Well, it has been quite the year. America has treated us pretty well. We get all the cool services like Netflix and next day (or even same day!) Amazon delivery. Service levels seem higher than in Canada.

Getting a drivers license, auto title, auto insurance are much more difficult. Health care is very confusing. It seems like you have to deal with four different entities to do anything, and as I am now learning, it is expensive!

One morning it really sank into us that we were in America. We woke up listening to a local radio station news broadcast that a man was arrested for having a storage locker full of automatic weapons, grenade launchers, C4 etc. He had stopped paying his rent was why he was caught. Only in America.

America is still in the dark ages with respect to units of measurement. I’ve managed to grock gallons instead of liters. (I actually still think in miles per gallon). I have yet to make the switch to Fahrenheit. I know 72 is room temperature. 32 is freezing. 90 is hot. Everything else is viewed as somewhere between those extremes. I still set all my weather utilities to use Celsius. Seems so much more civilized.

As for Microsoft. Well, what do I say? More accurately, what am I contractually bound to NOT say? (I dunno yet!) Yesterday was my last day at Microsoft. I know I can say that. What will I do next? Good question. Still to be sorted out. I do know I am moving with my lovely wife to San Francisco. Given my skill set and our desire to live in an urban environment, that is the logical destination being the center of the web and all.

I have found myself using Facebook and Twitter for my personal commentary and this blog is being neglected. My professional blog at Identity 2.0 has not done much better, but that is a different story. Now that I don’t have to follow Microsoft policies, I intend to share professional thoughts at Dick Hardt dor org and @DickHardt. The “2.0″ meme is so last decade.

Changes are afoot in the US, and my arrival is now one of them. I am leaving Vancouver and moving to the Seattle area to take a job with Microsoft … and you can Blame Canada for part of it! There are many things I will miss, and many that I won’t:

What I will miss

Friends: I’ve lived in Vancouver since 1981. I attended UBC and have many dear friends both new and old. I hope they will come visit me in Seattle!

Urban Living: I’ve gotten used to be able to walk to the store for groceries, walk to the theatre to watch movies and walk to local restaurants for great dining.

Restaurants: Vancouver has many amazing restaurants, and I have had the pleasure of becoming friends with many people in the industry. Boneta, Chambar, Chill Winston, Jules and Salt are the ones within walking distance.

Province of BC: We have a great government in power in BC. Gordon Campbell and the Liberal party have done a great job of improving the quality of life in BC, and the new slogan, "The Best Place on Earth" captures the ambitious vision they have.

Vancouver: This is a beautiful city. The mountains are right there. Not off in the distance. They are right there. Often when looking at downtown, you see the mountains above the tops of the towers. It is a cosmopolitan city that is still polite and humble. And the waterfront. It is everywhere. Visitors often mention "towards the water", not realizing that is almost every direction. With the new developments around the Olympic Village, there are miles and miles of seawall to explore.

What I won’t miss

Weather: I’d like to miss some of the weather, but I will still be on the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Dreary, gray days will continue to be in the weather forecast more often then I prefer.

Pro Basketball: I had floor seats for the Grizzlies when they were in Vancouver. I really enjoyed live basketball. The Sonics left last year. Damn.

Unsophisticated investors: I have had a few unsophisticated investors that have been painful. I had four in Sxip that have been making my life miserable for the last 10 months. Sure, people have differences of opinion — but refusing to meet to work things out is so unprofessional.

Canadian politics: while entertaining, the current federal fiascos are embarrassing. I used to tease my Americans friends that they should get a real democracy with more then two parties so that ideas can evolve. I keep my mouth shut now.

Vancouver Politics: the new mayor of Vancouver is also an embarrassment. He refused to pay his Skytrain fine. WTF? He has this "great vision" of solving homelessness and having developers build low cost housing. Sounds great, who would not agree? But where is the plan. I’m moving, I can stop ranting now.

Jennifer: my fiance will be coming with me!

What I look forward to

Change.gov: The new federal administration looks exciting and is more aligned with my social values then previous administrations. I look forward to experiencing the impact as a participant, rather then as a spectator.

New friends: I look forward to meeting new, interesting people. Hopefully fun, interesting people will want to meet me!

Cool services: As a US resident I will now get access to cool things that roll out in the US without having to feel like a 2nd class citizen waiting for iTunes, Netflix, iPhones etc. being available.

Smart People: I am really looking forward to working with a bunch of smart people.

New Home: Jennifer and I will be moving into a home together. We hope to find a place near the Microsoft campus with some property around it. Having a big garage and house will be a big change from the loft where we live now.

New Job: I am really looking forward to working with a bunch of smart people at Microsoft and learning about working in Big Enterprise and Big Software. For more about the job, read my Identity 2.0 post.

I was reading the Feb 4/08 issue of Fortune cover story on 100 best places to work and decided to play with Apple’s Numbers and do some comparisons of tech companies. A couple ratios were interesting, the revenue per employee and the number of applicants per hire, plotted below for your viewing pleasure. Google leads in both. Interesting to see Microsoft trail in diversity, and no surprise, Apple is not in the top 100 companies to work for. (click on the graphic to see a bigger version)

This is one of the funnier, more accurate ads that should be shown on TV

Lately I have been looking at how Sxip will make money. We have done a great job of raising awareness, the video of my Identity 2.0 keynote helping with that quite a bit. But I digress. I have been using the labels of vitamins, painkillers and Viagra to classify product opportunities.

Vitamins are something we all know we should take. Vitamins are preventative. They don’t provide any immediate feedback. It is a good idea, and when the stars are aligned we take them. It is really hard to sell vitamins.

Painkillers solve an immediate pain. When I have pain, I want painkillers and I want them NOW. Painkillers are easy to sell to people that have pain. It is not that they want the painkiller though so much as they DON’T want the pain.

Viagra lets you do things that were not possible before. Viagra gives you new powers! Once someone understands what Viagra can do for them, they want it. Even if they don’t really need it, they would like to try it!

At Sxip, we are looking for what the Viagra in the Identity 2.0 world.

globeandmail.com : Google eyes bigger Canadian office

Google Inc. wants to create a mid-sized research and development office in Canada with as many as 200 staff.

“We’re looking to grow aggressively. We think there’s a real opportunity for a Southern Ontario R&D centre,” Shona Brown, the company’s senior vice-president of business operations, said in an interview in Toronto.

The foundations of that office are already in place, following the acquisition last summer of Reqwireless Inc., a startup in Waterloo, Ont., that makes Internet browser and e-mail software for wireless devices.

Google’s website now advertises for just two positions in Waterloo, but Ms. Brown said the company is actually hiring across the board, from directors to fresh engineering graduates.

“We would like to grow a fairly sizable R&D centre there,” ranging between 100 and 200 people, she said. The company is also adding sales and marketing staff in Toronto. Google doesn’t disclose its local headcount, but in Canada it is still small. In Toronto, it doesn’t have its own offices, but rents executive space downtown. Worldwide, the eight-year-old company has about 6,000 employees.

At first blush, these seems like a good thing. One of the most powerful internet companies is wanting to grow in Canada! It shows that Canada is a world player in technology R&D. But those of us in Canada already know this. There are many R&D labs here in Canada. We are turning out lots of great engineers. But are we creating lots of indigenous Canadian technology companies? Many of the top engineers are being lured to the US. Those that do now want to move are now being lured to convenient R&D labs where they live so that they don’t have to move. Sure, they have jobs, but there is a shortage of those people.

By setting up an R&D lab in Canada, Google is exasperating the supply problem. They are able to attract top talent — who would not want to work for Google? But these R&D labs are not teaching this talent how to build a business. Canada is not building wealth. We are repeating history and once again exporting our best resources for others to monetize. This time it is human capital.

My buddy Paul Kedrosky recently wrote that Structured Blogging Will Flop. His reasons:

It’s the usual three reasons I trot out repeatedly to technologists with utopian visions who want to change the world on the back of altered user behavior:

1. People are lazy
2. People are lazy
3. People are lazy

I agree people are lazy. I know. I’m lazy. So is Paul. He is so lazy that he uses the same point three times in a row. I am a supporter of structured blogging. To counter, each of my points will be different, and I will even up the ante with a fourth:

1. Existing structures
2. Real time web
3. Machine RSS
4. Spam issues

1. Existing structures. Lots of bloggers categorize and tag their content today. People are already taking the time to add semantics. Blogging tools strive to differentiate themselves, and will add tools to make it easy to add structured blogging to their post, just like it is easy to tag and categorize. (btw: Paul, when are you moving to WordPress?) Since I am lazy, I would prefer to create a post about a public event so that it gets promoted by event tracking systems like Eventful, rather then run around and promote it myself.

2. Real time web. As the web gets bigger, and the cycle time of polling all the pages by the search engines gets longer, the relevancy of a search drops. The data in an RSS feed, or in the future, in a Ping, will be more relevant then data on a web page. If the data is structured, it will be even more relevant

3. Machine RSS. Lots of interesting feeds are not generated by humans. It is easy for machines to endlessly add the same structure tags to data that already has structure. With the rise of the real time web, publishers of data will look to move their data out so that it is easily found, just like people have been doing search engine optimization for years.

4. Spam issues. One kind of structure that is needed is the identity of the blog. 75% of new pings are spings (splogs). Splogs and spings are degrading the value of the real time web. Efforts are under way to resolve this problem, and hopefully we have all learned from our ant-spam experiences on how to do this right.

Structured blogging will not solve world hunger. It will likely look somewhat different from what the existing structured blogging effort, and I am sure there was more hype, then beef at Syndicate about this, but let’s not be lazy and dismiss it out of hand.

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdenieg. The phaonemneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aodccrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dnsoe’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the hmuan mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azmanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuoht slpeling was ipmorantt!

Sobering tragedy today in California. Two people died in a seal gray Carrera GT just like mine. I’ve had a light foot since mine got out of the hospital. It will stay light.

I was traipsing through an Air Canada lounge today and the latest issue of Technology Review caught my eye. I have been a subscriber, but was surprised to see issues lying around an airport lounge. There was the usual up-and-coming technology stories, but what got my neurons firing was a story by Stewart Brand, founder of ‘The Whole Earth Catalog’.

In “Environmental Heresies“, Brand posits a swing in views on population growth, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms and nuclear power. I was surprised to learn how rapidly the population growth rate is rapidly declining and the prediction that several industrial nations will have 30% fewer people in 2050 than today. Wow!

The environmental benefits of urbanization were not something I had realized. People are moving out of rural areas, nature is taking them back, and urban centers tend to be more efficient.

The story has been out for a while and there has been some blog dialog on TR’s blog site.