No one wants their last words to be "Oh my God! The old gypsy woman was right..."
As many of you know I live in Rossland, BC Canada. Rossland is a mountain town. First and foremost it is a skiing town. Like all small towns we have our own local eccentric or two that everyone knows. Gary Camozzi is one of those. During the winter Gary lives in a cave somewhere on Red Mountain and in the summer camps outdoors. Sometimes when the weather is really bad he stays in town at a relative’s house but mostly he lives outdoors year round. You can always tell when he’s close by, if you’re downwind that is. He did own a house here but it was condemned by the city, a topic on which Gary will lecture you incessantly given half a chance. While he is crazy as a loon (there is an apocryphal story of him climbing to the top of Red Mountain one winter night, dropping a lot of acid, removing all his clothes and doing a straight as an arrow high speed ski run down the face of Red ( used for world cup ski events) believing himself to be an eagle in flight until he wiped out.
Now Gary is a good skier from what I’ve heard but he’s not world class like he thinks by any stretch of the imagination. Here he is being interviewed - a glimpse into the mind of someone who took one trip too many as the person filming this makes clear with his cut aways 
One thing to note about Gary - he is a master stonemason when it comes to building rock walls. Seriously he builds walls that will never come down and does it with no mortar. It’s just that it takes him a very long time what with hand picking out each rock, a very long time. He is also quite well read.
Part I
Part II
Technorati Tags: Rossland, Gary Camozzi, Red Mountain, crazy as a loon,
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I’m not ready - view from my kitchen window on Friday
Come back summer! Next time we will see greenery will be sometime in April, March if we’re lucky. Sigh
We are continuing on our path to bring better high-speed networking to Rossland. We are very interested in building a Wi-Max type network to cover the entire city and neighboring ski hills.The tech committee I sit on met last week and the essential dilemma became apparent: how do we build community involvement or buy-in? There are two basic approaches we can take
The problem with the first one is that we are primarily a residential and tourism based economy with only limited number of potential big users. Getting buy in from the residents for the cost of building an open access public Wi-Max network for, from their perspective, the primary benefit of businesses is not an easy thing. However if you can build a business case on that basis then you have a better chance for success as the businesses will carry the bulk of the ongoing financial load.
The problem with the second one is that it’s really the kids who want more than DSL or Cable can deliver and their parents do not, yet see the benefit. They see that they already have DSL or Cable “broadband” and why do they need more. Even if you point out to them that they can go for the triple play (Phone, Video, Data) over that one connection and save money in doing so they see it as too much hassle to make those changes. An additional problem is that local smaller businesses who only do business locally do not see a great advantage to coming onboard.
I think the second way is still the way to go, and it’s in the way you do it that you build public buy-in. The real benefit of a high-speed network will be felt by the younger generations, those in their teens, twenties and thirties. They are the ones that are building online businesses and making use of all the convergences (mashups) taking place.
There are a lot of communities in this area that are pursuing their own solutions and I think it is very important to build a ery high-speed local area network that connects them all. If we can go that route we can make use of local community portals to build intra-community marketplaces and inter-community competition.
Back in their heyday Nortel Networks advanced this type of concept with their P-LAN (Public Local Access Network) concept and which, early in 2000, I wrote a white paper on for a previous employer. I still believe this is the path to take in order to build a maximum of community buy-in and community benefit. There is a lot of rivalry around her between cities and towns. Having an individual portal for each community, but a portal that can also be reached from outside of the community, both builds local involvement and makes the resources of that community more apparent to those who are outside of the community.
One thing I’d like to see is a local gaming server set up in each community accessible only to those on the LAN and then promote inter-community competitions. That will get the kids involved and draw in kids who aren’t as computer aware, giving them more exposure. The more exposure they get the more ideas they have on how to take “it” further. Kids need exposure to the net at an early age. It builds entrepreneurial talent. Anyone following the 2006 Olympics is probably familiar with Dale Begg-Smith who won Gold for Australia in Men’s Moguls. Dale is a Canadian who at age 13 started his own Internet marketing company, a company now worth around $40 Million. He’s not unique in that respect.
If families around here want their kids to stay locally, when they’re grown up, they need to realize that there has to be jobs and opportunities here. The single best way of ensuring that is to build a very high-speed network. Such a network will attract new businesses from outside the region who are looking to take advantage of the outdoor lifestyle here and, more importantly, it will give those kids with entrepreneurial talents a means of exercising those talents locally, creating even more jobs.
What do you think? How would, or are, you building community buy-in for a publicly owned high-speed network?
Right on schedule for Samhain (Halloween) Rossland got its first snowfall today 
The owner of this horse has been riding it all summer on a trip from Vancouver Island to here. About 700km. He’s tied up in front of the local bookstore cum bakery cum coffee emporium - Goldrush Books - just two blocks from where I live.
It’s Golden City Days weekend here in Rossland and true to form it started raining last night and was just p*ssing down this morning when the parade happened. I gave the parade a pass as Diane and I got up too late to get our act together in time. So here’s about all I saw of it
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Downtown the kids were having fun on the inflatables despite the rain
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This year they moved the belt sander racers indoors
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Prizes are given to best decorated and the fastest down the track and boy do those things fly!
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The Rock refers to the Rock Cut Pub halfway between downtown and the ski hill.
Well, last couple of days of July and the heat finally hit us here. It was at least 36C (97F) today but probably higher in the early afternoon. I left home at 11 going for a long hike called Redhead, one I haven’t done since last year. I wasn’t planning on picking huckleberries again today but I threw a ziploc in my camelback just in case. Good thing because I hit the motherlode on that trail and could not bring myself to pass it by.
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That haul (a full medium size ziploc) took about one hour to pick on 3 bushes. Last year, half that amount took about 2 hours on untold amounts of bushes. I’ve got them spread out on a cookie sheet in the freezer - once frozen I’ll transfer to a ziploc freezer bag. It;s best to do them this way so that the berries don’t freeze into one big lump. You can later open the bag and remove exactly what you want. Gazing into my crystal ball I see huckleberry margueritas, muffins and pancakes coming up 
Redhead is a great trail for exercise - it climbs seemingly forever then comes down quite fast. I ran into several groups doing some serious berry picking along the trail. No cause for alarm though this year they’re so abundant there’s enough for everbody, including the group of 2 three or four I met that drove in from Kelowna (300km) to pick.
I’ve always loved fires. They’re so primal, dangerous, awe inspiring. Ican remember the fires in our neighbourhood when I was a kid. The bulldozers would come in and clear a lot then the resulting slash would be burned. it would burn for days and we kids wuold gather round after, the workers left, to marvel at the sote and, of coursem play with the forbidden fire. The smell of fresh turned forest floor and the air redolent with the smell of burning cedar. Yes I’ve always loved fires. Som today I was at first shocked then pleased to see this house on fire just a couple of blocks from me and only four houses away from the house I used to own in town.
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Oh don’t think me heartless for being gflad the house was on fire you see the new owners want to build a new house there and in order to save tipping fees at the dump they arranged to give our volunteer fire department some practice. This was a controlled and planned burn.
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No hiking for me today. We sure are getting a lot of rain this year, good for the woods, lousy for my waistline. I’m beginning to think I won’t be going on the Canada Day Mt. Roberts hike again this year as I’m just not in good enough shape. I guess I’ll have to break down this winter and join the gym so I can condition throughout the winter.
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One of the cool things about living in Rossland is the number of community celebrations we have. Today was the 9th annual Spring Wing Ding. Merchants along the main drag put out sidewalk sales stuff, others sold burgers etc for good causes. The main attraction though was the entertainment in the town square. A small stage was setup and that left just about enough room for about 30 chairs for paserbys to stop and sit awhile and enjoy the music
I stopped and sat a bit with a few acquaintances and watched one fellow, Dan O’Bradovic who is a very good guitarist. Here he is below (seated) playing with Big Daddy Jerome in a very good rendition of Bruce Cockburn’s “Mama Just Wants to Barrelhouse All Night Long”
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Well it’s warmed up around here enough this past week that I thought I would try one of the more southern exposed trails asnd see if the snow was gone. It is certainy starting to disappear but it’s still pretty icy in the shadows. Her’s a look at what some of the trail looks like:
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I’ve mentioned before that I live in the mountains and some of the pictures I’ve posted here have given you some ideas of the terrain. However the elevations really strike home when you look at a satellite photo of the town.
It’s on the hillsides surrounding Rossland that I do all my hiking and you can see I have not exaggerated the steepness of the terrain
We are having very strange weather around here this year. Basically we had spring in February and the majority of snow in town melted. This should not have happened until April. Today I woke up to find it snowing hard outside. Winter again. I’m not complaing though. We had too little snow this winter and we need to build up the snow packs in order to have sufficient water for the summer. If we don’t get a lot of snow now we will have a terrible forest fire seaon I think.
