Penmachine

Daniel Hughes is a friend of a friend, and he disappeared on the morning of Friday, June 5. He is an enthusiastic bicyclist, and was apparently going for a bike ride in Vancouver—but never came home.

Here's a photo of him with his bicycle. If you see him or might have any information about what happened to him, please contact Vancouver Police. His family and friends are very worried about him.

Labels: friends, police, vancouver

People are supposed to be either introverted or extroverted, but I've never been sure where I fit. Perhaps I'm an ambivert (yuck, an ugly word):

• Most of the time, I like meeting new people; I have stage love instead of stage fright (hence why I've taught courses, given speeches and been in a band for so long); I'm decent with small talk at a party or in a crowd; and I can be quite a chatterbox—not to mention loud—in the right context.
  
  
• On the other hand, I always enjoyed being an only child; when I'm uncomfortable or in pain I tend to become quiet and withdrawn; I despise making unsolicited phone calls and am not fond of telephone conversation in general; when out and about (either in my own city or somewhere else) I'm far more likely to wander about alone, take pictures, and think to myself than to strike up conversations with strangers; and I need significant time alone every day, time I often take when the rest of my family is asleep.

So I found Sophia Dembling's "Confessions of an Introverted Traveler" (via Kottke) fascinating. I like her thesis:

Though I don’t need to talk to a lot of people, I love watching them. [...] I travel for the travel.

I suspect I may be primarily an introvert—like Dembling, I find the North American preference for extroversion a bit oppressive. That doesn't mean I prefer solitude in all circumstances, but that social interactions take energy for me, and I need time alone to recharge. I like activities with friends, and especially with my wife and children, but given time to myself, I'm unlikely to want to meet anyone for lunch or a night out. Instead, I might go out by myself, and it doesn't feel at all lonely.

I recall last year's Gnomedex conference in Seattle, an intense three-day geekfest of ideas and discussion together with hundreds of my peers in a Seattle meeting room. The hotel my wife and I chose was a good 20-minute walk away up the waterfront escarpment and through downtown. Despite the physical difficulty of making the trek with my rolling bag of computer and camera gear while suffering cancer-treatment side effects (as I still do), I enjoyed the trip each day. That's because I could be alone and enjoy people-watching as I trundled through the glass tower canyons and Pike Place Market, and either charge up on the way to the meeting, or get my energy back on the way to the hotel.

Right now is a good example too. I've had a rough couple of nights of side effects this week, and my wife is out for the afternoon, but now that I'm finally feeling good, rather than setting up a lunch meeting, or saying hi to my parents (who live next door), I'll probably just go for a solitary walk. That's just what I need.

Labels: cancer, chemotherapy, family, friends, psychology, travel

Twenty years ago this spring, I played my first gig as a drummer, at the Last Class Bash for the UBC Science Undergraduate Society. Our band, the Juan Valdez Memorial R&B Ensemble, was a five-piece with me on drums, my roommates Alistair, Sebastien, and Andrew on guitars and bass, and Ken Otter (now a professor of zoology) on another guitar.

We'd spent months rehearsing, but we still didn't know how to sing proper harmonies. Our playlist included mostly old songs from the '60s: "Gloria," "Long Cool Woman," the theme from "Batman." I skipped a final lecture for one of my high-level biology courses to set up for the show in the Student Union Building party room. Our friend Steve ran the rented PA system.

We were relatively terrible, but we were silly, and we had a good time. So did the heavy-drinking audience.

I'm still playing in a later version of the same band. Sebastien is still on guitar, I'm still on drums when I feel up to it. We're still playing some of those same songs. I've spent half my life in this act.

Labels: anniversary, band, friends, memories, music, neurotics, school

In 1974, on my first day of kindergarten, I made some friends. One of my earliest memories of school that year was three of us working on an art project. Rand, one of my friends, had a huge (huge for five-year-olds, at least) bottle of white glue turned upside down, but like a ketchup bottle, it was jammed.

Brent, my other friend, sang out, "There's no more gluuuuuue!" And then a huge glop of it fell onto the paper, completely covering up what we were working on.

I stayed friends with Rand and Brent for many years afterward. When Brent's family took a year away to go sailing around the Caribbean, we borrowed their TRS-80 Model I personal computer, the first one we had in our house. Rand and I spent hours at each other's homes, or with his family at their cabin on Keats Island, playing with Star Wars action figures.

Even when Rand changed to a West Side private school and his family moved out that way, we kept in touch, and a couple of years later I went to that school too. We lost touch with Brent slowly after that, though he was in my Boy Scout troop until 1982, and I have seen him from time to time in the interim.

Rand and I once tried making smoke bombs at his place, and drying them in the microwave. Not a smart move. We had to open all the windows and pull out the smoke alarm battery, hoping things would clear before his parents got home.

Eventually, he moved to yet another school and, as happens, we drifted away from one another. He emigrated to New York City almost 20 years ago, got married, and had a son. I stayed here in Vancouver, got married, and had two daughters. My daughters started kindergarten at the same school where Rand and I met a few years ago. They're still going there.

Recently Rand and I got in touch again on Facebook. He and his wife and son were in town last week to visit his family, and on Friday night my girls and I met them downtown for dinner. It was a short visit, but fun—the first time Rand and I had seen each other for more than 25 years. Long enough that he had time to grow taller than me.

We were both pretty big nerds back in the '70s and early '80s. Our nerdiness has mellowed, and it's also cooler to be geeky these days than it used to be. So we're different, yet not. Just like Vancouver.

Labels: friends, memories, newyork, school, vancouver

Here's our friend Lisa at her wedding yesterday, saying hi to our other friend Christina during the reception dinner:

And here was Lisa in a plaid skirt back in 1992 dancing to my band (a later incarnation of our band also played at the wedding yesterday, by the way):

Other than the wedding dress in one and the early-'90s fashions and hair in the other, she looks the same, 17 years later! I certainly can't say the same for myself.

Thanks to Simon for the '92 picture.

Labels: age, friends, memories, party, wedding

I'd forgotten yesterday that my friend Adam Woodall appeared in not one but two Goldfish Cracker commercials a few years ago. Here's the second one. No orange powder this time:

Labels: band, friends, humour, music, television

My friend and sometime co-musician Adam Woodall has been part of the music scene here in Vancouver for over 15 years, and he's finally getting some radio play: his song "Coming Home Soon" from the 2006 Adam Woodall Band album Silver Ring.

Virgin Radio DJ Buzz Bishop has posted his interview with Adam online. Give it a listen to hear about Adam and the AWB, and for a couple of mean live solo acoustic versions of "Coming Home Soon" and "Hit Me Baby One More Time" (yes!).

Don't forget to check out Adam's YouTube harmonica lessons too. He's not only a great singer and a tasteful and talented guitarist, but an awesome harmonica player. In fact, the first time I ever met Adam back around 1994 or so, I got his business card, and all it said was "Adam Woodall - Harmonica."

Finally, if you're wondering about his appearance in the Flavor-Blasted Goldfish commercial, here it is:

Adam's on the left. Yes, he really did get coated in orange powder for that.

Labels: band, friends, music, radio

I still have some more photos to upload, but early this evening we got back home after seven and a half hours and nearly 300 km by car and ferry returning from Tofino and Parksville. It was a great trip, one that will leave memories. As a nice capper, we managed to meet up with my friend Simon on the ferry in Nanaimo and, once we crossed the water, gave him a ride into West Vancouver to visit his family.

We live in a huge part of the world. I mean huge oceans, huge mountains, huge trees, huge birds, huge beaches, and huge distances. At highway speeds (except for the really twisty parts, and lunch), it took us three hours to drive in the rain about half the way, across one of the narrowest parts of Vancouver Island. It's apparently a faster trip right across Ireland. We passed between snow-blanketed mountains 1400 m high—taller than any in Britain, to make another cross-Atlantic island comparison.

It's common for us British Columbians to take day trips or short vacations over distances that would cross several countries in Europe, as my family did this week. I'm glad to be home, but as I noted on on Twitter, I miss the huge, deep, comfortable hotel bathtubs. And the heated tile floor in Tofino. And the sound of surf, gentle or roaring.

Labels: animals, canada, europe, family, friends, memories, oceans, travel

More photos in my Flickr set and from others.

Labels: blog, conferences, friends, geekery, northernvoice, photography, podcast, vancouver, web

More photos in my Flickr set and from others.

Labels: blog, conferences, friends, geekery, northernvoice, photography, podcast, vancouver, web

Sunday night, my wife Air and I took a quick trip back to Victoria for one reason: my old friend Simon, who lives and works there, was giving a music recital. He has been studying classical singing for many years, even though he used to play in my sixties rock band a long time ago, and is now a registered massage therapist.

But this was very different. The space, in the Lutheran Church of the Cross in Saanich, was beautifully bright, with wonderful acoustics. He and his co-recitalist Joanne sang works by Bach, Mozart, Caccini, Purcell, Gershwin, Tosti, Barber, and others—some together, some solo, with accompaniment by two excellent pianists.

My favourite piece was Simon's rendition of the crazy "La Danza" (which is almost a winking parody of itself—here's Pavarotti's version to give you an idea). Simon was smiling the whole way through, and both he and his accompanist Kim flew through it with great verve and skill. They received huge applause afterwards. When the recital was finished, Air and I joined Simon and one of his massage therapy co-workers at a nearby pub for dinner. We stayed overnight in a hotel, then returned home today.

The whole trip was a pleasant contrast from our last one to Victoria with the kids, just three weeks ago. No migraines, minimal medication side effects, and no one needed stitches. Yay!

Labels: friends, music, travel, victoria

My friend Simon scanned some old photos and sent them over a couple of days ago. They're of me and some of my friends (him included) between 1990 and 1992. We look younger than we thought we did at the time. And yes, the '90s definitely had its own fashion sense, even if we didn't think so then either:

The pictures include photos of The Love Bugs, the predecessor to my current band The Neurotics, which is still playing a pretty similar batch of songs more than 15 years later. If you'd been at the Starlight Casino in Queensborough, B.C. last night, in fact, you could have seen me playing guitar and drums just like in these images—but in a nice suit instead of a ratty t-shirt. Sebastien was there too.

Labels: band, friends, memories, music, photography, retro

While my cancer treatment means I haven't been able to work for my employer, Navarik, for close to two years, I still make time to attend a few company events, including the Christmas party last night in downtown Vancouver:

This year my colleague Nathan and his wife had an excellent idea for our traditional employee gift exchange: instead of getting each other trinkets, we were to imagine what our assigned recipients would have liked when they were children. They would get to open the wrapping in front of everyone at the party, then say whether the choice would have worked for their childhood selves. Now that the unwrapping is over, Navarik will donate all the presents to a children's charity for Christmas. Perfect!

Even more perfect? Whoever was matched with me gave my childhood self a matching set of a toy camera with a toy microphone. How about that?

Labels: friends, holiday, insidehomerecording, navarik, photography, recording, vancouver

Today marks eight years since this site first became a blog, back on October 27, 2000. That's the day I started using Blogger—long before Google bought it—to publish updates here, instead of doing them manually in a text editor. (I did so on the recommendation of my friend Alistair—who was also standing next to me in the photo I cropped down as my portrait at the time.) Believe it or not, I'm still using Blogger to run the site, although I don't host it on Blogger's servers, and I make my own templates.

That day back in 2000 was also a little over seven months after I first registered the penmachine.com domain—in the three years before that, I'd been publishing at various obscure URLs owned by my ISP and others. However, the alias www.pobox.com/~dkmiller will still get you here, as it always has. So, courtesy of the Wayback Machine, here are some looks back:

• Take a look at this site in September 2000, before I blogified it. I also have a screenshot of an even earlier version, plus a preserved HTML archive from 1998.
• You can also examine roughly how it looked in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008. You know, this blog hasn't changed as much as I might have thought.
• As far as I can tell, the most popular thing I've ever written here is my 2005 article about buying a cheap guitar, which remains my most-viewed page more than three years after I published it, and more than two years after I last made any updates to it. If you post stuff on the web, that shows you why you should avoid breaking links.
• To reinforce that, this month 30 people took at look at my earliest blog archive, and 140 people (!) read my spelling article, which was pretty much the first thing I ever published on the Web, back in 1997. Earlier this year, an editor colleague of mine finally spotted a typo in the piece—even though it had been online and widely read for 11 years. So I fixed it.
• In the past eight years, I'm not sure if I've had visitors from every country in the world, but I have had at least one each (and probably more, given that many people's browsers don't reveal their location) from Namibia, Greenland, Tajikistan, Vanuatu, and Nicaragua, among others.
• My biggest traffic spikes have come via Jason Kottke and John Gruber, which is little surprise if you know their sites.

Given how things are going, I have no idea whether I'll still be writing here in another eight years. But it's been fun so far.

Labels: anniversary, birthday, blog, friends, linkbait, web

My friend Jeff pointed me to the site Damn Interesting, which somehow I hadn't heard about before. But it's exactly what it says it is, so I've added it to my feed subscriptions and my blogroll.

And yeah, the colonoscopy went fine. Nothing to report, and the drugs were good enough that I don't remember a thing about the procedure.

Labels: friends, geekery, hospital, web

Since I started taking black and white film photos again back in July, I've noticed something. People like them a lot, on average more than my other pictures.

I'm not sure if it's that I take these photographs differently, because I know they are single shots on a limited medium, and will lack colour, so I compose and shoot them more carefully than others.

Or perhaps it's just that they are striking purely because they don't have colour and people aren't used to that anymore, epecially online. Maybe if I converted some of my other pictures to B&W, they might get a similar response too.

I know I enjoy making those images. It's pricey compared to digital photography, but that's part of what makes them different too.

Labels: film, friends, geekery, nikon, photography

My two kids attend the same elementary school I did 30 years ago. Although there is a recent addition, constructed since my older daughter began there in 2003, plus some ongoing seismic upgrading, the building hasn't changed much at all. (It was a relatively new structure when I started there in 1974.)

It was always a good neighbourhood elementary school, but one thing that has improved dramatically is an aspect of the social environment. The first week of school has all the students in mixed classes with others of various grades: final class assignments don't come until the second week. Throughout the year, the school organizes events and regular volunteer jobs so that more senior students (grades four, five, six, and seven) mentor and support younger students (kindergarten through grade three).

The consequence is that students get to know each other across all eight class years in the school. Even in grade one, my daughter was able to wave and say hi in the hallway to grade seven students she knew. And now that she's in grade five, she has buddies in lower grades. Her sister, in grade three, knows kids both older and younger.

That's a big change from the '70s: when I started, grade seven students were scary and huge and intimidating unknowns. They remained that way pretty much until I was in a split grade six-seven class years later. And by then I had no idea who the little kids were.

I don't know if this is a common change in elementary schools in Greater Vancouver, or Canada, or more generally. Our school administration has put a lot of effort into helping students understand their peers of all ages and background. Of course there is still bullying, and fights break out, but no more (and perhaps less) than I remember. I think that overall it's more of a community than when I went there.

Labels: family, friends, memories, school, vancouver

Today, my wife and I slept in (me more than her), took our kids to IHOP for brunch, had the car washed at Oasis, bought a few things at the insanely busy new Costco in Burnaby, then had a steak barbecue in our backyard with a couple of our friends and their son. My wife Air and our friend KA recorded their podcast while the rest of us took their dog Dizzy for a walk, before the rain really set in.

It was rampantly consumerist, yes, but it was a fun Sunday, and fun last day of summer for 2008.

Labels: family, food, friends, shopping

Photos like this one are the reason I've been using black-and-white film to take some of my pictures recently:

Labels: conferences, family, friends, gnomedex, meetup, photography

Frightening if you were the doughnut, anyway:

Photo by teh Boris, featuring the Mouth of the Travis.

Labels: doughnut, fear, food, friends, humour, photography

It was a long, enjoyable Canada Day for me, even though it included a 3 a.m. wakeup to take my wife and kids to the airport for a trip to Disneyland, another trip a few hours later for our friend Leesa to fly towards home, and, later, nightmarish traffic to Vancouver's North Shore for a barbecue:

Labels: airport, friends, holiday, photography, travel, vancouver

Of all the charity events out there, the Underwear Affair is now the closest to me personally, because it is, as Gillian notes:

...a run/walk to raise funds and awareness for cancers of the unmentionable areas: cervical, prostate, ovarian, testicular, colon, and other words I don’t say much on this blog despite having my mind in the gutter most of the time.

Kidding aside, I hear stories now and again of people who had some problem down there but were too embarrassed to go see a doctor, and how, in a way, they died of this embarrassment. So maybe it’s better to take the stigma out of talking about down there so that people will feel comfortable in seeking treatment for their problems and telling others about it.

Also, talking about butts is fun, everyone should try it. Especially in front of their mothers. At dinner.

She tells me that something like half of the funds she raised last year came from people who know me and my butt cancer woes. I find that pretty amazing, but maybe we can do even better this time? Go to her donation page and chip in.

The run itself is July 12, which is two days before I plan to start my next round of chemotherapy.

Labels: cancer, chemotherapy, exercise, friends, science

Back in 1986, a group of kids from my all-boys' private school (St. George's School in Vancouver) and a couple of affiliated girls' schools (Crofton House and York House) took a Spring Break "art tour" trip to Italy, with whirlwind visits to Rome, Florence, Pisa, Venice, Turin, and so on.

I have photos in an album somewhere, but Anne Pewsey Richards, who was also on the trip, has done much better. She posted a bunch of pictures to Facebook, and gave me permission to repost them at Flickr. If you thought my glasses were big the year before in my geekiest photo, check them out here with the accompanying sunglass clip-ons:

Anne's group shot also includes some prime '80s hair and fashions. (I'm on the far right, squinting—shoulda worn the clip-ons.)

Finally, you can see that I was a camera nerd, with the Nikon, big zoom lens, and obnoxious camera strap, even then (again, I'm far right—guess I had the contact lenses on there):

I'm sure there was no way at all that local Italians could tell that we were tourists. There are several people in her photos (Anne included—but she noted that she's lived in England since the early '90s) whom I have not seen even once in the intervening 22 years.

I also haven't been back to Europe since this trip.

Labels: europe, friends, memories, photography, retro, school, travel

Tomorrow, for the second time this year, I'll be giving a speech at a memorial service. This time it's for my mom's oldest friend Sonia, who died last November. She would have turned 70 in January.

I had no trouble at all putting together a eulogy for my friend Martin in January, but this time around it's a bit more difficult. My relationship with Sonia was different—she was my mother's friend, after all, so every time I saw her it was related to something they were doing together—but also lifelong. By the time I was born in 1969, they had been friends for well over 20 years.

Sonia's three best friends (my mom included) compiled some information and stories for me to work with, and I have some ideas on how to turn them into a speech, but I feel already like there will be too much left out. It's hard to distill 60 years of friendship into five or six minutes, maybe one minute for each decade. And the group at the memorial will be much smaller than Martin's, maybe 50 or 60 people instead of several hundred. I actually find it easier to speak in front of large groups than small.

Anyway, I'll find the key things to talk about, plus some extras I know myself, and I think it will go just fine. I hope I can do Sonia and her friends justice.

I feel a little guilty about one thing: I'm sort of glad to make speeches like this. That's because each memorial I attend means I've made it long enough not to have my own.

Labels: death, family, friends

The city of Burnaby, B.C., where I grew up and live, is just to the east of Vancouver itself, and is well known for a significant amount of parks and other green space for such an urban environment. One part of that is Burnaby Lake, a fairly large and extremely shallow wetland in the centre of the municipality.

The lake sits in Burnaby's central valley, and forms part of a waterway that starts at Trout Lake in Vancouver, runs east along Still Creek through Burnaby into the lake, and out into the Brunette River, which flows east and then south through Coquitlam into the Fraser River, which empties westward into the ocean. In recent decades governments have dredged the lake several times, both to provide enough depth for competitive rowing and to avoid having excessive sediment from development and the city's storm sewer system turn the lake into a mudflat—which is why the water's edge is so sharp in the satellite photo.

My wife had the great idea of taking the kids on a ten-minute car ride down the hill from our house every few days to check out the waterfowl and other birds, and to see if any chicks have arrived yet this spring. So far they haven't. But there are tons of animals and plants there, from birds such as ducks, Canada geese, crows, and pigeons to carp, frogs, squirrels, and even a significant population of beavers, the world's largest rodent and Canada's mascot.

She's gone down there with them a bunch of times, but this weekend I was feeling well enough to tag along. And a couple of days ago the sunny weather and abundant animals brought out another example of local wildlife: the Canadian wildlife photographer, whose distinctive plumage and plaintive ktsch-ktsch-ktsch-ktch call (known affectionately as the "shutter-and-mirror-slap") were in fine form down at the Piper Spit pier. The next day we visited again (this time one of the girls' school friends joined us), but our bunch was alone because of the cold and rain, which actually turned to snow briefly.

The entrance to that part of the park also crosses some railway tracks, which our daughters enjoy putting pennies on to see if they'll be flattened by passing trains. We're accumulating quite a collection of thin copper ovals now.

Exactly 20 years ago, in April 1988, I was working a summer job as a park naturalist, headquartered at the nature house at this exact spot, between the railway and the boardwalk. That job was where my wife and I first met. We led canoe tours of the lake some evenings (no motor craft allowed), and this year we're thinking of getting a canoe and taking our kids out there too.

Labels: anniversary, environment, family, friends, love, memories, park, vancouver

Figure skating's not really my thing, but blogging is, and my mom sure loves the sport. Blogging colleague Julie has a figure skating blog over at BootAndBlade.com, and she is trying to get media accreditation for the 2010 Olympics here in Vancouver.

I think bloggers should totally be there in the media scrum, so as her husband Darren has requested, if you have a website and link over to her site (such as to her worst falls in figure skating post), it will help.

Labels: blog, friends, olympics

A couple of interesting links from friends of mine today (nope, neither is an April Fool's joke):

First, Dave pointed me to tweetcloud.com, which aggregates Twitter posts into a tag cloud. Here's mine:

Funny, one of the words listed there is "cheng," which only appears because when I type Twitter posts on my iPod Touch, it tries to spell-correct "chemo" to "Cheng." That's annoying when it happens.

Second, Bill linked to an article in the New York Times noting that:

In the 17th century, China and India accounted for more than half the world’s economic output. After a modest interlude, the pendulum is swinging back to them at a speed the West has not grasped.

Some would argue that the overall pattern of human history since the invention of agriculture has been a long, slow march to the eventual ascendancy and dominance of China. It may be true.

Labels: china, controversy, friends, politics, web

It's been fascinating, if frustrating, to watch from the sidelines as the company I work for, Navarik, has done some amazing stuff over the past year. Most recently, they launched a new version of Navarik Inspection, our web-based application that helps petroleum companies keep a handle on the oil they're moving around the world.

That sounds like a pretty big deal for a small Vancouver company. It is. When people ask me what Navarik does, I use part of Navarik Inspection as an example. Here are the basics:

1. When an oil tanker pulls up to a terminal to load, the company shipping the oil wants to know, (a) how much oil gets pumped in, and (b) what the qualities of that oil are.
2. To confirm that, they hire a third-party cargo inspector who works near that terminal to check the various pumping measurements, and to take samples of the oil and analyze its properties, such as sulphur content, etc.—as well as to assess the state of the ship's tank, including (for instance) how much accumulated sludge is at the bottom.
3. Another inspector performs similar measurements and analyses several weeks later at the discharge port, where the oil is unloaded.
4. The information reported by the inspectors goes back not only to the shipper of the oil, but also potentially to a whole mess of other companies and people, often including the terminals, the ship's crew, the ship owner and operating company (which can be different), both the buyer and seller of the oil, various others involved in the transaction, and possibly government and regulatory agencies as well.
5. Each company receiving that information might do a bunch of stuff with it, such as passing it among various departments and through a bunch of computer systems for accounting, payment, analysis, and so on.
6. Especially with oil at record high prices, having that quantity and quality information be accurate is pretty important.
7. Until rather recently, a lot of the inspection reporting involved somewhat ad hoc systems of fax transmissions, emails, phone calls, courier shipments, and typing of the same information several times over into different computers at different places by different people—which risks delays and errors.

So, again, when people ask what Navarik does, I can go through the rigamarole above, and then explain how we've built a web-based software program that inspectors can sign into securely from any web browser on any computer (just like an online bank, or Gmail, or Amazon) and find out what shipments they've been hired to inspect. Then they can head down to the terminal, do their work, and come back and use that same computer (or a totally different one) to enter the reporting information, which goes directly over the Internet to the people who need to use it.

There's a lot more to it than that, obviously—mechanisms for other people to put together the lists of tests to be performed, procedures for nominating and contacting inspectors, information about ports and terminals around the world, thresholds for alerting people when inspection results are out of spec, and so on—but the overall result is that the whole cargo inspection process can go more smoothly. Information moves more efficiently and is more accurate, and people get paid quicker. And we have other web software solving similar problems for other companies too.

What I'm talking about here is a real web business—not one with a high profile and a shiny 3D glistening logo and a gazillion page views for a beta application with a questionable revenue model. Instead, Navarik is an under-the-radar company turning eight this year, with a few dozen very talented employees in a nondescript light industrial Vancouver building, adding a little bit of extra efficiency to the energy industry that keeps the modern world functioning.

For a business, that's a pretty good place to be. Navarik's founder, my friend Bill Dobie, will be speaking at the eLiberatica open-source conference in Romania this spring about it, and about how we use open technologies and standards that were built over the past decade for the Internet to make it happen.

I'm also hoping to be well enough again sometime later this year to help move it all along.

Labels: cancer, friends, money, navarik, web

Our pal Kerry Anne (left) was one of the team of kick-ass bloggers who swept the CBC Test the Nation 21st century trivia game show tonight on national television. Of course, who do you call if you want trivia? Chefs? Flight crews? Celebrity impersonators? Cabbies? Backpackers? No! You call the bloggers!

It was an impressive showing, with a team average of 50 out of 60 questions correct (83%), a blogger (Rick Spence) with the highest individual score (57 of 60, or 95% correct), and the team's celebrity endorsee Samantha Bee (of The Daily Show) also scoring highest among the celebrity panel, with 49 out of 60. You can read more from Miss 604, Calgary Grit, and Mighty God King—and surely dozens of other blogs by now.

UPDATE: Unsweetened.ca has a big ol' list of blog reactions. And the CBC Test the Nation blog and Buzz Bishop have way more.

Nice job, KA and crew. And you didn't even have to wear jumpsuits, chef's whites, or Borat costumes.

Labels: blog, cbc, friends, lipglossandlaptops, television, web

I realized recently that I haven't mentioned next month's fourth annual Northern Voice blogging, podcasting, and general Internet fun-time conference here in Vancouver. It takes place just over a month from now, February 22 and 23 (a Friday and Saturday) at the UBC Forestry Sciences Centre.

If you're not normally the sort to attend geeky tech conferences (well, and if you are, for that matter), this is one you should go to, because it's friendly, cheap ($60 Cdn for two days, as opposed to thousands of dollars for some events), and fun. There are always plenty of both new bloggers and experienced types around, from all over the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. It's well organized. Plus, the location is fantastic.

In 2005 and 2006, I both attended and spoke at Northern Voice, but in 2007 I had to miss it because of my first of many cancer surgeries. I'm planning to be there this year, but purely as an attendee who'll take lots of photos.

My wife, who went last year, is more involved this time, helping to organize the Thursday-night gala. You should sign up and come along too.

Labels: conferences, friends, geekery, northernvoice, vancouver, web

The profound shame about yesterday's memorial event for my late friend Martin Sikes is that many of us who spoke and sang and laughed and cried there didn't take the chance to tell him why he was important to us while he was still alive.

I was glad that I both spoke and played drums at the event—being busy helped distract me a bit so I didn't cry the whole time. I certainly had to clutch my wife's hand for support.

Martin was, by any measure, an extraordinary man. Otherwise there wouldn't have been 400 people—from relatives to co-workers to high school and university chums to those who only knew him from the parties he organized—out to remember him on a sleety January Sunday afternoon. More than one person told me they were quite surprised at how many different directions, into what they thought were completely unrelated groups of their acquaintances, they discovered his influence had reached.

To find out why, you can take a look at the memorial page I set up for him, which also includes notes from several of the eulogies spoken in West Vancouver yesterday. I learned a lot about Martin from those talks, especially about his life as a kid before I knew him, and his career and pastimes over the past decade or so, when I saw him only sporadically.

I expect some of his more recent friends and acquaintances might have learned stuff too. For example, his first commercial software success, the Blue Board software he sold as a teenager from his parents' house. Or that he, as a comfortably out gay man, had a girlfriend 20 years ago. (Any of them who'd ever met his adult daughter might have deduced that, of course.) My friend Sebastien summed Martin up best by saying that he was always trying not just to have fun, but to invent fun.

After the memorial, a bunch of Martin's old modemer Excursionist friends, including his daughter and her mom, gathered at Denny's on Burrard Street in downtown Vancouver, one of our frequent hangouts in the mid- and late 1980s. I think Martin's death hit us all harder than we might have expected. (I'm still bursting into tears at unpredictable moments today.) Like Dave wrote, we miss him more than we realized, for a panoply of reasons.

And we spoke of getting together more frequently too—some of us had not seen each other in 15 years or more. We figured out that the things we miss about Martin are also things we miss about each other. Teenage and early adult years are formative for anyone. But those of us who were part of Vancouver's early BBS community have an additional kinship of having been geeks before it was cool, and of having lived and loved and made friends (not to mention mistakes) online 10 or 20 years before the whole rest of the world started doing it.

I've said before that I have the technology and privacy instincts of a modern 17-year-old (search for me online, and you can find out almost anything you need to know, and probably more than you want). That's because when my friends and I were 17, we were already keeping in touch by flinging bits. However, perhaps uniquely, while we remember a time before email and the Internet, they were still critical components of how we grew up.

Many of us have remained in technical fields, yet have drifted in different directions. Still, when we do meet, the connection is immediate, and not merely nostalgic. At dinner, we still finished one another's sentences, even on topics (Facebook, climate change, the habits of our children) that didn't exist in our university days. After our greasy meal, I drove Larry, Bob, and Richard home across the eastern suburbs of Vancouver, and had tea at Richard's place before heading home myself. We spoke a bit about old times, but also nerded out about wireless data, servers, rebuilding houses, and fish tanks.

Who we were is also who we are. Martin was part of that, but he isn't anymore, which is one reason why losing him made us so sad. Despite his many successes, and much more than the rest of us, he had chosen to stay (or perhaps couldn't avoid remaining) the tinkering, pranking, inventing, train-obsessed, silly, party-throwing, risk-taking person he was when we were growing up together. Who we are can't be as much who we were without him.

Labels: bbs, death, friends, geekery, martinsikes, memories

Friends and relatives of Martin Sikes have organized a celebration of his life tomorrow, Sunday, January 6, at 4:00 p.m., at the Kay Meek Centre in West Vancouver. Here are a couple of articles about him from the Vancouver Sun this past week:

NOTE: I've now set up a memorial page for Martin, including links to articles about him, copies of the notes from his eulogy speakers, and photos from his memorial event on January 6, 2008.

Labels: bbs, death, friends, geekery, martinsikes, videogames

Some good things happened in my life in 2007. My kids took their first trip to Disneyland, and at the same time I made my first visit to the NAMM Show next door, which is like Disneyland for music geeks. I saw finally saw The Police in concert. My wife threw me a great birthday party. One of my best friends became pregnant with her first child, due in February 2008.

But otherwise it's been pretty rough. Back in January 2007, I first got my cancer diagnosis, and since then I've had four surgeries (one major), two rounds of chemotherapy (the second one is half-way over now), six weeks of daily radiation treatments, and almost a month in hospital, during which I dropped down more than 50 pounds below my normal weight.

To top it off, the year ended with the deaths of my mom's longtime friend, world figures Oscar Peterson and Benazir Bhutto, and my friend Martin, whom I'd known for more than 20 years. All role models, all flawed in their ways.

NOTE: I've now set up a memorial page for Martin, including links to articles about him, copies of the notes from his eulogy speakers, and photos from his memorial event on January 6, 2008.

And yet. And yet.

I have two very different yet wonderful daughters now approaching adolescence, and a wife who is by far my best friend and confidant. I have faced death and, so far, beaten it back. I have things I yet want to do, but also know that if I don't get to do them, I'm satisfied with what I've already accomplished in my life.

I'm glad to see 2007 gone, no doubt. I'm more optimistic now to see the end of 2008 than I was at some times during this past year. I'm surprisingly clear in how I see my place in the world. That's something of a gift.

Next Sunday there will be a memorial for Martin, who did not see the end of this year. I've been asked to speak briefly about his modeming and BBS days. One thing I know of him is that he was always trying to find new ways to have fun, and to be happy.

In my mind, we all have our lives and our families and friends, and we each must try to be happy, because they are all we have. Happy 2008 to you.

Labels: bbs, cancer, death, family, friends, geekery, holiday

This site runs on Blogger, as it has for more than seven years, but if I were starting over again today I'd probably use WordPress. That's what I recommend to my friends and relatives, so that other sites I work with, such as Simon's, my wife's podcast (as well as her personal blog), and Inside Home Recording all use it.

If you use the free WordPress.com hosting service, all maintenance and upgrades are handled for you by the fine folks who run it. But if, like me, you're reasonably geeky and need the extra customization available by running WordPress on your own server, the main hassle has been that, when a new version of WordPress comes out, upgrading the software involves:

1. Backing up your installation.
2. Downloading the latest version of WordPress.
3. Deactivating all the WordPress plugins on your sever.
4. Putting your website into Maintenance Mode (basically, activating a page that says, "Hold on, we'll be right back" to your web visitors).
5. Uploading a whole ton of updated files to your server, usually in several stages so you don't accidentally overwrite any of your own customizations, plugins, or themes.
6. Running an upgrade script to update the database.
7. Taking the site out of Maintenance Mode.
8. Checking to make sure nothing's broken.

I've gotten reasonably good at that, but it's still time consuming, especially for multiple sites. Today, while surfing around feeling gross from chemo side effects, I read about the Automatic Upgrade Plugin (via Scott Beale on Twitter). It does all of that stuff with only a few clicks.

I tried it on two websites without a hitch, even using the Automated Mode that avoids the multi-screen, "Here's the next step, CLICK HERE if you're sure you want to proceed" process—with hardly a hitch.

Then, confident, I proceeded to the third site, Inside Home Recording, again in Automated Mode, got almost all the way through, and encountered the dreaded "500 Internal Server Error" page. I tried rolling back to my previous installation of WordPress manually. No dice. I noticed even the IHR forums (which use different software) were dead, which was mysterious and a bit freaky. And when I tried putting a generic "Sorry I broke the site" HTML page at index.php or index.html at the root of the site, it still didn't work. Yikes! I'd blown up the whole website!

I had a hunch, and took a peek at the invisible .htaccess file. That's a plain old text file sitting on the IHR web server (which I think is in Texas). The ubiquitous Apache web server software it's running uses .htaccess as a list to answer the question, "What do I do with stuff on this machine when I sent it out to the Web?" It seems that either WordPress or the Automatic Upgrade plugin had added some extraneous stuff to the end of that file. I deleted the extra text and, bingo, IHR was back up.

Having rolled back to the older version of WordPress, I made sure I had proper backups again (I remind you, back up, back up, back up your stuff), then tried the Automatic Upgrade plugin once more, but this time in Manual Mode (i.e. confirmed each step). No problems on this second attempt, and IHR is spiffed up with the latest software release.

Elapsed time from upgrade to blow up to fix up? Less than ten minutes. Sometimes I'm glad I have some web-fu when I need it.

Labels: backup, blog, family, friends, geekery, insidehomerecording, lipglossandlaptops, podcast, software, web

NOTE: I've now set up a memorial page for Martin, including links to articles about him, copies of the notes from his eulogy speakers, and photos from his memorial event on January 6, 2008.

I mentioned that yesterday, in the shock of hearing about the death of my friend Martin, I hadn't yet cried. That changed today, and what prompted my tears was something small that I'd seen earlier this week and forgotten about.

As I've done since 2003, just before Christmas on December 23, I had sent out a holiday e-card (a photo of my family) to several dozen of our friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Martin was on the list. He had replied with a brief, somewhat mistyped Merry Christmas message and a mention of his upcoming planned New Year's party, sent from his BlackBerry.

The next day, long before I heard the news, I had read his reply among others from our friends, filed it away, and forgotten about it. Today, as the snow fell outside and I was deleting some of the bounced emails from defunct addresses on my e-card list, by chance I came across his message again. He'd sent it at 11:44 p.m. on the 23rd, and sometime between then and the time I first read and filed it on the 24th, he had died. It must have been one of the last messages he had sent. I went cold. It was like an email from a ghost.

That was too much, and I went into the bathroom and wept. I blew my nose. The tissue was bloody from the side effects of the chemotherapy that is keeping me alive. Not much later, I cried again on my wife's shoulder when I told her the story.

Tonight my daughters and wife and I had dinner with Simon, the friend who told me the bad news, on the lower slopes of the North Shore mountain where he and Martin and others had once shared a house—and where Martin had hosted my bachelor party in 1995, at the end of a night exploring empty storm drains under the City of West Vancouver. At dinner, Simon and my family and I drank a toast to our lost friend. We're still stunned, and we weren't sure what to say.

Since my post yesterday I've heard from several people to whom Martin was important. I realized that for many of us, he was a pivot in our lives, someone who, though he never reached age 40, affected the kinds of people his friends have become, and for the better. Perhaps that is what each of us should strive to do.

Labels: chemotherapy, death, family, friends

I've been wondering how to write this blog post all day, or whether to do it at all. But it seems silly (not to mention out of character) to avoid, so I'll just see what comes out.

UPDATE: This post originally had "1970-2007" in the title, which was wrong. I knew that in my head (Martin was born before me, in 1968), yet his Facebook profile said differently, and I used that. Details are easy to screw up. I've corrected the title after a note from our friend Johan.

I've also now set up a memorial page for Martin, including links to articles about him, copies of the notes from his eulogy speakers, and photos from his memorial event on January 6, 2008.

I heard this morning via a phone call from my good friend Simon that one of our mutual friends, Martin, died early in the day on Christmas Eve. While I didn't see much of him these days, I had known Martin for more than 20 years, since our days as BBS geeks in the early 1980s. We first met in person at Vancouver's Expo 86, at least a couple of years after I'd met him virtually online. He showed up at Expo with a shock of blonde dyed into his dark hair, and a Super 8 film camera with which he was making strange little time-lapse movies of everything he saw.

I can't confirm what details I've heard about his death, so I'll avoid repeating them in case anything is incorrect. His last Facebook update, from a week ago, talked about the snow on one of our local ski hills, from which he'd just returned. So his death seems to have been quite accidental, and certainly unexpected. While over the years it has happened to a few people I've known who were roughly my age, Martin is the first friend of mine to die, as far as I can remember.

He was a talented engineer who had recently "retired" (in his mid-30s) after making a bunch of money when his video game company was bought out. He seems to have spent much of his time since then DJing and organizing raves and other events. Maybe he'd spent some time riding freight trains, at which he was also an expert. Both of his parents and his daughter, now a young adult herself, have survived him.

Years ago Martin and I used to take mountain-biking trips together in the backcountry around Greater Vancouver. Engineer that he was, he brought the topographic maps (this was pre-GPS), and he was always hard to keep up with. We traversed the logging roads between Squamish and Indian Arm. He witnessed my worst-ever case of road rash, where I took a downhill on a logging road too fast and ended up sliding down the gravel on my side.

I've thought a lot about death this year. Having stage 4 metastatic cancer will do that. What's particularly strange about it is that Martin hosted a party for me on in June at his fabulous condo high up in a Yaletown tower, a few weeks before the big surgery that put me in hospital for most of July, and from which it took me months more to recover.

Yet here I am, still kicking, feeling as good as I have in all of 2007 despite my ongoing chemotherapy, and Martin is suddenly gone.

I haven't cried yet, but I still may. I came close when I saw my youngest daughter sprawled out asleep in bed as if she'd fallen from the ceiling, and it reminded me of Martin's daughter doing the same at a party about two decades ago. Mostly I distracted myself in a lazy post-Christmas day with my family watching TV (including a whole slew more of MythBusters), and late tonight I've been listening to a bunch of blues, plus the amped-up blues that is the latest White Stripes album. Jack White's Ph.D.-level guitar distortion helps draw the sadness out and cauterize it a bit.

Part of me feels it slightly unseemly to write this, since I'm not sure it's what his family and closer friends would want. Yet I hope they don't mind, because not writing it wouldn't be right either, like a hole in this blog—always a very personal place for me—where something important should be.

I'm not one to speak or write to the dead, as many are doing on Martin's Facebook page. I don't think he's anywhere to hear me anymore. I'll simply say that, as little as I saw Martin in recent years, I miss him with his twinkly eyes and off-kilter funny techie stories. I know many other people who surely do too. Together our memories will preserve what was best about him.

Labels: bbs, cancer, death, friends, geekery, memories, music, vancouver

From my youngest daughter, Santa Claus, and the rest of us here in my Great White North family, Merry Christmas.

Have a happy hoho!

Labels: family, friends, holiday, vancouver

To honour the end of NaBloPoMo (in which I didn't participate officially), this final post of November will contain a mishmash of nothing in particular:

Cory Doctorow is reasonably digitally paranoid, but he has a point about Facebook: "Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance."

It's worth listening to what Dave Winer has to say about podcasting, since he helped invent it, so when he writes, "I've heard that podcasting didn't achieve its promise," that's worth reading. His response begins: "First, obviously it depends on what you felt was the promise. Second, it depends whether you think there's more to do." He does.

Evel Knievel was an icon during my childhood, the epitome of cool to elementary school boys in the '70s. He died today.

Finally, here's a video of our pal Dizzy the Podcast Puppy licking my daughter on the face, after some prompting:

Labels: animals, extremesports, facebook, family, friends, pets, podcast

UPDATE: See my review of the iPod Touch.

The company I work for, Navarik, has been amazingly supportive during my medical leave for cancer treatment. It has always been a great place to work, even in the darkest depths of the dot-com bust in which the company started in 2000 (I did freelance editing work for them back then, and started as a proper employee in 2003). That's because the company's founders—university colleagues of mine—created a culture where people are important. It's the main reason I wanted to work there originally, because in the technology industry, you can't necessarily predict what kind of work you'll be doing in the future—but you can judge the culture of your employer pretty easily.

While I've been here at home recovering from surgery and pumping my body full of chemotherapy poisons, everyone else at Navarik has been working incredibly hard on some fascinating and powerful software that will help many people in the maritime shipping industry and elsewhere around the world do their jobs better.

This afternoon my daughters and I dropped by the office for the first time in some months. Coincidentally, it was the same day that the management team presented each employee with a Navarik-personalized iPod Touch (what's the plural of that? iPod Touches? iPods Touch?) as thanks for that effort. Amazingly, I received one too. The accompanying handwritten note from our CEO brought me (and my wife, when she read it) pretty close to tears.

This is not a new thing, nor a token attempt at recognizing the great people who work for the company. I'll write about my impressions of the iPod Touch tomorrow, but my impression of Navarik has only been reinforced: it would be hard to find a better place to work.

Labels: apple, cancer, friends, gadgets, ipod, navarik

Early yesterday morning, my mom's oldest friend died. Sonia met my mother when they were both in elementary school here in Vancouver, almost 60 years ago. By comparison, that's like my older daughter staying friends with one of her classmates until 2066. There was an autopsy today, but I haven't heard the results yet; we expect a heart attack, following Sonia's bypass surgery not long ago.

I knew Sonia my whole life, along with my mother's two other longtime friends, who have all continued to cook each other fancy dinners and share social events for over half a century. The four of them traveled through Europe for two years in the early sixties, and returned for a month-long reprise in 1981. Sonia was one of my mom's bridesmaids, and the two of them took belly-dancing lessons together in the seventies.

Like her friends, Sonia was an intelligent, independent, and individual woman. She traveled extensively around the world for many years, made and sold paintings, and lived in the same East Vancouver walkup apartment—a few blocks from the house I first lived in as an infant, and where my aunt and uncle live now—as long as I can remember. She never married or had children, and retired from her job with ICBC, our provincial auto insurance agency, several years ago.

Theoretically, hers was not a death in the family, but it's as close as you can get. I last saw her and her dark hair at our Thanksgiving dinner in October. I'll miss her at Christmas.

Labels: death, family, friends

My parents are visiting San Diego for a few days. Their hosts live right by the seashore in La Jolla, and are in no danger from the massive fires to the east, but the sky is still raining ash, and the sun is reddened by the smoke, as my dad's photo shows.

Hundreds of thousands of people (I thought I misread that, but no, 500,000 it is) have had to evacuate their homes. To see what's really going on from way high up, check out this satellite view:

Nasty. My parents return tomorrow, assuming flights out of San Diego Airport are running normally.

Labels: americas, disaster, family, fire, friends, sandiego, travel

I received an email today from someone who has both had cancer and been a close relative of someone who died from it. She reinforced, like others did, that being the relative was much more difficult.

Almost every day, my mom tells me of emails or letters or phone calls from people—some of whom I know, some of whom I've never met or hardly even know about—wishing me well and offering sympathy and support and whatever help they can. My parents and my in-laws, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, parents of my children's friends, and most of all my kids and my wife—all have done that and more.

My relatives and friends probably need as much support as, or more than, I do, because much of the time they feel there is little they can do. They send me suggestions, and help me when I feel bad, and pick up the huge amount of slack I'm leaving when I'm sleepy or sick. But they can't cure the cancer, can't even fight it the way I have to. They are spectators, and that must be hard.

So cheers to all of you. I don't often thank you the way I should, but I think you might understand why I'm a little distracted most of the time.

Labels: cancer, chemotherapy, ego, family, friends, pain, surgery

Compared to everything else that has happened recently, that surgery was a walk in the park. I'm home now, and going to have a nap. Or watch some more MythBusters.

Labels: cancer, family, friends, hospital, mythbusters, pain, surgery

Back in July when I had my big cancer surgery, Dr. Gourlay at St. Paul's inserted a small plastic stent into my left ureter, which needs to be removed. I've been waiting to hear from his office about when that might happen.

This morning they called to remind me that it's happening tomorrow. Except I never heard about it in the first place—the "reminder" was my first notice. That's fine. They will be sedating me, so I need to be at the hospital at 7:30 a.m., and the procedure is pretty short, so I should be back by lunch. (Much shorter than my last stay in hospital, I'm glad to say.)

My wife and parents and kids have been tremendously understanding as we shuffle the logistics around to make this work on short notice. I'm tremendously lucky to have them all here supporting me. Plans change fast around here sometimes.

Labels: cancer, family, friends, hospital, pain, surgery

Today was my wife's birthday. Unlike her, who put together a huge blowout party for me a couple of months ago, all I managed to scrape up was some presents, some coffee in the morning, and a dinner out with the family at our favourite Chinese restaurant. We were all going to see a movie, but I ran out of energy and had to come home first while the three of them went to see Mr. Bean's Holiday.

That's another example of the tough time we've had all had this year. I'm hoping it will improve. There are a lot of marriages that don't work very well out there in the world. Ours is not one of them: since my wife and I got married in 1995, I've always thought it was the best thing I ever did, and she has always been the one for me. It would be a shame if something that works as well as our marriage gets cut short by this stupid disease of mine.

I think back to my father's mom, my Oma, who lost her first husband in a Berlin hospital in 1947, later remarried, and moved to Canada. She and her kids didn't end up having known him very well—as a soldier in the German army, he was gone for much of their marriage. Fortunately that is not true here. But if I fail in my fight with cancer and die, my wife and my children will be in the same position: they'll have their whole lives, maybe another 40 years or more at least (more years than I've been alive), to live without me.

The idea of that sucks, and makes me sad. Certainly I hope it doesn't happen. If it does, I want to leave some happy memories. I hope that today, while low key, will include some of them. The big mylar dragonfly balloon my daughters chose, perhaps.

Labels: cancer, family, friends, love

This is kinda fun, reminiscent of Heromachine from years ago. You can make your own:

And like Heromachine, Alistair pointed me to it.

Labels: cartoon, ego, friends, simpsons

It's been well over a week since my last post, where I was complaining about morphine withdrawal. Well, it turned out to be rather more than that—yes, there were those shakes and chills and sweats, but it turned out that I also had a partial bowel blockage.

So I checked myself back into St. Paul's Hospital on Wednesday, July 18, and have been here ever since. It looks like things are finally stabilizing: I no longer have a tube up my nose, I'm starting to manage my own blood glucose again, and the medical crew needs to get my potassium levels under control, but the key thing is fatigue. I'm very weak, since I only started solid food again two days ago, and I'm now down to 148 pounds, another 12 pounds less than my last record low, and a full 52 pounds less than my normal weight.

Anyway, while the computer lab here at the hospital is fun, this is the first time I've felt up to coming here. If you want to get regular updates on how I'm doing, check my dad's blog at penmachinedad.blogspot.com if you haven't already. He has something new every day.

My family (especially my wife and parents) and friends have been unbelievably great, as have the hospital staff. My friend Simon is also in the same hospital, five floors down, following heart surgery, so we're continuing to be PKBF (painkiller buddies forever), although now the painkillers consist mostly of Tylenol and coffee. He's using the computer next to this one right now.

I may go home as soon as Monday, but we'll see. In any case, I'll be back soon enough. Thanks for continuing to check in.

Labels: cancer, family, friends, hospital, ileostomy, morphine, pain, surgery

I'm on my living room recliner couch now, after a week in the hospital (as you saw) that included:

• Wonderfully adept surgery from Dr. Phang and Dr. Gourlay, who saved both my anal sphincter and my left kidney, which I thought I might lose.
• Excellent, friendly, and caring treatment from all the nurses, doctors, and other staff of St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver who took care of me after that.
• Very fast recovery to start, so that everyone thought I might come home Wednesday, after only five days, rather than the seven to ten days originally expected.
• A big setback when my intravenous drip was disconnected, when I went into full-blown morphine withdrawal that had me shivering and twitching and groaning in pain through a whole night and morning.
• Getting a handle on that problem and beginning a plan that will bring me off the morphine as I recover at home.
• Having a visit from my great friend Simon, and then visiting him again as he recuperated in the same hospital from his own planned major heart-valve operation.

We could not share a room, since Simon's on the cardiac ward, but we remain PKBF (pain-killer buddies forever). Simon is still there for a few more days. Across the ocean my online cohort Jean-Hugues is also recuperating in a hospital in France after colon cancer surgery three days ago, so send them both your good vibes.

Thanks to my dad for posting updates, and to my wife for getting a few photos and the video up here (as well as for being generally wonderful, of course). Thanks to my kids for visiting and bringing stuff to help me feel better. I think my crazy wacky web guy activity will remain slow for the next while, but I'm back, baby.

Labels: cancer, colostomy, ego, family, france, friends, ileostomy, surgery

The other day in the car, my wife asked me if there were any places in the world I'd still like to visit. While yes, there are—it would be nice to see Paris, or New Zealand, or Istanbul—the question got me thinking more about my favourite places, the ones I've already been to where I'd like to return.

The ones that leaped to mind were all relatively close by, beautiful places in our Pacific Northwest neighbourhood of "Cascadia," wild places with water and evergreen trees, and each one reminds me of the people I shared them with:

1. Crater Lake, Oregon, for my parents - I stayed at the rimside lodge at Crater Lake National Park several times with my parents when I was a kid, starting in 1976. The last time I was there was a day visit in 1993. I still want to go back, to see the bluest water I've ever encountered (yes, it's really that colour), the darkest and most star-filled night skies I've ever seen, and the clear evidence of our volcanic part of the world—the lake formed a few thousand years ago when the former Mount Mazama erupted so violently that it collapsed in on itself, and the resulting caldera filled with rain and snowmelt.
   
   
2. Schooner Cove, Long Beach, B.C., for my friends - In the late '80s and the early '90s, my nerd friends and I (sometimes several dozen of us) made an annual car trip across Georgia Straight and the spine of Vancouver Island to Pacific Rim National Park, more specifically to the beachside campground at Schooner Cove south of Tofino. It took a bit of a hike through primeval rainforest and a slog along the sand to get there, which was part of the fun. We pitched tents and drank and sang around the fire over the May or July long weekend. Once we picked a bad spot and nearly got flooded out by high tide in the middle of the night, so we were smarter in subsequent years. Another time, a juvenile elephant seal was molting on the beach right near camp, and pretty much ignored us even when we were mere feet away. The beach is closed to camping now, which makes the memories even better.
   
   
3. Cannon Beach, Oregon, for my wife and daughters - I'd never been to Cannon Beach before my wife took me there in 1997, when she was pregnant for the first time. We've gone back several times since with both our daughters, in 2000, 2004, 2005, and 2006. It's an expensive tourist town in a spectacular location, which is one reason we like it so much: we can stay in a top-flight resort hotel steps away from the sand, and return from roasting marshmallows at sunset to a room with two bathtubs and a full kitchen. (As our fridge magnet says, "I love not camping.") We have had tremendous fun there each time, and I'm sad that my cancer treatment means we can't go back this summer, even though we were getting a little tired of it by last year.

Don't get me wrong. I love deserts and the tropics and mountains and other places too, but these three spots mean the most to me. So, inevitably, as we talked about them, the question came up: what if I don't make it back there? I do have metastatic cancer, after all, and there is even a small but non-trivial chance that I could die in surgery this week, something that's always a risk with an operation.

Here's what I told my wife. If I die, donate anything donatable: any organs or other parts, corneas, hair, whatever is useful to someone. If the rest of my body can be used to train medical students or get turned into a classroom skeleton or something, great, do that too. If there's anything left that no one can make use of, cremate that. Have a party, but not any kind of religious or spiritual ceremony—I don't believe in any of that stuff, so please don't pretend I did. If you can get together a band, have them play some fun songs, plus "Four Seasons in One Day" by Crowded House.

Then, when all that's done, split up the batch of my ashes and take them to Crater Lake, and Schooner Cove, and Cannon Beach, and put them in the water. Then enjoy those places as I did.

Labels: cancer, cannonbeach, craterlake, family, friends, longbeach, travel

My birthday party yesterday was fantastic. Thank you thank you thank you to my amazing wife who organized it, and to everyone who came. The gig with the band this morning was fabulous. I am completely wiped out, but it was worth it. Some photos (click each one to see more from that event):

Labels: band, birthday, family, friends, music, neurotics

I've always been a ham, a sucker for attention, someone who wanted his share of fame, and not necessarily fortune. It's a big reason I blog here, and play in a band, give away my music, co-host a podcast, and other such hammy activities.

So I've found some of the attention I seek online over the years, and I've always done some work to stoke that. But just as I wrote that cancer is a lousy way to lose weight, I really wish it wasn't what generated close to 80 comments on my "Dead Man Walking?" post (note the question mark!), and also got me both Scoblezied and called "a leading citizen of Vancouver’s technology scene" by none other than XML co-inventor Tim Bray today.

But hey, I'll take what I can get! Thanks everyone. I have friends in places I didn't even know.

Labels: cancer, ego, friends, robertscoble, timbray

I now know why I was getting those mixed messages yesterday. Today, Dr. Kennecke, my oncologist at the B.C. Cancer Agency, told me that he looked at my CT scan results from last week, and:

1. Despite the chemotherapy and radiation treatments, the cancer in my rectum has grown, not shrunk.
2. The spots in my lungs were not artifacts, but multiple further tiny tumours, showing that my cancer has metastasized (i.e. spread beyond its site of origin).
3. I therefore now officially have stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer.
4. The surgeons are going to perform my operation as soon as possible, maybe next week.
5. I will have followup chemotherapy after that to try to address the lung metastases ("mets").
6. The median survival rate for people in my situation is two years. If the doctors can successfully remove the rectal tumour and address the lung mets, my chances of surviving five years are somewhere under 30%.

To boil it down: my cancer has grown and spread. My goals now are to see the Winter Olympics come to Vancouver in 2010, and beyond that to renew my driver's license when it expires again in five years. But while my medical team and I will do everything to try to make that happen, there is a significant chance I might not live that long, that I might be dead before five years are up.

It's a heavy day. I have cried, and laughed, and shared a drink and nachos with my friend Simon, and hugged my wife and my children and my parents. And I will fight on. It's a fine line between acknowledging and accepting what could happen and denying it. I'm naturally an optimistic guy, but I can't pretend that everything will be just fine, because it already isn't. The future, even the near future, is a mystery, and I must walk into it.

Fuck you again, cancer. Even if you win in the end.

Labels: cancer, chemotherapy, family, friends, radiation, surgery

My absorption into the Borg that is Facebook is complete.

This morning, via the Macalope, I found the Facebook Friends screensaver for Mac OS X. You can set it so that it displays random photos, random albums, or (my choice) current profile pictures of all or some of your friends on Facebook, in a groovy Apple-style moving field, where the photos snake back and forth across a minimalist digital landscape with reflections.

Crazy crazy.

Labels: apple, facebook, friends, macosx, screensaver

When I posted my little reminiscence about BBS days of yore a few days ago, I didn't know that the same bunch of my old online friends was setting up a reunion party for this weekend, largely because of my cancer diagnosis. But they did, and we had great time last night. I got home and to bed at 4 a.m. Here are some photos:

We all, of course, remain great big nerds. As the night wore on, topics of conversation became more and more obscure, eventually hewing to secret atomic-clock–synchronized LED light shows in the trees of the North Shore, and tales of hopping freight trains, as well as whether 16- or 24-bit digital audio can ever accurately reproduce the subtle phase relationships of analog audio.

Like I said, great big nerds. What a fabulous time.

There were also lasers.

Labels: bbs, cancer, excursionists, friends, geekery, history, photography, vancouver

Here's some decent advice about how to avoid being pestered for free advice about something you're an expert in (via Brian Chin). Some complaints:

Las Vegas poker champion Scott Fischman [...] says that when he's invited to social gatherings, he has to decide: "Do I want to spend four hours answering questions or should I just stay home?"

Lisa Jacobson is founder of Inspirica, a New York tutoring and test-preparation firm. [She] even suspects that some parents of grade-schoolers have befriended her because they hope she'll be an asset when their kids are college-bound.

At a cocktail party, if someone says to a doctor, "I have a medical question," the doctor can always deliver the old line: "Great. Just get undressed." Now, those in newer professions—especially computing—are amassing their own quips.

I don't get hit with this sort of stuff too often, and usually the people who ask me for free advice (most often about computer stuff) are those I've invited to—family and friends whom I've helped when they bought a computer, and so on. But it might be good to keep some one-liners in your back pocket if you're a likely target.

Labels: family, friends, gadgets, geekery

Years ago, my friend Tara gave me a copy of The Manual by the KLF, which even then was horribly out of date, completely focused on the U.K., and still pungently accurate as well as funny.

It describes how, in 1988 or so, you could follow a methodical plan to get a #1 single in Britain with no musical talent whatsoever. In the intervening years several people in several countries have modified its instructions to do just that, or come close.

I loaned the book to my other friend Sebastien and never got around to asking for it back, but it turns out the whole text is online anyway, so have at it.

Labels: band, copyright, ebooks, fairuse, friends, klf, music, radio, recording

My wife reports to me that there are now nearly 50 people on the Facebook group called "Derek K. Miller Should Join Facebook." So far I'm not caving, but I may very well eventually. After all, I gave in on Flickr in time, so there is some precedent.

But that took almost a year, and it's only been a couple of months since the Facebook pestering began. You might have to wait a bit yet.

Now, to distract you: look over there! Chinese writing may have originated as long as 8000 years ago! Neato!

Labels: archaeology, china, ego, facebook, friends, geekery, language

Last year when Gillian and her Team Thunderpants entered the Underwear Affair, a charity run for "cancers below the waist," I thought it was a cool idea and an interesting opportunity for people of all sorts to parade around in their skivvies. But it wasn't anything I gave much thought to, nor did I donate.

This year, of course, I have one hell of a cancer below the west. So Gillian's run this year is a lot more personal.

Since I found out I had cancer at the beginning of this year, many people have asked me if there's anything they could do. Here's something: donate this year to help raise money that might find a cure, or develop better treatments, or reduce how fucking much it hurts sometimes to have this disease.

And, just in case Gillian's boss does more Google searching (for, say, an editor in Vancouver), I'll avoid posting photos of her in her underwear as Darren did.

Labels: cancer, charity, chemotherapy, friends, radiation, surgery

Tod Maffin has posted the premiere episode of TodBits.tv, his new online TV show. It runs live every Friday at 7 p.m. Pacific, 10 p.m. Eastern, and I managed to get on the air (voice only, no video) briefly. If you have an hour to spare, here is the recorded archive:

Nice job Tod, even if the first show was rough around the edges. Hey, so were the Police, and they had two other shows and a bunch of rehearsals beforehand!

Labels: friends, podcast, todmaffin, video

Jean-Hugues pointed me to this fascinating project in France, which he describes as...

...the incredible building site of the castle of Guédelon, in Burgundy. A non-profit organization is building a 13th century fortress, using only middle age technology. They started in 1997 and they hope the work will be finished by 2025. Around the building site, there is a little medieval village with the workshops of the craftworkers: carpenters, metal workers, rope makers, potters, and even a farm, with authentic middle-age pigs. Amazing!

The thought of taking nearly 30 years to construct a building is so antithetical to modern life—even the Empire State Building went up in little more than a year—that we forget that all sorts of big structures used to take that long.

Labels: castle, construction, fortress, france, friends, history, retro

Tod Maffin has a new show called Todbits.tv starting this week, and he's created a little promo commercial for it, with my tune "Hotcake Syrup" as background:

And the ever-talented Kris Krug has photos of The Police's dress rehearsal for their tour, which starts tonight here in Vancouver:

Finally, I don't know this guy, but here is what it's like to climb the world's tallest tree, a giant redwood:

Labels: climbing, forest, friends, kriskrug, music, photography, podcast, police, todmaffin, tree, video

A couple of days ago DemoCamp Vancouver came and went. I would have liked to go, but was still neck-deep in radiation side effects and general cancer-treatment funk.

I read this from Adam Fields (via Doc Searls) today:

In order to call some gathering of people a "community," [...] if you're a member of the community, and one day you stop showing up, people will come looking for you to see where you went.

KA went to DemoCamp, and told me that lots of people asked about me, how I was doing, and if there was anything they could do to help—just like back at Northern Voice. That's a community. And it feels like a family.

Thanks to Roland and Boris and Rebecca and kk+ and Tod and everyone else from DemoCamp and elsewhere who's been checking in. I'm doing okay, and I'll be at some Camp or meetup or conference or something eventually.

Labels: barcamp, cancer, democamp, friends, geekery, northernvoice

I've never
slept so much
pooped so much
lost so much weight
taken pills so much
had so much intestinal gas
showered and bathed so much
felt unplugged from life so much
stayed stuck in the house so much
watched so much Discovery Channel
missed so much feeling close with my wife, even when we're in the same house.

I thought it was getting better, but some of the side effects seem to be holding on to the bitter end. Then again, I have been taking poisons and getting pummeled with high-energy particle beams for a month and a half now, so I guess that shouldn't be a surprise.

I'm ready for it to be over. Damn am I ever. April and May have included some of the worst days (and nights) of my life.

My surgery coming in July is a scary concept, but if I think about it, the past several weeks have been like very slow, painstaking, relentless, not-directly-invasive surgery via chemoradiation, which I'm only going to start recovering from after my last radiation treatment on Tuesday. By comparison, the real operation will be over in one day, and then I can start getting better.

It won't be fun and games, but it will be decisive, and I hope the weather is good. My friend Simon may be having different surgery at the same hospital about the same time, so we can be summer painkiller buddies.

Labels: cancer, chemotherapy, family, friends, radiation, surgery