I actually couldn’t write about this last week.
Sometime on Thursday morning, it was minus 53 degree Fahrenheit here (wind chill factor). I sh*t you not. I wrote it correctly, but just to be sure (and just so I’m sure): It was -53 F.
The temperature reading in the car on the day before (which is pretty much my thermometer because, when I went to Home Depot to look for outdoor thermometers, every single one of them were butt-ugly), said -25 C, which amounts to -13 F.
I listen to WNYC.org pretty much every day of the week and on weekends whenever I can. I found it thrilling and sordid that the radio announcer was telling its New York audience (of which I used to be a very happy member) to button up.
On Thursday, I took out the garbage. When I came back, momentarily sans gloves, I brilliantly put my hand on the steel metal door handle. It went red.
It was the coldest day of my life.

Tonight, I had the opportunity to be totally immersed in some really beautiful and original music performed by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. This week, and all week, is their New Music Festival, which features new symphonic works by international composers. (Tickets to all seven concerts can be had for $69.00.) Tonight I heard an incredibly moving piece, “Rhythms of the Earth,” by Ural-based Olga Victorova and then was treated to another contemporary composition by Jim Hiscott called “North Wind.” Victorova, youngish at 45, hails from my grandmother’s motherland. The soloist for the latter work was a flutist from China, now living here, named Xiao Nan and his virtuosity during the entire performance made my hair rise.
I’ve been here six months. It’s not that long. I have to continue to remind myself to remember that six months is about the amount of time it takes to learn where the corner deli is and that’s about it. To have found the WSO tonight, housed in a majestic and modernist building downtown (about 15 minutes drive from this computer), was stellar, surprising, and, in that surprise, a tremendous humility.

I’ve been in tremendous denial during the month of January about the weather, which I generally take very lightly. I’m of the old school that believes very strongly that there’s nothing you can do about the outdoor temperature so get dressed and go outside.
It turns out that January was the warmest month on record in Winnipeg – at least since 1944, which wasn’t a very good year, afterall. I told people around here that I didn’t actually believe them that it got cold, that they were a bunch of exagerators and that I really liked the weather here.
Well, that’s changed.

The snows arrived.
It took about 2 weeks longer than usual. But they’re here. To misquote James Joyce, “Snow is general all over Winnipeg.”
I just went out to the 7-11, three doors down from our house, to get a few staples and there was plenty of milk on the shelves. And, surpisingly, staples.
The house is ready. We had the furnace checked a few weeks ago. It hadn’t been looked after in about, maybe, 6 years, perhaps more. The service repairman could tell by the way the doors were sealed around the boiler. They used to use some kind of concrete sealant around the doors to keep the heat in. Today, he explained, they use a kind of silicon sealant. It’s red and kind of pretty, like blood, and it was nicely applied all around the small doors of the furnace. Apparently, it’s the original one that was installed when the house was built in 1922. Back then, the owners would rake coal into the thing. Probably in the 1950s, it was converted to oil heat and then, perhaps in the 1970s or 1980s, it was converted again. This time it was gas. Natural gas.
The eavestroughs probably should have been cleaned. I mean the gutters. They should have been cleaned.
The house didn’t have all of its storm windows installed outside so a few of the windows in the house are directly exposed to the outside air, wind, cold, water. Not a tragedy but it’s something that we’ll have to attend to in the Spring.
But it’s Winter here. It looks like we’re going to get about 10 centimeters of snow. And, according to a long-time resident with whom I walked home today, once it snows at this time of year, it’s on the ground. It’s not likely to melt. The snow sitting on the ground right now, as I write, will be on the ground until March, perhaps later. It’s the same snow I’ll be walking upon for weeks, months. The same snow compacted by sister layers and feet and the occasional warm rays of the sun. The same snow, concretized and homogenized, compressed and repressed. Tonight’s layer will is the foundation for future slicks, for future falls and collisions, for the light reflected back up to the big sky here.
Tonight’s snow is one from Calgary, they tell me. Not a Northeaster, which is what I’m used to, as a Northeaster. But a Northwester, I guess, has come.
The quality of the snow seems like a lot of snows I’ve seen before. It’s powdery with a bit of wetness around the edges. It piles. And it doesn’t smell the way it does back home, in New York.
Over the weekend, we went to a Johnny Cash tribute party that was something like I imagined it and nothing like I could have imagined. I had waited pretty much two years for this event, held at our friends’ house. There were at least a hundred people there, sitting on the floor, on chairs, on stairs. J.C. himself made an apperance in the guise of one of our friends and he played beautifully. Petty Cash, Johnny’s little badass sister, also performed a song called “A Girl Named Poo.” And, just to keep the scatology going, a duo called the Ass Juice Trio crooned to lots of avail. It was great.
The snows and the cold are known to have this effect on people here. Being indoors means things get done and those things are often creative by nature. I love this.
I love this house, too. I wish I had a shovel, though.

I haven’t written in a while because I’m trying to redo everything:

I’m redoing MANOVERBOARD.com.
I’m redoing this website and moving it to a more robust and capable server.
I’m redoing TAB, slowy and surely.
I’ve canceled my cell phone service. I’m redoing mobility.
I’m redoing exercise or at least rethinking about redoing it.
I’m redoing my office, re-organizing files both on the computer and in the meatworld (I hate that term).
I’m going to start trying to cook dinner every night and redo pings of culinary laziness.
I’m rethinking my own personal geography and place in the world and how I relate to others here, there and elsewhere.
I want to redo my business model slightly in order to focus on application design.

I have written a few times since my move to Winnipeg about how wonderful it all is but I think I owe it to my stately readers a few lines about the problematic aspects of life here that I’ve found frightfully odd, disjointed, or otherwise simply silly:

• While Canadians all have access to good, if not excellent, healthcare, almost everyone I’ve met does not visit a doctor regularly. Some folks haven’t been to a regular physician in 8 years and they don’t seem to mind. In the U.S., people who have health insurance typically visit their doctor once per annum, just for that check-up. Part of the problem, perhaps at least in Winnipeg, is that there are not enough doctors to have a person relationship with and, therefore, why would you?
• I got used to really, really good organic milk in New York. Horizon brand comes to mind. It was everywhere, in almost every store and it tasted really fresh and clean and wholesome – the way milk never tasted when I was growing up. Back then, it was pretty typical for my parents to make us drink powdered milk. You poured a foil-lined package of white stuff into a plastic container, added cold water, shook and then didn’t drink. Anyway, I don’t miss powdered milk but I do miss the organic stuff.
• It’s looking pretty good on the permanent residence front. I don’t want to give the whole thing a ken-a-herra but so far so good. However, every time I turn around the government here requires a huge dose of application fees from my dwindling bank account. I’m sure the U.S. is the same if not worse.
• I’m having email problems. I don’t know why. A few clients and a few friends are not able to send me email. I can’t tell where the problem is – at Shaw, my ISP, or my host, or somewhere in between. I hate not knowing whether emails are not getting to me. I know it’s a bit like worrying about the next disaster except that there is “supposedly” something you can do about it. Well, maybe if “you” are an email consultant.
• Things are expensive here. It’s not the 7% GST and 7% PST that gets attached to almost every purchase – yes, that is 14%. It’s the duties or tariffs or somethings that gets tacked onto nearly everything. I wanted to buy Newsweek the other day and it was like going out to dinner.
• Amazon.ca is stinky. I don’t like it. It’s interface seems a pale reference to Amazon.com and, while it still kind of knows who I am, it just doesn’t offer the range, variety, and sheer value of its big American sister. For instance, I want to buy Dan Cederholm’s new book Bulletproof Web Design because it looks like a nice read. The price is CDN$39.19. List price is $55.99. The same book at Amazon in the States $26.39. List is $39.99. Free shipping applies to both. And I believe that GST will apply whereas in the States, nada on the tax front. This means that Dan’s books would cost me exactly CND$41.93. Sorry, Dan. On the other hand, perhaps U.S. citizens should all be paying an added 7% tax to help out the families in Louisiana.

Here’s what I got in the past few days, all of ’em good and shiny and nice and sassy:

• A New A List Apart.
• Relatedly, a fine new hosting service.
• Finally, a seemingly reliable Pantone to RGB (and back) online tool [I ain’t vouching for its accuracy].
• Three new clients for MANOVERBOARD, one of whom is in Texas!
• A shiny new bank card at Royal Bank of Canada, which will gladly take my immigrant money.
• A sharp-looking and amazingly easy-to-get Winnipeg Public Library card.
• A sweet two-pronged Panasonic Telephone for the office, put on my credit card.
• A new and kind of average-printing Epson printer [no thanks to our van lines, I’m without a printer and Epson gave me $40.00 to buy theirs at an oddly named Canadian store called FutureShop.
• Hopefully, some Vonage.
• Plain envelopes
• A renewed subscription to ol’ MacWorld.
• Great comments to a piece called “Content Stripped Bare” that I wrote in the recent Design in Flight and comments on comments on that piece in Design in Flight.
• Clothes from Old Navy, hopefully billed to our lovely van line [projected (or supposed) delivery date is now: September 2, 2005].

It’s taken three weeks but we moved into our new old house this morning. Laptop got upgraded thanks to the good folks at Winnipeg’s finest Mac shop.
I’ve been thinking much about design lately and have come across few very good sites recently. But it seems to me that design for the Web has taken a new turn and a new life the past few months. Much of this is thanks to Web standards and the undaunted promoters of good markup and clean styling. A few notes:

• Usability is in. Small fonts are out.
• Identities on websites have become smaller, more obscure, and perhaps more risk averse. Clean, clear (almost Web safe) colors are important and technologically sophisticated look is relatively important.
• Blogs are overblown. There is a recent article in Macleans [ed: Oh, he’s so Canadian, now] this week noting that 99% of blogs receive 10 or fewer hits per day. Perhaps Deckchairs is on its way to fantastic obscurity right now.
• Concomittantly, RSS is overblown as a reading mechanism. Contextual design is still very important to online visitors who want to get a sense of the writer and his or her place within an information hierarchy and in relation to the site being published. While a good many people are slightly aghast that Google is talking about patenting its advertising RSS feeds, those good many probably amount to a city the size of Schenectday. And I like Schenectady!
• There are a few examples of talented Web designers who recently built sites that don’t cut it in terms of good design. To wit, CapGemini was redesigned by Douglas Bowman and it’s very average. Subnavigation is, oddly, on the right side of the site. I showed the site to one client and she couldn’t even find the subnavigation until I pointed it out to her.
• Underlined links are, rightly, coming back but I think this is a trend and not a solid sign of better usability becoming of import. I hope I am incorrect.
• Navigation generally has become a more naturalized (or standardized) component of good Web design. We no longer see, much, repeated navigation at the bottom of a site. There are fewer drop-down menus. There’s less Flash menuing, which is often used to obscure the navigation itself. And larger typefaces are being used to pull in all those aging boomers. Still a lot of new sites stink.
• Photography is playing a more important role on almost every website, often too much. There are now so many bad stock photography sites that any old designer can find something that seems cool (a picture of an outlet with lightning rods coming out of it or an image of a girl screaming excitedly into her cell phone to a friend) that stock has become immature rather than mature. Oops, here comes a plug.
• Companies like 37Signals and Firewheel are doing the design world justice by making applications that are useful, pretty, fast, functional and serious.

Now I can go to sleep.

Mostly the past few days we’ve been spending money as if the colorful stuff is the paper of Monopoly. Toyota took a good chunk of our change today. The house is gobbling up all kinds of funds thanks to Home Depot, Canadian Tire, EQ4, HomeConnections, AutoPac, HomeSpace, Sears, and a host of other oddly named franchises. I must say that most of the goods we’ve purchased so far have been of a slightly shoddier or equal quality than those in the U.S. I don’t know why this would be the case and I wonder if this is just cultural pre-conditioning affecting my (perhaps poor) judgment but the final quality of the good we’re purchasing does seem to be of the lesser sort.
One other thing – I need RAM for my Mac. For the life of me, it’s very hard to find a store (online or otherwise) that is willing to sell me big ol’ RAM for my laptop. If you know of someone who vends the stuff that is not Apple, please let me know. Thanks for keeping the credit cards thin!

Here I am, pluggin’ away on my laptop in a brightly colored red and brown basement in the middle of the continent in a city in Canada. It’s all become rather strange and unworldly today and if it wasn’t for the very bright sunlight, the cloudless sky, the footsteps upstairs, the bag of pretzels and cats at my feet, and the whir of my BlackBerry, I would think that the flourescent lightbulbs above my head (which shall be soon replaced by something else) would drive me nuts.
The reality is that things in Winnipeg, Canada are oddly fine, relaxing, even wondrous at times. I won’t try to put a positive spin on events like most irregular bloggers but I will make a list of things I’ve found that are potentiallly of import:

• While NYC blogs like Gothamist are only one click away, I miss their relevance very much. In fact, I miss the daily horror of gossip and NYC transit news and the mindless shuffle of papers on anchors’ desks on NYC channels 2, 5, and 7. Yes, 5!
• I’m working very happily from a 15″ laptop, dragging the heavy thing from one place to another in the frantic hope of gathering enough time and connectivity to continue my work and make clients generally happy.
• I found that the Globe and Mail is the paper of record for people of my ilk. I’m looking forward to subscribing to it.
• The moving company is doing its utmost to be a pain in the arse. The goods have not arrived yet but to be fair, they did say “August 15.” I’ll name names when and if it’s necessary.
• Painting, working, cleaning, cooking, commuting in August without your personal effects is a bit like living in on the Starship Enterprise. It’s all-out limbo right now but it’s limbo with the full knowledge that it won’t last forever, at least according to our moving company.
• The Web has become boring of late and I think it’s just because the real world is actually pretty this time of year.
• Going to the DMV a few days ago was a walk in the park. Almost literally. I walked across a freshly mowed lawn, presented my old New York State drivers license and my US passport and told them I wanted to register for a new license. It took all of 20 minutes for them to fill out the forms for me, take my photo, charge me CND$50.00, hand me the new (2-part) license, and send me packing. In Brooklyn, this project would have involved a morning wait, questioning by the authorities, re-waiting in line, surly service and I’d probably make a friend in the process.

I do miss Brooklyn.