Auld - and new - acquaintance

puzzle peace by Barb Symons

Regardless of what you do on New Year's Eve (or whether you manage to stay up till midnight), I'm glad there isn't the same controversy about the commercialization of New Year's that so often swirls and threatens to subsume Christmas. It doesn't matter whether you consider yourself a Christian, a Jew, a Moslem, a Buddhist, a pagan, a nerd or a Luddite, whether Jesus was actually born on December 25 or some other date, or whether you consider him your saviour or not.

What's important is that we, as social animals, stop our ceaseless motion for a while and spend some time thinking about our lives, our world, our accomplishments, our failures, our hopes, dreams, and fears, and try to make some sort of plan to learn from both our triumphs and our disasters.

As we think about the beginning of a new (calendar) year and as we're bombarded with (and busy creating) our own 'best [and worst] of' lists for the year that's ending, I find myself thinking at this time of year about what really matters.

The illustration for this blog post is a print done by one of my oldest friends, Barb Symons. I met her when I was 19 and working in a bookstore. That was the year I read 300 books. Oh to have that kind of energy again - because lest you think I did nothing but work from 9 to 5 and read, I'll just point out that I worked pretty much every hour the store was open (including showing up on most of my days off, making it a 60-hour work week), partied heartily at least four nights a week, and was seeing someone at the time.

We have kept in touch sporadically throughout the years, and I am thrilled that I have been able to buy a couple of her best paintings. I'm even more thrilled that I finally got around to giving them the frames they deserve, despite the conundrum of having to pay almost as much for decent frames as one does for the art itself.

I spent this Christmas in Calgary with my cousin who has always been like a brother to me, and despite the horrific journey (I do know better than to travel at Christmas time), I will always be glad I did so. The wonderful thing about family is that it continues to expand, not only through the usual reproductive means, but also by marriage. I have acquired a whole new set of cousins with wonderfully diverse skill sets and personalities: nursing, flying, painting, fitness experts, and of course, several more musicians.

Since it took me more than 28 hours to get from Vancouver to Calgary and about 50 hours to get back, I missed seeing my friend Allen Gibson while in Alberta. I had taken a printout of my seminar, Social Media for Luddites, with me to give to and discuss with Allen. I'll have to email or print out another copy for him when we finally get together in Vancouver in mid-January. I gave it instead to my cousin, and had the pleasure not only of setting up a blog for his band, but of getting a follow-up phone call from him asking me to explain the difference between a widget and an application.

I think my explanation was about as convincing as my assertion that Einstein had invented the lightbulb. My familial reputation as one of the smart ones is on the decline, I'm afraid. Hopefully what I'm losing in that category is outpaced by gains I'm making in the 'one of the funny ones' category. Sigh. Still, it made for some good debate about whether Edison was a real prick or whether he was, rather, one of those managers who has the good sense to surround himself with the best and the brightest (no pun intended).

There was a lightbulb theme to this Christmas, as my cousin good-humouredly responded when addressed as 'The Green Bastard,' a Trailer Park Boys reference I didn't quite get, not having memorized every episode. My new cousins by marriage hail from Nova Scotia, and must therefore be excused for not acknowledging the superiority of the Monty Python crew. :) The Ottawa contingent of the family demonstrated a certain lack of physical grace as we were responsible for several clean-ups on aisle three: first when coffee sprayed all over the front hallway as we attempted to get out of the house, and then when an old fluorescent light for the laundry room was stored somewhere it shouldn't have been. Kudos to Mary for breaking one of the old bulbs rather than one of the new ones, which had to be exchanged as they were too short - that was clever, and it was also stellar of you to spend part of Christmas Eve vacuuming up its remains so no one got cut - that can't have been fun, even for someone who likes to clean.

I was touched by my second cousin's tracking the progress of my flight(s) from Vancouver to Calgary and by my new cousin, Mike's, expertise when my escape from Calgary/return to Vancouver went awry. He was able to explain the mysteries of the airport landing protocols in a way that made sense. I was also touched by the helpfulness of the Australian couple I met at the Calgary airport who were on the same flight to Vancouver as me. That was the one that took off, got to the BC border, turned back, circled the Calgary airport, landed, sat around for a while, and was then cancelled when the Vancouver airport was closed. I got more information from fellow passengers about what the hell was going on than I did from the airline, and there will be a blog post on the No Spin PR site about why companies need crisis communications plans more now than ever.

The Australian couple helped me find the airline number so I could do my bit to ease congestion in the line up to rebook a flight back to Vancouver. It was sweltering in the airport by this point, and I selfishly wanted to spend my extra time in Calgary with my family, not in a line up. I would like to think that if I am ever travelling with that much luggage, that great a distance (since they'd been skiing at Fernie over Christmas, were going to spend some time in Vancouver, and then head back to Oz), and with two children, that I could be as gracious, lively, and amusing as they were, but I think it's highly unlikely.

I loved the woman's suggestion that the Telus store was missing a huge business opportunity by not letting folks in the mile-long line up access the internet to rebook their flights. I felt amazingly handicapped with only a cell phone, having decided to have a low-tech Christmas and leave the laptop at home. It was a wacky time at Canadian airports. I didn't tell my fellow passengers about Air Canada's having held passengers on a Toronto-Vancouver flight hostage on the plane for 24 hours just before Christmas until after they let us off our plane - discretion still is the better part of valour, and I knew it was better to frame that discussion in terms of our having made a lucky escape rather than fear mongering while still on the plane, whose air rather quickly became stuffy in the half hour or so we spent on it after our surprising return to Calgary.

I was also completely charmed by the warm welcome I received from new cousin Heather, a Nikon girl who nonetheless not only gave her sister a Canon lens for her birthday (which falls on Christmas Day), but also tackled the dreaded Canon Rebel XT manual when Error Message 05 showed up on Mary's camera. Outnumbered as she was 2:1 by Canon women, she made a valiant attempt to search the index. In yet another absurdity in the quest for information, Heather looked up 'troubleshooting' in the manual and found nothing. Not sure why or how I thought to look up 'error messages' instead, but there were many moments of hilarity when it turned out the answer was 'turn the camera off, then turn it on again.' I was also greatly amused to see that the error messages listed were 01, 03, 04, 05, 06, and 99 - I guess if you get error messages 02 or 07-98, you're just plain out of luck. Just in case though, try turning the camera off and on again. :)

This year, we decided to do a fun but complicated one-present gift exchange that goes by various names (I was introduced to it by Heather as a Chinese gift exchange, but in talking to a First Nations friend it turns out there's an aboriginal version that involves dice as well - I doubt we could have managed that one). We had all agreed to buy/recycle/regift one present, maximum value $25. We then picked numbers and chose a gift, and had the right to choose someone else's gift (once). It was hilarious to see a group of so-called adults participate in this game.

My cousin and I started off the cheating by showing each other the presents we'd bought several days before Christmas (is blood really thicker than everything else? Or do old habits just die hard?). I know he spent considerably more than $25, and I also know he bought three presents, not one. Ahem. I had cheated too, of course, since the gorgeous little Bill Reid print of two copper frogs had cost more than $25 (although not a LOT more). Reluctant though I was to part with it, it was the perfect gift, and it was fun to watch the vigour with which various people tried to get their hands on it.

I'm not sure why I went for the biggest and most swellegantly wrapped present (I'll have to remember that green garbage bag wrapping technique, Ashley), but I was delighted with my foot spa and hope it wends its way to Vancouver one of these years (I was not about to try to take it on the plane after my home-made port got confiscated on my first attempt to get out of Calgary and I got a little lecture on the size of my plastic bag - by the time we got to the 'your foundation needs to go in the liquids bag' I was yelling, but it's a powder foundation! and brandishing the brush at the male security guard, asking him if he wanted to try some. This had the unusual effect of making him feel sorry for me, and he actually offered to leave his post to try to track down my friends so he could at least return the port to someone who could drink it rather than just get dumped).

I was also touched by second cousin Brendon's present, a copy of the Harrison Ford film The Mosquito Coast, based on Paul Theroux's book. I think that one ended up in the right hands, after hearing about the trip to Thailand. When the fair-skinned get sunburned, the medical professionals get going. :)

To friends and family, real and virtual, met and yet-to-meet, my wish for 2009:

May this year be one of hope, love, laughter, and, as always, spirited debate.

10 best things about 2008

Like most people at this time of year, I have 10 million, 427 thousand, 968 things I should be doing right now. The muse struck, though (this explains why the dishes never get done), and I find myself back at the computer so I don't forget some of the charitable thoughts I've just been having.

In the order in which they're occurring to me, here are the 10 best things that I've done, found, read, seen, participated in, or encountered in 2008:

1. Northern Voice 2008

My second year attending the Vancouver bloggers' and new media 'unconference.' This year I arranged to attend with my friend and neighbour Colleen, which meant I actually went to the dinner that kicked off the unconference, got there on time for both the Friday and Saturday sessions, had someone to compare notes with, and enjoyed the commute. Not to mention the environmental correctness of car pooling. Oh and the fact that I got to drink because for once, I wasn't driving!

Benefits of attending: far too numerous to list, despite the fact that I was still in quite a state and not feeling terribly sociable due to a bizarre and delayed form of grief after my mother's death on June 26, 2007.  With my usual beginner's luck, the first new person I met was Kris Krug, one of the driving forces behind the unconference. The second was Mhairi Petrovic, who's become a good friend and my strategic partner. Oh and Colleen won one of the big doorprizes, about $400 worth of Mac cosmetics, which made her day (and that of her two teenage daughters)..

2. Living Through Loss Counselling, a non-profit organization that provides both drop-in, group, and 1:1 counselling for people who are having difficulty dealing with grief of all sorts. Again thanks to my friend Colleen for suggesting that I get some bereavement counselling. To Judy, the group facilitator, and to all the members of my group, thank you for your support, your kindness, and the absolutely non-judgmental caring you displayed. Bizarre though I found it, traipsing off to what I came to think of as 'the room where the sad people meet' every Wednesday night for six weeks, I loved the fact that we were able to laugh amongst our tears and during the breaks at the strange thoughts, dreams, feelings, and ideas we had. I hope you are all able to approach the winter solstice and the festive season with lighter hearts and that your memories of your lost loved ones have turned that ineffable corner so you can think of those who are gone with smiles rather than tears (she says, as she finds tears pouring down her face while typing). What can I say - at least the memory of physical pain doesn't hurt the same way reliving emotional pain does. 

3. Fridays at Tinseltown with the principal of Happy Flower Research (you know who you are) (web site NOT under construction). While this theatre has occasionally disappointed by showing nothing but the kind of Hollywood blockbuster I'm happy to watch only on late night TV when I can't sleep, there is almost always one film I want to see, something sufficiently offbeat like the wonderful Turkish film we saw whose name I won't remember till I find the ticket stub, the truly horrific Atonement that I waited months and months to see and then hated; The Women from which I learned the lesson: read the reviews before you go and if they're all bad, see something else; and the surprisingly good The Duchess, also starring scenery-chewer Keira Knightley.

Of the first-run films I saw in 2008 (off to see Frost/Nixon tomorrow), Brick Lane was far and away the best, despite the bizarrely uncharitable reviews it got from the local mainstream Vancouver media (WestEnder, you should be ashamed of yourself - if you don't know enough about traditional Islamic beliefs and cultures to realize that when a woman allows a man other than her husband or son to see her without her headscarf on, you need a compulsory world religions course. And shame on you for having no search function on your site and for not archiving your old reviews). I am always highly critical of films made from books I've read, but I found no fault with this adaptation. While the portrait of Nazneen's husband is much thinner than in the novel, it was an amazingly subtle, complex, and moving film. But then I love those very slow-moving French and Italian movies where nothing much happens.

As a recovering workaholic, going to Tinseltown on Fridays does indeed mark the end of the week, and I am grateful for not only the films but also for the free parking. To the man at the ticket booth who never hesitates to let me out of the lot without paying despite the fact that I am not always able to find the parking ticket I've so carefully had validated at the movie theatre - thank you for trusting me. Thank you also for suppressing your laughter at my inability to make the turn and still hand you my ticket without getting out of car, week after week, until after I've driven off. :)

4. Todd Sieling's Slow Blog Manifesto, which, in @2020science's words, is 'A wonderful antithesis of the Twitter experiment!' I look forward to meeting this lovely young man at Northern Voice 2009, when I promise I will be more sociable.

5. The Twitterverse, the blogosphere, and flickr, which has introduced me to incredible gems of people like Michelle Sullivan (I deliberately linked to the two-part movie she made about Twitter rather than her main blog site because if you don't yet Twitter, you MUST view this to get a sense of how simultaneously silly and delightful Twittering can be - oh Michelle, are you going to volunteer to do the French translation of the Slow Blogging Manifesto? My tweet earlier today was obviously far too subtle); Denise Caruso of The Hybrid Vigor Institute, a woman after my own heart, to whom I have barely spoken but with whom I have this bizarre psychic connection (how did I know she knew how to tap dance? I can't explain it), and of course, Andrew Maynard, another in a long line of cross-platform talented people and beneficiaries of a British educational system that seems to routinely produce people who acquire PhDs in scientific disciplines and yet write beautifully lucid, explanatory, and compelling prose.

And then there's the cheeky Dr. Ben Goldacre of Bad Science fame. I should put out the call now for volunteers to do security when the publicity tour for the North American version of his book hits sometime in 2009 - let's just say that Duthie's on West Fourth in Vancouver (you know, the one practically next door to the Capers with its extensive collection of homeopathic remedies) would not be the best venue for a reading.

The British Boy Toy from the long-ago days of Yahoo! Books and Literature chat, who still calls and emails me, although now it's from places in Africa I'm not sure exist. 

Last but never least, the continuing virtual friendship with the amazingly prolific and talented Paul Jackson/Art Nahpro. I am doing my best to persuade him to enter the short film contest at Sundance this year, and have every confidence that if he enters, he will win. If you don't fall in love with his collages, his paintings, or his photos, you will at least appreciate the gems he finds, like this Eddie Izzard - Death Star Canteen video.

6. My quilting instructor, Beau Gabiniewicz, and her wonderfully calm and reassuring approach to teaching and to quilting. Since I never got around to spending time in New Brunswick so Aunt May could teach me how to quilt, taking this class was really important to me. It was really lovely to spend six Monday evenings in a row with a group of women whose ages spanned five decades. It was also heartwarming to see two different mother-daughter teams in the class, and to meet Barb, an avid quilter who brought in a book with an amazing line drawing of women quilting at the beginning of the 20th Century. It reminded her, she said, of learning to quilt at her grandmother's house. A couple of weeks ago I saw a vanity license plate in my neighbourhood, I QUILT. Wish I'd had the camera with me.

Much to my surprise, quilting is challenging on many different levels. Not least of which is trying to figure out how much fabric to buy. To my eternal chagrin, I am still as arrogant as ever about reading instructions - I don't actually read them, I glance at them and then forge ahead. Sometimes this works. Other times it doesn't, as when I failed to notice the instructions for one of my quilts said to sew two A pieces together, then two Bs, then sew the A blocks to the B blocks. No wonder I wasn't getting rectangles by creating blocks of AB, AB combos. It's ok, I've got a good seam ripper.

One of the nicest things about starting to quilt was the quest for fabrics - I've made the rounds of most of the remaining fabric stores in the Metro Vancouver area. Much to my surprise, they've all got strengths and weaknesses, even when the stores are members of the same chain. Some have great prices, some have great selections in particular colour ranges (not so great in others), and some have great staff. To Betty at Fabricana, whose advice was invaluable when I was first purchasing the tools I'd need, and to Cara at Birkeland Bros., where I purchased the wool batting for my first quilt, thank you. Your enthusiasm was inspiring, and your patience with my stupid questions was exemplary.

7. Finally spending a week at Diane Thompson and Dan Workman's cashmere goat farm in beautiful Nazko, BC. What on earth could I have been looking for on the internet four years ago when I discovered cashmere came from goats and that, unlike sheep, the goats don't have to be sheared, just combed? After meeting an amazing woman who raised milk goats in the Eastern Townships of Quebec - and also designed the curtain for the National Arts Centre in Ottawa - at a writing workshop 20 years ago, raising goats has always been a strange little fantasy of mine. It took me a while to get there, but I'll always be glad I went.

Two scientists turned farmers, Diane and Dan were incredibly stimulating conversationalists, even at breakfast (I had to get up a couple of hours early and pre-caffeinate in order to be able to hold  my own). I learned so much from both of them: how to milk a goat, how fundraising really works in a community setting, and, most important, how to follow your dream. I like to think that if I lived in the area, I too could be one of the Bad Women of Nazko. Sort of the same way I got to be an honourary Newfie without having to drink Screech. :)

8. Of the books I read this year, Helen Humphreys' Wild Dogs, Elizabeth Hay's Late Nights on Air, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night, Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen and the Kazuo Ishiguro I was persuaded to read (against my better judgment after the horrific disappointment of The Unconsoled), Never Let Me Go, were the fiction standouts.

9. Non-fiction is either a lot better written than it used to be or something in my brain has actually changed, as 2008 found me reading almost as much non-fiction as fiction (ordinarily the ratio is 1:100; suddenly this year it was more like 1:3). Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, Simon Winchester's The Map That Changed the World, John Vaillancourt's The  Golden Spruce, and, of course, Gabor Mate's moving study of addiction, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, were the ones I'd recommend. Poverty, the natural world, geology, foresty, the human condition....

10. The  birth of my third cousin (or first cousin twice removed), Ava Abigail Grace, at 4:27PM on Tuesday, November 25, 2008. Have yet to see a picture, but having known your mother, your grandmother, and your great-grandmother, there is no doubt in my mind, my dear, that you will be a beauty, inside and out.

What's really funny about Twitter

Having entered the Twitterverse a few months ago, I now think I'm sufficiently well informed to make a few observations about it. In the spirit of social media, I won't hesitate to do so.

Twitter's a lot like chat, except for the fact that it lacks a lot of chat's real-time functionality and the 140-character limit is a very real limitation (even though you can expand it to 240-characters using Big Tweet, which splits your posts into two but at least labels them 1/2, 2/2). The other very real limitation is the fact that you're forced to read from bottom to top, which is unnatural and disconcerting. The really positive trends though are that fewer folks on Twitter are hiding behind anonymous screennames, the discourse is - for the most part - highly civilized, and much of the information provided is not only timely, it's extremely valuable.

Many of the Twitterati (shall I define this term as Twitter stars? the most ubiquitous Twitter users?) are precisely those who were most disdainful of chat and most dismissive of its potential as a business app: geeks, journalists, and PR folks. Having attended a few moderated sessions on AOL, I've known since 1996 that the ability to bring people from around the world together to learn, comment and brainstorm in a text-based format was not only a cost effective but also a brilliant idea. Glad the rest of you are catching up. :)

But some of the Twitterati seem to have missed the point of social media entirely. For these folks, it's all about who's following them, not about the two-way exchange of information and ideas and the wonderful things that can result from the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. A respected British tech journalist Tweeted this morning that he had reached the 2000-followers mark, and seemed very pleased about it. Four hours later, he had 2009 followers - and was following a mere 145 people. I think we probably have to pardon him for not quite getting it: in his business, it's still all about having an audience and a following.

Some of the social media evangelists who update everyone on every cup of coffee they drink, every plane they catch, and every meeting they have, have revealed a fundamental lack of understanding of what should underly the use of social media tools: a solid grounding in what constitutes effective public relations - and marketing. One in particular seems to believe the old adage that all publicity is good publicity, and when he found himself at the centre of a controversy, continued to fan the flames by posting everything said about him and rallying his acolytes to do the same. The good news is that this will make an excellent case study in social media crisis communications. The bad news is that the discerning will have decided the effort of weeding out his wheat from his chaff is not worth it, which is a pity, because there's actually quite a bit of wheat there.

Others have demonstrated real leadership in the social media space, as well as a fundamental understanding of how important it is to take the high road in issues management and crisis communications. It's not fair that people say nasty things about you, blame you for things you haven't done, and supply their own interpretations of the facts. The sad truth is that if you engage on the mud-slinging level and repeat negative allegations in an attempt to refute them, you will only reinforce the negative things being said about you, appear to be whining, and, ultimately, alienate your supporters as you keep flogging that dead horse.  

Here's another perspective and someone else's tips on how not to use Twitter.

And here's a question: if you delete your Twitter account, will all your Tweets vanish? Or will they linger forever in the cyberverse?

Why must boys be such - boys?

The current controversy about Jonathon Narvey's Best of 604 nomination for best political blog is starting to remind me of working in the composing room at The Financial Post and watching three grown men hip butt each other as they tried to persuade the compositors to put their story on the front page above the fold. As if, snort. (Yes, I am that old - The Financial Post was a weekly when I worked there, and not part of the National Post, but co-owned by Maclean Hunter and the Toronto Sun. At least the Sun still exists as a corporate entity. And that's why the National Post has survived; it bought FP's subscriber base that had cost the Sun so much to build over the course of 10 years as a daily).

And to think I was so very flattered by Dave Olson's articulate assessment of my questioning what constitutes 'real' media versus 'unreal' media just a week or so ago (will have to look up the link for that one later; I've got photos to pick up). Update: photos not yet ready so I had time to look up the link.

Who's the jackass who complained about Narvey writing about his iPhone? Newsflash, you jostling bloggers, you: if a blog's nominated in a category, that's the category in which it belongs. Newsflash #2: most bloggers don't write about just a single subject. Check out Technorati's State of the Blogosphere 2008 if you don't believe me. And who's the other jackass who thinks the blog should be disqualified because it's 'called' Currents but is viewed at http://jnarvey.com? Give me a break.

But I'm thinking in all this that Dave Olson must be Bob Rae, Jonathon would then have to be Michael Ignatieff. Which leaves Raul, whose Twitter post first alerted me to the whole controversy, as Dion. I like it. It fits.

My only question is, where's my favourite candidate for the Liberal leadership in all of this, the adorably baby-faced Dominic LeBlanc?

Finisterre: A Film by Paul Jackson

Paul Jackson is one of the best flickr friends anyone could ever have. He blogs (de temps en temps) here.

Things I wish I'd said (2)

Looking up, originally uploaded by The River Thief.  Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008.

In the aboriginal cemetery in Nazko, BC.

I am surprised to find that I experience the disappointment of a hope I never knew I harbored.

Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace

Stonehenge kept coming into my mind, making me feel our lives are short and small.... Strange how pleasure is sometimes the prelude to melancholy.

Sara George, The Journal of Mrs. Pepys: Portrait of a Marriage

The language that I have now is not adequate to the feelings that I had then.

There is sometimes no reward for patience. If hunger is the engine, life is only either underway or stalled; and desire is just a watered-down version of hunger, a poor copy.

Helen Humpheys, Wild Dogs

It's not Bob Rae's ability to lead we should be questioning

Reading about the leaked Innovative Research Group survey that found Canadians question Bob Rae's ability to lead during a financial crisis and/or recession brought back a lot of bad memories for me.

I had forgotten all about the 'Rae Days' - forced unpaid leave imposed on Ontario's civil servants as part of his futile attempt and misguided strategy to cope with a deficit he inherited and then proceeded to allow to balloon totally out of control. Someone who actually knew how to run an organization would, instead, have come up with a more creative plan to cut costs through attrition, rationalization, and by investing in technology that would have made it possible for people to work smarter rather than harder.

Rae's election as Ontario Premier was something I thought I'd never live to see. An NDP landslide, it was, after decades of Progressive Conservative rule and then a brief interlude of David Peterson's Liberals. I even recall voting in that election, and that the polling station was incredibly remote and almost impossible to reach via transit. And I voted for him - well, not for him, but for whoever was the NDP in the riding in which I lived in Toronto's Annex.

He had been in power for less than a year when he started to take away the right to strike from those who had supported - and funded - the NDP for decades, the unions. He also enacted legislation that made it legal to hire replacement workers - scabs, they used to be called. My political love affair with the NDP ended before it ever really began.

And then there was his appearance on the Ralph Benmurgui show, Friday Night with Ralph Benmurgui, which I blogged about shortly after the Liberal leadership convention that led to Stephane Dion's victory. Forget that it was a ridiculously bad show (how could it not have been? when CBC launched the new show, instead of giving them a budget for costumes, they apparently suggested the series just use the leftovers from the old Tommy Hunter show - vintage at its most eccentric).

What Canadians in general - and Liberals in particular - need to question is what, exactly, Bob Rae stands for. Given the way he behaved when he finally became premier of Ontario, it's obvious his belief system is elastic at best and totally self-serving at worst. Since then, of course, he's decided he's not an NDP kinda guy at all anymore, he's actually a Liberal. I wonder if that will ultimately turn out to have been a bad move for him. Because if he continues to seek power at the expense of rebuilding the Liberal party, he'll ensure its ruin. And the federal Liberals are already teetering on the brink of financial disaster as it is. Perhaps that's been the master plan all along and he's secretly still an NDP candidate at heart. Somehow I doubt Jack Layton will step aside for him though if he decides to cross the floor yet again.

It's so much fun being a Sagittarian

Nazko columbines, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008.

My (at times) uncertain sense of direction has got me lost and made me late on more than one occasion. I find it odd that there are times when I can both navigate and tell time by the sun, but this doesn't always work - I've missed planes and been late more times than I care to remember. So when I have to be somewhere I've never been before, I try to make allowances for my own navigational arrogance and at least MapQuest my destination.

My first trip to a Lower Mainland Ikea was an exercise in sheer persistence - I'm still not sure what I did wrong (and I defy anyone who doesn't live there to tell me where Coquitlam ends and Port Coquitlam begins). I was living in Lions Bay at the time and everything went smoothly till I got off the highway. A nightmare then ensued in which I kept following United Boulevard and circling the large blue and yellow Ikea sign without ever actually being able to get to it. I persisted and eventually got to Ikea, but I was in a sufficiently foul mood by the time I arrived that even the Swedish meatballs and lingonberry juice didn't quite mollify me. Fortunately it's not all that tough to get there from where I now live [although if you aren't in the right lane on Columbia Street at rush hour, good luck getting into it to make that turn onto the completely unmarked Brunette (look for Royal City Autobody when heading east - that's Brunette) that leads you to the Ikea in Coquitlam].

So in preparation for a meeting Tuesday at the Libra Room, I went to their web site to make sure I knew exactly where it was (The Drive can be a bit overwhelming at times - so many neat little shops and restaurants and such a high turnover that you're never sure whether a place you visited on your last visit will still be there, or whether it's moved a couple of doors down, or just vanished).

Something about the web site made me wonder whether they were, in fact, open for lunch or not, and so I called them to find out. Having been lost and/or separated from my companions many many times at both Expo 67 (those folks at the British Pavilion were truly wonderful - they took me down the back stairs at least four times to help me get out of there) and Toronto's Caribana parades, I didn't want to be wandering around The Drive in the rain looking for my lunch companion (although we're both pretty good about calling when we're late or lost - I guess I'm just not over the trauma of having once asked someone to meet me at the intersection of two parallel streets). And they're not, so we'll have lunch somewhere else.

But I had to laugh when I read their take on the various astrological signs. And I can't argue with any item in this description of Sagittarians. All I'll add is: 'that's childish in a GOOD way.'

SAGITTARIUS - The Promiscuous One Spontaneous. High appeal. Rare to find. Great when found. Loves being in long relationships. So much love to give. A loner most of the time. Loses patience easily and will not take crap. If in a bad mood stay FAR away. Gets offended easily and remembers the offense forever. Loves deeply but at times will not show it feels it is a sign of weakness. Has many fears but will not show it. VERY private person. Defends loved ones will all their abilities. Can be childish often. Not one to mess with. Very pretty. Very romantic. Nice to everyone they meet. Their Love is one of a kind. Silly, fun and sweet. Have own unique appeal. Most caring person you will ever meet! Amazing in bed..!!! Not the kind of person you want to mess with- you might end up crying.

Peace through quilting

Baby Quilt 4, originally uploaded by The River Thief.

No, that's not a typo, I do mean peace achieved by means of quilting.

Early this fall I got my act together and signed up for a quilting course at my local high school. "Bed-sized patchwork quilt" I think the class was called (obviously I hadn't written the copy for it or it would have been something catchier).

I come from a long line of quilters on my father's side of the family. New Brunswick farm women for three centuries, the oldest family quilts I've seen were my grandmother's. My Aunt May used to quilt on a regular basis with her women's church group, and my mother commissioned several quilts from them, although I seem to have only ended up with one of them, an appliqued Basket of Tulips quilt.

Since I never spent the time with my relatives learning how to quilt before they died, I had to take a class. And what a wonderful experience it was, ultimately. A six-week course spread over seven weeks since it was scheduled for Monday nights and the second or third Monday of the course was Thanksgiving, I think I spent the first four classes in a state of manic frustration. Class one was just handouts and instructions and material lists and looking at quilt samples and talking about quilting.

Class two was cutting and assembly class though, and that was when the craziness started. I had left the purchase of fabric and supplies to the day of class, which mean I not only had to find the fabric store in Coquitlam, I had to come up with a vision in my mind's eye of how the seven different fabrics would combine in the pattern I'd chosen. More on the store I visited in another blog post. The fabric also had to be washed to shrink it and ironed before it could be cut.

I spent the two hours in class that night cutting and then when I got home, despite the fact that my back was aching from bending over low tables at the school, I decided my kitchen counter was the perfect height and that I would finish doing my cutting that night. We're talking 15 vertical rows of 14 squares each - you do the math.

I finished cutting at 1:30AM. And then, for some bizarre reason, I decided I had to do the pre-sewing assembly that night as well. Two hours later (that would be 3:30AM), feeling like I'd cracked the world's toughest jigsaw puzzle, I was finally done and ready to sew.

It went on like that for several more weeks. I ordered wool batting from a local store (more on that later too) and they seemed to forget my order, plus the carding machine was out of order for a while. I finally picked up my batting and then I had to finish the quilt top before the last class. I had spent class 4 in complete and utter despair at the school machines - I think I spent an hour and a half of a two-hour class trying to get the machine properly threaded, too stubborn to ask for help, because after all, I'd threaded it properly the week before, hadn't I? I knew how to do this. (If the dead cow noises coming from the machine were any indication, no I didn't actually know how.)

I had bought my own sewing machine around the midway point of the class, realizing that I was going to need to do some sewing at home if I was going to stay on schedule, and also realizing that this wasn't a flash-in-the-pan thing: the patchwork bed-sized quilt from the class was only the first in a long line of quilts I was going to make. It took me a while to beat my own machine into submission as well - I must say, those elusive reading glasses have a nasty habit of hiding just when you need them most, and I have all new sympathy for my poor parents struggling to sew my skating costumes and waking me up at 2 and 3AM to thread the needle on the sewing machine for them.

After what felt like a superhuman effort in more ways than one (change of plan re backing fabric; addition of a four-inch border to make the quilt bigger, etc.), by the final class I was ready to do what needed to be done in the classroom: assemble the quilt sandwich using the large, waist-high tables at the school. I just don't have the floor space at home to do this, and my hardwood floors would have got all scratched up by the pins.

In true quilting spirit, one of my classmates helped me tackle the creation of the quilt sandwich. The wool batting is incredibly 'lofty' (read: thick) and I could have used some larger safety pins. However, we got it pinned and that's when the magic really began. Seeing the fabrics I'd chosen and assembled, the borders, and how the new backing, which was generous enough to pull around to the front of the quilt and form another 'fake' border, all worked together to create something of beauty and harmony - it was just magic. My classmates were so kind: I got compliments on design, fabric choices, workmanship, execution - and the instructor suggested I view my quilt from the other end of the room, insisting that I look at it like 'an oil painting or other work of art.' I was amazed.

That quilt still needs finishing - it's going to have to be a tied quilt due to its loftiness, which means I need some wool to form the ties and have to see if I can find a wool needle that's also really sharp to get through the two layers of fabric as well as the batting.

But in the meantime I started two other quilts, and on Remembrance Day finished the quilt top for my second cousin's baby quilt. I'm in awe of how beautiful it is, even though I tried to be careful with this one. I read the pattern it's based on fairly carefully and I drew diagrams on graph paper with coloured highlighters. I still managed to get the quilt's 'rhyme's scheme totally wrong at first, and was making blocks that went AB+AB=C rather than (A+A)+(B+B)=C for quite a while before I realized my error.

In order to get the dimensions right, and because we know the baby is going to be a girl, I decided to insert a couple of sashes in the pink fabric - originally the sashes were going to be in the blue spider and cobweb fabric as well. The quilt top needs another ironing, but I am thrilled and totally in awe of myself. There is something about quilting that draws on and challenges so many of my skills that when I get to the end of a project phase I'm just stunned by the accomplishment. Finishing the quilt top is one of those project phase milestones. And so I thought I'd savour it for a while.

This is a variation of the Pippa Moore (Kitambaa Designs, www.pippamoore.ca) quilt pattern "Five Part Harmony/African Harmony." I'm calling it "Three Part Harmony: The Baby Quilt."

Who can keep up? I had only heard of 2/10 of these photo editing softwares

My head is spinning at the idea of eight additional photo editing software tools that seem to have sprung up in the time since I was last able to download photos from the camera. Ok, so the laptop was on photo-download-hiatus from August to the beginning of November, but still. Here's the article.

A return to 'my' America

Mist on the Nazko, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008

Watching early election results and the commanding lead Barack Obama established over John McCain and the lipstick-wearing [unkind word used to describe women who not only aren't feminists but are traitors to the cause and therefore that most contemptible of all things, historical revisionists], there was never any doubt in my mind that Obama would be the next president of the United States of America.

But there was doubt and fear amongst my American friends, those people who, for the entire duration of the Bush Jr./Dick Cheney era have been saying, when they felt free to speak openly, 'this is not my America.' One stolen election too many, it seems, less than a decade, one highly unpopular war and an administration that hasn't hesitated to curtail civil liberties and cast suspicion on every immigrant that isn't white, and thinking, feeling, informed, caring and educated Americans were losing hope.

If an Obama-Democrat victory is what it takes to get America out of its horribly paranoid, negatively aggressive and defeatedly blustering mindset, I'm all for it. On the sociological level, I am thrilled to see a member of Gen X in power rather than a baby boomer. At the tail end of the baby boom demographic myself, I have spent my entire life defined by that cohort but disadvantaged by it. Increasingly I wonder what the rest of the world must think of these aging children who were so obnoxiously upfront about their 'ideals' - which have translated, for the most part, into nine parts rhetoric and one part pure hedonism. As I watch ad after ad for adult diapers and erectile dysfunction drugs, I wonder what's wrong with making love like a 55 year old rather than insisting on doing it the way you did when you were 18. But then, one of my favourite expressions has always been the snidely muttered 'mutton dressed like lamb.'

If you weren't convinced by Michael Adams' book Fire and Ice that Canada and the US are diverging in their values rather than converging, take a look at the contrasts posed by the election results: with the lowest voter turnout in Canadian history, an apathetic country re-elected a Conservative minority government headed by an uncharismatic leader with a reputation for not being a 'team' player. With the highest voter turnout in 100 years of American history, a country that has been galvanized by hope elected a member of one of its previously despised minorities, whose battle cry is, essentially, getting to yes, as president.

I'm not asking to redo our election. I am wondering what those tired white boys who've announced they're planning to run for the Liberal leadership next May really think they have to offer the country or the world. There isn't a scrap of charisma amongst a half dozen of them. And I suspect that hope is made up of equal parts charisma, the courage of one's convictions, and blind faith.

Mini Book Expo review of Revenant

The Vancouver Writers Festival blurb about Revenant describes the novel, Tristan Hughes’ third, as an ‘extended -though not uncritical - love letter to Ynys Môn.’ The Tower and Send My Cold Bones Home are his first two novels.

That hadn’t occurred to me. The village of Ynys Môn, where three friends meet on the 13^th anniversary of the death of the fourth member of their childhood gang, seemed the least important element of the novel. Setting isn’t everything. What matters about Ynys Môn is not that it is geographically or socio-politically unique, but rather that it’s a quintessential ‘home’ place - one of the ones time forgot, where nothing ever changes. Set on an island, a certain regression is inevitable when you revisit the scene of your youthful follies.

Del’s gang of Ricky, Steph and Neil reunite to finally process Del’s death. Neil has never left Ynys Môn, Ricky returns – perhaps rightly – with a great deal of trepidation, and Steph floats back, perhaps seeing it for the first time. “You only learn how to see things properly when you’re alone.” Del, who delighted in cartwheeling across the beach, blissfully ignoring the shocking flash of her white panties, digging a bicycle out of the mud, and eventually trying to row a stolen boat to another island, is at one and the same time the only who really got away and the one who anchors the rest to the island.

The writing is lush and often self-consciously lyrical. Entering it is like wading into a warm sea of words that gently lap at you till you’re floating on them. Still, there’s something slight about it that makes me hesitate to recommend it to people – I found myself reluctant to reread it in the course of writing this review, and I’m not sure why that is. Hughes is a writer of promise, but that promise is yet to be fulfilled. Perhaps it's that his characters recount the events of their past, but don't seem to have processed them that makes this morally - ethically - psychologically - an ultimately unsatisfying read. Hughes is working on already well-trodden ground. That means the bar's set a little higher in terms of characterization, since hundreds of authors have already explored the same themes.

A native of the Welsh Island of Ynys Môn (Anglesey) and Atikokan, Ontario, Tristan Hughes will be appearing at the 2008 Vancouver Writers' Festival on October 24 as part of the Flights of Fancy event with Andrew Davidson and Elizabeth Knox, and at the Sunday brunch hosted by CBC's Sheryl MacKay (North by Northwest).

Embedding video isn't as easy as it seems, apparently

I'm preparing a seminar tentatively titled Social Media for Luddites (Luddites being some of my favourite folk, of course). It's such a vast and burgeoning field, and unless you really want to be at your computer 24/7, it's hard to really get in deep with all of the amazing software enablers. Erm, perhaps that's 'applications.' I was surprised to see myself described as an 'alpha' flickr user, but had to admit that I do log on to flickr everday, I regularly post photos (when I can download them from a camera, anyway), and I do participate in groups. I've kept my contact list on flickr deliberately small, and the number of groups in which I participate is very limited, although I do respond to invites from groups that ask me to post one of my photos. Perhaps the most heartwarming experience I've had on flickr was an email I got about a year after I posted photos I'd taken (and tagged) at Vancouver's Mountain View Cemetery. A man from the UK emailed to say I'd helped him track down a long-lost relative for the family genealogy they'd compiled - they'd known he'd emigrated to Canada but didn't know where he'd ended up.

Anyway, as part of my research and seminar prep, I'm delving a little more deeply into LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, and as usual, the Lee LeFever videos are a good place to start. Here's the one CommonCraft has prepared on Twitter, as posted on YouTube.

I'm sorry, we're too busy to create our own foreign policy, can we borrow yours?

It's amazing to me that it took five years for anyone of import in Canadian politics (and I include policy analysts and political staffers, the behind-the-scenes movers, shakers and king-makers in that category) to listen to the Australian prime minister's speech on Iraq. Australia may be a long way away geographically, but as another former British colony and part of the English-speaking world (not sure who is and who isn't a member of the Commonwealth any more), surely we should have been paying attention? We've been lapping up Australian films since the days of Breaker Morant and Gallipoli; we're busily reading Peter Carey and Tim Winton's amazing novels, but we're not sure we should pay attention to Australian policy or politics, even though they've been our allies in two world wars and are our socio-political half-siblings at the very least. In medical terms, this would be a bit like refusing to share your family medical history with your GP on the basis that it's irrelevant because you aren't your grandmother.

The word-for-word plagiarism is inexcusable. And Stephen Harper's spokesperson, Kory Teneycke, is clearly unrepentant on our prime minister's behalf:

"I'm not going to get into a debate about a five-year-old speech that was delivered three Parliaments ago, two elections ago, when the prime minister was the leader of a party that no longer exists," Teneycke said. Right. Back in the dark ages that was, 2003. Even those of closer to senility than to birth can remember that far back. Let's do some economic scare-mongering and try to deflect the attention from something that obviously doesn't matter, the personal and political integrity of the person who keeps wanting to be our political leader. I never thought I'd find myself saying this, but Stephen Harper's Conservatives are starting to make the Brian Mulroney gang look good: at least they had an agenda - an agenda so ambitious they created a whole new set of legislative committees to ram through the bills they wanted to create. Other than continuing to serve as prime minister, I'm not sure what this gang wants, what their vision of our country is, or where they hope to lead us. And to think people criticized George Bush Jr. for his lack of knowledge of countries other than his own.

No wonder the world doesn't take Canadians very seriously. Don't think for an instant Bob Rae deserves great praise for making this issue public during our current election campaign; it took him five years to catch on too and it's a blatant move on his part to assume thought leadership of the Liberal Party. Bill Graham, our former foreign affairs minister, was obviously asleep at the wheel too, praising the speech for putting forward Harper's party position so clearly. And so were all their staffers, obviously.

No one expects politicians to write their own speeches. Fear of public speaking is often ranked ahead of fear of death amongst all-time human apprehensions. Getting prepped to speak in public with the kind of gruelling schedules most politicians have is enough of a challenge. But policy analysts and political staffers are paid to stay on top of these things. We've always prided ourselves on not being solipsistic, on paying attention to what's happening in other countries, on trying to adopt best practises regardless of where they originate. What is it we've all been too busy doing instead for the last five years?

Why I will always be grateful the internet was invented

Content like this:

glumbert - Women in Film

I have no idea who G. Lumbert is, but I'm eternally grateful for this video.

Edit: A little digging revealed that the film's creator is actually Philip Scott Johnson, with a whole YouTube channel of his own.

Percolating slowing through the blogosphere - a great idea

Romantic Misdiagnosis - vintaged, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Collage and photo copyright Ruth Seeley

The wonderful Mhairi Petrovic told me about the mini BookExpo for bloggers yesterday and it's a wonderful idea - claim an available book, or two, or three, and blog about them within a month, linking back to the publisher and the author.

Since I often blog about books - old, new, purchased, borrowed from friends or the library, picked up in the laundry room (if it's a book I'm going to look at it) - it seemed like a natural.

I've requested three titles: one about guerrilla PR, one about building the brand of you to advance your career (something I witnessed when working for a global PR agency but didn't much appreciate as I was too busy working to worry about building my own brand, thank you very much), and the third - well, it's a fun one about dating younger men. Or at least I hope it will be.

New titles continue to be added and there are a few more books left.

Check it out.

Update: oops, that will teach me not to blog before reading the FAQ. Seems my initial choices were all gone already, but there are more to come - if you're looking for books to read and review, check the 'to be released' selection and wait till you get your confirmation email before blogging about it. Oh and it seems my book lust got the better of me: there is a limit of two books at a time.

Slight Tales # 23

Slight Tales # 23
Originally uploaded by ART NAHPRO

I cannot say enough good things about my flickr friend Art Nahpro, known IRL as the artist Paul Jackson. For a taste of his capabilities, watch this amazing video. He has a whole channel on youtube, I'll look for the link to that as well. Update July 23, 2008: here's the link to Paul's channel on youtube. I am still not sure why we're getting two versions of this embedded video in a single blog post, but I'll figure it out one of these years.



Enjoy.

Engaging graciously with one's audiences

World's most beautiful geraniums - one, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008

Since social media and Web 2.0 are all about engagement and dialogue rather than top-down message delivery - which is, essentially, monloguing - I thought I would do a brief post about engaging graciously with one's audiences.

I came across Leo Bottary's blog when looking through the questions relating to public relations posed on LinkedIn - he had asked if there was a way to make PowerPoint presentations less deadly (my hyperbolic phrasing there), and I pertly answered that I believe Pecha Kucha is the answer - six slides, 20 seconds per slide, and you're out. Much to my surprise, I later found myself on the June honour roll on his blog - a lovely example of acknowledging one's readers. Leo and I were colleagues at the same firm, but he wasn't one with whom I'd worked directly or with whom I'd even corresponded during my stint at H&K. I'm not saying we're all wonderful, but it's certainly a huge talent pool of professionals who have benefited greatly from the resources, continuing education, and professional development opportunities made available to staff. I have to say I agree with him - basic social skills (including use of the 'magic words') are kinda key to this medium and should be a requirement for folks working in public relations.* And it's nice to see that Web 2.0 is more about standing up and being counted than the empowerment of anonymity we saw with Web 1.0.

Next up: my former boss Boyd Neil, whose blog can be found here, or through the links I've provided. A crisis communications and corporate reputation management expert at H&K, Boyd did something I think few people can, which was to build a department from an extremely motley crew of inherited staff with, shall we say, varying levels of ability. That's one tough gig. Coming across Boyd's original blog was actually what got me off (or onto) my ass to start blogging myself. The premise for his original blog was Proustian. Even though writing is a large part of what he does for a living, he had more to say on a variety of subjects, and his subject matter was not trivial. I was following his Air Canada complaint saga closely but with a rather hopeless feeling: having requested a gluten-free meal they sabotaged him on a flight to Europe and he was sick for days afterwards. As someone who's had a variety of food allergies throughout the course of her life and has been astonished to see food allergies given less respect and attention by servers than religious dietary restrictions, I would have been falling all over myself to grovel at the mistake I'd made if I were Air Canada. But no....

When I alerted him to the fact that a link he'd posted wasn't working, I got a very gracious acknowledgment from him. When we worked together I appreciated Boyd's professionalism so much and was frequently amused by the fanatical grammarian in him. I don't think I've convinced him that those who regulate the English language (I think it's the OED folks, but I'm a little hazy on this) have conceded on the split infinitive front (it had to have been all those Star Treks, no? After you've heard 'to boldly go' seven million times you have to accept that you're never going to be able to maintain an 'infinitives must not be split' stance - better to choose your battles wisely and just stick to refusing to permit sentences that end with prepositions, a battle we can win).

The third example, and the original motivation for this post, was this exchange I discovered on the CBC web site, in which Esther Enkin, the executive news editor, discusses why CBC chose not to air the latest Bernardo video in its entirety. It's an excellent example of how to deal with diversity of opinion without compromising the stance your organization has taken. And if you read it, you'll see that the tone of the questions actually maps to the gracious tone Esther displays throughout.

Happy reading, all.

* If only they were - I came as close to death as I ever have when I watched in horror as a junior colleague once - gasp - picked his nose in the middle of a major presentation to a major client we'd been trying to win for nearly a year. I have never prayed so fervently to Scottie to beam me up as at that moment.

Plus ca change, plus ca change

The Life of Riley, originally uploaded by The River Thief.

While this photo isn't timeless, with the clothing, the car, the chair (in Canada we call them Muskoka chairs, not Adirondack chairs) and even the architectural style of the cabins in the background firmly fixing it in the late 1950s, early 1960s, my aunt is doing precisely what I wish I were doing now - sitting outside, watching the chipmunks and listening to the sound of the wind in the trees.

Instead, however, I'm blogging away, and the escape to the cabin in the woods will be delayed a few weeks. I came across this article about Bill Gates stepping down and wanted to link to it and discuss it because it details some of the controversy surrounding the battle for market dominance of Microsoft Word over WordPerfect.

It may be silly to be nostalgic over software (of all things!), but it's interesting to me that it is universally acknowledged that Betamax was better technology than VCRs and yet VCR technology still managed to triumph (for a while). I don't know the details of how that happened, or I've forgotten them. I do know though that WordPerfect had actually achieved market dominance at one point, and that it was lovely software to use. New releases were relatively rare, but when they happened, the richness of functionality, the ease of use of the new features, and their incredible usefulness made learning an intensely rewarding experience. No one has ever made the mail merge as simple as WordPerfect did, although it was a bit of a jolt, after having memorized hundreds of commands for the F keys, to just be able to use your mouse to click on an icon with version 5.1.

I remember coming back from a client user conference in California and trying to tell some of my 20-something colleagues what one of the product managers I'd met at the conference said to me. In retrospect I'm beginning to think anyone who worked in high tech PR during the dotcom boom deserves a medal merely for having been able to find a journalist under a rock who was willing to cover our clients - there was that much going on it sometimes seemed like we were asking them to be four places at once. Anyway, I remember telling them that the product manager had told me a story about his mother being a very early adopter of technology and that while she knew other software was available, she was still using Multimate. Even I had only encountered one or two computers in the 80s that used Multimate software. So I told them the story, adding that the software product manager had also said, 'Most people already have more software than they will ever need - or learn how to use.' I was met with blank stares. Usually my anecdotes get a better reception than this. Finally, one of the 20-somethings asked, 'Multimate?' I explained that it had been the word processing standard before WordPerfect. The stares were no less blank. And so I gave up. Twenty years can be a very long time, it seems. And my point - which was the bewildering profusion of options and the stress engendered by constantly having to learn new things to make one's job easier merely because new things were being developed and marketed, not because they were really necessary - had just sailed right over their heads.

But I was also thinking last week about the world before Starbucks. During one of my mother's last trips to visit me in Toronto in the mid-1990s, Starbucks hadn't really penetrated my consciousness. There was a Second Cup in my neighbourhood (Kensington Market), but Starbucks hadn't really arrived, and I caught myself wondering what she would have made of both the coffee and of the Starbucks experience. In her later years she was a huge Tim Horton's fan, and I wonder if she would have hated Starbucks' coffee, or if she would just have objected to its price.

The battle lines are very clearly drawn between Tim Horton's and Starbucks, and while it makes perfect sense that these two firms have positioned themselves at opposite ends of the marketing spectrum and deliberately set out to create completely different customer experiences, they've behaved like rival hockey teams. Except for the fact that they seem to have forgotten that you can't have a hockey game without two teams, and that hockey (and coffee) fans have something in common: they love hockey. Erm, coffee. I'm mystified by the loyal following Tim Horton's has (although I do snicker when folks cross the street with their Tim Horton's coffee to sit on the Starbucks patio directly across the street). The coffee is weak and bitter, the lighting makes me pray to be beamed up (or back in time to an era where fluorescent lighting had yet to be invented), and the whole orange and red thing - it doesn't just make me want to consume quickly and get out of there, it makes it pretty much impossible for me to set foot in the place.

But I find it sad to see Starbucks making the kind of mistakes that lead to the closure of 600 stores in a single year. When I lived in a town of 6000 in Ontario, the only good coffee I got was the coffee I made myself. I used to joke with my former colleagues that they could always leave Toronto and open a Starbucks in Kincardine, because the town needed one source of commercially available decent coffee (there were three Tim Horton's in town, I believe. Okay, two. That was two too many, IMNHO). Silly and frustrating though the whole Starbucks language is, as a corporate entity they've done an amazing job of training young staff and of creating a consistent experience. What seems almost like the mock-Italian of their creation labelling masks some very good things at the heart of this corporate empire. For staff, provision of benefits for even part-timers, a wage above the minimum, and a commitment to training are the things we as customers benefit from but don't necessarily see. Exquisite service, comfortable seating and lighting, and consistency of product quality are things we should celebrate, no matter our vintage.

Lois and Allan, 1946

Lois and Allan, 1946, originally uploaded by The River Thief.

A year ago today my life as a daughter officially ended with my mother's death. My father and good friend died on Valentine's Day in 1991. On this first anniversary I have just concluded my final duty to my parents, arranging the grave marker for their cremation plot at the North Vancouver cemetery. It was installed yesterday and I have just come back from mailing the cheque to Gerry Brewer, who made this final and amazingly painful duty so much easier. Perhaps it's sad that we have never actually met, but I appreciated not having to make an appointment, being able to select a grave marker online and work with emailed proofs, especially since the interment process was a little fraught for me. I also mailed copies of my parents' wedding film to the three cousins to whom I'm closest. One is featured in the film, as she was my mother's junior bridesmaid, her father shot the film (but still manages to be in it, so I'm not quite sure who else was involved in the filming, perhaps her mother as well), and - well - so many of our relatives are in it that I thought they should have copies.

Over the last few days I've been going through photos, editing, scanning, cropping, adjusting, and posting on flickr in a family photos set I've created.

This morning I found a photo I must have seen several times before but had never really looked at. There are several similar photos of my father during his army years, horsing around with one or another of his sisters, flirting with a local waitress before he 'shipped out' to WWII, striding into his future with a grin on his devilishly handsome face. I hadn't even realized it was my mother in this photo until I looked at it closely this morning. But on the back is written, in my mother's hand: "Aug. 16/46. Lois & Allan. AND THE HAT."

In looking at the photo and reading the date, I suddenly realized this was the first photo ever taken of my parents together, and that it was taken very shortly - probably no more than two weeks - after they had met.

It definitively answers the question that some of my cousins have had the courage to ask, 'What did he see in her?'

My father is not only movie-star handsome in this photo, he is in his prime. Snappily turned out in his newly acquired civvie finery, recently demobbed, he looks proud and determined here. There is no doubt in my mind that he was thinking, as he glanced at the photographer, 'this is the one.' Probably, since it was 1946, it was phrased, 'This is the woman I'm going to marry.'

But it is the look on my mother's face that amazes. The softness, the glow, the yielding tenderness. It's obvious she's captivated.

I wish I had known that woman a little better, the one who, for a brief while anyway, believed that life was full of infinite possibilities and the world was her oyster.

It's not its job to teach you how to spell

The miracle of pine trees, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008

At the risk of sounding terribly peevish and perhaps to position myself too far on the anal side of the oral/anal dichotomy, I have been noticing a lot of typos recently on web sites and blogs I encounter.

Far and away the single most common misspelling - and really, it's almost a word misusage rather than a spelling error - is the confusion that seems to exist between the contraction, 'it's' - short for it is - and the singular possessive of the personal pronoun it (as in he, she, it) - which is spelled 'its'.

Many years ago, I concluded there were two types of bad spellers in this world. The first is the person who just doesn't really relate to language all that well - or at least, not to its written form. Keenly aware that their intelligence is, to some extent, being judged by the quality of the written work they produce and that they are not what you could call 'linguistic naturals,' these folks always ask someone else to proof their work, keep a dictionary at hand, and actually do something to compensate for what they perceive as a handicap.

Then there are what I have always thought of as the arrogant misspellers, and I think this is what I'm encountering in a lot of web copy these days. These are the folks who do have an affinity for written language and they are probably also readers. They don't have an actual learning disability and they aren't intimidated by the written word. In my experience, these are the folks to watch out for. An early facility with language has made them horribly arrogant. They never spell check anything. They don't own a dictionary, and they think you're kinda stodgy for consulting one from time to time. With the advent of spell check, they've rested their case. The fact that spell check isn't going to tell you that you've typed 'change' instead of 'chance' doesn't bother them a bit. I don't blame anyone for not using grammar check when copy writing - it has an almost mediaeval approach to sentence fragments that would drive anyone who can actually type - or write - nuts.

However, the grammar check would help those who seriously do not know the difference between the contraction it's and the possessive of the personal pronoun it. Which is its. There is no apostrophe. And it is so easy to check this on your own. Just ask yourself, could I substitute 'it is' here? If the answer is no, remove the apostrophe immediately. If not sooner. And step away from the writing instrument. At least for a little while.

I will not name names. I know that the blogging platform in particular doesn't lend itself to mid-post course correction - it's very frustrating to write a post in Word and then have to reformat everything, adding the italics for the book and movie titles all over again, perhaps a little bit of bold here and there for emphasis, formatting the links. None of these things is particularly creative or inspiring, and perhaps they're antithetical to the creative process. But when I see 'it's' used incorrectly 14 times on the same page, please don't expect me to believe that you know better and just didn't grammar check your copy. You obviously don't know any better. But if you're reading this post, you no longer have any excuse. And if you'd learned this rule back in grade three when it was first taught, you wouldn't be having a problem with it now. Would ja?

For a list of the 100 words most often spelled incorrectly in the English language, click here.

Releasing the balloons: social media as opportunity

I'm sorry you were so unhappy., originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008.

While following up on a comment I'd made the other day on Kris Krug's blog, I noticed some of the resources he's made available on his site. For those of you who haven't heard of Kris, check out his blog and his photos on flickr. He's an extremely gracious young man (having finally achieved 'older woman' status I'm allowed to refer to him as such). I thought it was hilarious that the very first person I met at the kickoff dinner for NV08 was one of its chief instigators and organizers, but in my new, far more relaxed approach to networking (i.e. I have no expectations other than the trading of information about myself and receipt of same in kind), I am often pleasantly surprised by the people I meet without even really trying.

Today's find was SmashLAB's White Paper: A Primer in Social Media, which can be downloaded as a PDF.

What a pleasure it was to read. It's recent (March 2008), and while it's not encyclopaedic in its scope, it has reinforced something that occurred to me earlier in the week: social media presents opportunities that were always available to companies and individuals, but which few, if any, chose to employ. There were, however, some exceptions and workarounds. Here are three:

Very early in my career, I worked for Maclean Hunter in the old Maclean Hunter building at the southeast corner of University and Dundas in Toronto. This was the heart of Chinatown, close to funky little Baldwin Street, as well as to the Art Gallery of Ontario. There were tons of restaurants in the area. But on rainy days, people tended not to go out to lunch, and made their way to the cafeteria instead (Torontonians don't have that same ability to cheerfully endure rain as Vancouverites. They don't do well with snow either. In fact, the only thing they do seem to be able to endure weather wise is extreme heat and humidity, which finally drove me out of town).

Let's face it, it was cafeteria food - a step up from the slop served in high school, university and hospital cafeterias, but not exactly cutting-edge cuisine. Still, it was cheap and not totally nauseating. One of the things I noticed on the occasions I had lunch there was the the vice president of the consumer magazine division and publisher at the time of Maclean's magazine, Lloyd Hodgkinson, was always there whenever I was. In fact, he sometimes sat at my table. Other times I saw him sitting with other employees from a variety of different magazines. What I never saw was Lloyd sitting with a cabal of other executives at or near his level in the corporation.

I was once sent to talk to him about something, and while waiting to see if he had a moment to talk, he came out of his office and answered his (absent) secretary's ringing phone. I waited till he was finished the call and then teased him about - well - basically about the tail wagging the dog. And in the nicest possible way, he immediately set me straight. Basically he said, it's my job to ensure Maclean's subscribers are happy. And if they're not, I want to know about it. But, I said, doesn't the circulation department look after all that? Yes, he said, but if someone has taken the trouble to call me, I want to hear what they have to say, and make it right if I can. (I am, of course, paraphrasing here, since the conversation took place sometime between 1981 and 1983, and while I do have almost perfect short-term recall of conversations that really and truly interest me, it has been a while, hasn't it?)

I also think a lot about my stint with Coles Bookstores at the time of its most frantic expansion by opening new stores (as opposed to its later engulf and devour strategy, when it consumed first the Classic and later the W.H. Smith book chain). This expansion (I think the number of stores was supposed to double in less than three years and penetrate the entire US market in that time) was putting horrific strain on the existing stores. Making projection was well nigh impossible, given that we were operating with shrinking salary budgets and trying to cope with no less than three increases in the minimum wage within a year and a half. It was a challenge, let me tell you, and we had to get very creative indeed to keep the store adequately staffed and try to control shoplifting (our security device at the time being a single larger mirror). I heard stories of managers becoming so frustrated that they quit without giving notice and mailed their store keys back to head office. It was hard to get a district manager to visit your store (they were supposed to do a circuit of all their stores every six weeks) so you could raise issues and get some support for improvements; they were all being conscripted to help with the expansion too. Head Office seemed pretty busy too, and while there was a newsletter of sorts, it didn't really contain the kind of news that was important to us. Much to my surprise, our best sources of information were the publishers' sales reps, who did visit us faithfully (even though we did everything but our mass market ordering through head office).

I once took a creative job search techniques seminar. During this day-long event, the instructor gave us tips on how to get to the person who had the power to hire us. He suggested that if we were having trouble getting past the person's secretary or the receptionist that we lurk in the area and wait till said support staffer left her desk, then basically rush the office of the person we wanted to see. I came as close as I ever had to having an apoplectic fit at hearing this suggestion. I had done temp work as both a receptionist and an admin assistant. I had done so when the organization I was working for was hiring. Trust me on this one, not a single person who gave me attitude when I was trying to set up an interview with them (or who was following up on their application), was *ever* hired by any of the close to 30 organizations for which I temped. Because, of course, when reporting back on interviews arranged or passing on messages regarding who had called, I transmitted not only the bare bones of who, when, and how to reach, but also the substance and tone of the interchange.

The smashLAB white paper quotes Yahoo Senior VP Jeff Weiner, referring to blogs, forums, and social media in general, as saying that there has never been a tool like this in the history of market research. "We can now tap into timely responses from the public, at very little cost."

I beg to differ just slightly here. There has always been a way to tap into timely responses. The information has always been available to those who wanted it, without going to the expense of costly market research. But in order to tap into that information, corporations would have had to actually engage with their staff and suppliers and to listen to what those who were dealing with the complaints and getting feedback on products at the sales level were actually saying. They would have had to open their ears and listen, and instead of going through the motions of staff days where cake and hotdogs were consumed and paintball pellets were shot in a teambuilding fiasco, they would have had to actually get down and dirty and make a two-way flow of information not only possible but probable. They would also have to have understood how destructive the creation of silos within organizations was, and that if personal-empire building within companies was permitted, the company's death knell had probably already been rung.

The smashLAB authors say, towards the end of the paper, that the communities created by and flourishing within the social media context 'tend to respond best to authentic, honest and respectable dialogue and conduct....Effective social media efforts build relationships between companies and consumers.'

Indeed they do. But the true value of social media is that these relationships can be built and maintained quickly, easily, and cost-effectively, and that the Zeitgeist is finally such that we, as consumers, now have the ability to access, act, react, and interact with those who are trying to market to us, and that we are now perceived as having critical mass. We always did have critical mass. We just didn't used to be quite so organized about exercising it. Nor has it ever been so easy for us to communicate with corporations. And they have the ability to benefit from our collective wisdom as end users.

One final point re the white paper: another lightbulb went off for me in the discussion of the 'WalMarting Across America' blog fiasco. What WalMart did wrong was not so much not being transparent about the fact that the trip was corporate sponsored or that the idea had originated with its PR firm, Edelman. What was really wrong was that they presented only the stories of happy WalMart employees. Had they been transparent even to the point of showing the good, the bad, and the rather homely, it's unlikely they would have been 'outed' as they were.

For decades now (well okay for almost exactly two decades), I have been saying (you might say ranting but that glass is both half empty and half full - that's the definition of half ;)) that the reason women were better at sales than men was because women understood - on an almost instinctive level - that selling was as much about listening as it was about telling. More and more I think Helen Fisher is right in her book The First Sex: the early days of the 21st Century are indeed the first time in the developed world's history that there is a critical mass of educated women freed of the responsibilities of child rearing and capable of effecting change on a meaningful level. And if you don't believe me, read Kris Krug's charming redress of gender imbalance regarding tech folks to watch in 2008.