Pioneer on the Internet – Sean Gursky

Our London trip is a week away and things are starting to take shape. We have a weekend in Marseille booked and are getting an idea of what we want to do in and around London. We are not sure what we will do first, if we will attack Cambridge, Brighton and then London or if it will be a what we feel like in the morning situation, but we will be sure to make the most of this trip.

I downloaded “London Tube”, an iPhone app that displays a map of the Tube system, which also includes subway line routes and directions to stations. It even shows bus lines so if we are stuck at a station I should be able to figure out how to get to an area we are more familiar with. I do not feel fully prepared for the trip but I feel armed with the tools to survive.

Until I saw this!

The young people laughed when the ATM asked them if they required “some moolah for ya sky rocket”. The machine, in Spitalfields, was one of five Cockney cash dispensers from East London to Barnet that began dispensing “moolah” yesterday morning.

Seriously? I do not plan on using an ATM while there, but if I do I may be using one that will be dispensing linguistic sass? It may be bad enough that I am in a strange part of town where people sew hundreds of pearls to their clothes, but I won’t be able to understand the English words I am reading?

Also from that article, to make matters worse there was this quote:

“It’s complete pants”

Pants? What? Is that a good thing or bad? These British expressions are going to be the comical end of me.

I had a hot dog on the weekend. Usually this is not cause for a whole post, but this was more than a hot dog, it was a Fat Frank hot dog! My plight with Fat Frank’s has been long and arduous. It started in June when Cindy and I walked to Fat Frank’s on Whyte Ave and found them closed.

Fat Franks is closed!

Other trips down Whyte Ave were greeted with a closed Frank shack. In a cruel sense of mockery, the times I had already eaten or it was not hot dog o’clock Fat Franks would be open. I have seen the small Frank stations around Edmonton but was never in a situation to try one…until Saturday!

Jenna and I were running errands on Saturday and after a morning that had trips to AMA and Mountain Equipment Co-op we needed some supplies at Canadian Tire. It was early afternoon, several hours since we had breakfast and in the shadows of the entrance stood a magician commanding a portable Fat Frank’s stand. Like an oasis in the Sahara, I had a Fat Frank.

It may not have been a gourmet style one that you would find on Whyte Ave, but it was still delicious. Perhaps after having my first Fat Frank my luck will change and the next time I take a walk down Whyte Ave they will be open.

The MIT Media Lab released something called Personas Friday. I saw this on TechCrunch, and immediately thought of Wordle, except this takes you as a source of the words.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

I was curious how Personas saw my identity. Since I have a “Sean Gerski” doppelganger and have recently been wondering about my online identify I thought this was a good test. Obviously “online” was the front runner, I am surprised that “Illegal” was as large as it was, however I have no idea what that is referring.

I see that “Politics” and “Religion” are the same size too; you can draw whatever social commentary between that you would like. I took the words from Personas and turned it into a Wordle here.

Two weeks from now we will be in Wee Britain. Yeah, I am just as surprised as you are. Usually we plan any trip we take for several months, especially one that involves air travel, but England came together in under 24 hours.

For the last few months we have talked about going to England in September. However when Jenna was unable to get confirmation for her vacation we began to doubt if she would get any time off at all and started to build a contingency plan. On Tuesday she got confirmation for some key days covered by vacation, we found a cheap flight courtesy of Canadian Affair, I got my vacation approved and the rest is history.

We are able to get away with planning a trip so soon because we will be staying with family while out there. What are we going to do out there? No idea! But London/England seems like a big enough country we could find enough to do while there, we may even venture over to Scotland, Vienna, Rome or Marseilles. Either way, it should be a great trip and because we don’t have that long to wait until we leave it’s easy to get real excited for it.

The Trip
Short Version: I went camping. There was no mustard.

Long Version: I went back country camping and experienced ultimate highs and lows. I was in the bushes for nearly ninety hours and had a fantastic time with Gord and Tyler. I could stretch this post out, carefully detailing the trip, but I will leave that to Gord to do. My post will act as a Coles Notes of what transpired.

Thursday started out with a 3 hour and 45 minute drive to the trail head of the route we would take to Landslide Lake. We had built a large fire, roasted hot dogs and drank beer. This was the kind of camping I know how to do. However Friday morning would introduce me to what back country camping was really like and I had one of the most unpleasant and miserable experiences of my life. I was cold, wet, hungry and pain was starting to develop in my shoulders. Somehow, by the simple act of walking, I pulled my groin so I felt each step. If I was able to walk it I would have been on Death’s Door in minutes.

In the rain we sought refuge, set up camp, got warm and had a nap. By 5PM we had our first meal of the day, my camera still operated after the hike and I could feel my spirits lifting. I was ready to try this back country camping thing again.

The sun was out and Saturday was the highlight of the day with a 2.5 hour day hike to Landslide Lake. I broke my fishing rod in the process of snagging a whale, Ogopogo or a bear. The story changes depending on who you asked. Tyler and Gord did not fair much better with multiple line tangles and stubborn fish. We left the lake early as we could see clouds roll in over the distance and rain was not something we wanted to get caught in again.

A cup of coffee, a fire and a hot meal are wonderful things while out in the elements and each one added to the enjoyment of the trip. On Sunday we hiked the remaining 3.5 hours back to the car, our packs lighter than on Friday, we set off with our feet dry and we all had stories to tell. I began to think this was something I would do again. At the end of the trip my feet had multiple blisters, both groin muscles were sore, my left knee could not bend without pain and my back and shoulders were stiff; all of this seems par for the course.

Jean Farewell
The trip could not have been possible without my jeans. I was told to bring one pair of jeans for the trip and live in them. I lived every last minute of their life from Thursday to Sunday. They survived rain, mud, a hole caused by fire, several treatments of duct tape and hours away from the car the backside ripped, adding an oddly comfortable breeze to my stride.

The jeans were not going into the wash, they went straight into the garbage and proudly served their purpose right to the end.

In March my Project 365 photos, custom images and blog posts were eaten by 1and1. It took several weeks to go through the grieving process. I still find the missing images on my three years of Project 365 a sore spot, but eventually I came to terms that my blog posts would be gone but I would pick up the pieces and start again.

There was the possibility that the site could be recovered, even in part, but I did not want to get my hopes up that it would play out. Thankfuly, with the assistance of a few co-workers (Keith and Brent) they got to work on recovering posts through Yahoo’s web cache.

What followed was work that spanned several months as basic HTML pages were parsed with PHP and formatted into an XML document that WordPress could easily import. I understand the words but the process baffles me. It started with using Yahoo’s API to save the pages and then put them through the ringer to come out shiny and clean on the other end.

I am not sure how many posts I had over the years, I thought it number over 500, however, the magic that Keith and Brent worked was able to salvage over 180 going as far back as my first post in October 2005.

I have relied on my blog archive to tell me what I was doing this time last year or to remember a specific concert review. It wasn’t until those posts were gone that I realized how much this site meant to me, and that is why I will continue to update it.

Import WordPress

1. Importing post Velvet Mafia…
2. Importing post Studying Hard…
3. Importing post B-a-n-a-n-a-s…
…
182. Importing post My Right Keys…
183. Importing post My Not So Perfect Storm…
184. Importing post My Music Radio…

All done. Have fun!

This was a beautiful sight to behold. A huge thank you goes out to Keith and Brent for their effort on this, because without them Pioneer on the Internet would still be a shadow of its former self.

Small World
The Internet got a little bit smaller for me on Monday when Sean Gerski made a tweet about finding me online. The spelling on the last name is a little different, but phonetically we share the exact same name. Needless to say I awoke Tuesday morning to quite the surprise in my Inbox!

We are now e-friends and will be plotting to take over the world as only similar in name people often do.

Tube Steak Challenge
Last Friday my Tube Steak Challenge took another leap forward.

The Ice Dragons celebrated our summer hockey season with a wrap party at Gord’s where beer and food was provided from the team pot of our subs. Even though my method for remembering the number of dogs I consumed with the caps of beer bottles didn’t work out as planned I reached double digits before the end of the month.

I will be joining Gord and Tyler on a hike in the wilderness later this week up to Landslide Lake and there are hot dogs on the menu so I hope to return from the trip and have a a few more tubed steaks under my belt.

What is in a name? When it comes to marketing a brand or an identity the consensus is to come up with something and stick with it. Over the last few months I have been struggling with my online identity, but it has recently come to a head. Ask someone what my Last.fm profile name is, chances are three suggestions will come back. That is not how you stay brand consistent.

In 2005 I registered seagurs.com and used that as my online profile, however the use of the name was very limited. Besides the website it was only used as my Gamertag on Xbox360 and, most recently, on the Playstation PSN network. Could I really be identified as ‘seagurs’ elsewhere? Would it be a more appropriate and identifiable online identity than I realized?

For almost every other site or account I would go with ‘gursky’. It is an obvious nickname, usually unused when I register it on other sites. When Facebook launched vanity URL’s for user profile pages I began to wonder how I should be identified online. Would I go with ‘seagurs’, ‘gursky’ or something else? In the end I decided to go for something generic, but accurate name and claimed ‘seangursky‘.

The purpose of this post, and the reason behind this whole identity crisis, began when I was looking to create my custom URL on Flickr. Instead of being identified by numbers and letters I could use a name. I have been a member of Flickr for as long as I had a domain name but never knew they released custom URL’s. I was late to the gold rush but I had the intentions of registering ‘gursky‘. However, someone with a screen name not of gursky beat me to it.

What was I to do? This is Facebook all over again, do I go with ‘seagurs’ or ‘seangursky’ or something else? Ultimately I went with ‘seangursky‘ and began to wonder if I made the right choice.

I can change my Flickr screen name to reflect my custom URL, but that feels like I am giving up on an identity battle, however it is confusing to have a screen name different from the custom URL. Facebook, Flickr and Last.fm all have usernames that cannot be changed; but only last.fm is without my given name and just stands as ‘gursky’.

Only a few sites will allow me to change my name (like Twitter), but I guess the question is this: If the site allows it, should I move my identity over to ‘seangursky’? Or should there be a conscience split where social networking sites have one name but the rest don’t? Is it easy to define what is a social networking site and what isn’t?

I am at a crossroad. No matter which direction I go there will be old left overs (Xbox 360 and PSN under ‘seagurs’ and Facebook, Flickr and Last.fm under variations of my name) but which path is the right one to take?

I do not have an attachment to ‘seagurs’. It is a convenient combination of my first and last name, but is that enough to making it more prominent? Is the full name necessary? I have come to grips that I will never be the only ‘gursky’ online so perhaps this is how I can separate myself from them?

The Heritage Festival is a wonderful yearly event where you can experience other cultures through dance, food and history. With all of these cultural pavilions around me and $20 worth of tickets at my disposal to try something new, I could have eaten new food for the whole day. But I go and have a lefse dog from the Scandinavian tent.

It tasted like a normal hot dog, not the BBQ or flame roasted style I am familiar with. However, I can now say that my Tube Steak Challenge has expanded me as a person and cultured me a little more on how snouts and entrails are presented in other countries.

Heritage Festival: A great place to try a different type of hot dog.

I try to avoid posting the ‘flavor of the week’ videos but this one really stood out to me.

On November 9, 2007 Christoph Rehage set off to walk across China. While on his journey he photographed his hair and beard growth over the year (which is documented here). He put in over 4,500KM solely on foot and put together a fantastic video of his hair growth over that time.

There are numerous ‘photo a day’ videos but this one really stood out to me because of how creative the pictures were, the soundtrack he used and how unruly he looked after a year.

I can’t help but feel a sense of deep respect for what Christoph accomplished with this video. The walk he did alone is worth being commended for but the artistic result is amazing. I have photographed a month of growing a playoff beard and have nearly three years of doing ‘photo a day’ and I can only hope to capture something as remarkable as that with these challenges.

Watch the video here, you won’t regret it.