Finally

The moment I've been dreaming about for a little while now has finally arrived. Six years and a few... ahem... thousand dollars later, I'm finally done with my MBA. My last exam went well last night and I'm not worried about the outcome. I have one workshop left, but it's not for credit, I just have to show up and learn about business and ethics, something I'm really interested in anyways.

After the exam, a few students gathered at Malone's, our typical after-class hangout to drink a few beers. The guys were gracious enough to let me sit there with a big grin on my face. I'm the only one in the part-time cohort who has finished, the others still have their applied project to do this spring/summer. I'm going to miss many of the students in my class, very, VERY smart people, true innovators, thinkers, people that I hope are going to keep in touch and remain friends. Cross your fingers for the two SFU teams competing at the Ivy Business Plan competition this weekend in London, Ontario. Both teams are from my cohort, did I mention they were very smart? Yeah, I'm going to miss these guys. I keep on saying guys because most of the MBA students in my class were guys. I guess that's understandable for a program focused on high-tech, it's quite representative of the demographics of the industry.

I've received many e-mails over the past 24 hours congratulating me on finishing the MBA. I suspect someone (dad!) sent out an e-mail to everyone in the family (and beyond) to let them know. It's been such a pleasure, like getting many little virtual hugs from back East.

I'm still grinning.

So close...

Last night of prep and studying, a 7 a.m. webinar for our customers on designing usable applications, if tomorrow is anything like today, 45 urgent e-mails waiting for me when I walk in, four meetings, and an exam that will end around 9:30 p.m.

My last exam.

Happy long weekend

Did you enjoy a long, leisurely morning in bed, catching up on some reading? I sure did, and it was wonderful. The week was long and busy, so this was my reward. I think I was also fighting off a nasty bug, so far so good, but it had a way to drain my energy. A few more good night's sleep and I'll feel as fresh as a daffodil.

I heard a cute joke while at Yuk Yuk on Wednesday night. I somehow had entered a draw for six free tickets and won, so I brought together a few friends and we sat in a booth while listening to local comedians test some material. It wasn't all good, actually, a lot of it was terrible, but some had their moments. Here's the joke: if they didn't want people to download free music off the Internet, then why did they give it such a cool name? Piracy! Who wouldn't want to be a pirate? "I'll have me some of these great U2 songs, yarr." Unfortunately, most of the jokes were in poor taste, obviously lots were about sex, drugs (this is Vancouver). And somehow, you can't be a stand-up comedian unless you say "fuck" every second word. It impoverishes the dialog in my opinion.

I attended a fantastic presentation last night, but I'm not going to write about it here. Instead, I'm going to point you to my latest endeavor: Sustainability in Vancouver. I haven't advertised it yet, but I intend on sending an e-mail soon to individuals I know are interested in sustainability.

The power of simple

I come from a family that always has one or two containers of homemade soup in the freezer. My dad makes soup throughout the winter: vegetable soup, chicken soup, usually a combination of leftovers and whatever vegetables are left in the fridge. Every Christmas, we enjoy a traditional Slovak sauerkraut and sausage soup, a recipe passed on from my great-grandmother to my grandfather, my aunt and this year, my brother. I find soup amazingly comforting and on a cold, windy and wet day like today, preparing a large pot of soup to enjoy for dinner is truly one of life's little pleasures.

I'm always surprised when I invite friends over for lunch or dinner and get so many compliments on the soup. It's so simple to prepare! I've become a fan of vegetable soup, but instead of leaving pieces whole, I puree the cooked vegetables with a hand mixer, which creates a thick, almost creamy soup. No need for salt, pepper, or cream, it's usually delicious as is. Tonight's soup was cauliflower, carrots, celery, half an onion and spinach. My trick is to cook the onion in butter first, to get that sweet taste. A few spoonfuls of powdered chicken broth also add to the taste (and probably explain why the final soup doesn't need salting). Don't ask me for quantities, I just took whatever in the fridge was beyond being consumed fresh ;)

Sustainability or PR exercise?

I'm glad I slept in a bit this morning. I've been off work for the last three days of the week, but I was spending lots of time at the Globe 2008 conference, where I was volunteering. Three days of conference, walking around, greeting delegates, answering questions tired me out. It's hard being pleasant eight hours a day ;)

There a few things I enjoyed about the conference: meeting other volunteers (many interested in sustainability), getting acquainted with clean tech companies in the Trade Fair, some of the panels where the discussion was made lively by involving the attendees or having a good representation of various stakeholders in the panel speakers. As far as networking was concerned, I think volunteering made it hard to have meaningful conversations with delegates, as we were always pulled away from our posts to help with various tasks.

There are several things I didn't particularly enjoy though: delegates who walked in and out of conference rooms throughout presentations (people walking in 45 minutes late), delegates not turning off their cell phones and letting it ring as they rushed out of the conference room (brilliant), and panels that were often one-sided and not really addressing the sensitive points of a given topic. I think the conference could have also benefited from networking rooms. They were serving coffee between sessions, but the coffee tables were in the corridors and there didn't seem to be enough sofas for people to sit down and catch up with other attendees. Finally, neither the Trade Fair nor the conference were very green, with lots of promotional material printed on glossy paper, lots of cheap, plastic swag, a delegate bag made out of nylon or soft plastic that had a terrible chemical smell and since the coffee breaks only started after the first session (no coffee before the morning session), delegates were forced to get coffee from Starbucks or Tim Hortons, usually in single-use paper cups.

I do think a lot of the presentations were also PR for the oil and gas industry in Canada. I cannot belittle the effort made by these companies towards reducing their environmental and social impact, but when their core operations are so damaging in the first place, the concept of sustainable business practices by these companies is hard to swallow. I recently rented a movie by the NFB called The Refugees of the Blue Planet. This documentary discusses the impact of "development" by large multinationals on rural communities across the world. Many of these refugees are in developing or third-world countries, but the film also talks about Alberta where family farms are slowly being shut down by the drilling of H2S (sour gas) wells close to their homes. Farmers end up in evacuation areas where they would be required to leave at a few hour's notice to avoid being exposed to toxic levels of the gas. I'm pretty sure all the major companies involved in the drilling have sustainability departments and publish detailed yearly reports about their environmental and community initiatives. Hard to swallow.

I heard from many delegates who were also unimpressed with many of the panels. Session attendees often tried to challenge panelists to answer some difficult questions, but the answers they got were often vague or blatantly avoided the questions. On a dialogue about the partnership between NGOs and companies, one attendee asked a panelist to provide examples where their relationship with NGOs went beyond philanthropy, where the company had listened to the NGO and then changed some of their business practices accordingly. The company representative had spent his entire speaking time listing contribution made by his employer to non-profit organizations, but could not give any examples of changed practices as the result of a partnership with one of these organizations. Interesting "partnership" indeed.

Memories

This afternoon, Sarah and I walked down memory lane and went skating at the Riley Ice Rink, close to Queen Elizabeth Park. We were originally going to ski at Whistler, but we both had so much to do over the weekend that we decided to stay in Vancouver. The memory of our attempt at getting back into skates when we were at Big White encouraged us to make it an outing this weekend.

It was a lot of fun and just as I remember skating at the arena in Outremont, back when I was a kid. I used to go quite often, usually on Sundays. You'd meet up with friends and skate in circles around the rink, usually while the radio was blaring over the poor sound system. They would clear the ice after an hour, rebuild it with the zamboni, then have everyone back on for a few more laps. This afternoon was nothing different. Sarah and I probably looked really funny when we took our first few strides, our legs wobbly and unsure. However, we both quickly remember how to skate and started picking up some speed, crossing feet while turning, and made some halfass attempts at breaking (didn't really work).

We skated for well over an hour, giggling like little girls, checking out some of the hockey boys who were warming up in the ice. Yeah, totally back in high-school. Good times.

This is the song I'm listening to: Second Chance, from Liam Finn

Shivers down your spine

What a great feeling. It's a sunny Saturday morning here in Vancouver, I slept wonderfully last night (I was going to write "like a baby", but do babies really sleep throughout the night? I hear they wake up all the time) and besides some work with my team at school tomorrow, I don't have much planned. A weekend to relax :-)

Just as I was about to leave work yesterday, around 5:30, I saw a very bright rainbow around BC Place when the sun poked through the dark skies to illuminate buildings downtown. The colors were amazingly sharp. A few of us just stared out the window until the colors disappeared. Beautiful.

Then, I stopped by the Green Living Show. I was going to go over the weekend, but when I learned that Stephen Lewis was the keynote speaker at 7, I knew I couldn't miss it. I remembered listening to his five-part Massey Lectures on CBC a few years back and he was an incredible speaker.

His talk last night did not disappoint. The room was full, probably well over 100 attendees who were attentively listening to Mr. Lewis discussing global warming and its impact on some of the poorest societies in the world. Stephen Lewis has traveled extensively in Africa, and continuously works to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS and the impact of the disease on the very fabric of society. What was really interesting about his speech was about the limited choices faced by the very poor on our planet. He brought us back to one of the early conferences on climate change where a minister from Indonesia stood in front of a group of Western leaders and told them that if they thought they could prevent developing countries from using dirty coal and other non-renewable energies without offering an affordable alternative, they were dreaming. Such a powerful statement. Western, developed countries are in no position to impose environmental guidelines on the rest of the world, especially when our governments refuse to set any aggressive targets for greenhouse gas reductions on their own soil.

I'm so glad I had the incredible opportunity to listen to Mr. Lewis. At times, his enthusiasm and powerful rhetoric sent shivers down my spine. I would love to be one of his students at McMaster University in Ontario to have the pleasure of listening to him every week.

The rest of the show was predictable as far as the exhibitors were concerned: organic and bamboo clothing, organic food, green building solutions, and hybrid cars. Interestingly enough, last night there were more people checking out folding bikes than hybrid cars. Are we potentially reaching a tipping point where people realize that cars, regular, hybrid or electrical, are not sustainable? Rex Weyler, a local Vancouverite and the co-founder of Greenpeace International, also spoke last night and he said that half the environmental damage of a car is done by the time the vehicle is sold, before one kilometer is even added to the odometer. Resources, building and assembly, transport, all these processes to get the car to the dealership and in the hands of the driver also have a big impact on the environment.