About 6 weeks ago I started walking the river trail every morning. Since the trail is about 70% stairs, it is quite the aerobic workout. While I liked the real stairs-masters, I hate working out inside on a machine, it is just boring and causes me to concentrate on the pain. This though, is like a StairsMaster 3D with smell, sound and vision generator. It is invigorating and fun, save for the occasional snake encounter.

The first morning I walked, I did 1km in 25 minutes. Now I can do 1km in 12 minutes, and this morning I did 3.5kms in 45 minutes. In 6 weeks, I have lost 10 lbs and 4″ of waist-line. It is invigorating and I feel great! I hope to lose another 20 lbs over the next two months.

The first one I lost was uncle Dave. Dave and his family moved away to New Brunswick when I was a young kid but I continued to see them a couple of times a year. They would come and visit us during the summer vacations and the Christmas holiday season,and we would go visit them every other summer or so. Dave was a wonderful fun-loving man who loved to laugh and play practical jokes. But above all, Dave loved kids. He always spent a lot of time with us and would let us do cool things, like drive his car around the campground or go swim in the local river. He treated us kids as equals so I saw him more as a big friend then as an authority figure. In a sense, Dave was the father I wished I had. My own father is a very good man and I love him, but when I was a young kid he was working 60 hours/week to provide for us and he just wasn’t very present for me. Dave was not only the cool uncle, but he was also the dream father (to me anyway, not sure how his own two kids saw him).

But Dave influenced me in a much more fundamental way. He was single-handedly responsible for instilling in me a love of science and technology. When I was about 12, he spent time with me in his workshop explaining how things like diodes, resistors, capacitors and transistors worked, and we did small projects together. That year he even bought me a Radio Shack 100 Electronic Experiments kit and a Chemistry Kit. This launched me on a path to study Applied Science in college and it was instrumental in me later becoming an Air Force pilot and then for my second career in information technology.

After I joined the Air Force and moved out west I only saw Dave every few years or so, but he nonetheless still held a special place in my heart. Dave died way too young of an unfortunate medical accident. I can still see his smily face and he obviously still influences my life to this day having shaped who I became from an early age.

The second such influential person I lost, only recently, is uncle Roger. I was never really close to Roger since he was a busy executive and he lived in Montreal and I lived in Shawinigan and then Quebec City, but we often saw each other at his lake cottage in the summer. I also helped him with his personal computer when he spent time in Quebec City on business. Roger and his wife Fleurette were the most beautiful couple I knew. Deeply in love with each other and that love transpired to everyone around them. They were the epitome of love, gentleness and tolerance, and very supportive of their own kids even when they embarked on what was at the time very controversial lifestyles that my own parents were scandalized by. Roger was also a very smart man with a thirst for knowledge, an intellectual who studied all his life. He loved nature and became an expert in mushrooms, even helping start the Montreal Mycological Society. Roger was a distant role model to me, but he was the kind of man I aspired to be.

Roger was unfortunately afflicted by Alzheimer’s disease, a horrible disease that I think is doubly tragic for someone of his intellect. They say that Alzheimer’s is far worse for the victim’s loved ones than it is for the victims themselves and I believe it. This disease slowly took away Roger from his beloved Fleurette, devastating her. The last time I saw him he didn’t even recognize me, but I will always remember his gentleness, his intelligence and his loving nature. I still aspire to be half as good a man as he was. He died a few years ago from his disease.

The third influential person I lost is uncle Fernand. Last time I saw was in October 2010 during our visit to Canada and I can tell you that the Fernand we knew and loved was gone forever. Fernand was also afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease and it was progressing very rapidly. The previous time I had seen him, two short years before, he had no short term memory left but he still had all his strength, sharp mind and fun-loving personality. Alas, he died a year later, just a couple of weeks ago.

Fernand was a simple, unassuming man and I didn’t know him much when I was a kid. I really got to know him in my 20s and 30s. He began occupying an important place in my life after I joined the Canadian Air Force. By this time Fernand was a victim of the massive closures of industries that happened in Quebec during the 80s. He was forced into early retirement while in his 50s, which was devastating to him. He also decided to leave his wife around this time, walking away from a joyless and lifeless marriage when his only daughter reached 21 (something he had actually announced he would do 7 years earlier!) Rather than feeling sorry for himself he took this opportunity to realize a life-long dream and go live on the shores of his beloved Lac des Piles. From this point on Fernand lived a simple life close to nature and with a woman he loved and who loved him back without judgment.

I admired Fernand for his courage to leave his joyless marriage despite the fact that most of his sisters disowned him for doing it. He was a picture of happiness living by the lake with his lover, even though they had very little money. They took pleasure in each other’s company and in the beautiful nature surrounding them. He led a healthier lifestyle and got by with what he had, never asking for more. He thought me the importance of love and happiness, of not wasting your life on bad relationships or the pursuit of wealth, of taking risks and of living your life for yourself and not to please others.

My wife Diane and I spent many weekends at his lake house before we got our own cottage on the lake and then many wonderful dinners in his company after that. Every time we would come visit from out-west we made sure we spent plenty of time with Fernand. I have many fond memories of night-walks in the snow, and excellent food and wine mixed with great conversations and lots of stories from Fernand’s storied life. He always expressed interest and admiration for our own globetrotting lifestyle while politely acknowledging that he preferred his own low-stress and simple life. He was an important part of the process I personally went through over several years, ultimately leading to my own decision to get out of the rat race and live a simpler but more meaningful life close to nature and my lovely wife. Fernand was more than an uncle, he was a very good friend. I was simply floored last October when I saw how quickly he deteriorated in two years. He went from a strong man with a fun-loving and bubbly personality, to a wilted-up and frail old man with the mind of a child. Our old friend Fernand had already left us then, and now he is truly gone.

This brings me to a further comment on Alzheimer’s. We mostly hear about how this horrible disease slowly deprives its victims of their memory beginning with short-term and progressing to long-term memory, eventually regressing into childhood while taking away the intellectual powers of the victim. This was poignantly depicted in the film “The Notebook”. What this film fails to show though is the physical deterioration that often accompanies the mental deterioration. We also don’t hear much about how the personality, the essence of the person slowly fades away. Seeing Fernand last October brought that home to me, really hard. And for those who still cling to the notion that the “essence” of a person is encapsulated in an eternal soul that survives us, surely, Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases should make you reconsider that position. We now know, without a shred of doubt that the essence of a person, his or her personality, intelligence, memories, values, etc., all come from the electro-chemical processes of the brain. And when these processes start breaking down, the essence of the person disappears with them.

Here’s to your memory Dave, Roger and Fernand. Your minds may have been extinguished forever, but the essence of who you were lives on in those you loved and influenced. You all had a profound influence on me that I will cherish until my own death. I can only hope to have had a similar influence on other people during my own life.

Our guide was Anne Gordon, a well known animal trainer that has done work for TV series and movies in the past. She now lives in Panama where she has married an Embera Indian and organizes tours of an Embera village. She recently started doing whale and dolphin watching tours as well. You can find out more here and here. While I don’t for one minute believe her “spiritual” stuff, or that she communicates with the whales or worse, that she can heal people over the phone by channeling ”Dolphin Energy”, Anne is nonetheless a remarkable woman that has deep knowledge and respect for the animals, especially the whales. At our request, she respectfully kept all of that “woo woo” stuff out of our trip, so don’t let her website scare you away (I nearly cancelled after reading her website).

Anne organized the whole trip including the plane tickets, the lodging, a fishing afternoon and the whole day on the catamaran with Capt. Pascal. So this was a pleasant and worry free trip. If I was to do it again though I might elect to take the 1.5 hour ferry ride to the islands. While Air Panama only takes 20 minutes to get there, you need to arrive 1 hour ahead of time and we had 2 hour delays both ways. On the ferry you might actually get to see whales on the way there too!

Our first afternoon a group of three went fishing and caught 3 large dorados (mahi mahi) and 6 mackerels. These were dropped at two different restaurants on the island (Romantica and Gerald’s) where they were cooked for us for our two dinners on the island. All 9 of us slept in the comfy Contadora Island Inn B&B.

The second day we boarded the 44′ catamaran at 9:30 ( I think we should have gone out at 8 am since we were all ready, but it was what it was). The boat is very modern, roomy, stable and comfortable. Capt Pascal is a very nice guy and he cooked us a nice lunch too. The only disadvantage of the catamaran is that it is very slow so you can’t rapidly get to the whales when you spot them. But other than that, it was the ideal platform to spend a day on the sea looking for whales while respecting their space.

Things augured well when Pascal told us he was awaken by a couple of whales that came right up to his boat in the bay where he was anchored. Only a few minutes after leaving Contadora island, we spotted a smaller boat surrounded by a group of whales so we immediately aimed for them and it took us maybe 15 minutes to get there.

Here’s one my favourites, about George W. Bush:

“He’s unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”

Great stuff.

Morning Light in Altos del Maria

What triggered me to write this is that this problem came to a climax with my house builder last week. I always liked the man because he’s generally a good honourable man and he stuck to my project even though he was losing money and going through some very difficult times. I kept recommending him despite the fact that he completed my house 1.5 year late (I’m being generous with “completed” too), because he stuck with it and always came through, eventually. I even agreed to pay for things I shouldn’t have because I knew he was having financial problems. I even paid for the materials to fix our swimming pool and only asked him to provide labour and cement. It cost me $3500 to fix a problem that was his responsibility, but that’s what I needed to do to see it get fixed.

One exception is with the wooden doors below my BBQ counter and the steel doors in the carport. He had been promising me those doors since last October. I would ask him once or twice a month when he would deliver them and the answer was always “next week” or “in two weeks”. In January he even said “they are being manufactured right now”. I recently sent him two more potential customers so you would think he would treat me better than this…

Last week I just plain had enough and sent him an email asking him to stop lying to me and tell me exactly what was going on and when he really planned to deliver the doors, if ever. If he had said he needed me to help him with the cost of materials I would have helped, in the interest of actually getting those damn doors. Even if he had told me he couldn’t delvier them, at least I could have moved on and got them from someone else. Anything would have been better than just dragging me along for 9 months.

Well I found out that while they lie constantly, they don’t view it as lying. Telling you what you want to hear is apparently just a form of optimism and to call them out on it is a great attack on their honour. He just went ballistic on me and told me that “no sabe nada de nada” (you don’t know anything about anything), he insisted that he always intended to deliver on his empty promises but that something always came up to preclude it. Nine months of that, really? How stupid does he really think I am? If that doesn’t make him a liar , then it makes him and incredibly poor planner.

Needless to say I will not be recommending him again and I will be buying my own doors from someone else.

My two favourite applications so far are Swype and Wave Launcher.

Swype is a very clever replacement keyboard. Instead of trapping on the touchscreen keys you swipe your finger through the letters that speel the word. I was very skeptical of this keyboard when I first saw it but decided to give it a try because I hate typing on a touch screen as it is very slow and error prone. After working with it for a couple of days, I am VERY impressed! Swype’s very powerful and clever algorithms figure out the right word about 99% of the time, and when it is unsure it provides a menu of different guesses, the correct word is pretty much always there. You can also teach it new words, like my name for example. Watch the videos on the website and you’ll be impressed.

Simply Trace a Path

The word “quick” was generated from tracing the path shown above in a fraction of a second, by roughly aiming to pass through the letters of the word. A key advantage to Swype is that there is no need to be very accurate, enabling very rapid text entry.

I’ve already increased my input speed from 3-4 words a minute to about 20 words a minute. I think I’m faster with Swype than I am with the keyboard on my iMac! The guy in the videos can do about 40 words a minute. That’s mighty fast! Swype gets a big 5 stars from me!!!

Wave Launcher is a clever way to access your most used applications. Just a quick swipe up the screen and a beautiful arc-shaped menu of your apps appears, you slide your finger to the app you want and release. Voila! Wave Launcher gets 5 stars too.

1. The French Government attempted to construct the canal first (in fact, it was a commercial enterprise and the government never got directly involved).

2. The French were defeated by diseases (while deadly tropical diseases were a contributing factor, this was not one of the main reasons for their defeat).

In any case, this 600 page book is a fascinating account of the story that was only possible after years of research through the archives in France, America, Colombia and Panama. It is a tale of egos, greed, power, politics, science, culture clashes and the unforgiving jungle of Panama. It is well worth a read if you have an interest in Panama, or simply like history!