that ring of confidence

On my honeymoon

We're in Boston but tomorrow we head to Maine. I could live in Boston. I like visiting New York but probably couldn't live there.

I'll report on Maine later. Follow my Twitter and Flickr for the best updates. They're in the sidebar there.

Vancouver internet start-ups in The Georgia Straight

One of the things I told students at the Canadian University Press conference

that I spoke at was to always take any assignment offered [jks].  The life of a freelance writer is such that we really never know what will be our last job, and saying no to work is always a risk especially when you're trying to build a relationship with a publication.  While I've been writing for The Georgia Straightfor over a year the spacing between each article is long enough that I'm always a little concerned that maybe they'll forget about me.  The technology section only really has one regular writer (Blaine Kyllo) and having heard enough stories about freelancers who said no to one job and had publications just assume that they were no longer interested in writing, I pretty much say yes to anything and everything. 

Looking back on it I probably should have said no to an article being due just over a week after my wedding.  However I had been pitching the story since I first started writing for the Straightand it was the fall technology issue so it was hard to say no.  I also completely underestimated how much work a wedding was, and moving my wife into my apartment would be.  Which is a long way of being honest and saying that tech editor Stephen Hui had to do a lot more on this one than normal and so while I think the interviews went well the structure of the article is mostly thanks to Stephen, in however good it is.  Anything wrong with it is my fault.

The article is in the Straighttoday and on-line [tgs].  It turned out well in the end though I think if I ever do my song and dance for mold-able minds, I'll ad weddings as an exception of a time when begging off an assignment is probably a good idea. 

A last note about the article that

I feel I should mention is that I did a lot of interviews with people that did not make it into the finished article.  It turned out that I just had too much material and given that it takes at least 100-300 words to introduce and give details about a start-up company, some of the ones I spoke with had to be left out in order to keep in the assigned space.  Those interviews however aren't going to be lost, and I'll be turning them into short pieces for The Georgia Straight's website's tech section [tgs] over the next week or two. 

So we got our Photobooth Vancouver photos

 Apart from deciding to actually get married

we made three really important choices I think.  We found the right venue in the Heritage Hall on Main Street in Vancouver.  It's a lovely old building that didn't re quire much decorating and had that air of history without being anything so formal as a church.  We got great caterers in Presto Catering, who laid on a full Italian style feast for us with pastas, chicken and salmon.  Lastly we hired Photobooth Vancouver [pbv] to do two hours worth of photoboothing rather than buy everyone a wedding favour.

In fact everyone's wedding favours were the photos that they took, at no charge to them, in the photobooth.  Everyone had a blast, and I think in retrospect we wish we'd hired  the photobooth for at least an extra hour if not more, and seemed to really get into having their pictures taken and getting to keep their own unique souvenirs of our wedding.  Best of all after about two weeks we got a disc in the mail with all of the photobooth prints that everyone got to take home, plus the individual photos that make up the prints.  That's 500 photos which have been loading onto my Flickr account all day.  The full Flickr set of our pictures can be found on my Flickr account [fkr].

 

Cooking apple stuffed pork chops

Lydia is fond of the show Chef at Home.

It's a show on Food Network Canada about a chef named Michael Smith who cooks a meal at home for his family.  While getting ready to run some errands yesterday I was watching the show and he was making pork chops stuffed with apples, bread and sausage.  It looked very good and actually almost manageable, though we didn't stick around for the entire show so I never got to see how it turned out.

It turns out that watching the full episode of a cooking show is kind of important if you try to go out and without doing any research make yourself the same thing that the television chef was making.  For starters I did not realize that the pork chops would end up topped with an apple/mustard pan sauce and since I had no intention of ever making the meal I did not remember that apple juice was required.  I did remember that the recipe called for onions, but since the onion was invented and breed by Josef Mengele [wp] I wisely decided that I did not need that Nazi vegetable anywhere my meal.

The real proper recipe can be found on Chef Michael Smith's website [cms].

But who cares what a proper chef might do?

You're much better off listening to the advice of someone who watched half an episode on the making of apple stuffed pork chops and then went off on his own with his wealth of experience making Kraft Dinner and pouring milk on breakfast cereals.

I began by browning the sausages in a pan, and then once I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to get any diseases from them being uncooked I added in the apples.

After cooking the mixture until the apples were mushy I added four slices of toast that I had cut up into small bits and then cooked all of that until the bread had absorbed all the water and moisture from the pan.  Prior to this I was supposed to add apple juice but my fridge is currently stocked with about 173 litres of orange juice so we have no apple juice.  I was also supposed to add onions to this mixture but again... Nazis.

Once the bread had done its job and absorbed everything it was time to cut a pocket into the side of the pork chops.  This pocket was where I was now going to stuff the mixture of apples, sausages and bread.  It turns out that I had way more stuffing than I could fit inside the two pork chops that I had bought, so unless you're particularly adept at stuffing things into meat then I'd maybe cut back the amount of stuffing.

This is as far as I watched in the episode so at this point I had to refer to the website to see what to do next since I've never cooked pork chops.  Following the directions I pan seared them on each side for three minutes, added salt and pepper and then left them to cook in a pan on low heat with the lid on for another five minutes.

Now it's true that Lydia would totally tell me I made something good, just to avoid hurting my feelings.  She hates it when I weep especially in front of the cats.  So her judgment is certainly not to be trusted.  I mean she clearly loves me, a fact I discovered when I saw our wedding photos and realized that I looked a lot like a man trying to smuggle a family of Berliners through Checkpoint Charlie by hiding them in my suit.

"No, no kind East German security man, there's nothing odd about me, I'm just ginormous."

Which probably has something to do with eating things like this.

As Tracy Jordan says, "Meat is the new bread."

The best camera is the one you have with you

At the start of this summer I sold my old Canon Rebel and bought a new X1i so that I could add video to my DSLR.  The trouble is with my big camera, as I call it even though it's not that big, is that I just do not carry it around as much as I should.  Even a trip to the Richmond Night Market which is normally a great place to take pictures I've left it at home.  Thankfully the camera in my new iPhone 3GS is actually really good.  I've used camera phones with much higher megapixel ratings, but for some reason the iPhone's pictures tend to trump even the Nokia N95 5MP camera-phone I was using.

The saying is that the best camera is the one that you have on you, and I feel like the iPhone is a very good fall back camera.  Granted it's not yet ready to be the camera that I take to Whitecaps games or the one I want to pull out when I need a really good optical zoom.  However I think it can capture the events of day to day quite well.

I'd definitely hold up the picture above, taken at the Night Market with my iPhone, with anything that I've taken with an slr or dslr there.  The fact that it's small, not too conspicuous and always on me makes it actually fairly great.

That demon Canadian Health Care

Watching the news channels from America

and shows like The Daily Show it has become apparent to me that I no longer care at all about America's health care question. I realize that it's an important issue facing Americans but the fact is that you can only watch people acting like complete tools so long before you start to get frustrated and annoyed. I understand that some Americans want universal health care, and I understand that others don't. However the complete inability to keep the debate focused on reality is starting to drive me mad. And the fact that the Republicans keep demonizing Canadian, British and other health care systems without even really understanding what they're talking about is also frustrating. This is from an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily arguing against health care reform in the US:

The U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) basically figures out who deserves treatment by using a cost-utility analysis based on the “quality adjusted life year.” One year in perfect health gets you one point. Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on. The more points you have, the more your life is considered worth saving, and the likelier you are to get care.

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

To which John Gruber of Daring Fireball pointed out that Stephen Hawking was born and raised in the United Kingdom [df]. Just because his vocal computer doesn't have an English accent and he doesn't end each sentence with "pip pip, jolly good!" I suppose he's an honorary American.

I can only speak from my own experience

but I have never had anything to complain about with my apparently horrible health care.  I have of course heard the horror stories from America about a trip to the emergency room, some x-rays and pain killers costing $8,000 but since I've never experienced that I can't really comment.  I think in any system, no matter who pays for it, there's going to be a few horror stories if only because anytime you're talking about millions of patients and thousands to hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses and employees a few bad things are bound to happen.  So then let's talk about my medical history, and we had best get started now otherwise we'll be here well past dinner. 

I was born with tricuspid artresia, a heart defect that essentially means that there is a hole between the two halves of my heart.  The half with the oxygenated blood was not properly separated from the half with blood without oxygen.  In graph terms the blue blood and the red blood was mixing to form a kind of purple-ish blood that left me constantly short of breath.  It's rare and it took a bit to diagnose but eventually it ended up being decided that I needed surgery. 

I had surgeries when I was three months old, three years old, six years old and again when I was seven.  The latter two were open heart surgeries, and one I ended up spending about six months in the hospital recovering from after getting an infection.  I spent most of those six months in the intensive care unit, and that had to have been expensive.   My parents were young, well certainly younger than they are now, and had they had to pay for my care they most likely would not have been able to expand their business and become as well off as they are now.

The government covered the cost of my surgeries, and they were able to keep running their business without laying people off or having to sell off their convince stores or gas stations.  Instead of being financially destroyed by having to fund my operations they were able to keep working and they've well paid off the cost of my surgery by the extra taxes that they've paid for being in a higher tax bracket.  In turn having survived I've now had a number of years of paying GST and at least fourteen of paying income tax.

Let's talk about more current medical events

to be fair it's hard to talk about what my parents might have had to pay back in the 1980s.  I do think that it's important to understand that at no point during my long and expensive stay at the University of Alberta hospital did any government official show up and say that if I cost them much more they were going to have to put me down.  There were no "Death Panels" and there was no conversation about how much my life was costing the tax payers of Alberta.  And trust me if there was a province that would have put Death Panels into place to help cut costs it would have been Alberta.  I mean it's not socialist like Quebec.

But let's move more recently during my university years.  A few months having a pace maker put in, something suggested during one of my yearly check-ups with my cardiologist for the previously discussed heart condition, I started having intense abdominal pains.  A few nights they became so bad that I ended up going to the emergency room.  Pain killers, a few hours in the ER, x-rays and other tests cost nothing.  Eventually they discovered that I had gallstones [wp] and a few days later had surgery to remove them.  The surgery, the series of tests, the hospital stay the ER usage all cost me nothing.  Nobody from the government showed up to determine if I should be treated, nobody was in charge of what happened to me other than myself and the medical professionals working at Kelowna General Hospital.

Then there is my suspected sleep apnoea

for which I recently saw a specialist and then spent a night at Richmond Hospital being examined in a fairly sophisticated sleep study room.  It's true that before I jumped right to the sleep study room I had to visit my regular doctor to get him to send me to the specialist who then prescribed the sleep study but I doubt that it's different under a private insurance company. 

Speaking of private insurance companies

I have an awful hard time getting them to cover me.  Since I was born with a heart condition I have a pre-existing condition and nobody will cover me.  I have been lucky to have jobs where my employer provides insurance and so I get covered under that.  If I had to find my own private health insurance I'd be out of luck, and given the way that the companies behave in America if I did live in the United States I would most likely be out of luck even with the best employer provided coverage. 

Yes even in Canada there is still private health insurance.  While all insurance plans differ they tend to cover what the government does not such as extended health care (prescription drugs, medical supplies, hearing aids, vision care, semi-private or private room in hospital, complementary health services such as chiropractic and registered massage therapy), dental plans and the like.  My braces would have been covered by my private health care, since straight teeth are not a life or death issue.

If you're going to knock Canadian Health Care

you're not going to convince me.  If you're an American and bump into a Canadian on holidays ask them about what they think of American health care.  Better yet ask them what they would do if they had to go to the doctor's in America.  Short of severe injury most Canadians would probably report that they would rather wait until they got home, unless they've bought quite a good travel insurance package.  We all suspect that even coughing in the direction of an American doctor will cost us around eight hundred dollars, so we tend to tell each other things like, "Oh well just suck it up until you get back home."

And yes as someone in a middle tax bracket maybe in the long term I will have paid more into the health care system via my taxes than I will ever get out of it (though given my medical history that's unlikely).  However the fact that I know that if I ever need medical attention nobody is going to check to see if I have proper insurance or a large enough bank account before administering care is a relief.  When I was in university and had to deal with gallstones if I had been presented with a bill for the hospital care I had received I would have had no way to pay it.  My parents would have had no way to pay what could have been hundreds of thousands of dollars for my pre-existing heart condition and the surgery that has allowed me to continue to live.

So while the American right turns fear tactics on again, after finding that screaming "terrorist" no longer wins Presidential elections, and starts talking about Death Panels and the creeping specter of communism, I'll have you keep your hands off of my Canadian Health Care.  If you want to call it a demon, then by gosh it's the most helpful demon I've known.

So I'm married now

I got married yesterday. Neither Lydia nor myself have had a chance to blog about it, but I'm sure one of us will do a fully report soon. What I do have instead is the video shown at our wedding about our lives and relationship.

My article on open social networks appears in The Georgia Straight

My latest article is in this week's The Georgia Straight in all the finest newspaper boxes around Vancouver and on-line [tgs].  This one was a bit trickier to get my head around, because while I know what "open" means when it comes to having social networks like Twitter, Facebook and the like be more open not everyone agrees what that means.  For some people it's part of a larger view that all information should be open, while to others it's a call for users to actually have more control over their data and privacy than they do now.

So some people are for more privacy, others are for less, and yet they're all on the same side.

The other issue was that it's hard to get the other side of the argument.  Facebook never got back to me, and nobody is going to really stand up for less openness and user control over data but yet there may be legitimate reasons that it's necessary sometimes.  These might not be the strongest reasons, but it's a bit hard to look at an issue objectively when one side really won't talk.

I'm happy with how the article ended up though, and it's a case where it was nice to have an edit on it to help focus it a bit and make sure that I was making sense to anyone aside from myself.

Try everything twice

I've been bad at blogging recently.  Basically I tend to just use this site to announce new blog projects which I never follow through on.  Life is just kind of hectic these days as we move ever closer to the August 9th wedding date.  However I have been doing a Tumblr page, which is kind of a cross between blogging and Tweeting.  It's the new hotness.  

Check out Try Everthing Twice, the Tumblr site where my rather limited internet activity will be appearing.

Man walks on the moon

Some very not safe for work footage of the first moon landing which marked its 40th anniversary this week. They stopped landing on the moon six years before I was born, and by the time they got around to the last few missions it seems like it had gotten fairly routine. These days the only people impressed with the moon landings are Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. Which is too bad, because it seems like it would have been cool to live in a time when science was considered important and anything seemed possible in the future.