They think out of the box. They have guts, grace and trust their lines. Where we see a wall they have a playground. A window becomes a challenge, the sidewalk a parterre. They are the Aeriosa Dance Society. For some reason, as I watched them perform on the walls of the Vancouver Public Library last night, I kept thinking about Tolkien and the Elves.

Maybe it was the light. Maybe it was the slightly surreal evolution of the human spiders, bouncing off their own tilted horizon line and reaching downwards for the sky. Maybe it was just because I’ve again started reading the trilogy, for the Xth time, always the first. The critical part is forgetting about the bloody movies. But once I manage that, I plunge into the most detailed, carefully crafted fictional world ever invented with such delight that everything in my daily life becomes tinted by it. The Middle Earth erupts into my mind with such amazing power that I lose track of where the fiction stops and reality begins.

So they danced and they flew and they jumped and glided and hung, seemingly effortlessly, obviously happy, and high on the crowd’s mesmerized silence, which meant but an inner roar. Kudos.

 

 

 

 

After careful analysis of my many cramps, side aches, crashes, morale low’s, mood swings, mediocre results, motivation deprivation and various other technical factors, I’ve concluded that:

• I run more often in my head than out there;
• I run faster if I have something in the oven;
• I run much better to music and even better to certain specific beats.

Granted, I’ve known all that instinctively for a long time; but it’s now scientifically backed up by over three years of seriousgoofy running.

Hence my recent problem: for most of those years, I have been running to the same repertoire of less than 10 songs, half of which I actually use most of the time. Sure, they are pretty darn goods song and the repetition probably achieves some kind of hypnotic effect but still, I think a change is in order because as it is, simply hearing one of those tracks in a non-running environment gets my heart pumping, my forehead sweaty, my feet longing for running shoes and adrenaline shooting through me like if an invisible finish line had just materialized.

For the longest time, I had been putting off adding songs to my playlist based on the simple fact that finding tracks with an appropriate tempo within my 1500 song library was a daunting task of trial and error. The thing is, I use some tracks for warm ups and others for the 2 most common speeds I run at (slow and super-slow), and they each fit within their own rather narrow tempo range - 82 BPM for the slowest, 83 to 85 for the mid-speed ones and 86 to 88 for the fastest, as it turns out. It’s amazing how a change of 6 beats per minute can mean the difference between life and death!

Well, yesterday I found a nifty piece of software called beaTunes, which analyzes your MP3 tracks’ BPM (Beats Per Minute) and saves the resulting value in the file’s appropriate field via iTunes. I left beaTunes run overnight so I don’t know for sure, but the whole (one time) process probably took a couple of hours.

Result? I can suddenly browse through my music library, click on a column header and sort all songs by tempo! Nirvana! Not the band, the state! I now have an amazing variety of new songs to chose from and can tailor my running playlists to my needs based on the speed or rhythm I want to be running at on specific routes.

Now of course Microsoft is always behind and the Media Player which I use to upload music to my MP3 device doesn’t support the BPM field. Duh. Why would Microsoft natively support anything useful or cool? Mais qu’à cela ne tienne, iTunes does, so I made my playlist in there and then used the open source iTunes Export to turn it into a WMP-compatible list, and I was done.

The MP3 player is loaded (I refuse to run with the iPod - too bulky, too precious) and eager to get a field test. So am I. The new Asics rock. My runs are mapped over at MapMyRun. For only cramps, now, I will fight those in the hand holding the player.

[Note: this post was originally written about BMP’s but to accommodate the rigid perfectionist mind of some readers, later adjusted to BPM’s.]

Well, I got sidetracked. Again. In the middle of posting pictures of the recent Victoria whale watching expedition with Marie, I drifted and have just upgraded the South Africa galleries [1] and [2] with the coolest eye-candy, a 3D photo browser called PicLens, by Cooliris. Now this is going to require a small effort on your part (so small, really) if you want to enjoy the full experience, but I guarantee that if you bare with me, it will blow your mind!

So what are we talking about here? Well, until now, I’ve used (and still do on the blog because implementation here isn’t yet an option) the awesome Lightbox 2 Ajax script to display my photos in a slideshow fashion. However, web-based applications are evolving fast and more than ever, it’s about user experience and 3D interfaces. That’s where PicLens comes in: you install a plugin to your Internet Explorer or Firefox browser and voila (voila, but as always, the plugin installation is much faster and easier on Firefox than IE. No sweat for you sorry Internet Explorer users though, it’ll just take a few additional clicks and maybe a browser restart); the plugin transforms each photo gallery into a super-slick 3D photo-browsing interface, completely immersive and fluid.

Now, for those of you who are really lazy and don’t want to install the plugin, you will still get a PicLens mock-up, but without the 3D effect which, I think, is the most amazing part of the trick. So be bold, install the little plugin, it’s a matter of seconds, you can always uninstall later if it doesn’t live up to your expectations. Convinced? Cool. (No, I’m not getting a commission. I just love the gadget!) Click on one of the browser links above to get the plugin and see you soon in the South Africa galleries...

I’ve placed an entry link at the top of each gallery (gallery links above) but once on the gallery page, the mouse hovered over the lower left corner of each thumbnail will also reveal a blue arrow allowing you to start PicLens on that image.

Once in PicLens, have fun! Drag the 3D wall with your mouse to navigate along it, roll your mouse wheel to zoom in and out of the wall, click on pictures to enlarge them, navigate in all four directions with your cursor arrows, double-click on an image to get the slideshow in full screen, it’s all very intuitive and mesmerizing.

And of course, if you install the plugin and have Picasa Web Albums, a Flickr account, or even Myspace or Facebook, or Youtube, it’ll work there too! And if you don’t have accounts, you can still do generic searches on those sites and get the effect! Or try a Google Images search.

In case I haven’t convinced you yet, you can watch a video of the 3D effect here. Yeah, I know, I’m biased.

You gotta love Web 2.0.

When you first jump in, you might as well have suddenly left the known universe behind and stepped into a mysterious black hole. If you’re smart, your light is off; there’s no sense attracting the eager attention of surface stingers. But then you have to be good, too. Dropping a light that isn’t on means loosing it forever.

You’re dipped into absolute temporary darkness. Your suit slowly fills up and the water is likely to be chilly. You have to readjust your mask, exhale, and clear your ears repeatedly, trying to leave the surface where jellyfish abound as soon as possible. You’re disoriented and breathing a bit harder than necessary. If your ears cooperate, soon you feel yourself sinking. Flashes of light have already irrupted around you from other impatient divers, bright inquisitive beams piercing the night in a frantic, disorganized fashion. At this stage everyone is fiddling with a slipping weight belt, an unzipped wet suit, a flooding mask or a sleepy camera. Lanyard lights are hanging loose on busy wrists and trashing around like mad Hollywood floodlights. It’s time to turn yours on, too.

Instantly, the black hole turns into a very finite world defined by the narrow range of your dive light and bordered by impenetrable nothingness. Nuances vanish, giving way to radical shadows and harsh overexposure. You’re below 15 feet, now, and buoyancy has been tamed. Tired of exhaling, you relax your breathing and seek inner peace. Tunnel vision subsides and your mind begins to register a surreal environment. The dive has begun.

First things first; a glance at the computer confirms bottom time lapsing, depth increasing and a comforting lack of any warnings. No-decompression is forecast for longer than your tank will last according to the pressure gauge and your best guess. Things are looking good. Your buddy, almost forgotten in this surge of raw input, gives a thumbs up, and then remembers it’s the wrong hand signal, only used by land creatures and flying ones. So the fingers are closed into a circle. Good to go. You tune in your mind and your eyes to a new reality. And if your mouth could gap away from the regulator, it would.

This, all of this, is probably as strange and incredibly new as walking on the moon must have been for Neil. You’re weightless - that’s nothing unusual, hundreds of daytime dives have announced it. But you’re also horizon-free and completely isolated. In the dark, it’s all the same. Unless your senses have been honed by countless previous experiences, you just won’t know which way is up and which is down. And if watching your bubbles rising provides absolute proof, you might still not believe them. You’d better watch your instruments. Night diving is the ultimate test of one’s discipline and training. One day, I caught up with an advanced student at 120 feet, 2 minutes after instructing her to remain at 40 and run a triangular navigation pattern. The compass had hypnotized her and being blessed with forgiving Eustachian tubes, she had unknowingly sunk like a dying ship over the drop-off.

For now, the buddy system has lost most of its meaning. He or she is there, a vague abstraction hovering somewhere nearby, and yet you feel alone. Alone with your thoughts, your feelings, and a world that irrupts into brilliant colors and frantic marine life as your light glides over it and then fades back into oblivion as the beam moves on.

Your senses are getting sharper. You’re adjusting to new wave lengths and a different timescale. Finally, the underwater opera makes sense to you, and after a dramatic opening, the lead singers launch into mesmerizing solos. At times it will be an octopus, haunting the reef in full stealth, changing colors to match its surroundings and mimicking whatever is foreign. Or it might be a moray, muscular and slimy, undulating gracefully between coral heads in search of an easily cornered dinner. It often could be a spiny lobster, clumsy and yet wired, antennas scanning the ocean like a dog’s nose scouts the world around it. It might be a company of baby squid, hovering comically in the water column and easily blinded and fooled into bumping against your hand. It should, at some point, be a sleeping hawksbill turtle or a resting nurse shark, or even a very awake and sleek reef shark, now you see me now you don’t, in and out of the beam, coming from nowhere and headed back to it, with a soft spot for your six, which you will end up checking more often than necessary…

But all these are just appetizers, they are previews to the main show, teasers, a warm-up towards the dive’s apotheosis. Because sooner or later, no matter how extraordinary the fauna and how stunning the feeding frenzy of corals, at some point, you just need to turn your light off. And everybody else too. So when the night returns, you’re impatient at first, and think that bio-luminescence is highly overrated. Your finger inches towards the light’s switch. But then your eyes catch a glimpse of greenish light, a strange spark in the vast darkness. Then another. And another again. They multiply, like a swarm of fireflies appearing out of nowhere. Simultaneously, as your central vision gets accustomed to the absence of white light, your peripheral one begins to discern shadows and silhouettes on the bottom. The reef slowly re-emerges in front of you and a sense of 3D is reborn.

Within a few minutes, your eyes have adjusted to the dark and you are able to move around again. Bio-luminescence is everywhere, flashing, ever-changing, fluid, fascinating. Vertical strings of beads hang in mid-water like candles flickering in the wind, single flashing sparks surround as if emitted by a camp fire, undulating worms spiral endlessly in all directions, and the more you move the water around you, the more luminescence is triggered. If you are lucky enough to find a sand patch, you and your buddy could spend an eternity sitting on the bottom, waving your arms madly at each other and causing an explosion of greenish fireworks all around you. Tinkerbell playing in a candlelit cathedral is the best description I’ve come up with. You’ll come up with your own.

Eventually, the dive lights come back on, resurrecting those amazing reds one rarely sees during the day because of color absorption. You set out in search of a few rarities: a tame snake eel blindly foraging for food, an open basket star, fanned into the current on the drop-off’s edge, actively grabbing the worms that get caught in its web; a Spanish lobster, shy and looking more like a giant bug that a crustacean; and if you have a keen eye, maybe, a seahorse or a frogfish, both elusive and highly camouflaged, both exceptional sightings worth many stories to follow...

Then, too soon, your time is up. The dive computer has cut down drastically on your remaining bottom time, the aluminum tank is getting light, you might be chilly. You try to find a reef patch shallow enough to spend the safety stop there looking around some more, but you might just have to hang on the descent line. Three minutes later, you turn your light off after having glanced nervously at the surface, trying to assess the stinging layer. Some blow bubbles up to clear their path, others just chance it. Go slow in the last 15 feet, it’s still a dangerous zone. Surface. Inflate your buoyancy compensator. Signal « ok » to the boat crew. Get out of the water fast.

And then tongues get loose and the stories begin, probably lasting long after the boat has docked back at the dive shop, possibly far into the night. « Do you guys know what I saw??? »

Or better said, thinking with my stomach. Since it seems to be politically correct to do so, here are two of my recent crushes. First, there’s the mighty So.Cial sandwich, 2 minutes from work. You pick: a quarter of a sandwich for $6 or a full one for $12. You get a bag of free homemade chips to help you wait for your turn to call out your choice of ingredients. « For here or to go? », you will be asked. If it’s to go, be ready drag it back out. Theirs are the biggest sandwiches I have ever seen.

Then there’s the ever-famous coconut bun from Victoria’s Frank’s Honeybun Cafe.

To get these buns, one has to leave Vancouver behind, ride a bus for hours, then a ferry for more hours and another bus, still. And there they are, on a small downtown street - often sold out, the word has gone around. But they are unmatched in the Lower Mainland. Unmatched. And I mean it!

All right, all bitching and joking aside, oxygen or not, on TV or in his bathroom, watched by Oprah or his cat, he still did it. Se-ven-teen minutes and four seconds! Without breathing. And without passing out. Kudos. Now get a life. Or find a good cause!

Photo: New York Times

My dear Bagginses and Boffins, Tooks and Brandybucks, Grubbs, Chubbs, Hornblowers, Bolgers, Bracegirdles and Proudfoots, welcome to a new step in this blog’s sheepishly modest evolution. I have been blogging in the darks for too long, and even though it remains ideal for showcasing photography, I have decided to turn my back to darkness and ease into lighter tones again. Pompously, I named this template Rebirth as a wink to both the new look of the premises and recent events in my life. But with no further delays, I’ll take you for a walk around...

First and foremost, you will have noticed the « Web 2.0 » feel. Unless, that is, you don’t have a clue of what Web 2.0 is, in which case you are still part of a vast majority. Well, let me reassure you, Web 2.0 is not yet-another standard or a another programming language or set of rules. There is nothing hardcoded to be learned, no syntax to master. Instead, we are offered a tendency. A trend. A direction. Almost a philosophy. Web 2.0 simply is the emotional result of over 20 years of web evolution.

The term was first invented in 2004 to describe the emerging use of the World Wide Web and web design as creative and collaborative efforts. Computer users are currently experiencing a migration from their computer-based applications towards a web-based community where information sharing and communications are leading us into a new era. Social networking, wikis, blogs and photo sharing sites are at the heart of Web 2.0. It has become possible to work exclusively online through the use of webmail, messaging and web-based word processors, photo-editors, calendars and the like.

In addition, Web 2.0 marks the end of boring text-only browsing and the appearance of pretty online interfaces that mimic desktop applications, enhancing user-interaction and once again promoting a communication exchange. Surfing the web is now less about reading passively and more about participating and providing input and feedback, in real time.

Of course, to support such improvements, new technologies are being developed and my favorite is AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. To keep things simple, let’s just say that AJAX blurs the line between static web pages and a dynamic information exchange between server and visitor. It for instance allows you, as my visitor, to drag and drop the right sidebar widgets - reordering them as you see fit, or to collapse them by clicking on the Mac-looking green icon, all without the need for a full page reload. It saves you time and makes me popular by improving your experience and allowing for a pleasant visit. Go ahead, try it! It’s fun, and it’s very Web 2.0.

I have kept some of the core functionality of the previous template such as Lightbox 2.0 for all slideshows, because once again it falls into the new trend and because it is just one of the best scripts out there. I finally agree with my « editor » that the photo thumbnails inside posts are too small and will from now on include bigger ones. The template I based this one on was initially created for WordPress and eventually ported to Serendipity. The credits are at the bottom of the page. I redesigned it to follow my inspiration, got rid of the elements that were too obviously Mac-ed and reworked the comment display system to improve a touch on what I had with the dark skin. You can still toggle the comment display instantly (without a time-consuming page reload) with a link at the bottom of each post, or chose to immediately reply or post if you are the first one to do so.

Should this one not be your first choice, the old skins are still available via the sidebar. If you re-arrange the sidebar widgets, your browser will remember your preferences and the next time you visit, it will all be peachy. I have tried to streamline the loading process and cut down a single page’s list to 10 entries. You should experience slightly faster loading times.

Any way, in the end, blogging is not about the envelope, is it? It’s about the content. Right. Well, this IS content, about the envelope. I hope you’ll enjoy both.

Of the many web thinggies keeping me interested in my screen these days, worth mentioning are the following:

• Firefox remains at the top of the pack, slick, fast, free, efficient and most of all, fun! If you haven’t switched yet, you’re falling behind. Its extension possibilities are far superior to anything else that exists right now and allow you to turn your web surfing experience into a cool ride, which it might as well be considering the time we spend doing it! And that brings me to the next topic:
• Gmail Redesigned, a new skin for the rather boring standard Gmail look. It’s basically new CSS for Gmail, running on a Firefox extension called Stylish. Very interesting new look, much darker colors, something I like as you’ll have noticed by the template on this blog.
• Splashup, an online photo editing tool that allows you to retouch or resize your photos on the fly, from anywhere with internet access. No need to have a computer with Photoshop installed, it all happens in real time on the web site, through a VERY slick interface that fully illustrates the power of the Web 2.0 trend and AJAX.
• TED, (no, not the dog!) the Technology, Entertainment and Design web site, featuring videos of talks given by some of the greatest minds of our time at conferences where they are challenged to give the speech of a lifetime in 18 minutes.
• MapMyRun, a cool training tacking site with incorporated Google Maps route design and distance mapping. I haven’t managed yet to embed a run map directly onto the blog because of a conflict between Serendipity and <iframes>, but below is the link to my standard, ever so beautiful Stanley Park run.

In a coordinated effort for raising awareness while delivering a strong message to the powers that be, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is once again behind the Earth Hour campaign encouraging individuals, organizations and businesses in nearly 200 cities worldwide to turn off their lights between 8:00 and 9:00 pm local time tonight, Saturday March 29th.

Goal of the exercise: making a statement about Global Warming*, diminishing our energy footprint and having fun. Candles are cool. Darkness can be revealing. And that it will be, at the Vancouver Lookout, where people will enjoy a better view of the city than ever before, weather(!) permitting. As a matter of fact, Canada is said to have the highest anticipated participation rate. In Vancouver, major lights will be turned off on the Olympic flag, City Hall, the Lion’s Gate, Burrard and Cambie bridges, Science World and of course, Harbour Centre.

Various worldwide events and places will also go dark at 8:00 pm local time, such as a crab dinner in New York and the Google Home Page.

It is such a small step, a few percent of our energy consumption shaved off from one single hour out of almost 9000 in a year. But that’s how we are going to make it. There are no miracle solutions to the problems we are faced with. If mankind is going to win the escalating battle against itself in time to save the planet that supports it, it will be by taking small steps at first, unrelentingly, no matter how small. If each one of us takes a small step simultaneously, we are going forward. If we keep doing it all the time, we will be leaping.

It’s all about awareness. About changing bad habits today. About waking up. And about gathering momentum. More than ever, we have amazing communication tools that can actually let us witness in real time that we are not alone taking small steps. The internet can act as a global live reporter and as such, it has a tremendous role to play in the battle.

*BUT:

We must always be sure to act for the right reasons, not because it is trendy. I support energy saving theories and practices because they make sense. A wasteful lifestyle is definitely a sin, even if only from the point of view of equality: while we waste energy watching crap on TV, others across the world do not even have a hundredth of that energy available to take a shower or cook. Same deal with recycling, limiting pollution and the systematic rape of our natural resources.

However there are those who challenge mainstream ideas about Global Warming and are pointing out a disturbing lack of scientific consensus on CO2 as a planet-heating pollutant. For the sake of our planet and in order to keep an open mind and not to fall into yet another planet-wide manipulation of the masses, we owe it to ourselves to verify our sources and ask questions, and make sure others do, too. Here are two very interesting examples to illustrate this possibility. They are not meant as a call to anarchy or an attempt at trashing the efforts of environmentalists worldwide. They are simply the work of people who like understanding the reasons behind any fashionable trend like the current Global Warming debate, and who have become concerned that, once again, the lust for money and power might find its way all the way up to the top of the news and take control of even the best intentions behind what we have come to accept as our only hope: environmental activism.

The first is an AIM article titled Will Media Expose Global Warming Con Job? which I found recently and that echoed to my own doubts and concerns with surprising volume. My problem isn’t with Global Warming itself, but rather with the fact that I just had to capitalize it. I am extremely worried because just like wars, catastrophes and the sex lives of movie stars, Global Warming sells. It’s worth a fortune to the media world and also potentially to the smartest of international powers. The article above refers to the following New York Times piece, In 2008, a Hundred Percent Chance of Alarm. I quote: « Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels. »

Even author Michael Crichton had a go at this angle of things in his recent State of Fear novel; he actually took heat for it - that’s what you get for going against the flow and botching up your research on the topic. But whether he is right or wrong isn’t really my priority. I just like being reminded that not everything always is black and white, and that the media will at times act as a major disinformation tool and become the toy of shadow puppeteers, the ones that really control the world. When a politician wins awards for a documentary on climate change, my alarm signals go off. Those same politicians are waging wars all over the globe and fighting to control the world’s fuel supplies. Why on Earth would they give a damn about the consequences of Global Warming, unless it means that it will, one way or another, yield a substantial influx of green little bills in their hidden pocket.

The bottom line is, let’s do what we feel is right for the environment, and let’s do it now. And tomorrow. And the next day. Let’s fight for it and force a change. But let’s do it for the right reasons. Not because the media tells us that we are in deep shit. Not because Al Gore found a new path to glory by becoming a movie star. Not because we go with the trendy flow and if all the sheep will go green, so will we even though we don’t really understand it. Not because God’s wrath is upon us and doom unavoidable. Not because others say so.

Let’s just do it because in our hearts, it feels like the right thing to do. Let’s be curious about the mechanics of it, let’s look behind the scenes and let us question established facts if they are not supported by evidence. Let’s empower ourselves as the engine of change, rather than just its fuel.

Once in a while, to change the routine or take a break from intense photo or design work, I’ll allow myself to Stumble for a while. Here are a few interesting sites discovered on my last ride...

A rather interesting awareness test. Read the final credits. Smart of them.
Some motivation if you feel like you are failing. I feel better now.
Very funny aircraft snag book entries. Ok, maybe you need to be a pilot to laugh at some of those...
Science-fiction meets the present at the hands of good writers.