Merry Christmas. I think my lack of blogging in the past couple of months has switched most followers off so perhaps I should commit to blogging more often as a New Year's resolution.

We are in Nelson for Christmas and relaxing as we always do here. There is some snow here but not as much as last year so our journey up on 22nd was a lot quicker. The scenery was just as spectacular though. The snow covered mountains were beautiful and the rivers and lakes partly frozen but with the absence of brilliant blue skies we didn't experience the same sights on the way up as we did last year. On the last trip the partly frozen rivers were bright blue as the sun shone through the thick snow covered ice. This year we had cloudy skies all the way up so the variety of colour was missing but it was still spectacular.

For the first time in years I didn't get any CDs for Christmas but I've been buying enough in the charity stores recently to make up for it. I did buy The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall on Christmas Eve in a second-hand record store in Nelson. I have it on cassette in storage but I'm gradually trying to replace my tape collection with CDs as I find them. I might struggle with a few of them though and end up having to buy a second-hand cassette player in a charity store for $10. There's plenty of options for these machines and I suspect that most of them actually work pretty well but for $10 I can afford to try a couple until I get one that works.

I'll have to buy a hif first though. I bought a hifi magazine last week and depressed myself at the price of the various boxes you can buy. Record players have taken off again as the music business has embraced this old technology again. Most bands are releasing their material on 180gm vinyl so the hifi companies are developing the technology to keep up. But from the evidence in that magazine, it comes at a price. I'm sure you can buy the equipment in the hundreds of dollars instead of thousands but it would be great to b able to afford the quality and have a room to house it and the rapidly growing collection of CDs. There's even more vinyl in the charity stores so I will have fun wen I eventually buy a hifi.

In the meantime I will have to rely on the iPOD and the cheap machines that they plug into. Either that or we buy a quality iPOD stereo and make do until we buy a house. I think I will have to continue dreaming for some time to come.

Tracey bought me the complete Monty Python box set for Christmas. This is all the TV shows, a couple of live performances in the US and a couple of documentaries. I also bought the box set of the recent Monty Python documentary that was shown on the TV in Canada in November so I have a lot of comedy to watch...if I get the chance. A friend of ours leant us a DVD set of House, Series 4 and I watched that in a few days, driving Tracey crazy at the same time so I will have to watch Monty Python in sections I think.

I finished a course on speaking in public recently and one of the assignments was to give a couple of persuasive speeches. One of mine was to encourage the class to listen to different bands instead of the mundane piffle that the majority of the world seems to be listening to. I listed the following to teach them:

1. Marvin Gaye's What's Going On
2. New York Dolls first anonymously titled album
3. London Calling by The Clash
4. Velvet Underground and Nico
5. Three Feet High and Rising by De La Sol
6. Bryter Layter by Nick Drake
7. Nod's as Good as a Wink by The Faces
8. Super Ape by Lee Scratch Perry and the Upsetters
and of course
9. The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall.

I wonder if any of them will listen to any of this selection or will continue listening to Lady Ga Ga. Sadly I think the latter.

Going Up in the World

We've just moved. We will email our new address very soon but the email addresses and phone numbers will remain the same. We have moved to an apartment not far from the bat cave so we now have windows and a view of, well, the outside. We can now see what the weather is like before we venture out instead of guessing. We have an outdoor pool, strictly summer use only and way more storage space than we had in the aforementioned bat cave.

We officially moved out of the basement today and handed the keys back. It was a mad dash at the end. I was on a telecon at work when my cell rang from the basement. I hit "ignore" because I was on this telecon with my boss and a team working on one of my projects and then it rang again. Big panic: Tracey had locked the car keys in the car and couldn't finish the clearing up. And the deadline for moving out was repidly approaching. I called for help and someone drove me over to help her out. We finished the packing and filled the car to the brim. It was so full I was having to push individual shoes into little nooks just to get it all in. We finally had to call a friend to take the remainder and she saved our skin. We are now gradually making our way through a mountain of boxes and we're both knackered; Tracey more than me because she's been doing the majority of the work.

We now have a brand new, but tiny fridge. It's barely big enough to take one of those monster milk carton you can buy here but it will have to do. It comes with the apartment.

Anyway, I'm going now before I collapse in a heep.

Big Stage, Crap Sound

Sorry, sorry, sorry. We've been too busy with finding a new place to live (a blog in itself at a later date) and work and side effects of medication and stuff.

The biggest event we have attended since the last post was our trip, with the kids, to the U2 concert at the local football stadium. Our local stadium is an indoor dome of a building with a roof that is kept in place by air blown into a serious of inflatable tubes, so if the air handling units that power this were to switch off, the roof would fall down. This is about to be removed for a solid retractable roof.

The stadium holds around 50,000 people in the stands but the stage was at one end and offered a 360 degree view of the band (hence the title of the tour: 360 deg tour - very clever) so the additional people on the pitch took the total audience up to 60,000. U2 had promised to offer a discounted price for 10% of every night on their world tour so our tickets cost $30 each, but we were in the seats at the back of the stage, but still had a good view. I'll qualify that; we had a clear view of the stage and the lights and the hge 360 degree screens above the stage and the band themselves but Bono and the biys were little stick men if you didn't watch them on the screens.

Anyway, we took to kids over the downtown Vancouver and arrived just in time for the support band, The Black Eyed Peas. They are not my favourite band in the world although they were exciting enough in the early, less successful days before Fergie turned up, but since, then they have descended into middle-of-the-road mediocrity in comparison and as a result become millionaires due to a huge increase in their popularity. Honestly, some people have no taste, hence the reason why Maria Carey sells so many records.

So the Black Eyed Peas were OK and tried to cover the huge stage as best as they could but the sound was disappointingly poor - but then the support bands always are. They were on stage for about an hour and jumped up and down and sang and rapped and stood with their arms wrapped around themselves like rappers do and Fergie walked around on unnaturaly severe high heels and a sparkly dress and other dances took to the stage and people cheered and shouted everytime the main fella shouted "Vancouver" and that sort of thing.

Then they left and the stage was cleared and we waited for the main act. David Bowie's Space Oddity started to pump out of the venue speakers and this signelled the imminent arrival of U2. Then they started playing a few of their recent songs and we discovered that the sound "issues" experienced with the support were not exclusive to the support. It was rough, loud and crappy ad it didn't improve as the concert went on. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't sore on the ears but it wasn't great for the expense that they had obviously put into the stage. In fact, here's a comparison for you, it was worse than the sound in the main hall at the SECC in Glasgow. Now that's crap. But the lights and screens and everything was good I suppose and they did play Sunday Bloody Sunday which was good to hear but the biggest issue that night was the fact that the kids were bored stiff throughout. Evie had never been to a concert before but didn't really know U2 and while Josh had been to see the Racontuers a couple of years ago, he was ill and needed to go to bed. We would have happily gone after the second song but we had paid our money and wanted to get some value. We left half way through their first encore so that the kids were in bed at some point before midnight but we certainly won't be going to another concert as a family during school time.

Sadly there's nothing else coming up in Vancouver to talk about so I won't be going to any shows any time soon. Although I got a short shock yesterday when I saw an advert in one of the local papers for a Norah Jones show and the words The Fall under her name. I thought, "surely not". That would be a diverse pairing too far for the Canadian consumers but it excited me for about three seconds until I realised that The Fall is the title of her latest recording. Still, it's worth thinking about. The tour could introduce Mark E Smith to a whole new audience...most of whom would leave the venue before Ravi Shanker's wee girl took to the stage. I fear I would do the opposite. orah Jones is OK if you are in the mood for that type of music and you're not bothered by an album of songs that sound the same all the way through. Imagine what one of her shows would be like.....?

I also noticed this past week that Morrissey has been up to his old falling-over-on-stage tricks again. He collapsed during one show and this has been rescheduled and then at the start of a subsequent concert he was hit in the head by a flying bottle and walked off. Aparently this show is not be rescheduled due to a rather extreme case of sulking. I rember the days when Morrissey fans would try everything to get onto the stage with their hero and he didn't mind that, so why the change now? Of course, he plays larger venues now where the stage is higher and further away, making invasion much more difficult. Actually one fan got onto the stage at the U2 concert and was flattened by a few very large security guards. That will hurt in the morning.

Nothing in Particular

Not sure what I'm going to write about this time....

I'm attending a class at BCIT at the moment on Effective Public Speaking. People at work were surprised that I thought it necessary but I guess I was comparing myself, unfairly, to the best of the best at Honeywell and coming off a poor second best. Compared to the general public who are not used to presenting in a public forum and the kids on the course, I'm not doing to badly at all and enjoying it.

We have to give a number of presentations throughout the 12 week process and one of the group has spoken about her diagnosis of bone cancer that eventually lead to the amputation of one of her legs. This happened to her at the age of 18 but she seems to be coping really well with it, both physically (you'd never know that one of her legs was a prosthetic) and emotionally.

Anyway, it inspired me to talk about my epilepsy last week which necessitated me to do a little research on the world wide interweb. It would appear that of the 40 million suffers in the world, 32 million have no access to treatment either due to poverty and geography or the fact that they live in a country that still believes that epileptics are possessed by demons. actually, due to the side effects of these meds, I tend to agree with them, but that's another story. I read that the first evidence of seizures can be found in Babylonian tablet in the British Museum. These will be around 4000 years old and they apparently talk about demonic possession. It took another nearly 2000 years before a Greek physician, Hippocrates, figured out that there was a neurological connection to the seizures rather than a spiritual issue but it took the medical profession until the 19th century to formally recognize this and start treating patients with the care and respect that they needed. This, and the fact that witnessing someone having a seizure is a pretty freaky thing to go through, meant that the condition had a huge stigma attached to it and still does in the developing world, hence the lack of treatment in those parts of the world.

However, as I've said before, if not being able to drink beer and feeling a bit shitty is the worst I have to cope with, I'm not doing too badly.

I downloaded a Pixies concert this week. They are touring in celebration of the 20th anniversary of their 3rd album, Doolittle and some of their European concerts have been released for download at 10 pounds. I also bought the remaining Beatles albums on CD so now have the complete set although not all in the new format. I still don't like the new format...it's cheap and nasty looking.

We're off to see U2 with the kids this week. Should be fun. It will be Evie's first concert so it will be interesting to see what she thinks of it.

Green Ideas

I attended BC Hydro's Power Smart Forum this week to network with customers and learn a bit about environmental initiatives. For the uninitiated, BC Hydro is British Columbia's power generator and they have a department called Power Smart who provide funding and general advice for customers to help them complete energy retrofit projects to their buildings so that they become more efficient consumers of electricity. The over-riding reason BC Hydro want to do this is so that the use of their electrical output is minimized and they have sufficient surplus to sell to California, where electricity is consumed with a voracious appetite for lighting and air conditioning. They also want to control their output to prevent having to build new dams and destroying more ecosystems in the northern part of BC.

The vast majority of the electricity in BC is generated via hydro dams and are therefore very low carbon emitters, although not carbon neutral, but we do import electricity from places like Alberta where they generate electricity by burning coal so we are not entirely environmentally friendly here on the Pacific west coast.

The conference, though, included some key-note speakers, workshops and discussion sessions that covered all sorts of environmental issues in support of the Power Smart drive.

The best speaker was Andrew Winston who is a "globally recognized expert and speaker on green business" and had a very engaging presentation offering corporations some advice on how to reduce energy consumption. He introduced the fact that China is busy constructing the equivalent of 30 Manhattans in China every year and to support this, half the world's cranes are in China right now. China's recession was 7% growth and I attended a talk on the North American economy on the final day and 7% growth is not a recession to anyone, but in these recent economic times, if 7% growth represents a recession in China then you can imagine what their growth figures were prior to the global financial meltdown.

He also spoke of what Wal-Mart are doing with their suppliers. They asked the top 100 suppliers to an event in Brasil last year and 3 days prior, sent them all an agreement that they were being asked to sign live at the event, but sent it in Portuguese. The agreement forced the suppliers to agree to provide their goods in an environmental and sustainable way. This included an agreement not to purchase beef from any land reclaimed from the Amazon (the rain forest area in South American as opposed to the web-based book store), so Andrew's argument was that countries around the world had been trying to stop the rapid decimation of the rain forests in the Amazon for 30 years and Wal Mart have managed it...Wal Mart, that evil corporation that apparently treats their employees badly, pays them very little and their rapid expansion round the world has meant the end of small local retail outlets everywhere.

He also suggested that a recent poll of MBA graduates would be willing to accept a lower salary if the company offering it can demonstrate their green credentials over other corporations. This mirrors what we have been hearing from the States where under-graduates are increasingly choosing universities for their green credentials. Frankly I don't believe a word of that. Whilst it may help them make the decision if they are stuck between two institutions, the main reasons they base their choice on, I suspect, are the course they want to study, the success and quality of the university and how much they can afford.

He gave a couple of examples of initiatives that large companies have tried in an attempt to reduce energy consumption.

Conway made their truck drivers to reduce their speed from 65 mph to 62 mph and they saved $10M, but the best story he told was the distribution company UPS who stopped their vehicles turn left. Turning left in countries where we drive n the right hand side of the road means lots of idling while they wait for the on-coming traffic to pass and increases the chance of accidents. So through this initiative that they drove with the use of GPS they saved 28,500,00 miles of travel and 3,000,000 gallons of fuel.

His strongest message, however, was his recommendation that we greatly reduce our consumption of beef. This industry is responsible for the decimation of the Amazon forests and other agricultural areas around the world, the processing of the meat is energy intensive and then you have to distribute the products all over the world.

Food for thought....

I'm a 606 Commenter

I've just left my first comment on the BBC's 606 website. If this thing works the way I think it will, here's the link...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/606/F14978413?thread=6985364&skip=50&show=50

I'm NorthVancouverJambo. I feel so empowered.

The comments were in relation to an interview that the Celtic bigwig made to the BBC in which he...yawn...talked about his wish for the Old Firm to move to England. I'm so bored.

To iPod or not iPod

I've been listening to music on Josh's iPod a lot recently. Ordinarily I would get my melodic fix while driving to and from work (and anywhere else for that matter) in the car but due to the fact that I can't drive until December, at the very least, I can't really listen to it there so I've had to rely on the iPod. Josh's is the Classic that has an 80GB memory and despite having 309 albums on it and a collection of digital photographs, still has over 56GB of capacity left. When we eventually get our stuff, even if I add all our other CDs on (over 400 more), it still won't be full and I'd be concerned that the iMac will start to run slower, but I'm not sure. Any ideas?

Evie and Tracey have a Nano each but rarely use them.

Anyway, my question is, do I need an iPod and if so, what type do I get? A Shuffle is way too small and the Classic is way too big from my recent experience. The new Nano has a camera and a decent capacity but the one that is grabbing my attention is the iTouch, but only because it has the ability to play games on it. Other than that I don't see the benefit. I already have a Blackberry for work so don't need another box that does stuff on the internet or store personal records.

This is, of course, all academic because I won't be allowed one anyway.