In February, 2009, the Globe and Mail estimated that all levels of government had spent $1.4 billion dollars on Vancouver’s Downtown East Side since 2000. If the article is correct, that works out to $230K per person, in addition to what the government spends on the average citizen. Has there been progress? Not much, apparently. Anecdotally, the neighbourhood feels as (if not more) sketchy and broken as it did a decade ago.
I’m an advocate of radical solutions to the drug problem that’s at the heart of the Downtown East Side. I, for example, think we ought to give free heroin to drug addicts. I’m also a fan of decriminalization, so I was intrigued to read this report on Portugal’s 2001 decision to “abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine”:
The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.
“Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.”
There are plenty of numbers in the article, but it makes a pretty compelling case. I’d also be curious about related crime trends, such as drug-related violence, robberies and so forth. I favour decriminalization (and free heroin for addicts) because it reduces or removes the economic incentives around selling and procuring illegal narcotics.
In six months or so, remember to check Google Street View for the corner of Smithe and Homer in Vancouver. You were having lunch at Subeez, out on the patio, and the Google camera car drove past. You hastily snapped a poor photo as it waited up the block at a red light:
You were wearing a (very manly) pink shirt and having the chicken and brie sandwich. Maybe you’ll see yourself, with your face all blurred.
PopVox is the people’s choice awards held during Vancouver Digital Week. The PopVox Awards recognizes all major sectors of the digital media industry and celebrates its creativity, talent, and achievements. Creators submit their projects and the people vote online for their favorites.
We’re submitting in the ‘Best Do-Gooder’ category, talking about our work to help save the Great Bear Rainforest. I recorded a quick YouTube video for our submission, in which I woefully mispronounce the word ‘tract’:
While you’re at it, you could also vote for PhoneGap (a client) and friends of Capulet, Giant Ant Media. If you’ve got other favourites, feel free to post them in the comments.
We live in Victoria, but spend a lot of time in Vancouver. For the first couple of months of this year, when teaching a course at UBC, we were over every week. I actually don’t mind the ferry ride itself. I enjoy the opportunity to get an hour of work done without the distraction of the internet.
It’s the bus trips between Victoria and Sidney and Tsawassen and Vancouver that suck hard. They’re long, tedious and you can’t really work. Plus, I’m inevitably sitting near some cell-phone-talking douchebag who wants the whole bus to know about their new Ugg boots, or whatever.
I heard about a possible new passenger ferry service between downtown Vancouver and Victoria (here’s a short piece from Global, after the ad, thanks to 8chocolate for the link). Nautisol is still in the market research stage, and we’ll probably be living elsewhere if and when they put boats in the water, but I was still intrigued. From their website:
90 minute travel between city centers Victoria-Vancouver
Economy or Business Class
E-Ticketing with multi-language function
Kiosk ticket vending with multi-language function
Telephone ticketing
Terminal locations integrated with existing public and private transportation systems
Full service terminals to include Wi-Fi, ATM and Food Kiosks
Bicycle racks
Shuttle Bus Services
I see somebody caught the capitalization plague.
They’re running a rather peculiar customer survey, full of push questions (”Liquid Natural Gas is the fuel used to power this ferry service. LNG is one of the safest and cleanest fuels available.”), but I’m intrigued. Two attempts at providing alternative services have failed in the past. There’s the infamous PacificCats, rusting away in North Vancouver shipyards. Before that there was the Royal Sealink Express, which I remember taking a few times as a student in the early nineties. It’s a pity that didn’t work out–it was very convenient. The last time I was in the SeaBus terminal at Waterfront station, I’m pretty sure I saw a fading Sealink brand on an office door.
I’d imagine that, at some point, there will be enough people wanting to shuttle more efficiently between Vancouver and Victoria to make such a service viable. Has that day come?
Over the past year or so, we’ve been running a lot of one-day training sessions on all this social media marketing stuff. Combine that with the fact that our social media marketing course at UBC was full and had a sizable wait list, and we’re seeing a lot of demand for this kind of training. Seeing as we already have the curriculum prepared, we thought we’d run a couple of day-long workshops in Victoria and Vancouver. Here’s the blurb:
Adding social media into the marketing mix is increasingly important for marketers who want to establish an online presence for their businesses. We're running one-day workshops to teach communicators and marketers, as well as small business owners, how to:
Bring more visitors to your website
Increase your company’s visibility online
Approach bloggers and other online influencers about your products and services
Get your website social media ready
Craft a potent social media pitch
Incorporate online channels like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter into your marketing programs
Avoid campaign killers and online faux pas
Building on the sold-out course we taught for UBC Continuing Education this winter, we discuss the dos and don'ts of social media marketing; look at successful marketing campaigns; introduce the social media tools every marketer should know about; and cover online communications etiquette.
Students will leave with:
A copy of our social media marketing ebook, Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook
Templates for creating a social media marketing plan
The workshop is $299, all in after taxes and fees. There’s a way you can get a discount, though, and another way that you can attend for free:
You can save $50 off that price by blogging about the workshop on your own established (meaning not brand new) site. Don’t have a blog? Ask a friend or a local blogger if you can write a guest post for their site.
We’re giving away one seat for free for each event. All you have to do is tweet a link to the page on Capulet’s site (here’s a shortened one: http://capulet.com/smm) and include the hash tag #smmvic or #smmvan, depending on the session you want to attend. So, a sample tweet might look like:
OMG, I really want to attend this event: http://capulet.com/smm. It looks awesomesauce! #smmvan
Or, you know, something along those lines. We’ll randomly choose a winner for each event about two weeks before they occur.
Last night I finally got a chance to watch the Battlestar Galactica finale. Early on in the show, at about the 2:00 mark, the camera pans across a futuristic cityscape. At one point it passes over an inlet or river. There’s a bridge in the foreground and a geodesic dome further back. Here’s a screen capture:
Does that remind anybody else of False Creek, the Cambie Street Bridge and Science World? I couldn’t find a perfectly analogous photo (I suppose I could install Google Earth and see how it looks), but this one gives a lower perspective:
Obviously the show is shot in Vancouver, and I’d imagine that the special effects are done locally, so it’s only natural that we might recognize bits of the city in the finished product. This is the first time, though, that I’ve noticed renderings of Vancouver in a CG-only shot.
Warning, Spoilers Ahead
As for the finale itself, I give it a ‘B’. Some random notes: the final battle was reasonably satisfying, in an SDF-1 Macross sort of way. In retrospect, I’m still unclear on why Hera was so important to everybody, practically speaking.
I’m glad they found Earth, but it was a bit silly when they’d already found an ‘Earth’. It seems highly implausible that, after four years of a brutal struggle for survival, that the humans would send all their remaining assets into the sun. But what do I know?
The bit with Gaius and Caprica 6 each having a kind of Swayze-esque ghost was charming the first time I saw it, but they pushed their luck. That whole present-day New York denouement to the denouement was incredibly cheesy, and really should have been cut.
My unanswered questions:
What was Starbuck in the fourth season? A corporeal angel? I noticed that nobody called her “Starbuck”, which I suppose meant something.
How many cylons are left? Aren’t there a bunch of baseships out there still, roaming the galaxy?
What will future generations of humans do when they find the lyrics to Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” written on some cave wall?
UPDATE: I spoke to a member of the visual effects team who said that since the Caprica City scenes are shot on location in Vancouver, it made sense to base the look of the CG city on Vancouver, but with a few extra “futuristic” buildings thrown in.
The auction location is 8275 Manitoba St. in Vancouver, BC. The auction starts at 10AM on Friday, March 7th, 2009. Merchandise previewing is this Friday March 6th, 2009 from noon - 6PM.
This is a happy coincidence, because earlier today I was chatting with somebody who’d invited me to speak at their event. I’d written up the usual session description, and she’d asked me to swap out the phrase “real-world case studies” for “local examples”. I asked why, and she said:
Some of the feedback that we’ve received from other social media sessions say, “That’s great for those in New York, Toronto, etc., but what are people here doing?”
And here, lo and behold, is a local auction house making effective use of YouTube:
That clothing video has already had 3500 views (it would have had more if they’d used a description title and written up a description of the video, including a link back to their auction site). A nice result for the tiny effort it took to create.
A colleague who runs an online business is looking for a developer for a project. Here’s the brief, admittedly vague spec:
Our site is programmed in PHP and we use MySQL for our database. We currently have an inhouse developed shopping cart which uses two payment gateways, one that tracks credit card info for recurring members and one that processes the payments. The one that processes the payments now offers a service that tracks recurring, making the former redundant. So we are looking for a programmer that can implement the transition from one gateway to the other.
If you’re interested, send me an email at darren at darrenbarefoot dot com. I’ll forward the email on to my colleague, and he’ll get back to you if the’s interested. I really must get that Jobs page up and running on this site.
Note to future searchers who find this page: Please note the date on this post. If it’s later than April 1, 2009, it’s too late, so please don’t email me.
I particularly like the quiet “balls, balls” at the end, which is a little guest voice-acting action from Monique.
That video also stars Jay of Giant Ant Media fame. He sent me an email about some videos they created for Vancouver Adaptive Snow Sports. He tells me that it’s “a really wicked program dedicated to making the mountain available to those with disabilities”. Here’s one of them:
It’s been my impression that, at least in West Van and downtown Vancouver, there are fewer gas stations than there used to be? Is this true? Did a lot of the gas stations move out to the suburbs?
I rarely drive, so it’s not really a pressing concern for me, but I think I’ve observed this trend over the past fifteen years. I’m particularly aware of it because former gas station land has to lie fallow for a long time, so you become familiar with these weed-choked cement lots waiting for redevelopment.
Hang on. I did some further searching, and came up with some data courtesy of UBC. It’s not particularly current, but it confirms my observation:
The table below shows the number of gas stations in Vancouver in 1970 and 1998. There has been a reduction of 209 gas stations in this time period. However, there are 39 new sites, so the number of abandoned sites since 1970 is 248.
I also found this article about disappearing gas stations in Manhattan:
Since 1999, the number of gas stations in Manhattan has declined by 18 percent, to 207, according to the Fire Department, which maintains a record of gas stations in the city. Cropping up in their places are everything from condos to clothing stores.
It’s not surprising, really. If you have ten gas stations in a city, and get rid of five, you get more efficient and the number of possible customers remains the same.
