The optimist in me would like to point out that my aforementioned stupidity regarding my toasting of Serenity has an upside: in the process of rebuilding my network and moving services around, I was able to rename all of the machines to conform to my new naming convention: famous Canadians.

So here's the list:

• Dallaire (gateway and firewall) - Roméo Dallaire is a Canadian senator, humanitarian, author and retired general best known for his work as Peacekeeper in Rawanda during the genocide.
• Trudeau (web, dns, imaps and fileserver) - Pierre Elliott Trudeau brought us our Constitution, our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, was a champion of national Unity and had a pair of big brass ones when it came to doing what he knew was right, opposition be damned. He is my favourite Prime Minister.
• Douglas (laptop) - Tommy Douglas was the founder of Canada's nationalised health care system as well as the NDP. Champion for a range of socialist causes, he was depicted as a rebel in the CBC's Greatest Canadian series, I felt it appropriate that he get the laptop :-)
• May (desktop) - Elizabeth May is a long time environmental activist and the present leader of the Green Party of Canada and the primary reason that I'm a supporter. She is all kinds of awesome.
• Geist (my ps3) - Michael Geist is the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. He's a Canada's #1 copyright reform advocate, and I couldn't resist the irony of attaching his name to a Sony product.

Now here's the thing. The last two people are not nearly as strong as the first three. I mean, don't get me wrong, May and Geist are awesome people, but I feel as though the both of them haven't really done enough to be compared to the other three. I'd like to hear a list of suggestions for different names, hopefully related to their function if possible.

There are also 3 more computers on their way (low-watt replacements for Trudeau) so while one of them will still bear the Trudeau name (the webserver), there are essentially 4 machines up for naming rights:

• A domain server / DHCP server
• A fileserver
• My desktop (gaming, movies & development)
• My PS3

So here's where you come in: I want a list of names to use for the above. Tell me why your Canadian is a good choice: Riel, Pearson, McClung, whomever you like, but tell me why. I'd also like to have some women in the mix if possible -- it just feels kinda weird to have all my machines be male :-)

You may have noticed some sketchy uptime on this blog lately. For a few days there, my site would be online for a few hours, then drop offline for a few then return. It's done horrible things to my traffic as well as my personal productivity.

You see, my router, Serenity was falling apart. The little compact-flash card I was using was starting to flake out and I was seeing data corruption, segfaults and lots and lots of kernel panics. Not fun. This could be managed with the occasional reboot, but that's not a fix. No I had to buy a new cf card and rebuild serenity from the ground up.

This sounds more difficult than it is really. I just hopped down to London Drugs, bought a new card ($23 for 2gb! Looks like SD really did win that race) brought it home and opened up the box with my trusty screw driver, moved a few parts around and replaced the card. The only thing left was the install and configuratioin... except I got stupid.

The case fan was unplugged. I'd removed it months ago 'cause it was making noise and I wanted a quieter house. However, the CPU was *really* hot, so I thought it might be a good idea to test out if the noise was really tolerable or not. I took the little power wire and plugged it into a free set of pins and sure enough, the fan came on -- the server also rebooted.

I'd plugged one of the power cables right into the motherboard on some unlabeled pin. There was some scary-sounding beeping, and then the smell of burnt metal and plastic... even smoke. My curiosity, coupled with a stupid mistake (learn your cables Dan!) had had quite literally "toasted" my router.

So I'm now using my wireless router (originally just an access point) as my primary router and I'm already not liking it. I'd gotten used to handy things like IP blocking, and routing non-standard ports to standard ports to get around lame security on other networks -- all of it gone. However getting a replacement for serenity is looking to be around $400 so that's not going to happen anytime soon.

So let this be a lesson to you kids: be careful when playing with expensive hardware... one mistake and you really could fry your board :-(

I attended my first ever OpenWeb conference yesterday and as per company policy, I have to report on and share what I learnt, so what better way to do so then to make a blog post for all to read?

General

OpenWeb is awesome. It's a conference where people from all over the world come to talk about Open design and communication and hopefully, learn to build a better web in the process. Attendees include programmers, entrepreneurs, designers, activists and politicians all with shared goals and differing skillsets. I shook hands with Evan Prodromou, the founder of identi.ca and WikiTravel, heard talks from the guys who write Firefox and Thunderbird as well as the newly-elected representative for the Pirate Party in the European Parliament, Rickard Falkvinge. All kinds of awesome I tell you.

Rickard Falkvinge: Keynote - On the Pirate Party

Founder of the Pirate Party in Sweden and now a representative in the European Parliament (thanks to proportional representation), Falkvinge was a passionate and eloquent speaker who covered the history of copyright, the present fight for greater control of so-called intellectual property and more importantly the far-reaching and very misunderstood effects of some of the legislation being passed to "protect" copyright holders while eliminating privacy rights for the public.

The talk was very in depth and difficult to cover in a single post so I encourage you to ask me about it in person some time. For the impatient though, I'll try to summarise:

The copyright debate isn't about downloading music, that's just a byproduct of the evolution of technology. As the printing press gave the public greater access to information, so has the Internet managed to disperse that information further. The problem is now that the changing landscape has rendered certain business models ineffective, these business are fighting to change our laws to preserve said model rather than change with the times. Ranging from the frustratingly shortsighted attempts to ban technologies that further file sharing (legal or otherwise) to the instant wire tapping on every Internet connection (and by extension phone call) of every free citizen without a warrant, many of these changes are very, very scary.

"All of this has happened before, and it will happen again" he said. Every time a technological advancement creates serious change for citizen empowerment in society, the dominant forces in that society mobilise to crush it. The Catholic church, gatekeepers of the lion's share of human knowledge at the time actively worked to ban the printing press. They succeeded (if you can believe it) in France in 1535. This time, it's the media companies and they're willing to do anything, including associating file sharing with child pornography and terrorism to do it. Falkvinge's Pirate party is becoming the beachhead in the fight for copyright reform. Now the party with the largest youth delegation (30%!) in Sweden, they are working to get the crucial 4% of the seats in Parliament they need to hold the balance of power and they need your help. He'd like you to send the party 5€ or 10€ per month and I'm already on board.

Angie Byron: Keynote - Women in Open Source

Those of you who know me, know that I can get pretty hostile when it comes to treating women like a special class of people (be the light positive or negative) so I was somewhat skeptical about this one. Thankfully, I was happy to hear Byron cover a number of issues with the Free software community ranging from blatant sexism (CouchDB guys... seriously?) to basic barriers to entry for anyone new to a project. There were a lot of really helpful recommendations to people wanting to engage 100% of the community rather than just one half or the other.

Blake Mizerany: Sinatra

Sinatra is a Ruby framework that went in the opposite direction of things like my beloved Django or Ruby's Rails. Rather than hide the nuts and bolts of HTTP from the developer, Sinatra puts it right out there for you. Where traditional frameworks tend to muddle GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE into one input stream, this framework structures your whole program into blocks a lot like this:

  require 'rubygems'
  require 'sinatra'
  get '/hi' do
    "Hello World!"
  end

That little snipped up there handles the routing and display for a simple Hello World program. Sinatra's strength is that it's simple and elegant. It lets you get at the real power at the heart of HTTP which is really handy, but from what I could tell in the presentation, there's not a lot available outside of that. Database management is done separately, no ORM layer etc. etc. It's very good for what it does, but not at everything, which (at least in my book) makes it awesome.

Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer: Mozilla Labs

These are the guys who make the Cool New Stuff that comes out of Mozilla. You know those guys, they write a nifty web browser called "Firefox", I'm sure you've heard of them.

Mozilla Labs is where the smart nerds get together to build and experiment with toys that will (hopefully) eventually make it into a finished product. Sometimes that product is an add-on or plug-in, other times it's an entirely new project. It's all about how useful something is to the public. And as always, the code is Free. You may have even heard of Ubiquity, an extension to Firefox that promises to reshape how we use a web browser... they're working on that.

This time through, they were demoing Bespin, a code editor in your web browser. Imagine opening a web browser, going to a page and doing your development there: no need for a local environment, but without the usual disadvantages of aggravating lag or difficult, text-only interface. Now imagine that you can share that development space with someone else in real time and that you can be doing this from your mobile device on a beach somewhere. Yeah, it's that awesome.

We watched as they demoed the crazy power that is the <canvas /> tag by creating a simple text editor, in Javascript right there in front of us... with about 15 lines of code. Really, really impressive.

David Ascher: Open Messaging on the Open Internet

Ascher's talk on Open Messaging was something I was really interested in since I've been actively searching for information on federated social networking for a while now. The presentation was divided into two parts: half covering the history of email and it's slow deprecation in favour of a number of different technologies as well as how people are using it in ways never intended for the architecture. Major problems with the protocol itself were touched on, as well as an explanation about how some of the alternatives out there are also flawed.

He then went on to talk about Mozilla Thunderbird 3 and the variety of cool stuff that's happening with it. "Your mail client knows a lot about you" he says "but until now, we haven't really done a lot with it". Some of the new features for Thunderbird 3 include conversation tracking (like you see in Gmail), helping you keep track of what kinds of email you spend the most time on, who you communicate with most etc. and even statistical charts about what time of day you use mail, what kind of mail you send and to whom how often. It's very neat stuff. Add to this the fact that they've completely rewritten the plug-in support, so new extensions to Thunderbird mean that your mail client will be as useful as you want it to be.

Evan Prodromou: Open Source Microblogging with Laconica

Up until this talk (and with the exception of Falkvinge's keynote), I'd been interested, but not excited about OpenWeb. Prodromou's coverage of Laconica changed all of that.

Founder of WikiTravel and one of the developers on WikiMedia (the software behind Wikipedia), Prodromou has built a federated microblogging platform called Laconica. Think Twitter, but with the ability for an individual to retain ownership of his/her posts and even handle distribution -- with little or no need for technical knowledge required. Here, I made you a diagram to explain:

Here's how it is: whereas Twitter is a single central source of information, controlled by a single entity (in this case, a corporation), Laconica distributes the load to any number of separate servers owned by different people that all know how to communicate. Where you might be on a server in Toronto, hosted by NetFirms, I could be using a Laconica service hosted by Dreamhost in Honolulu. My posts go to my server, yours go to yours, and when my Twitter client wants to fetch your posts, it talks to NetFirms and vice versa.

The advantages are clear:

1. Infinite scalability: Twitter's monolithic model necessitates the need for crazy amounts of funding and they still don't have a profit model to account for those costs. Laconica on the other hand means that the load is distributed across potentially millions of hosts (much like the rest of the web).
2. You control your identity, not a private corporation.

The future is where it gets really exciting though. By retaining ownership of your identity and data, you can start to attach a variety of other data types to the protocol. For the moment, Laconica only supports twitter-like messages, but they're already expanding into file-sharing as well. You'll be able to attach images, video and music files, upload them to your server and share them with whomever is following you. After that, I expect that they'll expand further to include Flickr-like photo streams, Facebook-like friendships and LiveJournal-like blog posts. These old, expensive monolithic systems are going away. In the future we'll have one identity, in one place, that we control that manages all of the data we want to share with others.

Really, really cool stuff.

I went home that night and signed up as a developer on Laconica. I've downloaded the source and will experiment with it this week before I take on anything on the "to do " list. I intend on focusing on expanding the feature set to include stuff that will deprecate the monolithic models mentioned above... should be fun :-)

Drupal Oops

I closed out the evening with some socialising in the hallway and some ranting about how-very-awesome Laconica was to my coworker Ronn, who showed up late in the day. He wandered off in search of my other colleagues and I followed after finishing a recap with Karen Quinn Fung a fellow transit fan and Free software fan. Unfortunately though, I wasn't really paying attention to where Ronn was going, I just followed out of curiosity. It turns that out I had stumbled into a Drupal social where I was almost immediately asked: "so, how do you use Drupal and how much do you love it?" by the social organiser. James gave me a horrified "what the hell are you doing here" look and searching for words, I said something to the effect of "Um, well, I was pretty much just dropping in here looking for my co-workers... oh here they are! -- I like Drupal because it makes it easy for people to make websites, but I don't really use it because it gets in my way. I prefer simple, elegant solutions and working around something just to get it to work is too aggravating." Considering the company, my response was pretty well received. I backed out quietly at the earliest opportunity :-)

So that was OpenWeb, well half of it anyway. I only got a pass for the Thursday. I can't recommend it enough though. Really interesting talks and really interesting people all over the place. I'll have to make sure that I go again next year.

The VPSN is holding a fundraiser / movie night this thursday that promises to be both interesting and fun. I'm going to go, and if you'd like to come along, let me know eh?

City Shorts: A Public Space Film Festival – Thursday June 18, 2009

Mark your calendars and join us for our first annual VPSN Film Festival and Fundraiser.

We've assembled an excellent set of short films that look at public space issues, Vancouver's urban scene and city life. Included in this diverse package are movies on urban greening, public art, urban exploring, parkour, billboards and corporate presence, graffiti, and more!

This is the VPSN’s first film fest and fundraiser and we hope you can all make it. It’s part of our strategy to use this excellent series of shorts to remind everyone that great city-making still lies within the hands of its citizens. Not only will you be getting an evening jam-packed with films on the public realm, but you'll also be helping the VPSN too. Silver screen action with an added benefit!

Thursday June 18, 2009. Doors open at 7:00pm, show starts at 7:30pm. Tickets: $10 / $8 Students and Seniors. VanCity Theatre, 1181 Seymour Street

Liquid refreshments will be available for purchase. And there will be some lively post-film entertainment to take in as well.

I thought that I might post a brief note on this whole Be Part of the Plan business from Translink.

For those of you not living in Vancouver, Translink is the Lower Mainland transit authority. Created just before the demise of the NDP over a decade ago as a way to offload the responsibility of transit from the province, Translink is an unelected body charged with support of all methods of transportation from Vancouver out to just past Langley. They handle SkyTrain, the road system, the West Coast Express, the Seabus and even the cycling infrastructure and they're notorious for tending to do so with very little input from the public.

So you can imagine what a remarkable thing it is to see posters and ads all over the place for this be part of the plan program they're pushing. They're trying to give everyone the impression that they're interested in public input regarding their responsibilities and to do just that, they've built a website, a blog, a Twitter account and set up a number of "consultations" with the public over the next few weeks.

It all sounds really great: public engagement on one of the most important civil issues in this generation is a pretty big deal, but unfortunately there's nothing engaging about the whole process. Instead, all of this, the website, the Twitter, the "consultations", are all targeted at one purpose: they want more money and they want you to agree with them on their plans for transit going toward 2040.

Every element of this outreach has the same message:

1. You have three choices: more service, the same service, abysmal service
2. You should pick the first one
3. You should give them more money so they can do the first one.

Of course it's all framed like they're giving you all this really detailed information about the process of making hard choices about transit, but that's also bookended with statements like "we have a vision" on the one side and the usual "end of the world" rhetoric you hear if you don't make the "right" choice. What kills me though, and what should bother the hell out of everyone "involved" in this circus is that they entire process is framed with their own goals in mind. In other words, they've already made the decision and they're telling us that we have only one option for better transportation in this city and it's their plan. If you don't like it, that's it -- transit is doomed.

It's all quite dishonest and manipulative really. We know Translink's track record: over a decade of service with the transit adoption rate holding steady at an embarrassing 13%. They want more funding for their plans which we now know are just plain ineffective and we're being told that there is no alternative but to accept their position or give up. It's maddening.

I'd suggest that you attend one of these events and give them a piece of your mind (as I did) but I don't like encouraging people to partake in an exercise of futility. I would instead suggest that we come up with Better Ideas for transit in the Lower Mainland and work to pressure our elected officials to reject the Translink plan in favour of something more effective because this kind of manipulative behaviour should never be permitted to fly.

My mother had a great idea the other day and as I generally like great ideas, I'm going to go with this one.

Here's the thing, I'm turning 30 (that's three-oh (gasp!)) on the 25th of this month and I wanna have a party. This is the occasion for such things right? Trish was suggesting a dinner shindig in a Korean restaurant on Robson, and knowing Melanie she'd probably like to have something with bubbles :-) For my part, I just want my friends to be there 'cause I like my friends and as busy as we all are (especially me) I don't get to see you all nearly often enough.

Now, the great idea is that being that it's my 30th birthday, someone with some time on their hands can make me the fabulously awesome gift of organising the aforementioned party (or parties if you're feeling ambitious) for me. I'm terrible at this sort of thing and it's always nice when someone does the heavy lifting for something you're totally unqualified to do yourself. So, any takers?

I had a rather confusing experience last night that caused me to rethink a lot of the assumptions I'd made about this city.

Poesy and I had spent the evening in Chinatown's night market and were waiting at Terminal station to go our separate ways when an older gentleman appropached us and in very broken English asked us if we knew where he might find a hotel.

After some thinking on our part, we decided that the closest one we could think of was the Sandman near Stadium station and given the man's sketchy understanding of the local language as well of the area, I offered to take him there myself. It was sort of on my way anyway.

But this post isn't about Good deeds for strangers, it's about what it's like for tourists to try to experience this city and more to the point, what we can expect in 2010 when the world comes to our door.

This city is an embarrassment in the area of tourism. The transit system aside, just finding an intersection in this city is near impossible without accosting strangers, and in many cases, the strangers are hesitant to stop and help given their past unpleasant experiences with panhandlers.

There are so few wayfinding maps in Vancouver and a complete absence of them available in any other language but English. There are no tourism kiosks anywhere, especially after 5pm and all of this means that something as simple as finding a place to crash for the night becomes increadibly difficult -- even if English is your first language.

As someone who's done a reasonable amount of travelling in countries where he spoke even less of the local tongue than the aforementioned visitor, I can assure you that none of the places I visited, with the exception of Yeosu, Korea (a tiny town in a moncultural, insular country) did a poorer job of helping tourists than this one.

Now here's the kicker: the man who was curious about Vancouver and came here to experience this beautiful city but couldn't even find a place to sleep wasn't from Poland or even France. He was from this country, a little town east of Quebec City. In a nation that prides itself on having two official languages and in a city that claims to be multicultural this is very, very sad.

I'm open to suggestions here. Melanie has a plan to make wayfinding on Skytrain easier by creating (actually useful) route maps and pasting them up all over the place, but I'd like to hear some more ideas about how we could help guests like this man in the future. I'll bring these ideas to the next Mapping & Wayfinding VPSN working group.

This was the main tourist attraction near our hostel, a beautiful pagoda right next to a Buddhist temple.

The view of the courtyard from just inside the Asakusa temple.

This is a fragment of the density that is Shibuya. I've heard that Bladerunner was modelled after this.

The Meiji Shrine is really a great big part in the heart of Tokyo.

This is the present home of the Emperor of Japan. The role is purely symbolic now (unlike Canada, he isn't officially the Head of State), but he's still treated as though he is.

One of the few good shots taken of me on this trip. This is in Hama Rikyu Teien, a giant garden within walking distance of the world-renouned Tsukiji fish market.

Susan made a face for this one to be funny, so don't worry, she's not mad :-)

Susan loves ladybugs

The The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building is one of the tallest in the city and they offer a free elevator ride to the top so you can check out the skyline.

The seat of Imperial power for nearly 1000years, this is was shot in the garden of the Imperial Palace, Kyoto.

This is the closest they would let us get, but I still feel all special for being there.

As part of the lantern festival in Gion, this pagoda was illuminated.

Everything is cute in Japan, even the cookies.

The view from our lunch stop in Okinawa.

I've not been very studious about my Japan update and for that I'm sorry. Life's been a bit crazy since I returned "home" and I guess I figured that if I put up the pictures, I could put it off a bit but as the details of the whole trip are beginning to fade from memory, this is becoming more urgent.

So where shall I start? Lets start with a good one: Susan is awesome. Our relationship before the trip was a rather disconnected one. We knew each other only a little when I left Toronto, but I honestly believe that we've grown much closer as a result of this trip. It's always a risk, choosing to travel a foreign country with a friend and I'm really glad that it worked out so well. She compensated for my weaknesses and I for hers. I just thought that I might get that out first.

General

Japan is an interesting place. Though not as foreign as you may think, it's still quite different from Canada. This became quite clear to me no less than 15minutes after we landed at Narita Airport: I was fingerprinted as I came through customs. Those of you who know me know that this was quite traumatic for me. I've managed to go 29years without being treated like a criminal and here I was, at customs in a foreign country where I didn't know my rights in this regard. The man pointed at the little computer, and holding my passport he said: "Fingers. Put". I complied and it's really been bothering me ever since. I've even found myself trying to think of ways to mutilate the tips of those two fingers...

So yeah, Japanese folk seem to have fewer concerns about how much power the State has over them. This probably bothered me more than anything during my stay. A close second though would be the social acceptance of smoking over there. They still ask you: "Smoking or non?" when you enter a restaurant. Nasty. At least they can't smoke on the subway.

The subways were a bit of a disappointment really. All those stories you hear about pushers on the trains? Never saw one. In fact, the trains we were on never got any more crowded than a TTC or Seoul subway car does. From what I hear though, the JR Line trains from the surrounding areas are what started this rumour, as they support the suburbanites, but since we never went there, it never happened.

Tokyo

Transit is a good place from which to segue into Tokyo though. My gods it was impressive. Not so much the stations or the trains themselves, but the sheer number of lines and how the city manages its mass. Tokyo supports within its borders the entire population of Canada. 12million in Tokyo proper, and 33million when you include the suburbs.

But here's the kicker: you wouldn't know it. Excluding a few famous intersections, the focal points of the city are sufficiently dispersed that you don't have the "downtown" problem that plagues most North American cities. Instead of funnelling all 33million people into a single urbanised core, Tokyo supports many, many "cores", each with a mix of residential, commercial and even industrial uses. People will often live in Shinjuku and work in Roppongi, both "downtowns" in their own right, but within the same city. For the Vancouver people, imagine if Burnaby were a real destination for people, or if it wasn't unique to live in Vancouver but work in Richmond. Now imagine that all of that space were one great big city. That's Tokyo -- but with real transit.

One more note on the transit: it's massive. It's a mesh of 13 subway lines and 282 stations (not including the commuter rail (JR) lines) criss-crossing above and below ground, all different colours, sporting hard-to-remember names and managed by two different private companies. Now, imagine that even with all of that complexity, that it was super-easy to navigate: Each station is sequentially numbered and colour-coded so if you're going from A to B, you find the coloured line you're likely to take on the many free multi-lingual maps, find the start and end points and take their numbers. If you're going from 13 to 26, then you make sure that the numbers are getting bigger as you ride. If not, you're going the wrong way. Transit way-finding in Tokyo was never a problem.

Another common myth people hear about Tokyo is that it's a concrete desert, but nothing could be further from the truth. True, much of it is paved, but there are beautiful gardens everywhere, and I'm not talking about these lame Toronto-style parkettes, or these new mini parks that are popping up in Vancouver, I'm talking about acres of tended streams, trees and flowers right in the midst of the city. Some like the The Hama Rikyu Teien Gardens near the Tsukiji Fish Market cost a few hundred yen (100¥ was roughly $1.30CAD), and others like the Meiji Shrine are totally free. Beautiful landscaped public spaces nestled between the urban spaces to help keep people sane. It's really very impressive.

We only had three days in Tokyo though, so we couldn't possibly have seen everything we wanted to. Squaresoft and Joypolis would have to wait for another time. We did however see the busiest intersection in the world, in an area of town called Shibuya, visit Asakusa for its beautiful old Buddhist temple, walk through Shinjuku to see some awesome architecture as well as the Imperial Palace (though we couldn't wake up early enough to get inside the grounds). Tokyo is awesome, but expensive. You should go, but make sure that you're prepared to drop about $75CAD a day... assuming that you're staying in a hostel.

Kyoto

Like every rational country, Japan links its major cities with high-speed rail that plugs into local transit. You can take the subway from Asakusa to Tokyo station in 20minutes and without leaving the building, hop on a bullet train to a city hundreds of kilometres away. We were in Kyoto in a matter of hours.

Kyoto is pretty much the opposite of Tokyo. Where Tokyo is sky scrapers and 33million people, Kyoto is a quiet, traditional Japanese town riddled with centuries-old temples and a less-than-impressive subway system. You don't come to Kyoto for the bustle and night life, you come for the culture, history and peace.

Susan had booked us into Tani House, a hostel that bills itself as a traditional home converted for hostel living. We got a whole house to ourselves, complete with kitchen, living room, bathroom and a few bedrooms and the old woman who runs the place even made us tea when we arrived. We ate on the floor, we slept on the floor in the paper-walled bedroom and let the high-energy memory from Tokyo fade away. It's a great place to stay, I muchly recommend :-)

While digging around for a link to Tani House, I happened upon this YouTube video of the interior. Check it out if you're interested.

We didn't have a lot of time there, so sightseeing of Kyoto was rather rushed. We spent one day visiting the Imperial Palace1 complete with English language tour and acres of cherry blossoms and continued into the rest of the city to do some general sightseeing. Kyoto is divided by a massive river that the public uses for everything from jogging to picnics to makeouts. It's really quite beautiful. Have I said that enough yet? We spent an evening in Gion at a lantern festival, and we even paid a rather entertained cab driver to take us to The Nintendo Building. That's right, I can has culture.

Kyoto: Learn Your Pronunciation

One final note on Kyoto before I move on. We realised early on in our stay there that as Kyoto is overrun with beautiful old temples, the locals (and for the sake of this story, the cab drivers) usually navigate by the temple names rather than street intersections. This can be dangerous if you don't have the pronunciation down.

We'd done everything right. Susan had acquired a map of the city and directions to our hostel. We'd found the temple nearest our hostel (Daikaku-ji) and circled it on the map and after a long day of sightseeing, figured that a cab ride home was only appropriate. We handed the map to the driver, pointed at the circled portion and we were off.

It wasn't long before Susan and I both started to feel as though we weren't on the right track. The surrounding areas looked less and less familiar as the ride continued on and eventually the city began to fade away. With fewer and fewer lights on the streets outside, we started to freak out just a little. We asked the driver: "Daitoku-ji?" and he smiled, though looking a little confused and nodded. We had put all of our faith in a map and a stranger and now there was a lake coming up on our right.

30minutes and about 30 000¥ later, he pulls into a dark, deserted temple and asks for his cash. We panic. Much confusion ensues. Clearly he was sure that he'd taken us to the right place, but this was obviously not where we wanted to go. The driver figured that we did in fact want to be at this temple, we just didn't know where our hostel was from here. He turned off the meter and took us a little further into town where he proceeded to ask strangers for us regarding the location of this "Tani House" place. No luck. We got him to take us somewhere near civilisation, paid the incredibly patient man and got out. It was 10pm and we were on a strange street in a foreign country with a phrase book, an (apparently useless) map and just under about 100000¥.

It took us some time (and a few fruitless enquiries with non-English-speaking locals) to figure out that when we'd initially circled the temple on the map, we'd gotten a syllable wrong. Daikaku-ji was in the middle of nowhere. Daitoku-ji was where we wanted to be. It hadn't been a problem before because we'd followed the aforementioned directions to our hostel the first time.

So let this be a lesson to you kids:

• Get a map
• Make sure you've got the right place on that map.
• Trust the cab drivers in Kyoto, they're awesome, but feel free to second-guess yourself.
• Make sure that you have lots of cash -- just in case.

Tangent: Language

For those who already know, I apologise for stating the seemingly obvious, but since I didn't know, I must assume that I'm not the only one. Written Japanese is in fact three different character sets: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Most people know this much but what surprised and impressed me was the fact that each of these character sets have their own purpose -- ie. they're not exactly interchangeable.

Kanji for example is probably the closest thing to what Westerners often assume all Asian languages are like. Each symbol is a single character (as opposed to Korean which is a composite of symbols representing a syllable) which represents an idea or thought. "Home" has it's own symbol, as does "food" and "vehicle". These symbols are then combined into statements, often only a few symbols long that culturally mean something. "Car parkade" cannot be represented in Kanji, instead they symbol for "vehicle" and "place" are used and everyone understands.

The problem with Kanji though is that it's limiting. You can't really create full sentences with it easily. For this, hiragana is provided as the sort of "glue". The symbols are noticeably different and actually "spell out" into words rather than independently represent ideas. I don't really understand much more than this.

Lastly, there's katakana, which as my guidebook explained, is often used for foreign words. My name would be spelt with katakana as would "Vancouver" or probably even "meat loaf" as there's likely is no Japanese word for it. katakana appears deceptively similar to hiragana (for the uninitiated) so understanding signage with a little guidebook is really tough.

If there's anything that I've taken away from this trip, it's that I apparently have an aptitude for languages, or at the very least a sincere interest. I managed to pick up the basics in no time and have little touble handling navigation and simple conversation. It's fun! You should try :-)

If you're interested in finding more information about the various writing types in Japan, I found this handy site that covers not only the modern usage, but the historical roots of all three types as well.

Okinawa

Frankly, I was surprised that you can't take a train to Okinawa. Of course I knew that it was an island, but I figured that Japan of all places would have tried to run a train there :-) Sadly, this wasn't the case though, so we took a train from Kyoto station to Kansai airport in Osaka and boarded a short flight to Okinawa where we met Susan's friend Yasuko (pronounced "yes-ko") who would serve as our awesome guide for the duration of our stay in Japan.

The differences between Okinawa and either of our previous destinations are night & day. Everything from climate (tropical) to urban design (far more suburban) to culture (it's like another country) is drastically different from either Tokyo or Kyoto. Where Tokyo has skyscrapers, Okinawa has decaying low-rises, instead of subways, there are highways. The presence of Americans too is staggering. There's a US air force base within the city limits and everywhere you look you see American military types with their families. It's amazing how your personal feel for safety changes as well. In Kyoto Susan watched a girl leave her laptop on a table in a Starbucks while she went to the bathroom, but that kind of thing is much less likely in Okinawa.

But outside of the city, Okinawa is surrounded with tropical forest. Yasuko drove us all over the countryside to holy shrines and sleepy little villages where we took pictures of the flora, were eaten by bugs and enjoyed the scenery. We ate at a little place called "Pizza and Sky" with an amazing view and visited a series of cottage factories where people were making glass sculpture by hand. This is the kind of thing you just can't do on your own and Yasuko made this possible. She is awesome.

Our last big stop in our Okinawa trip was the Churaumi Aquarium a massive building on the shore that plays host to hundreds of different aquatic species. There was the traditional dolphin show as well as the biggest fish tank I've ever seen. I saw a fish that was bigger than a house dude. Crazy, crazy stuff.

Going Home

All of the above took place in the space of a week. There was more of course but as it is, this post is already way too long. Japan is just fascinating. With its mountain of cute toys (Hello Kitty anyone?), ancient culture and honourable people, it's an amazing place to experience. I'll have to go back, as I just didn't have enough time for everything I wanted to see. Next time I'll have to spend more time in Tokyo and Kyoto and be sure to visit Hiroshima as well. When I do return though, I hope that Susan will come with me too. She was fun :-)

Footnotes

1. Kyoto was actually the original seat of the Emperor from way back in the 8th Century. In fact, "Kyoto" means "capital city". It was later moved to Edo (Tokyo) in the 1800's.

For the past few months, the Vancouver Public Space Network has been holding a design competition to create a new "grand gathering place" in Vancouver – a place for festivals, markets, rallies, buskers and more -- Think Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto, Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, or even Piazza San Marco in Venice. Over 100 design teams signed up for the competition, 13 were short-listed. Now it's time to pick a winner.

Cast your ballot at online, but do it soon! Voting ends Friday May 22.

It's the most fun you’ll have with civic engagement all day :-)

If you’ve got time, come on out to Heritage Hall (Main and 15th) on May 27 (7:00-9:00pm) when the VPSN will announce the winner. It’ll be a great evening. For further reading on the reasoning behind the competition, visit WheresTheSquare.ca.

Oh, and for those who might be interested, this one is my favourite.

In the midst of one of those "because I can" moods today, I wrote a fun Python script to get my battery status and colour-code it so it could be loaded into my prompt. I'm posting it here 'cause I think it's nifty:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import re

battery = "/proc/acpi/battery/BAT0"

def getMax(path):
    return getValueFromFile(path + "/info", "last full capacity")


def getRemaining(path):
    return getValueFromFile(path + "/state", "remaining capacity")


def getValueFromFile(name, value):
    f = open(name, "r")
    for line in f:
        remaining = re.match(r"^%s:\s+(\d+)" % (value), line)
        if remaining:
            return remaining.group(1)


def isCharging(path):
    f = open(path + "/state", "r")
    for line in f:
        key = re.match(r"^charging state:\s+charging", line)
        if key:
            return True


def render(path):

    level = int((float(getRemaining(path)) / float(getMax(path))) * 100)

    colour = ""
    if isCharging(path):
        colour = "\033[1;36m" # Cyan
    elif level < 25:
        colour = "\033[1;31m" # Red
    elif level < 50:
        colour = "\033[1;33m" # Yellow
    else:
        colour = "\033[1;32m" # Green

    print colour + str(level) + "%\033[0m",

render(battery)