff. I only wish it worked beyond the context of my laptop.

See, last Tuesday was a pretty charmed day in my life. I had scheduled a quick drive into Toronto to join NewsTalk 1010's Round 2 panel with morning show host John Moore. I've been actively working on growing my media brand and doing new and neat stuff on-air, and this was a perfect opportunity to meet the folks I've worked with remotely for so long, and see the new studios. I booked some meetings, as well, which made for a very early, very long, very challenging and ultimately very exciting morning.

I also arranged to meet a radio host from the Kitchener-Waterloo region who I've worked with for years but had never actually met. He has been a mentor figure to me since the first time he had me on his show, and I was looking forward to finally putting a face to the voice. I was going to pop off the highway on the way back to London, and we'd meet for an early afternoon bite and then chat for a bit.

Unfortunately, I got a call after I was done doing the radio thing. A big tech story was breaking, and the folks at CTV wanted to know if I could comment. Given how close I was to CTV's national studios, I detoured there to do another quick interview (or two, or...) before heading home. Of course, all this took time, and it meant I'd have to postpone meeting my friend on the drive home.

The CTV experience was surreal. I met the team that turns my random ramblings into great television, and got to work out of the best equipped newsroom in the country. The most amazing thing was that folks who I've admired pretty much forever knew who I was. It was the kind of day that reminded me how lucky I am. It may not be an easy trek to carve out a career in the middle of today's media landscape, but Tuesday's experience sure reinforced that I'm on the right track.

My friend was understanding, and sent me a quick return message that I picked up on my smartphone just as I was about to go on-air again: "No worries...next time."

Fast forward a week and I get another message from him: "We should have had that lunch. Instead, I had a heart attack." He was in hospital, awaiting surgery, which by my watch is scheduled to begin in a little over a couple of hours.

Cardiac care being what it is in this country, I expect him to pull through with flying colours - but feel free to join me in a prayer or nine if you wish, because you can never get enough - but the sequence continues to play in my mind: Life happened and I had to shift gears. Work took precedence over personal. I get that. He gets that. We all get that. But still the thought remains: We didn't have that lunch, and then this happened. This happened.

I've had a this happen to me, and I appreciate the immediate sense of regret that washes over you as you think about all the things you didn't get to do, then the followup sense of fear that you won't get a second chance to actually do those things you haven't yet done.

I had the moment in my grasp, and I chose to let it go - a choice I wish I could now undo. Problem is there's no Undo key for this one. Only a yet-to-be-written script for my friend's story that I hope has a happy ending. Because lunch with him is something I can't wait to experience.

Refuah shlemah...only in health.

Major investor sells off BlackBerry shares

Interesting times in Canadian business after news broke that Fairfax Financial, which has long been one of the biggest boosters of BlackBerry, had sold off a big chunk of stock and was no longer the beleaguered Canadian smartphone maker's largest shareholder.

Because I'm always looking for the why behind the story, I picked up my pen - okay, keyboard - and started writing. Turns out there's more to this story than initially meets the eye.

The resulting piece was published on Yahoo Canada Finance this morning:

Making sense of Fairfax's BlackBerry selloff

Thematic Photographic 295 - Trees & Branches

Standing, for now
London, ON
March 2014

We're going with trees and branches as this week's theme because of a rather sad moment of realization I had just last week.
I was pulling into the parking lot at our son's school as I had done countless times before. This place has been our home away from home for more years than I dare admit - my wife teaches there, and our older kids studied there, too - so the entire campus is pretty much committed to muscle memory.

And something on this morning seemed off.

At first I couldn't quite figure it out. But then it hit me: The sky was a lot more open than I remembered it. The stand of old growth, delightfully tall trees at the edge of the parking lot had been partially cut down, leaving a gaping void where lush greenery once stood.

I immediately thought back to the photo above. I had taken it as part of a series this past March. The kids were attending an after-school program, and I was waiting in the parking lot with little to do beyond fiddle with my camera and stare. So I took a walk in the snow and shot the moment.

Little did I know that this would be the last picture I'd ever take of this particular tree.

And so we have this week's theme. Because they can disappear in a blink.

Your turn: Shoot a tree, or branches, or, as you can see here, both. Post the result - or results - to your blog or website, then leave a comment here letting folks know where to find it. Visit other participants through the week to share the photographic joy, and feel free to invite a friend along for the ride. For more info on how Thematic works, click here. Thanks again for making this such a highlight. Enjoy...

On (not) growing up

"To grow up is to wonder about things; to be grown up is to slowly forget the things you wondered about as a child."
Henning Mankell

I think we all know what the lesson is here...

When light compresses the view

Comings and goings
London, ON
September 2013
Thematic. Landscapes. Here.

Long lenses can do some pretty amazing things to an otherwise ordinary scene. Perhaps my favorite trait is that of compression: a long focal length tends to squish the scene from back to front - or front to back, depending on how you look at it. It lets you see ordinary things in extraordinary ways.

And so it did on this sunny September morning as I stood on a hospital parking structure. I was feeling less than my usual shiny happy self - hence the visit to the hospital - and I was alone in this silent world of concrete. I probably spent entirely too much time slowly walking the abandoned slabs in between the cars, but something about this place begged me to hang around for a little while longer. I wandered over to the edge to clear my head, and when I looked through the lens I realized why I had come here.

I may yet have more visits to the hospital in my future, but as long as I have a camera in my backpack, I'll always have the potential for a moment to stare out over the edge of an otherwise ordinary place and see the neighborhood in anything but an ordinary context. To anyone else it's just a picture. But to me, the possibility of being able to have moments like this is something that begs to be held onto. Tightly.

Your turn: Got any scenes nearby that beg to be compressed like this? Tell us about them.

Net neutrality is dead

Net neutrality is one of those things that nerds talk about at parties, but it never quite seems to cross over into mainstream discussion. After today, I'm guessing it probably should.

Long story short - and I'll apologize for keeping it short, because I'm supposed to be working on it right now - net neutrality means that when you go online, everyone can potentially have equal access to the same bandwidth. If I merge onto the highway, I can use any lane I want, and drive at any speed as long as I'm obeying the rules of the road.

In a ruling that just came down a few minutes ago, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission - better known as the FCC - opened the door to allowing companies, say Netflix, to pay carriers more for the privilege of higher-speed, privileged access. In other words, that big left lane over there? You're driving in it only if your car has a special sticker. That you paid a lot of money for. Don't want to pay the piper for faster service? Or can't afford it? Tough. Over to the slow lane for you, buddy.

The CEOs of some of the largest ISPs in the U.S., including Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon, signed a letter to the FCC that supported the creation of a so-called slow lane. Their reasoning? The government shouldn't mess with their business, and doing so would make it difficult for them to continue to innovate. As the major carriers continue a wave of unprecedented consolidation, the combination of market-dominant monopolies and the freedom to charge more to bigger fish who can afford it means their shareholders are happy campers today.

Web services companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix have a decidedly different perspective. They call the FCC's plan a “grave threat” to an open Internet because it would allow ISPs to discriminate against content providers - and it would add cost and complexity to their business models, which are all based on an open and free Internet. Not surprisingly, content owners, artists and other creatives have protested the move, as well.

Nothing changes today, of course. It's just one step in a very long process. Next up, a comment-and-review period, then a second vote, then a final FCC ruling later this year.

All of this is something of a slippery slope, with enough nuances to keep us all up at night for months. But the bottom line is the Internet as we once knew it will be changed irrevocably because of today's ruling. And it's only a matter of time before the U.S. policy decision influences policies in Canada and other nations.

More on this as it develops, but I wanted to at least get it out there for starters.

Your turn: Thoughts?

Related coverage:

• FCC approves plan to allow for paid priority on Internet (Washington Post)
• FCC Advances Fast-Lane Web Plan on ‘Net-Neutrality’ (Bloomberg)
• FCC to cripple the Internet (Fox News)

For additional background:

• FCC chairman revises fast-lane option in net neutrality (USA Today, May 12)
• The FCC is going to ruin the Internet this week (Inc. Magazine)
• Say no to the Internet Slow Lane (OpenMedia.ca)
• A rising tide of Internet regulation (Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe)