August 21st, 2009, 7 Comments »
Last week Julie and I spent a couple of days working from a cabin on one of the islands off the Sunshine Coast. There’s no cable or landline phone service to the cabin, so the only way we could manage this feat was by using the Internet Tethering feature on our iPhone.
For those outside the Cult of Mac, tethering transforms your iPhone into a modem for your computer. You use the phone’s 3G signal to access the web at slow but manageable speeds. You’re not going to play World of Warcraft, but it’s good enough for email or work-related web surfing.
This is kind of a game-changer for us. It means that we can work anywhere there’s 3G cell service. How much of BC is that? Not very much, but it’s a good start and I suspect that it’ll get better. Still, the promise of working remotely more–as well as always being able to access the web on my laptop in the city–is excellent news.
Canada Line, Ho!
When we’re in Vancouver, we usually stay near Cambie and Broadway. So we’ve been anticipating the opening of the new SkyTrain line for months. Since it opened last Monday, I’ve taken it like, 17 times. Okay, maybe more like six times, but it’s fairly awesome.
The trains are frequent and spacious, and it takes only 25 minutes to get all the way out to Richmond Centre. It’s a joy to ride the Canada Line right now, because it’s entirely advertising-free. All of the poster frames are empty, and the video advertising screens are off.
My only criticism of the Canada Line is that the subterranean platforms are aesthetically banal. Having ridden subways in a bunch of other cities around the world, I’ve always enjoyed it when individual stations have distinct designs. The Canada Line platforms look pretty much identical. Maybe this is due to time or budget restrictions, and there are plans to individualize the platforms down the road.
On a vaguely related note, we went out to Richmond Centre for a meeting on Wednesday morning. We walked through the mall–I don’t think I’d ever been before–before the stores were open. We passed several hundred Chinese seniors doing calisthenics to the music of, oddly, the Counting Crows. It was, I must say, a little Maoist. There was also a smaller group doing Tai Chi. I’d heard of seniors doing mall walking, but the scope of these exercising oldies was truly impressive.
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December 18th, 2007, 2 Comments »
My friend Eric is working on the Skytrain the Canada Line tunnels that are slowly threading their way under our city. Yesterday he wrote about breaking through to Robson Station:
It was pretty cool to experience the cutting head break through. I was expecting a much more gentle crumbling of the earth than the explosive display I witnessed. In fact, there was so much force that much of the rock, concrete, sludge and water sprayed 100 feet right towards us. I was standing about 150 feet back and got a little spray on my helmet.
He also included this cool photo:
I’ve also been meaning to congratulate my friend Lesley (Eric’s wife and the editor of our ebook) on winning the 12th annual Vancouver Courier Fiction contest. She’s a terrific writer, and she should blog more often. The link to the story is currently missing from Canada.com–somebody from the Courier should get that fixed.
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August 22nd, 2007, 3 Comments »
A couple of months back, my friend Rob Lewis had an idea for a little Web project. Rob’s the new CEO of Techvibes, and has the enticing challenge of transforming it from a creaky, Web 1.0 social network to something compelling and relevant in 2007.
Rob saw this map of the web in Montreal, and figured we could do something similar in Vancouver. I decided to use Translink’s familiar zone map as a background, so I set to work painstakingly recreating it.
We planned to announce our little project at BarCamp, so we decided to produce the first map with Vancouver’s Web 2.0 companies. We partnered with the good folks at Bluelime Media to turn my map into a site, and I really dig the retro fridge theme they came up with.
You can check it out at Techcouver.com.
Some Pretty Vague Criteria
We did our best to identify as many appropriate local companies as we could. My criteria were pretty vague, frankly, but then, so is the term itself. If we missed your company, apologies. There’s a link on the site to get added to the map–just click the fortune cookie fortune (odd, but grammatically correct, I think). I know Rob’s already received a couple of requests.
All of the companies that we found are clustered around downtown, so you kind of lose the whole Translink zone map effect. It’s a pity, too, because it took me hours to trace from Bowen Island to the Fraser Valley. Ah well, a future map will no doubt feature companies in suburban business parks.
Subsequent maps might include mobility companies, medium and large tech companies and so forth. Eventually we might even create some slick Ajax interface which enables us to fit all the companies on one map. For now, though, they’re categorized.
Here’s an interesting tidbit: in doing this project, I discovered that you can open up and modify Translink’s incredibly detailed PDF maps in Adobe Illustrator. That wasn’t any use to me and my zone map, but it’s a top tip if you need to hack up a map of Vancouver.
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