This afternoon, on my way to work, a kid zoomed by me on a skateboard. I recognized his t-shirt and he wore a wristband just like me, a wristband from Hillside Festival 2007. Yeah, I was a Guelph Lake for the weekend music, arts, and peace, a local hippy fest.

I volunteered for Chuck at the lake stage beer tent, which means I got to attend the festival for free. I saw loads of people, saw bands, ate food, sat in the sun, swam in the lake, and got the ultimate haircut.

The primary reason I attend the festival is to volunteer, other things are good too, but I see the hassle and price of a ticket as too great a cost. Volunteering, which I enjoy and gives me something to do, is a joy, so my benefit accumulates. Notwithstanding that, I do want to do other things at the festival, so I try to pack my shifts in early to be free for the rest of the time.

I came into the island in the early afternoon to do some training and then relaxed until my security shift started. I did security, then served beer until closing time. Then the next morning I did security from opening until the afternoon. Then I was free. I enjoyed it though. Serving was good. We served beers from Mill Street, F&M, and Wellington. While I kept the area secure, I got to listen to music.

While I was at the back stage gate, this band of young kids, Dancehall Free For All played. They are two guitars, keyboard, sax, trumpet and drums and played kind of jazzy funk or soemthing. They were great. They had real showmanship. When the guy was introducing them as soon as he said there band name, they busted into their first song. In their last song the drummer jumped up and started dancing while he beat the skins. There was a crowd of kids up front plus one older looking grey-haired guy dancing and bopping to their music.

For music, I also saw So Called, That 1 Guy, Dya Singh, Vieux Farka Toure, Sexsmith, and Ani.

I saw many people at the festival too. I served beer to Joe Dv the big little brother of a friend, I saw PilarH a girl from high school (which is long ago and far away), I saw Zara (who said “long time no see” I said “yeah about a year” since last Hillside), I saw NikiW,

I saw loads of people who were working security under Landry. On Friday I talked to Darren, Cake, and Madeline. Cake was excited when I told them that in our training they were referred to as professional security. I also later saw Sergeant, Mike Mkhnk, Amon, Fedy, etc.
I met people I volunteered with like: Megan, Adrian, Nadine, Dan, etc.

While checking ID I met a hapa dude who had several names Wee Armour was his mixed family name.

I also met a bunch of other people through people, John, Amanda, and Finn; Liz; Andrew and Sandra; Shannon and Harmony, Emily, John and Zanelli, Cynthia, etc.

So, it was a good fun weekend. There were plenty of children (good), plenty of music and food (good), unlike the performers, it was pretty white (weird), and there was loads of smoke, both legal and still criminal (bad).

Oh yeah, and I got the ultimate haircut.

How do you search for something that you can’t spell?

I wanted to know what a globjaman was? I heard it on a great show, but only heard it.

It turns out that is more commonly spelled gulab jaman.

Gulab jamun is a popular Northern Indian and Pakistani dessert, made of a dough consisting mainly of milk solids, in a sugar syrup flavored with cardamom seeds and rosewater or saffron.

I only found it because there is one page in googoo where it is mispelled how I mispelled it.

The character Dave said it in the hilarious new HBO 12-episode series Flight of the Conchords.

We learned this week that Waterloo Region area has the highest bottled water use rate. StatCan’s The Daily, on Wednesday, reported so.

Among Canada’s largest cities, the highest rate of households drinking bottled water primarily was found in the Kitchener area (46%) and in St. Catharines–Niagara (41%).

That factoid came from the The Households and the Environment Survey for which over 28,000 households were surveyed by telephone in early 2006.
I wonder if the local preference for bottled water is cause by the source of our municipal tap water.

Should I shave or let it grow now . . .

I actually shaved a beard off the night before Canada Day, but I still wanted to put those Clash-type words up there.

I had been letting facial hair grow for more than two months.

At the beginning of May I got injured in a soccer tournament. I had a gaping wound under my chin. Dr. Bob at Grand River put eight sutures in. Five days later Dr. Deb approved nurse E to remove them. A swollen scar yet remained so I eschewed shaving for a while lest I cut myself.

After some time, as you might expect, a beard grew. I told people that I was trying to look like the king of Sparta.

People would feed me the line from the Persian messenger in the movie and I would respond accordingly, with the line not the action.

If I shave there will be stubble, If I don’t it will be double. ha ha

“Where are you going for Canada Day?” someone asked me.

“I am going to Canada,” was my flip response. I was going to be at Waterloo in Waterloo and have a busy holiday weekend.

I worked until midnight on Friday. I got up at 8:00 Saturday morning and helped setup at Columbia Lake fields. We finished in the evening on Saturday and waited for security people to come at 20:00 to watch the setup overnight.

Sunday, on Canada Day, I came at 9:00 and we worked until 1:30 Monday morning. I was back at the fields with everyone at 8:20 — only a few hours after we had left — and worked until 14:00 before going to my house to change for paid work at 3:30.

So that was my Canada weekend. How was it? Great.

Giving directions

While we were picking up equipment and supplies on Saturday Mariano called Hiro to ask for directions because they were stuck in traffic on the Mac-Cart Freeway. Hiro said, “I’ll pass you to Ryan, also known as the Human GPS.” Luckily I knew exactly where they were and gave them the exit number and distances they needed to go.

Kid and the kangaroo

Earlier on the day I was driving some equipment to the main stage and a woman came up with her young six-year-old son. She said her son was disappointed that he couldn’t climb on the climbing wall because of the age requirement and asked whether children were allowed to climb on the scouts ropes structure.

“That is just for demonstration; only scouts can climb it.” The boy was disappointed.

“But you should go check out the petting zoo down there. They have a kangaroo,” I added.

The kid’s eyes went wide and he ran and climbed up into the golf cart and hugged me around the neck.

That was pretty funny.

Serving food

I mostly helped with operations, connected resources with needs, With all the different things happening for tesn of thousands of people, it is variedd and can get hectic. At one point later in the afternoon, I was asked to help in the food tent, which was getting busy with a long line. I started helping in food prep, assembling hotdogs in their buns and sleeves, but then I moved into expediting.

Orders came through a computer system. Patrons would pay and orders would get entered into the POS. On the service end we could see the differently numbered orders on a touch screen and people would give us their order number and we would get them the combination of pizza, drinks, hotdogs, hamburgers, and chips, al a carte or in combos. Then the order could get cancelled off the screen.

One main bottlenecks in the system was communicating the orders to the order fillers. The touchscreen was temperamental and the orders did not display in the sequence in which they were made. Then ensuring the people serving the food knew the items and to whom they went also broke down easily.

They other was on the production end. Food often ran out and needed to be cooked, or we needed the pizza delivered.

So I stepped in to help communicate the orders to servers. I would call out the orders to food and drinks and connect the patron with the person who would be delivering their order. It strained my voice and it was stressful, but we made it through I worked in there for about 7 hours and other were there longer.

My main disappointments about the food tent is how more and better planning could have improved the operation and how little support there was from other volunteers.

Slimy chair

At set down time, it is easy to see how much people are jerks, leaving trash and empty alcohol containers around. Someone even took a chair and threw it in the lake.

During clean up on Monday we got a radio call about the chair and drove over. It was about 8 metres out in the shallow and slimy water. Columbia lake is artificial, eutrophied, shallow, and gross. Someone said, “Ugh, can we just leave it there.” “Pffh,” I said and pulled off my shoes and socks and waded out into the water to retrieve the chair.

Moving barriers

Later Nopa and I started moving the heavy galvanized barriers in a pickup truck. We go good at it too packing more in faster and driving them up to the collection point. We switched jobs from being on the ground to being in the truck bed. But I got tired later and asked him to let me do the ground job, which was generally heavier work, but required less fine movement.

He counted them when we were done and we moved 73 of those barriers.

The end

So over the course of the weekend I ended up working about 50 hours. Monday afternoon Leanne was going to get coffee and she asked me if I wanted her to get me one. “Nah, i don’t … actually yes please.” I began replying, but changed my mind midstream.

Happly Canada!

It is our national holiday and I am going to . . . Canada. No, I am already here. I am in Waterloo and I am volunteering at the university where we will put ona huge celebration. Givien Canada is 140 years old today, the city is 150 years old this year and  the university is 50 years old today, things are going to be bigger, better, and more than ever.

May stalwart sons and  gentle maidens rise to keep thee steadfast through the years from east to western sea — O Canada.

I saw Vinton Cerf speak at Hagey Hall last week. The thing that struck me when I was there in the upper level of the crowded theatre and this 63-year-old (now 64) was going on about trojan horses, bots, zombies, and TCP/IP is that I hadn’t ever talked technically about the Internet with anyone older than their twenties.

That was the first of many reasons that I enjoyed the talk by this pioneer of the Internet who is still working on new and cool projects.

Vinton worked on ARPANET and helped develop TCP/IP while at UCLA as a grad students and at Stanford as a Professor. Now he works at Google as Chief Internet Evangelist and works with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory among other things.

Here are some of my notes from his talk:

• “I get nervouse when people clap when you get up. meybe you should just sit down because you won’t get any better.”
• When he went to Google they asked him what title he wanted and he first suggested “Arch Duke.” They later agreed on Chief Internet Evangelist.
• He had recently received an honorary degree from a university in the Balearic Islands and got to keep there formal robes that looked unusual. He wore them on his first day.
• He made a plug for Google, saying they are looking for good people and suggested that students go to the info session.
• He showed a slide of a house boat on lake Vembanad near Bangalore that he said loked like a hobbit might live in it. He was surprised when he turned his Blackberry on, got a good signal, and had 300 e-mails. (I think the connectionw as a surprise, not the numebr of e-mails)
• The internet has grown in the past ten years. He compared 22.5 million hosts and 433 million users in 1997 to 50 million hosts and 1,114 million users recently.
• He said that the growth of mobile telphony is an important new element.
• In the 1970s they drove around in a van measuring the packet switched radio network
• They connected three networks together for the Internet: ARPAnet, packet radio network, and the packet satellite network.
• They sent the first Internet transmission from the SRI van to USC through London on 22 November 1977.
• Then the internet “got bigger, more complex, and more colourful.”
• He showed a slide of a magazine cover with a t-shirt that said “IP on everything.”
• Any underlying transmission system should be able to carry a bag of bits.
• It means you can build an application without permission from providers.
• End to end privacy and of neutrality. It doesn’t care what’s on it.
• Broadband is unstable because it’s asynchonous. There’s pressure to move to symmetric.
• IP address space standardized in 1977.
• 4.3 billion was a mistake, too few addresses.
• Now we have to switch to a larger address space. Need to move to IPv6
• Of traffic on the Internet: http is 45%; streaming video is 36%, streaming audio is 5%. YouTube is 20% of all http and is nearly 10% of all Internet traffic.
• Information consumers are becoming producers.
• There’s democratic access to the world’s information
• There are new educational alternative and outlets.
• New business models (value added, low digital media costs)
• There are risk factors (spam, viruses/worms, abuse, misinformation, fraud)
• Innovation at the edge (e.g. Wikipedia)
• You can correct a single word on wikipedia. You would never publish a book with one word in it. You can make a contribution.
• Mobility and mobile, 2.5 billion mobiles and counting
• Some people don’t have bank accounts, but have mobiles.
• Devices can transfer minutes as currency.
• The keyboard on this is suitable for someone 3 inches tall.
• He started listing areas of research. Places that need innovation: SMS, payment systems, innovative interfaces, navigation systems, geo-location based services.
• He told the story of travelling and needing saffron because they were going to make paella. He looked for grocery stores on Google maps. He called the Safeway and asked for the spice department. He drove in and bought it. It cost like 12.95 for 0.06 oz. or something.
• Innovation needed in Internet enables services. He showed a slide on a laptop in a surfboard.
• He talked about how there is no Nobel prize for computer science and he joked that he came up with a theory of Schroedinger’s wine bottle (you don’t know whether it is good until you open it). No cats were harmed in this Gedanken experiment.
• Research problems: security at all levels, mobility persistence, intermediate “Erlang” formulas, QOS debates (smart routers), multihoming multipath routines, names (CCTLDs & GTLDs), mesh and sensor netowrks, ditributed algorithms, scaling of everyhting (IPv6)
• IP addressing is bound to the TCP that’s a weakness for mobility
• Need an identity layer above IP layer to be able to move from one access point to another the binding is at a higher layer of protocol.
• We have not taken advantage of broadcast media (software updates simultaneously for certain applications).
• Semantic network, modal indexing, what to do about information decay
• I say Google earth should have a time axis showing past earth views as well as proposed future developments
• Things are more being organized around people liike with MyFace and Spacebook (did he really say that?). Information is more useful if organized that way.
• Imagine in the year 300 pulling up a powerpoint from 1997. The ability to retain information depends on interpreting bits. We can’t rely on rtranslating data forward.
• New application challenges: IP TV and effects of symmetric broadband, VPOD practices, you could download additional info from objects on screen, like product placement.
• Some of you probably play WoW or Second Life. Sun had a panel discussion that occurredon second life.
• Google recently bought a company that placed advertising in virtual environments
• Cerf works with the jet propulsion lab on an interplanetary internet.
• His presentation was interrupted bya message on his laptop saying “a little virus thingy said it blocked something.”
• Rovers working on Mars were expecteed to have their solar panels get dusty, but dust devils clean them off so they are able to work for longer. They transmitted data on a 28kb cycle. They were reprogrammed to work on a 128kb cycle. The satellites used a store and forward system.
• We should expand networking capabiltiies of deep space network.
• We thought we could use TCP/IP. The distance between the planets is literally astronomical. Interplanetary Network IPN
• Delay and disintolerant networking - delay and disruption tolerant protocols - I worked on a chat project - they took it off to Iraq and I said wait it’s just an experiemtn and they said no it’s not.
• NASA should standardize on dtn protocol. On new missions past equipments could be assets. They should expect to creat a backbone with the same advantage as on earth.
• Then he showed a video of penguins.