Damir being musical with a wine glass:

On the third anniversary of the date, I want to come clean on my responsibility in the Great Blackout of 2003, when 30 million people in Ontario and eastern US went without power for a few days. Oh, it wasn’t completely my fault, I still blame it on the Radio Shack sales guy, but I suppose that I provoked him.

It all started that morning…actually, it started a few weeks before that, when my clock radio alarm went off one morning, I hit the snooze button for another precious nine minutes of sleep, and didn’t wake up for an hour when the alarm failed to go off again. That morning, Thursday, August 14th, 2003, the same thing happened, and I decided that I had to get a new clock radio. First, though, I felt like lunch with my friend Pat and a bit of sushi.

After exchanging a few emails on the subject (we communicate almost completely by email when we are not in the same room), we decided to meet at a favourite sushi restaurant close to her office, far enough away from my place for a decent walk there and back since I wasn’t really working that day. Unusually, I was early, so I went into the used goods store across the road in order to make myself late — otherwise, she couldn’t rib me about being late. For a measly $1, I picked up a used paperback copy of The Difference Engine by William Gibson and some other sci-fi writer since I had been on a Gibson kick lately, then dashed back across the road to meet Pat, who was sweltering on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. The heat was oppressive, even in shorts and a tank top, and I was a bit hot after my walk over. Over lunch, we chatted about the usual stuff, about the book that I just bought, and about my stupid clock radio with the intermittent snooze alarm problem. She said “You can stop at Radio Shack on the way home and buy another”, which started a conversation about Radio Shacks in the downtown core. She only knew of the one in the Eaton Centre, but I knew that there was at least one in the financial district, which was more directly on my way. We finished lunch and went our separate ways: she back to work, me back through downtown for a bit of retail therapy.

Along the way, I decided to look up the address of the Radio Shacks downtown through the web access on my Blackberry, but by then (2 minutes after leaving the restaurant), I had forgotten completely what I had to go to Radio Shack to buy. I walked along a bit, feeling stupid, but found a list of them and decided that I would just go in and my memory would come back to me by then. A longish detour to Business Depot for a new file case and some pens, then a quick stop at a fruit market for some mangos and bananas, and I stumbled across the Radio Shack in the Metro Centre. I was still having my “senior’s moment” so fired off to Pat via Blackberry email:

“Ok, you’re going to laugh, but I found a Radio Shack down here and can’t remember what I needed!!!”

I decided to walk around the store and see what came into my mind. Hmmmm, all these nice toys…oh, I need a memory card for my digital camera! That wasn’t the main target, but at least gave me something to buy. I snagged the sales guy from behind the counter and asked him for the memory card, then continued to wander around the store while he located the key to the display case holding the memory cards. Now this is a little store, so it didn’t take long. As he brought my memory card back to the counter, the memory in my head was jogged by a sign on the wall: “Clock Radios”. Eureka! That’s it! I headed for the sign, only to find the area stocked with power bars and other uninteresting electrical paraphernalia. Okay, but at least I remembered what I was there for. Back to the sales guy to ask about clock radios, and he pointed me to where they are actually displayed, as opposed to where the “Clock Radios” sign is. I find, miracle of miracles, the exact same clock radio that I already owned, just five years newer and in a lovely electric blue colour instead of a drab green. Bonus, I didn’t have to learn a new set of controls that I usually operate either in the dark or in a mental fog. I grabbed one of those and headed for the checkout.

While I was at the checkout, Pat replied to my email:

“clock radio yup, i’m laughing.”

I sent back:

“So I went in and walked around until I remembered that I needed a clock radio… d’oh! I’m checking out now…”

That message was time stamped 2:19pm, less than 2 hours before the blackout. I looked up from my thumb-typing to the sales guy’s “would you like fries with that?” questions that were probably indoctrinated in during Radio Shack boot camp. First, he asked if I would like an extended warranty for only $10. On a $25 clock radio? I think not. Next, he asked if I want to buy a 9-volt battery for the battery backup feature of the clock. Fatefully, I replied “No, we never have power failures in the city”. The rest, as they say, is history.

Next time, when the sales guy asks if I want to buy the battery backup, I’m not going to turn him down — these guys are powerful!

I draw inspiration from my friends for all sorts of reasons. Pat, my longest-term friend, does the most amazing photography. Michelle is starting, at age 40, to train in an inter-faith ministry. Barbara makes TV programs. And Susan, after living with rheumatoid arthritis for over 25 years, runs marathons (feel free to make a donation to her next run in Amsterdam at the link).

Not sure why all my inspirational friends are women…

A welcome addition to the BlogHer lineup for next year is BlogHer Business in New York on March 22-23. As I mentioned in my wrapup post about the recent BlogHer in San Jose, I don’t want to diss mommy bloggers and craft bloggers, I just don’t have much in common with them. Of course, I may not have much in common with the BlogHer Business attendes if they’re all the high-powered marketing types with perfectly coiffed hair and expensive shoes, but at least we have similar goals.

After almost 4 years of dating and over a year of looking for a home to buy together, Damir is moving into my smallish (but adequate) apartment. The housing market in Toronto is still crazy, with bidding wars on almost every downtown condo that comes on the market, and it seems stupid for him to be paying rent on an apartment when he is here half the time.

The big challenge is making room for his stuff, which means getting rid of some of my stuff, or at least putting it in storage for a while. We have a cheap storage locker thanks to a friend who lives in a large condo complex nearby with lockers for rent, and I’m packing up some of my things for the locker.

This morning, I was packing books: cookbooks and travel books. I love to both cook and travel, so this was a bit difficult, but when I looked at my cookbooks, I realized that I haven’t even opened many of them for more than a year, so certainly they can go into storage for several months until we have a bigger place. That begs the question, of course, why do I need to keep them at all? Is my cooking style changing so that I don’t use some of the older ones as much? Do I just look up recipes on the internet instead of using a cookbook? Or do I just cook what I know without referring to a recipe at all?

The travel books were also hard to separate myself from, but I tried to make an assessment of where I’m likely to be travelling over the next year (which is the longest that I can imagine it will take us to find a new place) and kept out mostly the European travel guides plus my collection of city maps from all over. Egypt, Australia, Mexico — all in the box.

Technical books will be next, and a glance at my bookshelf has me realize that a lot of these are going to be junked, like Duda & Hart’s Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis, a classic book that I used during my university years when I was developing image analysis algorithms, but is so far from what I do now that I know that I’ll never use it again. Just opening the cover and seeing Bayesian classification and linear discriminant functions takes me back more than 20 years… and makes me close the cover again, quick.

Once the books are done, I’ll be tackling the closet to make some room there — he claims that he has clothes to hang in the closet, although the only suit jacket that I’ve ever seen him wear is already here.

With the acquisition of my new digital camera, I decided to go pro on Flickr, which in turn has led me to start uploading all of my travel photos that have been previously hosted on my travel subdomain. I’m putting them in sets by trip, and tagging with the locations, so this could take a few days.

Many of these were taken with either a crappy old digital camera, or were scanned from 35mm negatives, so the quality is variable. Lots of great old memories, however.

I often find myself explaining to people (sometimes complete strangers) about why I have a business blog, often describing it as an “online portfolio”. A marketing type at BlogHer used the phrase “to establish yourself as a thought leader”, which is probably accurate although I really hate that term. Then I saw this description by Bill Sweetman that really nailed it:

I chose to go whale watching with Quoddy Link Marine, not because they had a blog, but because of what the blog revealed to me about the company and its staff, something a typical corporate Website is not usually very good at.

I’ve kept a sporadic personal blog on Blogger for a couple of years, and have decided to move the old entries over here under their original dates so that I can retire that one. I’ll leave my Getting off topic post that marked the beginning of the blog at this location, although that might not make sense for someone reading through from the beginning.

Two years ago, I was shanghai’d onto a dragon boat crew for the annual races in Toronto. It was more fun that I thought that it would be, I actually got some exercise at least once a week at practice, and we raised money for the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. Recently, I came across an email that I wrote at the time wherein I described how the practice sessions drove me to make comparisons between dragon boating and bad sex:

• Everyone looks clumsy getting in and out, and if you’re lucky, no one falls overboard in the process.
• Getting things in synch is trickier than it looks: not only do you have to learn to dip it in at the right time, but also to take it out at the right time.
• The participants spend most of the time looking at someone else to see if they’re doing it right.
• It’s all about that extra six inches in the stroke.
• The main event takes about 100 strokes and is over in about two minutes.

Amusing myself by thinking of these points was the only thing that kept me from jumping overboard some nights as our coach barked orders at us, and my right hand slowly became numb from the cold water.