Mambo Taxi

For a while I worked for a company called "Openflows" which did consulting on open-source for non-profits and leftist organizations. It was satisfying work- and I only stopped working for them when the University offered me a full-time job in 2004. Their founder in Toronto, Jesse Hirsch, has been a tech columnist for the CBC for 25 years. He just had an interview with Jesse Brown on Canadaland podcast to talk about his possibly last broadcast on CBC, in which he asks "why CBC continues to promote Facebook after we've seen what that company has done to undermine democracy. CBC refused to post the segment online, raising questions about what you can and cannot say on our public broadcaster." It's a compelling listen, and makes me wonder how to react to the morally awful behaviours at the top of facebook.

Before I worked for Openflows, I was self-employed and in a partnership doing web consulting, from 1996 onward- while I was still in my last year at University. To tell you how early this was, we registered the domain name coder.com. Last November I was approached by a startup based in Austin, TX, looking to buy that domain name. I had really stopped working on those projects after starting working at the University, so it made the most sense to accept their (I think very fair) offer. I just looked them up. Their project is in public alpha and appears to be a success. "It's like google docs for programming." You get a web-based IDE and a virtual server, hooked to all sorts of useful things you can easily install. If you want to run more projects, or you want to harness 96 virtual servers at once for really quick compile times, you'll be able to pay them $5 a month. I expect the most exciting part comes with what more tools they might hook to the back-end for their subscribers. They just raised a cool $4.5 Million from venture capital, so they are doing OK for themselves. I sort of wonder whether they will incubate some kid's project that will replace facebook... I will say that I have no regrets about the path I took out of school. I was never interested in working startup hours, or risking my half of our mortgage on a dream idea. Especially since these big dream ideas often turn into crazy nightmares, don't they?...

On Tuesday, I'm giving a talk at the University's annual tech conference, WatITis, titled Perspectives on co-op employment and user-centered web-application development. This will be interesting. I'm motivated to do this because I really like my job right now, which is largely project management and supervising co-op student programmers. This is certainly a shift from what I was doing a decade ago, which was solo programming and sysadmin work. I'm keen on programming things that make academics' lives easier; and on giving student employees the real-world experience as we do this.

I'm very curious what the people who come to my talk will be looking for. I wish I could ask them in advance.

1) I used to blog regularly, and I miss it. The book of faces has inertia going for it; and I'm not yet pulling the plug there, but I want to try this again, in long form. So welcome! Pull up a chair!

2) In 2012 I started a blog about being Quaker. It's named after work by one of my favourite Quaker poets, and also after one of my favourite Quaker Science Fiction novels. I might also post there, occasionally. We'll see.

3) I became a dual American / Canadian citizen as of June 22, 2007. My partner dan and I moved here from the US in August 2001, so he could take the position of professor of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.

4) When we moved here, I was a self-employed web application developer, for a much-younger Web. My business-partner and I made our first $2,000 out of a meeting at Comdex in 1996. I look back on those days fondly but definitely don't miss them! I worked for various companies doing Web 1.0 stuff; but I really hated chasing down clients for payment. I started working at the University of Waterloo in November 2004, in a job that was roughly 75% my dream job. Since then I've changed bosses six eight times, but still work for the same unit, Computer Science. My job is currently 100% my dream job. The me-of-half-my-lifetime-ago would be astounded. I expect I will stay at the University until I retire.

5) In July 2002, we adopted the cutest puppy in the world. At the time Rover was six weeks old. It was a few weeks later that we discovered that a certain number of people are offended that we named a girl dog Rover. I was really perplexed. I'm told that her cousin Sonia the Samoyed wanted to know if she's a squeak-toy or a snack. She really was the best dog. She lived to a ripe old 16 years, and we miss her all the time.

In August 2021, we adopted the director of the River Institute who is an absolute delight. And very photogenic. River is learning new things every day; even if it is "what is the best way to arrange my blankets for napping?"

I have many books. So does dan. We have moved them all a number of times, and they are rather heavy. We've moved together from Ithaca to Boston to Kitchener/Waterloo, Ontario. We bought a house with lots of room for book-shelves. Both of us come from families with lots of books, and whenever I'm in New York City I always come home with bags from the Strand Bookstore, the most overwhelming used bookstore in the world. Since then, we moved into a condo with fewer bookshelves, and the count of books went down somewhat, but there are still a lot.

I like science fiction. I really enjoy Greg Bear, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson. I enjoyed The Dazzle of Day by Molly Glass, a Quaker sci-fi story set light-years from earth. Also, I very much enjoy Bears Discover Fire by Terry Bisson. If you like offbeat sci-fi I recommend checking out They're Made Out of Meat, a quick short story.

My favorite regular fiction author is Paul Auster; I particularly enjoy re-reading "Mr. Vertigo" and "City of Glass." I'm a big fan of Toni Morrison.

I have a complete collection of Dykes to Watch Out For, not only because their publisher, Firebrand Books, was located across the street from us on the Commons of Ithaca, NY; (and then I was Firebrand's website editor, after we moved to Canada). I like Edward Gorey books too.

In the realm of non-fiction, I read a bit of science, history tending toward history of cities and gay and lesbian history, and more recently, Indigenous studies- historical and modern.

Since I first wrote this section (back in 2002), I significantly reduced the amount of reading I did for fun. But I've gone back to reading a bit more, again, because it makes me happy. If you're interested, I track most of my reading on goodreads.

melted_snowball and I left for NYC on Friday, returning late last night. He was the instigator, saying he really wanted to see Pippin, and after watching the Tony awards video (which you can see on that link right there ^^ ), I had to agree it was worth seeing on Broadway. So, in for a penny in for a pound, we also made plans for Kinky Boots, another Tony winner this year.

We had our next-door teenaged neighbour watch Rover for us, which worked out quite well, compared with boarding for the weekend- R. likes her routines, and our neighbour certainly likes Rover! (And now I notice that Rover has to sniff their door when she comes back from her walks... I think this may have something to do with bacon on the weekend...)

We got to Pearson and discovered our noon-time United flight had been postponed three hours. Well, indefinitely. Well, we might be able to rebook onto the next flight in three hours maybe. Instead of following the gate agent's instructions, I found us another United agent who instead put us and one lucky other guy onto an Air Canada flight at 3pm, and standby for an earlier flight. So the three of us trooped out of the ground-level prop-plane area to our waiting gate, and crossed our fingers, because 3pm was going to make it tight for us to get into the city and to our hotel and to Pippin. dan did his thing and got us from an unlikely standby to a much more likely standby flight- and lo, all three of us got lucky. And found ourselves on the ground at Laguardia just after 2pm. And we made it to our hotel in Hell's Kitchen, Midtown, in fine time.

At the end of this trip, I'm quite appreciative for the chance to run off and do things like this. We both really love Manhattan. We were idly talking about how great it would be to live there; perhaps when we both retire; perhaps for a short period on one of dan's sabbaticals. If this works, it will certainly involve a lot of planning- and being flexible, perhaps more so than with the flight rearrangements...

This was a full, but not overly full, trip.

We stayed in Hells Kitchen, the first time either of us had spent much time on the West Side. It was quite convenient to Broadway, our hotel was comfortable, and there were many good restaurants, including an eponymous Mexican restaurant "Hell's Kitchen" which had amazing fish.

Pippin was eye-poppingly neat. The acrobatics were the most awe-inspiring I've ever seen (see ^^ video). The first act is easily in my short list of favourite first acts of any musical. (Whatever that list is; I haven't given it serious thought except that the first act of "Sunday in the Park with George" is currently at the top. But I digress.) The story feels like it sort of unwinds in the second act. I hadn't seen the show before and wasn't prepared for a bit of storytelling where a certain amount of plot seems to be un-done in order to tell a completely different story in the second act- the story felt stapled together, and the main character AND the main actor started to grate on me a bit. I see from the wikipedia page that it could have been smoother in the second act. But the Leading Player/"Ringleader" character was wonderful throughout, including the very end where she offers Pippin a suitably glorious finale for his life aspirations. All in all, seeing this was my favourite part of the trip.

We had left Saturday mostly unscheduled, with an idea to get half-price tickets for an evening show, and a plan to see my Aunt who lives in Manhattan in the mid-afternoon. d. and I negotiated this one pretty well, also; I was going to see my Aunt while d. went downtown to buy us tickets. She accepted my sending his regrets about not seeing her, even though in advance she had said she would be very offended if he decided not to see her. Anyway, she and I got to visit, she got to show off her local Whole Foods and get me a mid-afternoon snack, and d. got to stay the hell away and do some clothes shopping downtown while ostensibly "on a line" getting us tickets at the TKTS booth.

But I get ahead of myself: In the morning we went to the Guggenheim. The main exhibit was by James Turrell, a Quaker artist and architect who works with light and shadow. In addition to designing a Quaker meeting house in Austin Texas, he's done other arts installations that have felt Quakerly to me, inviting contemplation and inner stillness. His big new work turned the seventy-five foot tall spiral atrium into ... Well, sort of the inside of a mood lamp, with gorgeous curves and subtle slow colour changes. Some 50 people laid back in the atrium looking upward at the colours. It felt meditative to me, even with the occasional conversation nearby. Though: it didn't feel like Quaker Meeting, not by a long shot. But it was at least as meditative as I could hope for in a crowd of New York tourists. I'm not sure what Frank Lloyd Wright would have thought about what they did to his atrium, but I'm grateful for the chance to see the exhibit.

There were also some great abstract art from the Guggenheim's collections, from between World War One and Two- including some great dadaist work, and some great Miró and Klee. These would have been a fine stand-alone reason to visit the museum.

And then we hit the Armory for "WS", a retelling of Snow White by Paul McCarthy. This, like the Turrell, was large-scale, covering the stadium-sized Armory (we once went to an art-sales show there, which took many hours to get through). Unlike the Turrell, it was loud, edgy, and quite profane, and I'm quite surprised they weren't sued by Walt Disney's estate. Every staff person we asked what they thought of it, said they couldn't wait for it to finish- which it was to do the day we saw it. In retrospect, I would have been fine if it had closed just before we were there.

After we met up after my Aunt, d. and I walked down to the High Line, the multi-mile linear park which used to be an elevated train-line. I wanted to like it, as a floating-park-in-midair. But there were too many people, too many rope barriers telling us what was off limits, and too few comfortable benches. All it needed was a roof and it would feel like the train- in the end I think it didn't escape far enough from that which it once was. I hope that it can gradually shift into something more than that, over the decades. Maybe a few exits into adjoining buildings? That would be spiff.

Dan's ticket find for the evening was "Phantom of the Opera", which neither of us had seen, though 20 years ago I listened to the CD quite a lot. Now in its 25th year, it was exactly like the CD, not a note different from what I remembered. And the music, instead of being a fond reminisce, sort of felt late-80s cheezy. Upsides? The costuming was great- particularly, I loved the spectacle of the masquerade ball. I guess it's good to finally see this; just as later this month I'm finally seeing Cats (in Toronto). I hope I like Cats more.

On Sunday, we walked to the Hudson River Park, just a few blocks from the hotel. Now this, this is how to redevelop an urban park. It was less manicured, more varied, and most importantly, not cramped. There was also free kayak instruction and consequently lots of people *in kayaks on the Hudson*. Which felt a bit weird to me, since I always considered the water there to be too dodgy to do anything with. For that matter, the ducks we saw next to the water looked a bit scruffy.

We did quite a lot of walking: after the Hudson park, across midtown to Central Park, lunch near Lincoln Center, and back down Broadway and down to 42nd street to see Kinky Boots. Which was great fun, and deserved their Tony wins. I might buy the album; it felt like a Cindy Lauper CD but in drag. (Which is possibly the same thing).

And then we retrieved our luggage and headed for Newark airport for our evening flight home. And we returned to Rover in our house, which was the best return ever.