This is an exciting day for me. Today, we’re far enough along on the project for which I left Sun Microsystems and MySQL that we can at least announce that we exist. So today I’m proud to announce the existence of Empire Avenue Inc. You can head on over to our little introductory web page and see who all is involved. You can also add Empire Avenue to your Twitter and Facebook so that we can inform you when stuff is actually out there.

Okay, so that’s probably not that exciting for anyone else I suppose, after all, the key question on the mind of anyone reading this is quite likely, “sure you exist, but what the hell are you actually doing?”

Sorry, can’t tell you that just yet.

Not unless you are interested in us sending you a NDA and listening to us pitch to you for either money or a partnership

Here’s what I am going to reveal: We’ve managed to put together a really neat and incredibly talented team of individuals to take on the challenge of revolutionizing online advertising. We’re not just a bunch of technology geeks, but people with passion and a fair amount of experience over numerous technology, game and marketing fields.

Of course every entrepreneur thinks that they can change the world. I’m no different. But what I can definitely tell you after a month or more of working together with this team is that we are going to have a lot of fun challenging and disrupting the marketplace. Isn’t that what it’s all about?

So when are we going to reveal all?

The answer is something I learned from working at BioWare: When we are done; when we are happy with the quality of the product. Our goal is to launch something that is exciting, but polished, it would do no good to go into a beta when we’re not ready. Now for those that we approach in the near future about investment and/or partnerships, well they will hear all about it! We can’t wait to get this out into a beta for you. As you can probably tell I’m truly excited, not just for me, but for the entire team at Empire Avenue!

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook and we’ll reveal all to you as soon as we are able!

As today’s Tweetisode gets published it will bring to an end the 12 weeks of the Tweet Rhapsody. The Tweet Rhapsody takes six Twitter accounts and creates a 2000+ Tweet conversation which creates the Tweet Rhapsody story. The details of “what” it is, I have blogged about, but the how and why… well that’s another story.

The How

Technically the Rhapsody is very very simple. So simple in fact that the entire technology was finished in a matter of three days. The site, its design, the wonderful portraits purchased from an artist on iStockPhoto and the bots which post to Twitter. In short from conception to realization the Tweet Rhapsody came together mostly over a single weekend.

The process for posting each Tweetisode went thusly: Write the 25-40 Tweets place them in a spreadsheet which automatically checked for lengths. For each Tweet I entered the GMT time which I had to mentally calculate for its relevance to the story and to what it meant to Montreal, Canada and Colombo, Sri Lanka. I did discover that conducting a romance between those two countries is entirely possible with the time zones (just in case someone wants to try in real life).

Once the Tweets were done, all I had to do was import the CSV directly into the MySQL database and the programming would take care of the rest. This included showing it appropriately on the web site as well as a bot which would post to the Twitter stream of each individual character. Simple, sufficient and in the end worked very well.

The Why

It’s not every day someone wakes up and says “I’m going to write an Internet-based romance between Sri Lanka and Canada and I’m going to use Twitter as a medium”. I can guarantee that that is likely not a thought most people wake up with. I did.

The Tweet Rhapsody was written to accomplish several tasks. One was a technical test of a generic platform I had written in PHP and Zend Framework with MySQL as the database, this platform I hope to now finish and use for various other projects (and yes, eventually open source).

The second objective was to finish a literary experiment I had started several years before during the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) initially at the behest of my good friend Craig Welsh. This was a story written through blog posts similar to the “Briefroman” or Letter novels of the 18th-19th century. I never finished it and it is these characters which became the central pieces of the Tweet Rhapsody. In addition, the great thing about the Briefromane was that they did not ignore the fact that the letters were important to the story, quite the opposite in fact. I wanted to make Twitter not just the medium, but indeed, part of the story. In other words the story might happen in Twitter-space but could not have happened without the characters being aware of Twitter itself.

The third reason was that I wanted to have a running commentary on issues in both Sri Lanka and Canada and show the similarities of the two countries rather than the large obvious differences. I am of the Sinhalese majority by birth but I long for the day that all the peoples of that island nation are brought together in peace, no more than I wish for the eventuality where there is no discrimination between the English, French and Aboriginal Peoples of Canada. In Sri Lanka yet, the divisions are very deep and my hope is in the possibility of friendships of the type displayed by Raj and David in the Tweet Rhapsody.

The last reason is that I am a closet romantic and I kind of liked the idea or seeing whether this format could actually make people believe in six characters enough to follow them through to the bitter end.

You may or may not know that this week concludes my initial experiment into using Twitter, and indeed any online communication service to write a novella. I’ve been meaning to blog about all this for a while, but when I came up with the idea I was working for Sun Microsystems and within the same span of time (12 weeks) that the Tweet Rhapsody ran for, I have quit my job and gone on a three-week vacation. As you might imagine, my blogging kind of went out the proverbial window!

So what and why is the Tweet Rhapsody. First, I am not the first to use Twitter to write a story. Frankly do a Google search and you will discover that there are many Twitter novels. A lot of them come from Asia. Where I might be the first is how I used Twitter to tell the story. Instead of a single Twitter account spouting out 140-character lines from a story, the Tweet Rhapsody was six individuals on Twitter, their individual Tweets would make up the story.

Essentially the Tweet Rhapsody is a collection of Tweets which when read in a specific order bring up a an extended story over the 12 weeks. You could read it on the web site, or you could search for #tweetrhapsody on Twitter and follow the story. Either option worked.

There are many problems with this method of storytelling. First and foremost, the problem with writing a conversational story is that there is almost no background information presented to the reader. In fact the reader has to imagine and make up much of the background story from little snippets of conversation.

A second problem came from the fact that not only was it conversational, it had to be delivered in the Twitter format of 140 characters. Woah. The third problem was that I wanted this to be fast and quick, so I divided each week into a chapter and each chapter into “Tweetisodes” that last only a day. To add more misery to the writer (i.e. me) I also decided that there was to be no more than 40 Tweets and a minimum of 25 Tweets per Tweetisode. I had to hook and tell people a story with 25-40 lines per day from any of six characters told as a story.

This is not easy. I am very curious to know whether I succeeded.

I then added a further complication to the whole thing. I wanted the Tweet Rhapsody to be written as *fast* as humanly possible. To that end each Tweetisode was written at the most two weeks in advance and there was to be next to no editing. This was basically a write-once, post-immediate exercise. The only exception I made to this rule was that I chose one friend, two at the most, to see the Tweetisodes before they were posted.

So thank you very much Delphine and Meghan.

I had developed a skeletal story for the Tweet Rhapsody but I wanted the story to evolve in relative real time. When an event happened in either of the two countries that the story is set in (Canada or Sri Lanka) I made reference and even wove it into the main fabric of the story. Events such as Michael Jackson’s death could not be ignored. The idea was to make the Tweet Rhapsody as living a conversation as possible. The characters do not inhabit some fantasy land they needed to be part of our fabric of existence complete with weather and news.

This also meant one more restriction. While I knew the relative path of the story I could not write the story more than a week in advance at the later stages. This worked very well until I had to go on vacation to the wilds of Newfoundland and Labrador and discovered that finding an internet connection when required was not always as easy as it could have been.

I have now posted Tweetisodes from airports, train stations, hotels, bus stations, the lobby of restaurants, poaching free wireless from unlocked routers and a whole host of friends houses, cafe’s and what not.

So the end result? 37,000 words over 12 weeks broken into 12 chapters with well over 2,000 tweets.

On Friday September 11, the initial story comes to an end.

I’ve spent the last day letting the results of the United States Presidential Election settle. For full disclosure, if you haven’t yet noticed, I’m a proud Canadian and I live in Montreal, Quebec. Why then has this election meant as much to me as it seems to have meant to those who it directly affects and who voted?

As I was coming home from my friend’s house last night after Barack Obama had given his acceptance speech and the pundits were poring over every last detail, I noticed that the bars on “The Main” in Montreal were spilling out with people. This was a Tuesday night after all and the Montreal Canadiens weren’t playing, which meant that most of these people had gathered together to watch these elections. No doubt, they too have been moved.

My friend the Towniebastard was glad the American people “didn’t fuck it up”.

To be honest though, we don’t know how Barack Obama will do as the leader of the world’s most powerful nation. So, in a year we may all be sitting around asking the question, “how did he screw up?”. I’m hoping that won’t be the case at all.

I’m not quite sure I understand my own feelings, but the election of Obama means more to me than just what he might do. It is much more about what he has already done and I think that makes me giddy with joy. These elections have been one of the most watched, televised, reported upon, vilified and generally media-filled in the history of mankind. More people around the world have probably heard of this election than any other since apes started walking on hind legs.  This is thanks to never before avenues of communication available to us from the Internet to mobile telephones.

This election may belong to the United States, but they were about us as a civilization. Here was a candidate who walked and talked the language of inclusion. Here was a candidate who was a different colour to the majority, whose race had been subjugated and had to fight hard for all the rights they achieved.

I am a coloured minority in my nation, I understand what it feels like to wonder the question, “if I were fit to lead would people see beyond what I am and see who I am?”.

But even more than that, it is the idea that at this juncture of the western civilization, we are talking about inclusion, we are talking about doing better, we are talking about what it means to be human, what it means to be part of this civilization and what it means to be part of this world. Instead of fighting about what we cannot do, this election was about what we could do, what a nation can become.

The idea of America is great. Its founding fathers were indeed inspired in the constitution. Great nations lead us to a greatness in humanity beyond the borders of those lands. Like in ancient times when great learning spread far and wide from single nations of learning. I wish for all nations to do great things. I wish for all peoples, even us here in Quebec who are about to go into mudslinging between Anglophones and Francophones to start thinking about what they could do together; to see beyond the differences rather than always accentuating the differences.

If a black man whose people were brought to a country as slaves could rise to be the leader of that country, then why must we bicker about small differences in what we eat, how we say things and where our parents came from? Instead we need to see what we can do, what great things we, the current caretakers for this beautiful world, can achieve together.

I hope that as Quebec goes to the polls in December that we look beyond how we can do things separately, and more towards how we can build a society together, how we can achieve greatness in our times and solve the crises that affect all of us. Let us learn from our southern neighbours and what they have achieved there. Let us practice the language of inclusion, opportunity and fraternity.

I’ve lived all over this great country now and as Obama has repeatedly said about the United States, we are not all that different. In fact the similarities far outweigh the differences.

Okay, I know I’m rabidly anti-Air Canada. I admit it. I no longer fly with them if I have to spend a dime of my own money; points and work money are excluded. The only other reason to fly AC would be because there is no road, timely rail or the ability to parachute into a community or be sent by way of a giant human cannon.

So Air Canada now announces today that starting in May they will charge $25 for you to have an extra bag in the luggage compartment. So, fine, other airlines have done it and Air Canada wants to be the “me too!” airline when it comes to finding role-models who stiff their customers. But that leads me to the question, what is it that I actually pay for when I pay a fare to fly with Air Canada? Let’s see…

• Cost of carrying my luggage, well I guess from now on if you say an extra bag is $25 then my other bag must be the $25 cost hidden in the ticket price.
• Cost of peanuts and a soft drink. That must run Air Canada about $10 at the very most.
• Cost of carrying my pet. Oh wait Air Canada doesn’t allow that anymore.
• Cost of the Airport Tax… no that’s always added as a service charge.
• Cost of the meals… right, they charge for that extra in economy.
• Cost of them to help me out when winter weather screws up my travel plans… right they now want you to pay an “insurance” fee to get good customer service.
• Cost of manning call centres for lost baggage (and they sure have a lot)… oh right they route your calls to India for cents an hour…
• Cost of the fuel you say? Then why do we pay extra fuel surcharges?
• Cost of the NavCanada? No that’s also a surcharge.

So tell me where do all my hundreds of dollars go? Bad customer service and annoying stewards and stewardesses? Look, I would understand if I received friendly and helpful service and maybe even a nice airline to boot. The entertainment system crashes, the people are unfriendly, the seats are cramped, food you have to buy… Maybe Air Canada needs to find the proper way to be “competitive”, like maybe making me want to fly with them again.

So, I am basically paying let’s say $400 (minus taxes etc) to board a vehicle, be prodded by security, wait in umpteen lines, have Air Canada people be rude to me, buy my own food, sit cramped for hours and then let out at my destination and have my baggage lost? Great. I love air travel with Air Canada.

This is the question being voiced by many of my Albertan friends this week after the most recent Alberta elections which saw the provincial Conservatives return to power. The Tory party has ruled Alberta consistently since 1971. This time the party under new leader Ed Stelmach gained 72 of 83 seats in the legislature.

All this was after so many pundits, so much media hype, so many people claimed it was time for Alberta to have change. What happened to all the change?

One friend messaged me afterwards and said how is it that after winning 52.7% of the popular vote, Albertans were left being represented by 87% Tory representatives? How representative is that for the province?

Is it a democratic government when most of the people are not proportionally represented?

If you had a group of ten people and you asked them what they should do, would you consider it valid if only four people decided for the group? That would leave the majority of the group silent. In Alberta’s case, it is potentially a case of the silent majority. In these elections a scant 40% bothered to vote.

Why then are the majority of Albertans so reluctant to vote? And why after all this asking for change, vote for the party offering the least dynamic options for change?

I have a few theories, some of which I’m surmising through my 6 years in that province.

1. A lot of Albertans are not from Alberta. They have no allegiance to Alberta nor do they see participating in Albertan politics to be their right or want. Many have come to Alberta to seek their fortune in this modern oil rush. Many will return back to their provinces.
2. The better off tend to be silent and want the status quo. There are a lot of Albertans who have done quite well over these last years, they do not want change and that really is what “Conservative” means. As you amass wealth and property, owners of such do not want any dramatic change which will place danger upon their income. It’s case of tuning out instead of tuning in. Even the message of “change” probably shut down many thought processes.
3. The people of Alberta are generally “happy”. By “happy” I mean that the majority of people are probably fed, have clothing, make a decent living etc. In any society, control can be gained by means of making that society happy. Even Hitler talked about giving people “Arbeit und Brot” or “Work and Bread” and with that he claimed no one would oppose the government. (I am in no way claiming the Alberta Tories are Nazis). Revolutions only happen in societies where the majority of the people are unhappy.
4. Another friend espoused the idea that oil economies breed totalitarianism. If you look around the world you will see that most oil economies have a tendency to move to a unitary party state. I do not know why. In Canada, the same has happened in Newfoundland and Labrador with Danny Williams’ Tories.

As to the question of whether this is democracy, the answer depends on whether you believe that democracy is the idea of power being in the hands of people or the power being in the hands of rule by representatives of the majority of people.

In this case Alberta is ruled by its people and the people that have been asked by the voters. The reality is that the majority did not vote. How democratic that is I’m not entirely sure, it depends on whether that majority would have voted differently.

There is a real danger for the Alberta Conservatives. If they get wrapped up in the notion that the majority voted for them, they could place into play lots of policies which will alienate them from the majority that did not vote. Remember an unhappy society wants revolution, a happy society wants evolution and status quo. Steady Eddie better do by right by the majority that fell silent this past Monday.

I’ve been living in Quebec well over six months now. Something you would never guess considering the dearth of photos from Quebec and Montreal on this site. As everyone knows my camera goes with me on every trip and rarely do I not take a photograph of something. Over the last six months, I haven’t stopped taking photographs but I have been quite lazy in putting them up. Here then are the photos from our September long weekend camping trip to Tadoussac, Quebec.

We went to kayak, frolic among whales, sing campfire songs and eat good campfire food. Along the way we managed to not get blown away by a savage storm, sing impromptu songs for people at a local café, wait for ferries, drive crazily and tell many stories. In other words, a fantastic camping trip.

Maybe I’m being a bit too sensitive, maybe it’s because I read an entire news article, maybe it’s because I’m in a contrary mind. Today there is an article on cbc.ca which has General Rick Hillier, Canada’s Chief of Defense Staff (Canada’s top military man) saying that hey there’s no way to avoid combat if Canadian troops are stationed in Kandahar. The story is not that special really. But I read through to the bottom and the phrasing struck me weirdly. I quote the last few paragraphs:

He also dismissed reports of an angry phone conversation with the prime minister over the government’s handling of the Afghan detainee issue, saying his relationship with Harper was “solid and good.”

The general said he heard about the reports when he was on vacation in the Dominican Republic with his wife.

“I was on my third rum and Coke and I really didn’t give a damn,” he said with a chuckle.

The Newfoundland-born Hillier said he can accept whatever decision the federal government ultimately makes, as long as it honours the sacrifices made by the Canadians killed in Afghanistan.

I’ve taken the liberty to highlight the phrase in question. I find it interesting that in a lot of articles where Hillier is giving a statement or it’s about the military or his relationship with Stephen Harper, the journalists always point out his origins in Newfoundland. Now, I don’t really mind, heck I would prefer to be known as “adopted Newfoundland and Labradorian Dups” and I think it’s fantastic that a Newfoundlander is atop the military, but why bring it up in this article? In fact I’ve heard this exact same phrase from most media outlets in referring to General Hillier.

So as a proud adopted son of Newfoundland (and I’m making a point as that phrase is also not important), I ask, why is that fact so important? In the article it doesn’t say Ontario-born Harper? Is it so weird to have a Newfoundlander atop the military? In fact I’m not sure I’ve seen such a comment about the birthplace of other Canadian national officials in such articles. Is it common for all Chief of Defense Staff’s of Canada to be so addressed? Maybe we should start putting in more details in all the articles.

“Ontario-born Harper was talking to Newfoundland-born Hillier about the England-born Her Royal Highness the Queen…”

Again, maybe I’m just being a bit picky and sensitive today. It just seemed like such an odd thing to just drop into an article, especially when there is a biography link available from CBC itself if one were so curious.

So I’ve been living in Canada for 15 years. I’ve travelled from one coast to another. I’ve gone to the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, climbed the Rockies, slept under pub tables in Newfoundland, kayaked on both coasts. Today was the first day I was beyond the security posts at Pearson International… meaning I can finally say, I’ve been to Toronto!

It’s odd, you hear so much negative stuff about Toronto when you live elsewhere in Canada that you  expect to find a land seething with devils, hot pits of lava and work gangs headed by Beelzebub. I was expecting to be hounded by Bush supporters, Canadian capitalism gone awry, signs in nothing but English and an avowed hatred of French, and a huge pipe sucking up the oil reserves of the west to pay for infrastructure of the east. I think there’s even a movie about how Canada loves to hate Toronto.

I’m glad to report that there are no work gangs, I was not shouted at, I was not told to leave for being from Newfoundland, living in Quebec nor for having just left oil-rich Edmonton. Union Station is right downtown and around the corner from the CN Tower. And today, having left my luggage at the Via Rail luggage counter, I explored just a tiny bit of our behemoth city. Oh yes, and I took the elevator to the top of the CN Tower.

Toronto, is, sad to say, like every other city in Canada, just bigger. If I can make even claim to make an impression by walking around for a couple of hours and seeing three streets, it’s just that, downtown Toronto is Canada. The streets are clean, the buildings well-kept, the staff polite. Truly Canadian. If I can even claim to say it made a first impression, then that impression is that where Montreal immediately screams life, change, irrelevance (and a certain crumbling nature of its infrastructure), Toronto screams order and cleanliness. I saw more security guards today than anywhere in a three block radius!

Well, I can no longer claim to be a Toronto virgin. Now on to Pearson and further to Dubai, the land which is building the successor to the CN Tower.

Canada’s Parliament named the democratically elected leader of Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi an honourary Canadian today. She has been under houser arrest for the majority of the past two decades. Let me say that I am very proud to have you as a Canadian and hope that some day we can share something truly Canadian when you visit us as part of a free Burma. Congrats to Parliament for recognizing the plight of the Burmese people in such a high profile manner.