by Brendon J. Wilson

American Idol

There’s nothing like seeing the discovery of a new musical talent. Nothing. Unless you include watching the aforementioned new musical talent attempt to invent new notes in the audition while miming Britney Spears dance moves in a valiant attempt to achieve liftoff. Such was the scene set on American Idol last night and tonight.

While the bluntness of Simon Cowell, the most forthright and outspoken of the three judges always makes for good entertainment, I sensed political purpose in the discussions between the judges. In several cases, the judges appeared to be more engaged in debate over the state of the music industry than in evaluating the participants’ performances. Could there be trouble in music producers’ paradise?

At one extreme, Simon cut down participants with vitriolic panache for their lack of “the look” of an American Idol, pointing out that vocal talent alone did not a star make. At the other extreme, Randy Jackson stood true in his belief that the ability to sing was all it took. Paula Abdul was left to act as referee and remind both Simon and Randy to make a decision regarding the soon to be broken dreams of yet another victim, er, rising star.

The debates raise the question: are the cracks finally showing in the music industry’s facade of invincibility? Up to this point, the fight over the future in music has raged between those of us on the outside and the music industries. But now, with the impending departure of Hilary Rosen from the RIAA, the explosion in decentralized file-sharing networks, cheap and accessible professional sound recording capabilities in every teenager’s bedroom, it was only a matter of time.

Now, viewing the disagreements of Simon and Randy, both major insiders in the music industry, over where the future of music lies, can the end be near for the major labels? It appears it might be.

in Culture / Entertainment 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Feisty It Is!

After sending a downright ludicrous proposal for an MBA internship to Mark Hanson, Sony’s VP of VAIO Product Marketing, I got a response tonight. Whoo-hoo! Here’s to half-baked ideas on how to find an internship when your internship center is failing you.

Mark Hanson responded with:

Brendon,

How could I possibly NOT remember you? Interesting proposal… I believe your suggestion and expertise would reside in a different division of Sony. I’ve forwarded your info to a couple of Sr Managers in the related divisions. I have also forwarded your resume to HR.

I wish you luck in your endeavor.

Mark Hanson
VP and GM of VAIO PM
Information Technology Product Division

Admittedly you could read some negative things into the response. For example: “How could I possibly NOT remember you?” Of course he remembers me. I spent nine months tracking him and his engineers down until I got a laptop design problem fixed for free for myself and a half dozen other disgruntled Sony customers. Sure he remembers me. But probably not fondly. Which perhaps explains why my “expertise would reside in a different division”.

Somewhere near, oh I don’t know…Guam? Shanghai?

That aside, I think I’ve answered the question proposed before: crazy or feisty? Feisty it is!

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 by Brendon J. Wilson

Crazy Or Feisty?

It’s internship time! Given that the UBC Commerce Career Centre has a grand total of seven jobs listed for the Lower Mainland, I’m taking matters into my own hands these days. But where to work?

On an impulse, I remembered my old friend Mark Hanson, VP of Sony VAIO Marketing. Given the amount of work I’ve done to solve Sony laptop problems for Sony customers, I figured I’d be a shoo-in for an internship position there. After all, I’d pretty much been working for them for over the past year anyway, right?

I fired off the following quick email to Mark Hanson last night:

Hey Mark,

Don’t know if you remember me, but I’m willing to bet you remember this website:

    www.brendonwilson.com/ideas/sony/getangry.shtml

I’m still getting email on a weekly basis regarding the Sony thermal shutdown problem, not just on old Sony models but on new ones as well. That got me thinking:

I should work for Sony.

What I’m going to suggest might be classified as either ballsy or just downright crazy, but I think it makes sense: I’m currently in the middle of my MBA at the University of British Columbia, and it’s coming around to internship time (June – August). I’m already helping Sony to solve its customers’ problems when Sony’s own customer service seems incapable of recognizing and addressing customer issues, or addressing them in anything but the most ham-fisted manner (ie: replacing whole motherboards for $800).

The failure of their laptops is costing people more than money or lost work: it’s costing Sony the loss of a lot of street credibility. I talk to people and see just how disappointed they are with their laptops, especially given that they bought a Sony specifically because of the dependability they’d come to expect from Sony. Now they’re swearing they’ll never buy a Sony again. Not just a Sony laptop. Any Sony product.

So, here’s what I propose: you hire me for my MBA internship and I track down your customer service and your quality assurance issues.

You already know my attributes: I’m smart. I’m technologically savvy. I’m an evangelist. I take service seriously. And I get the job done. It’s all there on the resume on my web site.

I look forward to hearing from you soon,

Brendon

I just can’t decide: would this be considered “crazy” or “feisty”?

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 by Brendon J. Wilson

Atomic Shredder

I’ve been trying to think a lot about the Next Big Thing, the kind of technology that will usher in widespread change making lives better around the world. Yeah, I don’t like to think small. The technology that most people think will change the world, nanotechnology, is probably decades away; however, I’d like to propose a more important milestone we should strive for before we attempt to build physical products on an atomic scale.

In his classic lecture of December 1959, titled “There’s Plenty Of Room At The Bottom”, Richard Feynman proposed creating smaller manipulators which in turn would be used to build even smaller manipulators, eventually enabling atomic-scale manipulation . It’s a neat idea, but one that has yet to come to fruition. What I wonder is if what we really need is the capability to assemble on an atomic scale; it would seem a more practical goal to be able to disassemble materials, if not on an atomic scale, then at least a near-atomic scale.

In the case of nanotechnology, I wonder how we will be able to assemble solid materials at an atomic scale without having repulsive forces blow apart a work in progress before reaching a stable crystalline state. Historically, it’s always been easier to destroy that to create, so why not use that to our advantage? Given humanity’s appetite for throwing tons of away perfectly good resources into landfills every day, a far more useful technology would be some kind of atomic shredder. Such a device would be capable of breaking down large items, such as consumer electronics, into piles of relatively homogeneous and pure raw materials. Given the failure of recycling to reclaim significant amounts of resources due to the difficulty of easily separating constituent components, this would be a perfect solution.

If only we had such a technology we would be in the midst of a new resource Gold Rush, except this time the prospectors wouldn’t be looking for gold. They’d be looking for garbage.

in Technology 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Great White North

Ashley’s friend Catherine is visiting us for two weeks, so we decided to take a short three-day trip down to Seattle. I’d always thought of Seattle as a cousin to Vancouver, but most of the times I’d visited in the past I hadn’t stayed long enough to really get a feel for the city. This time, I got a better opportunity to really see the city.

One of the first things that always strikes me when I cross the border into the US is the immediate presence of African-Americans. What I can’t figure out: where are all the black people in Canada? Vancouver is less than three hours from Seattle, yet you’d be hard pressed to find any black people in the city. Did the trail of the Underground Railroad arrive at the US-Canada border and Harriet Tubman said “Right, far enough.”? It’s weird.

We visited the usual tourist traps: the Space Needle, the Museum of Flight, the original Starbucks store and the Pike Place Market. We skipped the Experience Music Project this time, mostly because it’s a trip unto itself.

If nothing more, I at least learned the secret of that episode of The Simpsons where Springfield gets a monorail: Matt Groening, the show’s creator, went to Evergreen State College in Olympia, just outside Seattle. The Seattle Monorail, a leftover from Seattle’s 1962 World’s Fair, runs from the Seattle Center to its terminus in downtown Seattle, a mere 1 mile away! Everybody sing:

I swear it’s Springfield’s only choice,
Throw up your hands, raise your voice!
Monorail!
Monorail!
MONORAIL!

Though at first glance Seattle appears to be similar to Vancouver, on closer inspection it seems like every large American city. Huge multi-lane highways feed into the center of town, yet there’s still horrendous traffic congestion at rush hour. The city empties out after 5 o’clock, with the possible exception of the malls in the downtown core. Not a lot of people seem to actually live near downtown.

Maybe Seattle isn’t Vancouver’s cousin. More like an uncle, twice removed.

in Personal 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

I. Am. Sore.

I went skiing at Cypress Mountain yesterday, the first time I’ve gone skiing in nearly ten years. And today, I am in a world of pain. Alright, “world” might be an exaggeration, but I’m at least in a small island, possibly a Pacific continent which I won’t name here, of pain. I don’t understand how ten years passed since last I went skiing. I guess with going to university and travelling, it got lost along the way.

I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed skiing. As a kid I joked about the almost pathological addiction of my father to skiing. He’d wake me up on Saturday winter mornings at an absurd hour, a gleeful grin on his face:

There’s fresh powder on the hills, let’s GO!

I think he enjoyed skiing just to spite me and get me out of bed early on the weekends. It was a 20-minute drive from our house to Kimberley Ski Resort, located in the sleepy town where my father worked at the local hospital. The fact that the hospital was only five minutes from the ski hill only fed his addiction, allowing a determined skier to hit the hill several times in the same work day: before work, at lunch, after work, and after dinner. And my father was a determined skier.

Mostly, I remember riding the chair lift with him, which he jokingly reminded me counted as “quality father-son time”. It was as if he were attempting to prod some omnipotent sky-bound referee to keep an accurate score.

I missed that yesterday.

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 by Brendon J. Wilson

An Easy Gift

Ashley‘s been going nuts trying to find something for me for Christmas. Part of the problem: I don’t really want anything. That’s not to say that there’s nothing I want in this world, just that most of the things I want are either unrealistic to ask someone to buy for Christmas, or can’t be bought in a store. My mother is the same way in recent years. This year, she gave me a gift request that most people would find pretty odd: take $40, give it to people in need on the street. And give it without judgment.

I set out Friday morning to honour my mother’s request. I dutifully stopped at the Scotiabank, took out two yuppie biscuits ($20 bills) from the ATM and then changed it into four $10 dollar bills. But where to give? Ironically, it was before noon, hence none of the street people who normally frequent Granville and Robson begging for change were around. I set off to find another gift for Ashley to kill some time.

On the bus up from English Bay, a man got on the bus and begged a ride off the bus driver. As he wove his way through the passengers in the bus, he asked each person for some change to help him buy a sandwich. I fingered one of $10 bills in my pocket, drew it out and handed it to the man. He looked a little surprised and thanked me for the money.

“Don’t thank me, thank my mom.” I said.
“Oh, okay. Where is she?” he said, looking past me to the seat behind me.
“Oh, she’s not here. It’s a Christmas thing.”

I walked off the bus at my stop, noticing a few strange looks from the other passengers on the bus.

It was afternoon by this point and a few more street people were visible panhandling in the Robson area. I had three people in mind to whom I wanted to distribute the remaining $30: Harmonica Guy, the Space Cellist, and Cat Girl.

Harmonica Guy is an old man who plays harmonica on the street, pausing every couple of bars to look up and say “hi” to people as they pass. Usually he hangs out on Granville near Pender. But he wasn’t there.

Next, I tried to find the Space Cellist. I knew finding him would be hit or miss; either he’d be at his spot at Granville and Robson or he wouldn’t. The Space Cellist has been a mainstay in Vancouver since I visited the city as a kid. Basically, the Space Cellist plays a stringed instrument consisting of two hubcaps sandwiching an acoustic guitar body, acting as a bridge for a set of strings hooked up to an electric amplifier through a weird guitar peddle. He tunes the strings by sliding bolts up and down the strings to get the space cello “in tune”, though however he defines that is anyone’s guess. He bows the strings and the result is something that belongs as a background for the next Pink Floyd album. But again, he wasn’t there.

I was losing hope of finding someone I recognized at this point and Cat Girl was my last chance. Cat Girl sits wrapped in a blanket with her cat on a corner of Robson opposite a store that sells only fridge magnets. Logic suggests the store should have closed a month before it even opened. By some cruel trick of the cosmos, it’s on that corner after three years. Just like Cat Girl. Except, of course, today.

In the end, I distributed the money to two random people on the street and a Salvation Army bell ringer in front of London Drugs.

In retrospect, despite the running around I did, it was still the easiest and cheapest gift to give. Maybe more people should ask for this for Christmas.

in Personal 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Rollercoaster to the Bottom

We went to RezRez‘s Christmas Party last night. It was awful. Drinks were $6.50 (hip flasks courtesy of Farshad were an easy solution to that problem). But that was only the beginning.

First up, Stan Sprenger, the company’s CEO. Imagine you were the CEO of a company, set to deliver a speech to the 300-plus employees and guests attending the corporate Christmas party. Would you consider the following anecdote appropriate?

I was at the mall today, and I saw a little blond girl get up on Santa’s knee.
“What do you want for Christmas?” Santa asked.
“I want Barbie and GI Joe!” the little girl proclaimed.
Santa looked confused at this request.
“I don’t understand. Doesn’t Barbie come with Ken?” Santa asked.
“No. Barbie comes with GI Joe. She only fakes it with Ken.”

Probably not. I don’t think I know a single self-respecting executive officer who would consider that an appropriate joke for a corporate Christmas function. But it didn’t stop there.

There were the little barbs volleyed by the Chief Operating Officer during her introduction of the CEO. Perhaps they were subtle enough that most people didn’t notice, but I detected the distinct edge of frost in the COO’s delivery of some carefully chosen jokes sent in the CEO’s direction.

About halfway through last night, everyone at the party transformed in my mind into Sims characters. I even saw the body language of those engaged in conversation match those of Sims characters, all exaggerated and overly animated. I felt very alone in that room. It’s not just that I didn’t know a lot of the people there or that I didn’t fit the age demographic of the company (newly graduated high school teens in the call center, mid-thirties burnouts everywhere else). The thing that really struck me was just how much I couldn’t relate to the people I was around.

I mean, yes, it’s a party. People are looking to have fun and be a little silly. But there was something else at work last night. I couldn’t actually imagine myself ever being like one of those people. They were so…unsophisticated. Low brow. Or for lack of a better word, stupid.

I’ve always thought that most people are as smart as I am, at least from the point of view of common sense. Maybe it wasn’t an explicit assumption, but I now realize it’s probably the reason people fail to meet my expectations a lot of the time. I know the people at the party weren’t stupid, just that they had a different set of priorities and values. But I can’t help wondering: why can’t I share those values? Why can’t I just let go, forget about trying to make a difference and just enjoy the rollercoaster ride to the bottom?

in Opinion / Personal 8 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

An Eventful Evening

It’s been a stressful couple of weeks, what with all the exams I’ve been writing lately, so I haven’t had much time to blog. That aside, I didn’t have many spare brain cells left to write with or any interesting events to report. And just when I thought I had nothing to write, I get assaulted on the way to the movies.

Ashley and I were going to see a movie up on Granville Street and were just crossing the intersection of Nelson and Richards when we saw a man strike a woman. At first, I thought it was a guy being a jerk to his girlfriend, but then he rushed at Ashley and me, striking me in the side of the head. No big damage, but it was a bit of a shock. He was yelling and obviously just looking for a fight. Ashley and I put a bit of distance between ourselves and him and went to help the woman.

At this point, I started thinking straight and asked Ashley to dial 911 on her cell phone. Of course, the one time we actually need a cell phone, she doesn’t have it. I watched as across the street the man proceeded to kick at a taxi and get into another scuffle with another man. I signaled to a woman in a car to dial 911 on her phone. She was in some kind of stupor and took forever to pull out her phone and start dialing. By that time, the man that had been involved in the scuffle had dialed 911. I approached him and used his phone to talk to the police.

We followed the man down into Yaletown, keeping our distance while giving the police directions and a description of the man. The police caught up with us near the Opus hotel and arrested the man (much to the chagrin of a classmate I ran into just as the police showed up).

As it turns out, the man had a mental condition of some kind.

What should have been an episode that would only make me further cynical about the human condition turned into quite the opposite when I met up with Ashley at a local Starbucks. As it turned out, the Starbucks manager had given her a free latte while she waited for me, which was a pretty decent thing to do. And it happened again when we went for dinner: we were a little zoned out so Ashley explained to our waitress what had happened. The manager came over and explained he’d had a similar experience in the restaurant a few nights ago. Then he gave us our drinks on the house!

Wow. Maybe people aren’t so bad after all. Only in Vancouver could I get assaulted and end up feeling better about humankind. How’s that for something to write about?

in Personal 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Harry Potter

Alright. I’m a big kid. I admit it. But guess which big kid got to go see the new Harry Potter movie? That’s right. This big kid! My friend John invited me to and Ashley to join him for the sneak preview, courtesy of Electronic Arts. Ohhhh yeah!

The second movie is a direct adaptation of the second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. It runs pretty long, but doesn’t disappoint. One major improvement of this installment over the first is the dramatic improvement in the quality of the computer graphics used in the movie. Unlike the first movie, which sported CG compositing that was only mildly better than the old ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ movies, this version has some really slick eye candy.

One thing that did surprise me: this installment has a lot more intense and in some cases, gruesome scenes. I hadn’t noticed this in the book, but apparently it’s Rowlings’ intention to build the level throughout the series until the seventh final book. By the seventh book, not all of the characters will still be alive.

Until then, I’ll just have to wait with bated breath for JK Rowling to hurry up and finish the fifth book.

in Entertainment 0 comments