I was really interested in this article in Prospect magazine which I read the day before some bastard tried to blow up my home town again! It's a long piece but well worth a read.

In Canada the Prairies are meant to be where it's at when it comes to sky. Prairie skies even made it into the CBC Seven Wonders of Canada list. Here in Calgary we are where the Prairies meet the mountains and I have to say we get some amazing skies. This evening on the way home I was very excited to see what I think is my first mammatus cloud!


Ever since reading The Cloudspotter's Guide last year I'd been fascinated by these clouds. What red-blooded amateur meteorologist wouldn't.

I was touched by Gordon Brown's faith in his old Kirkaldy High School motto but it made me wonder what the hell my school motto was and had I , inadvertently, been living by it.

Wikipedia tells me my school motto was Misericordias Domini In Aeternum Cantabo aka 'I will sing praises to the Lord forever'. So that's a "No" I think. If I go back to my exclusive prep school then I don't fare much better: Arduus ad Solem (which I could still remember!) aka 'Struggle towards the sun'. 'Struggle towards the snow' - that's a bit closer but I suppose doesn't count.

Wikipedia also told me something else I didn't know: that there's a Japanese pop group named after my school! abingdon boys school have a single out next month. That's just weird.

As an example of a "glass half empty" outlook you can't do much better than this headline from cbc.ca's Calgary news:

Booming economy has downside for bankruptcy industry

Another weekend and another lovely hike in the Rockies. This was courtesy of the Calgary Outdoor Club and involved a trip to Paradise (valley).


Our goal was Lake Annette, nestled at the base of magnificent Mt Temple. It's prime bear country apparently and a guy coming down the track told us he'd seen a small black bear near the trail. Alas we saw no sign of it - but I did see a beaver and you don't get more Canadian than that! I'm really up for seeing a bear but ideally from a car or possibly across a creek. I may well change my tune if I do actually see one.

The hike itself wasn't too tough which was just as well as I had to get up at 6am to bike to the carpool pick-up location and then bike back at the end of it all. Photos here.

I don't normal post links or anything that's not to do with the main subject of this blog which is of course me (me! me! me!). But this little nugget from the b3ta newsletter deserves a wider audience. And I am powerless to resist anything that combines my two favourite things: politics and Bugsy Malone.



I don't necessarily agree with all the sentiments but the choice of song is brilliant. It really reminded me of the unbounded optimism I felt May 1 1997; Labour had won with a huge majority; I had hugged Billy Bragg (at some point I will stop crowbarring that into every other post) and things could apparently only get better. They could have been anything that they wanted to be. And look what they were.

It's two weeks till Calgary descends into what I am reliably informed is it's traditional 10 days of civic meltdown and wild west tomfoolery. I'm talking of course about the Calgary Stampede - "the greatest outdoor show on earth".

Signs of the imminent festivities are popping up all over town. In the foyer of the office building I'm working in a wigwam has been erected; elsewhere rustic fencing is going up and hay bales are being strategicaly positioned for maximum authenticity. But the most obvious sign that something is up is all the painting that's going on.


Every other shop window downtown is getting a makeover it seems. And I'm starting to recognise particular artistes as the most popular. What do they do for the rest of the year.



I've created a special set on flickr and I'll try and keep this set updated with more sights.

Who says I'm not a man's man?

Apologies everyone - this is very much narrow-casting. Or maybe it's the long tail...

Anyhow:

Doug - thanks very much for the postcard, it's straight onto the wall of fame. Hope all is well with you, Sarah and any other Johnsons that there are now.

Did you get any emails from me in the last few months? Not sure I've got your proper address. And do you still live at Penrhyn Road?

It hasn't snowed for nearly 3 weeks in Calgary which I think makes it officially summer. Now that the ski season is over the hiking season begins and I have set up Hike Club at work in order to go and enjoy the great outdoors with other people.

Hike Club meets once a month and our first outing was yesterday where we undertook the Upper Kananaskis Lake circuit in Peter Lougheed Provinicial Park. I'd heard it was a good early season walk as it should be snow free by now (which it mostly was) and didn't require much up and down so we can break ourselves in gently. I was also looking forward to exploring K Country, as the locals call it. I've heard that while tourists flock to the wonders of Banff and Lake Louise, crafty locals head to Kananaskis: the scenery is magnificent and it's even closer to Calgary.

They might have a point


The weather wasn't perfect as you can see but it was no obstacle to a grand day out. We had a good turn out of ThoughtWorkers, friends and families and I think the whole thing was a good start to the hiking season. Thanks to everyone who came - especially Wayne and Bekkie for giving me a lift :)


But the real highlight occurred on the way home. My first moose sighting of this trip!

I've just started a new project at work. However it's not in Calagry it's in Kingston, Ontario.

"Kingston, Ontario?" I hear you say "Isn't that where you went to university for a year about 15 years ago?"

"Yes it is"

"Wow. That must have been a real nostalgia trip!"

"Well...."

I was expecting it to be a massive nostalgia trip so it was it was very strange when I arrived and didn't really recognise a thing! A few things came back on the way from the airport such the limestone buildings and Waldron Tower (my old hall of residence). But downtown where the hotel and office were I looked around and thought "I don't recall any of this" which felt a little strange.

It wasn't that things had changed out of recognition: I would have had to be able to remember something before I could realise it had changed. I came to see that the problem was I didn't really know the downtown - I'd spent almost all my time on campus and that's what I had forgotten over the years (Obviously if I was a Mac I'd have been living it up in town all the time). It wasn't till I wandered up Princess Street that things started to come back. The cinema, the site of the Chinese Laundry cafe, the unsightly Princess Towers and, joy of joys, the A&P supermarket from where I used to buy by Fudgee-os. Then on Thursday after work I finally got a chance to visit the campus and that WAS nostalgic.


I could remember enough to see what had changed and what stayed the same. The cafeteria reminded me of skating to breakfast one morning on a frozen Lake Ontario, walking past Vic Hall reminded me of the moment I decided that "Vapour Trail" by Ride was the greatest song ever!


It all seemed like a long time ago: I even had a full head of hair in them days!

You are nobody in ThoughtWorks without a shiny MacBook pro laptop. Work supply us with Dell laptops which is fine with me but when you work for the alpha geek company obviously that isn't going to coupe la moutarde for everybody. While Macs are certainly beautiful they are also expensive and I really don't want to pay that kind of money to read my email with even more insouciant panache when work will give me a computer for free.

Then there's the matter of the TV ads. Every time I see one of those "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads (the same campaign runs over here just without Mitchell (OA) and Webb) I'm reminded that I just don't want to be a Mac.



Look at him, the big girl's cardigan! He has it easy and he's just so passive-aggressively smug about it all: he thinks he's got life all worked out. He is a boulevardier, an idle flaneur!* I realise that all that equates with being cool these days but I've never wanted to be like that (that's why I'm a skier not a snowboarder!).

My sympathies are with PC. PC is everyman. He deals with life's vicissitudes with a shrug and just gets on with it. He's not good looking or cool but he works for a living and he's probably a nice guy; meanwhile Mac is editing the video from his G8 demonstration to post on YouTube (what did global capitalism ever do for him?). God, I sound like an old fart all of sudden!

Anyhow, the fact is that Mac is actually Nathan Barley (this link is NOT safe for work or the easily offended!), PC is really Tim from the office and I know which one I want to be.

*harrumph! Bring back national service.. Flogging.. Getting on your bike etc etc.

I'm trying to suspend judgement on the logo, sorry BRAND, for the 2012 Olympics unveiled today. I'm entertaining the possibility that at some point I'll get used to it and come to admire it as a work of visual genius and not an 80s hair-metal album cover. It's a long shot but who knows. And kudos to us for making the same logo for Olympics and Paralympics for the first time.

But when the hell was it acceptable for anyone, let alone Sebastian Coe, to say stuff like:

"This is the vision at the very heart of our brand...It will define the venues we build and the Games we hold and act as a reminder of our promise to use the Olympic spirit to inspire everyone and reach out to young people around the world...It is an invitation to take part and be involved"

and not be ridiculed for here to eternity? Meaningless mumbo jumbo has truly conquered the world! Even our Tony got in on the act

"When people see the new brand, we want them to be inspired to make a positive change in their life"

What??

I can't bear to think about what vacuous psychobabble some square-spectacled "imagineer" at Wolf Ollins trotted out to justify their £400,000 fee. But apparently the brand is "hardworking" so that's OK.