Want to connect to University of Alberta Wireless?

Wondering why the UWS website tells you how to connect an iPhone but not a Blackberry?

OK, I can’t tell you why UWS is interested in supporting iPhones and not Blackberries but I can tell you how to connect. It’s straightforward and can be done in less than 30 seconds using your CCID and password if you know which settings to select.

1. Go to Set Up Wi-Fi Network. (Click on header with clock » Under Set Up, Services and Options)
2. If your Wi-Fi connection was off, you’ll be prompted to “Turn on Wi-Fi to perform a scan”.
3. The BlackBerry will scan to search out available Wi-Fi connections. Generally on campus there are always three and there may be more:
   • UWS (WPA2 Enterprise)
   • Eduroam (WPA2 Enterprise)
   • HowToConnectToWireless (Open)

   The one you want is UWS (just like doing this on your laptop)

4. Click on it and it will bring up a form on Wi-Fi Security where you need to input some of your info.
   • Enterprise Sub-Type: » PEAP
   • Username: » [your CCID username]
   • Password: » [your CCID password]
   • Username: » [your CCID username]
   • CA Certificate: » Thawte Premium Server CA
   • Inner Link Security: » [Auto]
   • Token: » [none selected]
   • Disable Server Certificate Validation: » [leave this unchecked]

   Click Connect

5. The Blackberry should tell you that your manual connection was successful.
6. I’m on a 9XXX series Blackberry so the default setting is to use Wi-Fi instead of 3G (and hence not have to pay the service provider for data) when Wi-Fi is accessible. If you’re on a different Blackberry this is something you might want to look into. It’s a simple change in your browser’s settings that will look something like this.
   • Settings » Options » Advanced Options » Browser » Change “Default browser configuration:” to “Hotspot Browser”
   • Or
   • Open your Browser Menu » Options » Browser Configuration » Change “Browser:” to “Wi-Fi”.

I guess all that’s clear is that the colour changes, which is indication that I at least did something right. The quantitative measurement of the optical properties however yields better indication that a bandgap exists, rather than just basing speculation on the presence of some shimmery looking stuff. A bandgap appears as a “bump” in a reflection spectrum and a “dip” in a transmission spectrum. The reflectance spectrum is shown here:

The nanostructure of the photonic crystal is created by seeding a surface with nucleation points and then depositing a structured thin film based on a 3D lattice structure which has a B-Zone that creates a complete bandgap. An example of how the seeding works is shown at left and then two images of a structured photonic crystal thin film are shown at right. (click the images to see them larger)

While Lovato doesn’t explicitly state he’s trying to create certain hormonal condition for racing in addition to getting the fueling right I think the plan he gives does just that. I’ve been thinking about tricking your body’s insulin response quite a bit recently and some of the related things that go with hormones during both exercise and recovery. Joe Friel had an excellent article on his website today about RER & fuel sources during exercise. In it he provides a reference to a study I’d recently read the abstract of about pre-exercise fuel. I still can’t get the full text of it and the abstract doesn’t allude to the answer but I believe the authors likely would assume the source of the variation seen has something to do with the insulin response caused by the glucose versus the fructose. Also worth linking for the interested reader is an article about exercising under depleted carbohydrate conditions (this is a valid way to train your body to run at a lower RER despite what people may think) and another article establishing that consuming carbohydrates during exercise raises RER. Us as athletes can’t somehow select an RER during exercise, our body decides upon it based on our exertion… but because the relationship between RERs and exertion do sometimes change, it’s something that we probably can modify if we want to, in theory it can be trained.

An aside for the real geeks: The electrical engineer slash physicist in me wants to learn the dirac-response to all of the different things I could put in my body as though I function as a neatly organized linear system. Then I could make a “Nutritional Born Approximation” of my body and the protocol I’m following and have a pretty good idea of what’s going on with the macronutrient levels in my blood/liver/muscles during exercise. Clearly it doesn’t work like that and I think a lot of people then dismiss the question as “the body is more complicated than you think”. I agree, the body is more complicated than I’d like it to be in this regard but I refuse to believe that it is too complicated for me to study and learn. How do we learn to make any improvements to sports nutrition at all? I am far exceeding progress compared to where I could be based purely on trial and error so obviously some of the system is at least quasi understandable. The obvious question to ask then is what makes the system nonlinear. That’s the starting point to make a guess at how to best approximate a nonlinear system and as best as I can tell the answer is hormone levels. Insulin is the obvious one as well as the ones involves in regulating free fatty acids, and the more I reflect on the past couple seasons epinephrine has likely got to have something to do with substrate consumption. Paul Tichelaar mentioned while we were riding together at one point this summer that he thinks very very few coaches really understand hormones and that getting a grip on that would really help us out as athletes. I thought a bit about it at the time but I couldn’t see the course of action to learn to be better about it, now I’m starting to see it and I’d like to pursue it. If only I had more time.

Now that I’ve written a half page of ramble I’ll finally get to the point I was going to try and make. I had a great nutrition plan at Ironman. I practiced during training with it and I executed it very precisely on race day. Energy levels and gastric distress did not play a role whatsoever in my race which is exactly the role that you’d like them to play. So if you didn’t get the clue already I’d recommend reading Michael Lovato’s nutrition plan and if you’re so inclined feel free to continue reading and have a look at mine.

• Friday is the day of my last workout (Sunday = Raceday). Total duration set to be close to my previously established duration of glycogen supply when my body is operating at Ironman pace. For me this is 1 hour 40 minutes and I did about the equivalent of a sprint triathlon with a 50% too-long bike leg. The workout is long enough that I’m going to generally drain out my muscles but I’m not going to drain then dry. Immediately following this workout I hit myself hard with good recovery food. Approximately 3:1 carbs:protein. Consume a whole protein source. I ate fruit, rice, sausage and nuts. I ate until I was full… and then ate a big lunch 30 minutes later. This marked the end of excessive eating. I needed to make sure the body would be reloaded but not stuffed.
• Night before – Ate a bunch of stuff that I enjoy eating, not trying to stuff myself. I ate a bunch of Quinoa and half a pork tenderloin. If I wasn’t sharing with Dad I would have probably eaten the whole pork tenderloin though!
• Breakfast – 4 fried eggs, 4 small pieces of bread, some olive oil on top to make things slimey, and a full tub of yogurt. I also had a few pieces of cheese as well as a banana and a kiwi fruit. Emphasis is on not being hungry and lasting from 4:30am when I ate the meal until 8am when I would be on my bike and beginning to eat in earnest once again. There’s no big sources of fiber here, and there’s a relatively high fat and protein content in this meal compared to what is often recommended for pre-exercise. Carbohydrates are there but the emphasis is on stuff that has low to medium glycemic load, I guess the fruit doesn’t really fit the bill. The idea is to get the digestive system running, and running above a minimal idle, not just to put the key into the ignition. Minimal insulin response to this meal and in that sense similar to Lovato.
• Race Morning – brought water along but didn’t drink more than 500 mls. Banana at 30 minutes until the start. This will be hitting my bloodstream and leaving the stomach as the race begins. Note Lovato’s tip: don’t go into that long swim with a slightly dipping blood sugar. I wouldn’t go into any swim with a dipping blood sugar and that’s often the reason I’m the guy standing on the pool deck at triathlon club workouts while we wait for the group ahead of us to finish and I’m munching on something. Low blood sugar is a recipe for poor focus and low motivation and personally that’s a recipe for disaster during a swim.
• During the bike – Targetting 2500 calories in the first 4.5 hours on the bike leaving me a full half hour for the descent off of Richter without any pressure to keep consuming. It is un-aero and inefficient to eat when you could be doing more than 60 kph. I also want to give my stomach a chance to empty out so I hit the run with my body loaded up with energy and fuel but without a brimming stomach.
  
  With me:
  • 2×24oz bottles of Gatorade = 350 calories
  • 2 tube shot bloks = 400 calories, (one before Richter, one before yellow lake)
  • 4 gels 4×110 = 440 calories
  • 4 clif bars = 960 calories

  Need to get en-route:

  • 5 bananas = 600 calories (try at every aid station if there’s time, there isn’t always if I’m trying to get two bottles)
  • 2 bottles of Gatorade = 350 calories
  • Drink Water the rest of the way. (Leave every aid station with more than half a bottle of water)

  Add up all the calories except for the gels and throw away 4x(1/4) full bottles of gatorade and you wind up at 2500 calories.

  The plan was not to eat any of the gels unless I felt like I needed to get more simple sugar flowing into my body in which case they could replace a clif bar or bananas if I couldn’t get them from the aid stations. I preferred to stick to a slightly more complex carbohydrate than powergel. Admittedly I could just choose to eat hammer-gels or carbo-pro or mix up a stiff bottle of perpetuem or something like that and achieve the same ratios and style of calories but I want to be able to happily get through this race without feeling hungry which I discovered can happen if I’m fully fueled but I’ve not been eating much real food. The end result is that I wanted to chew on something to tell the body I was eating and selected to eat clif-bars. They taste good, they chew a lot prettier than a powerbar, and they are at a pretty optimal level of carbohydrate complexity for the intensity I planned to race at. They’re not as low in fiber as all the other options I mentioned earlier but they’re not “high” like any oat based granola bar. That said, I am drinking gatorade as my primary source of electrolytes on the bike and am getting some pretty simple sugar from there as well as from the 2 tubes of shot bloks which I consumed at the base of each climb, with the intention of riding at a higher exertion on the climbs than on the flats and making sure that I was only asking my digestive system to to relatively easier work while I was asking my legs and lungs to be doing relatively harder work.

• Can of coke in bike special needs… only plan to stop for it if I’m having a rough time, otherwise I want to conserve the caffeine boost until the run.
• On my aerobars I had a list of landmarks and relative locations of aid stations as well as a guide to how many calories I needed to put in by certain landmarks to stay on track nutrition-wise. I also noted where I would be when each hour of the ride rolled over to the next if I was keeping pace for a 5 hour 5 minute bike split.
• Leaving T2 – I had a disposable bottle filled with two cans of cola and extra electrolytes added (3xEload caps) which had been frozen overnight and wrapped in tin foil to keep it slushy/frozen in my T2 bag until I arrived. I took this in my hand as I left and used it as a reason to help me do the first mile slow enough otherwise I would likely totally overdo it. It also got the caffeine flowing in my system which is just what I wanted as I find it gives me a good boost. I had a second bottle of the magic mix stashed in the special needs bag along with all sorts of random crap thinking that I wanted to cover all the bases of what I might be craving. I wasn’t craving much when I got there so I didn’t take much other than a fruit leather (50 cals). A special note for people doing Ironman Canada, you should have something to drink in there as there is no aid station at special needs but the stations are spaced out along the way as though you are due for one when you get there.
• Aid Stations – Gels at every third aid station with water (8 gels). Drink coke/gatorade at each of the other aid stations when possible. Don’t drink more than 500ml at any one aid station as it will make my stomach slosh. Always try to have one gel in my pocket. Stash ice into top at each aid station. Once through the aid station redistribute the ice how I’d like, into arm coolers and neck. Never leave without arm-coolers being wet. The game plan was to switch to water instead of coke and gatorade if I’m feeling like my belly is full. In the final 10 mile I was full up on energy and dealing with cramping in my legs as I ran. By this point I was largely just going through the motions and taking tiny sips at the aid stations rather than drinking anything of substance or consuming much fuel. The game had changed by that point, I had no doubt about my ability to finish strong energy-wise and by the time I hit the south end of town I was in good enough shape mentally and nutritionally to lax up the plan fuel wise and put the focus on the main task which was pain management with the cramps and just keeping on trucking. I took no gels during the last 10 kms and stuck with the coke/gatorade instead.

Post race I ate some pizza but not a lot. Drank some of this and that but didn’t really do that good of a job loading up my body with all sorts of good food. I was hungry but didn’t have much appetite to actually do the eating as I’d spent the whole day eating. Oh well, I ate some chips, drank my first beer in four months, and went to bed. Nothing fancy.

On a related note I wanted to mention that I am really happy to have a guy like Chris McCormack as world champion in our sport. I’ve had differing opinions of the guy over the course of the past few years with lots of the different spins that the media tries to put on this guy. Over the past season though I’ve paid better attention to what he’s doing and what media he’s putting out and how he’s contributing to triathlon. I’ll admit the swaying of opinion could be swayed a bit by the fact that I’m now consuming more “Chris McCormack sanctioned” media and him and his sponsors have had the opportunity to polish it up a bit, take the edge off the sharp bits that might stab you, and at the same time highlight the highlights. Sure, that might have something to do with it but we can also look at the facts.

Chris probably partied hard and reveled in his win as he alluded to in his victory speech… but a week later he was in California spending a week on a big bike tour with the CAF. Where’s Mirinda Carfrae following her victory on the womens’ side? partying in Vegas. I’ll make no illusion that I wanted Macca to beat Chris Lieto, the guy I’m totally rooting for to win Kona before he retires, or even Craig Alexander who is a consummate professional and great role model in his own right, but really I am mighty mighty happy to have Macca take the crown.

My paper was published in Applied Physics Letters on August 2, 2010.

Reflectivity of a photonic crystal device fabricated by glancing angle deposition may be reversibly
altered by infiltration with an absorbing dye solution. An electric field controls the dye ion motion
through the photonic crystal. Rapid reflectance changes up to 0.4 in the crystal’s optical band gap
are demonstrated. The time evolution of the dye movement process is examined and its operation
described. This work may have applications for a passive optical display. © 2010 American Institute
of Physics. doi:10.1063/1.3473827

The figures follow:

FIG. 1. (a) Bragg stack photonic crystal microstructure fabricated using GLAD. (b) Schematic representation of assembled cell, not to scale. Reflectance is measured from the top surface.

FIG. 2. (a) Reflectance ranges achieved when driving the cell with 800 mV. Negative polarity yields a reflectance minimum, whereas positive polarity drives dye out of the crystal for a reflectance maximum. (b) Maximal reflectance variation (λ = 715 nm) driven at three voltages. Same reflectance scale as left.

FIG. 3. (a) A reflectance time response of the cell at 715 nm when addressed with a driving voltage of 1000 mV. (b) The calculated characteristic time constants of the optical response. Driving voltages of 600 mV, 800 mV, and 1000 mV are shown in light, medium, and dark gray, respectively. Gray borders indicate wavelengths where rise or fall behavior resembled a clipped exponential.

If you’re interested in a copy of the .pdf of this paper and cannot download it from the internet you’re welcome to contact me and I will pass it along via email.

If you are in San Francisco, and attending the conference, and have found this page, I’d like to invite you to attend my talk on Thursday at 11:20 in room 234 (Mezzanine). My talk is entitled “Photonic Crystal Switching by the electrophoretic movement of dye ions” and is part of the session on “Novel effects and Applications in Photonic Crystal Structures” within the “Photonic and Phononic Crystal Materials and Devices IX“. Relevant information is on pages 238-240 of the Technical Program.

Now that I’ve located all this spatially, temporally, and categorically I’d probably be wise to briefly outline the paper:

ABSTRACT: Glancing angle deposition (GLAD) facilitates the fabrication of nanostructured thin films with varying density, using a motion control algorithm governing substrate movements during film growth, which engineerings the film structure. Film architectures for specific optical applications including photonic crystals are easily produced with GLAD. A challenge in the photonic crystal field has been the realization of in-situ control of optical characteristics. We have demonstrated partial control of stopband optical characteristics using an electric field in a GLAD 1D photonic crystal by the electrophoretic movement of absorbing dye ions.

Authors: Joshua D. Krabbe, Univ. of Alberta (Canada); Michael J. Brett, Univ. of Alberta (Canada) and National Institute for Nanotechnology (Canada)

With a bit more elaboration:

The basic premise of this work is that the movement of absorbing dye ions into and out of a porous photonic crystal yields a means by which the optical properties of the stopband of the photonic crystal may be modified. The device structure (shown below) is probed for reflectance optical properties from the top surface within the operating region (delimited by dashed lines). The photonic crystal is deposited on a transparent conducting oxide film and when the sandwich structure is completed with an identical counter electrode the device becomes electrically addressable. A dissociating dye (Methylene Blue) is used and when a positive voltage (top with respect to bottom) is applied the cations of the dye (absorbing species) are driven out of the photonic crystal. Reversal of the voltage attracts these cations and absorbing dye species accumulate in the photonic crystal.

Note: this image is (very!) not to scale.

As you likely have already anticipated, the presence of absorbing species within the photonic crystal has an inhibiting effect on the reflectance. Changing the dye concentration affects the probability of photon-dye interaction. The response of reflectance properties with addressing voltage, and an examination of the time response of optical properties to electrical switching of the device will be presented; along with an elaboration of the GLAD technique used to fabricate the porous photonic crystal that forms the basis of the device.

If you can’t attend, the proceedings will be published in 2-4 weeks.

I started writing this bit earlier last week but had to postpone posting it until I could flesh out a few paragraphs after a fantastic ski trip. So it’s not in time for the 2010 list making that happened last week, but I don’t think that really matters. Readers who were going to read it will likely read it anyways, that’s what readers do – by definition.

1. We’re greedy, selfish, love prejudice and are still somewhat racist – perhaps that’s not the most politically correct means by which to kick off a review of the decade, but the specifics making me note this fall chronologically near the beginning of the 200Xs for myself. Spending a year away from Canada in 2000-2001 highlighted the fact that typically we like ourselves a lot and we don’t like other people all that much. My own experience was probably magnified by being in my early teens at the time, the age that’s arguably got the meanest peers of any age for everyone. My own situation as the foreign kid made that all the trickier. I was the only boy in the grade with long hair I was the only one with an accent. I was one of a few from the village three towns down the road from school. I was too tall. I was damn good at maths. I had the wrong shoes for with the school uniform. I didn’t get the right food packed in my lunch (Mom fixed that one quickly though). I fit no molds and while the prejudices I experienced were rather tame compared with the ethnic cleansing experienced by many people groups around the globe they were certainly noticeable to a wee little GCSE student.
   Oh well, back to Canada in the summer of 2001 I’d escape being the subject of these prejudices, and that should hopefully reduce the amount of tension I felt surrounding this issue. But boom, September 2001 rolls around. Maybe I’m more aware now, or just older, or it’s more extreme than it has been before, but there’s racist commentary all over the place. Everyone Arab is suddenly a terrorist. How did that work? Maybe I needed to have experienced prejudices from the being-dealt end before I had reason to feel uncomfortable finding myself at the dealing-out end. Not a lot has changed by the end of the decade, nearly every media outlet I’m influenced was spewing reports about the climate change summit in Copenhagen. None of it made me happy. There’s an entire global community trying to sit around a pie, and debating how to slice up that pie, and every single nation at the table needs to have an above average slice. All the big polluters want some version of a cap and trade system, yet no system based on cap and trade knows how to distribute the quota. From what I understand, the quota distribution system has basically been proven by economists to not work in the long run. Unfortunately that’s the system the big players are pushing for because they know that if they can weasel their way into an unfair share of the global quota for emissions then while the whole world has to tighten their belts they will have to tighten their belts the least. Alberta will profit from this, I know it, and it makes me sick.
   Intentionally trying to deny developing nations an equal shot at using the planet’s resources is just as self-serving as a game called: “Make a flamethrower out of an aerosol deodorant can and try to light the Canadian kid’s hair of fire in the locker room at school.” Maybe it’s because once we’re grown up we find bigger and more complicated words to use to mean the same thing as ‘bullying’.
2. It was this decade that I made a realization world conflict was current. I distinctly remember watching the BBC news in the living room at our home on School Lane, Staveley Cumbria UK. There was footage from what I only remember was some Serbian conflict in Macedonia sometime in the spring of 2001. There was house to house and street to street armed conflict being shown between people who looked too much like me. I remember being somewhat shocked, sure there were wars going on, but from what I understood, Canada, America and Europe had their shit together we were too intelligent, too highly developed, and too “good” (whatever that means) to rely on anything but diplomacy to set things straight in the world. Canada’s army was for sending on peacekeeping missions with the UN, and that was something that should be highly respected. We were so well advanced in my mind, and we should be proud of it. Our soldiers went to Honduras to help out after hurricanes, or to help dig people out of the rubble after big earthquakes, no soldier that I identified with ever did anything that I didn’t think was good. Wars, genocide and armed conflict happened in places like Rwanda or Chechnya, Israel sometimes bombed what I understood to be “the bad guys” in Lebanon. These weren’t people like me. It’s not like I was out of the loop on the whole Kosovo conflict during the late 90s, but up until this point in life I don’t think I’d realized that this wasn’t too foreign. Perhaps, just because they were fighting, they weren’t at all like me. Perhaps it was the fact that I was now in Europe and the footage was from that afternoon and being shown hours later on the same continent. I remember this distinctly to be a perspective changing occasion, my reality was not as peaceful as I thought it was. People just like me fight, and kill each other. Whoa, what an eye opener for a random weekday afternoon.
   This only happened mere months before September 11, 2001 and mere months after that Canada was off an fighting in a war in Afghanistan. These events weren’t such a hard pill to swallow after the TV broadcast that spring, I seemed to know by then that the world was less at peace than I might have imagined earlier.
3. Pope John Paul II died in April 2005. The world paused for a while it seemed, this man had done so much for humanity during his life that absolutely the entire world took note when he passed on. I didn’t know a whole lot about the man, probably average for the average person outside of the Catholic church, but the way things seemed to pause worldwide when he passed away grabbed my attention. It seemed that the whole world converged on Vatican City to pay their respects to this man who had played such an important role in the history of the world. This fascination by the general public meant that I also started to learn about the Catholic church, and when the media died down I kept on going. This would lead initially to just paying attention, but later beginning to attend weekly mass, reading a few excellent books and taking elective courses through the Catholic college on campus. Pope John Paul II’s death was actually rather immaterial to myself but this set in motion a significant change in perspective and appreciation for differing views and values within the ecumenical church.
4. Perhaps this is the only thing on the list that occurred at a certain time and made the impact right away. Most of the others were events that occurred over months, or catalysts for perspective changes that occurred over the course of years. This happened over the course of maybe 20 minutes one Friday evening in front of the TV in the basement. Bono was giving a speech at the federal Liberal Party convention. It was the night where Paul Martin was taking over leadership from Jean Chretien. Bono took the stage and made a strong case for the power of our nation to do good in the world. He suggested that this period of history would be remembered for three things, the internet, the war on terror, and the lack of the first world’s involvement in the affliction plaguing the continent of Africa. That being a combination economic suppression through debt and exploitation as well as AIDS destroying entire generations of lives. It was a combination of compelling statistics as well as sincere human to human communication. The case was made in my mind for two things; first that there were real things that could be done on a super huge scale to make amends for some of the problems facing different areas on the planet. That if federal governments around the world decided to make it a priority to improve aspects of the global community thing would actually change for the better. Second, he changed how I thought about how I could view my government. If I believed that the potential existed to make positive change in the world, then I should be considering which federal party campaigning to form a government was going to behave most appropriately in that global community, not just for what they could provide me. I was for the first time thinking as a resident of planet earth, rather than as a resident of the overprivileged nation of Canada. I recall the speech relatively frequently when thinking about global issues and definitely every time I’ve been able to cast a ballot since then. If you want to read it, someone graciously typed out the Full Speech and posted it online.
5. It was about mid-decade that Canada changed the legislation governing same sex marriage. This, according to my understanding, was the turning point for gay rights in our country. It seemed that over the course of the previous few years there was an ever increasing frustration with the issue swirling around in the public media, and within different circles of conversation that I participated in. Following approximately 2005, when the same-sex marriage legislation battle came to a close within Canada, there has been a chance for the whole country to calm down and catch it’s breath. I’m certain that this has been for the better. All of the slippery slope arguments that had been made over the course of the previous years failed to hold any water. Religious officials had maintained their right to treat marriage as their traditions saw fit, no-one was trying to marry their pets, and no-one was force-feeding our children messages about their sexual orientation. Society had unambiguously improved, freedom had been granted to a slice of the population without taking anything away from the rest of it. Hallelujah! My own experience relating to the actual issue however, was rather unattached. I didn’t write any letters or join any protests, but I was content to see things change, with me on the sidelines.
   A year later, I was confronted face to face by someone I really respected about almost everything. How could I say I was going to vote for the Liberal party in the 2006 federal election when they had legalized same sex marriage? I was caught totally off guard by that statement. I remember anticipating that the discussion of who we would be voting for in the 2006 election was going to be about something like healthcare, or environmental issues, or the gun registry, or dealing with fallout from the sponsorship scandal, or a fiscal imbalance between the federal and provincial governments… One of those issues that the media kept pushing. Nope, I was mistaken, the question went something like this: If I agreed that biblical teaching was that the God-designed plan for relationships and families was between a man and a woman, how could I support any federal party that would permit otherwise? I distinctly remember having to pause and collect my thoughts for a bit. Well, the fact of the matter was that I wasn’t opposed to that. Actually, I was in support of it. The presence of committed relationships between people of all orientations was undeniable, and it wasn’t going to change because someone else was going to label it as sinful. What good was it going to do in the world to prevent some people from participating in a social structure that was largely run by the government, the insurance guys, and the tax-man?
   The discussion turned into a great one, ideas flowed about our largely undeveloped ability to listen to the needs of other people rather than decide what their needs were. The problem solving strategies that we’d been force fed through school and then university, more often than we’d like to admit were trying to cram round plugs into square holes. If there was a bit more listening and less strategical approaches taken in real life we’d soon realize that our plans for others’ issues had our own fingerprints all over them. Our home-grown solutions unfortunately don’t start out custom designed for other situations. In the subsequent months there was a lot of good that came out of what started as a really tense situation. A ton of trust was developed because, as I recall it, we were actually listening to each other once in a while.
6. Lance Armstrong won his 7th consecutive Tour de France during the summer of 2005. I spent that month of July generally in recovery mode from spending May and June sick in bed. The result was a lot of TV watching, and a new found love for the sport of bike racing. It was a realization for me that I was far more interested in this sport than most others, there seemed to be very little luck in the game, there was skill, effort, fitness, and strategy, and ultimately the best guys seemed to be able to win but they had to try amazingly hard to do it. There was something beautiful about a sport where you could earn fitness by putting in the hard work and quantitatively get better at things. That summer was the catalyst for me heading off to do all sorts of things in the world of endurance sports: learn how to swim, do my first triathlon, bike across an entire continent, run my first marathon, actually win a race. and get myself sufficiently enamored with long distance triathlon to sign up for Ironman. If we’re looking for life-changing and not just mind-changing events this one is it, since that Tour de France I’ve found hundreds of hours each year to put into this endurance sports campaign. As a totally unexpected bonus I’ve made some of the best friends of my life as a result.
7. I changed how I thought about food during this decade. Heading off to University required that I was going to be the person choosing what I would eat every day for breakfast lunch and dinner. I did a decent job right from the start, and got a lot better in the years that followed. Whether that was initiated by seeing the whole world go crazy about the Atkins diet in the few years prior, or due to the hilarity of “Supersize Me”, or just because I didn’t know any better than to eat relatively healthy, I ate better food than 99% of the world living in residence. There was a basic realization that the world chooses to feed itself very poorly sometime in the first half of the decade. During the second half of the decade things changed again, there is a difference between not eating poorly and eating well. Making that change takes some time and some effort but the decision to do so occurred based on conversations with real people who had their heads on straight. My friend Tulani had completely quit eating sugar and I tried that for about two months, before gradually becoming more lax on that front. A family friend, John, was eating strictly according to the direction of a naturopath, nothing processed and huge categories of the supermarket put “on hold” until he developed “better blood”. Neither appeared to be missing out on anything, it was just a decision, and their enjoyment of life and food had improved as a result. A simple realization really: I could choose to eat what I wanted, and I was in complete control of how I was going to decide what I wanted. Rather abruptly I pretty much didn’t want all sorts of things.
8. Friends ended in the spring of 2004. This is, I think, somewhat tied to a realization that occurred when Justin Timberlake tore off part of Janet Jackson’s top in front of all of America at the Superbowl the previous winter. The relationship between society and men and women is far from perfect. Friends wasn’t a show serving up sexist messages, but it wasn’t doing it quite right. If it weren’t for Sarah Jessica Parker being on the TV at the same time and being the go to example of liberated sexuality, perhaps Rachel Green, Monica Geller, or Phoebe Buffay (unlikely) would have been developed into that character. When the second half of the superbowl party turned into a discussion of whether or not the “wardrobe malfunction” was supposed to have happened or not, it wasn’t a marker of emancipation. It was an indication that things weren’t right, despite the fact that people were now suggesting that they were. Sure, women had rights like men but we’re far from having arrived at a solution, or destination. Somehow the end of Friends, made this especially noticeable to me. The fact that the feel good ending to the show is Ross and Rachel back together and Monica and Chandler heading to the suburbs with the twins was kind of a sick joke.
   In theory there’s freedom and equality but in reality in my perception this has just been replaced by almost equally un-beneficial expectations that we just hold in our heads. The issue of women’s rights has migrated from one that existed on paper for one sex to one that exists in the mind of society and afflicts both genders. As of 2004 when Friends came to a close we were far from success. Later in the decade there was an election in America where Hillary Clinton and Tina Fey, err… Sarah Palin, played large roles. Was anything better? Things seemed to be regressing more than they were progressing on this front through the last decade if you ask me.
9. My federal government admits fault with regard to their dealings with the residential schools. This is something that I’d been learning about over the course of a few previous years. Until I had spent a fair amount of time learning and discussing I was almost completely certain that this was not my issue. Despite the severity of the issue or the magnitude of the problem, I was most certainly not involved. Until I started to learn from people instead of books. Suddenly the issue was my issue, but the avenues to do things still seem distant and obscure. I identified with the damage caused and sometimes I think that’s all that anyone hopes from me, to listen, share the pain and to agree that what happened is wrong. When the apology was made in 2008 by the federal government I was lucky to be spending the week with friends, native and white, who also could pause and reflect on the significance of it. Not a lot changed that day, but witnessing the official statement seemed important to me. It was hopefully the beginning of a new renewal and at the time, I remember feeling a sentiment of great hope in so many conversations. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission might have gotten off to a rocky start but I’m certainly rooting for it to be able to overcome those obstacles and make a firm record in history on the second attempt.
10. Quantum mechanics soaked up my life for the better part of two semesters of university. What I at first thought was the pinnacle of my education was nothing more than an ivory tower rather detached from the world. By the time I was part-way through my final year of undergrad I could speak differential equations like the best of them. I had knew the normalization constants for dozens of probability wavefunctions off the top of my head and could basically guess at the forms for most others with an uncanny chance of success. I had started to develop intuition with regards to diagonalizing the matrices necessary to make eigenstates of an interaction matrix orthogonal. I had developed skills that even I myself deemed useless. I didn’t have a huge issue with it at the time, it’s not like I suddenly wanted to un-learn these things. It did cause me to back up however, I wanted to decide which skillsets I was going to develop as a part of my education. Quantum mechanics no longer made the cut. It’s no wonder that Engineering Management and my Christian Theology courses were my most appreciated the next semester. I was basically refusing to become a maven of mathematics, a prima donna of process control feedback or an exemplar of electronic wavefunctions. I was done with learning things to score well on tests. I was only going to train my brain to do things that I knew were useful. Now you could start debating with me the merits of training a brain to focus on putting out the most even wattage on a bicycle over the course of 5, 6, 7 or 8 hours, but that’s besides the point.

]]> http://krabbe.ca/blog/2010/724/feed 0 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/216 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/216#comments Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:11:04 +0000 admin http://krabbe.ca/blog/?p=216 A recent letter to my member of parliament. I’d encourage you to read it and consider contacting your federal representatives as well. If you’re really out of the loop you can find out who your MP is By using your postal-code.

Hello Linda Duncan.

I don’t know how intimately you understand the worldwide AIDS situation, it’s a complicated beast to say the least. Inarguably a huge contributing factor to the perpetuation of this issue is the fact that people don’t know any better than to keep spreading the disease either because they don’t know they’re infected or because they don’t know how to take simple steps to prevent transmission. Getting people started on treatment is intimately tied to education. Communities of people living with HIV/AIDS who are living as a result of ARV treatment change the societal outlook on the disease, instead of a silent killer amongst the culture treated individuals are given physical ability to stand up against it and confidence against the disease is created within the community. This is a step along the avenue to conquering the disease.

• 2.3 million children under the age of 15 are infected with HIV.
• Less than 15% of the 780,000 children who need treatment are on the necessary medicines.

I personally don’t think it’s particularly important to discuss how many people are going to die this year as a result of this problem. Anti-Retro-Viral treatment is not going to keep them alive forever. They do however, change the perspective of a community being wiped out by the disease, the question is a quality of life for the living. It’s about creating hope and inciting change.

You might be interested to know that I along with approximately 100 other students at the University of Alberta (the vast majority of whom I presume live in your riding) raised nearly $7000 at the end of last month to support the work of an organization called Dignitas International. (www.ualberta.ca/~dignitas) Our fundraising is basically going to be purchasing drugs and that’s it. Getting drugs moving is considered such an important part of this process that all we focused on this year as students was awareness and the purchasing of drugs. The International organization is putting a huge effort towards distribution and care system optimization (I’d be excited to provide more information about dignitas international if you’re interested) but drug movement is a huge deal, so much so that it’s all we focused on for this year’s fundraising event.

Here is where the situation involves our national government and therefor you!

In 2004 Canada responded to the urgent need for medicines in many developing countries by creating “Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime”, with the goal of getting more affordable, generic medicines to patients in the developing world. Unfortunately, the initiative was, and remains, seriously flawed. The bureaucratic burden associated with it has limited its use to one instance in the last 5 years.

The good news, though, is that CAMR can easily be simplified… without any additional spending. In testimony and submissions to Parliament, the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network and other organizations have outlined how CAMR can be streamlined by moving to the ‘one license solution’. Canada’s largest generic pharmaceutical manufacturer has made the commitment that, if CAMR is simplified, it will produce a lower-cost children’s version of a key AIDS drug for export to developing countries under CAMR. I request that you support the bill associated with this issue, a long term positive impact is directly linked to the passing of this bill.

I recognize that as a representative of this area you’d like to represent our interests but likely struggle a bit to know what people deem important. Consider the fact that there are 100 constituents who actively are making an effort to see AIDS drugs moving. I have a hard time imagining that you could even find 100 people who in principle are against the concept let alone making an active effort with their time and money to move in that direction. Please bring the situation with the CAMR to the attention of the New Democrats and request party support in the HOC. Bringing this issue beyond attention and towards action is critically important.

I look forward to hearing your response.

Josh Krabbe

]]> http://krabbe.ca/blog/2009/216/feed 0 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2008/217 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2008/217#comments Thu, 27 Nov 2008 22:16:13 +0000 admin http://krabbe.ca/blog/?p=217 “If a parrot said my name wouldn’t that be an onomatopoeia” — A good friend of mine (November 27, 2008)
]]> http://krabbe.ca/blog/2008/217/feed 0 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2008/218 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2008/218#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:24:21 +0000 admin http://krabbe.ca/blog/?p=218 So I’m stuck in the lab at 8:30 pm on a Monday night. It’s not like I could be swimming anyways due to the roadrash on my hand so it’s not the end of the world… But I decided to film a bit of a video of the process I’m working with right now. Captions on the video itself tall what the different controls are… so there’s no description here.

I admit I crammed a lot of annotations on the tiny little video but that’s what the pause button is for I guess. Or the replay button if you’re interested. Or the back-button on your browser after you realized what this actually was a video of.

]]> http://krabbe.ca/blog/2008/218/feed 0 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2008/219 http://krabbe.ca/blog/2008/219#comments Sun, 08 Jun 2008 15:27:25 +0000 admin http://krabbe.ca/blog/?p=219 Convocation was Wednesday in Edmonton. I at first thought it was a pretty outrageous idea to travel all the way up the QEII highway just to walk across a stage and get 3 seconds of fame. Indeed it was as expected, three seconds of walking across a stage, but everything else was pretty good and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Dean Lynch bought all of the grads lunch and we has a chance to catch up with a few classmates. Then we did a few photos in the gowns and headed over to the Jubilee Auditorium for a few speeches and a parade across the stage.

I have to say that I thought the speeches were a ton better than expected, I wondered sometimes as an undergrad how out of touch the administration was with what actually went on on campus. While I’m probably still justified in thinking that to a certain extent what everyone had to say was particularly relevant to the occasion and as a whole rather well presented.

So as Dr. Zemp would say “I’m running out of things to say so let’s look at some pictures”











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