[PHOTO] The Drake Hotel

The Drake Hotel (1150 Queen Street West is a boutique hotel of note located just down the street from my first residence in Toronto and a couple of blocks east of Dufferin Street. Once a flophouse, five years ago the Drake was reopened as one of the places to go in Toronto, as a centre for art and music and high culture and rooftop patio parties featuring the likes of Woody Harrelson. Me, I remember the place mainly for the coffee-and-scone breakfast that I bought up there from a friendly dreadlocked woman before I took the streetcar to work.

The Drake from the east
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

The Drake from the west
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

[LINK] "Black can't appeal empire-destroyer reputation"

The Toronto Star's David Olive has an article in today's Star considering Conrad Black's surprisingly success in gaining the right to appeal his conviction on fraud charges to the US Supreme Court. Olive is skeptical as to whether Black's conviction was entirely above the board, given his lawyer's alienation of the jury and the scattershot application of charges. Still, he doesn't doubt that he'll have to continue to deal with his legacy as a fraudster and a destroyer of companies.

Which means Black won't shed his lifelong status as a convicted felon, or the perhaps sadder fate of being a once-powerful industrialist now challenged to find assets to cover the multimillion-dollar cost of realizing his new privilege of making his case before the top court.

Floyd Norris, the veteran New York Times business columnist, is convinced that the appeal-court decision Black seeks to have the court overturn "leaves little room for doubt that fraud was committed here."

Still, Norris allows that if Black's jail time is shortened, "it will be interesting to see if [Black] can reclaim his place in high society."

Black hasn't the necessary funds to reclaim a place except in the op-ed pages of the National Post and The Globe and Mail, which inexplicably freed up scarce newsprint for Black's explanations of why Barack Obama couldn't win the U.S. presidency.

No, Black's unalterable legacy is his rare distinction of being on the scene for the dismantling, possibly, of three industrial empires. Those would be the old Argus Corp. (Massey-Ferguson Ltd., Dominion Stores Ltd., CFRB); his own brief mini-Murdoch empire – and CanWest Global Communications Inc., the Asper media conglomerate facing implosion as it continues to choke on the acquisition debt from buying Black's big-city Canadian dailies at the top of the market nine years ago.

Fairly or not, Black's reputation as a destroyer of businesses is set in stone, regardless of the outcome of a foreign court's ruling on the validity of fraud charges on which he was convicted.

[LINK] "How the Web saved Star Trek"

Last week, The Globe and Mail's technology columnist Ivor Tossell wrote an interesting column examining how the sort of fan enthusiasm that resulted in the production of fan-made Star Trek can be not only crediting with helping to revive the franchise, but with pioneering a new open-source approach to culture that Paramount was wise to accept. This sort of enthusiasm, Tossell argues, is the sort of thing that allows popular culture and the Internet reach their full, joint potential.

There's a lot of things you can do with the Internet. You can sit around all day, strip-mining the Net for free movies. You can disappear into virtual worlds. You can log onto your favourite website and leave a comment that will cause readers to wonder whether the planet wouldn't have been better off left to the dolphins.

You can buy a webcam and do something profoundly embarrassing that will render you unemployable for years. You can spend your days filling up Facebook with a hollow performance of yourself. You can create a Web service that seems destined to change everything, only to discover – several billion dollars later – that it really changed nothing, because people are people, and the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Or you can make something. On the sunniest days, I look at the Web and I see a world of people making things. Maybe they're cat videos; maybe they're full-blown recreations of science-fiction series from the late sixties. Either way, the creative process never happens in a vacuum. It's an endless back and forth of ideas and materials, and some of them will always cross the lines of ownership and copyright.

It's unusual to tell a story of an online project that takes a corporate work, uses its intellectual property to make something new, and gets rewarded instead of sued. But then, Star Trek has always envisioned an inexplicably cheery future in which creativity trumps commerce. It's science fiction, all right, but let's run with that.

[LINK] "Hands off our Arctic, Canada tells Europeans"

The Globe and Mail's Doug Saunders this past Saturday wrote about Canada's push to get its Arctic territorial claims recognized.

This new assertiveness has caught European and Russian officials off guard as Ottawa pushes to fend off attempts by other northern powers and the European Union to claim stakes in the Northwest Passage and the open seas of the High Arctic.

While this involves hard diplomacy, such as Canada's leading role in a move to exclude the EU from sitting on the Arctic Council, Mr. Harper's officials have also ordered embassies abroad to mobilize their cultural resources to deliver this policy message, to create a visual image of a fully Arctic Canada.

The stakes are high. Yesterday, Russia released a report arguing that Arctic resources could spark military confrontations, and Canada recently released a major atlas of the Arctic, the result of research intended to back claims of Arctic land ownership under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

"Canada is an Arctic nation and an Arctic power," Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon told European leaders in Tromso, Norway, at the end of April, while directing his diplomats to adopt an assertive new language around Canada's Arctic possessions. Under his instructions, the new phrase "Arctic power" has begun appearing in communiqués and speeches.

The message for Europe's leaders and citizens is simple and abrupt: The Arctic is not up for grabs. "Through our robust Arctic foreign policy," Mr. Cannon said, "we are affirming our leadership, stewardship and ownership in the region."

Russia, it seems, is Canada's major competitor, although the European Union is also being held at a distance on account of the loudness of Russia's claims and Canada's fear that a European Union voice could overpower Canada's.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the netbook

If I read Wired more frequently, I might have come across Clive Thompson's article in the February issue, "The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time" before now. In it, he writes about how the netbook--a relatively low-powered portable computer that, instead of computing everything itself, instead sources everything to Internet-based programs--is radically altering the computer market. It all started with an attempt by one woman to come up with a cheap portable computer suitable for purchase in poor country.

The miserly constraints spurred [Mary Lou Jepson] to be fiendishly resourceful. Instead of using a spinning hard drive she chose flash memory—the type in your USB thumb drive—because it draws very little juice and doesn't break when dropped. For software she picked Linux and other free, open source packages instead of paying for Microsoft's wares. She used an AMD Geode processor, which isn't very fast but requires less than a watt of power. And as the pièce de résistance, she devised an ingenious LCD panel that detects whether onscreen images are static (like when you're reading a document) and tells the main processor to shut down, saving precious electricity.

To build the laptop, dubbed the XO-1, One Laptop per Child hired the Taiwanese firm Quanta. It's hardly a household name, but Quanta is the largest laptop manufacturer in the world. Odds are that parts of the machine on your desk, whether it's from Apple, Dell, or Hewlett-Packard, were made by Quanta—possibly even designed by Quanta. Like most Taiwanese computermakers, it employs some of the sharpest engineers on the planet. They solved many of Jepsen's most daunting engineering challenges, and by 2007, the OLPC was shaping up. The poor kids of the world would have their notebook—if not quite for $100, for not a whole lot more.

Inspired (or perhaps a bit scared) by the OLPC project, Asustek—Quanta's archrival in Taiwan and the world's seventh-largest notebook maker—began crafting its own inexpensive, low-performance computer. It, too, would be built cheaply using Linux, flash memory, and a tiny 7-inch screen. It had no DVD drive and wasn't potent enough to run programs like Photoshop. Indeed, Asustek intended it mainly just for checking email and surfing the Web. Their customers, they figured, would be children, seniors, and the emerging middle class in India or China who can't afford a full $1,000 laptop.

What happened was something entirely different. When Asustek launched the Eee PC in fall 2007, it sold out the entire 350,000-unit inventory in a few months. Eee PCs weren't bought by people in poor countries but by middle-class consumers in western Europe and the US, people who wanted a second laptop to carry in a handbag for peeking at YouTube or Facebook wherever they were. Soon the major PC brands—Dell, HP, Lenovo—were scrambling to catch up; by fall 2008, nearly every US computermaker had rushed a teensy $400 netbook to market.

Thompson suggests that, because of their cost and their high degree of functionality, and because future netbook computer users won't necessarily need to or want to use high-powered software like Photoshop, netbook computers are the wave of the future, as opposed to unnecessarily powerful computers like--say--the Toshiba Satellite laptop that I'm using to type this entry.

This interests me greatly, not only because of what it says about the future of computing--networks of relatively low-powered terminals connected to a high-powered Internet--but because of its strong similarities to the first mass computer network. I refer, of course, to the Minitel, a French computer network active from the early 1980s with millions of subscribers, a network that made use of dumb terminals connected to strong servers. I used the Minitel model myself for a global computer network in an alternate history that I wrote some years back, the Euronet. It's nice to be vindicated, much too late for the Minitel, perhaps, but not too late for myself. I like being a good futurist, or whatever you call what I did back then.