Last week we went sailing in the Gulf Islands in southern British Columbia. It was the first longer trip on my new boat Liberty and I had been looking forward to it. My sailboat is quite spacious, with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms (the boat sleeps 8 people in total), so next to Grace, Scott and Elaine I also brought my parents along on this trip.

The original plan was to sail to Desolation Sound and spend a couple of days there, but the day we left the wind was blowing hard and exactly from the direction where we planned to sail, so we changed our plans just an hour into the trip. Instead if going north to Desolation sound we went west and crossed the Strait of Georgia to Galiano island.

There was more wind than I had imagined and there were a lot of waves once we were away from the mainland. Most of my family members did not feel too great, but luckily the boat is quite fast and within 3 hours we were on the other side of the strait where the conditions were very different. On the west side of Galiano the water was completely flat and there was hardly any wind.

Then I suddenly realized that I did not bring any guidebooks nor official charts for the Gulf Islands with me, because we had not planned to go here. Luckily my chart plotter has all the charts I needed, so based on those charts and with a bit of Googling on my phone we decided to go to Ganges Harbour on Salt Spring Island. I called 2 marinas there, the first one (Salt Spring Marina) did not answer the phone but the second one (Ganges Marina) luckily did. They would close for the night before we would arrive but they still had a good spot for us.

The marina was quite nice and they indeed had a big spot where other sailors helped us to tie up the boat. We then cooked a quick meal so the kids could go to bed early (they were very tired after a long day on the water), and after that I had a bottle of wine with my parents.

The next day we spent a lazy morning in the marina, we did some shopping and I managed to buy the official charts. At 1 pm we left Salt Spring Island and sailed south to Pender Island. There was not a lot of wind so we took it quite easy and ended up motoring the last part of the trip.

On Pender Island I had reserved space for the boat in Poet’s Cove, a nice marina that shares a pool and restaurants with a resort. Scott and Elaine went kayaking and I took the kids out in the dinghy. The water here is much colder than close to Vancouver, probably because of the proximity to the Pacific Ocean. I wanted to go for a swim but after just putting my feet in I decided to stay on the boat instead!

The third day we sailed to Sidney, which has a big marina with some nice boats in it. There was quite a lot of wind when I had to dock the boat and I was very happy that Liberty has both bowthrusters and a stern drive. Without that I am not sure if I could have managed it. We had a drink on the boat and then strolled through the town. I had been here once before but when you arrive by boat it always looks like a different place. I now noticed the many bookstores (the town is famous for it apparently) and was more interested in the boat stores than in the real estate agents (I always look at house prices when I’m in a nice place).

After a night in Sidney the wind had picked up even more. We had planned to sail to Victoria, but that meant we would have to go straight against the wind and the tide currents through an area with lots of rocks and shallow areas. Because we really wanted to go back to Victoria (where we spent a few days with the family in July) we decided to just motor there. That worked well and it was a nice ride. We among others passed by James Island, which is a huge private island with its own golf course and very nice beaches (and it’s for sale!). And we got to see the nice villas on Victoria’s waterfront from the boat, there are some great houses there.

I managed to get a spot in Victoria’s inner harbour, right in front of The Fairmont Empress Hotel, where we stayed last month. We did a bit of shopping and sightseeing and then ended the day with a good meal in a seafood restaurant. After the kids were in bed we had a drink outside on the boat while watching the sunset.

I really enjoyed spending a few days on the boat, but because of business obligations I had to go back to Vancouver. So on the last day we left quite early to take advantage of the currents and sailed and motored in just over 10 hours from Victoria to Vancouver. Most of the trip back the autopilot sailed the boat for us, so we could enjoy a book or just look at the natural scenery.

The Gulf Islands are incredibly beautiful and there are hardly any other boats. In Holland such an area would be filled up by people on their sail- and motor boats, but here you hardly see anybody else. I am happy that I have now explored this part of British Columbia a bit, I will certainly be back!

The new Honda Pilot 2015 brochure

I take many pictures every day and some of them I put online, especially on Flickr. I started using Flickr for my online pictures in January 2005, a few months after I started this blog. At first just a few pictures per week, but from my stats I can see that I became more active around 2007, when I started posting 100-200 pictures per month.

Right now my Flickr stream contains over 17,000 public pictures that have been viewed about 2.5 million times. On average people view about 2500 of my pictures every day, but when I post a lot of photos in a post on this blog or on Facebook/Twitter that can easily go up to to 5000 or even 10,000 views per day.

I believe in the motto ‘sharing is caring’, so I use a Creative Commons license for my pictures, the Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license. That means that anybody can use my pictures, either commercially or non-commercially, as long as they attribute the picture to me and if they do not change the picture in any way. Because of that my pictures have ended up on many other websites over the years, but also in travel guidebooks, magazines and in newspapers. Normally I only find it out through Google Alerts when pictures are attributed to me, or when I see a spike in traffic coming from an external site.

A few weeks ago an ad agency working for Honda got in touch and asked whether they could use a picture of the Sea-to-Sky highway for a Honda car brochure. It was a photo that I took with my iPhone while driving home from Whistler last year. I told them that was fine with me and that I did not want money for it, just an attribution with my name and a copy of the brochure.

The original picture

Because the quality of the iPhone picture was not very high I did not think they would use it, and I also did not expect them to send me a copy of the brochure. But to my surprise yesterday Fedex delivered a couple of Honda Pilot 2015 brochures and on the second page my picture was used. So now I can also add car advertising photographer to the list of many different jobs that I have had over the years!

A couple of people asked me this morning why Bitcoin went down so much over the past couple of days (it went down to $500 before buyers came back into the market). My take is that it’s a combination of a couple of factors:

1. New merchants such as Dell now accept bitcoin, but sell the coins the moment someone buys a product. Result: supply up, but no change in demand, so lower price
2. Bitcoin miners mine at a loss at current prices, so they wait for a price increase. However, they can’t wait too long before paying their bills, so they start selling as well when prices are in a downward trend.
3. The successful Ethereum crowdsale means that these old coins will hit the market as well (I don’t think many people bought BTC just to invest in Ethereum), again increasing supply and lower prices
4. These lower prices led to massive margin calls on Bitfinex, at one point 9000 coins were sold in 15 min on Bifinex, leading to a sharp decrease in prices and additional margin calls.

Because the order book is so thin these (small) increases in supply lead to lower prices right away. If you have some extra cash laying around this seems like a good time to buy (although according to technical analysis, if $500 is broken the price may go down to the $430 resistance level). What will happen next is that short sellers take profits and start buying again.

Still waiting for the first Wall Street ETF to be approved, at that point demand will go up a lot, which should lead to a huge increase in price. But that may still be a couple of months away, the SEC is so slow…

On August 13, 2004, today exactly 10 years ago, Adam Curry recorded his first podcast, The Daily Source Code (DSC), which started the whole podcasting phenomena. Coincidentally I was following Adam on his blog during that time so I listened to that first DSC as well. I immediately liked the concept of self-produced on-demand radio and so I started looking at the technology behind podcasting. Doing that would change my life, but of course I had no idea about that yet.

In the summer of 2004 I was working in Shanghai as a managing partner in a consulting company called China Bay. During that time I was not active online yet, but during the hot summer months in our small high-rise apartment in Xujiahui I started reading blogs (blogging was still quite new at that time) on subjects that interested me. I also started playing around with RSS feeds for the first time.

Adam Curry’s blog was on my blogroll (does that word still exist?) because I used to listen to him as a teenager when he was a famous Dutch DJ. If I remember correctly he used his blog to describe how he was hacking together a piece of software that would let you automatically download mp3 files to your iPod. He called it iPodder and with that podcasting was born.

I spent August playing around with iPodder, reading the newsgroups and/or email newsletters about podcasting and of course listening to the first podcasters on my big white iPod (which still had an internal hard disk!). Dave Winer’s Morning Coffee Notes was one of my favorite podcasts (Dave invented RSS) and of course the show that Adam and Dave recorded regularly, Trade Secrets.

I was not an entrepreneur yet but I started looking at potential business opportunities around that time, and I felt podcasting could become big. Within a very short time podcasters were sharing intimate details of their lives online (e.g. on the quite explicit Dawn and Drew show) and for the first time I realized that people want to show others their lives if you give them the right online tools (remember that this was long before social media started to take off).

Podcasting suddenly gave everybody the freedom to record a show and distribute it to the whole world on a subscription basis through a ‘podcatcher’ (another word that’s not being used anymore I think, iTunes is the best example of a modern day podcatcher). By following so many blogs and podcasts I also felt the urge to start sharing my own ideas with the world. I thought about doing a podcast, but decided to start with a blog first. My first blog post dates back to September 2004, but it’s lost in cyberspace (the archives on this blog only go back to August 2005 when I changed from Radio Userland to Blogger). Luckily I still have a hardcopy of my first 2 years of blogging because Grace put them together in a hardcover book as a Christmas present in 2006.

After starting the blog I wanted to do more and my idea was to set up some sort of podcatcher for the Chinese market. I was thinking of a service where everybody could upload their podcasts and where other people could subscribe to them. But I felt that would not be sufficient, you would need an editorial team that would put the best podcasts on the homepage in order to attract more people to the site. However, I could not do that myself because I had hardly any programming skills. I was looking for someone who could help me with that, but did not have a big network yet in the online world.

Coincidentally I sat next to Gary Wang during the first Formula One race in Shanghai in September 2004 (Gary and Grace both worked at Bertelsmann during that time and that company had invited us to the race) and we became friends. A few weeks later during a round of golf I explained him my podcasting ideas and that turned into a new company. Of course we found out quickly that a pure audio site would not become very big, so we added video as well and then Tudou was born!

Interestingly at the same time a company in Silicon Valley was trying to do the exact same thing for the US market. They were called Odeo and were also a combination of a podcatcher with a homepage with the best podcasts. They even managed to get into the New York Times with their idea. Just like us they realized that pure audio podcasting does not scale and is hard to monetize, but instead of switching to video they went in a completely different direction and launched a SMS broadcasting service that they called twttr. And yes, that’s now Twitter with a $25+ billion market cap.

Thanks Adam Curry for this innovation, without you I would probably not have started this blog and certainly would not have come up with the idea for a podcasting site. Audio podcasting never really became mainstream but because of it other people developed new ideas. And I actually still listen to podcasts regularly, not on an iPod anymore but now in my car through the iPhone podcast app.

Every summer the Celebration of Light takes place on English Bay in Vancouver, a fireworks festival in which country teams compete to create the best fireworks show. Last night it was Japan’s turn and we decided to check it out with visiting friends from Seattle. Because hundreds of thousands of people were expected to show up we decided to take our boat and watch the show from the water.

We left the marina just after 6 pm and drove the boat under the Lions Gate bridge and around Stanley Park to English Bay. The currents in the First Narrows just before the Lions Gate were very strong and a 70 foot motor yacht ahead of us was pushed off its course several times. Our boat was less affected (likely because we have a deeper keel?), but I had to work hard at the rudder to keep it going in the right direction. But after the bridge it was easy sailing again.

The weather was fantastic, about 30 degrees Celsius and a clear blue sky. There was a bit of breeze to cool us off, but the sea was almost completely flat. Surprisingly there were not a lot of boats on the water.

We decided to go straight to the place where the fireworks festival would be held to find a good anchoring spot. We found a really good place close to the fireworks barges and put the anchor out about 200-300 meter from the beach.

The beaches in downtown were very full already, in order to get a good viewing spot you have to be there many hours in advance. And they kept on getting fuller and fuller, I read this morning that a total of 350,000-400,000 people watched the fireworks last night!

After anchoring we went for a swim and we lowered the rubber dinghy into the water. The water was warm enough to swim, so that was a good way to cool off a bit.

Scott wanted to go kayaking, so I also put his small kayak out. Because there was a bit of a current (tidal currents) I put a long line on his kayak so we could always pull him back in if needed.

Around 8 pm I took a quick shower and then we had dinner. Lots of boats had barbecues on board, and the smell had made us all hungry. Among others we brought sandwiches, salads, quiche and soup, and we ate it while watching the boats around us. More and more boats kept on coming, I was happy that I had moored early. I am not too experienced with anchoring my boat yet and the last thing you want is that the anchor does not set well and you drift against other boats.

After dinner the kids played on their iPads and we talked and read a bit while it was slowly getting dark.

The sunset was beautiful over the water, especially with a drink in our hands and good music on the sound system.

Just before the show would start at 10 PM we changed the music to a radio station that would broadcast the fireworks music. Each Celebration of Light show is synchronized to music, which makes it even better than a normal fireworks show. And I finally had a good reason to put my outdoor sound system really loud!

I am not an expert in fireworks shows, but I have seen a lot of them over the years and this certainly seemed like an extremely good one. It lasted about 25 minutes and it looked like the Japanese team used every pyrotechnic trick in the book. Of course being so close to the actual barges made it even better, you could even feel the pressure changes because of the explosions!

After the show most boats left right away, but we had another drink and waited until most of them had sailed off into the dark. Then we pulled up the anchor and slowly motored away. It was pitch dark and there were still some boats anchored, so we had to be very careful.

Once on the open water I sped up to about 9 knots, but I did not feel completely comfortable. I navigated on my instruments (you could not see a thing around you) and from experience I knew what areas to avoid, but I was worried that I might not see some of the other boats. Most vessels had the required lights on, but there were a few smaller ones that did not seem to understand how dangerous it is to sail without lights. And many of those smaller boats did not show up on my radar either, so it was kind of dangerous. Isabell offered to sit at the front of the boat and look out for other vessels. Glad she did because she indeed had to warn me twice of ships that I had not seen yet.

There were quite some waves on English Bay and in First Narrows, mainly caused by speed boats, but we made it back safely. Around 11:30 we were back in the marina, packed our things and drove home. Elaine had fallen asleep during the boat ride back already but Scott was still wide awake. At home I put Scott to bed and then Marcin and I ended the day with a few beers at the pool. It had been a great night on the water!

I put a lot more pictures of the evening online in this set on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/chijs/sets/72157646199469433/

My family in law is still visiting and they will leave later this week, therefore we decided to do a bit of sightseeing. I had planned to go to Deep Cove with them on my boat, but because I sprained my wrist on Friday when I slipped outside the office (never read emails on your phone while walking…) we could not to do that. But of course you can also drive your car to Deep Cove, so that’s what we did.

Deep Cove is at the eastern end of Vancouver’s North Shore, at the entrance of Indian Arm and at the foot of Mount Seymour, just a 25 minute drive from our house. It’s a great village to visit in summer because of the combination of mountains and a peaceful bay. I actually looked at a house on the water here before we bought our current home, but because it rains a lot more in Deep Cove in winter I decided not to consider the place.

But of course the summers here are just as great as in most places in British Columbia, with temperatures in the mid-20s Celsius and clear blue skies most of the time.

Deep Cove has a marina with mainly small boats (at least compared to Vancouver’s downtown marinas), even on the public dock the maximum length for boats is just 36 feet. So if I had taken my own boat I would have needed to anchor in the bay. Also I would have had to call the railway bridge over the Second Narrows as my mast is too tall to pass under it. So going by car was actually a good solution.

We walked along the beach at low tide and looked at the many people in their kayaks and canoes. The water is normally very quiet here, so ideal to paddle around. It’s also the best place to venture into Indian Arm, a 20 km long glacial fjord with steep mountain slopes on both sides and several water falls.

After a lunch of sushi, sashimi and teppanyaki at a local Japanese restaurant we decided to drive up Mount Seymour. In winter Mount Seymour is Vancouver’s third ski resort (next to the ski areas on Cypress Mountain and Grouse Mountain), but in summer it’s a great place to go hiking or to enjoy the views.

Because my parents in law are a bit older already we did not do a real hike, but instead enjoyed the views over Vancouver with snow covered Mount Baker in the distance. If my hand would not have hurt so much from the fall I probably would have done a short hike up and down one of the ski slopes. I’ll leave that for next time.

The downside of a real estate boom is that a lot of downtown buildings will be demolished after 15-20 years to make room for other (=more profitbable) buildings. In China that happens a lot, and sometimes the safety measures are a bit less than you would expect.

In the video below a tower at a busy intersection in downtown Qiqihar (Heilongjiang) was blasted without any warning for the public. A car coincidentally recorded the whole scene while standing at a traffic light. No police cordoning off the area, no spraying of water to reduce the dust, and not even a warning that an explosion would take place. Makes me wonder if a worker accidentally pushed the demolition button too early. Only in China…

Note: The video started playing automaticall (with sound…), so I decided to take out the i-frame and just put a link to the original article where the video is embedded:

http://hk.apple.nextmedia.com/realtime/china/20140726/52732150

Source: Shanghaiist

As regular readers know I am passionate about anything related to Bitcoin, especially applications that use the blockchain for more than just monetary transactions. One company that I have been following since their launch in January is Ethereum, a platform and programming language for applications built on top of a new distributed ledger (blockchain). Business Insider named them the most hyped digital currency since Bitcoin, and I think that is a correct title.

Vitalik Buterin introducing Ethereum at the Miami conference

After Ethereum was introduced to the world in January at the Miami Bitcoin Conference, its 21-year old genius founder Vitalik Buterin became an instant rock star in the Bitcoin world. People even started comparing him to Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto. Vitalik announced at that time that Ethereum would launch its crowdsale IPO on February 1, and I had planned to buy some Ether during that time.

However, right before the IPO should take place the sale was cancelled and since then there have not been a lot of official announcements. Because of how they handled their potential investors I decided not to put any money into Ethereum if they would try to do their IPO again. When you can’t even handle a simple crowdsale well, I wonder if you are mature enough to run an altcoin platform that should change the way we do business.

People all wanted to talk to Vitalik after his talk in Miami

Well, this week Ethereum finally launched its funding, this time without any advance notice. At least, I did not get the message and I also don’t think Vitalik mentioned it at the Chicago conference last weekend. But that did not matter, because the IPO was a HUGE success: after 2 days they already raised almost 7000 bitcoins, which is about US$ 4.8 million at current prices.

To me that was a surprise, I knew the company was hyped but I had not expected such a major hype. Why? Simply because the company is still purely a powerpoint and a couple of geeks talking at conferences about their ideas. Very good ideas I have to say, but there is no product yet and there won’t be a product until at least 6 months later. But that’s not all, because they are selling Ether (their currency) without announcing how many Ether they will selling in total (it’s an open-ended crowdsale). That means you have no clue what percentage of the company you will buy or, in venture capital language, you invest without knowing the valuation of the company.

And what do you get for that? Moe Levin put it well in a podcast interview today in which he called Ether “Casino chips that can only be used in one casino”. It may be a huge casino eventually, or maybe there will never be a casino. Or they will just keep printing new chips for new users, diluting the value of the current chips.

To make matters worse, anybody can copy Ethereum’s source code (it’s open source, so anybody can see it) and start a copy of Ethereum that works exactly the same. And that’s already being done, last night Aethereum (Yes, just one letter difference) was announced and this platform will give its coins away for free based on how many Bitcoins you own.

USD 4.8 million is a lot of money, a lot more money than the company needs to build its product. They are a low cost operation, basically just a bunch of young but very smart developers, who all get Ether as well for their efforts (if I remember correctly 9.9% of all Ether is set aside for the founders).

As a rational investor I would never put money into such a venture, but it seems most Ethereum investors are not rational. Ethereum uses an interesting incentive to get people to buy quickly, because after 14 days the price of Ether will go up. That means you’ll have a limited time to buy at the current price. This may be part of the reason why people want to put money in as soon as possible. On social media people are arguing that they just invest to help the team, and that may be true. However, I believe 4.8 million is a lot of money to give away to help a young team to build a good product, even in the Bitcoin world.

To be fair, the Ethereum team did nothing wrong (well, they botched their first IPO and are terrible at investor communications) and they are very clear about the fact what they offer. It’s not a pump and dump. They mention it’s not a regular investment, you just get coins that do not even exist yet. Maybe Ether will become very valuable or maybe it will never have any value, to me that’s gambling.

And that’s fine, but you won’t see me put any money into Ethereum until after they launch their coins and until they get some traction. The Bitcoin world changes so fast that by then another competitor may have emerged that is better or faster. Congrats to the team for raising so much money so easily, now the pressure is on them to deliver on the expectations they created.