Colin's Blog

I don’t do New Year Resolutions. It’s just a thing I don’t do. However, I do want to do a few things differently in 2012 than I did in 2011. One of those things is NOT sitting at my desk for 8 hours a day (in addition to the 3 hours a day I sit in my car). My bum has had enough.

I decided to go for a fifteen minute walk every day at lunch time. Problem is that I find walks boring. I find myself just trying to get from point A to point B as efficiently as possible – staring at my Blackberry to pass the time while trying not to bump into anything. I could tell that this daily walk thing would go nowhere quickly.

Enter my rekindled interest in photography – thanks to access to a proper camera. I realized that if I took my camera with me, I could keep the boredom at bay while honing my skills. Basically, I’d be going on a photowalk by myself. Neato.

In order to keep myself from just filling SD cards everyday (and doing nothing with the photos)  and to ensure I was actually practicing and not just “spraying and praying” I came up with a few rules:

• No more than five exposures per walk
• Manual exposure and manual focus only
• No photo review on the walk
• Post at least one photo per week

Because my shooting rules are so strict, I’ve allowed myself free-reign in post-processing. This way I get to practice my Photoshop skillz as well. :)

So, without further ado, here are today’s images:

A quick update about our upcoming trip to Malawi:

• I’m now officially a “co-leader” of the study tour – which means that the dozen or so people we are taking will be my responsibility should anything go awry while we are travelling. All of the pre-arrangements are thankfully someone else’s responsibility! The coolest thing about this is that the other “co-leader” is my very good friend (and mentor of sorts) Rev. Ted Creen, recently retired from St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Owen Sound.  I’ve known Ted for nearly thirty years and I am so excited to be sharing this experience with him.
• As I mentioned in the last blog post, the purpose of the trip is learning. This is not a mission trip in the traditional sense. Malawi may be a little short on fuel these days, but they’re hardly short of available labour. Flying halfway around the world to erect a building that could instead be built by Malawians (thus providing income) doesn’t make much sense.  Instead, the purpose of the trip is learn – in an intensive way – about the work that the PCC does in Malawi. We will be hosted by our mission staff there and will visit the many projects that Canadian Presbyterians support directly including orphanages, shelters, etc. The trip will also include a weekend “home visit” with a Malawian family.
• There are three Canadian Presbyterian families currently serving in Malawi. You can learn more about them and their work (and about life in Malawi) on their blogs:
• Mike and Debbie Burns
• Todd and Annika Statham
• Glenn and Linda Inglis

Stay tuned for more updates leading up to the trip.

The relatively tiny country of Malawi - often called “The Warm Heart of Africa” – has always been a part of my family’s story.

In 1965, just a year after Malawi gained its independence from Great Britain, my grandfather accepted a  school administration position at Blantyre Secondary School in Malawi’s largest city. His appointment was part of a program of Canada’s Department of External Affairs – the first such program to assist the fledgling country.   At the same time, my grandmother accepted a teaching position at St. Andrew’s Secondary School – now known as St. Andrew’s International High School.

So, at thirteen years old, my mother and her younger sister and brother found themselves in the heart of the dark continent.

The stories have been told many times over the years – with sometimes varying details: the time an elephant snacked on the thatch roof, the time a gecko fell in the pudding, the time my aunt – peering through her camera’s viewfinder – shouted “just another second!” as a disgruntled rhino charged their Land Rover. Thankfully, the driver ignored her. [these are my memories of these stories - I make no claims of accuracy]

In exactly six months, my wife Arminta and I will set off on our own Malawian adventure!

The Presbyterian Church in Canada (where I happen to work) does a considerable amount of work in Malawi. In addition to funding several projects through PWS&D, we have anywhere from five to ten staff in the country working with our partner, the Blantyre Synod of the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP).

We will be travelling with several other Presbyterians from across Canada on a two-week “study tour” of Malawi in and around Blantyre.

We are beyond excited about this trip. While both of have traveled overseas before, neither of us have been to Africa – and we haven’t really traveled at all since our honeymoon a decade ago – and that was just to Maine, so it doesn’t really count.

I’ll likely blog more about this as the time gets nearer, but now that it is all confirmed, I wanted to make the “official” announcement.

It’s a big week for Facebook. With their annual developer conference coming up, they’ve rolled out a few new features including “Smart Friend Lists” which I hadn’t even had a chance to write about here before today’s HUGE news: you can now subscribe to a personal profile’s public updates without having to friend them.

Here’s how it works. As you browse around the site, you’ll notice that some users have a button at the top of their profile that says ‘Subscribe’. Click it, and you’ll start seeing that user’s status updates in your News Feed, just as if you were their Facebook friend. But there’s a big difference: unlike normal Facebook friends, the people you subscribe to don’t have to approve your subscription request, and there’s no limit on how many people can subscribe to any given user.
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Of course, Facebook has offered a similar feature called Pages for years now, which was meant for nearly the same thing (you’ll find that many journalists and politicians have already created Facebook Pages… because that’s what Facebook told them to do). The difference here, Facebook says, is that users no longer have to maintain two separate entities; they can just use the site’s sharing settings to decide which content they want to share very broadly, and what will only be shared with friends.

via Facebook Launches Twitter-Like ‘Subscriptions’, Lets You Share With Unlimited Users | TechCrunch.

continue reading…

I tried twice this summer to teach my almost 6-year-old to ride her new bike without training wheels. Both outings were epic failures leaving both of tired and frustrated.

Imagine my envy when I came across this little story from one my favourite parenting bloggers…

..at the tender age of three years and 10 months, he just learned how to ride his bike without training wheels.

I’m super proud of him, but actually, I can’t really take any credit for teaching him.

The only person who taught Nico is Nico. Seriously. Other than that last twenty minutes or so this morning, when my oldest son Marco and I repeatedly yelled, “Pedal!!!” and “Keep moving!!!”, no one taught Nico any bike riding skills.

via How I Didn’t Teach My Three-Year-Old Son to Ride His Bike Without Training Wheels | Playborhood.

The latest incarnation of a decades-long collision of “cool” and “Christianity,” hipster Christianity is in large part a rebellion against the very subculture that birthed it. It’s a rebellion against old-school evangelicalism and its fuddy-duddy legalism, apathy about the arts, and pitiful lack of concern for social justice.

via Hipster Faith | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction.

I struggle with what this writer calls “hipster churches” and I can’t exactly put my finger on why, but here are a few thoughts: continue reading…

photo credit: Mark Donovan

Last night the inevitable happened. My Vancouver Canucks (of whom I’ve been a fan for over 15 years) lost Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals. I say inevitable because a storybook ending to a storybook season would have been too good to be true. When the Canucks finally win a Cup, it will be in a year that they finish seventh or eighth in the Western Conference. continue reading…

I decided quite a while ago that I would keep partisan politics off this blog – for a variety of reasons. This post is consistent (just barely) with that policy because it deals more with the philosophy of liberalism rather than the politics of the Liberal party. More than that, I feel compelled to share this as widely as possible because I think we’ve managed to forget – in only a few weeks or months – what liberalism really means. To be fair, I think we’ve also conveniently forgotten what conservatism and democratic socialism mean. continue reading…

The first two posts about this issue are here: here and here.

A very quick update to report that two WRDSB Trustees got in touch with on Friday and asked me on Friday to form a delegation to the Board to see if we can restore some common sense to the boundaries. If your family attends Chalmers and you would rather walk to Stewart Avenue than bus to Myers Road, please get in touch!

During one of those conversations, I was told that there is another group of parents who are upset about being bused to Stewart Avenue when they could be walking to Myers Road! Someone seriously dropped the ball on this accommodation review!

Update: The Cambridge Times published a guest column that I submitted last week: http://www.cambridgetimes.ca/opinion/columns/article/963483–boundaries-needs-to-be-revisited

If you haven’t read my first post on the new school controversy, you can find it here: http://colincarmichael.ca/a-new-school/

Earlier this week we attended a public meeting that we hoped would shed some light on the new school boundary situation. I honestly hoped that in talking to the school board planners that some previously unknown bit of info would surface that would make it all logical.

Didn’t happen that way. In fact, when I pointed out my concerns, the response I got from the planner was “you’re right, it’s not ideal.” Wow. Unfortunately, despite that acknowledgment of the non-sensical boundaries, there was a definite “nothing we can do” attitude. No invitation for alternative solutions or offers to be accommodating to certain neighbourhoods.

I’ve always felt that one should never complain about a problem without being willing to proffer a solution. I do not claim to be a “planner” or to take into account all of the intricacies of urban planning but here is how I would approach the situation…

Below is a map of southeast Galt with Stewart Ave school and the new school marked. I’ve overlaid a 1km radius on each school – which I think is a reasonable distance to expect kids to walk.

click for larger version

You can see that most of the kids in southeast Galt fall into one or the other of these 1km walking zones. There are, of course, those which fall out of the radius, and those within the radius but whose actual walk is too far. These children could easily be picked up by the buses bringing the rural kids into town from North Dumfries township.

Can it really be that easy? I doubt it. If it were that easy, the school board would have just done this in the first place. There must be, however, some middle ground – some way to ensure that kids aren’t being bused to one school when they could be walking to another.

if you’re interested in seeing the current boundaries compared to the board’s proposed ones, I’ve uploaded them here: http://colincarmichael.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/newandoldboundaries1.jpg