First day of Brumaire -- the foggy month -- today, and the Montreal weather seems bound and determined to fulfill the promise of that gray name. The day of pomme (apple), which reminds me that we've wanted to go apple-picking in the Autumn since we arrived in Quebec a few years ago. But something seems to push us inside on October and November days.
Locals say that the best way to confront Winter is face-first, getting outside and being active in the snow. I'm not sure; it's never worked out that way for me. We had snowfall a couple of days ago; in the middle of a rainstorm big wet clumps of snow started falling from the sky. I was working out at the gym around the corner from our house, and people in the weight room went to the windows to watch the snow fall. Halloween is the traditional day for the first snow for Montrealers; more than a week early was kind of fantastical, like a long-odds horse winning a race.
tags: montreal weather brumaire quebec
Mo' blogging
I can't say why, but my production has dropped off precipitously on this blog in the last week or so. Partly it's had to do with an increased workload; also, being out of town for two long weekends in Hudson (New York) and Halifax (Nova Scotia) threw me off my pace. And I've felt some pressure to cover these trips and other things going on in my life, which has kept me from writing short sharp posts.
But mostly I think it's a case of keeping up a feedback loop for myself. When I've made a blog post, I watch for responses on Technorati or Planet Debian. I add one more thing or one more post. I get in the habit of blogging and then it comes more naturally in short bits and movements.
I guess it all comes down to the typical but hard-to-remember suggestion: if you want to do something, you have to do it.
tags: blogs
BarCampMontreal
Montreal's BarCamp event turned out to be even better than I anticipated. I got up late on Saturday morning and I wasn't at the downtown location till quarter to 10. It was held in Fred Ngo's swing dance studio, Cat's Corner, on the power-centre block of 400 Ste.-Catherine. The studio had tables and chairs and a reception area set up, and it turned out to be a great venue -- lots of room and a big feeling because of the mirrors on the walls.
I got there just in time to catch Chris Hand of Zeke's Gallery give an excellent talk about collecting art and participating in art culture in Montreal. Not only was it extremely informative, but it charged me up to be more involved in Montreal's art scene. It also set a great tone for the rest of the day -- talks at the event ranged from alternative voting systems to art and research projects to technology surveys to demos of new products and Web sites. It kept the entire thing really fun and refreshing -- different parts of your mind used at different times.
I was glad to see that Heather Kelley and Damien had come; I'd made a point of inviting them, so it was good to see their faces. They did one of the first presentations, about their upcoming games-and-art event, GAMMA, at SAT on 9 November 2006, straddling the gap between the industry-oriented Montreal International Games Summit and the gamer convention Festival Arcadia, not to be confused with Montreal's other top export, The Arcade Fire. Man, games are hard. Anyways, they demo'd a game they're developing for GAMMA in which the gameplay action responds to arbitrary musical input; they've got several teams of developers who are putting together games to fit this criterion. Interesting concept, fun and cool.
There were a ton of great discussion, but I think my favorites for the day have to include Hugh McGuire's talk about the excellent Librivox project; Anne Goldenberg's presentation on Wikigraphe, which I'd seen before but which continues to boggle; Austin Hill's discussion about raising money and building Zero Knowledge; and Sylvain Carle's talk about successful consulting.
The best part of the talks was that I came away feeling smarter and with new projects I wanted to work on. Sébastien Pierre's demo of data-mining del.icio.us tags in revealicious made me think hard about data clustering algorithms (something I've wanted to work on for a while). Patrick Tanguay gave a great talk about co-working setups in other cities, with the aim of starting one here in Montreal. As a near-independent worker who's getting tired of his home office, this was a pretty fascinating idea, and I'm hoping to follow-up. And Simon Law's talk about Web 2.0's negative influence on Open Source software gave me a lot to chew on for my visit to the Web 2.0 Conference coverage I'm doing for Linux World.
All in all, I thought the event was the best that BarCamp has to offer. Montreal has such a rich technology and Internet culture, and some of the smartest people in town were at the event. All our major tech sectors were covered, and people interested in hacking, yakking, and entrepreneurship were in a nice balanced attendance. We were all in one room together, which kept up a good atmosphere, and we had only 15 minutes per talk, which kept things well-varied and interesting.
If I had any criticisms, it would be merely that I can think of so many people I wish had been there. There are a lot of women involved in Montreal technology and Internet culture who weren't in attendance, and Montreal's majority francophone community was underrepresented. But I think those are outreach problems that need to be handled for the next time around. Fred Ngo is already talking about BarCampMontreal2, which may or may not be coordinated with RecentChangesCamp.
Yesterday's Montreal Gazette had an article called Geekfest comes to town which featured a photo of Heather and Damien in the print edition. Simon Law got an excellent BarCampMontreal photoset on Flickr, and also invited me out to take photos together (fun). There's a BarCampMontreal post-mortem for those interested in a follow-up discussion.
tags: montreal barcamp barcampmontreal barcampmontreal1
N Dollars... American!
One of the funny things about Canadians is that when they talk about a large amount of money, they suffix the dollar amount with the word American to let you know that it's really a large amount of money. Like, "I just ordered this t-shirt online and it cost me thirty-five dollars... American!" or "He moved to New York and now he's making 85 thousand dollars a year... American!"
It's less of a punchline than it used to be -- American dollars used to trade at about 1:1.5 or 1:1.6 to the loonie, but now it's hard to find 1:1.2. Still, Canadians talk about American dollars like D&D players talk about platinum pieces. They're just a qualitatively different currency.
I note this because I joked about in previewing Austin Hill's talk at BarCampMontreal, and he did note that they raised $80 million American for Zer0 Knowledge. I had to stifle a laugh during the talk.
Austin writes - Hi Evan. Yeah that's funny. I may have mispoke - we raised $55 million american which at the time was important to distinguish because that was $80 million canadian. Just wanted to be clear. Loved your presentation BTW
Project Blackbox
Everybody's all abuzz about Sun's innovative design in their new Project Blackbox. It's a datacentre that's built into a big shipping container; whenever you need a datacentre you can just ship one of these blackboxes to wherever you need it.
I have to admit that it's an amazing piece of in-your-face metaphor. I mean, when a company is shipping tech jobs overseas, they can make it all the more poignant by actually taking the jobs and putting them in this big shipping container and stenciling "JOBS" on the side and packing it on a cargo ship and sending it off into the sunset.
And you don't really use these big containers unless you're shipping something faaar away. If your job is in that box, man, you can just kiss it good-bye, because baby it's gone.
Maybe the best way to ship out one of these jobs containers would be to have a big bulldozer that comes through the middle of town, crushing the community infrastructure under its treads, and then picks up the big shipping container full of tech jobs and carries it off to a big ship in the harbour (rolling over some more schools and houses and small businesses) and then sends it off to somewhere crazy and foreign where they keep monkeys as pets as a matter of course.
In any case: good job, Sun. I hope this works out great for you.