blinkit

Summer begins now

WMD: It's still a little less than a month away, but I declare summer to be officially under way in this week's column. Text follows here:

Sitting on my deck last weekend, I had a brief glimpse of summer. It can't come fast enough.

We suffered a long winter in Vancouver. It wasn't particularly cold or snowier than usual, but it was interminably grey, with one sunless day following another. Spring came almost unnoticed with more grey--and a last fit of snow--overshadowing the annual bloom of our cherry trees.

This past winter also brought to me more work than usual, with more stress at our workplace than usual, which is why last weekend was my first two free days this year that coincided with sunshine and warm temperatures. Waking up Saturday morning, blinking at the light like a survivor of a planetary holocaust emerging from his bunker, I finally felt the season change. I leapt past our limp spring and right to summer.

I sat for hours on my deck. Ate meals there. Drank beer. Read at length a real book. And watched people go by on my street. It felt almost like childhood, except for the beer.

A few columns back, I described the endless days of my childhood summers. I equated it then to a freer time in our society, but that adolescent sense of eternity also had as much to do with summer itself. Summer is about long light and unrushed days, of heat and dreamy reflection. In December, we eat too much, drink more than is sensible, rarely get exercise, shiver through commutes in darkness, rain and snow, and plunge into overcrowded, chaotic malls to spend far too much money on our holiday rituals. In July, we take afternoon naps in the shade.

We open our windows wide in summer, and ignore the thermostat until October. We go outside and rediscover outdoor spaces that in winter's cold would have been dangerous to our health. We clean up our patios and decks, liberate our lawns and gardens from debris, plant food and celebrate being alive with flowering plants.

Echoing our distant savannah ancestors who invented the first barbecue, we cook outside and share meals in the open air with family and friends. We venture into the parks and onto the beaches and let our bare feet feel the direct touch of grass and sand. We let our children run and yell and make only token efforts to rein them in. We fill the walking trails and bike routes and try not to notice the bickering between dog owners and the people they annoy. In winter, strangers appearing in the dark of the night give us pause. On a summer's night, off-leash dogs, the odd beach stabbing or a riot on a fireworks night not withstanding, the same strangers might be an occasion for a chat.

If we're brave, we hit the ocean water and let the salty coolness wash over our bodies. We swim, sail and surf. Or we lie on the sand and pretend we've done all three.

We lose our clothes in summer, and in a supposedly casual city that remains hung up on ancient Anglo-Saxon guilt, newly restrained by an Asian sense of propriety, such freedom cannot be underestimated. We bundle up in winter, and because this is Vancouver we do our best to appear hip but end up looking like fashionably dressed astronauts. In summer all pretense is lost. The dress of the day is shirts or light tops, shorts or skirts and sandals. Repeat throughout the week.

The shedding of clothing is also when we realize how beautiful so many of our citizens can be. Yes, some of us should remain hidden, swathed in layers of fabric to prevent the rest of us from spitting up our coffee. But so many others, of all ages and both genders, are blessed. On sunny days, in shopping districts like South Granville, the girls of summer come out in flocks, lightly clothed and strolling unselfconscious in their loveliness. Ordinarily sober, serious columnists innocently lounging at sidewalk cafes suddenly lose their train of thought in mid...

And we read. I used to think the long-standing tradition of reading in summer was a bourgeois indulgence propped up by boring newspaper features about what books local celebrities are taking to the "cottage." But now I understand why people choose summer for reading. There's plenty of natural light, you can read outside anywhere you can throw down a blanket and cooler, and because you've worked throughout the winter in confined spaces to escape the dark and cold, books are needed to rekindle the soul. Television doesn't feel right in summer. Movies become more mindless than usual after Victoria Day weekend. Books are what save us. Live music, too.

Summer officially starts in a little under a month. It ends too soon. I started mine early, and despite the return of grey clouds this week, it's not going to stop until it absolutely has to--perhaps in mid-November.

Today's bLINKit: If real life were like Second Life, a video.

Suffer the children

WMD: Column from mid-April: The evil that is summer school. Text follows:

Summer classes stifle children's right to run free

Blue sky days with nothing to do not in cards for kids of today's competitive parents

Barry Link, Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Thank you, Vancouver School Board, for helping to kill childhood.

The Courier reported last week that the school district will not charge fees for most of its summer courses. That's good for students who repeat courses because they failed them during the regular part of the year and need a do over. But for many citizens of Vancouver from ages five to 18, this is potentially bad, because too many parents are nuts.

The move to free summer courses was forced on the school district by the Ministry of Education, which in turn was compelled by a Supreme Court of B.C. decision in 2006 declaring fees for public school courses to be illegal. That decision came from a suit by a Victoria school trustee who rightly wanted to eliminate school fees of any kind because they create a two-tier system of education in which students from poor families are shut out of courses that require money for equipment or materials.

Offering summer courses for "free" (in reality, they're paid for through our taxes) will cost the district $2.2 million a year. Officially, it's a hit to the district budget. Unofficially, the district is overjoyed, as the hiply named Laurie Anderson, an associate superintendent, revealed. "We're encouraged by this because it allows us to provide students with the opportunity [to take classes]," he told the Courier last week. "We have the capacity obviously--we have lots of schools."

Bureaucrats hate unused capacity, even in summer. And more summer students strengthens the public school system's social role as warehouses for non-adults.

Schools are vital as civilizing institutions. Education should be our biggest financial investment. Teachers deserve to be well paid. But in truth, we lock up children and teens in schools because we haven't figured out anything more imaginative to do with them. They scare us. They're loud, they move too fast and would spawn babies at 14 if we didn't put a leash on them. So we lie to them by warning that if they don't go to school five days a week, the sun will explode.

That longstanding tradition of imprisoning children 10 months of the year worked for years because we let them out every summer. Originally, the annual furlough allowed kids to work family farms and bring in the harvest. The country got fed. But gradually, when we learned that we could get our food at the local Safeway and that Farmer Brown largely depended on immigrant labour, summer became prime time to be a kid.

I was a child in the '60s and '70s, and yes, it was a simpler, dumber time. We rode mastodons then and wore furs. And oh how we marvelled at the invention of fire. But I was also--and I believe myself extremely lucky--part of the last generation of North American kids allowed to run free. Summer was summer, with school a distant memory. Sometimes I went to camp or went on trips with my family, and as I got older, I took on summer jobs. But much of the time I did very little. It was bliss. When you're an 11-year-old boy, and your time is your own, a summer day of high heat and a cloudless blue sky seems like it can last for decades. For anyone past 30, contrast that childhood and even teenage sense of eternity with your life now, when a decade slips by as if it were a day.

Contrast also my quaint experience of childhood as unstructured and self-organizing with today's child, whose typical day resembles a spreadsheet of prescribed activities performed in highly guarded environments. Unfettered as children, my generation became parents and turned childhood for our own kids into a lesson plan. Even play became a teachable moment.

We've also increasingly refashioned our culture along social Darwinist lines, which is why summer for many parents cannot be allowed to fall into mere fun. Their kids are being raised to compete, and competition for a finite number of university placements means summer school for prep courses or to redo courses taken in the regular year to get higher grades. Free summer courses for them is mana from a heaven of extreme parenting. Their urge to compete through their children, and our relentless drive for efficiency, are also behind the concept of year-round schooling, as anti-child (or teenager) as any educational concept going.

Such thinking forgets the cycle of life. You are young, you play. You get old and then you die. Do not repeat. There's a saying that no person on their deathbed wishes they'd spent more time at the office. The same applies to the classroom.

Why our culture changed is a puzzle. But this much is true: we were kids once, and then we forgot.

Mars landing live

Today's bLINKit: For anyone looking at this blog Sunday afternoon, PST, check out Ustream live coverage of the Phoenix Lander on Mars. They're basically streaming the NASA TV live feed, with commentary scrolling by from the peanut gallery.

Get a free laptop, beware the giant IPs

Today's bLINKit: Get a free Eee PC (cheap, but robust and widely praised mini-laptop) at RBC by opening an account there. Switching banks is actually a lot of work, and I have no idea if RBC is a better or worse bank the others, so it's worth nothing that the machine RBC is giving away is going for $299 at The Source.

WMD: Continuing with Courier columns, this one published yesterday:

Big Internet providers control on-ramps to information highway

Bell, Shaw and Telus well-positioned to dictate shaping of Internet in Canada

Barry Link, Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Imagine ordering a pizza over the phone from the locally owned pizza shop a few blocks away. You try calling but find it takes forever to get a dial tone. Frustrated, you hang up and call the nearest pizza chain and are instantly connected.

Now imagine the next day you learn that the chain corporation cut a deal with Telus to provide super quick phone service, while the local guy, as a much smaller pizza maker with limited funds, refused or could not afford to pay for a similar deal and was given an inferior phone line. As a consumer in search of open and equal pizza choices, you'd be outraged. And so would the local guy.

Of course, this scenario is a fantasy. Anyone of us can order from a small independent pizza place as easily as we can call Dominos or Panagos. But according to Internet defenders like Matt Thompson, this kind of imbalance could soon occur on the Internet thanks to the monopolistic cable and telecommunications companies that now control almost all the on-ramps to what we once called the information highway. In the U.S., giant Internet providers want to charge a premium to web destinations which have the potential for high traffic. Those who pay the premium would be offered a fast lane for Internet users to patronize to their websites and services. Those who don't pay the premium will find their traffic relegated to a second tier of inferior service on a bumpy and winding dirt road.

The issue has become known as net neutrality, which Thompson highlights during a talk Friday at VIDFEST, Vancouver's annual geek gathering of digital new media. The Vancouver-born Montreal resident, a consultant with the U.S.-based SavetheInternet.com campaign, will share the podium with John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead member who co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Net neutrality is a complicated issue to wrap our heads around. We gripe about monthly fees for broadband access, but most of us don't care about the technical workings behind the scenes of the Internet as long as we can poke friends on Facebook and watch cats play piano on YouTube.

But the pizza by phone analogy, which Thompson used when I talked to him last week, is useful to remember. The Internet is as much a key part of modern economic and social life as the telephone, Thompson argues. And just as consumers expect certain rights involving phone usage--such as the ability to easily call any number in the phone book--we should expect the same rights online.

Canadian Internet providers such as Shaw and Telus haven't made noises--yet--about providing premium service to web destinations that can afford to pay. But they are messing with the Internet in other ways. Telus infamously blocked a union website to its subscribers during its last labour dispute--the equivalent of cutting off phone service to the union office. Most providers routinely throttle the connection speeds of users who engage in peer-to-peer file trading. And Bell, a major provider in Eastern Canada, recently admitted slowing down connection speeds for third-party providers that legally lease the use of its network.

In the U.S., similar moves by American providers have sent geeks to virtual barricades. Last year, Thompson produced an award-winning online video that was part of a massive campaign to thwart legislation that favoured the giant Internet providers. The campaign went far beyond geekdom to include hundreds of organizations--from conservative Christian lobby groups to artists--and hundreds of thousands of individuals. That same diverse and powerful coalition has a shot at passing genuine net neutrality legislation in the U.S. in coming months.

But in Canada, net neutrality is an emerging issue at best The CRTC has washed its hands of Internet regulation, and Thompson believes the federal Conservatives will let Bell, Shaw and Telus dictate how the Internet will be shaped in this country.

Thompson, who says the economic importance of net neutrality can't be emphasized enough, notes the Internet was built as an open and equal marketplace. Anyone with an idea--or service, company or political position--has just as much a chance of promoting that idea to the world as anyone else.

Thompson hopes Canadians wake up. We developed a plan for the 19th century railway lines which built the country in its early years, he says. We need to have a similar plan "for the most important invention since the printing press, and the public needs to have a role in that plan," he says. If we don't, better start preparing for limited choice in pizza.

See VIDFEST at www.vidfest.com

On my list ...

WMD: OK, I haven't blogged in a long time, a common setback for bloggers. Work kept me more than busy, sometimes drained, and owning your own apartment and being on the strata takes more time than you realize. I needed the time off. But back now, with catching up to do -- rebuilding my small but faithful audience for one thing. Hope you all come back.

I'll be catching up on past Courier columns first. My most recent Courier column is here. And since the links still don't last on the paper's web page, I've reproduced the text below:

Confessions of a compulsive list-maker

Scent of cat pee highlights need for 'writing things down'

Barry Link, Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Some time ago I came home, opened my door and smelled cat pee. I was not surprised, since I have a cat. But I was surprised, since in all the years we've been roomies he's never gone either No. 1 or No. 2 where he's not supposed to.

I quickly checked the litter box in the hallway closet and discovered an interesting fact: it had no litter. I had changed the litter box only three days before, dumping out and bagging the old litter and putting a new plastic liner in the box. But I forgot to put in new litter. I don't know why. I was distracted when changing it--listening to my MP3 player, thinking about ordering a pizza and meditating--haven't we all done this?--on the future of contextual human-corporate relationships in the void left by the retreat of post-industrial social organization. But the real reason my litter replacement project failed came down to one thing: I forgot to put it on my list.

I am a list-maker. If I don't make lists, I don't get things done. The fridge can be empty and the pantry bare, but unless I put "get groceries, stupid" on a list somewhere, I won't go to the grocery store. I'll eat the drapes first. And if I eat those, I won't replace them unless I put them on a list.

That's why I have many lists. I have a list of short-term domestic projects and another of long-term personal goals. I have a list of things I want to buy, a list of things not to buy, and a list of things to recycle or give away. I have a list of friends I need to catch up with and another list of friends to apologize to for failing to catch up with them because I've spent too much time putting things on lists.

I'm not alone. Humans have been making lists since the invention of writing. We know this from cuneiform clay tablets unearthed in Iraq and dating back to the ancient Sumerian city states of 5,000 years ago. The many thousands of tablets are full of lists: monarchs establishing their royal lineage, merchants making lists of customers and suppliers, alien supermen making lists of human women they took back to Atlantis to mate with. And there's also this famous fragment: "...and pick up a quart of goat's milk on the way home."

Lists became vital to keeping early human civilization together. Now centuries later, everyone makes lists--government tax departments, telemarketers, Mafia hitmen, Santa. Lists permeate our culture, from the bestselling Book of Lists, first published in the 1970s and going strong today, to the endless and fairly irrelevant rollout of "endorsers" by Vancouver's three dozen or so mayoral contenders.

Some lists you want to be on, such as the VIP list for the opening gala of the Vancouver International Film Festival. And no matter how hard you try or embarrass yourself in public with obvious hints, some lists you never seem to get on, such as the VIP list for the opening gala of the Vancouver International Film Festival.

But keeping lists is hard, which is why helping people keep lists has become an industry. And like a lot of industry it's moved to the Internet, which of course, thanks to Google, whose business is to keep some of the biggest lists ever made, was tailor-made for the creation and keeping of lists.

As a monomaniacal lister, I was overjoyed a few months back to discover Remember the Milk, a free web-based tool for making lists that are easy to create and edit and easy on the eyes.

We have plenty of lists at the Courier. Every day, we juggle lists of stories for our writers to file, lists of stories that need to be edited, a list of photos that must be shot, and a list of pages where those stories and photos will go. I have a list of freelancers, a list of words and phrases I try to ban from copy, a list of local public figures to offend (we try to rotate them) and a list of staff days off. My email inbox is essentially one vast list of people to reply to.

So thank God for RTM, as it likes to be called. Each morning, I fire up my personal account page and watch the lists magically unfold. It tells me what I need to do. And because it's on the Internet, I believe everything it says.

Back to my cat: he's highly resourceful. He used the litter-less box once, decided that was dumb, and for several days used the fireplace, which still had winter's ashes, as a toilet. It was a clever move, but also the main reason my apartment reeked of feline urine. But he never would have used the fireplace to pee in if I had not forgotten to remove the ashes. And why didn't I get around to that job?

It wasn't on my list.

Today's bLINKit: Remember the Milk, a great online efficiency tool, can be found here. I use it for both home and work.