Author Archives: David Truss

Airports and airplanes

Today we travel from Vancouver to Toronto to Paris to Barcelona. Including an early arrival to the airport, on one of the busiest travel days of the holiday, we will be traveling for 26 hours. Add another 9 hours on the clock to that for time zones and this makes for a looong day!

But we finally get to see our daughter, who turned 23 a couple days ago, for the first time since she moved to France. And our youngest daughter is with us, and this is our first family vacation in a few years.

We are going to spend a lot of time in airports and on airplanes… but I’m finally getting excited about the trip. And I’ve got a few episodes of a show downloaded on my iPad as well as 2 audio books on my phone. I have snacks, headphones, and AirPods, and a battery power bank to keep my devices charged. I’d like to just click my heels and arrive at my destination, but if I’m going to spend a whole day traveling, I might as well keep myself entertained.

Barcelona… here I come!

The future is now

I’ve shared Chat GPT a couple times (1, 2), and I really think that tools like this are going to create a massive shift in jobs, education, and creativity. It can been seen as both scary and exciting.

On another front, scientists have achieved ‘ignition’ in a nuclear fusion test. This is the creation of a fusion reaction where the energy output is greater than the energy input. For over a decade this was an unachievable goal, any reaction created required so much energy to produce that the costs were greater than the returns.

If you showed someone from 1995 the technology we had 25 years later in 2020, they would be impressed and amazed. I’m reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But what I’m seeing right now seems like magic.

I think the leaps in technology and ingenuity that will happen in the next 25 years will so far exceed what we saw happen in the last 25 years that it will feel more like we are 50 years in the future rather than just 25. So, buckle up and get ready for a wild ride into the future… it’s just getting started now!

Kids being kids

Last night we had a school dance. I’m at a school with only 87 students, over 50 students came. The whole thing was organized by students, there was a student DJ, and the atmosphere was as alive as if there were 250 students there.

Most kids dressed up really fancy, some were in clothes they wore at school. Most danced, some sat in small groups and talked. Very few spent time on their phones. Everyone seemed to have fun.

This is a crazy time of year. My days involve a constant flow of overlapping demands. I had a Principal’s Christmas dinner on Monday night, I had my daughter’s university showcase performance Tuesday night, and I was at the school yesterday for close to 14 hours, only leaving after helping our custodian and locking up after the last students left… but it was totally worth it to see kids being kids.

Unfashionable

I don’t have a lot of fashion sense. I never have. My sisters used to ask me if I was really going out the way I looked. When I got married I’d be heading out the house to go to an event and when I’d get down the stairs with my outfit on, my wife would just point up the stairs. Up I’d go to look in the mirror to figure out what wasn’t right and change. Sometimes she’d come with me to make suggestions. I’d listen and try to learn, but it was and still is a slow process.

Combine this unfashionable eye of mine with my complete dislike of shopping, and now, 24 years into marriage, I don’t own too many things I’ve purchased myself and my wardrobe is much nicer and easier to coordinate. But I still make choices that my wife and daughters suggest I change… and I usually do because they aren’t wrong.

I’ve seen this trend where people buy uniforms for work. They basically buy one colour of pants, then a single or up to 3 similar shades of shirts to wear every day. They just completely remove the guesswork from what to wear and they have just one outfit that they wear every day.

I would be happy doing this. I’d eliminate a choice that I don’t find easy to make. But that would involve shopping and I’m probably not going to do this any time soon. However if some time in the future you see me in the same clothes 3 or 4 days in a row, know that I’m not being unhygienic, I’ve just finally taken the plunge and reduced my wardrobe to a single or a few very simple options… but then again, my wife will still probably choose something else for me to wear. 😁

Nobody told me

Nobody told me that there would be days where all I do is go to meetings and deal with emergent issues. Or how important it would be to deal with these emergent issues immediately. Nobody told me that my priorities would be whatever other’s priorities are, and that my priorities would take a back seat on my to-do-list truck of things that need to get done.

But that is the job. It’s about getting everyone on the same truck, going the same direction, while emergent issues come at you from any and every direction. The biggest challenge: making sure you have enough gas in the tank… both metaphorically and literally.

Nobody told me there would be days like these. Strange days indeed!

Language barrier

When we lived in China we lived in ‘a small city of 6 million’, Dalian, on a peninsula on the east coast. It was not unusual for my family to hear no English spoken by anyone except us from the time we left our Canadian curriculum foreign national school on Friday until we went back to school on Monday. We couldn’t go to a restaurant unless the menu had pictures. And if you were in a store and didn’t see what you were looking for, a game of charades ensued with hand gestures and singular Chinese words coming from us rather than sentences.

Google Translate was fairly new and most Asian languages were not well translated, especially Chinese. I remember going to a grocery store to buy baking soda for my wife. I put the 2 words into Google Translate and got two Chinese characters. But on the shelf were 6 or 7 different items with some having the first character and some having something very similar to the second character, and none having both.

I asked for help and the employee couldn’t help me. She asked a coworker, and she couldn’t help me either. I was stuck. I finally bought a plastic back with a white powder that looked like baking soda and on my way home I realized that the cost of this item was less than 50 cents Canadian, and had I bought all 5 of the most likely items, it would have cost me under $3. That would have saved me 30 minutes and a lot of frustration.

Now things have changed significantly. Language translation is so much easier. People can have full-on conversations with Google or an app translating voice to text and/or voice almost instantaneously. These tools will even correct themselves when the context of the sentence is recognized. For instance, I think ‘baking’ and ‘soda’ were two words that were translated for me independently, and so the words were loosely translated to ‘cooking in the oven’ and ‘bubbly drink’. Now translators know that these words next to each other mean something different than when the words are used in a different context.

All this to say that the days of language being a major barrier to basic communication are over. I can think of a lot of frustrating conversations and miscommunications I had in my 2 years of living in China that would not have happened if we went now rather than over a decade ago. I think of the conversations I wanted to have but couldn’t. I think of the questions I had that were just left unanswered.

Sure there were a few magical moments where we overcame the language barrier and made special connections, but these moments pale in comparison to what we could have said and done with the tools available today. While I hold some nostalgia about the way things were for us back then, I think I’d still prefer it if we had the language conversion tools of today back then.

Travel plans

I find it odd how much time we spend planning to go away. We have a cat that needs attending to, and fortunately we have a nephew who will be staying at our place while away. There are flights and places to stay to arrange. There is the packing, and the planning of things to do.

Holiday getaways are wonderful things, and I feel fortunate to be able to enjoy the great trip to Spain we have planned, but I don’t get excited by the planning and prep work the way I see others get. I don’t know how to ‘do’ anticipatory excitement. But I love arriving at a new destination. I love waking up in the morning in a foreign place knowing that the sights and sounds of the day will be different and new. I enjoy the flavours of new foods.

Now it’s time to start packing so that I’m not in a scramble the night before we leave… and hopefully a little excitement will creep into the tasks I need to do.

Convenience at a cost

Yesterday I went to the Apple Store and purchased a new computer. I knew what I wanted but was talked into buying the larger version which came standard with the upgrade I was getting with the smaller one. The price difference happened to be the same as my educator’s discount but it did cost me a bit more for memory differences between the two sizes. Still, I left the store really happy, and excited about the added screen real estate. All said and done, the whole exchange took less than 20 minutes.

If that was the kind of exchange between the sales clerk and myself that I received at all stores, I’d probably shop in stores more often. But most exchanges end up being like my Canadian Tire experience, and this makes me not want to shop. So I do most of my shopping online. I order from the convenience of my home and the products arrive at my home. I am my own sales clerk. I don’t need any shopping bags at the till.

While grocery stores, and hair salons, and pharmacies will probably survive over the next 20 years, I’m not sure how many retail stores are going to survive when more and more people choose to shop online? Walking in the mall last night I looked at a few stores and wondered how much profit they could possibly make after paying for rent, power, and staff. Then I wondered what our economy would be like without these jobs, if most retail stores no longer needed all their staff?

Shopping from home is really convenient, but it will change the way our shopping malls and plazas look. Maybe the cost of this convenience will be far greater than the convenience is worth.

Be invisible

Yesterday I said in a post about our school’s open house, “I have a saying I share with the tech crew which is, ‘It’s your job to be invisible’.”

A few years ago we had Alvin Law visit our school. When he arrived our tech crew set him up with a wireless microphone and had everything set up just as he specified. He did a truly amazing performance and after the show, after the tech crew helped take off the microphone, Alvin said to me, “Dave, what kind of a school are you running here? It feels pretty special.”

Then he said, “I present to multi-million dollar companies, like IBM and Microsoft, and I have never had a tech crew treat me so well. I’ve never had my sound work so well. I’ve had presentations where they are paying me a lot of money to present to 1,000 people and they can’t get my sound to work. There wasn’t a single issue with my sound today, it was perfect.”

That’s the sign of a good tech crew… they are invisible. When a microphone doesn’t work, people notice the tech crew. They are also noticed when a microphone is too loud, or there is feedback, or an off stage mic isn’t turned off, or when the lighting doesn’t actually light up the performers. When these things happen, the crew become part of the performance. When everything works as planned, they are invisible.

When a tech crew does their job well, they are invisible.

iHub Open House

Last night was Inquiry Hub‘s yearly Open House to promote our school and help Grade 8 students and parents learn a bit more about us. After 2 years of only hosting it online, it was wonderful to provide a face-to-face experience again. We had about 150-160 people join us at the school and about 60 follow along from home on our livestream.

I threw a little curveball into my part of the presentation when I asked a former student to come up and tell us about his experience moving from our school to university. I knew he might be coming to the event but I didn’t see him and ask him if he would say something until about 3 minutes before the show started.

He did a great job, and I knew it would be valuable for him to share this experience because as part of the presentation there was a video where a current Grade 9 asked a current Grade 12 if she felt prepared for university. But how is a Grade 12 to know when she hasn’t made the transition yet? So asking a student who made the transition and successfully graduated from Computer Science at UBC was, to me, a good thing to add to the show.

What’s neat about our school is that students present so often as part of their experience, I knew this student could share his experience with short notice and do an excellent job. And sure enough he did. That said, I also knew that I was causing panic for a few of the student organizers for going ‘off script’. I actually mentioned that at the start of my talk, before introducing our former student.

The pride that these students all take in their school is so high and the idea that I’d go rogue and change plans a bit was simply not part of the show. Still it went off well and the rest of the show went exactly as planned. That’s not by mistake, there were several rehearsals and presentations and technicals went as expected. I have a saying I share with the tech crew which is, “It’s your job to be invisible.”And indeed it was. More on that tomorrow, I’m just thrilled to say that our students did an amazing job not just with the presentation but with engaging with the audience afterwards, sharing some of their inquiries, and showcasing the kind of projects done at our school.

It was a special night!