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I get asked a lot about the origin of my name. Predictably, lots of people think that it’s First Nations in origin. It’s not. I’m pretty Caucasian, and my ancestors have only been in Canada for a couple hundred years.

I’ve always understood my name to be English in origin, and to predate the Battle of Hastings, but that’s about it.

For my birthday last month, some friends got me one of those ‘here’s where your name comes from certificates’. Here’s what it said:

This is an English name from the Olde English pre 7th century “baer”, bare or naked, and “fot”, foot and was used as a nickname for someone who habitually lived and worked without shoes on. It was used specifically of friars and pilgrims and those who went barefoot as a religious penance. There were similar examples in Medieval England for example “Barleg” and “Bareshanke”. The friar in Shakespears “Romeo and Juliet” is described as “a barefoote brother”. William King and Elizabeth Barfot were married in St. George’s Chapel, Mayfair, 1748. The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of Reginald Berfot. which was dated 1203, in the Pipe Rolls of Cumbria. during the reign of King John, known as “Lackland” 1199 – 1216.

I suppose, then, that my ancestors had to put up with bad jokes about “no shoes”, too.

To be thorough, I also found this listserv message on my name that looks rather thorough.

Last Friday, myself, Julie and two friends set off for a 106 km bike trip along the Canal du Midi from Toulouse to Carcassonne. Although the weather has been mostly agreeable this spring in the south of France, the forecast foreboded a lot of wind and rain. Nonetheless, we rented bikes from Mellow Velos and set off.

The first 50 km of the canal path is paved, so the first day was reasonably straightforward. We wove between strollers and joggers, and passed Europe’s first electron microscope. City gave way to suburbs and then countryside as we rode east against a strong head wind. It didn’t rain on us, though, and we actually caught some sun as we paused by a lock along the route.

The canal is an engineering marvel. It stretches about 240 km, connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. Designed, constructed and mostly funded by Pierre-Paul Riquet, it’s been an important transportation route since it was completed in 1681. These days, the only commerce on the canal is from tourists in rented boats and hotel barges (my friend operate a particularly classy one).

The canal has 91 locks along its length, and the maximum speed on the canal is 8 km/h, so nobody goes anywhere very fast on the waterway. The locks are quite remarkable to watch in operation, as they shift a boat 15 or 20 feet up or down. There are also a number of spots where the canal crosses another river. It’s a bit headwrecking to think that you’re riding a bike beside a canal which is on a bridge that’s over a river.

After resting our weary bones at a chambre d’hote in Gardouch, we braved colder and wetter conditions the next day. Happily, the wind had shifted and was now a welcome helping hand at our backs. The paved path ended, and recent rains had made several sections of the canal rather muddy. It was more BMX track than solid cycling path. If you’re considering this route, I’d recommend waiting until a little later in the year. It will be busier–we saw few cyclists outside of the cities–but the clayey soil will be drier and much harder.

We soldiered on, though, and arrived at Castelnaudary on the second night. Castelnaudary is a charming town where the canal widens into a basin. It’s also the heart of cassoulet country, so we replaced our expended calories with a hearty bean, rabbit and sausage casserole.

The third day of riding was the longest–42 km into Carcassonne. We eventually abandoned the canal’s towpath for the smooth tarmac of a nearby road. After picking our way among roots and mud puddles on the canal, it was a curious pleasure to fly down the road at 30 km/h. I appreciate that, to the experienced cyclist, these numbers aren’t particularly impressive, but they’re long and fast enough for me and my aging quads.

We did have lunch at a rather unusual pirate-themed creperie in the little town of Bram. Their crepes were excellent, as were their sea shanties and Breton cola.

I have mixed feelings about Carcassonne. The fortified old city is very striking, and the basilica inside is gorgeous. However, the interior has been entirely transformed into a desperate more-French-than-France cluster of tourist businesses. You can eat lousy meals, buy all kinds of Carcassonne-themed crap and take tacky tours within those stout walls. For stony fortifications and history, I prefer the working walled city of Valetta in Malta, or the tiny village of Minerve here in France.

I’m very fond of the pace of a cycle trip. You’re neither trudging along without much sense of progress, nor flying through the countryside in a car, disconnected from the sounds and smells around you. If I were doing the ride again, I might have actually started the ride at Gardouch or Villefranche-de-Lauragais, and carried on passed Carcassonne for another day or two. The paved surface out of Toulouse was welcome, but its suburbs were not.

I’m already planning another bike trip in the fall that will cover the westerly half of the canal, which would have us finishing near the Med at Sète.

The second and third photos on this page are by Monique.

Every so often, I see a video, usually from a research lab, that demonstrates some new technology. It’s typically kind of mundane, with banal camera work, titles from Windows Movie Maker and monotone, academic narration.

And yet it feels like I’m watching science fiction. I experience some combination of awe and creepiness, like I’m peeking into the future. I usually utter “holy crap” under my breath.

I’ve probably reacted this way to dozens of technology demo videos, but these are a few that stand out in my mind. The first one seems totally ordinary in 2012, but it blew my mind in 2006 when Sun Microsystems’ Johnathan Schwartz flipped over a desktop window (it’s at about 3:00–listen to the audience’s reaction). “What?” I thought. “Windows have backs?”

I expect that by now, we’ve all seen the footage of Boston Dynamic’s BigDog robot from 2008. It’s the first time that I ever saw a mobile robot that didn’t seem absurdly frail and delicate, as if it might tip over at any moment. In this video, a man actually shoves the robot with his foot, and the thing staggers but recovers.

The latest example of an awe-inspiring tech demo comes via Jeremiah Owyang on Google+. Touche demonstrates pretty fascinating new frontiers in touch interaction with objects. My favourite bit is when we see a guy changing songs and volume on his music player simply by making gestures with his hands and arms. It’s like we’re teaching objects sign language.

UPDATE: Here are the slightly revised slides  (PDF) I presented today, in PDF format.

This morning I gave a talk entitled “Trackbacked: A decade of social media” at the iMedia conference in Edmonton. I was intentional in choosing that title, as the term ‘trackback’ (replaced, I suppose, by the likes of ‘reblog’ and ‘repin’) has disappeared from common usage as quickly as it appeared.

The talk is a meandering look back at the last 10 years of social media, and some of the lessons I’ve learned there-in.

As I sometimes do, I created a mindmap to organize my initial ideas about the talk. I thought it might interest iMedia attendees to check it out. Click to embiggen:

These are just early notes, so I may not completely believe (or be willing to argue in favour of) everything in that image. The version above is just an image, so here are the links sprinkled around the diagram:

• http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/fark.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User’s_Guide_and_Catalog
• http://darrenbarefoot.com/flowers/
• http://www.penmachine.com/2011/05/the-last-post
• http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/files/2012/03/blogmoredigital_4f706ae71e5af.jpeg
• http://maps.google.com/?t=8&utm_campaign=8bit
• https://vimeo.com/20465929
• http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/
• http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-new-aesthetic-needs-to-get-weirder/255838/
• http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/

A couple of weeks ago, Julie and I hopped on a train for the 45 minute ride to Montpellier. While we planned to stay over night and explore the charming old town, our main purpose was to visit L’Office Francais de l’Immigration et de L’Integration (OFII). A successful visit would mean that we were officially legal in the eyes of the French government, and were permitted to spend the year here.

The OFII represented the final step in a process that began in the fall of 2011, when we began assembling documents to apply for a long-term stay visa. As you’d expect, the application requirements were vigorous. We easily each had a stack of documents an inch high–everything from our verified banking records to proof of medical insurance. If you’d murdered us on the way to the French consulate in Vancouver and hidden our bodies, you could have assumed our identities with ease.

A multicultural clump of humanity was ushered into the OFII office the following afternoon. What followed was–and I  write this without sarcasm–French bureaucratic efficiency at its finest. In the space of an hour and 45 minutes, we each had four appointments. We met with:

1. A nurse who weighed and measured us, and completed a short interview regarding our medical history.
2. A nurse who x-rayed our chest cavity.
3. A doctor who reviewed the x-ray (pronouncing my chest “claire et normale”), took our blood pressure and listened to our breathing.
4. A functionary who completed the paperwork and attached the precious ‘vignette’–an official sticker–in our passport.

Just like that, we were official. We celebrated with Thai food, an ethnic food beyond the prowess of our village’s restaurants.

On a related topic, I was very impressed with Montpellier. It has a gorgeous, mostly-pedestrian centre that’s lively and full of bars and restaurants. The city’s spirit is no doubt buoyed by a reported student population of 60,000. And, though it was early in the season, there was a minimum of tourist tatt and related nonsense. I wonder if nearby Carcasonne draws most of the visitors, and so permits Montpellier to just go about its business?

For the average hockey fan, the days between the regular season and the playoffs are torture. There’s  very little news, as teams are more secretive than ever about line-ups, injuries and the like. All the media can do is sit around and make predictions. All fans can do is read and ruminate on those predictions.

I started a spreadsheet that shows all the media and hockey blogger predictions I could find. I’ve made it editable by anybody, so that should others discover predictions, they can add them to the document.

I’m currently up to around 450 individual picks from nearly 60 pundits. I don’t claim to be exhaustive, but it’s hopefully representative. Here are some early impressions:

• The longest series is predicted to be NSH/DET, with the shortest being NJD/FLO.
• There’s great consensus in the east, with at least 90% of the media agreeing on the outcome of all four series.
• There’s the most disagreement on the CHI/PHO series, with the media currently going 60%-40% in favour of the Blackhawks.
• Almost nobody picks 4-game series sweeps, which is odd because there’s usually at least one in the quarter-finals each year.
• Confidence in the Canucks is reasonably high, with more than 83% of the media picking them to pick the Kings, in an average of roughly 6 games.
• Hockey writers are almost all Caucasian men.

In completing this little exercise, I couldn’t help but think fondly of Maggie the macaque, who routinely outpicked the TSN staff in years past. This year, I’ll have to settle for a sea lion from Niagara Falls.

In a related note, I’ll be going on something of a social media cleanse in the coming weeks (and months, hopefully). As I’m living in France, I’ll be watching playoff games about 12 to 18 hours after they finish. So, I’ll need to avoid the likes of Twitter and Facebook in order to enjoy the games in a  prelapsarian state, if you will.

UPDATE: I thought I’d better store my first round picks here, which I tweeted the other day: NYR in 4, BOS in 7, NJD in 5, PIT in 7, VAN in 6, SJS in 7, CHI in 5, NSH in 7

For the past decade, I’ve been able to walk to my work. 10 years ago, that commute was a half-an-hour jaunt across the centre of Dublin. Since 2007, we’ve worked from home, and so my walk to work has been measured in seconds.

When I can walk to work, I find that most of my other needs fall within walking distance, too. Whether we’re living in Victoria, Malta or Victoria, BC, groceries, restaurants, medical services and the like have just been a stroll away. When we can, we plan our living circumstances around this proximity, and I’m the happier for it.

As I think about it, walking reminds me that I’m living my life at a healthy, sustainable pace. I don’t have to hop into a car to beat the traffic so that I can make it to the office on time, or get to a store before it closes.

I appreciate that this kind of lifestyle isn’t for everyone. Your average North American family lives in the suburbs, and so they can’t walk to school, work or the rest of their lives away from home. They routinely need cars to get where they’re going. My choice to walk is the privilege of a childless, middle-class knowledge worker. Of course, in many small towns around the world, walking is still the way of life for much of humanity.

Here in France, I walk every day. Usually it’s down to the local shops–the grocery store, la pâtisserie and la boucherie. I also walk up and down the Canal du Midi a lot. It’s very pleasant to follow the meandering path of the slow-moving canal, shaded by plane trees.

I recently learned about the Camino de Santiago, a Catholic pilgrimage in northern Spain, and one of many such pilgrimages throughout Europe. While I’m not Catholic, I do see the appeal in a moving ritual that lasts a month and leaves you alone with your thoughts and surroundings.

I’ve been a fan of Kickstarter since it launched back in 2009. I love its very 21st-century take on patronage. It’s also my favourite example of a particular kind of startup idea. Back in 2009, I wrote “it’s a terrific example of spotting something that people are doing in an ad hoc basis, and creating a site to formally organize and enable that behaviour.”

I’ve been delighted to watch it grow, and work its way into the mainstream. There are plenty of indicators of its success, but one is all of the Kickstarter imitators that have emerged.

Kickstarter now processes some serious coin. They’ve recently had several projects raise more than a million dollars, and in 2011 their projects collectively generated just under US $100 million That’s up from $27 million in 2010.

With all that money floating around, there must be an emergent demand for a professional marketer or fundraiser who can help Kickstarter projects achieve their goals. After all, Kickstarter (and its ilk) are simply a particular kind of fundraising, which is itself a popular profession.

Accidental consultants

I did some searches for ‘Kickstarter consultant’ and the like, but Google’s cupboards were surprisingly bare. I found this guy and this guy, both of whom more or less admit to accidentally becoming crowdfunding consultants. Interestingly, they’re both filmmakers who had their own successful Kickstarter projects. I’m always been a little leery of the “I did this, so you can too” approach, but I have no reason to doubt their capabilities. I was surprised not to find any professional marketers or fundraisers positioning themselves for this kind of work. Even searches for the more general ‘crowdfunding consultant’ (and some variations) didn’t produce as many convincing results as I would have expected.

The average Kickstarter project in 2011 only asked for about $8400. If you’re earning a few percentage points, there’s not a lot of money there. But many of the projects are worth tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most projects seem to be founded by artists, musicians, filmmakers and designers. These are, in my experience, people who, on average, aren’t great at marketing themselves and their projects. Most of the artists I know would prefer to make art.

On the other hand, it’s still early days for Kickstarter. So perhaps it’s a prerequisite for a successful project that the people behind it be savvy marketers? In essence, Kickstater filters out the creative people who are bad at crowdfunding?

Obviously, crowdfunding is becoming big business. And it’s about to become a lot bigger, thanks to a new bill that President Obama is soon expected to sign into law. I expect to meet more and more crowdfunding experts at conferences in the coming months.

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