Going Supernova

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 23:14:00 GMT

Back in February, I bravely (and foolishly!) posted on this very blog that we had been fortunate to avoid heavy travel in the growth of Radiant Core. Wiser heads might have realized that posting such a statement could only possibly lead to a massive influx of travel, and since then I've been to Redmond to visit Microsoft in February, San Diego for ETech in March, and San Francisco for Web2.0Expo in April. I thought May might spare me a visit to our friendly neighbours to the south, but the classically Canadian May 2-4 weekend saw me in NYC with some friends on a road trip. Thankfully, that was the end of my scheduled travel and I was looking forward to a restful June in our beloved (and sweltering) Toronto.

But that was not to be! Thanks to the incredible generosity of the conference organizers, I've been invited to attend the upcoming Supernova next week in San Francisco. I'm particularly excited about this one because it combines two of my passions - technology and business - in a forum packed with industry leaders and mover/shakers (similar to cocktail shakers in that their presence at these events is often combined with a fair amount of alcohol and that merely standing near them can sometimes make you tipsy with excitement). A particular thanks to Deb Schultz for the gracious invitation, and for some advice on an upcoming Radiant Core project which I can't talk about just yet.

The schedule looks particularly tasty: they're running an OpenSpaces event on Tuesday at Wharton West, and those who know me know that I'm drawn to those events like a moth to a self-organized, community-driven, meritocracy-based flame. Be still my beating heart and pray that AA gets me to SF in time to catch part of it!

Wednesday is Challenge Day, a series of workshop like events "designed to provoke opinions from leading technology and business thought-leaders on key Supernova topics". I'm particularly looking forward to Making Computers Smart: A Dumb Idea? (Moderator: John Markoff, Barney Pell, Elizabeth Charnock, Nova Spivack), Introducing the Relationship Economy (Jerry Michalski, David Weinberger, Doc Searls), Research and Relationships (Discussion Lead Max Kalehoff, Aaron Coldiron, Steven Haskel, Jonathan Carson), and Where's the Innovation? (Lightning Talks).

Thursday and Friday move into more traditional session days, with everybody moving through a series of talks and presentations together. Topics range from Dark Matter: Are We Missing the Real Internet Economy? to The Social Web: Choices and Voices to Disorder: Feature or Bug?. It all looks pretty interesting, and I plan to blog as much of it as I can, bandwidth allowing (in both the time and network senses).

Registration is still open and I highly recommend it if you're involved in the web. It's not a particularly cheap conference (the Challenge Day is a great deal at $695, the full three days will run you $2,595), but the caliber of the participants is high and the sessions are quite small so you're virtually guaranteed to make some good contacts. If you're going and want to meet, drop a comment on this post or find me on Twitter.

iCommute - A Call for Spring

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 10:00:00 GMT

I live in Brockville, but I work in downtown Toronto, so the distance I travel one way is 341 kilometers from door to door. I only have to make this journey twice a week, since I'm lucky enough to only work three days a week in the office and the remaining two from home. The drive can take anywhere from three hours to almost seven depending on traffic, accidents, power surges, or weather. This commute puts me in a growing category of workers called Super-commuters.

In 1990, only 24% of all North American workers were a part of this Super-Commuter group, which has grown to well considerably leading up to today when well over 50% of all new workers are now considered super-commuters. The largest part of this newly developing demographic is traveling the great distances in the search for ever more affordable housing, which is true in my case as my wife and I are restoring an 1880‚ Upper Canada home that we just love. Others choose to live closer to children or ex-spouses. Regardless of the reasons, Super-Commuting is here to stay.

I've been doing the drive for exactly four weeks now, and I calculated my time being in car for the month at just under 40 hours - your average worker's full work week. In that time, I have travelled over 3200 kilometers. The biggest reason for my long drawn out periods of time in my car is that the weather in Ontario for this past February has truly sucked. Two massive blizzards plus a typical eastern ice storm. I imagine once the weather improves I will be down to a much more deal-able 20 hours of monthly commuting, which at the moment sounds really fantastic to me.

So I call on you, God of Spring, who was so well represented by Michelle Pfeiffer in the talent contest of Grease II, to relieve me of my frozen feet, my underlying emotional panics of seeing semi-trailer trucks in ditches or drivers without the sense to purchase proper snow tires. I call on you, for open window road travel, and the ability to actually enjoy the b-side of whichever Meatloaf album the classic rock stations along my Thousand Islands Ontario commute decides to play.

I call for Spring.

Radiant Core: travel tag

Going Supernova

iCommute - A Call for Spring