A Year Gone By

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A year ago, my friend Derek Miller passed away from cancer after a 4-year fight that he documented on his site, penmachine.com.

His last post, which he entrusted to me, went viral (CBC, Daily Mail UK, Globe, MeFi, Brisbane Times, among many others) and was seen by millions of people around the world. I was unprepared for the enormous popularity of the post and spent the next 4 days in sheer panic as I searched for servers with ever-greater bandwidth to place his final words.

I was riding an emotional roller-coaster: dealing with the death of my friend, working hard with friends and colleagues to stabilize access to his blog, realizing that each new solution wasn’t enough to handle the load. I was devastated that his final words were being missed in the tiny window of opportunity offered by the attention-deficit online community that would soon move on to other things, but I was also elated that his words would be seen by people that might never have read his writings.

A year later, everything is back to normal on the site. I still have trouble reading his words, looking at his picture and listening to his music, but I do all of those things anyway. I’m the custodian of his site and I take pride in this task he bestowed on me – a bittersweet burden.

Derek shared a lot of interests, which is what brought us together almost 30 years ago. Yesterday I found some CDs that he shared with me many years ago and it reminded me of when we were younger, comparing music that we favoured. I was a strong Zeppelin, Floyd, Who and Beatles fan. He was a big fan of early Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush and Laurie Anderson. I spent most of yesterday listening to two of our favourites, ending with Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”.

Thanks, Derek, for being my friend. I miss you.

Fixed

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Back online after fixing the problem. Not sure how many people still read this, but I’m glad to get everything else working.

Yay me.

Running again

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Tonight I hit the streets of Burnaby once again in the hopes that jogging will catch on with me. While I’ve taken part in two 10km races and a 5km one, I’m not a natural runner. Despite that, I’d love to improve my cardio, trim some weight and generally return to a better level of fitness.

The problem is I’m not a natural at anything athletic (come watch me play hockey some time), so pretty much activity takes a lot of energy to get me going. A grossly simplified version of Newton’s First Law of Motion applies directly:

An object that is at rest will stay at rest unless an unbalanced force acts upon it

I’m the object at rest and running is absolutely an unbalanced (that is to say: insane) force acting upon me. However, once I’m actually moving, I tend to enjoy the activity and that’s a good thing.

Now I just have to keep it up for a couple of… years.

In Scotland!

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It seems like I was planning this trip forever and now I’m finally back in Scotland. I came for the occasion of my cousin’s wedding and have stayed beyond. I have just under a week remaining and have managed to put almost 1000 miles on the rental car in just 9 days.

I’ve visited a couple distilleries (Oban and Talisker), a chocolate factory (Cocoa Bean), stayed in a castle (Comlongon), walked up to a natural monument (Old Man of Storr), tasted some fine food and drank some excellent drink.

Today, I’ll be visiting a distillery or two, driving around (or in, haven’t decided yet) Inverness and visiting Cawdor Castle, just south if my current location: Nairn.

Cawdor is the way that Calder was misspelled by Shakespeare, and it sadly took hold. I’ll make my argument to rename it later today, but I don’t expect to be successful.

Sungard Summit 2010 – Day 1

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It’s great to be back in my second home, San Francisco, for the next few days while I attend Sungard Summit 2010. It’s an annual conference for users of Sungard Higher Ed products, such as Luminis, the portal platform I manage at BC Institute of Technology. Each year, the conference moves to a new city (last year was Philadelphia, the year before it was Anaheim), so I was excited to discover that this year was where I feel most at home outside of Burnaby.

Opening day starts with registration, which I was able to skip by registering last night, and then brunch in one of the giant halls at Moscone Center. The breakfast was great and I met folks from colleges and universities in Oregon, New Jersey and Texas as well as employees of Sungard. One of the people sitting at my table had an iPad, which he had downloaded all of the conference material (agenda, session info, maps, etc) onto. He let me play with it for a while and I have to say, even as a Apple fan, it was a pretty great experience.

After brunch, we heard the keynote from Ron Lang, the CEO of Sungard. It was typical fare, discussing the importance of collaboration, teamwork and how that needs to be part of Sungard’s guiding principles. He’s a good speaker, but there wasn’t much there that was a surprise or even unexpected. He did, however, have a great tip for travellers to San Fran: take a trip across the Golden Gate and check out the view from a rarely used road to get a sense of the beauty that is the pristine coastline just north of the city.

After Ron came the main speaker, Chris Gardner, author of “The Pursuit of Happyness“. He relayed much of his story which has been turned into a best-selling book as well as a feature film starring Will Smith. It’s an amazing story and, in many ways, better than the book which glosses over some of the more dire situations. The main difference is that his son wasn’t 5 years old when his struggles were at their hardest, he was 14 months old.

Although Chris isn’t a natural speaker, he is a compelling one. Perhaps because he isn’t the slick, highly scripted speaker that is often chosen for keynotes, he came across as genuine and personable in his discussion of personal struggles and the responsibilities of parenthood that rise above all others. I was moved by much of what he said, especially in regard to his discussion of not having a father and how important it was to be there for his own son, no matter what the cost.

After that, it was back to business. I happened to run into a fellow Luminis person from SIAST and we talked about portal ideas and the perils of presenting at Summit for a while. We made our way to the upcoming Luminis Kickoff session, where we found Josh Horner, the Product Manager for Luminis. It was a great opportunity to talk one-on-one about upcoming products, ideas for imminent releases and even planning for future conferences.

The Luminis Kickoff session was great, with a discussion of the coming Luminis 5 platform which included a demo of the product. To be honest, it’s not much different than what I’ve already seen, so I wasn’t blown away, but I am excited about the product and look forward to running my own demo at some point.

Things I have noted this year:

• Sungard is still using IE6 for conference kiosks. Seriously?! A technology company using IE6 is embarassing. Editing this WordPress post was very challenging using this ancient and unsupported browser.
• WiFi is spotty at best. In larger sessions, signal drops to nothing repeatedly, which kills sessions. Extremely frustrating.
• Rooms have been quite big and well miked so far. An improvement on some previous locations
• Wayfinding is excellent this year! Good job to those who have set up the signs and assistants

Now back to my hotel room to touch up my presentation for tomorrow and then find some dinner in this fine town. Suppenkuche, anyone?