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My partner Jennifer recently published her first book. It’s a slim volume of 145 pages called No Ordinary Boy: The Life and Death of Owen Turney. One could generically describe it as memoir or narrative non-fiction. No Ordinary Boy is the story of Jennifer’s journey with her severely disabled son Owen, who died last October—unexpectedly, and leaving us all grieving—at the age of twelve. I knew Owen for approximately 4 years prior to his passing, and I was there while Jennifer wrote the book, witnessing the trials and difficulties of a first-time author working through her grief as she captured the different aspects of her story and forged them into a coherent, intelligent whole that’s significantly more than the sum of its parts.

In the last few weeks, I’ve watched as Jennifer has struggled to succinctly ‘explain’ what her book is about to different people. Before it was published, it was easier. This is what the book is. It’s what I’m working on. Defined through the act of writing, of exerting control, of applying change, of restricting who could see it, read it, provide feedback. Who—and how. Trust was bestowed upon a very small number of trusted advisers and readers who gave feedback, made substantive and copy-editing suggestions, carried her forward through the gift of encouragement and positive response. Every so often, someone would say, What I read in your book was this. Which, I think, leaves first-time authors awe-struck and amazed: Really? I didn’t know that it could mean that to someone.

The surprise and delight of hearing about what others see in your work, and the stress of having to formulate a routine, short and universally resonant response to the question So what’s your book about? are, I believe, common occurrences after launching a book into the world.

We’ve known since the late 1960s that assigning a single, ‘authoritative’ interpretation to a text which is anchored in the biography and context of its author is at best limiting, and at worst simply incorrect. Roland Barthes argued this convincingly in The Death of the Author. While many more traditionally oriented schools of literary studies take issue with the idea, writers can experience it directly in their own work: the sense of ‘I didn’t know it could mean that to someone’ is an illustration. A book is always more than the author’s alleged intent; more, different, better, richer, more textured, more nuanced, more literary. It becomes these things in the eyes of the beholder: the reader sees—and produces, generates—these additional layers of meaning in the act of reading, interpreting and relating the text to his own context. Not initially an easy concept to wrap one’s head around, certainly uncomfortable for authors, and theoretically not entirely unproblematic, but practically true as anyone who’s ever written creatively knows.

No Ordinary Boy is multi-faceted and layered in this way; readers will find their own meaning in it. It will be a different book to every one of its audiences. Jennifer’s own surprise at how ‘the story came together’ into a coherent, meaningful, flowing narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end is an expression of a new author’s initial uncertainty. The book, in a sense, discovered itself through various ‘false starts.’ She writes,

Before Owen’s death, I had planned to write a guidebook—an Advocacy for Dummies sort of book. I started the project many times, each effort ending in frustration. I eventually realized: I have no universal advice to give. No tips or tricks [...] If I wrote a guidebook, I thought, it would be relevant only to people exactly like me (No Ordinary Boy, p. 8).

So what is No Ordinary Boy, and who is it for? At the most surface level, it’s a memoir describing approximately a 13-year time frame during which Jennifer discovers that there are medical complications while she is pregnant with her first child which require multiple surgical interventions prior to giving birth. She learns to care for a very complex-to-care-for baby who gradually reveals multiple severe physical and developmental disabilities; embarks on a bewildering journey through various therapeutic, educational and healthcare institutions (sometimes because of severe, life-threatening crises, sometimes in the interest of improving Owen’s or his family’s quality of life); and eventually experiences his sudden death and her (and her family’s) grief in response.

On a deeper level, No Ordinary Boy raises and addresses several key issues about disability and its relationship with family, institutions and the world. Jennifer tackles some particularly difficult and uncomfortable questions, such as: What’s best for my family, which consists of more people than just my disabled son? Or: Who are we doing all this educational and therapeutic work for? And: How can I make decisions on behalf of someone who cannot express his own preferences? The book traces the author’s personal growth through key insight after insight. Jennifer’s formidable intellect and keen intuition allowed her to ask and answer these questions for herself—and in the process, I believe, forge a better existence for her son and family. She does not permit the relentless demands of caring for a child like Owen to suppress her searching mind in favour of merely soliciting empathy. She knows that we (family, friends, institutions, the public) would be all too keen to respond with sympathy and pat answers to ‘disability’ and its various challenges. But our offers, though well-intentioned, would be meaningless to a family like Jennifer’s. There is a chasm between us and families dealing with disability that sympathy alone cannot bridge.

Unlike those who believe that disability is by necessity something that requires an outward-directed advocacy—an imperative to tell the world and demand its response—I believe Jennifer finds truth in a somewhat modern adaptation of Carol Hanisch‘s feminist idea that the personal is the political. In contrast to Hanisch’s notion that there are no personal solutions to the problems of minorities or those at the margins, Jennifer’s journey shows that an intelligent, awake, critical perspective can and should be applied to the ‘common sense’ truths of medical, educational and therapeutic disciplines and institutions. By shining a spotlight on the ‘small things’ and questioning their relevance, applicability and wisdom at each step of the way, she shows us how the courage to know ourselves can bring about positive change—in ourselves, our families and our environment. Her focus, however, always remains on the personal first and foremost: she challenges herself to discover and apply the right or correct solution to every problem, not just the typical solution, and she looks to things under her immediate control first instead of asking the world to change in response to Owen’s challenges. Her chosen approach is much harder but also infinitely more productive than merely following what society and its institutions suggest; it is also genuinely valuable to everyone else grappling with the same subject matter—and that, of course, elevates it from the personal back to the political.

In a healthcare system that’s chronically unable to provide comprehensive, patient-focused, holistic and programmatic preventative and responsive care, it is up to the patient (or his caregiver) to ‘own’ the trajectory of his interactions with the system, to decide what’s best at every step—particularly if what’s best is not what the specialists are saying, or what the ‘system’ thinks. When it comes to therapeutic practitioners and institutions, it’s always best to ask who is being measured, and to what end. Jennifer describes how she gradually learns that (communications and occupational) therapists have their own quotas, metrics and objectives to fulfill which often have little to do with Owen’s development. Instead, attempts to help Owen develop a system of alternative communications (he could not hear, speak or use his hands to communicate) mostly just result in a lot of incredibly hard work to which the author (heartbreakingly) dedicates a number of years of her life, to essentially no practical avail (other than finally gaining the key insight that “[no] matter what I do, it will never be enough” (p. 109). The government requires that all children receive an education, so Owen goes to school for a number of years. Some of the more touching passages in No Ordinary Boy chronicle Jennifer’s discovery of how schools for disabled children ‘game’ activity reports sent to parents when the evidence suggests that disabled children actually experience few educationally or socially useful activities and are mostly simply ‘managed’ until it’s time to go home.

In each case, Jennifer eventually ‘opts out’ of the programming offered to her and Owen. This results in greater personal and family peace, a reduced-stress environment of her own construction consisting of providing Owen with educational, social and therapeutic experiences provided by a small, hand-picked group of in-home caregivers, many of whom have become our friends over the years. The final culmination of Jennifer’s ‘opting out’ is when neurologists suggest that Owen might be a candidate for deep brain stimulation, a new form of therapy that sees the insertion of a small electrode into the brain and delivers low-voltage electricity in order to achieve a certain (unpredictable) amount of relief from the involuntary muscle contractions Owen suffered from all his life which made caring for him extremely challenging. The parents decline, and Jennifer writes,

I left that appointment practically skipping. I felt I had passed a test, or resisted a strong temptation. Not because we decided against the surgery but because I knew we had reached the best decision for Owen, given everything we knew and all we had experienced, in spite of the forces moving us in a different direction. [...] With this one decision, I enjoyed a surprising new freedom. There was nothing left to hold out for, no more straws at which to grasp, no more hope for improvement, no more theories to explore, no further trials. Finally, Owen was just free to be. I have no doubt he felt just as much relief as I did (p. 139).

No Ordinary Boy, then, is the story of discovering  and experiencing individual freedom as the result of applying our critical faculties to the big questions we are challenged to answer in our lives. It is the story of a mother’s personal development and courage—not the ‘courage’ many people attribute to someone tasked with the Sisyphean task of caring for a severely disabled child (“I could never do what you do!”), but the courage to ask hard questions about every aspect of caring for such a child, and the courage to say no to following the typical trajectory, the path laid out by the institutions.

Asking—and answering—these questions requires tremendous strength, honesty and trust in one’s own abilities. It shows us the positive change that can come as a result of having the willingness to look at ourselves and our place in the world, and how to progress towards a better world—for ourselves, those who depends on us, and those who will come after us.  And that is what makes No Ordinary Boy relevant to all of us, not just to parents of children with disabilities, or healthcare practitioners.

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I have so far refrained from commenting on Jennifer’s book as a written work. It is beautifully written, full of keenly observed and remembered passages brimming with natural, often elegant dialogue; relevant and witty internal monologues helping us understand complex medical or philosophical matters simply but never in a reductionist or dumbed-down manner. The author’s use of language is natural and conversational which should make the book well-received by, and easy-to-digest for, a number of different audiences.

It should also be stressed that, while No Ordinary Boy naturally highlights aspects of Jennifer’s and Owen’s story that illustrate some of the deeper philosophical issues it’s trying to address, it is by no means an incomplete narrative—or difficult to read. I imagine that parents of disabled children will find much to emotionally connect with here. They may recognize aspects of their own journeys in No Ordinary Boy—through the warmth, immediacy and confidence of Jennifer’s language and the ‘everywoman’ appeal of her narrative, especially evident in the early chapters dealing with the discovery of her difficult pregnancy and Owen’s first months in the neo-natal intensive care unit. It is, next to its intelligent and emancipatory message, also simply a great story that demands to be read.

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No Ordinary Boy: The Life and Death of Owen Turney is available directly from Jennifer’s website or on Amazon.com.

I recently read this in an article in the Shambhala Sun, a magazine about Buddhism:

Here is another practice, rooted in Zen tradition, which you might enjoy. Sit down with someone you care about and have a cup of tea. The practice is just sitting and having tea and conversation for its own sake. Drink the tea together without an agenda, without wanting anything from the other person or trying to change them. That means not wanting them to think or feel differently from the way they do, without wanting them to appreciate you, or needing them to understand how you feel about them. Enjoy yourself. (From a piece by John Tarrant entitled, “Let me Count the Ways,” September 2011, p. 33)

I find myself buying Shambhala Sun quite often, lately. Trivially, I might say it’s become a guilty pleasure of sorts; the way one might buy an especially nice bag of coffee beans or a box of Belgian chocolates.

Guilty, because it’s hardly becoming for an atheist—an avowed religious skeptic with a decades-old penchant for expressing said skepticism—to buy a magazine of religious teachings. Yet: pleasurable, because the quality of thought and writing in the magazine strikes a chord for me almost every time I turn its pages.

I find myself drawn to its no-nonsense advice about becoming a better, more socially functional, more authentic person; about how to better endure suffering during the difficult times and be more conscious of the world’s gifts during the good. Grace, dignity, groundedness, being in harmony with our surroundings, developing an ability to let in the simple—and deeply frightening—truth that we are ultimately impermanent, as is everything around us (something I have had much recent occasion to experience): all concepts the Buddhist teachings I’ve read address very well.

As I grow older, I increasingly search for guidance that resonates with me because I’m better able to articulate what that is. The endless stream of self-help books (business or personal) that our culture produces mostly misses the mark for me. I believe they serve to trivialize teaching and learning; what was once the noble calling of moral philosophers has now been reduced to 20 new self-help titles per month, accompanied by showy performances on daytime talk shows. Thought as entertainment is about as nourishing as a burger from McDonalds.

I struggle with my discovery that much of the subject matter I’m interested in is primarily presented in a religious context—just not the religion I was raised in and that I rejected so readily (Lutheranism). Of course I know that Buddhism is different from other belief systems in that it seems to offer an extraordinary amount of freedom in how one might choose to interact with it, explore it, adhere to it. Adherence to doctrine may not be its central precept (though I don’t know this for sure). But I also read or hear about Buddhist activities that signal ‘organized religion’ to me and cause me to instinctively back off further engagement: hours or days of silent meditation retreats and other repetitive physical practices; the renouncement of conventional living to follow a monastic trajectory, chants and other activities to invoke the spirit of someone who himself wouldn’t have claimed to be more than an awakened, enlightened teacher.

I don’t reject religion with a young man’s need to be brilliant by being offensive to others anymore. I have come to deeply appreciate Christianity’s immense cultural achievements—in music, painting, sculpture, the art of publishing. Our culture would be nowhere without it. Rejecting it and its artifacts would be meaningless, unproductive, nihilistic. I am the child of Western civilization in every way, and I embrace it.

For years I fervently hoped to better grasp onto my poorly substantiated suspicion that it must be possible to argue for a universally true, secular set of ethical principles according to which we should conduct ourselves—in our private sphere, and publicly in our communities. Before I left academia in the mid-1990s (recognizing my increasing boredom with my graduate degree as indicative of any academic career I might eventually have), I had tried to synthesize a better understanding of Kant’s ethics through the lens of Michel Foucault, who himself (I think) held the belief that shining a public spotlight on certain otherwise unregulated exercises of power (deliberately hidden from view) might render them ineffective in time.

What was missing, though, was any real sense of why the public would perceive these transgressions of power as intolerable, and why it would be compelled to act once the truth had been exposed. Nobody could—or wanted to?—admit to the possibility that we all have a basic set of common human moral assumptions ‘built in’ that allow us to agree, in the moment, on what is right and good, regardless of our cultural, geographic or religious backgrounds.

Having been out of academia for so long now, contemporary philosophy is something I access through the popular media, if at all. (I’m moderately at peace with this mechanism; it’s fundamentally reliable if a little sluggish.) So it came as a welcome surprise recently when—courtesy of Jennifer‘s keen mind and New Yorker subscription—I heard about the British philosopher Derek Parfit.

Parfit, as I understand it, has just published a book he’s laboured on for fifteen years in which he tries to develop a philosophically sound, secular argument in favour of there being universal moral truths. The journalist Larissa MacFarquhar, who wrote the Parfit profile in the New Yorker, summarizes the main thrust of On What Matters as follows:

Parfit believes that there are true answers to moral questions, just as there are to mathematical ones. Humans can perceive these truths, through a combination of intuition and critical reasoning, but they remain true whether humans perceive them or not. He believes there is nothing more urgent for him to do in his brief time on earth than discover what these truths are and persuade others of their reality. He believes that without moral truth the world would be a bleak place in which nothing mattered. This thought horrifies him. (“How To Be Good,” by Larissa MacFarquhar in the New Yorker September 5, 2011, p. 44)

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In a relativist world, this is immensely exciting. We are increasingly caught between the ongoing project that is modernity—in which indeed, as it turns out, nothing matters because there is no universal moral truth to anchor our judgment (or agreement on how to arrive at such a truth)—and the ever-increasing backlash of religious fundamentalism (Christian and Muslim alike), where universal truths not only exist but apparently need to be advanced by the sword once again, just like a thousand years ago.

What we variously describe as ‘pluralism’ or ‘postmodernity’ may be culturally entertaining to the rich and powerful but is also fundamentally unjust and destructive to the hundreds of millions who are not. Whether on a local, national or international scale, individuals and institutions struggle with how to make and justify moral decisions, and whether to assert them beyond their own immediate sphere of influence. Telling your neighbour to turn down his music when it bothers you causes no small amount of agonizing for a variety of reasons. An argument between members of different ethnicities or cultural backgrounds results in much private self-doubt (and sometimes, public outrage). ‘Tolerance’ becomes the yardstick by which everything has to be measured, and has also evolved into the primary weapon against freedom of opinion and expression. Our fragmented attempts at constituting our own moral authority in the international sphere are either short-lived populist movements (Band Aid, Bono’s debt relief, etc.), hollow treaty organizations that act without any genuine popular support (the United Nations, the International Criminal Court), or simply waging the odd war here and there.

How we feel about the future and about future generations is key to how we act in the present. “Parfit has always been preoccupied with how we think about our moral responsibilities towards future people. It seems to him the most important problem we have.” (“How To Be Good,” by Larissa MacFarquhar in the New Yorker September 5, 2011, p. 53). Our ability to discover—and agree on—a universally acceptable moral truth that is not based in religion or the subjective views, preferences or indeed whims of every person will directly influence how well we leave the world for our descendants.

I am now sixty-seven. To bring my voyage to a happy conclusion . . . I would need to find ways of getting many people to understand what it would be for things to matter, and of getting these people to believe that certain things really do matter. I cannot hope to do these things by myself. But . . . I hope that, with art and industry, some other people will be able to do these things, thereby completing this voyage. (Derek Parfit in ”How To Be Good,” by Larissa MacFarquhar in the New Yorker September 5, 2011, p. 53)

I’m not yet sure what my own contribution to Parfit’s “art and industry” may eventually be, but I have ordered a copy of On What Matters and I’m feeling strangely undaunted by the prospect of slowly working my way through its 1,400 pages. It seems like a discovery of tremendous personal importance. It purports to resolve one of the great “what if” questions I had often wondered about in my own intellectual journey. I look forward to being taught, and to seeing what I may do with what I’ll learn in the future.

This summer, we spent 10 days in London on a family trip. It’s a remarkable city that offers immeasurably much to see and do. No specific number of days would be ‘enough’ to see all of its significant sites, in part because — unlike New York — there are no natural boundaries confining one’s explorations. The closest thing we had was perhaps that our Oyster cards (London’s prepaid transit charge cards) limited us to zones 1 and 2 of the public transit system, which still cover a significant area.

To North Americans, London is an object lesson in evolving a kind of livable urban sprawl that remains, in a way, on a human scale despite its immense dimensions. The first thing that strikes visitors from the New World is how low the buildings are. Restrictions on building height are rarely lifted, and there are no condo towers and only a few corporate sky scrapers. The result is of course a city that looks usable, approachable, manageable.

In Toronto, we commonly take pride in having a ‘reasonable’ public transit system. But it’s only reasonable when compared to other places in North America that basically don’t have a transit system at all (such as Detroit or Los Angeles). London’s dense web of tubes, buses and regional trains puts even Germany’s public transit to shame. Sure, the tube is cramped at rush hour and you have to take a lot of escalators into the depths of the earth to get to your platform, but the net effect of the interconnected nature of the system is that there’s no single point of failure (both at the system level, and in terms of your personal travel options — there are always multiple ways of getting to your destination).

At surface level, it’s very much a walking city. To those of us unaccustomed to doing a lot of urban walking, it can be a bit of a shock to the system to be on your feet all day, every day. You do become used to it after a while though. In the inner city, everything is actually very close and easily walkable.

And the spoils of navigating at street level are myriad and wonderful: delicious restaurants, pubs and sandwich shops (offering healthy fast food) at every corner. Beautiful architecture as far as the eye can see. Markets, museums, parks, red double-decker buses, quaint (and basically unused) red phone booths, the South Bank. The bustle of Londoners and tourists dodging each other everywhere. (The dodging happens because Britons drive and walk on the left, and there are now so many tourists in London during the summer months who steadfastly cling to their own continental walking habits that the sidewalks turn into a very long and exhausting basketball game every day.)

We also spent several days visiting the ‘official’ sites. The Tower is surprisingly interesting and impressive, particularly the hourly tours led by a Yeoman Warder. The strange realization that every depiction of the British monarchy prior to the 19th century you’ve ever seen on television essentially takes place in the White Tower, which was the official residence until 1837.

The Victoria and Albert Museum was a revelation: I had expected something more like Toronto’s ROM (a hodgepodge of cultural artifacts, not-quite-art and not-quite-cultural-history). What I saw instead was a collection of some of the most priceless and timeless art, sculpture and historic craft I’ve ever encountered in a single building. (Even though I couldn’t quite shake the notion that the British were displaying everything they had looted in 400 years of Empire.)

The London Eye — built after I last visited London — is also well worth queuing up for (and it was a surprisingly short wait). It’s a marvel of technology and is much bigger than it appears in photos. I was so tickled by the sheer engineering achievement of the giant Ferris wheel that I’m afraid I missed taking in many of London’s famous sites while we were on it. I would go on another ride in a heartbeat, regardless of the relatively high cost.

Speaking of costs, I actually found London surprisingly affordable. The main cost, inevitably, is for accommodation. Acceptable (i.e. clean) short-term accommodation in London is possibly at even more of a premium than it is in New York. Our approach was to rent an apartment via VRBO.com, and so we lived it up in a South Kensington mews townhouse that left my Londoner friends somewhat speechless and assuming I was made out of money because nobody can afford to actually live in South Kensington (the per-person, per-night cost was still much lower than an acceptable hotel room would have been). The cost of food, however, seemed lower than it is in Canada, and perhaps somewhat more predictable because both taxes and restaurant service charges are included.

If it weren’t for the jet lag (I’m writing this blog post at 5:30 am), we would certainly visit it more frequently. It’s an unconditional recommendation and a must-see if you haven’t been.

Jennifer’s write-up and (much better) photos from our trip are here.

When I first started blogging in 2007, the trend seemed to be that blogs should be narrowly defined and specific to a topic. I couldn’t see how I could reasonably blog about music and technology and consulting and food in the same place.

First there was Teabowl, a blog about music, food, books, traveling and that sort of thing. Then, there was Infowork, an ill-fated attempt at writing about consulting and Microsoft technologies (the field that I work in). When I started to realize that I had no place to talk about all the other things I’m interested in (business, politics, design, etc.), I started Changebowl.

Cleverly and quite effectively, I had created my own long tail, fragmenting the “Carsten content experience” to such a degree that even I was getting confused. You haven’t experienced self-inflicted stress until you’ve had three undernourished blogs stare you down every time you open a browser, demanding updates.

So I consolidated all my old blog posts into this new blog right here, reworking them where necessary and deleting those that simply weren’t doing it for me anymore (mostly old tech news and recommendations for products I’ve since stopped using because something better came along).

I will just stand by my “Renaissance man” persona and assume that my posts are either found via Google (in which case I believe the reader doesn’t care what else I blog about) or read by people who know me anyway and won’t be surprised when I follow a post about enterprise content management with one about death metal.

Happy reading, and thanks for staying the course!

In the last few days, he’s been tweeting a selection of “Principles of Adult Behavior” from a list he apparently first wrote up when he turned 30. In an article from 2001 about the perils of America’s relentless and destructive ‘pursuit of happiness,’ he writes,

But not until I turned 30 was it made obvious to me that my wariness of the pursuit of happiness might be a subtle form of treason. Like many of my generation, I hadn’t really expected to live to such an age. I really didn’t trust anyone over 30 – and remain reluctant to do so even now – but since I was about to be one, I figured I ought to at least take a stab at graceful adulthood. [...] So I spent the night before my 30th Birthday composing a list of advisories to myself that I called “Principles of Adult Behavior.”

Having turned 40 myself last year, graceful adulthood is certainly on my mind (maybe more so now than when I was 30), and I find Barlow’s principles quite excellent so far (even if he himself calls them “blandly inarguable, the sort of platitudes Polonius liked to lay on Hamlet”). Navigating my way through the frequently difficult and dysfunctional world of work, these seem like good occasional reminders for being mindful, present and staying on track with good behaviour that doesn’t compromise me or others.

Adult Principle #1: Be patient. No matter what.

Adult Principle #2: Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him.

Adult Principle #3: Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you.

Adult Principle #4: Expand your sense of the possible.

Adult Principle #5: Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.

Adult Principle #6: Don’t ask more of others than you can deliver yourself.

Adult Principle #7: Tolerate ambiguity.

Adult Principle #8: Laugh at yourself frequently.

Adult Principle #9: Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.

Adult Principle #10: Try not to forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong.

Adult principle #11: Give up blood sports.

Adult principle #12: Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Do not endanger it frivolously. And never endanger the life of another.

Adult principle #13: Never lie to anyone for any reason.

Adult principle #14: Learn the needs of those around you and respect them.

Adult principle #15: Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.

Adult principle #16: Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun.

Adult principle #17: Praise at least as often as you disparage.

Adult principle #18: Never let your errors pass without admission.

Adult principle #19: Become less suspicious of joy.

Adult principle #20: Understand humility.

Adult principle #21: Forgive.

Adult principle #22: Foster dignity.

Adult principle #23: Live memorably.

Adult principle #24: Love yourself.

Adult principle #25: Endure.

(More back story and discussion here.)

Everyone’s lamenting the decline of proper stereo equipment. Teens are losing their hearing to their tinny iPod earbuds and nobody knows what non-compressed music sounds like anymore.

People don’t buy stereos these days — listening to music in one’s living room has become part of an overall surround sound home entertainment setup that comprises a tv, five or seven speakers and a subwoofer. All music destined for commercial success is now mixed with such high compression (to grab attention on the radio and compensate for the poor quality listening devices that are so prevalent) that it’s lost all nuances and dynamics. There’s actually a movement to reduce the amount of compression applied to recorded music.

And yet, in our era of the long tail and tech entrepreneurship, there’s more and more excellent, affordable audio equipment available, mostly made in China to exacting specifications from US or European engineers and sold on the web or through smaller retailers. As with everything these days, Google and niche sites are your friend — as long as you know what you’re looking for, chances are you will find it at a price point that works for you.

The quest for ever-better audio equipment never ends, truth be told. The scale has an unlimited top end of course, and — given enough money — it could always be just a little better. I’m never not thinking about it (like any good nerd).

I listen to a lot of music while working in my home office.

Recently, I found what I think are the best desktop speakers I’ve ever heard. They’re made by a company called Audio Engine and cost only around $200 (a remarkable feat given that Bose charges twice as much money for what are essentially two plastic boxes with artificially enhanced bass and the most horribly coloured sound you can imagine).

The Audio Engine A2 speakers come in two kinds of black (glossy or matte) and white. They’re small, heavy and quite beautiful. They have Kevlar woofers and silk tweeters. And — after about a week of burn-in, which all good audio equipment requires — they sound simply extraordinary. The built-in power amplifier (in the left speaker) produces ample power to fill a room, and if you’re sitting right in front of them (using a near-field monitoring setup in a typical computer application) they can be quite overwhelming even at low volumes.

They have excellent bass, focused mids, and trebles that are never sharp or uncomfortable, regardless of what kind of music you play. The A2s also have great depth of field and sound stage. Even coupled with a better-than-average, yet still quite flawed external sound card/DAC such as my trusty old M-Audio Audiophile USB, they sound briliant — musical and coherent regardless of musical style. Even complex orchestral music doesn’t overwhelm these tiny wonders.

Audio Engine sells a set of little rubber pedestals that tilt the speakers slightly backwards and bring them inline with the incline of your monitor.

I’ve replaced the cables that came in the Audio Engine box with my own — I’m using a decent-ish pair of Monster interconnects plus some leftover Totem Tress, a fantastic speaker cable made by Totem, who make the speakers I use in my main stereo, to connect the amplified left hand side to the unamplified right.

I cannot recommend these speakers enough.

The more you ‘live life transparently,’ the more you post to your social networking life stream, the more ‘friends’ and acquaintances you pick up along the way, the more you invite trouble. Well — that may be stating it strongly. But you do attract a small group of social media hecklers, bullies and office chair pontificators whose apparent sole raison d’être is to leave sarcastic and clever (to them & nobody else) comments about your status updates. You know the type who encourages you to post more observations about the coffee you drink and the sandwiches you eat? And the type who just feels compelled to comment on everything, simply everything, regardless of whether he has anything to say? Sure you do. You’ve encountered them, too.

The problem has been irking me more lately. The busier I get at work, the more I look to increase the quality of my social networking time. Facebook — that melting pot of personal and work family, friends and acquaintances — has the answer, even if it’s not immediately obvious.

When the big Facebook Privacy Scare hit earlier this year, I carefully divided my < 400 friends into a number of different groups to whom I decided to disclose different things. Most of these decisions were about really personal information, like address, mobile and home phone numbers (I do tend to pre-edit myself fairly well when it comes to photos). I also disconnected almost all of the applications I had in my profile, un-liked everything, un-joined most groups and put some tighter controls around what Facebook profile information the outside world got to see via Google.

This weekend, when the hecklers and pontificators finally pushed me over the edge, it became clear that Facebook’s updated privacy controls can also be used to exert a kind of content distribution control, a sort of personal censorship. So I created another Facebook privacy group for my hecklers and pontificators. And then I removed that group’s right to see any of my updates. To them, my wall will basically appear empty from now on — nothing to leave comments about. (People are free to follow me on Twitter. They’d get to see essentially the same content there. But the fleeting nature of Twitter — and the sheer number of spammers that I ‘gong’ every week — makes me less concerned about managing the problem without upsetting the delicate social ecosystem that is Facebook.)

Another option would have been to de-friend or ban them. But it’s not that I have something specifically against these people; I just don’t enjoy being incessantly bombarded with their opinions about my opinions. And for their comments to be preserved, together with my updates, for eternity.

All of this has made me think about the connection between privacy and censorship in social networking. What I have just done is censored a few people, exercised a sort of digital Nimbyism. It’s a pretty mild form of censorship in that I haven’t muzzled them anywhere other than on my Facebook wall by preventing them from commenting on my status updates. But it forces me to consider my views about openness, freedom of speech and censorship.

Like most people considering freedom of expression, my internal dialogue is one about personal limits and the public good. Lawmakers need to balance the concepts of freedom of speech and personal protection daily. Where I net out — for now, anyway — is that in my small portion of social networking, I have the right to decide what’s inside and outside my personal limits. My policy is that I’m open to positive and negative feedback, to other perspectives, and to humorous commentary. But I’m not open to criticism of what I say couched in a quasi-humorous ‘heckling.’ That’s just bad behaviour. I’m also not open to web diarrhea. Just being in front of a computer and having the time doesn’t qualify you to comment on my stuff. You need to actually have a point.

Nerds get a bad rap. We are being made fun of for our love of, and intimate ways with, our gear. When I say ‘gear,’ I mean computers, musical instruments, stereo equipment, cameras… anything that only reveals its depth when engaged with properly, and anything where there’s always a ‘step up,’ a better version that can be bought, configured or hacked. New, better gear fills us with desire, partially because it enables us to pursue some greater cause more effectively; partially because owning better gear than the next nerd gives us a certain gearhead cachet.

While I’ve been reading the big gear blogs for years — Engadget, Gizmodo, Tom’s Hardware, Computer Audiophile, Create Digital Music and the like — a recent addition to the field has kept me coming back consistently. What sets The Setup apart is that it consists of a series of interviews with real-life gearheads, the tech industry famous and not-so-famous, talking about the gear they own and the gear they’d like to own. They’re also asked to imagine their ideal future gear (“What would be your dream setup?”).

What makes The Setup special is that it accurately describes the almost symbiotic relationship nerds have with their gear. The most interesting aspect of it is the fluent, almost poetic voice with which most of the interviewees describe their equipment. This blog doesn’t dumb anything down for anyone: every contributor assumes that you are already a gearhead and that you’ll understand the language. This is not a blog for those who don’t already have at least the same tendencies. A lot is taken for granted here, and every interview asserts a common set of assumptions. There are no Mac versus Windows slinging matches, either; it’s clear that at this level of gearheadness, you’ve tried everything, understand it well enough, and have arrived at your preferred configuration.

There is something fundamentally inspired about presenting tech workers and their equipment in this way. It relates most closely, I think, to what we know about artists, artisans and craftspeople and their tools. There is an intimate connection between artists and their brushes and canvases; between goldsmiths and their forming tools; between artisan potters and their wheels and kilns; perhaps even between roofers and their hammers. In each case, an intimate knowledge of the tools is required in order to deliver quality work that others will pay for. Such mastery is obtained in the course of what are often long formal training programs or apprenticeships (or informal learning and ‘working your way up’).

Why should it be any different in the computer industry? I think that my long history with being an actively engaged, enthusiastic and analytical advanced computer user uniquely qualifies me to be good at my job. I know intrinsically how things work; while I’m not an engineer and have never designed any hardware, I understand hardware concepts very well. I’m even better at software: my work revolves around designing commercial software for my customers, and I take an active interest in my field. Yet, if I weren’t also a passionate, frequent, long-term user of all manner of software, I’d only be half as good at my work.

I think the popular view of the nerdy gearhead comes from the fact that a large percentage of the general population now also uses computers (not to speak of stereo equipment, digital SLR cameras, etc.). And for all those who use a computer merely as a day-to-day tool to achieve something else, it seems incomprehensible and ridiculous that there are some who engage much more deeply with their equipment.

In order to really create something great on a computer, you need to achieve a certain ‘symbiosis’ with your equipment that’s exactly the same as learning how to mix oil paints and successfully apply them to a canvas.

The nuances in The Setup are also revealing. Everyone’s got their own hobby horse, their own foible: Maggie McFee keeps talking about backing up; Jason Rohrer takes great pride in using an old Dell laptop that his sister was going to throw out. Only people whose understanding of a particular field is very highly developed are permitted to have eccentricities, and these folks are near the top of the heap in this regard.

I also thoroughly enjoy following the evolution of someone’s gear-related pursuits. For example, Tim Bray talks quite a lot about his high-end digital music setup (which is not unlike my own, to some extent). It’s inspiring to follow a true nerd’s passionate inquiry into a ‘related’ field and then see the finished product.

I’ve learned a lot from The Setup and — if you’re a nerd — you will, too. I think it’s time that the gearheads took back the legitimacy of their pursuits from popular culture’s disdain. If it’s true that (for better or worse) digital workers are like artisans (some more like artists, some more like craftspeople), then we should be allowed to have deeper relationships with our tools just like other, similar professions. I enjoy the ironic “taking back geekdom” movement that started as early as 1995 with Douglas Coupland‘s Microserfs as much as the next guy. But the irony only serves to mask our underlying suspicion that maybe, just maybe, everyone else is right, that these digital tools don’t deserve the same kind of respect, and that our deep, emotional investments ultimately won’t be paid back.

I say get rid of the irony and commit to being a gearhead. Embrace it.

The Weather Network is a portal to another reality. It’s a 24-hour cable news channel where everything revolves around the weather, all the time. Every bulletin and every story segment is about the weather, climate change, or about the weather’s impact on traffic or other aspects of people’s lives (cars spinning out in deep snow, homes destroyed by falling trees or floods).

There is no irony in the Weather Network’s flow: it’s as if the anchors and journalists aren’t even aware that there’s another world out there, one where the weather is merely a small part of people’s lives. Presenters are professionally dressed in business attire and have all the mannerisms of CNN or BBC World: they say things like, “Up next!” or “What an interesting story there.”

During the frequent “news bulletins,” there are even ‘chatty’ parts where two anchors (!) share some informal banter with the viewers, like this:

Anchor 1: We thought we’d start this newscast by showing you some pictures of warm, sunny Toronto yesterday.
Anchor 2: Let’s do it!

Since nothing actually happens during the news bulletins, they are filled with B-roll images from around the country, showing iconic scenes from Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, St. John’s, Toronto… catalogued (in a very large media library, one presumes) by season and weather condition, so that the appropriate clip is shown. For example, one of today’s stories was “Vancouver has Winter Woes of Its Own,” where we learned that winters are hard even in Vancouver because it always rains there:

One of my favourite parts is how the Weather Network has its own weather report. Just after the news, the actual weather report comes on, with a country-wide review of meteorological conditions, followed by an exhaustive local forecast. Of course, there’s also a traveler’s forecast that talks about a number of US cities.

The Weather Network also runs house promos where it tells us why it’s the best Weather Network out there (there are no others). It claims to have “40 meteorologists” on staff who anticipate and report on storms and other extreme weather conditions, and the promo is filled with dramatic images of floods, hurricanes and cars sliding on highways during blizzards.

The high production values of The Weather Network make it eerily similar to the Onion News Network, the Internet’s most brilliant video news satire, where everything is just like real television, only much, much funnier.

Now, you can sort of work out why the Weather Network is the way it is. This is a channel most reasonable people will only flip to for a quick weather check before leaving the house in the morning. Its ‘bounce rate’ must be very high. So the idea of creating ‘sticky’ viewers by offering interesting stories, opinions and banter to hang on to that viewer just a little bit longer must have made sense to someone.

But I like to imagine that there are home-bound people somewhere for whom the Weather Network is a main source of information about the world. Who are continually amazed at the astounding goings-on in Canada’s weather, who are delighted with the “international news” items about tropical storms and Canadian travelers stuck at airports due to white-outs.

In popular culture, the weatherman is typically the newsroom underdog: an aspiring journalist who doesn’t quite measure up to his news anchor brethren and who wears flashy jackets (it’s a waist-up sort of world) or does wacky things to catch our attention.

The Weather Network is the revenge of the weatherman: it’s all weather all the time. Because if you can’t join them, just create your own.

Many of the houses on the Island are pretty basic but artistically adorned. This one’s shack is festively decorated with a universal pagan symbol.

This home struck us as the most modern and architecturally advanced on Centre Island. The view of the city skyline must be spectacular.

This seemed to be like a little Freecycle station: islanders appear to use this open air closet to get rid of unwanted junk.

The ‘parking lot’ outside the Rectory Café.

Footprints in the sand.

The Island seems to suffer from a high density of cast-off things stored in people’s yards. Here: a still life with Fender Rhodes. Fetching.

The Lake Ontario waves on a windy day.

Bicycles parked at the ferry dock, on our way back to Toronto.

Picture by Benjamin Nagel, via Wikimedia Commons

Apparently, I’m a hipster now. According to my friend Bryce, who calls everyone a hipster who uses a Mac. Though I feel a certain kinship with PC in the “Get a Mac” commercials (who doesn’t? how can you not root for the likable underdog?), my purchase now entitles me to the same hipster gloating and proselytizing Mac users allegedly do. I’ve joined a small but growing number of Mac users, and I didn’t even buy AppleCare.

Now, for someone who spent a number of years working at Microsoft itself, and all his years since being a devoted Microsoft product guy at various system integrators, this may be a puzzling choice. Some might say it’s a choice I shouldn’t have made. It’s a little like the ad agency that was hired to create a campaign for Coca Cola and offered its clients beer after the first meeting. As someone who regularly works with Microsoft technologies, helps sell them and believes that they are good products, buying a Mac isn’t the obvious choice.

So why did I do it? As with everything, there are several reasons. The primary reason is that I wanted a small, rugged and aesthetically pleasing laptop for everyday use. What I had before was large, heavy, thick, plasticky, had poor battery life and was very powerful. Other than “very powerful,” those were not attributes I was actually looking for. But they are what you get when you work in an office and someone else orders a computer for you. It wasn’t even price that was the issue so much: the Lenovo laptop was neither particularly cheap nor a corporate standard. But it was a sensible IT decision to buy.

I was also secretly a little envious of the cachet a Mac bestowed on its devoted users.

There is simply no Wintel PC manufacturer today that offers a small, rugged, fast and aesthetically pleasing laptop for less than $2000. See for yourself; look at their websites. Many of them have models that are attractive, fast and small: Dell offers the Adamo, Lenovo has its X200 series, and Sony has a whole slew of pretty little laptops. However, if you want a reasonable specification, all of them are very, very pricey, for no apparent reason.

Enter Apple. The small MacBook Pro is a more than reasonable performer, costs only $1700 or so (I got mine for $1400) and is heart-stoppingly beautiful. Like the commercials say, everything is properly thought out. It’s a design object as much as it is a computer. From the MagSafe power adapter, to the gorgeous screen, the backlit keyboard, the great battery life, and – last but definitely not least – the aluminum unibody construction, this is a fantastic piece of hardware.

So I thought: I’ll just put Windows 7 on it. It’s a PC, Apple’s just released new Boot Camp drivers for Windows – how hard can it be? I’ll just tell people, “It’s a PC.” I even have one of those “I’m a PC” stickers – maybe I’ll put that on it. As a sort of ‘work credibility defense mechanism.’

Right. And then, I started to use OS X Snow Leopard.

Initially just to see if I could figure it out. Whenever I had tried it previously, in an Apple Store for example, I had felt like a total newbie – not a feeling I particularly appreciated. Didn’t understand how to use the trackpad, didn’t know how to right-click, couldn’t find anything, etc. Typical “Windows user tries Mac for the first time” sort of stuff.

So after unboxing my new Mac, I learned how to configure and operate the single-button multi-touch track pad (I’m fairly convinced I could never go back to a regular touchpad now). And I started clicking around. As a project, I found and installed all my regular open source/freeware software – things I use in my day-to-day computering and blogging life. I easily found all of them and the entire operation took no more than about an hour. Throughout, the OS was fast, responsive and – most importantly – entirely self-evident. I didn’t really have to stop and Google anything. I just knew how to do things. I had a copy of Microsoft Office:Mac 2008 lying around, so I installed that, too. (Entourage seems like Outlook’s hillbilly cousin, but the other apps seem perfectly usable.)

Within less than a day, I felt like I had my productivity basics in place.

Next, I installed Windows Vista using Boot Camp and the (new) Boot Camp drivers. It worked. The drivers are mostly great, with the painful exception of the touchpad driver, which is way too sensitive (and you can’t configure it to change this). Waited the customary 2-3 hours for Vista to download and install all manner of software updates… you know, Service Pack 1, Service Pack 2, Internet Explorer 8, about a thousand security updates, all that incomprehensible “Windows Genuine Advantage” stuff, etc.

And then I thought: “Hang on. Why don’t I just run Vista in a virtual machine, like all other smart Mac users who have to use Windows for work?” Enter Parallels. Cost me another $80. Apart from my Mac, those are the best dollars I’ve ever spent.

Parallels, for those who haven’t experienced it, is like Microsoft Virtual PC, but for the Mac. You can run a fairly large number of operating systems as virtual machines. Parallels installs a number of drivers in the guest OS that enable things like file sharing and graphics integration with the host computer. In Windows – significantly – this means that Parallels can run in ‘Coherence’ mode, which makes application windows from the guest OS appear as if they are being run on the Mac. For example, Outlook, Word or Internet Explorer can be started from the Mac’s Dock and ‘float’ on the Mac desktop as disembodied windows. Given that my Mac has 4GB of RAM, I can comfortably allocate 1.5GB to the virtual machine, which is plenty to run the things I need to run during work hours.

As I went through my (very shallow) learning curve, several thoughts began to take shape. First, I felt a sense of amazement and elation at how truly excellent OS X Snow Leopard is. It’s fast, responsive, reliable (I have rebooted this laptop only once since I got it 6 days ago, and that was during the Parallels installation), pretty and breathtakingly usable. If you’ve used a computer with a windowing operating system before, you can use this. Period.

Coupled with my amazement is a growing sense of sadness and confusion about where Microsoft fits into all this. I’m sure Windows 7 is a good operating system. All reports so far, both on the web and from friends, indicate it’s lighter, faster and more stable than Vista. Whenever I’ve played with it, though, it still looks and feels like Vista once you look beyond the new chrome on the Start Bar. More importantly, now that I’ve used OS X for a week, Windows looks and feels light years behind the competition.

It comes out in the little things that are simply built into OS X – and that, in Windows, you have to laboriously add in yourself. Things like software to take pictures using the built-in iSight webcam. Apple Photo Booth is brilliant, easy to use, and every computer should have it. On my last two Vista machines, the OEM had provided software to use the webcam – Windows itself doesn’t have any. The same is true for previewing files such as PDFs and images. Windows can show images but can’t show PDFs out of the box. Etc. Etc. It sounds petty. And, if you think of it on an item-by-item basis, it is. But together, having all of these utilities just there, out of the box, is brilliant. Productive and intelligent.

My new hipster Mac experience has taught me that Microsoft may be falling behind in more than just the mobile space. While the company has made great strides in server software in the last 10 years, putting itself firmly on the map as an enterprise player similar to IBM or Oracle, it has actually lost ground in both the desktop operating system and mobile phone market. In smart phones, it is reasonable to assume Microsoft may never catch up, after the iPhone. On the desktop, it’s a smaller margin (and one cannot underestimate the immense power of habit; after all, Microsoft controls more than 97% of the desktop operating system market), and maybe Windows 8 will amaze and delight. Somehow, I doubt it, though.

In the meantime, I’ll be a genuinely delighted Mac user. I will try not to gloat when I’m in meetings with people who use PCs and Windows. I wouldn’t have Justin Long’s uncanny ability to seem both superior and like a nice guy all at the same time. At heart, I really think I’m more of a PC. But man, do I love my new Mac.

(Photo of Justin Long courtesy of gdcgraphics via Wikimedia Commons.)

Definintely Not The Opera (DNTO) is a magazine show on CBC Radio 1 that comes out every Saturday. It’s one of my most treasured Canadian cultural institutions. Originally named Brand X, it was first broadcast in 1994 and later renamed to Definitely Not The Opera to signify that it ran opposite Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on CBC Radio 2.

Host Sook-Yin Lee is a former MuchMusic VJ who took over DNTO in 2002. She’s also an accomplished actor, musician and filmmaker. Known for pushing her own limits (and, as a result, ours), Lee was involved in a controvery in 2003 when she acted in the film Shortbus which showed her having unsimulated sex. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation threatened to fire her in response, but a number of international media personalities supported her strongly and the CBC backed down.

DNTO is unusual in the current media landscape. A salon-style magazine program resolutely aimed at Generation X, it entertains and informs not by commenting on current affairs or the entertainment industry, nor by decorating itself with celebrity interviews. Instead, DNTO picks a topic (for example, “What do you believe in?” or “What didn’t you learn in school today?”) and provides 2 hours of thoughtful and intelligent analysis, narrative, humour and commentary.

The ‘talking heads’ are an eclectic mix of (mostly local, Canadian) artists, writers, scientists and other cultural producers. The style is a Sook-Yin Lee-led conversation, interspersed with incidental music. Quite unlike a more traditionally oriented interviewer, Lee asserts her opinions strongly in most segments – each episode has a story to tell and a point to make, and ‘getting out of the way’ doesn’t really support that objective.

Stories, in fact, are what DNTO is all about. Stories from when we were kids, stories about love and sex, stories about memorable embarassing moments, about accomplishments and failures, about the intrigue of the world. Stories about life.

Lee, in a way, is the show: many of DNTO’s most memorable stories are from her own life. She has a strong sense of wonder, an awareness of the magic of ordinary events, and is entirely fearless of disclosing too much (or at least that’s what we allow ourselves to believe). She professes that she’s “private” and a “prude” (her Chinese background, perhaps), yet we have weekly evidence of her need to share her most private experiences on air.

DNTO is very Canadian. The spirit of Trudeau’s children permeates every moment of programming. Cultural differences are acknowledged and respected, shared school experiences celebrated. The Canadian melting pot is discovered and surfaced in the ordinary events of everyday life. Somehow, DNTO manages to be wildly entertaining in its ordinariness; more so than, say, many of NPR‘s magazine shows which are oriented around cultural events (books, films, music releases) and their associated producers.

DNTO is available as a weekly podcast from the DNTO website.

[Editor's note: This post refers to an older blog of mine that's since been shut down. It's here mostly for historical interest. My misgivings about "business blogging" in the service of my profession remain unchanged...]

As many of you know, I work for a Microsoft partner – we provide consulting services and create software solutions, mostly for the public sector in Ontario, Canada.

I used to have a blog at infowork.ca that talked about some of my experiences and observations about my work, particularly work related to Microsoft technology. I also tried to provide my views on issues and challenges in the world of IT professional services. It’s still a relatively young profession (even though it’s been around for 40+ years now!) and there are all kinds of fascinating and challenging things to talk about.

But, I confess, I ran out of steam. If one’s energy level for a project is any reflection of one’s enthusiasm for the subject matter (and it is!), then this wasn’t really what I wanted to blog about. Certainly not the only thing. So the posting frequency became less and less, and my stress levels about not posting higher and higher. The main thing I learned from blog 1.0 is that I defined my subject matter too narrowly. As a result, I didn’t have anywhere to talk about all the other amazing things I discover daily.

My interests are pretty far-ranging, and many of them are either directly or indirectly related to my work. If they’re not, then they’re simply not yet connected to my work; they’re still waiting to be synthesized.

I’ve defined what I’ll write about in blog 2.0 much more loosely and honestly. I’m excited to have a new space where I can talk about the present and future, and how we’ll get there. I’ll still talk about technology, but I think my comments will be much less specific to all things Microsoft and more about the incredible emerging web.

This is a positive milestone for me – WordPress at the ready, hosting account all tuned up, and some time to write a couple of posts. I need writing as part of my daily introvert’s self-care package, so it’s been great to nerd out a bit and tinker with getting it all set up. I hope you’ll decide to subscribe.

Mary’s Organic Crackers have become one of my staple foods lately. And since I use my blog/soapbox to write about things that I love and recommend, I felt that Mary deserved a shout-out.

Mary Waldner (interviews with her can be found here and here) was a psychotherapist for most of her career. A health-conscious mom and active baker, she was diagnosed with Celiac disease in 1994. Her son was also afflicted. Like many Celiacs (or those of us who find wheat gluten hard to digest), Mary soon discovered that it’s not easy to eat well because our society bases so many foods on wheat (wheat truly is in everything). When you also have a desire to eat healthily and avoid certain other foods (like GMO corn, trans fats, etc.), your options become so thin as to almost be non-existent.

Mary’s is a typical entrepreneurial success story: she developed her crackers at home, for her own use, and started to take them along to parties where should would eat them in lieu of chips or wheat crackers. relatives, friends and complete strangers started to like them, too. She made more and more crackers and started to give them away. In 2004, Mary’s Gone Crackers was founded and began producing the crackers more industrially (in the US, they’re sold as Mary’s Gone Crackers, and I can’t for the life of me work out why they would choose to change that in Canada). They now have US and Canadian distribution and are typically available in health food stores or healthy sections of regular grocery stores. At between $4 and $6 per box, they’re not cheap, but they’re totally delicious.

Mary’s Crackers are made from brown rice, quinoa, flax seeds, sesame seeds and (wheat-free) tamari. They have a hard bite and a satisfying nutty flavour and can be eaten by themselves, but they’re better with some hummus or another healthy dip/slather. Or you could serve them with cheese.

Best of all, Mary’s Crackers feel like they’re a sinfully delicious crunchy snack but are actually healthy food. When I have Mary’s Crackers around, I don’t feel any need to have chips (or other salty snacks).

Because every ingredient is organic and the crackers contain flax seeds, I’ve discovered that they’re best stored in the fridge. I do buy rather a lot of boxes when I go grocery shopping, and I’ve had the odd one go slightly rancid on me when I used to store them in my pantry, so now they’re in the fridge.

Breakfast these days is frequently: a bowl of oatmeal with organic maple syrup, a handful of cashews or almonds, a cut-up apple, and some Mary’s Crackers with hummus. Low nutritional stress, high satisfaction and good health. What more could you want?

All over Toronto, “Urban Fresh” Sobeys have sprung up in the last two years. For those not from Toronto, Sobeys is a large Canadian grocery store chain. The “Urban Fresh” stores are unholy, small ’boutique’ grocery stores aimed squarely at cooking-challenged young urbanites. They present themselves as filled with ‘healthy’ fast food options (there’s lots of prepared food, expensive luxury brands, frequently to the exclusion of regular budget brands, an olive bar, a whole display case of individual cake slices, etc.) but ultimately, they’re the worst of the industrial food compex: limited, expensive, unhealthy and wasteful. Sobeys “Urban Fresh” is where self-respecting, right-thinking people who care about their bodies and our world shouldn’t buy groceries. It’s the sort of place you should only go to when you’re in a pickle.

Almost Perfect is the anti-Sobeys. Located near Sheppard and Keele, it offers brand name food at dramatically reduced prices. The food got there because of damaged packaging, manufacturer closeouts, overstocks or changes of packaging. Almost Perfect is clean, reasonably well presented and looks like a grocery store. Most brands are recognizable, and in 95% of cases, it’s clear why the food is there: cans are dented, outer cardboard packages may be slightly torn (but the inside vacuum packages are perfectly intact), outer wrappers may be missing. Some items are past their manufacturer’s expiry date but have been frozen before that date was reached; the store has a helpful sign that assists with decoding the various “sell by” and “use by” dates on packages, and what they mean here.

It’s the sort of place that does well on the fringes of suburbia, and there’s only one in Toronto proper; the others are in Ajax, Oshawa, Whitby or Peterborough. The typical clientele, I imagine, consists of young penny-pinching families, those living just above the poverty line, and older, retired folks who are on a fixed income, and whose dollars go much further at Almost Perfect.

Unfortunately, Almost Perfect is also the sort of place that hip ecologically conscious urbanites wouldn’t be seen dead in. You don’t see any Zip Cars in the parking lot on Saturday mornings. No urban warriors cycle here to fill their baskets with fabulously cheap foods.

If saying no to industrially produced imported food is one side of the personal activism coin, surely Almost Perfect is the other side. In the same way that we think Second Harvest is a great idea (collecting unused food from fast food outlets and delivering it to social service programs), we should also rally around Almost Perfect. Not primarily because of the savings (though these can be considerable in these recessionary times; we bought about $80-$100 worth of various soy meats, sweet potato chips, loose leaf tea and other veggie-friendly stuff for around $30), but because things shouldn’t be thrown away when they’re slightly damaged or don’t look perfect. And as anyone who’s ever opened a can or frozen package well after its expiry date and found the food inside perfectly fresh can attest, those dates mean very little when things are stored properly.

Buying frozen food at Almost Perfect should be cool in the same way as buying a “pre-loved” pair of recycled jeans at Value Village, or getting a weekly organic produce box directly from a local farm. These may be small things in the greater scheme, but the greater scheme will benefit tremendously from them, as will your savings account.

How would you move house without these? This is the ideal moving bag. From humble beginnings as a $1 useful item available in large boxes at the Ikea checkout, these are now officially one of the most useful things I have in my household. While they’re obviously too large to take them grocery shopping, they’re ideal for moving soft things (pillows, blankets, clothes) and assorted lighter ‘stuff’ that doesn’t mind being jumbled together, like shoes.

They also have a satisfying crumple sound – a bit like a sail maybe, or tarp. While you certainly can’t use them to sneak stuff around in, their crunchy nature signifies that they don’t mess around. Apparently, you can carry up to 60kg (130 pounds) in them.

Buy from Amazon.com

A review of Karim Rashid’s Design Your Self (2006)

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ’97: Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now. (‘Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young,’ by Mary Schmich in the Chicago Tribune, 1997)

If you lived in the Western world and had access to a radio circa 1999, you know these words. Baz Luhrmann, an Australian screenwriter, director and producer, took a ‘theoretical’ commencement address from a Chicago Tribune columnist and made it into a ‘song’ of sorts: read in an authoritative male voice, the track dispenses a broad range of advice over a version of the song “Everbody’s Free (To Feel Good)” by Rozalla. Definitely a ‘novelty’ single, it reached #1 in the UK and Ireland and a respectable #45 in the US.

Industrial designer Karim Rashid‘s Design Your Self, whether intentional or not, has the same thrust throughout its roughly 325 high-gloss pages of advice. Clearly not content with a single role or type of work, Rashid-as-author dispenses advice on the four key areas of life. The sub-title is, “Rethinking the way you live, love, work, and play.”

The book’s tone is a benign imperative: “Create large white spaces,” “impose order,” “drink plenty of water and use a humidifier,” “sex toys are great,” “simplify where you can.” It took me a lot of conscious effort to move beyond the imperatives, handsomely summarized on colourful pages with designer-ish fonts.

When I did manage to set aside my indignation at page after page of being told what to do and how to live, I initially learned that Karim Rashid is quite a good writer. While it’s definitely not particularly artistic prose, it is head-and-shoulders above almost every self-help book I’ve ever read. Most explanatory passages are crisp and economical, with perfectly serviceable (and sometimes slightly quirky) anecdotes from the famed designer’s hobnobbing life.

About 100 pages in, another realization: the reason I didn’t set it aside (and I set books aside readily when they irritate me) was that Rashid actually made sense in large stretches. It’s a strangely all-encompassing work, this; as wide (or wider) in scope as Emily Post‘s famous instructions about manners, he sets out a comprehensive guide to living in this 21st century, urban, technology-savvy, media-saturated multi-culti world of ours. Design Your Self‘s surprisingly broad range of topics also ensures that it never runs out of subject matter and, therefore, doesn’t become boring. (It’s quite possible to read it in the same way one might watch a horrible accident being narrowly averted: “Can he do it? Will he be able to turn the wheel before he hits the guard rail…?”)

Design Your Self is the ultimate reference to a kind of celebratory cultural relativism and as such will be deeply irritating to anyone with a more conservative outlook. Searching for its roots is, of course, not particularly hard – at least not if we speculate a little. Rashid was born in Cairo and grew up in Canada during the crucial Trudeau decades. There’s a generation of Canadians who came of age in the 70s and 80s who, naturally and quite fervently, believe in a tolerant, let’s-all-get-along, economically productive, inclusive society. This book is one such person’s attempt at imparting that world view to the next generation.

Rashid’s father was a non-practicing muslim (as he recounts in a passage about accepting yourself and others), and one gets the impression that his world is a deeply materialistic place, a place where spirituality of any kind has little place (key quote from the section about managing your own death: “Why can’t someone order a casket from Gucci or Prada?”). This seems fitting for a pontificating industrial designer, on one hand: this is a man who makes things, after all. Famous, iconic things. Things we might admire in a catalogue or exclusive storefront window.

On the other hand, it’s clear that Rashid is driven to communicate more than just advice and instructions. His is a thoroughly materialistic ethics, presented in perhaps the only way that such a project can be presented in the 2000s. Rashid’s desire is, I think, to intervene in the increasing occurrence of young people who simply don’t appear to have any idea how to do things, how to live. He does this in a way that is reasonably dignified – not preachy, not against a millennial backdrop of impending doom, not as the wise words of an old man (Design Your Self was published when he was 46). He offers advice based on reason alone, strange as that may seem.

If you can suspend your disbelief long enough – and, perhaps, skip over the portions where he tells you that black is out and that you should wear white and pink – there’s actually a lot to learn here. A little is about design and how one might structure one’s surroundings and activities; a lot is (old-fashioned) common sense, brought into the 21st century by a smart, accomplished and charismatic man.

It’s the sort of book you might find in a second hand bookstore on a Saturday afternoon, and before you know it, it’s Sunday night and you’re lounging on an orange couch with rounded edges in your newly remodeled loft apartment wearing white jeans and silver sneakers, wondering whether you should really have ordered that Gucci casket after all.

When it’s winter, I find I let things slide. Or maybe they slide all by themselves, and I just don’t do anything about them. That’s often because I find I’m quite unaware that something needs doing. Take, for instance, some inflation issues I encountered recently (no, not of the economic kind…).

This is the first year I am parking outside overnight. Previously, I had been in nice, hermetically sealed shoebox-like condos with underground parking. There, my car didn’t really encounter winter until I drove it outside. It got a little crusty as I drove it from parking garage to parking garage, but really, winter was something we both ventured into only for brief periods of time. So tire inflation issues weren’t really something I was particularly familiar with. Imagine my surprise when I realized just how much tire pressure (10% or more) my brand new tires lost over the course of a couple of weeks at -20°C! I found myself wondering why my Subaru’s steering was off and things were feeling a little, well, sloshier than even the sloshiest of Toronto’s icy streets should. I was also mystified about why my fuel consumption seemed way up… I thought, “Okay, a cold engine might use more fuel, but…”

So I stopped by my friendly neighbourhood gas station (okay, it’s actually a completely impersonal chain gas station that gives you ‘points’ every time you fill up; I just like saying ‘friendly’ and ‘neighborhood’) and properly inflated my tires. What a difference!

Another thing I realized a month or so ago was just how bad my mattress had become. When bought, a number of years ago, it seemed like a good one – expensive and properly supportive. Maybe a little too fluffy in that 18″ pillow top kind of way. But okay. What the pillow top masked, for me at least, was how unsupportive the underlying structure had become. It was sagging in the middle, and its occupants would sort of roll into the centre. When this was pointed out to me recently, I bit the bullet and went to my friendly neighbourhood mattress store (there is actually one in the neighbourhood but it, too, is a bit soulless, filled with salespeople pretending to be sleep consultants). $700 later and I’m now the proud owner of a brand-spanking-new mattress. My back thanked me immediately and continues to thank me every day.

Clearly, winter is a season that requires me to be more structured and organized than I normally need to be. Nothing feels naturally as if it needs doing; my caveman instincts tell me it’s time to bury myself in my home, stay inside, consume the food I have stored in my cupboards and hibernate. From now on, I think winter will require me to make lists and check items off as I go. The relief of addressing these two things was immediately tangible, so I think I’ll continue to go through my list of things I don’t want to know about (or do) as winter turns into spring.