For me Swiftsure began on the week before as I scrambled to get all the gear together for the race. A life jacket with a harness, a tether, as well as a water activated light attached to my life jacket. Lots of little things which all make lots of sense, but were unexpected when I excitedly signed up for the race the month before. With all my gear in my duffel bag, I boarded Big Ben the night before the race to avoid Tour de Victoria road closures that would make it difficult to get to the boat on time in the morning.  Captain Jim McLaughlin (of the Oak Bay Sailing School)and most of the other 6 members slept on board the 50’ Benetau Oceanis that night.

Everyone was up by 7am, and after a light breakfast we had a brief discussion about how we would start the race, and who would be responsible for which tasks. Jim II was charged with setting up a Helm and Navigation rotation for our crew of 8: one hour on navigation, followed by one hour on the helm.  This meant that everyone would be able to get some sleep during the night if the race went long.  With a forecast of winds of 10-20 knots, there was some talk of getting home for a late dinner that night, but when we motored out of the Victoria harbour at 8:30am, winds were light and stayed light as we arrived at the start line just off Clover Point.

The first groups of boats started their races beginning at 10am. Our “Juan de Fuca” race started a bit late at 11am.  Unfortunately when the cannon fired for our start, the wind died all together, and we were drifting backward with the flooding current of 4 knots.  For about half an hour we struggled with the sails, trying to move into a position with better wind, but we continued to drift backwards with five other boats.  The yachts with spinnakers held their own at Clover Point, and slowly started to make headway at the current slowed. Finally we decided we’d better drop anchor before we ran into Discovery Island.

We dragged our anchor for 10 minutes before pulling it up and lashing the rode from our spare anchor to our primary anchor. Our lashed up “extended” anchor solution worked, and we came to a stop about one kilometer north of Discovery Island.  There was still no wind, so we talked, drank a beer or two, and kept tabs on the Champions League final on our iPhones until about 3pm (yes, Barcelona did win).  With the wind rising, and the flood current slackening, we weighed anchor and started making our way back to the start line.  We passed the mouth of Victoria’s inner harbour a 5pm, which was slack tide, and got a close up look at the side of a very large freighter passing by.

We now we had the ebb current helping to push us the 75km towards Clallam Bay at the base of the Olympic Mountains in Washington State. The winds remained steady until about midnight. We were able to enjoy a completely clear night sky as we slowly beat our way up the median of the shipping channel with the 5k wind wafting directly down the strait.  The night sky was amazing bright without the city lights to obscure them.

I took my second shift at the helm and navigation station between 4am – 6am. Things were quiet and uneventful as we beat windward, zig zagging back and forth the median between the shipping lanes in the strait of Juan de Fuca.  My iPad with it’s Navionics software was great to have with us in the cockpit, so we could easily keep tabs on exactly where we were. Visibility was great for night time, and thankfully we didn’t see or come close to any freighters during the night. By 7am we were able to see Clallam Bay where we had to round the marker before heading home. The closer we got to the boat marking the turning point, the lighter the winds became. This is when the talk started about possibly not making it home until some time Monday morning.

As we rounded the marker boat, just 100 meters off the shore of Clallum Bay, the crew of the boat threw us a zip lock bag full of chocolate bars, to help us keep our energy up before eating breakfast.  Unfortunately with a headland blocking the wind, it took us over an hour to get out of the bay and into the strait where there was a bit more wind. As we were inching our way out of the bay I decided to go below and get a bit of sleep.

When I woke an hour later I could hear the diesel engine running and could tell that we were moving much more quickly through the water than we had been all night.  At first I thought that we had decided to motor home because of the light winds.  When I finally came to and asked what was going on, it turns out that we’d killed the house batteries using the lights and electronics during the previous 24 hours, and were running the engine in order to recharge them.

The good news was that we were now moving much more quickly, and were heading towards home on an almost direct broad reach rather than tracking back an forth into the wind as we had been doing on the way out. The forecast was now predicting winds of 25 to 35 knots in the late afternoon, so we were anxious to get home before things got too windy.

The wind did start to pick up as the afternoon progressed, so we progressively furled in our Genoa and main sail. By the time I took the helm at 3pm, the wind was blowing and, and Big Ben was twisting in the water as sizable swells from out of our rear starboard quarter pushed us towards home. It was hard work struggling with the helm, trying to keep Big Ben from looking like a drunken sailor.  I felt a little bit better to see Jim struggling with them when he took the helm after me.

We crossed the finish line at the entrance to Victoria’s inner harbour at about 4:30pm, after almost 30 hours of continuous sailing.  We would not have believed it before the start of the race that it would take us 22 hours to get out to Clallum bay, and then only 7 hours to make the return trip.

Our check-in with race officials. As one of our crew handed over the GPS tracking device the official asked why the GPS case was wet. We replied that we thought that they’d appreciate it if we washed the puke off the device before we returned it.  There was a nod of approval, and then they moved on to the last bit of official business before our race experience was officially over.

After we’d tied Big Ben up, the pizza and our spouses arrived, and we enjoyed some time in the cockpit eating pizza, drinking and telling stories about our 30 hour Swiftsure adventure. Swiftsure this year, and the Victoria Maui Race next year?

The bottom line from Science Based Medicine:

“Rather than jumping on the low-carb bandwagon before his ideas are properly tested, the precautionary principle suggests that it might be more reasonable to follow a moderate diet like the Mediterranean diet (or to follow Michael Pollan‘s stunningly simple advice to ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’), to limit ‘empty calories’from simple carbohydrates like sugar, to eat a variety of vegetables and fruits, to choose low calorie density foods that are more filling, to limit meat intake, to limit salt, and to keep looking for behavioral and environmental ways to change our calories-in/calories-out balance.”

Good advice that I’m going to try to follow… although some of those empty calories (especially in chocolate form) are so difficult not to give into every now and again!

• For manual jobs, more money = higher performance.
• For knowledge workers, once they have enough money not to worry about money anymore, more money = lower performance.
• So what motivates knowledge workers then? Autonomy (or self direction), Mastery (getting better at what you do) & Purpose (does what you’re doing make a difference?)

It’s a great video, I highly recommend watching it!

What digital assests are we talking about?  Things like:

• Online Account Information: Facebook, Blog’s, websites, Email, and Shopping sites.
• Hardware: including computers, thumb drives, backup drives and DVD’s… Any hardware that you have personal data stored on.

What got me thinking about this?  I saw a thought provoking article on the American Bar Association’s web site, called Estate Planning for your Digital Assets, by Dennis Kennedy.  Here are 3 important steps taken out of his somewhat lengthy article:

Step 1. Inventory Your Digital Assets: After the inventory is complete, put the list (including user names and passwords) in a secure place, possibly in a safety deposit box along with your will.

Step 2. Identify Appropriate Help: Let one or more people know about your inventory, so they know it exists and where to look for it when it will be needed.

Step 3. Provide Instructions:  You may want friends on social networks like Facebook or Twitter to be notified of your passing.  Make sure you’ve provided a message to post (along with the passwords you’ve already written down). You may want to close up your blog with a parting message, or pass along specific information to individuals (like photos or journals).

We know that their motto is “Do no Evil”, but now that they are a public company, their only real duty as a corporation is to enhance shareholder value.  If down the road Google falls on leaner times, and they have to choose between enhancing shareholder value and protecting the public’s privacy, I’m not sure how well our privacy will be protected.  I hope that they’ll do the right thing, but without strong regulation and threat of serious penalties, I’m not sure that who ever is in charge of running Google at that point in time will do the right thing.

Here’s a couple of great lines from the article:

Responding to recent public outcries over its handling of private data, search giant Google offered a wide-ranging and eerily well-informed apology to its millions of users Monday.

“We would like to extend our deepest apologies to each and every one of you,” announced CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking from the company’s Googleplex headquarters. “Clearly there have been some privacy concerns as of late, and judging by some of the search terms we’ve seen, along with the tens of thousands of personal e-mail exchanges and Google Chat conversations we’ve carefully examined, it looks as though it might be a while before we regain your trust.”

Google expressed regret to some of its third-generation Irish-American users on Smithwood between Barlow and Lake.

Added Schmidt, “Whether you’re Michael Paulson who lives at 3425 Longview Terrace and makes $86,400 a year, or Jessica Goldblatt from Lynnwood, WA, who already has well-established trust issues, we at Google would just like to say how very, truly sorry we are.”

-http://www.theonion.com/content/news/google_responds_to_privacy

On my first shopping trip I was looking for toner for my Lexmark 250DN.  At Staples, the toner I needed cost $150!  Can you believe that!  I only paid $250 for the printer, and now they want to charge me $150 for the toner.  A quick check at Amazon.ca showed the exact same toner costing $105.  I ended up saving $45 dollars. If I had just purchased it directly from Amazon in the first place, I would have saved  another $5 or more in gas for the trip to the store.

The second “in store, online purchase” incident took place last night.  Our son had asked us to purchase Assassin’s Creed 2 for the xBox 360 for him.  At EB Games in our local shopping mall, they were asking $70 for the game.  My iPhone informed me that Amazon.ca was selling the game for $57.  The kicker was that they didn’t even have the game in stock, so I simply purchased it from Amazon.ca as we walked away from the store.  I later learned that if you purchased the game from the EB Games online store you would only have to pay $60 (plus shipping… no shipping charges with the Amazon purchase).

New iPhone programs are making this type of comparison shopping easier and easier. RedLaser for example lets you scan bar codes and look up pricing (american pricing only for the time being).  SnapTell is another program that allows you to take pictures of products and get Amazon.com pricing for them, along with product reviews.  The product review can be very helpful, especially if you are not very familiar with the product you are trying to purchase.

There is real value in being able to go to a store and consult with someone about the purchase you are going to make.  There is also real value in being able to take something home right a way, if you need it in a hurry.  If I’m not in a hurry, and I feel that the price difference is too great, I for one am not afraid to walk away from a store and make my purchase online.

GoAnimate.com is an entertainment website that enables the simple creation of unique computer animated stories, satires and sentiments that can be shared with the entire online community.

Historically, the creation of animation required specific skills, limiting those who can express their creativity. We designed the Go!Animate application to allow users to create animations without drawing talent or a technical understanding of advanced software such as Flash. The site provides users with a library of interesting characters, backgrounds, props, sound effects and music for use in creating their own unique animations. Creators can customize their animations with a number of tools and features that allow them to create truly unique works of expression.

Enjoy!

It cost $20 on Amazon.com, and can hold a fairly good wad of cash (up to 30 bills), plus up to 10 credit cards (5 on the credit card side and up to 5 on the cash side).  Here are some bullet points from their Amazon.com ad:

• Polished Stainless Steel
• Double-sided
• Securely holds up to 5 cards on the credit card side
• Can hold up to 5 additional cards on the money clip side
• Ultra-thin and light weight
• Personalize your Smart Money Clip with engraving

After you’ve finished your run, you can see the route you took on Google Maps on your iPhone, or go to your computer and log on to RunKeeper.com and see a more detailed map of the route you ran. The map on the website is excellent, complete with a graph showing your speed during your run, as well as the altitude you were at.  For me this clearly shows how I slow down when going down hills, and how I speed up at the end of the run as I push to the finish line. Click here for a view of a run I did a few months ago.

There are both free and paid versions of RunKeeper.  The free version has most of the features of the paid version, but $10 is not a high price for this excellent application if you end up using it a lot.  Have run running!

Hairy Cell Leukemia (HCL) is very treatable, but because so few people contract it, individual doctors and oncologists don’t see it often or at all during the course of their careers. I have a wonderful medical team behind me, but I suspect that I am only one of two people that they have treated with this disease. They are busy people with limited time during the day for research into my disease of interest.

The internet allows me to connect with communities of people who are also fighting the disease, and with other medical professionals who specialize in it’s treatment. For HCL in particular I’ve found a great online bulletin board, called Rob’s User Friendly HCL Site and Chat Room. The support there is wonderful. When my blood test numbers recently starting trending downwards, I of course consulted with my doctor, but I also shared with the HCL board. I received support from the board, and also some advice from a Doctor who is a regular on the board (a GP who is himself is a HCL survivor). I also received private messaged pointing me to journal articles that related to what I’m going through at this point in time. I now have two or three thing to consult with my doctor about, including an article from the Journal of Clinical Oncology that talks about different chemotherapy strategies that have been tried over the years with HCL.

Without the internet, and the communities that it enables, I would know much less about the disease I’m battling, and would be not nearly as well equipped to discuss different treatment options with my doctor. So after not visiting Rob’s User Friendly HCL board for a couple of years now (since my last round of chemotherapy), it looks like I’ll become more of a regular now that my old friend is back with me. By the end of next week when my bone marrow biopsy results are back I’ll have a better idea of what treatments, if any, I have to look forward to.

For now I’m feeling great. This past week, I’ve played soccer twice, gone mountain biking with my sons, and played a little touch rugby. Life is good. I have much to be grateful for. I better get going though, my ride to the hospital for my bone marrow biopsy at 10:30am is about to leave.

Comiqs.com is a free web site that allows you to upload your photos and create comic-style stories. You can see in the photo the right that some proud parent took a picture of their cute baby and then added some comic strip style text boxes. It is a lot of fun to play around with.

I’ve been using ComicLife (made by the same company that has created comiqs.com), on my Mac for a couple of years now, and have loved it. If you want to do more comic-style stores I highly recommend paying the $24.95 to buy comic life (there is a Windows version now as well).

Here are a few of “cartoons” that I created with Comic Life… It was a great was to remember a fun trip to Moab I had with my boys and Mitch Massey and his boys:

• Adventures in Moab – Part 1
• Klondike Bluffs! – Part 2
• Gemini Bridges – Part 3
• Unsettled Weather – Part 4

Enjoy!

If anyone is interested in doing some screen casting, but do not like the free web based program Screencast-o-matic, Techsmith is now giving away an older version of Camtasia Studio (it is one of the better screen cast programs around, with plenty of bells and whistles). For the download links and information, please go to the Downloadsquad website. It’s fun to play with and they say you can upgrade to the latest version for half price.

As the systems administrator at the UVic Faculty of Law every semester I see one or two students who have lost everything… documents, pictures, music… Everything on their laptop computers. The look on their faces is unmistakable. They come to me looking for help. Unfortunately more often than not I have to deliver the news to them that they have lost all their data. Typically the the data is lost because of a hard drive failure (a recent Google report seems to indicate that newer high density hard drives are becoming less reliable not more reliable). Recovery is sometimes possible (just ask my good friend Mike Binstead), but it can often be quite expensive ($1,000 or more) if the problem is severe enough that a hard drive recovery company needs to be involved.

The most recent student who came in to my office with a troubled look on her face, just had her laptop stolen, and did not have any of her data backed up. She lost everything except for things she had e-mailed other people (she uses a webmail program, so her e-mail was not lost).

Last week I heard another sad story from publishing company that I’ve been working with. One of their branch offices had a fire which destroyed all six of their computers. The person in the office I’ve been working with most closely didn’t have any of her data backed up and lost everything. Two others in the office had backups, but stored them at the office, so their computers and their backups were both destroyed (just because you back things up doesn’t make your backup system full proof).

I know a number of data loss stories from Hurricane Katrina… I won’t tell them here, but I’m sure you can imagine what happened to many people and companies who were not backing up their data, and keeping some of the backups stored off site.

The biggest complaint I hear about backups is that people feel they are a pain to do. I agree! Most backup systems are a pain. If a backup system requires human intervention on a regular basis, it is probably not going to work well. Up until recently I backed up my home computer by burning the Data to DVDs. I have enough pictures and videos on our computer now that it took 3 DVDs to back everything up. It was a pain to do, and as a consequence, I ended up backing things up once every two or three months … not very impressive for a systems administrator.

At the Faculty of Law we backup everything on our servers nightly using a little piece of software on the servers that backs all the changed data to a central server on campus. The next day, a copy of the backed up data is shipped to a storage location on the other side of the country. I sleep better knowing that if the Law School Burns down, all our data is recoverable.

I recently started using a similar system for my laptop and home computer to backup all the data. It is Wonderful easy to use service, and for up to 2GB of data it is Free! The company is called Mozy Online Backup. If you have more than 2GB of data, you can pay $5 per month to store Unlimited Data. I am happily paying $5 per month for my unlimited account. Mozy works on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX (the Mac client is currently in beta testing, but I am happy with it’s performance on my laptop). Here are the features I love about the Mozy backup service:

1. It requires no intervention to backup. Just setup an account, install the software, select what you want to backup, and then just let it run!
2. It backs up your changed files every 3 hours, and keeps different versions of the same document for 30 days.
3. It stores your data off site at a different location, so in the case of a natural disaster or fire, your backup will be safe.
4. It is cost effective. Free for up to 2GB (which will work perfectly for UVic Law students) and $5 per month for unlimited backups.
5. The data is encrypted before it is sent to the server so that it is secure while it is being transfered over the internet, and while it is being stored on the Mozy server.
6. Mozy just signed up General Electric as a customer, to backup their systems world wide. A nice vote of confidence in Mozy.

I encourage everyone who does not have a good, reliable backup system in place to take a hard look at Mozy for your personal backup solution. I’ll be installing it on the two computers are my parents house the next time I visit.

My best learning experiences were with teachers who were excited and passionate about their subject. Ask around your school to find out who are the most exciting and passionate teachers. When you find that list, go take their course, it does not matter what it is. – Tim O’Reilly

The best grade I received in my University career was in Probability & Statistics 151. Before taking that class I has consistently done poorly to average all my math related courses. Stats 151 was different. It was different because the professor was excited about the subject, and had a knack for using interesting gambling and farm examples to help illustrate concepts as he taught the class (some of the farm examples were a bit off the wall). Inspired by the “A” grade I received in his class I took one more statistics course, and with a more average teacher, I received a more average grade.

So I repeat the advice from Tim O’Reilly:

Find out who the best teachers are at your school (or in the faculty if you’re at a University), and then take classes from those teachers, no matter what the subject!

• A plasma display (ideally 42" or larger).
• A video switch for students to plug their laptops into.
• A table that allows 2 to 4 students to face the display

What typically happens is that a group of 2 to 4 students will plug their laptops into the video switch. As the group works on their project they can in turn display what is on their laptop screen on the Plasma screen so that the whole group can look at it and comment on what the person is working on (Here are our instructions for students on how to use the equipment).

The feedback from students has been positive, although some have mentioned that they would prefer to have the equipment in a group study room so that they could keep their discussion private.

What we have done is basically a "poor cousin’s" version of what MIT and Stanford are doing. Instead of a video switch, they use a dedicated PC with server software loaded on it. This software allows the networked laptops to share the Plasma screen between all the computers at the same time. The laptop screens are not shared, but as the users move their laptop cursor to the top of their laptop screen, the cursor magically appears on the Plasma screen… and all 4 laptop uses can interact on the plasma screen at the same time if they want.

The software that enables this collaboration is called TeamSpot. There is a server component that runs on a dedicated PC which is connected to the plasma screen. Each laptop needs to have TeamSpot client software installed to work properly (or at all).

Google has announced a contest where the team that creates the best 3D version of their university or college campus with sketchup wins a trip to Google headquarters in Mountain View California. Very cool. I just wish I was back in College. I’ll see if my Son wants to do his school, and submit it. As a 9 year old he might be able to impress the judges even if his "campus" is a little smaller then most.

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• 94% of incoming students own laptops, and 98% of those laptops are wireless.
• 87% have high speed internet at home, and only 1% do not have any form of internet access from home.
• The average purchase price for laptops dropped again to $1358 (down from over $2000 in 2004).
• See the last page of the report for student comments (page 3).

I guess it’s not surprising that wireless capabilities on student laptops is approaching 100% given that you cannot buy a laptop now without a wireless card built in. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed large numbers of students using skype for their long distance calls, rather than land lines, cell phones, and/or calling cards. I wonder if that will change now that the "Skype-out" to regular phones is not free. It is interesting that laptop prices continue to fall at a fairly steady rate, which in part is helping increase the number of students who can afford to arrive at school with a laptop. The only question is what are they doing with their laptops in class

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Well, I can tell you that’s sage advice. It’s great when people make contributions in the form of ideas and proposals, but it’s even better when they’re written for busy people. Here are some examples:

• Making important points up front
• Clear taxonomy of headings, and lots of them
• Writing clearly and succinctly
• No long, unbroken paragraphs or tracts of text.
• Preferring bulleted lists with clear points to paragraphs.
• Use of emphasis in formatting to make important things clear

These days, I find I don’t have a lot of time to read everything carefully, so the better structured a document is, the more I get out of it. I frequently find I miss entire subsections or points of documents, even when there’s relatively little text, because of incomplete organization. My eyes definitely glaze over when i see a large block of unbroken text with few headings. At the very least, it’d be very helpful if folk would structure their thoughts into: "Problem" and "Proposed Solution".

Before you post, stop and think if you’ve written something in a way that’ll allow others to get the most out of it. Communicating your ideas effectively means you may get a clearer and quicker response from other people.

The increasing volume of digital information with which researchers’ work is making the task of finding, capturing, organizing and eventually collaborating with digital data more difficult.  Electronic information in multiple formats sitting in multiple silos of data present a challenge to researchers who have difficulty finding a specific piece of information in a timely fashion.

The two major benefits that come from effective knowledge management and knowledge sharing are an increase in the speed and quality of the research being performed. Less time is spent looking for information that has already been identified or created, so that more time can be spent in analyzing and associating disparate pieces of information. Modern electronic tools make possible collaboration between colleagues that in the past would have been difficult, expensive, or impossible.  Voice and video conferencing over high speed research networks can facilitate real time collaboration at a fraction of the cost in time and money of flying members of a research team to a central location. On line collaboration tools can greatly facilitate group document creation and editing, and when it comes time to polish the final product, real time document editing makes it possible for groups scattered around the world to review a document together and make edits together.

Once researchers have the appropriate software to manage their data and help them collaborate, they need to make sure that they also have the appropriate hardware and infrastructure to take full advantage of the benefits the new software will give them. Access to high speed research networks is a must for video and voice conferencing, as well as real time document editing. An average desktop computer with two monitors, instead of the traditional single monitor, will give researchers a 10% + boost in productivity. Finally a web camera and good quality head phone/microphone rounds out a well equipped research workstation.

Whether they realize it or not, most researchers are struggling with the mountains of digital data that they have accumulated during their careers. If shown the tools available to them to find, capture and collaborate,  many, if not most, will start to use some of these knowledge management tools to increase their productivity and effectively manage and collaborate with their data.

Dear Stuart,

The Vinyl Cafe has been on my mind a lot these past few days. My wife has finally convinced me to write this letter.

I was in the hospital every afternoon this past week for my latest round of treatments. I shared a room during my stay on the Oncology Ward with a three older gentlemen. During the course of the week different patients came an went, but Cliff, one of the fellow patients, was there the whole week with me. While I was around each afternoon, Cliff was never alone. His wife, Pearl, stayed with him during the day and was kind enough to go get some of those little plastic ice cream cups for us all from the fridge down the hall. It must have been at least 25 years since I last ate an ice cream out of one those little cups with the cardboard peel-off lids. The only change those cups have undergone in the past 25 years is that they do not ship them with those little wooden spoons anymore. The good news is that the taste is exactly like I remembered… cool, creamy goodness, laced with enough sugar that they cannot help but taste wonderful. Cliff, Pearl and I sat around enjoying, or eating one of life’s simple pleasures while our other roommates enjoyed an afternoon nap.

While I was lucky enough to be an outpatient, Cliff was in the hospital 24/7 while he was recovering from the radiation treatments he had received for a brain tumour. I wish I could tell you that this was his only health problem, but he also has inoperable cancer in one of his lungs. In spite of these problems, he is hoping to go home in the next few days, once his hospice nurse arranges appropriate home care for him. He misses sleeping in his own bed. Pearl would like to take care of him on her own at home, but both she and Cliff are around 85 years old and she just isn’t as strong as she used to be.

Friday was my last treatment and when I arrived, Cliff and Pearl were quietly sitting together. I greeted them and they asked how I was doing. From the look on their faces, they seemed a bit low, so I offered to go to the fridge down the hall to get some ice cream for everyone. Pearl thanked me for my offer, but told me that she had already been to get some but it appeared that they were out of ice cream today. Sometimes life just isn’t fair.

We chatted for a bit, and soon my nurse arrived to hook me up to my IV for my treatment. While I had a few moments to myself, I wracked my brain to try to think of something that might cheer Cliff and Pearl up. Then an idea came to me. My routine had been to talk with my fellow patients upon arrival, then read a chapter of my favourite book (“Marley & Me – Love and Life with the World’s Worst Dog”… I highly recommend this book), then do a bit of work on my laptop computer. I also had an iPod with me that I hadn’t been using. Along with all my music on it, I also have virtually all of the Vinyl Cafe stories that have been released onto CD, on it. I could think of at least on thing that would put a smile of both Cliff and Pearl’s faces – “The Blood Pressure Chair” story. I found the story on the iPod and asked if they wanted to hear a really funny story by a great story teller. They said they would, so they each took one of the ear pieces and sat their soaking up the experience. It was amazing and wonderful to see their faces light up as the story unfolded for them. Eventually I could hear Cliff chuckling softly to himself with a wide grin on his face.

Near the end of the “Blood Pressure Chair” story, some visitors arrived for him, but he was too engrossed to leave the story, so Pearl and I chatted with his visitors while he continued to snicker to himself. I’m not sure which story he moved onto next, bit it was about a half hour later when he asked me how to pause the thing so he could say good-bye to his visitors. By the end of my treatment, I’d decided to leave my iPod with Cliff so he could listen to and enjoy the rest of the Vinyl Cafe stories stored on it. I figure that if someone can survive radiation therapy, I’m sure he could survive or even thrive with a few more hours of “Vinyl Cafe” therapy. I’ll go back in a couple of days and ask him which were his favourite stories. Thank you for sharing Dave, Morley and the rest of the gang with us.

Sincerely,
Rich McCue

Victoria, BC

I did learn something interesting yesterday from my nurse.  She was just getting ready to hook me up to My IV drip when I ask her if she knew how much my treatment cost.  She said she didn’t know but that she would go and find out.  I didn’t expect that she would know off the top of her head, and half suspected that she wouldn’t be able to easily find out the cost either. To my surprise she came back about two minutes later with a small booklet with, among other things, the cost of cancer treatment drugs. After thumbing through he booklet she found my drug, and showed me that the cost was $485 per mg, and that my half liter bag clear fluid contained 10 mg of the drug. So the total cost of the drugs for my daily treatment is about $4,850, and the total for my week long treatment will total over $24,000.  Needless to say I think I’m getting my money’s worth out of my federal and provincial taxes this year.  UPDATE: My nurse told me that she had mis-read the booklet.  The cost was about $500 per day, not $5000 per day.  So the treatment was not quite as expensive as I first throught it was.

As I mentioned, I’m sharing a room with three other men who are also going through cancer treatment.  Yesterday I had a chance to chat with Cliff, one of my room mates, and his wife Pearl.  As we talked Pearl told me about an experience she had on the bus that day.  The couple, both in their late 80′s, live in James Bay, and typically take a taxi when they occasionally need to travel further than walking distance from their home. Now that Cliff is in the hospital, and Pearl is visiting every day, the daily taxi rides were starting to strain their tight budget.  So she decided to try taking the bus to the hospital. She caught the bus with out any problem, but when she arrived at the hospital bus stop she realized that she was going to have to go down some stairs to get off the bus. She had the misfortune to catch one of the older buses with steep stairs at the front and back of the bus. Going up the stairs when she boarded the bus wasn’t too bad, but Pearl has problems going down stairs now that she is almost 90 years old.  As she stood at the top of the stairs wondering what she was going to do, she looked around the bus with a distressed look on her face.  Fortunately a couple of fellow passengers noticed the distressed look and asked if she needed any help.  She told them that she has a problem going down stairs.  At that point two passengers jumped up, each held her under her arms and gently assisted her off the bus.  The two young people made sure she was ok and then re-boarded the bus.  The bus pulled away.

Pearl said that she stood there on the side walk overwhelmed with emotion. She had just been standing on the bus, afraid to go down the stairs, and with in a few seconds two young UVic students had carefully helped her off the bus. She felt so grateful that tears started to well up in her eyes. Pearl’s comment to me as we sat chatting in the hospital was that while our society may have some problems, there are still a lot of good people around, who are willing to help a total stranger in need.

I had an enjoyable afternoon.  Take Care.

Geekcorps, a division of IESC, promotes economic growth in the developing world by sending highly skilled technology volunteers to teach communities how to use innovative and affordable information and communication technologies to solve development problems.

This looks like a wonderful way for IT to give back. 

Currently the Google Desktop will search for key words in the following documents and programs: 

  Gmail

  Outlook contacts

  Outlook appointments

  Outlook tasks

  Outlook notes

  Outlook journal

  Outlook Email

  Outlook Express

  Word

  Excel

  Powerpoint

  Internet Explorer

  AOL Instant Messenger

  Netscape Mail/Thunderbird

  Netscape / Firefox / Mozilla

  PDF

  Music

  Video

  Images

A fairly complete list of applications and file types. This got me thinking… for an individual or small office, why pay thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars for a Knowledge Management system, when you will probably be using it primarily for key word searches to find documents?  Google Desktop will do 90% of what you need it to do for your knowledge management needs.  So unless that 10% is really important you can save yourself a lot of cash.

You may be concerned about privacy, and the ability of Google, or anyone else, accessing the data on your computer. Google takes pains to point out that none of your indexed information ever leaves your computer. You can read more about Google Desktop’s privacy policy on the Web site.

I highly recommend Google Desktop.  Now we just need to see the linux version of Google Desktop and I’ll be really happy!

Before you start, consider blogging’s place in your workgroup’s communication infrastructure. A wiki is an outstanding tool for public collaboration, while email excels at person-to-person communication. Blogging occupies a useful niche between these.

Blogs can provide an important venue for certain kinds of information. For example, a business development manager can provide daily reports on sales calls without waiting for some specific progress to report (e.g. a contract signing) as he might want to do before sending a company-wide email. As a result of having more information about the manager’s customer visits, participants in design meetings may be better equipped to balance upcoming feature releases.

As another example, a project architect could release a series of blog entries detailing long-term goals and intentions for a project. Co-workers could then respond to, and help refine, the architect’s ideas. At the same time, the employees taking direction from the project architect will develop a better idea of what the architect has in mind and pursue their own work accordingly.

In short, by providing an informal window into a person’s or team’s work, you can foster better communication between co-workers.

Another interesting thing I was told by one of my drivers, who also happens to be a bee keeper, is that right after the US bombing took place, the quality and quantity of the honey production by his bees increased dramatically. Now why would that happen? It may have something to do with the fact the the US destroyed most of Serbia’s heavy industry in the bombing, and in the process eliminated the source of most of the pollution in Serbia. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) many of the plants have now been repaired and the pollution if flowing freely again. It’s not surprising that Mirko (the bee keeper) now reports that honey production is down to where it was before the bombing again.

Lastly, during my stay in Serbia, the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenicia massacre was observed. Eight thousand men and boys were killed by Serbian soldiers while UN peace keepers looked on near the infamous Bosnian town. The Serbians I talked to in Belgrade were ashamed at what happened, but correctly pointed out that Bosnian soldiers had committed smaller atrocities in Serb villages around Srebrenicia before the Serbian solders committed their crimes. Prominent Bosnians and Croatians, including famous basketball players for example, rightly condemned what the Serbian soldiers did, and in their anger said many hateful things about Serbian people in general. There are now some signs of reconciliation though. An all star basketball game for the retiring Serbian basketball star and national hero Aleksandar Djordjevic was held during my visit. Many former team mates came to pay tribute, including some former Yugoslavia national team players from Bosnia and Croatia. It was reported in the media that one Croatian player expressed concerns about travelling to Serbia, because he literally feared for his life after some of the things he publicly said about Serbia during the war. Djordjevic told him not to worry, that he would let everyone know through the media that he was in Serbia as his personal guest. His visit went off without a hitch, and he was cheered by 20,000 Serbians at the beginning of the game. Hopefully we will see more cheering on both sides as time goes on.

Today I conducted my last site visit at the Belgrade Municipal Court, and had the opportunity to visit with Biljana Kosanovic, the head of the IT department (or department of scientific information) at the Serbian National Library. The Municipal court visit went well, but was uneventful. The visit to the National Library was extremely interesting. Biljana comes across as an extremely capable individual who has managed to accomplish many things at the library in the face of severe staff and monetary shortages. Among other things, she manages Kobson, which is a consortia of academic libraries, and government organizations, organized to purchase scientific journals and academic databases. It was formed in 2001 and currently has 151 members. They created their own federated search at the title level, and are

In her opinion, most students and faculty members at Serbian academic institutions do not know how to use on-line resources effectively. She was heartened to hear that the NCSC is helping the law faculties to offer legal research and writing courses. The library has a lab of 20 computers for instruction, and have used this lab to help medical faculty learn about on-line journals and databases for their research. IP authentication used to restrict access to the journals and databases, so that anyone coming from a Serbian government IP address can used the journals and databases (anyone at a university or government office). If using the service from home, students can use their Library assigned user name and password to access resources through a proxy server (Easy Proxy). They are also looking at citation manager for possible use.

In the past the National Library had 12 librarians, but because of funding cutbacks they are now down to 3 librarians and 3 senior IT staff. This was a conscious decision made on their part, in the face of their cutbacks, to concentrate their management dollars on IT related positions, as in their calculation this would allow them to maximize the effectiveness of their institution in an increasingly digital world. The library has 206 other library staff, and 5 million monographs (or books for all non-library people out there).

Kobbis is their library automation system. It was developed in Slovenia, and was purchased by the government for all academic institutions on the country. Conversions are taking place at universities across the country to this new system. The migration is taking place slowly because of a general shortage of staff at all the universities. The Kobbis systems allows for a Union catalogue & OPAC for all involved.

One innovative way the National Library has found to combat staff shortages, has been for the head Librarian to request from the government young men who do not want to do their two years of national service in the military, to do that service in the library. They have requested technically minded (i.e. Computer literate) young men to work at the library, and it has been successful. The quality of work that the young men do is uneven, but overall it is very helpful. They do their best to hire the individuals that work out well, but are unfortunately not always successful.

The rest of the afternoon I spent working on a hardware and software purchase form for USAID, and worked on writing my final report. I’m coming down to the wire now, and hope to have the report substantially done before I get on the plane on Monday morning. I have a conference call with the purchasing specialist in Virginia tomorrow afternoon, so I’ll find out if the list of hardware and the specifications I’ve sent are acceptable for a purchasing perspective (for some reason USAID prefers to purchase from US Companies?).

After work I had dinner with the chief of mission, David Anderson. We went to a wonderful little Serbian restaurant. I ate a chicken dish, wrapped in bacon and filled with cheese. It tasted wonderful as you might have guessed, but was probably not the most healthy thing I could have eaten. Actually most of the Serbian dishes seem to score high in the taste department, but not so high if you’re looking for healthy food. Time to head to bed now.

Today has been a report writing day from start to finish. I’ve been chasing down the last few requirements for my reports: A vend card system for student printing, windows training for law court judges and staff, and finally legal database access for Westlaw, Lexus/Nexus among others. Not much exciting to report.

On the side you can see a picture that I took on Monday of one of two police stations that the US bombed back in 1999.The amazing thing about the bombing of these buildings is that it appears that both buildings were hit directly in the middle (looking at them from the front), give or take a metre. I asked Mirko the other day if this way typical, or if they were just lucky. Mirko replied that almost everything they hit the hit right in the middle.

It’s 9PM here in Belgrade and I should probably get back to report writing…

I was awoken at 4:30 this morning by the call to morning prayer, or the actual morning prayer from the neighbourhood mosque. I’m not sure which it was, as things were a little bit hazy when I woke at that early hour. Fortunately I was able to get back to sleep, and slept in until 7:30. After breakfast Mirko and I went to the local bazaar to do some shopping. I found a nice leather jacket for Heather (hopefully I got the size right), and some European soccer jerseys for the boys. I just need to find something nice for Emily and Jillian and I will be set for gifts for everyone when I get home. We also ran in to the cutest little puppy on our shopping trip, so I stopped to give him a scratch behind his ears.

We left Novi Pazar by 10am and started out five hour trip back to Belgrade. At least it should have been a five hour trip. They are doing some fairly major improvements to the road through the mountains, and we were stopped for about one hour for some work they were doing. At least it was a beautiful spot that we stopped at. On our way thought the mountains Mirko pointed out a monument that was built in honour of the soldiers that fought in World War I (see picture on the side). We also talked about the environment. Mirko is a bee keeper, and his production has gone way down the past few years as industrial production has increased in Serbia. Ironically, Mirko says that he had the best production and quality of honey at the height of the war in the mid to late 1990′s because a lot of Serbian industrial production was destroyed by US bombing. Factories Destroyed = Less Acid Rain = More and Better Honey. The only problem with that equation is that a lot of people are out of work and are going hungry, which is a key ingredient in the recipe for ethnic and regional tension. We arrived back in Belgrade around 4pm, and I spend the rest of the afternoon and evening report writing.

At 8:30am we set off for Novi Pozar. Vlad has called in sick, and Innes and Mija are on vacation, so Mija’s brother Mirko is driving, and Milena from the NCSC office are acoompanying me. The trip to Novi Pozar is about five hours the the South West of Belgrade. The country side near Belgrade, and to the north is relatively flat, but the further south west you go, the more mountainousness the terrain becomes. The highway is narrow and winding for the last 2 ½ hours of the trip and it reminds me of travelling on the Crowsnest highway (#2) in Southern BC. The landscape is green, hilly and beautiful. Not quite as mountainousness as in BC, but familiar never the less.

We arrived at the Novi Posar courthouse right at 2pm and were greeted by Vice-President of the court and their Systems Administrator. We talked to them about the proposed donation of a computer, printer and internet connection, and possibly a photocopier and fax machine. They are expecing a large donation of computers similar to what the Kragujevac Courthouse will be getting, but they are in next phase of the EU project, and they are not sure when they will get the computers. We visited the reading room in the courthouse and there is plenty of space for the equipment. They have only dial-up internet for two computers in the building, so we talked about options for getting high speed internet for the library computer, and possibly for other computers in the building. It was a good meeting.

At the end of our visit, the Vice-President offered us the services of the courthouse driver to take us to an middle-age monistary just outside the city. The monistary is called Sopocani, and was built by King Uros I in the first half of the 13^th century. It was partially destroyed at least twice by Turkish armies over the years, and was abandoned for 200 years before work on its restoration began in the 1930′s. There are still several beautiful fresco’s in the building, that withstood the weather during the 200 years that it had no roof. It is currently in use again as a monistary. While we were visiting, one of the top leaders of the Eastern Orthadox church in Serbia visited the monastic complex and walked into the church while we were admiring the outside of the chapel. I purchased some trinkets from the little store on their site, and then we headed back down the mountain, and into town.

We ate dinner at the hotel we are staying at. I had the equivalent of the meat lovers special, which consisted of a variety of traditional Serbian grilled meats along with a bit of rice and vegetables. It was very good. We then went for a walk around the down town area of the city. Novi Posar probably doesn’t have more than one hundred thousand inhabitance, but I counted at least four mosques in the down town area. About eighty percent of the population in the city are Muslim. That percentage is much lower in the country side however. There are many little shops, selling cloths and jewlery in the narrow streets in the older part of town. I will do some shopping before we leave in the morning.

It is very interesting. Right now sitting in my hotel room I can hear a man from a near by mosque singing the evening prayer over a loudspeaker. I can also hear other men singing along with him. I wonder which direction Mecca is from here. One other thing that Mirko (our driver) pointed out to me as we were walking around this evening, is that there are almost no women sitting in the side walk cafes. While there are very few women who wear the traditional Muslim head covering, other traditions are firmly entrenched. I asked Mirko why there were some many problems between Serbians and Muslim Albanians in Kosovo, but everything seemed fine in Novi Pazar. His response was that he thought it was only a matter of time before there were problems. Given the history of the breakup of Yugoslavia over the past ten years, I can understand why he is pessimistic. I hope he is wrong though.

I did see the training facility they have in the office area (which will be a computer lab). The room has space for between 18 and 22 computers. This room is what the company currently occupying the buildings (an IBM business parter) is using for computer courses. They already have fairly high speed internet for the business in the building. The area for the library is not huge, but it is larger than the current Business Law Library space. There office for the librarian set aside. They have additional space near the library where they plan to place computers for the students to use. Their goal is to have 100 computers for student access, giving them a 1/10 ratio of computers to students. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next month and a half to see if they can pull this move off.

After the site visit Vlad an I returned to the NCSC office and I wrote up my notes from the visit and then went to get a quick hair cut (my hair has been taking too long to dry in the mornings). Tanya was very helpful in taking me to the little salon a half block away, and making sure that I could communicate with the young lady cutting my hair. Thankfully the hair turned out just fine. I went back to the office and did a bit more report writing, and then at 12:30 left for a lunch time basketball game with the Mormon missionaries I went to church with on Sunday. Most of them are American, but a couple of young Serbian guys came to play as well. We had three or four quick games of half court 3 on 3 basketball. It was a lot of fun. I really like the Serbian style of half court basketball (you don’t have to take the ball to the top of the key after a defencive rebound… you can shoot right away). It makes for a much quicker, or higher scoring games. Who really likes to play defence anyway; it is much funner scoring points.

After more report writing in the afternoon I started to walk back to the hotel around 7pm. As I walked through the park around the large Eastern Orthodox temple near our offices (St. Sava I think – right beside the Serbian National Library), I decided to try to take a look inside (it is still under construction). The picture to the side is taken from my office window. No one stopped me when I went through the front door, so I went in further. The place is incredibly HUGE inside (note the size of the back hoe below the front door in the picture). The outside of the building has been finished, but the inside is only between five and ten percent completed. I have never been inside St. Peter’s in Rome, but I imagine that the dome is probably about the same size and height as the St. Sava dome. It will be an amazing place when it is completed. The interior space give the architect a huge canvas to work with. Given its’ size, who knows how long it will take to finish. The temple is situated on the site where a Turkish Visier is said to have burned the remains of St. Sava (the patron saint of Serbia) in order to punish the people of Serbia for a recent rebellion. I think that the Visier would be in awe of what has been built on that site.

I continued on my way to the hotel, but ended up stopping about half way there because of a torrential down pour. I had an umbrella, but I was getting soaked by the wind blown rain, and the water splashing up at me. I was fortunate enough to share a shop awning with two men roughly my age from eastern Serbia. They were in town working on a construction project because there is so little work in their little home town. I mentioned to them that I was going to Novi Pozar the next day, and they told me that I had to purcahse some jeans while I am there. Apparently there is a fair bit of textile manufacturing that goes on in Novi Pozar. We’ll see what I find when I get there.

On Saturday morning I woke up and decided I should get some exercise, so went for a jog. I first jogged up to the national assembly building, then looped around back towards the hotel, and crossed the Sava river to try to see if I could reach the arena where the volleyball match the night before. It was only about 3K from the hotel to the arena, so I jogged past it a bit to see some of the sites on the other side of the river. This brought the magnitude of my ripoff by the cab driver the night before clearly into focus. Many buildings outside the down town tourist section are run down, unless of course they are newer buildings. I’m not sure how different this is from the rest of Europe is; hopefully I’ll see more of Europe some day.

On my jog I saw a billboard with Srebrenitza (where I think some Bosnia Serb soldiers killed a eight thousand civilians) written on it and a picture of a dirty doll on the ground. There was more text in Serbian, but I couldn’t read it. I’m not sure if it was something put up by the government or a private group. I have asked a couple of people here about the civil wars in the 1990′s and get the impression that there are widely divergent views of who was viewed to be in the right and in the wrong during those conflicts. I’m sure that the issues surrounding the conflicts were not as black and white as they were portrayed in the western media, but the way some people here gloss over what happened in Srebrenitza is some what sad. It wasn’t until about a year ago that the Serbia public saw direct evidence on TV of the killing of some innocent civilians. The video showed 6 civilians killed execution style by some irregular Bosnian Serb soldiers. I think part of the problem is that people want to believe that nothing really bad happened, and with the Bush administration having a bit of a credibility problem after the weapons of mass distruction, people here say that the west in general cannot be trusted to report the news accurately
(look what they did in Iraq is their general response). In any case, bad things always happen in wars, and I’m glad that I was blessed to live in a relatively peaceful part of the world.

On my jog I also saw a bus with, “Donated by the people of Japan” written on the side. Very nice of the Japanese to help out with public transport here. Related to that, on my second day here, I can remember on of the office staff mentioning to me that one of the electric street trams that was going by us had been donated from another European country. The tram was definatly a hand-me-down, where as the bus looked brand new.

In the afternoon I went out for a walk to find a church to attend the next day. The doorman helped me with directions to the address I found on the internet. As I walked down toward the church I went by the bombed out remains of the military head quarters building. They were a mess! This was in the down town area that the buildings were hit, and buy the looks of it, there was only superficial damage to the other buildings around them, probably from flying debree. Only 2 1/2 blocks from the bombed buildings is the US Embassy. It had five grim looking Serbian soldiers standing out front, complete with green fatigues, helmets donned, and M16 machine guns in hand. I thought they were US marines from a distance, but when I said hello to one of the soldiers as I walked by, he turned to me and I saw the Serbian patch on his shoulder. He didn’t even smile. One block up at the Canadian Embassy, their single rent-a-cop was in his shack leaning back in his chair, eating a cookie. The contrast couldn’t have been larger. The slogan on a poster at the Canadian embassy said “Canada: Cool – Connected”. I block back I found the chaple I was looking for. I think I’ve finally figured out the street signs; they are typically on a corner of the buildings some where at the intersection – unless it is a main road, and then they might have a small street sign like we have in Canada or the US. The church was right between the Canadian and US Embassies, about a half a block up a side road. There were some missionaries in the chaple, and they told me that the church service stared at 10am the following morning. I walked down to the church the next morning, and enjoyed a nice service in Serbian. One of the missionaries translated for me, so I was able to keep up with what was going on, and what was being said. I spent the rest of the day wandering around the down town area, and reading my Belgrade and Serbia tour guides. It was an enjoyable, laid back day.

I started today by walking about five blocks down the the British Airlines office to see about some compensation for the late luggage. I receive seventy pounds for my troubles, which was almost enough to pay for the cloths that I purchased while I was waiting for my luggage to arrive. To the right you can see the outside of the hotel that I am staying at. It is called the “Hotel Moscow”. It was built in the 1930′s and has a Soviet style flavour to it (or at least what I think is a Soviet flavour). They say that the hotel has air conditioning, but I don’t believe it. Fortunately all the windows open, so I can get a bit of breeze to help cool down with at the end of the day. You can see a picture of my hotel room below. The NCSC (National Centre for State Courthouses) offices are only about two kilometres away from the hotel, which has made a very nice walk, returning from the office after travelling during the day.

After leaving the British Airlines office, I walked the three kilometres to the NCSC office and started putting together pricing for all the equipment that I have specified for use at the law faculty libraries (computers, servers, printers, photocopiers, vend card system and software). Not quite as much fun as travelling around the country, visiting universities, but this is what I am here to do. I have the approximate pricing for everything except for the vend card system. At the end of the day I sent this list of hardware and software to our local IT contractor for him give us a provisional quote. For the official procurement, the hardware and software specifications has to be put out to tender, but this provisional quote will give us a good idea of how far our budget will stretch.

For lunch I went to a local fast food place; actually it wasn’t that fast, but the “Serbian Hamburger” was excellent. They use a mix of hamburger and ground pork, with some spicing, that makes an excellent burger. They tend to be quite large, so by the time I was finished, I was stuffed. One thing I’ve noticed in Serbia, is that a lot of people smoke here. I think part of the reason why I’ve noticed this is because of the law against smoking in public spaces in British Columbia. Here people smoke everywhere, especially in the many out door cafe’s. The other thing I’ve noticed while driving around the country, is that drivers are very liberal in the use of their car horns. They are definatly not shy about l leaning on their horns. Another thing that has impressed me is the number of people who can speak English here. Especially the younger people. English is a compulsory course in the schools here so most young people can speak at least a little bit of English. Many signs in major public places are in both English and Serbian. For example in the new arena here, all the signs are in both languages. It is ironic that they have adopted English as their second language, when historically they had closer ties with Austria/Hungry and Turkey. Maybe it is because those relationships were forced on them, that they do not speak more German and Turkish.

After work I went home dropped off my stuff and then caught a taxi to take me to the arena for a volleyball game – Serbia against Brazil. Unfortunately my taxi driver is a perfect example of why taxi drivers some times have a bad reputation. My ride to the arena cost me 1,300 dinar, which converts into about $23 Canadian dollars. To put this in context, my ticket to the game cost 800 dinar. I checked my tourist map when I got home and saw that we had taken a very round about way to get to the game. More on my return trip in a bit. The game was excellent. It was very close with Brazil winning in the end. When Serbia was doing well the crowd was very loud, when Brazil was on a roll, they were pretty quiet. A couple of times when Brazil amazing plays, the crowd gave them polite applause in recognition of excellent plays. The arena that the game was played in is only about two years old. Construction on it started in the early 1990′s, but the war delayed it’s construction by a number of years. It seats 20,000 spectators, and is modern, but somewhat spartan compared to other arenas I’ve seen. The only food you could buy inside was juice or pop, and potato chips. There was a heavy police presence both inside and outside the arena. Not just regular officers, but officers with their riot helmets and batons hanging from their belts.

After the game I decided that I wasn’t going to get ripped off again by another taxi driver, so I exited the arena and asked a couple of people where I could catch a bus to the down town area. Two people pointed me in the direction of a bus stop, and one even gave me a bus number to look for. When I arrived at the bus stop the bus I was told to catch arrived, so I just hopped on. Initially the bus was heading toward down town, but after about 10 minutes I was pretty sure it wasn’t any more. I asked someone on the bus if they spoke English; he said a little bit, so I asked him if the bus went down town. To my disappointment he said no. I followed up by asking him how I could get to down town. This was beyond his English, so he asked the person in front of him in Serbian if he spoke English, which he did quite well. This person told me I should get off the bus at the next bus stop, cross the street, and hop on any bus that stopped on the far side of the road and it would take me down town. I thanked him, did as he told me and arrived back at the hotel in about 20 minutes. I enjoyed my ‘office’ day today, and am looking forward to a day off tomorrow so I can do a bit more exploring around Belgrade.

Today Mija’s brother, Mirko picked me up outside the hotel, along with Vlad. We then stopped by Ines’ apartment, and then set off for Novi Sad. Mija had the day off to take care of some family business, so his older brother Mirko was filling in for him. Novi Sad is about one hour north of Belgrade. The farm land that we travelled through was beautiful. The land is quite flat, almost like southern Alberta, except that things are not nearly as dry here; all the crops and grass along the side of the road were green. It appears that the main crops in this area are corn, sunflower and a little bit of wheat. It took us about an hour and a half driving northward to arrive in Novi Sad.

When we arrived at the Faculty of Law in Novi Sad, the campus was packed. Apparently this weekend there is a big music festival, and people have been pouring into the campus area all day, setting up tents and filling parking spaces. Mirko could not come in to the law building with us as he spent about 20 minutes looking for a parking space. Unlike all the other Facultys I have visited here in Serbia, the Novi Sad Faculty is situated on a campus similar to what you typically find in Canada and the US. Rather than a building in a down town like area, the Novi Sad campus has large open, grassy spaces between their buildings. After entering the building, we went strait to the Dean’s office where she warmly greeted us, and insisted that I try some of their famous Novi Sad tomato juice (which turned out to be very good). She told me a bit about the history of the Law faculty, and then answered some of the questions I had about administrative issues, such as paying for printing, and determining if they would be able to install the electrical and network wiring for the computers we would donate (which they indicated they could do). The Dean also had some questions about books on family law that Ines said she would follow up up with her on. Next we walked to the library where the head Librarian, and Systems Administrator joined us. We looked at the reading room where they proposed that the computers should be located. The room is large and bright, with a mezzanine, and expansive windows helping to light the room. The building is constructed of cement, but there are a number of columns where the data and electrical wires could be surface mounted in a relatively inconspicuous fashion (they have done this in one corner of the reading room already where they have 3 old public access terminals).

Next we went upstairs where they have a computer lab of 10 computers, including one workstation for an lab tutor to monitor the use of the computers. These computers had just been recently upgraded to Windows XP Pro, with 2.2Ghz processors and 256 MB of RAM. The Law Faculty has about 3000 students, and they have a grand total of 13 computers for the students to use. And just like all the other law schools, the students cannot browse the stacks for books. They must make a written request to a librarian, and then he or she will look for the book. If they are busy, the have to come back the next day to pickup the book.

After visiting the lab we said good-bye to our hosts and drove to the down town area to get a snack before head back to Beograd. The new word I learnt today was “good” or “Dobra” in Serbian. The English words for the day (I’m helping Vlad with his already excellent English) were “Eclectic” and “Ecumenical”. We were discussing the use of Linux and Windows by the Novi Sad systems administrator, and both those words seemed appropriate in the conversation. I’ll test him in the morning to see if he remembers them (he probably will).

Today we woke up to a cloudy rainy day. We ate breakfast together at the hotel, and then drove to the Nis Law Faculty building in the down town area of Nis. The Faculty of Law and Faculty of Economics share the same building that was built in the 1950′s. We went directly to the Vice Dean’s office and after greeting him, he took us on a tour of the Faculty. One interesting feature of the administrative area of the Faculty, is that all the doors had a padded leather covering. Vlad told me that in communist times, having a padded leather door was a sign of status. I’ll have to see what I can do about getting a padded leather door for my office when I get back to Uvic. First we went to the library area and was shown the single student workstation for accessing on-line legal resources. The computer was ancient (it was running windows 3.1), and the librarian told me that it works “sometimes”. There were three or four other computers for on-line research, but they were reserved for faculty use only. Next we walked to the reading room, where they are proposing to put the desktop computers we are purchasing for them. You can see what the room looks like in the picture above. The computers would be place along the back wall on the main level, as well as along the same wall on the mezzanine above. They have recently installed electrical outlets along those walls, and are planning on installing Network jacks as soon as they know how many computers they will be receiving. While looking at the reading room, we were joined by the faculty systems administrator. His background is primarily Linux and Unix based, although they have one windows server. He told us that they would need an additional switch to accommodate any computers we would give them. As for printing, they thought that a vend card based system would best fit their needs, as giving network accounts to all their students would be difficult given the number of students in their faculty. Currently printing is free on their one student accessible computer, but students must bring their own paper to print on. From the reading room we went to the Dean’s office, and were introduced to him there. He is a confidant man who is very proud of his Law School. He presented us with two DVD’s that were made to commemorate the 45^th anniversary of the founding of the Nis Law Faculty.

We arrived back in Belgrade around 2pm, and went back to the office to get caught up on e-mail and so I could finish summarizing my notes from the meeting. Neil Campbell (the UVic Law Librarian) was able to put me in touch with our Westlaw and Lexus/Nexus representatives, so hopefully we will be able to work something out to give Serbian law students similar access to the on-line databases as Canadian students have.

My luggage finally arrived! Three days late, but it caught up with me at last. I arrived back at my hotel (the Moscow Hotel) at about 5:30 and they said my luggage beat me there by thirty minutes. It would be interesting to know if it travelled the same route to get here as I did. I suspect it arrived in Belgrade via Singapore, or Dubai. It’s nice to have a selection of cloths to change into. I bought some pants, a shirt and some socks so that I’d be able to rotate through two sets of cloths until either my suitcases arrived, or they were pronounced lost and I could buy a bunch of new cloths.

I celebrated the arrival of my luggage by putting on my sneakers, some shorts and a t-shirt and walking down to the Fortress and talking my way into a pickup basketball game. The guys at the basketball court were very friendly. I talked with one guy in particular, whose English was quite good. He found someone who was a bit tired, and I took his place in a couple of 3 on 3 games. I played OK, but not spectacular. I was a little afraid of re-spraining the ankle I rolled a week and a half ago. A couple of the players where excellent passers. They seemed to be able to find their team mates and pass to them at will. One other thing that was interesting, is that when they play half court basketball, if you are defending and you rebound, you don’t have to take the ball to the top of the key, you can immediately shoot. I’m sure on a couple of occasion my team mates were wondering what I was doing when I had a clear shot after rebounding and I ran away from the hoop. I hope that I’ll be able to get back there a couple more times and play again; I need to do something to help me stay in shape.

For some reason I couldn’t sleep this morning, so at about 5am I got up, had a shower, and then went for a walk to explore the down town area of old Belgrade, minus most of the people. I walked down the deserted pedestrian walk way and into the park down at the end called Kalemegdan. This is a park built around the remains of several ancient fortresses, the first of which dates back to the Celts. You can see the different styles of wall building used over the years in the picture on the side. The fortress was used and expanded upon by several different empires over the years, including the Celts, Romans, Turks, Hungarians and Germans (among others). After wandering around the fort, and finding four beautiful basketball courts and two tennis courts among the ruins (it was odd to find the courts there, but it does make them much more accessible and usable to the public, especially younger people), I headed back to the hotel for a 7am breakfast, and then got ready to be picked up by Mija for our trip to the south of Serbia.

At about 9am Mija, Inas, Vlad and I left Belgrade by car and travelled for two hours to Kragugevac. We first went and visited the Law School there. The law building is somewhat newer than the other law school buildings we have visited, but is also looks a lot like a cement bunker (I’m pretty sure it was built in the 1960′s, or early 1970′s). We met with the head Law Librarian, and he indicated that they had a reading room and two storage rooms that they want to convert into computer labs for their students. They were just waiting to find out how many computers they would be receiving, and then they would hire and architect to draw up some plans and then begin the renovations necessary to have electrical and data ports at every desk. We also asked them if it would be helpful to receive a donated photocopier, and they said yes, but if they had a choice between a photocopier and additional computers, they would take the computers. When questioned about how they would restrict access to the computers so that their lab would not be over run with non-law students, the librarian indicated that the already require students to show the equivalent of their student card to gain entry into the library. They were also interested in gaining access to Westlaw, Lexus/Nexus and Hein-on-Line, but not if if would be a large expense. I was impressed with their Systems Administrator. They seemed willing to do their part to make electronic resources available to their students. One final thing the Law Librarian said was that they were changing their curriculum so that their students would be writing more essays, which he though would mean more on-line research and more need for word processing. After finishing the tour of the law library, we then drove across town to the Kragugevac Municipal Court Building.

The Municipal Court Building in Kragugevac is a beautiful, if somewhat run down heritage building in the down town area of the city. We met with the Secretary of the Court, as the President of the court was on a trip to Denmark with some other Serbian judges and our program director, learning about the Danish legal system. The good news at the Court house was that the European Union was donating 200 computers along with networking equipment to the court house (as opposed to the one computer that a report I was given indicated would be donated). All the judges will have computers after the EU donation, although they will not be able to directly access the internet from their offices. To access online resources they will have to go to the “internet cafe” that is being setup, which will consist of eight computers with internet access. The bad news is that the library was not slated to receive a computer, nor any of the administrative staff at the court house. The internet cafe will be on the other side of the building from the court library (you can see the library in the picture on the side. I stood in one corner of the room to take the picture, so you are looking at 75% of the library. It is very small and very hot in the summer time). It looks like we will probably help them out with a photocopier and a computer for the library.

After our visit to the court library, we drove out of the city toward Nis which is about an hour an a half drive south from Kragujevac. Once in Nis, we drove around the city for a while to find our hotel. Unfortunately the reservations at the hotel we intended to stay at were somehow cancelled, so we ended up driving to a hotel on the outskirts of town. There is a lot of construction going on around the hotel, which was interesting to see, because the methods of construction and construction materials are very similar to what I saw in Brazil almost 15 years ago. Lots of cement and brick, with ceramic tile roofs. Very different from the lumber construction used in Canada, but I suspect that cement and brick are much easier to source locally than lumber is in Canada.

After settling into the hotel we went out to find some dinner, and went to a very nice Italian style restraunt called momma’s pizza. The pizza was excellent. The servings were huge, and I barely ate half of the pizza that I ordered. Luckily Mija and Inas were able to help me out). Next we decided to explore around the old town and went to the city fortress (which is now a very nice park), to look at the ruins. I did a little shopping in one of the tourist shops in the fortress, and we enjoyed some icecream. This fortress, like the one in Belgrade, is ancient. It was constructed by the Romans, and was used and improved upon by various empires over the ages. Unfortunately our hotel does not have internet access, so I won’t be able to post this to my blog, or check my e-mail until we get back to Belgrade tomorrow afternoon.

Our first visit of the day was to the Belgrade Law School. The School is home to about 3000 students. In the picture to the side you can see the two computers that are available for the students to use. Incredible! They are in the process of converting one of their reading rooms into a computer lab with 35 seats. With our help, that will raise their computer to student ratio from 1/1500 to 1/85 (as opposed to our 1/10 ratio at the Uvic Law Faculty). To make matters worse, very few students have access to a computer and internet at home, so it computers are not available at school, they don’t have access to on-line legal resources. The good news is that their network infrastructure is in good shape, and that their access to the internet (through a government funded research network) is also quite fast. They have a knowledgeable network administrator who is struggling to do his best with the resources available to him. Most faculty members have computers in their offices, and research assistants have access to a small computer lab (6 workstations) so that they can do on line research when necessary. I was also able to visit with the vice dean, and we discussed how valuable it would be to be able to give her students access to on line legal resources such as Westlaw UK, Lexus/Nexus and Hein-Online. One interesting note, is that students are not allowed to roam the stacks and take books out on their own. If a students wants a book (an this is standard practise at Universities in Serbia), they request the book from a librarian, and then the librarian goes and gets the book for them, and checks it out in the student’s name. Quite an ordeal to get a book. Searching for materials on line will make the students feel like they have died and gone to heaven. The visit was productive, and enlightening at the same time. While they have very few student accessible computers, they have laid the groundwork to make installing those computers quite easily.

Then we grabbed a taxi and went to the Belgrade Business Law School (a new private school). We first met with the Law Librarian. All the books in their three year old law school fit in one room about 20 feet by 15 feet wide. Truly amazing. There current computer situation is somewhat better than the Belgrade Law School as they have 60 student computers shared between 3000 students (1000 law students, and the others from two other faculties in the same building). All students are given a network user name and password. Next we met with the Dean of the Law School and found out that the Law Faculty would be moving to a new building in October, so they would be setting up a computer lab in that new location (with between 30 and 40 workstations). We have arranged to see to the new building on Monday to get a feel for the size of the new computer lab, and how we can help them with Computer Hardware and networking equipment. Their current network is in very good shape, and they have at least two competent network administrators. They will hire an additional network administrator for their new building. The dean also expressed a keen interest in being able to access Westlaw UK, Lexus/Nexus and Hein-Online (I think this will be a reoccurring theme on my Faculty visits). I am have been told that infrastructure, hardware and network support at the Business Law School is probably the best in the country for law schools.

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of
my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7773650/site/newsweek/

UNDERWOOD: Why do we need a new industrial revolution?
MCDONOUGH: The Industrial Revolution as a whole was not designed. It took shape gradually as industrialists and engineers figured out how to make things. The result is that we put billions of pounds of toxic materials in the air, water and soil every year and generate gigantic amounts of waste. If our goal is to destroy the world—to produce global warming and toxicity and endocrine disruption—we’re doing great. But if the goal isn’t global warming, what is? I want to crank the wheel of industry in a different direction to produce a world of abundance and good design—a delightful, safe world that our children can play in.

You say that recycling, as it’s currently practiced, is “downcycling.”
What we call recycling is typically the product losing its quality. Paper gets mixed with other papers, re-chlorinated and contaminated with toxic inks. The fiber length gets shorter, allowing more particles to abrade into the air, where they get into your lungs and nasal passages, and cause irritation. And you end up with gray, fuzzy stuff that doesn’t really work for you. That’s downcycling.

[My mentor and colleague] Michael Braungart and I coined the term upcycling, meaning that the product could actually get better as it comes through the system. For example, some plastic bottles contain the resi-dues of heavy-metal catalysts. We can remove those residues as the bottles come back to be upcycled.

Not all products lend themselves to that.
Most manufacturers take resources out of the ground and convert them to products that are designed to be thrown away or incinerated within months. We call these “cradle to grave” product flows. Our answer to that is “cradle to cradle” design. Everything is reused—either returned to the soil as nontoxic “biological nutrients” that will biodegrade safely, or returned to industry as “technical nutrients” that can be infinitely recycled. Aluminum is a technical nutrient. It takes tremendous energy to make, but it’s easy to recapture and reuse. Since 1880, the human species has made 660 million tons of it. We still know where 440 million tons are today.

Are there products already that meet cradle-to-cradle goals? If so, how do we find them?
Within the month, we will be branding cradle to cradle. Products that meet our criteria for biological and technical nutrients can be certified to use our logo. A note on the packaging will tell you how to recycle it. You’ll know: this one goes into my tomato plot when I’m finished or this one goes back to industry forever. We have already approved a nylon, some polyester textiles, running tracks, window shades, chairs from Herman Miller and Steelcase, and carpets from Shaw, which is part of Berkshire Hathaway. The first was a Steelcase fabric that can go back to the soil. We’re now working on electronics on a global scale.

How do paper products like magazines fit into this picture?
Why take something as exquisite as a tree and knock it down? Trees make oxygen, sequester carbon, distill water, build soils, convert solar energy to fuel, change colors with the seasons, create microclimates and provide habitat.

My book “Cradle to Cradle,” which I wrote with Michael Braungart, is printed on pages made of plastic resins and inorganic fillers that are infinitely recyclable. They’re too heavy, but we’re working with companies now to develop lightweight plastic papers. We have safe, lightweight inks designed to float off the paper in a bath of 180 degrees—hotter than you would encounter under normal circumstances. We can recapture the inks and reuse them without adding chlorine and dioxins to the environment. And the pages are clean, smooth and white.

So we can keep our trees and have newspapers, too.
Most environmentalists feel guilty about how society behaves, so they say we should make longer-lasting products—for example, a car that lasts 25 years. That car will still use compound epoxies and toxic adhesives, but the ecological footprint is reduced because you’ve amortized it over a longer time. But what’s the result? You lose jobs because people aren’t buying as much, and you’re using the wrong technology longer. I want five-year cars. Then you can always be getting the newest car—more solar-powered, cleaner, with the newest air bags and safety features. The old car gets upcycled into new cars, so there are still plenty of jobs. And you don’t feel guilty about throwing the old one away. People want new technology. You’re not typing on an Underwood, if you know what I mean.

So growth is good?
Yes, if you use nature as a model and mentor, if you use modern designs and chemicals that are safe. Growth is destructive if you use energy not from the sun and a system of chemicals that is toxic, so it’s anti-life.

Given that industry today fits your definition of anti-life, why aren’t you fighting for stricter environmental regulations?
If coal plants release mercury—and mercury is a neurotoxin that damages children’s brains—then reducing the amount of mercury in emissions doesn’t stop that. It just says, “We’ll tell you at what rate you can dispense death.” Being less bad is not being good. Our idea is to make production so clean, there’s nothing bad left to regulate. This is extremely interesting to people of all political persuasions—those who love the environment and those who want commerce free of regulation.

Can you really have industry so clean it requires no controls?
[At the Rohner textile plant in Switzerland] we designed a fabric safe enough to eat. The manufacturing process uses no mutagens, carcinogens, endocrine disrupters, heavy-metal contaminants or chemicals that cause ozone depletion, allergies, skin desensitization or plant and fish toxicity. We screened 8,000 commonly used chemicals and ended up with 38. When inspectors measured the effluent water, they thought their instruments were broken. The water was as clean as Swiss drinking water. A garden club started using the waste trimmings as mulch. Workers no longer had to wear protective clothing. And it eliminated regulatory paperwork, so they’ve reduced the cost of production by 20 percent. Why spend money on paperwork, when you can spend it delivering service or paying your workers a living wage?

Where would I find this fabric?
It was selected for upholstery on the new Airbus 380. It’s made of worsted wool to keep you at the right temperature—cool when it’s hot and warm when it’s cold—and [a plant fiber called] ramie to wick away moisture. It’s a high-performance-design product. Going ecological doesn’t mean downgrading performance criteria.

How do you get more industries to adopt these ideals?
Industries don’t change unless they have to or there’s some commercial benefit. At Herman Miller [the furniture company], we designed a factory full of daylight and fresh air. Productivity soared. And because of all the natural light, they cut lighting costs by 50 percent—overall energy by 30 percent. We’ve been doing this a long time. But now that China has taken it up, it portends exciting things.

What are you doing in China?
The China Housing Industry Association has the responsibility for building housing for 400 million people in the next 12 years. We’re working with them to design seven new cities. We’re identifying building materials of the future, such as a new polystyrene from BASF [with no noxious chemicals]. It can be used to build walls that are strong, lightweight and superinsulating. The building can be heated and cooled for next to nothing. And it’s silent. If there are 13 people in the apartment upstairs, you won’t hear them.

We’ve designed a luxurious new toilet. The bowl is like a lotus leaf—so smooth, axle grease slips right off. Nothing sticks to it, including bacteria. A light mist when you’re done will be enough to flush it, so you won’t use lots of water. We’ll have bamboo wetlands nearby to purify the waste—and the bamboo, which grows a foot a day, can be harvested and used for wood.

The Chinese are afraid urbanization will reduce productive farmland, so we’ll move farms onto rooftops. At least, that’s what I’m proposing. The farmers can live downstairs. And when you look at the city from a distance, it will look like part of the landscape.

Is it practical to put farms on roofs?
Traditional roofs aren’t practical. They degrade from thermal shock and ultraviolet radiation and have to be replaced in 20 years. For the Gap’s corporate campus in San Bruno, Calif., we planted a “green roof” of ancient grasses. The roof now damps the sounds of jets from the San Francisco airport. It absorbs storm water, which is important because they have serious issues with storm water there. It makes oxygen, provides habitat, and it’s beautiful. We also made a green roof for Ford Motor Co.’s River Rouge plant. It saved Ford millions of dollars in storm-water equipment.

How will you fuel the Chinese cities?
I want to see solar power cheaper than coal, but to get the speed and scale to do that fast, you need a place like China. We’re not talking about dinky solar collectors on roofs. Think of square miles of marginal land covered with them. This could drop the cost of solar energy an order of magnitude. And for every job making solar panels, there are four jobs putting them in place and maintaining them. We could import these panels, and for every job the Chinese give themselves, we get four. What a gift. And I guarantee you, China will never be able to capture an American photon. We would have indigenous energy and energy security. And we wouldn’t be throwing our money into holes in the ground.

And we wouldn’t need nuclear energy.
I love nuclear energy. I just want to make sure it stays where God put it—93 million miles away, in the sun.

Your ideas are really catching on.
It’s an amazing moment in history. We also have two huge new projects in England—working with the cities of Greenwich and Wembley. The developer, Adrian Wyatt, has asked us to conceive the meta-framework for the project.

We won’t get everything right the first time. Change requires experimentation. But no problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it. Our job is to dream—and to make those dreams happen.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7773650/site/newsweek/

At about 5:30am Sunday morning I decided that I better go to the Royal Jubilee hospital to get checked out as my temperature was at about 103 Degrees (39.7) (I’m on doctors orders to get medical attention right away if I develop a high temperature because of my currently depressed immune system). So I arrived at the hospital at 6am, and there were two people (yes only two) in front of me. I was quite pleased as I thought this would mean that I would be seen by a doctor fairly quickly. At about 7am I was still in the waiting room with the same two other people, when someone from the lab arrived to take some blood samples from me. I thought that it was a little odd that they would do this in the waiting room, but was happy as I expected that this would speed things up. I continued to wait, and at about 10am I went to the Tim Horton’s in the hospital to get something to eat as the Nursing staff continued to tell everyone that arrived at the triage desk that the emergency ward was full and that they would have a long wait. Between 6am and 10am only five or six more people arrived to the triage desk, one of whom was immediately admitted because of the seriousness of his aliment, and the rest sat in the waiting room with me.

Not long after 10am, I was taken back into the emergency ward and couldn’t believe what I saw. I trusted the hospital staff when they said that the emergency ward was full, but not only were all the regular beds full, but the hallway leading from the outside of the hospital to the main area of the emergency ward was bumper to bumper with elderly people on gurneys waiting for a proper bed. While I had been sitting in the waiting room, I was not able to see all the elderly people being brought in by the ambulance staff from nursing homes in the down town area. Now that I was in the ward I could see and hear what was going on. Ambulances and vans from nursing homes arrived on a regular basis with elderly patients suffering from everything from broken hips to dehydration from the flu. The few life threatening cases were given beds right away, and the less pressing cases backed up in the entrance hallway. By my unofficial count (as I walked to and from the bathroom) all but two people in the ward were under 60 years old. Admittedly the Royal Jubilee hospital is in an older part of town, but over 95% of the admitted patients were over 60 years old.

As I lay resting in my bed for most of the day I could overhear some of the conversations between the intake nurses and the elderly people in the hallway who had not yet been properly admitted. Many of these people were clearly suffering from some degree of dementia, and the staff had a difficult time getting information from them to help them make a good diagnosis. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to try to help someone who cannot communicate very well. Actually I do know what that is like, because I have a one year old daughter. And that is how the staff kindly treated the patients with dementia; like small children.

This is completely anecdotal, no statistics or science used in forming this option, but given the demographics of our population I would guess that this problem is not going to improve on its own any time soon. I’m not sure what would be the best way to try to alleviate the problem. You can always throw more money at the problem and try to fix it the same way you’ve been doing it, but on a larger scale (i.e. add more beds to the hospital). However in the zero sum game of budget politics, the extra hospital beds may come from fewer seats available in Universities, or higher taxes. Not very fun choices to make. I hope we have a better solution for the problem before I’m ready for retirement.