Any Way the Wind Blows (As Long as It's North)

Tuesday took us to Canada, and Wednesday brought us back. TQ and I went up to Winnipeg for the Canadian Distance Education Conference, where we talked about our efforts to use blogs and wikis for helping students find and make use of information. It was cold up there, but we had a warm reception during the last session of the conference, where over 20 people came to hear what we had to say, asking questions and offering up some of their own ideas. It was a great session, though it threw me off guard when some professors spoke matter-of-factly about their resistance to using American servers to store or manipulate information. Any non-US server was fine with them. They mentioned the Patriot Act as a concern, leaving me a little uninformed about what provisions there might pose a problem. I'll need to look into that more. But they were interested in our work.
On a lighter note, I had brought an old case of cassette tapes to play in the non-cd player car we took, and TQ noted that one tape was dated--the recording made on May 16, 1977, 30 years to the day from our travel. Yours truly, a 20 year old soldier stationed in Friedberg, West Germany, just north of Frankfurt, making recordings. It was cosmic forces at work, so it was fitting the music was from the Canadian band Klaatu, and the first song? Check out the photo: "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft."
The trip also featured good Korean and Italian food, a nice cool run around windy Winnipeg (where in their 50 degree weather people sported t-shirts, rode their motorcycles, and cruised with their convertible tops down). We shopped very briefly and scooted back south again on Wednesday, flashing our passports at the border, two occupants of international craft coming home (without having had either Canadian bacon OR Canadian Club.