Here’s the view from the window on our flight to Boston last weekend, just before landing at Logan airport. We were neck-and-neck with the Song jet, which was also coming in for a landing, then pulled ahead. A little closer, and I would’ve been able to watch the in-flight movie on the other jet…
We’re coming up on that time again: the next “Ask Tucows” online chat takes place in just one week — Tuesday, May 2nd.
The first chat was quite successful and went well over the “official” scheduled length. Based on the response and length of the conversation, I have decided to lengthen the “official” time of the chat; it will take place on May 2nd from 12:00 noon to 3:00 p.m. EDT (that’s 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon Pacific, or 16:00 to 19:00 UTC).
I’m working out the last of the chat details right now; I’ll post them shortly.
If you missed the last “Ask Tucows” chat, a transcript is available online at Tucows Developer News.
Jane Jacobs died today at the age of 89. Among other things, she was a champion of liveable cities, a citizen of Accordion City and the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Robert Fulfold said of her: “Jacobs came down firmly on the side of spontaneous inventiveness of individuals, as against abstract plans imposed by governments and corporations. She was an unlikely intellectual warrior, a theorist who opposed most theories, a teacher with no teaching job and no university degree, a writer who wrote well but infrequently.” We all owe her a debt of gratitude.
Requiescat in pace, Jane.
Whenever an airplane manufacturer releases a new model plane, they always trot out special versions showing planes equppied with cocktail lounges, massage stations and sleeping berths. However, the airlines who purchase these planes see things differently: their goal is to pack as many people as possible on a flight. Seat space has diminished by 3 inches on average since 1978 and now Airbus is proposing making the term “cattle class” less a figure of speech by proposing a standing-room concept.
I am reminded of the South Park episode where Mr. Garrison invents a new vehicle that is controlled by four suspiciously penis-like handles, one of which goes into the driver’s anus. “It’s still better than the airlines,” one character says. The vehicle, a parody of the Segway, is such a success that the airlines go bankrupt and have to be bailed out by the government.
Maybe we should write to the airlines right now and say “If you install those standing-room seats, I’m never flying with you again.”
Tucows has opened a web service to the public called Feedcache. If you’re a developer building an application that needs to retrieve RSS feeds reliably or search through them, you might find this service useful. For more information about it, see my postings on Tucows Developer and Tucows Farm as well as Ross’ posting on his blog.
The DemoCamp brain trust and I attended a presentation put on by ICT Toronto, a committee formed by the City of Toronto to boost Toronto’s profile as a leading city of infortmation and communications technologies.
I should pleased at this development, but something really worries me: it’s being run by the City of Toronto. Mayor David Miller and his crew, like most NDP members and voters, are very good at talking about “feeling your pain” but aren’t all that hot on actually getting things done. It’s a problem with Toronto politicians; they worry excessively about projecting the right message, optics and photo opportunities, even when the task is simply to change a lightbulb.
At the risk of alienating some big players in the local tech scene, I will state that I believe that not only is ICT Toronto’s task too important to be left to ICT Toronto; I think that we will have to accomplish that task in spite of ICT Toronto.
Let’s consider another promotional effort run by the city: The Toronto Transit Commission.
Say what you want about the marketing and lore that comes with the world’s other transit systems — New York’s, London’s or Paris’ — when it comes to home-grown transit fandom, Toronto does quite well for itself. This is a good thing, too, since the Toronto Transit Commission (a.k.a. “TTC”) is pretty clueless at marketing itself; they’d probably be incapable of marketing immortality. The best promotion for the TTC comes not from the head office, but its riders and fans.
Consider the difference between the Toronto Transit Commision site, a useless hodgepodge that seems to have been designed by someone with the visual sense that God gave oysters:
Believe it or not, someone got paid to make that.
Now consider the completely unofficial, fan-created labour of love, Transit Toronto:
The difference is stunning.
The New York and London transit systems market themselves well. There’s lots of licensed memorabilia for the New York subway:
…and the London Underground’s memorabilia sells like hotcakes:
Where is the TTC merchandise? Good question. It actually exists, but you’re not going to find a link to it from TTC site, and none of it shows the design or imagination of the merch for New York’s or London’s system. The official merch is simply the TTC logo slapped on various objects, with all the creativity and style of those “YOUR COMPANY NAME AND LOGO HERE” ball pens.
Once again, the best stuff comes from the fans. The most desirable TTC memorabilia is Spacing.ca’s lapel-pin buttons featuring the names, designs and colour schemes of every station on the line:
For those of you who want to ride the subway more efficiently, there’s the TTC Subway Rider Efficiency Guide, which tells you where to sit on the train to be closest to the exits for every station on the line. It’s available online and had also been distributed free of charge by loyal TTC fans.
The people behind the Efficiency Guide are going to release a new guide on May 2nd titled Unorthodox Tips for Riding the TTC, which will contain over 200 tips for riding the TTC. Included will be “23 tips on making riders’ journeys more comfortable, 11 tips on how to secure a seat on the busiest routes, and 6 tips to help make travelling with young children a little easier.” The TTC should be giving these guys a year’s worth of free passes for this.
Since this is the TTC’s management, they’ll probably ignore it, or worse still, come out against it. They’ve done this sort of thing before. You might have read about John “Robot Johnny” Martz’ troubles with the TTC. He created a map of the Toronto subway lines featuring the names of the station rearranged into amusing anagrams and got a cease-and-desist order as his reward.
The TTC seems so good at actively seeking out and killing any public goodwill towards it that it’s hard to tell whether their actions are driven by incompetence or malice. You’d think that it was being run by a secret cabal of car dealers.
I worry that ICT Toronto will handle the promotion of Toronto as a high-tech hub with the same lethargy, inefficiency and inefficacy as the TTC in promoting itself as a public transport system.
I believe that the true promotion of Toronto as an information and communications technologies centre will come not from top-down committees of investors, but the people closest to technology: those of us who actually make them go. Bottom-up organizations such as DemoCamp, BarCamp, the Mesh Conference, the Rails pub nights and geek gatherings at Linux Caffe will probably do a much better job that ICT Toronto will, especially if their lame web presence (a single static HTML page, and no link to the report about which it made so much fanfare) is any indication.
It all boils down to this: if you’re a technologist in the Toronto area, don’t wait for ICT Toronto to promote this city. The city’s past performance suggests that it could very easily fall flat on its face. It’s up to you!
To close, I’ll leave you with the three things you can do right now to meet ICT Toronto’s goal of making Toronto a high-tech hub:
Paul Graham is a programmer (he made a lot of money writing the program that eventually became Yahoo! Store) who spends his time these days running Y Combinator, a company that gives seed money to tech start-ups and writing essays. Many of his essays are primarily of interest to computer programmers, but a few of them are general enough to catch the interest of a wider audience. His essay Why Nerds are Unpopular, which comes in both a full version on his website and an abridged version in Wired, is probably the one with the most general appeal.
One of the start-ups that Graham is backing is Infogami, a service that ” lets anyone put together good-looking easily-editable websites”. One of Infogami’s uses is to make blogging easy. Graham, who apparently believes in the maxim “eat your own dog food”, promised the Infogami folks that he’d start using it to blog the moment it was blog-capable.
One of his recent blog postings, Paul Graham Eats Breakfast (Director’s Cut) (the title is both an inside joke about Paul Graham’s fanboys and a reference to “cheese sandwich” blog entries), covers his observations about cities, particularly the San Francisco/Bay Area urban clump and the Boston/Cambridge grouping, with some emphasis on his home base of Cambridge.
(I can’t explain why, but the discussion of cities and how they affect life has always been interesting to me. Had I not gone into computer science, I’d probably have gone into the field of “city design for living” or whatever they’re calling it these days.)
He writes:
One thing most visitors to Boston don’t get– and I didn’t consciously realize till I came back this last time– is that there are two towns here. There is a Boston of universities and high-tech companies, and there is a Boston of Archie Bunkers. No one calls them town and gown, but that’s the root of the difference.
Boston is one of only two places I am aware of where they make regular use of the terms “town” and “gown” to refer to the division between city and university populations. The other is Kingston, where we actually used “town”, “gown” and “crown” to refer to the division between Kingston, Crazy Go Nuts University and the nearby military academy, Royal Military College. In his blog entry, Paul Graham talks about how having a Boston accent clearly marked you as “town”, while having a more general American accent marked you as a resident of Cambridge, or “gown”. He remarks that there used to be a rich Boston accent; think Charles Emerson Winchester from M*A*S*H or Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island. Even I have had personal experience with the whole class/accent thing: in the Philippines, you either have servants or you are one, and my “American” accent clearly puts me in the former group.
(Having the accent of a fluent English speaker pays off here too, but sometimes it pays to fake a “fresh off the boat” sound. This story will explain what I mean.)
Another thing that Graham talks about in his blog entry is more applicable to Toronto in general. He concludes his entry with this paragraph:
I find every ambitious town sends you a message. New York tells you “you should make more money.” LA tells you “you should be better looking.” Rome tells you “you should dress better.” London tells you “you should be hipper.” The Bay Area tells you “you should live better.” And Cambridge tells you “you should read some of those books you’ve been meaning to.”
My question, which is especially relevant in light of my observations that the high-tech scene here is booming and considering the recent report from ICT Toronto is: What is Toronto’s message — or what should it be? (And by “Toronto”, I mean “Toronto and Region” — hey, let’s include the entire “Golden Horseshoe“.) I’ll talk about this further in the coming days, and you should too — tell me what you think in the comments!