In the first few years with no heat, pipes will burst all over town, the freeze-thaw cycle moves indoors, and things stat to seriously deteriorate. Buildings groan as their innards expand and contract; joints between walls and rooflines separate. Where they do, ryan leaks in, bolts rust, and facing pops off, exposing insulation. If the city hasn’t burned yet, it will now. Collectively, New YOrk architecture isn’t as combustible as, say, San Francisco’s incendiary rows of clapboard Victorians. But with no firemen to answer the call, a dry-lightning strike that ignites a decade of dead branches in Central Park will spread flames through the streets. Within two decades, lighting rods have begun to rust and snap, and roof fires leap among buildings, entering panelled offices filled with paper fuel. Gas lines ignite with a rush of flames that blows out windows. Rain and snow blow in, and soon even poured concrete floors are freezing, thawing, starting to buckle. Burnt insulation and charred wood add nutrients to Manhattan’s growing soil cap. Native Virginia creeper and poison ivy claw at walls covered with lichens, which thrive in the absence of air pollution. Red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons nest in increasingly skeletal high-rise structures.
By definition, none of us will ever get to see this (after all, it’s the world without us…), but every winter in Vancouver a miniature version of this plays out:
Stanley Park has a massive pool in it but it’s shuttered for the winter; literally no one enters it between September and May. The ever-resourceful crows recognize this and use the concrete surface as an oyster-opener. They drop the shells from on high then swoop down after they crack on impact. Since no one’s going in the there to clean it up, the shells collect over the winter.
It’s interesting to imagine that in the immediate aftermath of a Vancouver without us the streets near the water might end up filled with a thin coating of broken shells…
Babak Golkar’s Grounds for Standing and Understanding rethinks our everyday relationship to architecture.
At the end of the gallery sits an afghan rug; the patterns have been perfectly extruded to create a speculative cityscape.
To get to the rug you walk through a room full of sharply angled lines. If you’ve been to the gallery before, it feels all wrong: this wall wasn’t here before? Why has the window been blacked out?
And then when you see the rug and its surface, it sort of makes sense. We’re part of the exhibit and we’re looking at ourselves, hidden in the everyday.
Trapped?
It’s not clear, but the recursion gives you pause.
I’m on the road snaking north and east with the traffic. A bumper flies off a car traveling the opposite direction; it happens so fast that maybe it almost didn’t. And now there are deer. Four of them including a few horned bucks. Not too many points but too far away to tell. Can’t turn my head because I’m driving. I note with relief that they’re on the opposite side of a fence.
The radio. I haven’t listened to it in years but now it’s my best friend (there’s no iPhone adapter in this car). As the city recedes so does musical variety. Steve Miller band. Aerosmith. Is that Motley Crue? I can tell by the music that Kingston is approaching. If we ever lose GPS or street signs I’ll still know how if I’m in the St. Lawrence River Valley just by the music. Dear god. Supertramp.
The first flakes of snow are starting to fall. And fall faster. And suddenly the other cars can’t handle the road anymore. A hatchback has backed into the bush. A truck has trucked into the ditch. Wait, there shouldn’t be a tractor trailer parked there. Focus, focus, focus. Don’t watch the snow; it’s like a siren that wants to pull you off the road. Trust that the lanes are there and drive through it. Use the car and drive because the snow can’t last forever.
And it doesn’t. But other folks are tired. The gentle turn in the 401 at Lancaster, designed to wake you up, almost fails for another hatchback: the curve becomes the ditch as he goes straight but the rumble strips wake him up and he recovers in time.
Keep driving. Keep driving.
And new music fills the car. Beats. Rhythm. Not classic rock. A city approaches.
Montreal’s highways are a mystery. I could have sworn I drove down this road five minutes ago. Why is a plane flying directly above me? Didn’t I just turn right three times? Oh wait, there’s the city.
Rocketing towards it in the dark. A 12 kilometre tunnel that slowly fades the radio to fuzz. I pop out beneath a construction site as a light snow falls.
I check in to my hotel. The heat is barely on and I can almost see my breath. Was The Exorcist filmed here? It’s late but I need to do a bit of work. I go to a bar in a hotel; not mine. The bar is big, too big for the crowd in it and the elegant decor feels almost embarrassed. I sit at the bar and sip cocktails named for another city. I return to the hotel and sleep in the cold after the clerk insists that his technique to turn on the heat will work; it doesn’t.
Awake. Wash. Why is the faucet detached from the wall? Why doesn’t the stopper in the sink work? I must remember to never stay here again.
Need breakfast. Saw a Starbucks nearby. Dear god, these are the friendliest people on earth. I didn’t realize how good Dr Dre’s headphones were, Mr. Barista. Thank you for the pin to add to the other ones on my bag.
Meetings. The reason I came. They’re good.
And I’m back on the snake’s lair of highways around Montreal. Concrete crumbles and rebar is exposed. Graffiti appears in random locations.
A train is steaming west like me; I slowly pass it counting cars along the way. The Surete drives at exactly 100 and we all slow pass them just over the limit.
I stop outside Quebec in the fringe of Ontario where the French language is making a last stand. At an unnamed restaurant that’s more like a cafeteria, smoked meat and fries seem to hold the community together. The proprietor is a hustler and tries to upsell me a clam chowder; I politely decline and ask if it’s locally sourced from the St. Lawrence. A wry smile.
Back in the St. Lawrence River Valley and that means more classic rock. Again the Aerosmith. And the Motley Crue. How is it possible that I haven’t heard a Crue song in ten years and then twice in two days. Supertramp, round two. Zeppelin: three different songs. The same damn Steve Miller song as yesterday. And the Five Man Electrical Band‘s Signs. Twice. Must be Cancon.
The 401 is noticeably faster than Quebec’s highway 20. The OPP cruises along at just under 130; oblivious to anyone slower than them but warily eyeing trucks.
I briefly catch American radio. It’s all debt reduction and cash for gold ads. Tired of your silver tarnishing? Have tacky gold from the ’80s? Our buyers have over one million dollars to spend this weekend. Head to the Ramada in Messina. I picture an over-lit room with a pile of ugly jewelry in the middle; barkers surrounding it and handing out bills to nervous men and their depressed wives. The reality is probably more banal.
The first rumblings of classical music and hip hop. Toronto approaches. This ride is almost over. Traffic thickens but doesn’t noticeably slow. Two lanes become three, then four and the bifurcate into “express” and “collectors” that move at indistinguishable speeds. Signs overhead predict the future of the road and cars jockey for position.
And then it’s over. My exit appears. I’m off the highway and home and everything slows to a stop.
It’s that time of year again: to reflect on what I did or didn’t do in the prior year and attempt to chart a plan for the current one.
What were my goals for 2011? According to this blog post, I had four:
Launch my own company. This one happened. Placeling is up and running – and if you own an iPhone and haven’t downloaded it yet, your first new year’s resolution should be to do so.
Meet a lot of interesting people. This one also happened, although not quite as I expected. By launching my own company, I’ve met a tonne of interesting people; now I need to figure out how to continue this in the new year
Do less, better. Yup, again, this happened. I focused on a few things in 2011 and it worked
Run a 3:10 marathon. Close, but no cigar. Ran a 3:15 in May. Tried again in October but ran a 3:18 instead. I need to retool how I run if I’m going to ever do this
And I had a secret fifth goal: start a family. And this one worked: my son was born in November.
So, what’s up for 2012?
Well, there are some unspoken resolutions: I’ve got to be a good dad, a great husband and a good CEO at my company. But those are tablestakes; you don’t really get any points for doing them as they’re expected.
Here – in no particular order – is what I’m going to try in 2012:
Manage stress better: find a way to do yoga once a week plus one of running/biking/swimming/boxing. Cook more and make the meals healthier. I hit a low point in November where I was gritting my teeth; need to learn to be better at managing stress
Be more creative: I’m going to finally use all the Arduino-related stuff I bought a few years ago: Wen and I are going to make a robot. I’m going to cook a new meal every week. I’m going to code for at least 30 days straight to really learn Rails. I need to blog more
Not buy a book: I love books, but I’ve got a stack of unread books I’ve accumulated over the past few years. I’m going to read them all before I buy a new one. Heuristics and Biases: this is your year (NOTE: I’m talking to Wendy as I write this and she already predicts I fail; the gauntlet has been dropped)
Get hyper-organize: I signed up for a year of Evernote plus I’m using Mint. We’ll see how this goes, but I’m going to try and get everything into the cloud and see if it changes how I think/behave
There you go. The 2012 list. Check in a year from now to see how it goes.
I just got back from my second trip to San Francisco and Silicon Valley in two weeks. It’s been a whirlwind; some thoughts and photos.
0.
Above all: I have the best wife in the world. We had our first child three days before I had to leave for the first trip and she still encouraged me to go (note that I say “encourage”, not “did not discourage me” from going. Big difference).
1.
If you go to work for a tech company that’s run by the original founder, be prepared to be micromanaged. Steve Jobs was legendary for his focus on individual pixels, but he’s not the only one. Larry Page personally approves every acquisition by Google – even if it’s for a million bucks (they’ve got $40 billion in cash reserves). The other Larry – Ellison – of Oracle has to approve any purchase order over $100,000. And on the Kindle, Jeff Bezos is getting into the single pixel approval scene.
And as a founder, I can’t fault any of them. There are some things you’re never going to give up control of.
2.
As you get closer to Silicon Valley, you’re encouraged to think bigger. This is a refreshing break from Vancouver where you’re encouraged to think small.
When I moved to Vancouver in January and was starting to get going, I met an “entrepreneurship mentor” who told me that the best things in the world are “niche businesses: find a nice little space with no competition and print money.” Nice idea, but if you’re building a web-based business almost certainly not going to happen.
Moreover, I’ve met lots of folks in Vancouver who are aiming to build a small business that could achieve a $10 million exit. More power to them: that would be a life-changing event for the entrepreneurs and could happen – as long as you’re building niche software; no way you can do that with software that’s going to be on every person’s device/used by millions/etc.
We met a VC in the valley who told us that he’s frustrated with going up to Vancouver because people think so small.
And frankly, the odds of failing are pretty much similar depending upon what size company you’re trying to build, so in my world, think big.
When you get to San Francisco, you meet folks who are thinking bigger. To them, success is defined by a company that will be worth $50-100 million in the next five years.
And then you get down to Sand Hill Road in Menlo park where, to paraphrase Linda Evangelista, no one gets out of bed for less than $100 million.
3.
For the uninitiated, Sand Hill Road is where almost all the VCs in Silicon Valley have offices. It’s a tiny little strip of land and it controls billions of dollars of money to be invested; likely more than the rest of the world combined.
When you get there, it’s a remarkably uninspiring place. Think taupe, two-storey office parks that all looked like they were designed by the same insipid architect. Most of the offices themselves are just empty space: meeting rooms and almost ostentatiously large offices. Most of the buildings are shared by many different firms and, curiously, the bathrooms tend to be outside the offices themselves. (I can’t help but wonder if the perk of partnership is the key to a secret indoor bathroom).
It’s only the cars in the parking lot that give you a clue as to the value of what takes place here. Don’t be surprised to see a Ferrari or a Tesla roadster – although, on average, there are fewer luxury cars than I see crossing the Burrard Bridge on a daily basis (why are there so many luxury cars in Vancouver? And why are they driven so badly?).
Also, 3000 Sand Hill road is probably the place in America where you’re most likely to see a billionaire. One of the highlights of my trip was watching one tell off a friend of mine. Upon asking a guy who he thought was a nobody (but unbeknownst to him was one of the most successful investors ever) how much a Tesla roadster costs, he was zinged “If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford one.” It was funny (although maybe you had to be there).
4.
Silicon Valley in general is remarkably banal; it actually feels like a giant strip mall mixed into the suburbs. Only occasionally does a crazy high tech campus pop out at you and remind you that, oh yeah, everything piece of technology you use both today and in the future is created here.
5.
Biggest piece of advice I got: move to San Francisco. People outside the area think you’re crazy to start a company anywhere but the Valley. Time will tell if this is right or not.
6.
On my flight out we flew over the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge was sticking out of the fog which spilled out to Alcatraz and then evaporated, leaving the city centre to glow in the sun. Incredible view; wished I’d had a window seat to take a photo.
7.
And now, some photos. Traveling with an iPhone and some running shoes means that you can actually see a lot of things – although just from the outside.
Whenever I find something I might want to buy, I park in on one of my many Amazon wish lists. I use their Web services both personally and professionally. And I’ve owned a Kindle for years; it’s the only eReader I’ll use.
But I’m frustrated with Amazon as they’re missing a golden opportunity with the Kindle.
Part of the reason is that Amazon is hard to pin down as a company. Most people think they’re for shopping; more sophisticated pundits think of them as the “platform for buying anything.” But then how does that explain their web services? The tablet?
I like to think of them as a scaling company. They started by scaling retail. Before Amazon, if you wanted to buy most things, you went to a store and bought what was available; some folks skipped the store visit and bought from the limited set of items available in a catalogue.
Post-Amazon, we expect to be able to buy anything across any category and have it fulfilled by Amazon. With the legendary Long Tail, Amazon scaled retail.
Enter their Web services. Having built an incredible set of online services for internal use – and enabling themselves to scale quickly – Amazon realized that they could sell these same services externally and help others scale. Now there’s not a single startup that doesn’t use Amazon’s web services for elastic storage and computing; why would you waste time building your own cloud when you can use Amazon’s? You would be wasting time that could otherwise be focused on growing your business; Amazon helps your company scale.
Which brings is to the Kindle. How does the Kindle reader and the Fire tablet fit in?
A cursory analysis would suggest that they don’t: they’re just trying to fight the iPad and maybe scale the number of books you can read. But that doesn’t sound like a compelling narrative.
What I hope that Amazon will do is use the Kindle to scale me.
Huh?
One of the biggest problems of this age is information overload. Imagine if the Kindle became the platform to manage this and therefore to help you basically scale your brain.
Here’s how it might work.
Every time you read an ebook you highlight the passages you like and see those others like. You can do this today.
Now imagine that this all lives in a website matched to your profile.
From this website (or an associated app) you can upload a PDF and its converted into an ebook-style form that you can highlight; popular passages by others are automatically highlighted as well.
Now Amazon builds a web browser that lets you bookmark web pages and clip/highlight sections and store them in this new “Kindle Brain” (they’ve already built a browser…).
Throw in the ability to add notes and make everything searchable (notes, clippings and files) and you’ve got something interesting. You’re starting to scale my brain.
But to really scale my brain, Amazon would use their awesome recommendation technology on top of all this. Every item in my Kindle Brain would contain related items that I’d saved, that others had saved and related products from Amazon’s database. I can now start to see the web that connects everything I ever learned; patterns I would otherwise miss become obvious.
Now take it even further. Amazon has built an incredible database of my interests. Every day it goes out and summarizes everything I should read, all the time suggesting related products. And then they write their own search engine so that every time I search for something, it searches both the web and my Kindle Brain.
Interesting to see two of the Big 3 getting into car sharing, but both of these pale in comparison with what Daimler is doing with its Car2Go service. The word “disruption” gets thrown around these days like it’s the new “hero”, but Car2Go is genuinely disruptive.
Before explaining why it’s disruptive, a quick primer on how it works. If you live in a Car2Go city (San Diego, Austin and Vancouver in North America), you pull out your iPhone and find a nearby car. You go to the car and start your rental by tapping a car against the window. You then pay by the minute, hour or daily maximum – whichever is cheapest for you.
The system is disruptive for three reasons:
1) You get incredible peace of mind: you don’t pay for gas or insurance so you never have to think about the car itself.
2) You can park the car anywhere (technically anywhere with permit parking or select reserved spots). This is incredible: point-to-point driving; no more returning the car somewhere (GM & Ford – pay attention to this).
3) The price is about a third of a taxi and comparable to the bus.
The price of the car starts at $0.33 per minute, which sounds high until you actually look at your bill.
I frequently get a car to drive to/from work. It takes as little as six minutes and is never more than about eleven. The bus costs $2.50 and a taxi is $12.00 plus tip. If I meet my wife downtown for dinner it’s cheaper to drive home than to take the bus. Even though a ride may cost a bit more than the bus, after I price in my time, the scale tips to Car2Go (even if I have to walk a few blocks to pick up a car).
Here are my rides from last month (your riding history is available online):
I used a car 16 times last month and it cost me $129.32. That’s an average ride price of just over $8.00.
To put that in perspective, to lease a Smart Car (the same ones used by Car2Go) would cost at least $159/month. My car-owning friends tell me that insurance in BC is about $60/month. And don’t get me started on gas or parking.
I’m saving over 50% versus what I’d otherwise pay, easily a couple of grand a year.
The system isn’t perfect. My driving is being tracked and who knows what that could lead to. Also, as more people discover the service I’m realizing that if I work past 7 pm I’m in a Car2Go dead zone:
But these are small prices to pay.
As a business, it sounds like the service is taking off. Within 100 days of launching in Vancouver, they’d signed up 5,000 people doing more than 4,000 rentals a week at an average rental period of 30-50 minutes. That’s not a great business yet – maybe $3M a year in revenue – but the growth is meteoric: usage is up 4X since launch. This could be a serious business soon.
Car2Go doesn’t release any profit info for Vancouver, but given that every car is identical (and that parent Daimler is also the manufacturer), they’ve easily got the lowest fleet costs of any ride sharing service.
If you’re lucky it’ll be coming to your city soon; it’s definitely changed how I live in mine.
I work in an industry that prides itself on failing fast. And so Internets, let me share with you a story of my own personal failure.
This is the Cortona 12L Swing Out Wastebin:
You’ll notice that it sits in my sink rather than underneath it where normal garbage cans are found.
And this is where my story of failure begins. For, despite my engineering degree, I could not figure out how to install the damn thing.
I thought the instructions might help, but they seem to be translated from Chinese by someone who only knows Urdu. That might explain why there’s a reference to an elusive bracket #4 that’s nowhere to be found (I’ll be dreaming of you tonight mysterious bracket #4).
Or perhaps that’s why the letter B is backwards on the ‘helpful’ template they provide.
Anyways, after a little over an hour of this I’m admitting defeat. If anyone’s looking for a teasingly-good-looking-but-ultimately-useless waste bin, just let me know. I can hook you up.
In the meantime, all is not lost as this ridiculous experience has at least moved me to blog again.
On the banks of the Fraser River, behind a massive distribution warehouse and just off the flight path to the airport lives a Vancouver summer tradition: the Richmond Night Market. It’s a medley of Asian traditional meets county fair where dim sum and hawker stands replace candy floss and ferris wheels. Wen and I had to go.
For us, the main feature was the food. We revelled in deep-fried fun. Taiwanese chicken:
Japanese yams and onions (coated in teriyaki mayo…):
The skewers and cups were a nice touch.
But that wasn’t enough dough-crusted fun. From there it was on to octopus balls:
Here’s how they’re made, in case you’ve ever wondered how they make them round:
And then some battered frozen lychees for dessert. The difference between the frozen centers and fried shell is great:
It wasn’t all deep-fried though, we also had roasted corn – although we removed any healthiness by slathering it in butter and then various cheese and salt toppings:
Wen also got some fresh-squeeze orange juice which came with this curious lid freshly stamped on it:
We were stuffed and we didn’t get a chance to try the duck crepes, assorted noodles or dip into the dim sum.
While the food was the main event for us, there was also a huge market where you could indulge your fantasies of buying cheap sundries from overseas. Apparently Angry Birds has been turned into a series of plush toys that now battle Mario et al. for kids’ attention. And, if you desire, you can now change your eye colour before hitting out a night on the town:
It was a great time and felt like a North American-ized version of another market I was in just over a year ago…
Right now I’m reading Empires of Light. It’s the fascinating tale of how the world was electrified. Not “electrified” in the sense of “the Beatles are coming to town!” but rather, literally, why I can flip a switch and the lights go on in my house.
This tale could be utterly pedantic – for instance, “first we wired up Wall Street, then we went up 1st Avenue”, etc. but it’s not. Rather, it’s the story of all the people behind this massive undertaking: their dreams, their quirks, their greed and the alliances and factions between them.
The central characters are Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Edison is the quintessential scrappy American inventor while Tesla is the refined, sophisticated European scientist. I absolutely loved this paragraph where the author writes about what each thought of the other:
…Far worse, believed Tesla, was Edison’s approach to science: “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search…His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of his labor.” Edison, in turn, dismissed Tesla as a “poet of science” whose ideas were “magnificent but utterly impractical.”
I love the stereotypes they throw at each other (and this is in the 1880′s). For what it’s worth, Tesla’s ideas won, but it took American money and business acumen to make them win – plus he died broke. Edison’s technology lost the war, but lives on (it powers the computer I’m writing this on) and so does his company: General Electric was formed out of Edison’s many holdings.
Finally saw EyesWideShut only 12+ years after it's release. My confusion over its meaning led me to this awesome screed http://t.co/xF0e9u0r42 years ago
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