Last week the Canadian Competition Bureau released the report Your Data, Your Control: How data portability can unlock competition and empower consumers. The surprisingly readable report centers around an experiment exploring data portability in the insurance sector, calculating that “introducing data portability could save Canadians “between $1.10 billion and $3.83 billion in both time and money on their annual costs.” I decided to read the report to understand how the Canadian federal government thinks about data portability in general, with an eye towards other digital spaces like social media, cloud, AI, and the types of stuff I am interested in.
Realized that this is the first Anglo country (other than the US) that I have ever traveled to. Usually when I go somewhere I get some foreign-language manga for my kids, but that a moot gesture here 😅
Chad points at things London Edition ☝️🤓 Part 6: Walked around the downtown core which is pretty quiet on a Saturday and saw The Gherkin, The Scalpel, Sky Garden, all of which cannot really be explained. Finally there is the The Monument to the Great Fire of London (1666) which is MASSIVE
Chad points at things London Edition ☝️🤓 Part 5: Random Edition including the I Goat, the site of London’s first coffee shop, the White Hart Lane train sign, and myself at the Bubble Bond outside Liverpool Station
Hey! It’s your Canadian 🇨🇦 Dad in London 🇬🇧. Let me show you what I found down this sketchy alley
Chad points at things London Edition ☝️🤓 Part 4: Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. The boys are up in Manchester this weekend so I took the stadium tour. Took a ton of pics of the pitch, and of course the mural of Sonny
Chad points at things London Edition ☝️🤓 Part 3: Not so much pointing in this edition which focuses on tall pointy things. Walked down Fleet St and the Strand, past King’s College, saw the Camel Corps Memorial, Cleopatra’s Needle, crossed the Thames again, saw the Eye and then it was Big Ben time.
Chad points at things London Edition ☝️🤓 Part 2: St Paul’s Cathedral where I spent an inordinate amount of time staring at the dome, avoiding walking over people in the crypt, huffing up tight circular stairs to the roof, then freezing while taking in the view.
Chad points at things London Edition ☝️🤓 Part 1: Tower Bridge, the Globe Theatre, the absolute unit of a building Tate Modern Art Museum, then crossing the bridge to St Paul’s
Omg I slept 9 hours.
Time to do some laundry then explore London.
Attended a talk by some g0v.tw and ocf.tw reps from Taiwan at Newspeak House. They covered the evolution of the #opensource community in Taiwan, the relation with the gov, and the “Bloody Truth” of OS economics :lolsob: We then had a wide-ranging conversation and 🍕💖
After having a massive fish & chips I stopped by a Sainsbury’s and picked up some Jaffa Cakes and Walker’s Salt & Vinegar before heading back to the hotel. 🇬🇧 Might have to put on some Doctor Who to round out the evening. 🙃
Also, Brick Lane is a dream for street photography. I will have my GRIV out tomorrow for a wander 📸
Checked out the Newspeak House venue to prep for #PfP✨London, ended up staying for the Open Rights Group meetup, then got a massive fish&chips and hung out with faculty and fellows and even met some visitors from the Taiwan open source community passing through from FOSDEM. 💖
After a 3 hour delay due to a water pump issue—which they couldn’t fix so just shut down the system resulting in no coffee, tea, or running water in the bathrooms for the 9hr flight—I finally took off to London 🇬🇧 Slept the whole way and checked into my hotel. Everything is so… British 😂
How boring people people are actually interesting (and how they can help you do crimes) — advice for a 14 year old from the inimitable Mike Monteiro 😊
