Piotr Woloszyn

I want to talk today about new ways of expressing opinions and reaching to people using example of a tragic accident which happened last year in Canada.

On October 14, 2007, Robert Dziekanski, 40 years old Polish immigrant who arrived at the Vancouver International Airport has died shortly after being tesered and subdued by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) after waiting 10 hours at the airport and becaming visibly agitated. According to police Dziekanski “continued to throw things around and yell and scream”, after the arrival of the police officers, which was later revealed to be false in the video. RCMP was heavily criticized for providing a false version of events prior to the public release of the video. It was very unfamous incident which triggered big debate concerning police use of tasers and about the way how RCMP handled the situation. Just to mention that Dziekanski has been teasered second time after failling to the ground which completely doesn’t make any sence to me. Some eyewitnesses claim that he has been tesered as many as four times.

Couple of days ago this case came back to the headlines again. This time because of a video which appeared on YouTube that “parodies” the incident. The video, created by Vancouver resident Mike Greenway, titled Megaman vs. Polish Immigrant shows the 1980s video game character Megaman tasering an opponent (Mr. Dziekanski) after choosing option “Taser Mercilessly”.

As we could expect the reaction to the video was mixed. Media in Canada and Poland has been indignant at the video calling it more than offensive. Similarly a spokesman for the RCMP said he found the video offensive blaming the online culture for emerging such thing on the Internet: “Any right-thinking person who would look at the video would be offended by that. A gentlemen lost his life and it is in extremely poor taste” said sgt. John Ward. Lost his life? Hmmm… Rather you took it. On the other hand there are opinions that the video in the form of parody is really a statement on police taser use, not a cheap entertainment for crowds. The author Mike Greenway said that “The video that I made is a tongue-in-cheek parody about the incompetence of everyone involved, not police brutality.”

Why then that video has been so controversial? Because it’s been intended to be. Someone could say that Greenway crossed a border of a good taste when he has chosen the infantile form of an old game to make a comment on that event. But to make a point we have to reach sometimes for such tools to trigger discussion, to be controversial in sake of reaching bigger audience. I am really happy to live in current times when everyone via forums, blogs, videos, twitts etc. has a chance of forming independent thoughts and independent conversations. A spokeswoman for the Polish Embassy in Canada, Marta Grywalska said: “The public was disturbed by the event. This is how the subculture reacted to it”. Well said. But it is not a subculture anymore. We have own voice. We are the mainstream now.

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My friend Rags wrote about work-life balance lately. He writes about challenges we have to face in current world as professionals:

If I regularly take time off after work to just “chill out and relax”, I realize I’m being left behind in the rat-race while everyone else is constantly moving forward.

As we live in society of ubiquitous flow of information and changing all the time trends and opinions but we have got limited time we are bound to make constant decisions: what news do we follow, which blogs and books do we read, which technology we are going to try and spend our precious time with. We could try to find an analogy with finance sector: we have a limited resources, in our case it is time, and we have to invest this in the best way to get the best result. To quantify this result can be difficult as it is not as obvious what to take into account: career progress, money we earn, being well rounded and conscious professional or maybe the degree we influence and interact with our closer or farther professional neighborhood?

Did I forget to mention private life?

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After reading last entry on David’s James blog about reasons for not blogging enough I started to think about my own reasons for doing exactly the same thing.

User friendliness of the blog content management is important but I don’t think that is my excuse. What it is then?

I am not going to mention the natural human laziness (I’ve just done it). It could be this as well but in my case I can see two things on my way to have more often updated blog:

• perfectionism (sic!)
• type of the content I decided to write about

Perfectionism because it stops me from posting “quick and dirty” posts. Very often instead of writing maybe bit rough entry but actually writing it I wait for a bit of time when I can “do it properly”. And obviously it rarely happens.

Type of the content because I decided to post mainly solutions to common software development problems as a favour to other as I often find answers for my questions in other’s people blogs. But this type of content is pretty time consuming to create. I might to change it as I am not to be honest as excited about doing that.

So… That’s my list of excuses. What’s yours?

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After couple of months of non-existence of my website, when my old, shabby server in living room refused to breath, I decided to move the site to some real hosting. So… it happened today. I am not sure if I will keep posting regularly as it wasn’t the case so far but at least I have technical opportunity to do it now, no more excuses.

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Ron Jacobs have just posted a new entry on the ARCast TV blog about stuff I work on. If you want to find out more about the Web21C SDK project and what you could possibly do in one line of code then have a look here.

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I just wanted to drop couple of lines from Barcelona. One hour ago the Microsoft TechEd: Developers 2006 was officially closed. We were very busy last four days. It was really a great experience. I worked last couple of months on an internal project for British Telecom (BT) and TechEd was actually the first place where we released information about Web21C SDK for Visual Studio. It is still closed beta-version but we gave an opportunity to some developers to sign up for beta testing and try it out. Our booth was busy all time and we signed up much more people than we expected. So, that’s good! In overall everybody from the team is in great mood. Barcelona that’s a good place to be in November comparing to UK ;) BTW. the guys in funny aloha shirts last day were us!

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