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New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott narrates a nice five-minute video exploring the excellence and universal appeal of Pixar’s films. His thesis, in summary, is that they often feature an identity crisis–the hero feels he doesn’t belong. Humans of all stripes respond to such notions. Plus, of course, they’re usually exceptionally executed.

On a related note, I was recently listening in to a conversation among five 30-something, university-educated women. They were talking about movies. Despite being aware of the glowing reviews for Pixar’s Wall-E, they were unanimous in their lack of interest in seeing the movie.

I don’t want to inspire a lot of female commenters to contradict me, but I have a sense that women are generally less interested in animated films than men. This seems entirely understandable, given that most of the animated work they’ve seen has been a) made primarily for boys, featuring male protagonists and b) bad. Still, I think it’s unfortunate, because some of the most remarkable and effective movies of the last decade have been animated. I’m thinking here of Persepolis, Ratatouille and The Incredibles. The former of these movies obviously bucks this trend, but it didn’t necessarily have the broad appeal of the Pixar movies.

We currently don’t have cable. I’ve been putting the decision off to the fall, when I’d judge how much I was missing regularly watching the Canucks. At the moment, I’m thinking Shaw will go without our $50/month. It’s hard to be hopeful at the moment

He was inactive on draft day, but I was willing to give new Canucks GM Mike Gillis the benefit of the doubt. Then he turns around and offers a Mats Sundin an absurd amount of money–at least $3 million over market value (it feels to me like Sundin is done with the NHL). And before that he makes a cheap, ineffectual play for a restricted free agent.

In short, unless Mr. Gillis has some brilliant strategy that none of us can see (and that’s definitely a possibility), it’s going to be a rough year at GM Place.

That’s no big deal. The team has been quite good for nearly a decade, and you can’t go to the playoffs every year. The organization ought to embrace the idea that this is a rebuilding year. They should give as many young players as much playing time as possible, and try to trade some veteran assets while they’re still desirable. Roberto Luongo isn’t going to win a cup in this town in the next two years, and he could bring serious value in a trade.

The Canucks likely won’t make such changes in 2008, but assuming the team tanks, look for a fire sale on veterans at the trading deadline next spring. And I think that would be terrific. The current crop of players was good, but rarely great.

I didn’t hear until late last night (ferry trip plus Mark Knopfler concert kept me away from sports news), but yesterday longtime Canuck Markus Naslund signed a two-year deal with the New York Rangers for what works out to $4 million a year:

“It wasn’t hard to keep playing because I knew a few weeks after the season I wanted the chance to play again and maybe redeem myself and play the way I know I can play,” Naslund said last night from his home in Ornskoldsvik.

I’m glad to see the backside of Naslund (as, I’m sure, were many Vancouverites when he was walking around town). Don’t get me wrong–he could play. In his prime he had a Brett Hullesque release from the slot, cunning hands around the net and terrific outside speed. Also like Hull, he has that ability to sneak into the bare patches of defensive coverage to make room for a shot. He had three forty-goal seasons here in Vancouver, and was obviously a key component to the team’s success during his tenure. For a couple years, the West Coast Express line of Naslund, Morrison and Bertuzzi was the best in the league.

Still, his production has been systematically tailing off in recent years. He may enjoy a boost with a more attacking-style team and a more capable centre, but that was never going to happen in Vancouver. The team hasn’t had the personnel for the past two or three years. Last year the Canucks paid Naslund $6 million for 25 goals from Naslund last year, which was about 15 goals too few.

Naslund was never the kind of player I really admired. His commitment to defense was, at best, spotty and he was reasonably timid on the ice. Mike Keenan’s decision to hand Naslund the captaincy after Messier left was a brilliant tactical decision, but I think its effectiveness has long been exhausted. Naslund always struck me as too cool to be captain. It was hard to imagine him getting angry at his teammates for underperforming, or standing up for them physically on the ice.

It’s a common pattern as players age: they don’t necessarily want to decline in the same city where they rose to prominence. I’ve enjoyed watching Naslund over the years in Vancouver, but his expiry date had, for me, already passed.

If I have the Swedish correct, the title of this post means “we’ll miss you, Naslund”, “I love you, Markus”. Cue the cheesy tribute video:

This is a third in a series of posts about the process of building a house on Pender Island. If you’re just joining us, you may want to read the first and second entries before this one.

We recently got a series of sketches from John, our architect. These were the first drawings he’d done–really just starting points to foster further discussion and narrow our options. In theory, John has parsed and processed our site visit, conversations, questionnaire answers and his observations, and distilled it into an approximation of the house we might like.

John presented the sketches without a lot of interpretation or recommendations. He explained how they worked, and the general ideas, but left them with us to mull over. I appreciated this–it enabled me to turn my largely uninformed eye to them without a lot of preconceptions.

To begin, John proposed that we put a single-car garage (we really hope to stay a one-car family) a good distance–60 or 70 feet away from the main house. The two buildings would be connected by a walkway, built with a retaining wall into a slope of the land.

This appeals to me at some fundamental level. Our property is on Hoosen Road, a typical rural BC road. It’s densely lined with tall cedars, and the walls of green are only occasionally interrupted by narrow driveways. Our driveway is one of these. Turning into it, the trees close in as you mosey another eighty or a hundred yards to the proposed site of the garage. With this layout, you’d have a final green-walled leg to your journey as you walked up to the house.

In terms of the main house, our architect provided three options to work with–two narrow, two-floor designs and a squarer, three-floor floor plan. We immediately rejected the three-floor option. We want big, airy rooms, and splitting our limited square footage between three floors seemed counter-intuitive. Plus, our house in Malta had five floors (though it probably wasn’t 1500 square feet). Vertical distance feels different from horizontal distance, and I see no need for more than the minimum number of stairs. This is also a minor consideration for resale. We’d likely be selling to an older couple, and they’d probably want fewer stairs.

The ground plans that follow are from the two-floor design we prefer. We’ve got changes in mind, certainly, but our architect has done a great job of capturing and responding to our requirements.

Some notes on aspects of the design that appeal:

• The pathway ends with a kind of tunnel that runs through the house to a terrace or deck on the far side. This invites visitors to meander through to check out our view before they even enter the house. This extends the gradations of public and private space that begins back on Hoosen Road. You’re on our property, ‘in’ our house, but not inside yet.
• Whether joined by a roof or not, the office section has the feel of separate building. I’ve never needed to ’shut the door on work’, but I do like the sense of a house composed of more than one ‘pod’ or structure.
• Separate office spaces for Julie and I, stacked on top of one another. We have different lighting requirements for our work spaces (I want a cave, she doesn’t), and this solution satisfies those nicely. We could probably put a hole in the floor of some kind so that we could talk to each other without the phone or one of us moving.
• A big, fluid kitchen, dining room and living room space and only one eating area. We both grew up in big houses where the dining room was, at best, used once a week. None of our houses since then have had breakfast nooks or other secondary eating locations, and we’ve never missed them. We really don’t want unused space in our home.
• An indoor/outdoor fireplace. In temperate BC, this might extend the sitting-on-the-deck season a bit.

Next Tuesday, we’re going back the our property with our architect to have a look at it again. We plan to roughly figure out where the house would sit, and Julie and I will provide feedback on these initial ideas. Then, ominously, we talk about what we can and cannot afford.

Guideal (a curious, non-English-in-origin name that has me thinking of GUIDs) is a website that connects tourists and tour guides:

If you want to show a part of your neighbourhood or your entire city to travellers or if you want to visit a place like never before with of one of its residents; welcome to Guideal!

Each tour guide creates his/her own tour according to his/her knowledge and personality and can, if desired, be paid for each tour accomplished.

So, for example, you could get a historical tour of Chicoutimi in English or French for $50. Or a free tour of Belfast in the seventies.

I’m not one for guided tours myself, but I could see a place for Guideal in the long tail of tours. I’m thinking of smaller towns and remote locations that may not have fulltime tours that are advertised offline. Alternately, in big cities, there’s probably a demand for guiding in less popular languages like, I don’t know, Tagalog or Xhosa

Maybe it’s just been a bad week, but VOIP feels like a rare Concorde-esque backward step in technology. In the past week, I’ve had three separate conversations (all, coincidentally, with software startups) interrupted by lousy phone service. In each case, the person I was speaking to blamed their dodgy VOIP service.

We were reasonably happy with Skype (and SkypeOut) when living in Morocco and Malta (the Maltanet VOIP service was awful). Yet, counterintuitively, it’s been much more unreliable when making calls from BC. Maybe a busier network is to blame?

On the other hand, Shaw has provided the most reliable VOIP service I’ve ever used.

In short, making a phone call used to 100% reliable. Thanks to VOIP, we’re down to about 85%. What gives?

Irish blogger Damien Mulley devised a generous and clever means of increasing the visibility of Irish tech companies:

The premise is that everyone talks up a company (if they think it deserves to be) on a particular date. Every second Tuesday at it happens. Everyone tech and non tech alike are encouraged to talk about the company so that hopefully a tipping point is reached and a potential investor or journalist or partner hears/reads about the company.

Happily, the first candidate for this bloggy bake sale is our client, PutPlace. The response has been mighty, mighty impressive. For all you Catholics, Eirepreneur suggests that a better name might be ‘Shove Tuesday’.

I was thinking that we ought to do this for Vancouver (or British Columbia) startups. Maybe Techvibes or Bootup Labs could sort that out?

In related news, we’re running a photo contest for PutPlace. All you have to do is photograph yourself making a silly face, submit it to our contest, and you could win an annual subscription to PutPlace for 100 GB of data + $200 USD Amazon gift certificate. Go forth and panic for the camera.

We were briefly in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. We didn’t get much of a chance for sightseeing, though we did take an enjoyable architectural boat tour on the Chicago River. That’s where we took these fifteen odd photos. They’re unremarkable. This is probably the best one:

Our climate action dividends arrived today. For non-British Columbian readers, the provincial government has seen fit to bestow CAN $100 on every person with a British Columbian address. This cash-in-hand accompanies new taxes and new tax cuts. From the brochure that accompanied our cheques:

New tax reductions, new programs and the Climate Action Dividend are all designed to support your climate smart choices. Whether you purchase energy-efficient light bulbs, shop locally for produce, or use your dividend to help purchase eco-friendly upgrades in your home, your decisions can make a big difference.

First, a couple of petty complaints about the brochure itself:

• There are photos of nine people on it, and eight of them are women and girls. Subtext: men can’t be bothered with the environment.
• The English side of the brochure prominently features a photo of a (forgive me) very dorky, glasses-wearing girl clutching a sapling. Subtext: only nerds care about the environment.
• The phrase ‘global warming’ is three times as popular on the web as ‘climate change’. Yet the brochure only uses the latter term. Subtext: the government’s PR firm set the messaging instead of picking terms that people actually use.

I think this is an idiotic program. The vast majority of British Columbians are going to spend this money the same way they spend every other dollar. If the government wants to make the environment a priority, then they ought to invest the $440 million in measurable initiatives that are in the public interest.

However, I’m prepared to be convinced otherwise. Who wants to mount a rational, evidence-based argument in favour of the climate action dividend? I think I was out of the country when this announced, so I missed the initial flurry of punditry.

I tried to do this for myself. My first point was the citation of the Canada Child Tax Benefit or ‘baby bonus’. I did find some (hardly definitive) evidence that it increases the birth rate. Still, I’m not sure that comparing it to this one-off cheque is an apples to apples argument.

Via email, I got a link to this remarkable (if academic) video demonstrating a series of Photoshop-esque effects as applied to video. It’s from a group at the University of Washington–here’s a blurb from the accompanying paper:

We present a framework for automatically enhancing videos of a static scene using a few photographs of the same scene. For example, our system can transfer photographic qualities such as high resolution, high dynamic range and better lighting from the photographs to the video. Additionally, the user can quickly modify the video by editing only a few still images of the scene.

If you watch to the end, you’ll see how they remove an irksome No Parking sign by cutting it out of a single video frame. It’s pretty cool.