I was watching Finding Nemo the other night with our “youth of today”.  I’d only seen it for the first time late last year – about 9 years after it was released.  That’s par for the course.  This was the second time and I was enjoying it just as much.  Nemo is taken, dad swims after him and has one misadventure after another.  After escaping sharks, a torpedo hits a mine and a large explosion ensues.

A bubble roils the surface of the ocean.  Two birds watch it.  One of them says, “Nice.”  Then it flies away.

The first time I watched the film, I laughed at that one word.  The delivery is excellent.  The second time I heard it, I laughed as well but this time out of a new understanding.  I was hearing it differently this time.

My first reaction had been – shall I dare say it – that of a “typical boy”.  The bubble was meant to be understood as a fart, causing much hilarity to ensue.  But I took the “Nice” as a compliment!  While a boy might twist his face at a smell or sound, there is a deep-seated admiration of another who can cause disturbances or other mischief.

It was with that in mind when, the second time, I heard “Nice” as a reproach, and the subsequent departure as an expression of that distaste.  That’s a more mature, girl or boy, response to something a bit disgusting or rude.

Words are complex tools.  We think we’re being abundantly clear when we express an idea, only to find that it is misinterpreted or misunderstood due to a context or mindset we can’t control.  Visual cues can help offer the speaker a chance to try a second explanation, so long as there is time and the first one hasn’t gone completely awry.  An e-mail may seem clear but you don’t really know what the reaction is on the other end, until you get a response.

One thing I notice when speaking to some lawyers is their safe way of speaking, without committing to one thing or another.  The vagueness that is caught up in their language can leave it open to interpretations that they may not have meant.  The ensuing misunderstandings can result in creating unnecessary conflict.  On the other hand, I spoke with a lawyer recently who was very precise both in the words used and in his manner, and his clarity struck me.

It – and the two birds – came to mind in another conversation.  We were discussing something that had been said and the demoralizing effect it had had on the recipient.  Sometimes we have the opportunity to choose a negative meaning or a positive one.  We often find what we are looking for.  I may overthink it, but I tend to look at the context and that helps me to keep perspective – and not overreact – to something that may not be as loaded a comment as it seems.  That was my advice too – and to never react to anything on a Friday! – but those two birds will almost certainly reassert themselves in my own thoughts when faced with ambiguous comments.

When Google announced it was wrapping up Reader, I flipped immediately to Tiny Tiny RSS and decided also to go back to Mozilla Firefox.  That experiment has ended.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with the Web browser but there were a couple of irritants that made me decide to go back to Chrome.  One was a repeated problem with Firefox Sync – where your bookmarks, etc. are kept in sync – that I was unable to figure out how to solve.  Another was on my tablet, where Firefox was ignoring the space bar so I was having to double tap it to type in a search term.

Long story short, I’m back on Chrome.  But still using Tiny Tiny RSS.  One of the nice features of Tiny Tiny is that it has built in support for Firefox.  When you find an RSS feed, Tiny Tiny can be configured to appear in the drop down list of RSS readers and, if you want, be the default.  Again, replicating behavior common with Google Reader.

This is easy to do with Google Chrome, if you know where to put the information.  I found it on one of the support forums.

The first thing to do is to go to a feed and have it prompt you to subscribe.  You should see something like this (below) with Bloglines (!?!) listed as the default RSS reader in the drop down menu.

Click on the drop down and select the Manage option to add your Tiny Tiny RSS server to the list (and remove the others).  You can see that “Whelan Tiny Tiny” is already in the list.

The new screen that appears gives you a list of all of the possible feed readers you use.  You can delete the ones you don’t want (select the name and click the REMOVE button) or leave them.

To add yours, click the Add button, give it a name (first box) and then put this in the second one:

http://your-tiny-tiny-server-domain-name/public.php?op=subscribe&feed_url=%s

If you have a secure connection, you should put the “s” in after the http:

https://your-tiny-tiny-server-domain-name/public.php?op=subscribe&feed_url=%s

I think it’s obvious but replace “your-tiny-tiny-server-domain-name” with YOUR domain name or server name:  localhost, yourname.com, whatever.  Click the SAVE button and return to the list of feed readers.  You can close the tab or window now and go back to the feed subscription page.

Now you should be able to select your Tiny Tiny RSS server from the list and – if you check the box – set it as the default RSS reader.

April was a hectic month for a lot of reasons.  Somehow I missed being quoted in an article in the Canadian Lawyer magazine.  The article – Maintaining client confidentiality in a mobile world – actually meshes well with a presentation I justed posted over here.  Here is the meat of what I said:

David Whelan has explored many of the options and issues surrounding them, from the technical perspective. Whelan is the manager of legal information with the Law Society of Upper Canada and author of Practice Law in the Cloud. He points out there are a variety of ways for lawyers to work remotely while having access to their office files. “A law firm using a virtual private network, a virtual desktop tool like GoToMyPC, or even a personal cloud tool like Tonido, could leave their files and data on their internal computers and access them from outside their office,” he says. “Cloud computing shifts the responsibilities. If a law firm is enabling remote access to internal computers and files, then they bear the responsibility of ensuring that the technology is implemented to limit unauthorized access. If they put it in the cloud, that technology obligation shifts to the cloud provider. In either case, the lawyer needs strong passwords, needs to understand what those implementing the technology/security are doing, and, of course, continues to have his professional obligations.”

Lawyers who want to have a mobile practice can develop their technology in a variety of ways, using a number of free and fee-based tools.  They can opt for cloud-based resources or they can leave it all in their office.  The fundamentals – passwords, encryption, staff supervision – are the same in either place.

Funnily enough, I’m not sure that the Thomson Reuters Canadian Lawyer people know that the book they mention is a Thomson Reuters Carswell publication!  Nice product placement but inadvertent, I think.

Here are photographs that we took on our 6 day trip through Iceland in 2013.  They’re incorporated into a broader account of the trip, but I’ve broken them out since there are so many.

This is part of a set of posts on a trip to Iceland by our family of 5.

Saturday was our last full day in Iceland and we were finally getting the hang of the slow start in the morning.  We had visited the museums the previous day and today’s big activity was whale watching.  We walked through the city a different way today, away from the Laugarvegur main street and instead up the hill towards the Hallgrimskirkja, or Hallgrim’s church, near our apartment.

We continued our walk west, which took us down past the Tjornin Lake again.  We came prepared today and emptied a bag of bread in small bits for the feasting bird hordes on the water.  Once the bread was gone, we headed on across the town and up the hill on the west side above the harbor.  The Catholic church’s bishopric is based here.  They ran a school as well until 2005 but it is now privately run, although it is still located on church land.

We slowly made our way down to the harbor and picked up our tickets and confirmed where we should board the boat.  We then walked back into town and had a hearty lunch at Geysir.  It was our first real restaurant meal and it was worth the splurge.  I must admit I was a bit worried that someone might lose their lunch from being sick on the boat, but in the end no-one had any problem on the boat.

Whale Watching

A trip to Iceland can be tricky for families with smaller children.  There are plenty of interesting physical things to see in Iceland – waterfalls, glaciers, volcanic remnants – and many interesting museums.  But there are some activities that might be fun as a family that are limited by age.  We had come up with a short list of things we’d like to try and one by one had to eliminate them.  Hikes on glaciers have a minimum age of 10-12.  Horse rides have a similar minimum age requirement.  I’m not complaining about those sorts of restrictions – no-one, including parents, would want to get started on an activity like that only to find it wasn’t appropriate – but it meant we needed to find other things.  One of the remaining activities on our wishlist was to go whale watching.  It’s easy for the whole family and having both enclosed and open decks, means pretty much everyone should enjoy themselves.

We booked over the Internet for a specific day and then picked up our tickets on the pier.  The company we used blogs about their sightings but we didn’t really have any idea whether we’d be fortunate to see anything.  In a way, part of the adventure was just to be on a boat going out towards the ocean.  We all had our coats and hats as we were assuming it would be cold at sea.

The boats were remarkably steady, without any of the roll that I would have expected.  The company sent out two boats together and there were about a half dozen boats from this and other companies on the water at the same time.  Our boat had a full complement of passengers, most of whom headed topside as soon as we left the harbor.

There was nothing to see except the other boats, the occasional gull, and of course the lovely views of Snaefellsjokull to the north and Reykjavik to the east.  After about 40 minutes, the staff spotted whales and we were off to the races.  Whale watching is a lot of hurry up and wait but I was surprised how often we saw something.  In the end, our boat watched 4 humpback whales moving through the water, sometimes quite close to the boat.

Humpback whale near Elding boat Hasfulan near Reykjavik, Iceland

It was definitely a high point for our trip.  To be honest, it was nice to have some photographic evidence of the whales, but mostly I just watched them, and for the signs that the staff were calling out.  After we got back to our apartment – and collapsed again! – it was interesting to look at a picture of a humpback whale and realize how little of it we’d seen above the surface!

The Pearl and Home

Sunday was our last day and not a full one.  We definitely took it easy.  Well, most of us.  My wife was up early and packing while the rest of us eventually emerged.  We cleared out the refrigerator and slowly worked over the remnants that had survived previous meals, polishing off the last of the delicious skyr among other things.

We packed the car and drove down to Tjornin Lake one more time, feeding the birds again.  It was still early on a Sunday morning, so it was mostly children and parents and a quite boisterous bunch of birds! There was one more sight on our list before we finally headed south to Keflavik for our plane home.

The Pearl – Perlan in Icelandic – is a building with a dome sitting atop four hot water storage tanks.  We picked it for two reasons.  First, it would be a good place to have another sit down meal and second, it was home to the Saga Viking Museum.  This one’s a bit too far to walk from where we were staying, although there is probably public transport to it.  The museum has wax figures and depict the Viking settlement of Iceland, focusing on a number of particularly significant figures.  Some are historically significant, like Snorri Sturluson.  Others, like Freydis Eiriksdottir, are notorious for other reasons.  Freydis is thought to have been with the settlers of Vinland (Newfoundland, Canada) and frightened off natives during an attack.

In any event, the Saga Museum is a great depiction of fights, plagues, a bit of blood and gore and a different look at Viking history in Iceland.  We thoroughly enjoyed it.  Just as at the National Museum, there were some clothes to try out, including full chain mail.

We climbed back in the car and headed south.  It was an easy drive to Keflavik and the airport is very manageable.  In no time, with a wait in line at the Iceland Air counters, we had checked our bags and heading for the gate.  The airport is being renovated so there was nowhere to sit but we just sagged against the walls and waited for our flight to be called.

I looked at my notes but nothing remarkable must have happened on the flight home.  It was a daylight flight so that we took off during the day and, with the four hour change, arrived back in Canada in the early evening.  We found our bags, learned that the train to the parking lot wouldn’t be working for a few months, and rode a bus instead.  It was an exhausting 6 days but we’ve spent many weeks since remarking on the variety of experiences we had in Iceland.

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