Back To Civilization

I'm back! The people of Rankin Inlet are certainly a tough breed, I would never be able to stand the conditions under which they live. Perhaps I'm just soft from living South of the treeline but wow! Thirty below most of the time I was there and winds to boot. On Friday awoke to blowing snow which had the locals abuzz, they cherish their winter months the way we cherish summer. Had a warm reception at the airport when I arrived, met by two folks representing our client, and the lodge keeper. If you ever find yourself in Rankin, stay at Nanuq Lodge... trust me, it's an experience you'll not forget. Sorry for not posting but the internet connection was slow at best, dare I say less than dialup.

Thanks goes out to Page, Annamarie, Brad, Cindy, Jim, and the folks in the office for making the trip comfortable and productive.

Taking Social Media Rejections To Heart

If you feel the sting of a "defriending" or "unfollowing" you are apparently not alone. In this world of ever expanding online social networks it seems rejection cuts equally as deep as it does in the real world. CNN's Breeanna Hare takes a look at how feelings get hurt in social media circles in this interesting article.

"People tend to think that these relationships are trivial and not very deep, but this is what we're moving towards, having a lot of our communications play out over the Internet," Purdue University social psychologist Kip Williams said. "That's the way it's becoming; this is how we interpret our worth. People care how many [online] friends they have."

To quote Brad Paisley "I'm so much cooler online"

Traveling Novemeber 2nd to 7th

My day job will be taking me to Rankin Inlet in Nunavut the week of November 2nd to 7th. As a result I may not be posting regularly, this is for several reasons:

• I will be busy with my clients; and
  
• Connectivity is a big question mark at the moment.

As I type this the temperature in Rankin Inlet is -24 degrees Celcius a huge change from the +16 we had here in Charlottetown yesterday, though that was higher than we would expect here on Halloween. I am very much looking forward to capturing a few photographs, hopefully the Northern Lights and perhaps some wildlife, and expect that my host accommodations, the Nanuq Lodge will provide a memorable stay.

Their website leads me to believe that there may be some very interesting coversations/stories from the proprietors:

"Your Hosts.
John Makayak Hickes was born at Pistol Bay, near Whale Cove, and lived near Rankin Inlet, beyond where the Con Shed is located. After years in Churchill and Ottawa, John returned home to share his warmhearted hospitality with guests. John grew up on the land and has a deep understanding of Inuit culture and the history of Kivalliq. A co-owner in Sila Lodge, John has a background in hospitality, training, and natural history interpretation. His special joys are his kennel of sled dogs and teaching youth about dog handling.

Page Burt has worked as staff naturalist with Bathurst Inlet Lodge since 1973, and lived in Yellowknife and Rankin Inlet. A biologist, Page divides her time between Outcrop Ltd., and Nanuq Lodge, looking after projects which include vegetation baseline studies, communications,
tourism consulting and bookings and service to the guests of Nanuq Lodge. Page is a specialist in arctic natural history and author of Barrenland Beauties, a colour field guide to arctic plants."

I'll post what I can, when I can. Perhaps some photos or video and some thoughts on this northern community located on Hudson Bay. Here are some interesting facts:

The local wildlife includes:

Polar Bear – Top of the Northern Food Chain. Largest of all bears. Skilled hunters – mainly hunting marine mammals. Sizes range from: males – 350 to over 650 kg and females from 150 to 250 kg. Colour varies from pure white to creamy yellow.

Wolves – Has a complex social hierarchy. Larger than a sled dog. Usually white colour in this area. But closer to the treeline, the colour varies.

Foxes – Arctic Fox can change colours with the seasons, from white or bluish-gray during the winter to yellowish- white & brown in the summer. Foxes usually live a nomad life & travel alone. Foxes home range is 16 to 25 sq. km.
Red Fox or Cross Fox – larger than Arctic Foxes. Has started traveling to the Arctic since the 1940s and has increased steadily ever since. Foxes usually live a nomad life & travel alone.

Wolverine – one of the larger species of the weasel family. The wolverine has a muscular body, strong legs & short bushy tail. The wolverine is widely known to stand up to Polar Bears, to raid traps and raid cached food.

Walrus – marine mammal, lives in packs, has 2 long tusks. The male tusks are larger than the female tusks. Males usually weigh up to 800 kg and females up to 500 kg.

Whales – mostly Beluga Whales in this area, occasional Bowhead whales or Narwhales. Beluga whales migrate from Churchill, MB during the summer, and return there in the fall.

Caribou – Have adapted to the cold. Usually travel in herds. Main source of food for Inuit. Available throughout the year. Main diet: lichen, moss & mushrooms.

Birds – Canada Geese, Snow Geese, Bunting, Peregrine Falcon, Gyr Falcon, Raven, Seagull, Owls, Loons, Sandhill Cranes, Swans, Arctic Terns and in recent years Red Robins.

Fish – Arctic Char, Trout, Greyling, and Rock Cod

Siksik – Arctic Ground Squirrel is a social animal that live in colonies. They live in burrows, which have many entrances. These burrows can be hindered by permafrost.

Wish me luck!

NASA Running Tests On Spider Monkeys

For the first time in decades NASA is working with primates as part of the preparation for space missions. This time around spider monkeys are being exposed to radiation similar to that which a human might be exposed to when traveling to Mars.

"We realized there was a need for this kind of work," Jack Bergman, a behavioral pharmacologist at Harvard Medical School's McLean Hospital in Boston, told Discovery News.

"There's a long-standing commitment on the part of NASA to deep space travel and with that commitment comes a need for knowing what kinds of adverse effects deep space travel might have, what are the risks to astronauts," Bergman said. "That's not been well assessed."

The animals will not be destroyed after the experiments but will rather be cared for at a veterinary hospital, with no further experiments to be preformed on them.

Chimpanzees were sent into space prior to the first human attempts in order to test the Mercury capsules.

Source: Discovery News.

Icann Approves non-Latin-script Domain Names

With about one half of current internet users speaking languages with non-Latin scripts, the internet regulator Icann, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has approved a move to support domain names in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts.

"Of the 1.6 billion internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based," said Icann president and CEO Rod Beckstrom earlier this week.

"So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world's internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the internet continues to spread."

The work required to support the change is described as a "fantastically complicated technical feature"

Source: BBC News

Google Music Search Roll Out - Music Onebox

Finding your favorite tune via Google has just become a whole lot easier with the un-boxing of Music Onebox. Entering the name of a song, an album name, or bands name into a Google search box will now yield results from Lala and MySpace Music. Clicking on either of these links will in most cases, present a pop-up window that enables you to play the song once in it's entirety, for free, and also presents a link to buy the song.

“The intention is not to turn the partners on Google into a free streaming music service. This is about providing a richer experience for users looking for a particular song,” said R.J. Pittman, Google’s director of product management. Music searches often account for two of the top ten searches conducted via Google, within the US.

Source: Bits Blog

Gizmodo Serves Up Scareware

Hackers posing as advertisers for large corporations have been targeting high volume sites buying ad space and infecting their links with scareware. The latest to be fooled into taking the ads is the popular tech blog gizmodo. In a statement on the site, gizmodo says:

"I'm really sorry but we had some malware running on our site in ad boxes for a little while last week on Suzuki ads. They somehow fooled our ad sales team through an elaborate scam.

"It's taken care of now, and only a few people should have been affected, but this isn't something we take lightly as writers, editors and tech geeks,"

The malicious sites associated with the ads try to convince users that their computer is infected with viruses and trojans, and offer them a download remedy which is actually harmful code that can be used by perpetrators to acquire information on the infected PC such as credit card details.

A similar scam got past the folks at the New York Times last month.

Source: BBC News

Google Voicemail - A Google Voice Tweek

Google has decided that a hack developed by users of the Google Voice system, who didn't want to change their phone number to a Google Voice number, makes sense. The Official Google blog has an announcement regarding a new feature that allows you to use a lighter version of Google Voice with your existing mobile phone number, the trade off is that you will not get all of the features of a full blown Voice account. Oh yeah, and you need an invite to the system before you can get either the light or the full featured versions working. This video gives a great overview of the new lighter version.

I'm still waiting for my invite but it's also unclear what the catch might be for those of us north of the border...

Twitter Taking Notice Of How Users Interact

Twitter has been sitting up and taking notice of how it's users interact with each other and is rolling out some "new" features based on those observations. Over the next several weeks, Twitter users will see two new features, Lists and Retweets, both of which have spawned from user-generated innovation.

According to this New York Times Article "“Twitter’s smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, ‘Gee, let’s not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let’s outsource design to them,’ ” said Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. and author of the book “Democratizing Innovation.”"

Innovations such as the referral of other users by the "@" symbol preceding their user name and the "#" tag identifying a topic where also user generated and are very much embedded in the Twitter vernacular.

Geocities Will Cease To Exist After Tomorrow

While this isn't really that big of a story from the standpoint that Geocities hasn't really been relevant for some time now and hence Yahoo!'s decision to pull the plug and delete the entire site, from a purely historical point of view it is interesting. Geocities was one of the first services to offer web users a home for their own sites, and let me tell you many of those sites were real beauties. It may have contributed to this whole self publishing world that we now live in.

According to Computer World Blog "In April 2009, Yahoo announced that GeoCities would cease accepting new registrations in preparation of the service's closing. In June, they clarified: the service would shut down on Oct. 26, 2009. As their FAQ states, GeoCities is not being decommissioned — it's being deleted. That means any data not personally backed up by its owners or readers will not be recoverable, ever."

Rest in peace Geocities and your users' over use of the blink tag, may we never be subjected to those neon colour schemes again.