Paddling at last

Every night on this Brigade, the crew captains and some of the advance crew gather to discuss the next day's paddle. Last night the meeting was held in a school gymnasium in Rexford Montana. Close to half the Brigade slept in the gym as it was raining. The rain continued all night and this morning at 8am the forecasted rain made for a wet start. The nine canoes paddled about 24km down the Koocanusa reservoir, slowed by both rain and a head wind. We trailered the boats past a dam and then paddled another 22km into Libby, MT -- this was my first paddle of the Brigade.
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On to the USA

We arrived at the Koocanusa reservoir last night and this morning the Brigade is paddling towards a ceremony at the border. The reservoir has been almost emptied in anticipation of the huge snow melt that will soon arrive.
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Off to the Sea

Friday we began the David Thompson Columbia Brigade -- a six weeks canoe journey to Astoria, Oregon at the mouth of the Columbia River, about 1000 miles away. Saturday morning the Brigade was up shortly after 5am and headed to a breakfast hosted by the community of Canal Flats and followed by the canoe launch pictured here at the nearby Kootenay river. Yesterday was the first day with a large arrival celebration at the beach in Invermere. The beach was crowded to watch the ten canoes arrive and paddle around in figure eights before a race to shore. Bagpipe players lead a short parade followed by more music, story-telling, fur trade-era exhibits from Parks Canada and comments from local leaders.
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SPOT the canoes

Follow this link to a full screen map showing the recent progress of The David Thompson Columbia River Brigade. It leaves Invermere BC on Friday June 3rd and arrives in Astoria Oregon at the Pacific Ocean on July 15th.

TEDx Waterloo

TEDx Waterloo was over a month ago and it was an excellent event. My favourite speaker was probably the long-distance swimmer Vicky Keith. The open science topic was interesting; Edwin Outwater from the KW Symphony was far more interesting than I expected and Abby Sunderland, the kid who was lucky to survive her attempt to sail around the planet isn't a super polished speakers, but has an incredible story. TEDx isn't TED, but it was a fun event.

Kirk has paddled on

Kirk Wipper, a truly great Canadian, died two days ago. He gathered hundreds of canoes at his Canadian Canoe Museum and was awarded the Order of Canada. I had the pleasure of spending some time with him on the final day of the 2008 David Thompson Brigade thanks to the efforts of Linda and Eric Williams.

Use Facebook? Read this

http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2010/feb/10/highlights-eben-moglens-freedom-cloud-talk/
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Ecovative TED talk

I posted a message about Ecovative a couple years ago when I first saw these guys at a Rensselaer business plan competition. It was obvious they were the best of the lot, had a great intellectual property position, an enormous market to work within, great timing and had the desire to make it happen. They were ranked 3rd of 3 by the brain-trust panelists and "VCs"! Now they have a contract with Steelcase (office furniture) and are featured at TED:

http://www.ted.com/talks/eben_bayer_are_mushrooms_the_new_plastic.html

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PlayPump video

I failed to get this video to upload to my Wordpress blog), so I am attempting to send it to this blog and perhaps I can cross-link it. If you haven't read my comments about PlayPump, the short version is that the product costs four times more than the standard pumps used in many countries and somebody is creating a future water problem for a school & village when they remove a fully functional Afridev pump and install a Playpump. The video shows kids having some fun, playing with the pump.

So it seems the BlackBerry video format might be the issue, since Blogspot doesn't seem to want to show it either. Hmmm, this could take some work.

I'm in Malawi

I am in Malawi as part of an Engineers Without Borders placement. The bulk of my updates will be on an alternate blog where you can subscribe to receive an email notification when I post something new.

This map doesn't show Balaka where I am living, but it is east of Ntcheu (which is spelled incorrectly on this map).

I went to an internet cafe to upload some files. Silly me. I plugged my laptop into their network and the fastest internet site in town painted the Google search logo over a period of about 10 seconds. They need some bandwidth over here. My BlackBerry has EDGE connection speed which is better than so called broadband here.