Frederick Giasson’s Weblog

I just finished to re-write an English (thanks to Jon for correcting it) and French version of my personal web site. I wanted to open myself a little bit more on the cyberspace; I wanted to give the possibility to people to learn who Fred is personally, professionally and in pictures.

More and more people contact me, via my blog and website, for a full of reasons. However, everything is happening on the cyberspace and people sometime have doubts about the authenticity of the people they meet. For that other reason, I wanted to write more things about me: what my profession is and my passions in life as well as publishing hundred of pictures I took around the World in my last trips. That way I wish that people become more comfortable and less shy to talk with me by knowing more things about my personality. That way, I wish that I will increase the trust people have in my cyber-authenticity (so trusting me and my work).

Technorati: Personal | website | open | social | profession | passions | photo | |

Yup, we finally got one! Thanks to Mark Evans, Mathew Ingram, Mike McDerment, Rob Hyndman and Stuart MacDonald for this initiative.

I will try all my best to be there; I should register in a couple of days.

Mesh will take place in Toronto at the MaRS Collaboration Centre the 15th and 16th May 2006.

Many people will be there like Steve Rubel, Tara Hunt, Om Malik, Jason Fried, Stowe Boyd, Amber MacArthur, and many others.

The agenda is not fixed at the moment, but Stuart will put it on their blog as soon as it is nailed down.

For the attendees, you should use the tag Mesh06 when blogging about that event.

Who are currently talking about that event? Check out the Technorati Tags; however, at the moment you can find more results using Talk Digger.

I just found via the Remarkk blog that there is a BarCamp in Toronto the 13th and 14th May 2006, just before the conference. It could be a good warm-up, and it could be a good place to present a new major feature of Talk Digger (in fact it is far more ambitious than the meta-search engines I created with Talk Digger, and in my humble opinion, it have far more potential to connect people and find/follow/enter into discussions evolving on the Web). The only thing I hope is being able to finish a demo by the 12 May; otherwise I could simply talk about Web discussions.

Technorati: Mesh06 | Canada | web2.0 | conference | barcamp | BarCampTdot | torcamp |

As you probably know, I was on a trip in India for the next months. However, as expected, nothing gone as expected: thanks God!

There is only one word to describe my trip: Adventure.

It was awesome.

Everything started in India. I have been there for 3 weeks: 3 weeks of pure adventure. It was awesome and really an experience to live for an occidental. Nothing is familiar and everything can happen in India. My motto was: expect the unexpected.

I will not write everything here (I wrote about 40 or 50 pages in French just in emails, to my friends and family, to describe what happened, and not really expected, during the last 5 weeks). However I can say that it was awesome and I would do the same trip anytime.

As I said, I was supposed to be away for 2 or 3 months, and I came back after 5 weeks, so what happened?

Everything ended with my last adventure in the Himalaya. There is the short story:

I flew from Kathmandu to Lukla (the last airstrip before the Everest) and was suppose to go to Gokyo, then getting the Chu La Pass (if the weather conditions were good) then heading to the Everest base camp. (Have in mind that I have been alone all the trip long, meeting a incredible number of people from all around the world).

Click here for a map of the region

So I headed to Gokyo without any Acute Mountain Sickness problems: I was at 4700m of altitude. Everything was going as expected and without any problem except for a could that started 2 days ago, so I woke up the morning after my first night at Gokyo, started to climb the Gokyo Peak (5400m), expecting to go to the Chu La Pass later in the day.

Then the unexpected happened.

I get a HAPE (High Altitude Pulmonary Edema): water in lungs. I had only one thing to do from that point: climbing down of 1000m of altitude in the next hours or I could get permanent injuries to the lungs or worse death if I keep myself at that altitude for too long. The problem is that I had to climb down to Phortse to climb down of 900m and it is a 12km or 15km of walk in the mountains, with 25kilos of stock, 50% to 60% of the sea level oxygen, malfunctioning lungs and I was alone, unable to find a porter or even a tourist to help me to carry by pack-sac.

To make a short story, I got to Phortse after around 11 hours of walk: I never been that exhausted. Then the next day I got to the doctor in Kunde ( if the day before I was exhausted, now I was dead after the walk from Phortse to Kunde). Then I found that everything was okay vis-a-vis my lungs, but I got an alimentation intoxication.

It was the worse… I haven’t been able to eat during my last 3 days in the Himalaya because of this intoxication, and I was spending around 5000 calories to get me out of there. So I was not able to go back at the Everest base camp because I wasn’t able to eat, so getting back my energy. My antibiotics were not effective and I wasn’t able to restart to eat after a couple of days so I decided to get out of there in case that it wasn’t a bacteria that I had in my belly. So I found a cargo Helicopter that was flying near from where I was (Namche Bazard) to Jiri (a beautiful old 1960 helicopter drove by by Colonel I. Tchekov).

So I got back to Kathmandu 4 days after my ascension of Gokyo peak, my belly started to get back on track after 10 days, and I am now in Quebec.

My trip was awesome; I lived many many fabulous things during these 5 weeks.

Now I am back, full of energy and ready for the next steps.

Right now I am digging in 5 weeks of web feed aggregation, trying to check what happened in the Blogsphere during the last 5 weeks. So my next posts will probably be in relation with the interesting writings I found.

tags technorati : Himalaya india nepal trip hape mountain everest Kathmandu

In the past, 30 or 40 years ago, people were saying: in the future, with all the new technologies, we will work 20 hours a week and all the rest of our time will be spend on leisure.

In fact, 30 or 40 years later, people are doing twice the work they were doing with the same time. The new technologies permit us to do much more things in much less time. Some people will tell me that it is not the case, but I would say that if it is not, at least the quality is greater.

The problem is that with these new technologies and these new working techniques follow new dynamics. Well, if we can do more in less time, then why the situation is not as expected decades ago? Because new geo-demo-politico-dynamics are emerging at the same time. The world is changing, everything goes faster and faster. New democracies are emerging, new populations want their part of the cake, information is democratizing with the evolution of the Internet, etc. We have to learn, to assess, and to act quickly to be able to cope with this new and constantly changing world.

It is in that vision that new products and technologies emerge every week. Most of these products try to help you to cope with these new dynamics. They try to automatically assess your environment, they try to help you to find relevant things in the constant incoming flow of information, and they try to make things easier for you: but the result seems that it will only help you to do much more things with the same time.

Is it our human nature to works endlessly? Is it our social structure that is pushing us in that direction? Is it the result of cultural interactions? Why do we use that saved time only to try to do more things?

Technorati: work | technologies | society | culture | future | leisure | time |