I was finally linked to by National Newswatch.

A couple of months ago I got a note from our MLA, Cam Broten who knew that Mark did a fair amount of volunteering with me at The Salvation Army and now at The Lighthouse whenever I have a task that needs to be done.  Cam nominated Mark to win a recipient of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medal.  A week or so ago this arrived in the mail inviting Mark to the Saskatchewan Legislative buildings to meet Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall in a ceremony and tea.  Tomorrow morning we will be driving down to Regina so that Mark and Wendy can be a part of the ceremony.  Yes I said, Wendy as Mark only gets one guest and I am not it.  Wendy would prefer that I go as she is nervous about it but I saw the Duke and (then) Duchess of York in 1989 in Saskatoon and I thought she would enjoy it.

Sadly I couldn’t even get into the Legislature as the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall are apparently a really big deal so I have a couple of hours to kill in Regina by myself while Mark and Wendy are living it up.

Fantastic piece by Gizmodo

Flickr’s mobile and social failures are ultimately both symptoms of the same problem: a big company trying to reinvent itself by gobbling up smaller ones, and then wasting what it has. The story of Flickr is not that dissimilar to the story of Google’s buyout of Dodgeball, or Aol’s purchase of Brizzly. Beloved Internet services with dedicated communities, dashed upon the rocks of unwieldy companies overrun with vice presidents.

As a result, Flickr today is a very different site than it was five years ago. It’s an Internet backwater. It’s not socially appealing.

Recently, Flickr rolled out a "Justified" view, a way to scan your friends’ recent photos where they are all placed together like puzzle pieces. It’s similar to the way Pinterest lays out images. It’s a dramatic, gorgeous way to look at photos—that mostly highlights how rarely many people update now.

As I scroll down I note that friend after friend has quit posting. At the bottom of the page I am already back in mid 2010. So many of my friends have vanished. It feels like MySpace, circa 2009.

This is anecdotal, sure, but I follow many of these same people on other networks (Path, Facebook, Instagram) where they tend to be very active. I see photos of the same people, with their same children and their same dogs—all looking a year or two older than on Flickr.

This justified view also serves to highlight just how many of my friends’ photos are formatted in perfect squares—the tell-tale sign of an Instagram snap that’s been exported. Many of my contacts’ entire photostreams are made up of Instagram photos. In other words they are mere duplicate streams—with fewer comments and activity—of content that exists in primary form elsewhere. The only reason they are active on Flickr at all is because they automatically export there.

There are other signals as well. On Stellar.io, a favorites aggregator that tracks what people are linking on Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr, the latter’s links fail to show up even daily in my stream. And of course, there is that damning Quantcast traffic chart.

I still love and use Flickr a lot but like a lot of people, enjoy using Instagram a fair bit as well.  My iPhone shots go to Instagram first (where they are sent to Flickr, Twitter, and occasionally Foursquare) but anything shot with a camera goes right to Flickr.  Sadly that isn’t as easy as it should.  The Flickr Uploadr is slow and often times out and I have had a horrible time setting up a Flickr acct for The Lighthouse.  After having problems with the login, Yahoo!/Flickr have totally ignored my help requests and despite it being a Pro acct, no one will answer my emails.   I keep hoping that Flickr will survive but more and more it feels like Dopplr 2.0.

From Dr. Gabor Mate,

There is a disproportionately high ratio of native Canadians among my Downtown Eastside patients, as well as in Canada’s drug-using population and prisons. And they suffer disproportionately. Last week, a study showed that the HIV rate among Vancouver’s aboriginal drug users is twice that of non-natives. The report came just a day after the tragic incident in which two toddlers froze to death on a Saskatchewan reserve. Their father, in an inebriated stupor, had carried them into a snowstorm.

The devastation wreaked by addiction among our first nations peoples is a national scandal — or it would be, were it to strike virtually any other segment of our population. Our country is strangely indifferent to its depredations among this marginalized group. We seem content to accept the high death toll that afflicts our native citizens, the low life expectancy, the high incarceration rate and the grinding poverty that both gives rise to substance abuse and results from it. We seem to comfort ourselves with the belief that the endemic drug addiction and alcoholism are unfortunate realities for which we, as a society, bear no responsibility. From both scientific and historical perspectives, such a view is distorted and self-serving.

Addicts are made, not born, and the most common precursors are early childhood privation, neglect and abuse. For several generations, Canada’s native children have been far more likely to suffer grinding penury, abuse and childhood substance addictions than non-natives. But contrary to what is sometimes asserted, such facts say nothing about the “innate” nature of Canada’s native peoples, either cultural or genetic. Abuse of young children among tribal peoples living in their natural habitats is virtually non-existent, and so it was with North American natives before European colonization. On the contrary — in many ways, their parenting practices were more enlightened than those current in our civilization.

And tobacco and other potentially addictive substances were available prior to the European settlement of this continent — even alcohol, in what is now Mexico and the American Southwest. Yet there is no mention by anthropologists or historians of anything that could be reasonably called addiction. As Bruce Alexander, professor emeritus of psychology at Simon Fraser University, points out, “where alcohol was readily available, it was used moderately, often ceremonially rather than addictively.”

The precursor to addiction is dislocation, according to Dr. Alexander. Dislocation is the loss of psychological, social and economic integration into family and culture — a sense of exclusion, isolation and powerlessness. “Only chronically and severely dislocated people are vulnerable to addiction,” he has written. Thus, today’s dismal statistics arise from the relationship between aboriginal people and the dominant culture.

With the mass migration of Europeans to North America and the economic transformation of the continent came also the loss of freedom of mobility for native peoples, the inexorable and still ongoing despoliation and destruction of their habitats and traditional livelihoods, the invalidation of their spiritual ways and persistent discrimination. Within living memory, native children were seized from their homes, alienated from their families and incarcerated in “civilizing” institutions where their lot was one of cultural suppression, emotional and physical maltreatment and, all too frequently, sexual abuse.

The overall pattern continues to be dispossession, denial of historical rights and patronizing control. Canadian society, with our self-appointed “mission” to improve the health, education and well-being of Afghans, has not even come close to securing those same essentials for our first nations citizens. The living situations, health conditions and social deprivation of many aboriginal Canadians are abysmal even by Third World standards. Under such circumstances, among tormented, dislocated and, most fundamentally, disempowered people, pain and suffering are transmitted from one traumatized generation to the next.

The weekend that was: On Friday night I dropped by the Rook and Raven to celebrate Sean Shaw’s birthday.  On Saturday morning we took Oliver up to the cabin for a night of rest and relaxation.  It was so relaxing that other than filling the bird feeder, I got nothing else I want done accomplished which was okay.  I did manage to get in a long nap, an extended game of fetch in the lake with Maggi, and a good night’s sleep.

I also realized that the last time I spent some time at the cabin, I came home and quit my job the next day.   A lot has happened since I was last up there.  One thing that did catch my eye was this hanging on the wall.  Wendy had seen it and bought it before our last trip up there.  Odd how life works sometimes.

Where I am at the moment: I am work.

On my to-do list this week:  I have some bad medical news that is going to be confirmed.  Nothing life threatening but maddening and frustrating.  I am also finishing up a marketing/communications plan.

Procrastinating about:  That doctor’s appointment.

Book I’m in the midst of: The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their Employees, Retain Talent, and Drive Performance

Music that seemed to catch my attention this past week:  Been listening to the new Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas.

How I’m feeling about this week: It’s going to be a good week.

This comes from the Saskatoon Police Service.

Six Toronto men are now facing charges relating to a dial-a-dope operation in Saskatoon.

The arrests were made following an investigation by the Saskatoon Integrated Drug Unit which began in March 2012.  The investigation focused on a crew of Toronto men who were running a dial-a-dope operation within the City.  On Wednesday, May 2, 2012, six males (ranging from 25 – 31 years old) were arrested and two search warrants were executed.  SIDU officers searched a residence in the 1200 block of Avenue D North and a hotel room in the 2100 block of Avenue B North resulting in the seizure of 7 ounces of cocaine and crack cocaine along with $20,000 in cash and numerous bank cards.  A total of 19 charges have been laid so far relating to Trafficking Cocaine, Possession for the Purpose of Trafficking Cocaine and Possession of Proceeds of Crime.  

In addition to these charges a 25 year old man was also charged with Escape from Lawful custody when, after he was arrested, pushed and ran from officers.  He ran into oncoming 5:00 p.m. traffic at the intersection of Avenue C and Circle Drive but was apprehended again immediately by officers.  Numerous unrelated warrants from other Canadian cities were also executed on these men.             

All six men are scheduled to appear in Provincial Court today at 2:00 p.m.  The court information number is 44304529.  This investigation is ongoing.

An electronic photo depicting the seizure is attached for the media.

The Saskatoon Integrated Drug Unit is comprised of members of the Saskatoon Police Service and "F" Division of the RCMP.

I thought it was classy of the policy not to name the hotel and not describe the house as “that house that everyone in Mayfair knows they are dealing drugs out of”.   Still it was a good job of the Saskatoon Police Service.  It is something that we have been complaining about for a long time in the neighbourhood and that block is notorious for illegal activity.

If you are like me, you don’t use your CD player very much or if at all anymore and you have a couple of them laying around.  If that is true, The Lighthouse needs them for their Complex Needs Wing.  The residents that are moving into the Complex Needs Wing have their room and board paid by the Ministry of Social Services but have very little money after that.  By the fact that they are in the Complex Needs Wing means that they can’t even start to think about employment yet.  We have televisions and cable for them but many of our residents love music and we would love for them to be able to experience that or listen to John Gormley, Sheila Coles, or another morning show in the morning.

If you are inclined to drop off a CD player/stereo, feel free to weed out your CD collection and bring us down some “classics” that you don’t want anymore.  Our residents will love them and we won’t tell anyone what you brought down.  I love Bon Jovi so I can’t judge anyone.

You would be surprised how much stuff like this can mean to people.

When I started at The Lighthouse, I was caught on what was the best way to communicate with the staff.  I didn’t want to use memos and while email works, I wanted something that would keep a narrative of where we started from.  I set up an intranet with Google Sites and while it was impressive, I didn’t think it would get checked enough and was a bit of a pain to post stuff too.  I finally settled on setting up a password protected staff blog using Blogger.  It took about 2 minutes to set up and invite the staff to.  Another 60 seconds and I had invited Chris and DeeAnn to post to it as well.

The response to reading it was good but there were some technical difficulties.  Once those were settled it will be even more productive.  The main technical obstacle is staff forgetting their passwords at home and then wanting to read it at work.  That was solved by setting up a generic account that can be accessed by anyone at work to read it.

We are only six posts into it and I am not sure what the end result will be but the hope is that it will be a resource that will bring staff up to speed quicker and give them a better feel for the ethos, feel, and personality of The Lighthouse quicker than ever before.

With it being so easy to set up and publish to, I am surprised that more employers aren’t using internal blogs more.  I have loved the idea ever since I heard of the idea of Blogger in Google shortly after Google acquired Google.

From MacWorld:

"Google Inc., which implemented an internal Web log system behind its firewall about 18 months ago, has seen tremendous benefits from it and may in the future consider providing tools and expertise for this purpose to interested clients, a Google executive said.

Google deployed an internal blog for its employees shortly after acquiring the blogging service Blogger in early 2003, and since then Google staffers have found many useful and creative ways for the internal blog, said Jason Goldman, Blogger product manager at Google.

"Since then, we have seen a lot of different uses of blogs within the firewall: people keeping track of meeting notes, people sharing diagnostics information, people sharing snippets of code, as well as more personal uses, like letting co-workers know what they’re thinking about and what they’re up to," Goldman said. "It really helps grow the intranet and the internal base of documents."

Google executives have talked in the past about the company’s internal Blogger implementation, called Blogger in Google (BIG), and a Google employee even posted a screenshot of a BIG page last year".

It’s not a new idea but it has the potential for The Lighthouse to have a big return on almost no investment.

The man behind Mitt Romney’s campaign, Eric Fehrnstrom

Fehrnstrom calls himself a "utility player," and in the press he’s typically identified as a "Romney spokesman" or a "Romney strategist." But that doesn’t begin to do justice to his place in the high command. Fehrnstrom has been with Romney for a decade, longer than any other political adviser on his 2012 campaign. "Anytime I’ve got questions or I’ve got a doubt, I know I can go to Eric and I’m getting feedback from someone who’s inside Mitt’s brain," Romney’s senior adviser Kevin Madden told me. Or as Peter Flaherty, another senior Romney adviser, puts it: "Eric has a deeper shelf of institutional knowledge of Mitt Romney than anyone I know whose last name is not Romney."

Fehrnstrom’s first job for Romney was running the press shop during his successful 2002 run for Massachusetts governor. But his role quickly expanded, and  as Romney’s national profile grew, so did his trusted aide’s. (So much so that when Scott Brown was looking for someone to help him win Ted Kennedy’s old Massachusetts Senate seat in 2010, he hired Fehrnstrom, who remains Brown’s top strategist.) Over the course of his decade with Romney, Madden says, Fehrnstrom has become "a Tom Hagen figure. He’s consigliere to the governor."

But with two slight differences. Whereas Hagen was always trying to cool off the hotheaded Sonny Corleone and keep the peace, Fehrnstrom, 50, is both the wise man and the hothead. He wears the uniform of the modern political consultant—iPad tucked in the crook of his arm, open-collared shirt, rectangular-framed glasses—but his fleshy face and thick New England accent betray a rougher core. And far from reining in Romney, he performs the opposite service for his client: Fehrnstrom toughens him up. "Eric gives Mitt a capability that Mitt doesn’t have," says Ben Coes, Romney’s campaign manager in 2002. "It’s a streetwise savvy; it’s an on-the-ground Boston-smarts mentality; it’s a back-alley-politics, survival-of-the-fittest point of view. Mitt is not a knife fighter. Eric is a knife fighter." The best political operatives are the ones who provide their clients with a tangible quality the candidate himself lacks. If Karl Rove was Bush’s brain, then Fehrnstrom is Romney’s balls.

Interesting profile.  I don’t know if he is any tougher than other presidential advisor, Karl Rove seems to have set the bar very high (or very low depending on how you vote) but if anything, it will give you an idea of what kind of general election it will be this fall.

It’s been about a year since I took some extended time away from work.  There has been the occasional weekend away but a combination of Wendy’s depression last year pushing all of us to almost the breaking point (as an aside, it pains me to read of Heather and Jon’s marriage issues as their marriage was an inspiration in knowing the depression would not beat us as a family) and a lot of stress at where I was working.  The only time I got away and some time to myself was when I had heart problems last summer and that wasn’t exactly relaxing.  Since I started at The Lighthouse, most days are 10 – 12 hours and when I am at home, I am working.  I have always prided myself on being there for the boys but there was a six day stretch where I didn’t see either boy and then I followed that up with another five day stretch.   While work has been less stressful with some new excellent staff coming onboard, the hours are still long and this line of work has a lot of conflict.  There is conflict with some residents although that is heartbreaking, it isn’t stressful.

The stressful part is working within the system that really is dysfunctional.  There are multiple agencies and as a colleague said to me this week, they only care about their stovepipe.  The bigger the bureaucracy, the more extensive the rules and the more rules there are, the harder it is for people in the margins to get help from them and the harder it is that it is to help them.

Here is story about Richard I know and is a resident of The Lighthouse.  When Mark Horvath was in Saskatoon last summer, Richard was in The Lighthouse’s shelter while Mark shot this video.

Richard’s a cool guy (who has now a long term room) but when you think about this story, Social Services in Humboldt sent him by bus to Saskatoon without supports, prior arrangements, or even to check out of the shelters could house him (before you defend Social Services, I verified those facts last year) and you get a bit of an idea what we deal with.  Outside of Richard’s health problems, there are no other significant contributing factors to his homelessness and yet he was sent to live on the streets in a strange city.  There is even more government dysfunction to the story than he says here.  I don’t have his permission to say it but it’s so insane, you wouldn’t believe it anyway.

Then there is Rhoda’s story which was also interviewed by Mark Horvath while he was in Saskatoon last summer.

She mentioned the tent that she was discharged earlier to.  Here is it.

It’s in a clearing where some of people Saskatoon’s homeless live.  I know that we like to think we don’t have homeless encampments but we have two large ones and a smaller one in the city that people live in, take care of each other in, and sadly get really sick in.  When I originally found out about these spots, my reaction was that this is where people go to do drugs in or just won’t conform.  No, most of it that they just don’t have anywhere else to live.  In the winter they find places indoors… abandoned buildings, sheds, or garages.  Some couch surf.  Most of the people are “off-the-grid” or in other words, they aren’t on Social Services and are stuck living outside, even if they have HIV.  It’s crazy. 

Again, just take a second to think about this for a second, our hospitals are legally not allowed to discharge to the street but a doctor decided that it was okay to send her back to this tent, even though she had HIV and was just hospitalized for something serious. I wish this was a rogue doctor but it isn’t. I am not saying that all doctors are like this but some sadly are. A couple of years ago I was invited to speak to some hospital social workers and during the meeting some started to cry and started to talk about what they are expected to do. As a couple of them said, “it’s abusive working conditions” because of the expectation of them to clear out hospital beds.  I know social admissions (admission to a hospital for a reason other than being sick) are on the upswing but discharging anyone to this is just wrong.   One agency in an attempt to help it’s clients even allowed people to sleep in a metal shed in the back of their location because they had no where else.  I don’t know the “R” value of metal sheds but I am assuming it’s pretty close to being colder than outside in the winter and hotter in the summer.

Some people don’t have even this and I was reminded of a former client who committed suicide this winter after an enduring an extended period of absolute homelessness.  She had mental health issues and I am sure that is the real reason but she was on the streets and in the cold for a long, long time.  In the meetings that I am too often a part of, I keep hearing, “someone is going to die”.  Well it happens, it is just that “homelessness” isn’t recognized as a cause of death.  Alcohol, drug use, or mental health issues are blamed and we can keep looking the other way.  The worst part of it was that this was a death that I may have been able to prevent if I had decided to take a more involved role in but like a lot of people, it wasn’t my job either.

What’s the solution to the encampments and people being discharged to the streets (other than firing some doctors and social workers)? The big picture is that the province needs to make someone responsible for homelessness and housing and right now no one is.  Quite a few departments have initiatives to ensure it doesn’t happen which means that with many people in charge, no one is in charge and that is why someone with HIV is living in a tent in an encampment in Saskatoon. 

I can’t fix that but I can create a space that has an extremely low thresh hold for entry which will at least connect people up to supports and stop them from having to live in places like this (there are always going to be some that want to live like this and I can’t do anything about that).  It would be a place of last resort for those that are banned elsewhere.  It would concentrate on keeping people alive more than providing comfort with the idea (a gamble perhaps) that once people were comfortable enough with staff and others that they would be willing to take some positive steps in securing housing.

The problem?  No one wants this kind of service around them and no one wants to fund it because many of the people who would use the service scare people (they scare me occasionally), are very violent or just vile and angry.  One guy we tried to work with this winter went on and on about his desire to have sex and violently rape female staff and residents.  It’s obviously a mental health disorder but he wasn’t being treated and yet his IQ was so low he wasn’t able to get help for himself.  While at one hand he was a risk, he was also a victim and he doesn’t deserve to freeze to death.

In other cities that have free shelter, it sadly gives an incentive for social workers to not give people emergency services and so you actually make the problem worse for others.  In case you think that professional social workers wouldn’t do it, I heard lots of stories of clients coming to a shelter with instructions from their worker to lie to staff in order to get a lower subsidized rate.  The reason I knew is that they would confess to me because their conscience wouldn’t allow them to do it and they didn’t want to get caught.   I can’t imagine what would happen if there was a place that was free.  Well actually I can and it would be an excuse for more people not to do their jobs.

As for why it won’t get funded… the cost benefits are large but they would happen in a different department than what would fund it.  No community really wants to get behind it because of the fear of what can happen and because people die in small enough numbers that we really don’t have to care about it.  

You can get more details here.

and it only took him a couple of days

Richard Florida looks at density and ecology in bigger cities

The size and density of cities confers considerable economic advantages. Denser cities are seed-beds of innovation and productivity improvement, as Jane Jacobs long ago argued. Pioneering studies of "urban metabolism" by Geoffrey West and his colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute find that as metro areas get larger their metabolic rate essentially speeds up, making them more productive and inventive

The environment benefits from density and size as well. Larger, denser cities are cleaner and more energy efficient than smaller cities, suburbs, and even small towns. Ecologists have found that by concentrating their populations in smaller areas, cities and metros decrease human encroachment on natural habitats.  Denser settlement patterns yield energy savings; apartment buildings, for example, are more efficient to heat and cool than detached suburban houses. Urban households emit less carbon dioxide than their suburban and rural counterparts. In his book Green Metropolis, David Owen lauds the dense, concentrated built environment of Manhattan – where most people live in apartments and use mass transit — as the greenest place in America. When it comes to greenness, size matters; as urban regions grow their populations, the rate of growth in their emissions actually declines.

It’s the Tampa Bay, Phoenix and 255 other cities that will determine the health of the United States economy

Collectively, large cities — which we define as metropolitan areas with a population of 150,000 plus — in the United States are the center of gravity of the economy, generating almost 85 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and nearly 20 percent of global GDP today. While New York and Los Angeles, the two American megacities with populations of more than ten million, have continued to tower above all others among the 259 large U.S. metropolitan areas, it’s the 257 "middleweight" cities — with populations of between 150,000 and 10 million — that generate more than 70 percent of U.S. GDP today. The top 28 middleweights alone account for more than 35 percent of the nation’s GDP.

It is America’s large cities, and particularly the broad swath of middleweights, that will be the key to the U.S. recovery and a key contributor to global growth in the next 15 years. Large cities in the United States will contribute more to global growth than the large cities of all other developed countries combined. We expect the collective GDP of these large U.S. cities to rise by almost $5.7 trillion — generating more than 10 percent of global GDP growth — by 2025. While New York and Los Angeles together are expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 2.1 percent between 2010 and 2025, the top 30 middleweights (measured by GDP) are expected to outpace them with a growth rate of 2.6 percent.

What’s the formula for success?

Even when narrowing our focus to the strongest performing cities, again there is no single path to success — no unique blueprint that all urban leaders should pursue. The cities that outperform their peers simply find ways to make the most of the economic opportunities they face, get lucky, or both. Some cities have been able to reinvent themselves; many others make the most of their endowments or their location.

Even in these important middleweight cities, growing is going to be tough

The coming years are not going to be easy. As households and the government pay down debts built up before and during the recession, growth could be dampened for many years. Cities that have experienced real estate booms and busts will find recovery particularly hard going. In Orlando and Phoenix more than half of mortgage holders are in negative equity. In Las Vegas, it’s two out of three. And there are still pockets of stubbornly high unemployment — two-thirds of all the jobs lost during the downturn were in states that accounted for only 45 percent of the U.S. population.

Some researchers are about to find out

If you’re a psychologist, the news has to make you a little nervous—particularly if you’re a psychologist who published an article in 2008 in any of these three journals:Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,or the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Because, if you did, someone is going to check your work. A group of researchers have already begun what they’ve dubbed the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from those three journals for that one year. The project is part of Open Science Framework, a group interested in scientific values, and its stated mission is to “estimate the reproducibility of a sample of studies from the scientific literature.” This is a more polite way of saying “We want to see how much of what gets published turns out to be bunk.”

For decades, literally, there has been talk about whether what makes it into the pages of psychology journals—or the journals of other disciplines, for that matter—is actually, you know, true. Researchers anxious for novel, significant, career-making findings have an incentive to publish their successes while neglecting to mention their failures. It’s what the psychologist Robert Rosenthal named “the file drawer effect.” So if an experiment is run ten times but pans out only once you trumpet the exception rather than the rule. Or perhaps a researcher is unconsciously biasing a study somehow. Or maybe he or she is flat-out faking results, which is not unheard of. Diederik Stapel, we’re looking at you.

The Ward 4 race got off to a tough start when it came out that Sean Shaw bought the domain names for his opponent Troy Davies.  Like all stunts like this, it backfired and gave Davies the moral high ground and got himself linked from Dave Hutton’s blog which helped the SEO of his campaign.  Not a good day for the Sean Shaw campaign.

Down at The Lighthouse, we are getting a lot closer to opening up our nine new complex needs rooms in .  These rooms are for people who have significant mental health issues and often have concurrent drug disorders.  Each room comes with a new bed, dresser, television, table, and chair (they are really nice) but we want to help people feel at home.  If you have any of the following and want to donate them, please drop them off at The Lighthouse anytime and let the front desk know they are for the complex needs wing.

• Alarm clock
• Stereo
• night tables
• dresser
• 4 cup coffee maker
• coffee cups
• small microwave
• coat hangers
• lamps (non halogen please)

The wing is designed to house some of Saskatoon’s hardest to house people with some of the most serious issues and these touches will take a room and make it feel like home.

Here is a summary of my weekend

• Finished The Patrol by Ryan Flavelle by which is about a seven day patrol by Canadian troops in Afghanistan.  Recommended.
• Came into work on Sunday and prepped for a meeting that I having this morning.
• Had coffee with the Siebert’s which is always a good time.  I was also introduced to Ubuntu which is fast even on a P4.  It runs Libre Office, Skype, has five gigs of backup space, and handles email and the web just fine (Chrome and Firefox).  I could see The Lighthouse using it for both residential and office computers.  Oh yeah, Jared told me it installed in ten minutes which is 47 hours and 50 minutes faster than a Vista or XP install is taking me.
• Finished watching Generation Kill.  It’s not as good as The Wire (few shows are) but it is amazing in it’s own way.  I really enjoyed both the book by Evan Wright and the show which was done by David Simon and Ed Burns.

I was planning to order a 300mm lens for my Pentax K-x this spring and I was in Don’s Photo this weekend when I saw a used one for a good price.  It isn’t professional quality but it should let me take some better photos of Mark’s football games than my 200 mm lens but we will see how it goes.  I took some test shots yesterday and was impressed with the quality.  Now I just need to find some time to take it with me to do some shooting.  That could be the hardest part of owning this lens.

Photography for me in Saskatoon is always challenging.  I tend to want to photograph stuff during the winter but winter in Saskatoon is long, brutal and white.  It’s just an ugly place to live at times.  In the spring, summer, and fall, things get a lot easier but I find that I need to get past the blah’s of winter photography to get to that point where it is fun again.

From Slate

Some people have already moved on to a post-Word world. One national sportswriter told me he writes everything in TextEdit, because it goes easy on memory and it opens and closes in a snap. (My own latest copy of Word won’t launch a new blank document without demanding that I identify which of a half-dozen kinds of project files—most of which are meaningless to me—I’m trying to create.)

When I was writing a book, which required lots of alone time with a giant file—and lots of word-counting, which Microsoft is good at—I stuck with Word. But for everyday projects, I go days or weeks without opening it. This piece started out as a Gmail message, which saved automatically and was easy to access at home, at the office, or on my phone in transit. Then I switched over to TextEdit, which gives me a bigger window to work with and handles line breaks more cleanly than Gmail does. For protracted edits, I create a Google document, so multiple readers can work on it at once. If they want to track the changes, they can read the revision history. For short blog posts, I write straight into the publisher.

If I really want a word count, I open a Word document and paste my work into it. Once I have the number, I dump the document, unsaved, so nothing gets contaminated with Word-iness.

I know only one person who loves working in Word: my 4-year-old. It’s valuable to him to be able to put the names of subway lines in their correct colors, or to spell out "autumn" with each letter a different falling-leaf hue, or to jump from Times New Roman to Comic Sans to Chalkboard in midstory. He also loves to write things on my old manual Smith-Corona. A tool that’s lost its purpose makes a great toy.

I have used Word from version 2.0c all of the way up to Word 2000.  I can’t remember the last version of Word but I hated the ribbon bar and made the switch to LibreOffice.  It’s a bit of a memory hog but AbiWord got buggy some time ago and I haven’t been able to get it work right on several different machines and gave up on it.  Personally I loved Word 2.0c.  It inspired a love of writing and design.  I also kind of liked Word 97 but since then it has lost it’s soul.

At work I needed a database to store contact information at The Lighthouse.  I originally went into Libre Office Base (and thought about purchasing Filemaker) and planned to design a database myself.  I then realized that I had better things to do and DeeAnn would need to use it as well.  Both her and I work on our desktops and laptops and I use my iPad quite a bit at work as well so a cloud solution seemed to be in order.  A bunch of the options I looked at seemed far more expensive than what I thought I should be paying for in a small institution.  While I was looking around, several people recommended I try Google Contacts.

I am a pretty big fan of Google Contacts personally as it allows me to keep my address book on my iPhone sync’d up with my address book in Gmail.  After checking it out, I looked at it and saw that as a stand alone now which is exactly what I wanted.  It is customizable enough and exports data easily enough that I can get it out anytime I need it.  I set it up with a new account and started to input data.  Of course I wanted to be able to sort the names and it allows me to create groups.  We have groups for service providers, politicians, vendors, and other groups and of course with it you have integration with email when you need it.  As for accessing it, all it takes is a bookmark and a password.

I know there are a lot of options out there but Google Contacts is free, accessible from anywhere, sync’s with our iOS/Blackberry/Android users.  Being a Google shop, it also is easy to export out parts of the database for staff who need the contacts.  Going back to my time at Lakeview Church, I have wanted an easy to use contact database.  We had database designers, consultants, and all sorts of people say they would be a part of the project but it never did anything because in the end, I think they conceived as too complicated.  In the end Google Contacts takes the project to it’s most basic level and does a pretty good job of executing it.

If you are looking for a database for your organization and you don’t have time to design it yourself, check out Google Contacts.  It has more under the hood than you would think.

It’s not pretty (or that ethical).  I don’t even know if it is that safe.

Unfortunately, ship accidents are not the only safety concerns facing cruise passengers. Between Oct. 1, 2007, and Sept. 30, 2008, the FBI received 421 reports of onboard crime from cruise ships, including 115 simple assaults, 16 assaults with serious bodily injury, 101 thefts, and 154 sex-related incidents. Cruise ships made these crime reports following March 2007 congressional hearings in which the cruise industry made a commitment to report to the FBI all crimes against U.S. citizens (though the data also include some reports regarding foreign nationals). The rate of sexual assault on Carnival Cruise Lines in 2007 and 2008 was a surprisingly high 115 per 100,000 passengers.

Of course it a profitable industry based on really low wages.

The cruise industry’s atrocious environmental record is matched, perhaps, only by its disregard for workers’ rights. Workers on foreign-flagged vessels, even those owned by U.S.-based corporations, generally work without union protection and are frequently subjected to arbitrary wage cuts. As Paul Chapman, founder of the New York-based Center for Seafarers’ Rights, told the Los Angeles Times: "A ship owner can go any place in the world, pick up anybody he wants, on almost any terms. If the owner wants to maximize profit at the expense of people, it’s a piece of cake."

Although the U.S. minimum wage was extended to ships registered in the United States in 1961, Congress left intact the exemption for foreign ships. A 1963 Supreme Court decision extended this exception by ruling that U.S. labour laws, including the right to organize, do not apply to foreign vessels engaged in American commerce, even if the owners of these ships are from the United States. This is the context in which the modern cruise ship industry developed and took hold. Today, as reflected in records disclosed in discovery in several court cases, the typical worker on a cruise ship has a mandatory 77-hour work week, can work for 10 to 12 months without a day off, and can earn as little as $450 per month.

Keeping these practices in place requires that cruise lines violate long-standing U.S. law. The Merchant Marine Act of 1920, better known as the Jones Act, provides U.S. maritime workers with the right to sue for pain and suffering damages from job-related injuries. But in the mid- to late-2000s, following settlement of Borcea vs. Carnival, the cruise industry began including arbitration clauses in cruise-ship workers’ contracts — they are now commonplace. These clauses have dire consequences for crew members. They mean that a foreign cruise-ship worker on a U.S.-based ship has limited right to sue his or her employer in U.S. courts because the ship and the company operating the ship are both foreign-registered.

To make a long story short, the cruise industry pays essentially no taxes, flaunts the laws of the sea and then when it is in trouble, relies on the navies and coast guards of the world to bail it out.

The cruise industry enjoys an enviable position. The corporations are registered offshore, thus avoiding U.S. taxes and regulations, but they benefit from many services paid for by the U.S. taxpayer. For instance, as disclosed in Freedom of Information Act requests, one disappearance from a cruise ship can cost the U.S. Coast Guard more than $800,000; the Carnival Splendor’s engine-room fire that left it adrift off the Mexican coast in November 2010 reportedly cost the U.S. government $1.8 million. By registering ships under flags of convenience, the corporations also dodge U.S. labor laws, even though their passengers are mainly Americans. In effect, North Americans taking a cruise enjoy an economic vacation on the backs of the foreign workers employed on these sweatships.

I have never been on a cruise for the primary reason that I prefer to drive but their labour rates have driven me crazy for years.  Sadly as I read of a 77-hour work week and work for 10-12 months without a day off for the privilege of earning $450 a month, I am turned off by the prospect.

AKMA has a great post from his vantage point from the University of Glasgow on the hated Research Education Framework

In order to understand the *#$€!¥!#* REF, you should bear in mind that universities over here have for the past century or so been funded almost exclusively by the government. That’s a system that has cultivated one of the outstanding educational systems in the world, second (perhaps, though it depends on the sample one takes) or superior to the USA. Since the economic collapse (for which the universities and other public services must have been primarily responsible, since it’s our funding being cut and not financiers having to repay the losses their speculation caused), funding for teaching (as distinct from research) is being cut to the bone; for humanities disciplines, our main government contribution will come for research. And the way the government’s research funding is determined is the *#$€!¥!#* REF.

(Research funding was determined by the *#$€!¥!#* REF’s predecessor, the RAE, in the past; since other sources of funding are drying up, though, the research component takes on heightened importance.)

The *#$€!¥!#* REF works this way: at a given moment, every university in the UK will gather pieces of research that represent the work of their staff in various subject areas, and a committee of scholars will evaluate all the books, essays, research reports, whatever, and assign each institution’s staff a piece of the research pie. That moment, for this REF cycle, begins January 2014. All across the UK, academics are straining to make sure that they have four significant publications in print before that deadline — all at once, except for the elect who have already published four estimable works.

What a messed up way of determining funding.

I hate to post this here but Wendy snores.  Like a lumberjack on a rampage.  She isn’t the only one.  Mark snores (but he lives downstairs), Oliver snores, and even the dog snores.  Many nights I have been driven from our bedroom downstairs because of the snoring and then the dog senses something is wrong so she follows me, snoring as she goes.  It drives me crazy.

We have tried the nose strips and they help a bit but I finally found a solution that does work and that is the WhiteNoise app for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad. 

The free version is, umm, free while the paid version adds more sounds and some more features. 

I have a cheap docking station upstairs in our bedroom and I put my iPhone on to charge at night beside me and tinker with the audio for a couple of seconds until I get it right.   I tend to use ocean waves crashing (which reminds me of the Bahamas) or rain.  It also has a cool feature where it turns your iPod into an LED clock that you can adjust the brightness with a touch of the hand.   If you live with a snorer, try the WhiteNoise Lite app.  If it works, upgrade to the full version.  It’s worth it.

This is from Maureen Dowd

Augusta National Golf Club, which has kept its men-only policy long after giving up its black-caddies-only rule, should stop emulating the Saudis and award a green jacket and club membership to Virginia Rometty, the new chief of I.B.M., a Masters sponsor. You know you’re in trouble when Rick Santorum is urging you to be more progressive on women.

“The thing about Augusta is, it’s not just another golf club,” said David Israel, who was a sports columnist with me at The Washington Star. “It is the most famous private golf club in the world. It should be leading and opening doors and minds. Instead, it chooses to venerate a venal and exclusionary past, an idyll of segregation. Revering its lost traditions is like wistfully remembering Lester Maddox’s ax handle.”

Rometty and other female executives should persuade their companies to cut connections with Augusta until equality blossoms like the course’s azaleas.