For that reason I have long been puzzled by, and wanted to meet, Doug Alward.  Who the heck is that, you might say?  Precisely.  We don’t know Doug very well at all, but it is his sacrifice that without a shadow of a doubt furthered athletic endeavour in this country on an unimaginable scale.

Terry Fox in Ontario, 1980

After all… we do, however, know and revere his good friend Terry Fox.

But here’s the thing not a lot of people know:  Without Doug, Terry could not have made his courageous run.

Last November the Vancouver Sun asked who should light the Olympic Flame at the 2010 Opening Ceremony in Vancouver.  There has been a movement afoot to nominate Betty Fox, Terry’s mother.  I think there’s a good intention here and I *really* like the idea of a nod to Terry Fox, who became even in his short life a beacon of inspiration to the world, and who is not infrequently referred to as one of the Ten Greatest Canadians.  Betty’s a wonderful woman and her connection to Terry is obvious, but she shuns the limelight, and at her tender age and conditioning would not particularly enjoy the opportunity of running a few kilometres into a crowded stadium, mounting some stairs, and lighting a giant flame.  It’s symbolic and well-intended, but probably impractical.

The infamous van, restored in 2007

In April 1980 there was only one person standing beside Terry Fox in St. John’s, Nfld as he dipped his toe in the Atlantic to begin the Marathon of Hope.

That person was Doug Alward.  An otherwise rational person by all accounts, Doug had been convinced by his best friend’s passion and dedication not only to help him train for the unprecedented task of running the world’s longest continuous highway, but to go with him.  For months Doug waited for his friend in a sweat-soaked, disgusting-smelling van at the side of the road.  As Terry approached Alward would greet him, provide any refreshments or anything he needed, and check on Fox’s health and emotional state.  Then, as Terry ran ahead, he would leapfrog the runner and drive ahead exactly one mile, stopping to repeat the process.

It had to be the most maddeningly slow drive across this country ever attempted.  He did this while their friends were off on their post-graduation trips to Europe, working at lucrative summer jobs, or preparing for University.  For much of the four-and-a-half months of the Marathon of Hope, Doug did this alone.  Still, Alward asked nothing of his friend but that he keep on running and stay healthy.

He asked nothing of us, either.  Except, perhaps, a donation to fight Cancer.

Doug Alward neither sought nor did he receive any of the limelight showered upon Terry during this heroic endeavour, yet he was there every step of the way.  It is a testament to his strength of character that he did not fall victim to the cult of personality that grew around his friend within a few weeks of beginning the run; he evidenced no jealousy of Fox’s growing fame or of the adulation of fans, politicians, and celebrities; he simply focused on his job within the team as coach, trainer, medical technician, cook, agent, manager, head of security, and fixer.

Can you imagine the entourage that would accompany such an endeavour today?  In 1980, for much of that journey it was only Doug.

Doug Alward in 2006

Perhaps 2010 is the time for us to honour his selfless contribution, just months short of the 30th anniversary of Doug’s greatest drive.  We should nominate Alward to light the flame.  Clearly it is a way for VANOC to remind the world of our local hero Terry Fox, and the fight to cure cancer that he prodded forward; but it is also a way to shine a light on the thousands of unsung heroes — coaches, trainers, sponsors, skate sharpeners, family, and friends — who truly power our athletes to the peak of their performance, as Terry surely was when he embarked on his run.

On a practical level, Doug Alward is once again a prolific runner, participating of course in the Terry Fox Runs but also in Sun Runs and other events.  He’s an active member of the Phoenix Running Club in Coquitlam.

I think it says something about Doug that I can’t seem to find a picture of him anywhere (finally did)… but perhaps now it’s time for him to enjoy a moment in the sun, for all he did for Terry… and all he did for us.

If you think this is a good idea, I’ve created a Facebook Group to advance the cause.  Join, willya?  And tell your friends.

It would be a mistake to view this list as a ranking of popular blogs in the city. My friend Dick, who edged me out at #11, last posted on June 18.

Instead I’m going to guess that my appearance on this list is because I spend a lot of time writing and discussing various things not only on my own blog, but on others as well. I’ve also cultivated, in part because of my time spent south-of-the-border, a rather extensive network of friends and associates from a diversity of internet-centric businesses. As such I am often a featured LinkedIN member (who knows how that algorithm works?) and claim to know lots of people on FaceBook (my profile was recently locked down due to freakish invasions of my privacy by a certain individual).

What many don’t know is that starting in 1998 I maintained an open mailing list called FOIB for more than five years which had hundreds of subscribers and was soapbox for my more controversial ramblings and opinions on politics, culture, the environment, and technology. So blogging, per se, is not new to me.

In essence I have chosen to live my life with reasonable transparency on the web, and share my thoughts and opinions all over the place, whether they’re welcome or not. Here I am on twitter and flickr.

To some extent, being voted one of “The web’s 20 most-visible” people is a self-fulfilling prophecy: it will lead to more connections, likely more traffic to this blog and others I frequent, and increased visibility for my thoughts and validations. I’ll do my best to keep it interesting, and worthy of your time. And to the team at NowPublic, I am most humbly grateful.

I’m proud of this puppy.

-Ian.

—-

Strategies for Riding the Electrical Rollercoaster By Ian Andrew Bell, scoop [at] ianbell [dot] com

The growing power crisis in California presents a stark but very real vision of the future for all of us in North America; and as Vancouverites and Quebecers learned this winter, even with our ample supply of hydroelectric power, you just can¹t take anything for granted anymore. As it happened, thousands of businesses and residences were impacted last month by an explosion at a BC Hydro substation, which cut off power to Vancouver¹s downtown core for several hours.

For many businesses, the power outage in Vancouver was a wakeup call ­ ³This lasted longer than any outage since we¹ve been in business,² said Simon Kan of Dolphin Computers, a computer systems consultant who supports dozens of downtown high-tech companies. ³Our clients¹ battery-backup systems rode out the initial dip in power, but they weren¹t prepared to handle such a lengthy interruption.²

Reports are still coming in, but Simon expects to spend the next few weeks working double-time to assist clients who have suffered everything from software glitches and lost data to catastrophic hardware failures as a result of the sharp cutoff in power.

This is no surprise ­ power failures are the most common cause of system failure. In fact, damage to equipment, as well as loss of productivity due to power spikes, brownouts, and blackouts cause more than $300 million in PC damage annually.

And that¹s not the only problem. With the Internet becoming a predominant tool for doing business globally, companies who go online significantly increase their vulnerability to damages and lost productivity as a result of the loss of power. According to a study commissioned by Contingency Planning & Management Magazine, companies in the brokerage business and other financial sectors can lose as much as $6.45 million USD per hour of downtime.

Companies who host their own Web Sites, Electronic Mail, and/or File Transfer services directly from their offices go effectively ³off the air² whenever power is lost to the telecom equipment, routers, or servers that carry their information online. The result is incoming mail ³bouncing² back to the senders, remote office workers cut off from their peers, and rather embarrassing ³ERROR² messages confronting customers and partners who are trying to view the company Web Site.

³It’s interesting that it takes a major blackout, or rolling blackouts like those in California, for people to realize the value of a good power strategy,² says Greg Fournier, Sr. Product Manager for American Power Corporation (APC), makers of UPS battery-backup systems and software. ³They can have the most incredible gear and technology, but without power that equipment goes to waste.²

So how do we prevent hardware damage, data loss, confused employees and irate customers? Addressing this threat to corporate integrity requires a somewhat complex matrix of solutions. How companies address these issues depends upon size, budget, and the degree of criticality of their information systems. A strategy that incorporates the flexibility to deal with the changing climate of your business is key ­ and dependence upon a single solution or technology is a recipe for disaster.

The following three basic categories of services and products combine to ensure a well-rounded and cost-effective overall strategy for corporate survivability during a power failure:

Protecting Your Users

Nothing is more frustrating when you¹re working on that seven-layer Excel spreadsheet than having your computer¹s monitor go black as you¹re entering that masterstroke calculating field. However, most office workstations only require enough power during a failure to ride out isolated brown-outs or brief interruptions. During a power outage, individual users simply require enough time to safely store their data, close their programs, and shut their machine down properly.

APC sells a simple power-bar sized device designed for individual computers. The product, called the ³Back-UPS Office² offers surge protection as well as up to 40 minutes of battery-backed running time for a single computer for less than $120. The software that ships with this device will inform the computer it¹s attached to when its own power is running low so that it can shut itself down safely when the user is not available.

Another option to consider in protecting data on workstations is equipping employees with notebook computers instead of desktops. Because they¹re portable, these come ready with their own built-in batteries, have more rugged internal power circuitry, and have numerous other advantages (and disadvantages, depending upon your office environment). Simply plugging a notebook into the AC circuit via a surge suppressor probably gives adequate protection from all but the most catastrophic of power events.

Keeping Internet Services Alive

Long gone are the days when companies can entrust their corporate Internet strategy to the neighbour¹s prodigious (a polite term for ³nerdy²) teenager. Just as gone are the days when it was a Good Idea to run Internet services from within the offices of the companies they are required to serve. In this day and age, people (and customers) have far greater expectations for the reliability of Internet services such as email and web sites.

Simon Kan sees the value in taking those customer-facing aspects of the business, such as email and web services, and pushing them outside the office: ³There are just too many calamities that can happen to servers in an office environmentŠ while some services have always got to be in the office, internet services need to be in a place where they are safest to make sure they¹re always up.²

Fortunately, many new Internet businesses have applied a longstanding model for reliability taken from the pages of telecom 101, creating co-location centres with redundant internet connections, battery-backup power, and their own power generation facilities.

One such company, which rode out Vancouver¹s power outage with uninterrupted bliss, is Peer1. Peer1, headed by Geoff Hampson, provides co-location facilities for internet servers: ³We were impressed by how our systems handled this real world test ­ there is a real difference between scheduling a power shut down for testing purposes and actually losing utility power for several hours late at night. Our customers who live and work outside of the Lower Mainland never even knew there was a problem.²

For a few hundred dollars per month, customers can park their Internet servers in highly secure, temperature-controlled racks in Peer1¹s co-location network centre. Here, the servers will enjoy the utmost in quality in utility power, air conditioning and cooling, disaster protection, and even protection from curious onlookers.

But housing your internet servers in a co-location facility like Peer1 is only an option for companies who have the resources to manage them. For smaller companies without the desire for their own dedicated Internet servers with all of their accordant maintenance costs, outsourcing may be the answer. Fortunately, there is a font of new Service Providers who will host your company¹s Web, email, and other Internet services on their own systems in operations centres similar to Peer1¹s.

Vancouver¹s Electric Mail Company is an IT outsourcing company that provides, among other services, hosted email and messaging services. EMC¹s email solution allows corporations both large and small to cost-effectively outsource their messaging needs while preserving corporate integrity, manageability, security, image, and branding. ³Email is like electricityŠ when it works, nobody says Œthanks¹, but when it¹s down there¹s an uproar² says Iain Black, EMC¹s President and CEO.

His job may be thankless, but EMC saves companies money while significantly increasing the reliability of their email services. Iain estimates that small-to-medium-sized companies who operate their own internal email servers spend approximately $80-$120 per month per user to keep these services up and running ­ and that¹s to say nothing of the costs for building a strategy to effectively operate these services through power failures and other disasters ­ which most haven¹t done.

³Companies should take the time to analyze their critical business applications and decide which ones can be effectively outsourced,² Iain says, ³and those applications should be placed in the hands of companies with both the infrastructure and the skillset to ensure quality and reliability.²

Protecting the Crown Jewels

Says Greg Fournier at APC: “One of the most dangerous risks to any business is the loss of power. Any outages can cause companies to lose important and critical data, and will cause companies lots of problems with failing hardware and downtime.² According to Greg, these costs grow exponentially with the number of seats (employees) affected by the outage.

The servers that store all of your Local Area Network¹s backup files, control the printers, and keep track of users and security are particularly sensitive to outages. It can take days to resurrect one of these monsters when they suffer damage from a surge or a power failure. Worse than the loss of data and/or hardware is the productivity loss that can result from such an interruption and the time it takes to restore services to their former glory.

Whatever the size of your business, you will want these servers to both be able to ride out brownouts or dips without interruption, and for the servers themselves to know when power is lost so that they can shut themselves down effectively and safely.

APC and others make high-end battery-backup units for servers and network operations centers, like APC¹s ³Smart-UPS Rack-Mount². These devices not only add the ability to extend the server¹s operations through a major power failure, but also interact with the server via software, informing it to shut down safely when battery life runs low.

APC¹s software, called ³PowerChute² will even inform Systems Administrators via email or pager when a power event is detected. Properly configured, PowerChute will be able to manage the UPS systems on its own or in conjunction with Enterprise-class network management tools like Tivoli or HP Openview.

Anticipating your power needs in a growing network environment is often where businesses, even those who invest in UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) devices, fall over.

Many SysAdmins do not take the time to accurately calculate the power demands (measured in WATTS) of their various pieces of network hardware. As the operations team continuously add new devices, thereby increasing the accordant power draw, your UPS which once gave you 8 hours of uninterrupted power may now provide only 30 minutes. Even worse, some devices which are critical to the network¹s survivability may be plugged directly into AC while nonessential items are occupying valuable power cycles on the UPS.

Implementing a strategy for the salvation of network equipment during a major power outage is not so simple as ordering a RackMountable UPS from your local reseller ­ it requires planning and careful calculation.

Many companies find, once they do these calculations, that they simply do not have the square footage to house enough battery storage to power their equipment through major interruptions. That¹s where more brute-force methods of power backup come in.

Gordon Roberts, Branch Manager for Finning Power Systems Canada in Vancouver, has had his phone ringing off the hook since Tuesday Night. Finning sells standby diesel generators that output KiloWatts and MegaWatts of power for factories and buildings.

³It used to be that standby generators were an afterthought ­ customers bought them because they were mandated by the building code, for operating elevators and emergency lighting, and so they did it as cheaply as possible.²

But now, Gordon says, that has all changed. ³The Information Age has created a need for businesses to have absolute reliability of the utility. If America OnLine has a major central outage,² says Gordon, ³it can cost them one million dollars per minute.²

That¹s US Dollars, too. Truly, for companies in the Information Economy, the cost of standby diesel generators, which can run between $20,000.00 and $3,000,000.00 depending upon the required power output, is miniscule compared to the opportunity cost of being ³down², even for a few hours.

Many of Finning¹s customers are building managers whose tenants have banded together to demand higher output from the building¹s existing backup power generators for their data equipment. Whereas one company does not have the need for a 65-Kilowatt generator (enough to power about 130 desktop computers), several can spread the cost of the generator easily ­ and for creative building managers, selling backup power is an additional revenue opportunity.

The key, according to Gordon, is to build not for today, but for tomorrow. ³Build it and they will come.² If recent events in California are any example, he may be right.

-Ian/2001

Ian Andrew Bell is a technology consultant and writer living in Hollywood, CA.

Links:

American Power Corporation: http://www.apc.com Peer1 Networks: http://www.peer1.com Finning: http://www.finning.com Electric Mail Company: http://www.electricmail.com Dolphin Computers: http://www.dolcom.com