The app I really liked is called VanPark 2010, and overlays metered parking rates on top of a map of downtown Vancouver.
Lots of geeks abstractly advocate the power of open source and open data, but this seems to be a great example of how opening up data can help the average citizen. I requested a feature where the user enters an address, and the app highlights the cheapest parking within, say, 500 meters.
And can we take a moment to recognize the awesomeness of Bing Maps’ Birds eye view functionality. It truly is the eye of God.
Somebody sent me a link to this foldable electric bicycle designed, I gather, for urban commuting. This ad is ill-advised in a number of ways (is the more egregious crime the green wave of faux-exhaust or the attempt to make ‘yike’ a verb?), but you get the general idea:
There’s a longer Discovery Channel piece on the site that explores the design and features of the bike a bit more. I like that it breaks the ‘lean forward over the bars’ paradigm of biking.
The key question, though, is this: is it less nerdy than a Segway?
A couple of years ago, we did a project for ThoughtFarmer called Tubetastic. It was one of our wackier campaigns, involving an invented company, a fake intranet and a lot of org charts. Itexceededourexpectations.
We’re working with ThoughtFarmer again, with another peculiar idea: IntranetSecrets.com. It is, as you may have guessed, a play on the super-popular PostSecret (very slightly unsafe for prudish workplaces) project. It’s a blog of secrets–some created by us, some user-submitted–about corporate intranets. Here’s an example:
Not roll-around-on-the-floor funny, but hopefully chuckle-to-yourself amusing. Please check it out. If you’ve got a secret about your hated corporate intranet, feel free to submit it via Twitter or this anonymous submission form.
Next week we’re heading to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico for a week of relaxation and exploration. I’m thinking of getting some new luggage. For short trips I tend to use this roadster bag I got in Morocco. For longer trips, though, I use an increasingly worn backpack that I bought eight years ago in Ireland. As my father sometimes says, it doesn’t owe me anything.
I’d like to get something new, but I face a vexing luggage selection problem best articulated in a table:
Pros
Cons
Backpack
Keeps your hands free, and it’s easy to carry long distances.
I always feel conspicuous wearing my ratty backpack into nice hotels. The older I get, the more conspicuous I feel.
Wheelie
Robust, professional and easy to wield in airports.
Pretty much useless outside of the smooth sidewalks of the western world. Awkward to carry.
Duffle bag
More formal than the backpack, less formal than the wheelie.
Looks kind of like a hockey bag. Not fun to carry over long distances.
I know that the easy answer is “just man up and keep using the backpack”. But surely there are options I’m overlooking, aren’t there? And, no, I’m not going to buy any of that hard plastic luggage that everyone in Ireland seemed to own.
On Friday night I was invited to HIVE 3, a site-specific installation of 12 short, concurrent performances out at the Great Northern Way campus. HIVE 3 is a collaborative project of over a dozen local theatre companies. I think of them as ‘second-generation companies’. Not as old or established as the Arts Club or the Vancouver Playhouse, but some (like Pi Theatre or Theatre Skam) have been around for at least fifteen years.
Each show occurs in a walled-off corner of the space, though a couple actually happened in shipping containers outside. The performances ran 10 to 20 minutes in length. For some shows you simply queued up, but plenty of others had hoops you needed to jump through to gain admission. You might have to get a token from a previous attendee, or secure a ‘VIP invitation’ from a bouncer with a clipboard. The Electric Company performed for one audience member at a time, and they ran a lottery to choose the lucky winner. I didn’t see it, but the company’s GM assured me they’d post video of the show on their website after HIVE 3 closes.
My friend called the evening “the Fringe on acid”, and that’s a pretty apt description. I saw six shows over two-and-a-half hours, and they varied in quality and tone the same way any six Fringe shows might.
My favourite was probably Boca Del Lupo’s “The Interview”, which used clever projections and a treadmill to tell the story of an embedded reporter in Afghanistan. I assume it was fiction, as it featured a plot point very similar to the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire (retold in this nice folk song). I also liked Pi Theatre’s “House/Home”, which was kind of a burlesque pop-up book of a playlet (that’s their show in the photo below). November Theatre’s “Ana” was a carefully-crafted little nugget which seemed just right for the evening’s constraints of time and space.
Others were less successful. Nearly all the shows suffered from a lack of reach. Many companies were experimenting with form–more on this in a minute–but few aspired to genuinely take on a meaningful theme or move the audience. Maybe the evening’s format discourages weightier topics?
On the whole, I applaud this approach. It’s probably the first time in my life when I’ve attended a theatre show and been (just barely, admittedly) on the old side of the audience. Most of the audience still had their own hair, and it wasn’t grey. In a world where the big theatres regularlytarget senior citizens, that fact alone is pretty exciting.
It’s also a great opportunity to take the temperature of what theatre artists are thinking about these days. One trend I observed was how so many of the shows were concerned with or were mediated through technology. The aforementioned “Ana” includes a long (if familiar to me) riff on analog vs. digital. “House/Home” was performed using microphones and all the audience members wore headphones (this was also intended to manage the noise bleeding between shows). Theatre Replacement’s “S.P.A.M.” had some clever schtick involving the audience’s cell phones, though they could have constructed a more intriguing story or framework for the interactions.
I had a chat with one of the organizers about how HIVE amortizes risk for the performers. The audience member pays one price ($25 for adults, $20 for students and seniors) to get in, so the pressure is off any one particular company to sell tickets. They can take chances and experiment, and don’t have to be utterly concerned with the bottom line.
Likewise, the twelve companies can pool marketing resources. The capacity for each night is only 200, and HIVE 3 runs for eight nights through March 20. Surely the combined email lists, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts of the 12 companies are more than enough to scare up 1600 attendees.
You’re not going to be moved to tears by anything you see at HIVE 3, but if you’re up for a concentrated shot of theatrical creativity, check it out.
Last fall, a programmer friend of mine explained the task management system called Kanban. The concept originates from a Japanese system of just-in-time production in factories and such, though I’m not sure how relevant that is to how I’m using it. Here’s a two-minute video explaining some of the philosophy in a manufacturing context. I also understand that Kanban is popular in agile programming.
For me, it’s a real-world task list arranged into three columns: queue, current tasks and completed tasks. An important aspect of Kanban is that the system be highly visible, usually on a wall. Here’s our very simple setup in our home office:
The visibility enables other team members to see what you’re working on. The physicality of the system feels important, in that you’re actually moving the sticky notes as you complete and queue up tasks. A friend compared it to the tile system that air traffic controllers use. In the terms of original concept, each of the sticky notes is a ‘kanban’.
At Capulet and at a client site, we’ve found it to be a simple but effective way to manage tasks, a real improvement over plain text lists or Remember the Milk. I’ve sold a few other people on Kanban, and they seem to dig it too. It’s like I’m in the Getting Things Done For Dummies cult.
If you have diffiiculty keeping track of your and your coworkers tasks, I’d recommend giving Kanban a try.
As regular readers know, I have an ongoing interest in the transforming landscape of journalism and the media. On Twitter today (I’m afraid I lost track of the originating tweet), I spotted this five-minute video featuring the executive producer of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. A year ago, they were the first major metropolitan newspaper to go online-only.
They now operate with a staff of twenty, apparently garnering nearly the same number of monthly readers as they did when they had a print edition. The video is pretty self-promotional, but it’s an interesting view into a newish model of professional journalism:
Is it me, or does the staff at the Seattle P-I look a lot younger than the average newsroom?
The lead person on the journalism side has the surprisingly fresh title of ‘Executive Producer’. That feels more contemporary than, say, ‘Editor in Chief’. I also noticed that she referred to the Seattle P-I as a ‘company’, which isn’t what I’d expect to hear from newspaper professionals.
UPDATE: Oddly, it looks like the video has been removed. I’ll try to track it down.
I have seen no more than three operas in my life. The one I saw on Saturday night, at the invitation of Burnaby Lyric Opera’, was “Cosi Fan Tutte”, directed by Matthew Bissett, an old friend. Keep these facts in mind in reading this post.
“Cosi Fan Tutte” translates to “Women Are Like That”. It’s got a Shakespearean plot of disguises, jilted lovers and some climatic marriages, and it’s about as sexist as it sounds. It’s a mid-career opera buffa by ol’ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
I wish I could comment on the technical or artistic abilities of the performers, but I’m not really qualified. The acting style of opera always seems broad, but I gather that that’s a convention of the medium. Another convention is how the singers constantly repeat lines of dialogue. It’s very odd, for a man more accustomed to musicals.
Matthew has always been a playful director, and this production showcased his talents. The libretto was in English, and set in contemporary Canada. It replaced the traditional “men fake going off to war” plot with “men fake going to pro-hockey tryouts in Regina”. The set was dominated a gigantic–maybe 25″–cell phone on one side of the stage, which hilariously featured text messages between the sopranos and their suitors. I thought some jokes were left on table regarding the giant phone–couldn’t somebody have updated their Facebook status, search Google Maps or even sung an aria through their phone camera?
I’m obviously neither an opera lover nor an aficionado. As operas go, this one was comical and enjoyable and, contrary to stereotype, I could understand at least three-quarters of what people were singing. “Cosi Fan Tutte” closed last Saturday, but be on the look out for future projects from Burnaby Lyric Opera.
It’s actually an opera-heavy month, as this Saturday I’m going to “Nixon in China”. I don’t plan to become a regular opera-goer, but I understand this to be a modern masterpiece, so I thought I’d better take my medicine.
