Tales under the cat tree

Duleepa Wijayawardhana

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In this podcast we'll explore the wonderful worlds created by words: from technology and the future to fiction and other realms. Come join me and my friends for a weekly exploration of our present, future, and humanity through storytelling. tales.dups.ca

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Ep. 22: (Update) The Shortcut and Enlightened Migration

An updated version of Episode 6 included an interview with Riikka Loisamo, CEO of The Shortcut. The interview is followed by my own immigrant story and some singing! Links: * Visit The Shortcut in Finland for more about their programs and how to get involved. * Learn more about the attitude change campaign run by The Shortcut and their partners. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tales.dups.ca

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Ep. 21: The "Cheater" Episode

When I was growing up in the 1980s in Hong Kong, we only had four television channels. Of these, two were in English—ATV and TVB. My father refused to buy a VHS player, his reasoning being that I would spend too much time watching TV. To this day, I think it was because he was burned by VHS beating Betamax. As with every kid in my generation, I was glued to the TV at certain times of the day. There were Saturday morning cartoons, Sesame Street every weekday afternoon, and the famous syndicated Disney hour on Sunday evenings. Without modern conveniences like YouTube, if you missed an episode during a long and arduous season of 25 episodes, your only hope was to watch it on videotape or wait for reruns. There was also the infamous “cheater” episode that many shows of that era created. Picture this: It’s episode 18 of a Golden Girls season in the 1980s. Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia are sitting around the kitchen table. Sophia brings up some ridiculous premise about her flight from Sicily, and therein ensues an episode made of clips from previous episodes. This is a “cheater” episode—no new footage, cheaper production costs, and some ridiculous framing device for the clips. As I grew older, I noted that almost all the TV shows used this gimmick at some point in the season. There were comedy shows that I watched with my parents, like The Golden Girls and The Cosby Show, while others were more aimed at me, like MacGyver, The A-Team, Riptide, and Hardcastle and McCormick, to name a few. Television in Hong Kong in the 80s was a mix of American and British. I don’t remember if television shows from Canada, Australia, or the UK used this storytelling mechanism. I do recall watching Neighbours, for example. This came on every afternoon, and I remember watching youngsters Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan very clearly before their music careers. Canadians would be surprised to learn that The Beachcombers would air on lazy Sunday afternoons, usually after televised lawn bowling, and someone will have to write in and tell me whether that show had such episodes. I sincerely doubt that many Hong Kong people could make head or tail of what was happening in Molly’s Reach. It’s probably unsurprising that what I remember most about The Beachcombers growing up is a comedy skit show in Hong Kong making fun of it. So for this “cheater” episode for Tales Under the Cat Tree, I will use the framing device of what it has taken to put out a weekly podcast of roughly 20 minutes by myself. After all, this was something I had never done before. Initially, my plan was 20 episodes in total, so, with this episode, I am considering this my first season, done and dusted. In listening to this you may get some ideas if you are considering having a podcast yourself. At the end I will talk about what’s next! Recording a Podcast Microphone Arm: Rode PSA 1+ microphone arm Microphone: Shure MV6 USB-C microphone. A very good microphone I could not use: a Rode NT 1 Condenser mic. Mentioned: Coming Up with a Theme Song Audio effects: Artlist. Mentioned: Interviewing for a Podcast Interviews: Riverside.FM. Audio editing: Audacity Audio AI: AuphonicWireless Mics: Rode Wireless Micro Mentioned Use of AI in Tales Under the Cat Tree Other editing tools: Adobe Podcast. Transcription: MacWhisper whisper.cpp The Future of Tales Under the Cat Tree At the end of 21 episodes, which is about the same number as a season of 80s television, I need to look forward to Season 2. I didn’t know what I wanted out of this podcast, and it shows. I’ve experimented with themes, structures, publishing times, and formats. The criticism I’ve received reflects the same: you don’t know what to expect, and I don’t have a format to stick to. Going forward each week, I will pair bigger topics with a compelling piece of fiction or autobiography. I sincerely believe that stories provide a lens into capturing and understanding any topic—whether history, technology, or business—by connecting personal narratives to the wider picture. This means more episodes such as Episode 10, where I wrote a story called “To the lands of milk and honey” to illustrate management styles, or Episode 15, “From Russia Without Love,” which had a story about Stalinist purges by Dr. Erwin Warkentin followed by an interview. This means more original writing and biography, paired with interviews and topics around an episode theme. Thank you to everyone who has helped me thus far, you are too numerous to name. I hope you will join me or stay with me on this journey. In fact, I hope you will contribute. Everyone has or knows someone with a story. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tales.dups.ca

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Ep. 20: Flash!

Today’s episode also features the flash fiction story “Sullivan’s Choice” My name is not Dave Dave was born bawling. He didn't really like what he saw when he popped out into the light. "Rather depressing," he drawled. But there was nothing to do about it, so he sighed, shut up and set up shop in my head. To date, that is the shortest “flash fiction” story I’ve ever written at exactly 42 words, not including the title. Flash fiction is a sub-genre of the short story that can range from a few hundred or fewer words to maybe a thousand words. In other words, a really short short story! As with any story, it needs to have a progression: a beginning, a middle, and an end. Flash is a genre I knew nothing about until early 2024 when I randomly decided to get back into writing fiction. Since I needed something to force me forward, I found an online course at Oxford University entitled, “Flash Fiction Workshop,” with writer and teacher Gail Anderson. On a whim, I enrolled. Over a twelve-week period, this group of students was courageous enough to present their creations to each other and receive live feedback. I won’t lie; the first time my story was discussed, I was terrified. I can write until the cows jump over the moon for the world wide web, but here were real, live people dissecting my work in front of me while I was muted. I suppose years of code reviews by my peers have helped, but this was on another level. Writing flash stories is an art. If I had been asked how difficult it would be to write a piece of fictional literature under 1000 words, I might have said, “It can’t be that bad.” In reality, with less space to get your ideas across, each word becomes a ponderous weight on your lips. In such a situation, your mind can lazily wander into a “telling” mode where the reader is left unsatisfied and unchallenged. With 1000 words or less, can you craft a story with any wonder at the end? Does the story leap from the page into your subconscious long after you have read it because it made you think? Can you even get the reader to see the same things you do and get to the same conclusion? The first story I wrote for the class was called “In the looking glass.” It centered on the perspective as seen from within a mirror stationed in the hallway at the entrance of an apartment, something I had thought was obvious. But it wasn’t. It was only obvious to me because I had imagined my current apartment, which has a mirrored closet at the end of the entrance hallway. Seeing my short short story through other people’s eyes was enlightening. One person even thought there was a video camera behind the glass; another could not understand why the person was putting on shoes in their bedroom. After all, that’s where they had their mirrors! Every week we were given “prompts” and a specific word count with which we played for the following week. The prompts could be photos, audio clips, or random words, to name a few. For me, a haunting melody turned into a tragedy for twins; a prompt about a city turned into a story about a parrot; and a photo of an old storefront bearing the name C. Sullivan turned into a version of the devil come to visit, called “Sullivan’s Choice.” If you are interested in starting up writing again, or for the first time, Gail’s course is one of the best I can recommend. I had forgotten the joy of putting pen to literal paper. I had forgotten the cathartic release of working through reality by writing fiction. A few of us loved the course so much that we have continued to meet almost monthly since the course ended. The “Chapter Chasers” writing group celebrated its first anniversary this past month. Through this year of telling stories to each other, the members have changed jobs, survived health scares, moved cities, and found refuge in our imaginations. We have yet to meet in person! Because of Gail, her course, and my writing group, I do believe my writing has improved. I am now on the lookout for adverbs that don’t really advance the narrative in someone’s head, where the writing becomes lazy, making for a less engaging experience for the reader. I think with care about each word and sentence, making sure they work to drive home the story. I did take a longer, advanced writing course after the “Flash Fiction Workshop.” The advanced writing course gave me more tools to explore character, plot creation, and more, however, for me, receiving live feedback from my peers was the most fun. Storytelling is unique to each individual: their style, their experiences, and their beliefs. Courses won’t teach you how to write but give you tools with which you can get your story into the mind of another effectively. As with any skill, the only way to improve is to practice every day and every week. Every day I walk through a myriad of stories: The veins on a leaf are the map to an ancient city; a shuffling man hunched over on the sidewalk, a tale of joy or sorrow untold; a melody unlocks the path to someone’s heart. Every day I am bursting to tell you a story. I do not know how you will understand it, I do not know if you will enjoy it, but I do know that I must try. Sometimes the stories are long, but oftentimes, you can accomplish in a few words what takes a novel, and that is the beauty of flash fiction. Since April, I have published only one of the other stories that I wrote during the flash fiction course: The following are flash fiction stories specifically written for this Substack This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tales.dups.ca

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Ep. 19: Remembering Moishe

If you are looking for links to various sources, materials and sites cited in the show, please scroll to the end. The article that inspired this episode is Yair Rosenberg’s The Atlantic piece: The MAGA Influencers Rehabilitating Hitler. I only met Moishe Kantorowitz once in my entire life, some 30 years ago. I have remembered his name ever since. This is not something I can say about most people that I have spent a couple of hours with. Moishe—I hope I can get away with referring to him by his first name—came to talk to the History graduate students at Memorial University of Newfoundland, of which I was one. He was, in my memory at least, a quiet man. He came in, sat at the head of the classroom; there were some ten of us and a few professors. I can't remember when, but he rolled up his shirt, turned his arm, and showed us the tattoo of his number from Auschwitz. He talked about the forced march from what is now Belarus. He talked about what that felt like, how starved he was, and what it was like to lose all his family. Moishe was the first and only Holocaust survivor I have ever met in person. A decade later, I was coming down a long mountain hike in the Rockies with a dear friend, and we had incorrectly calculated the amount of water we needed. That interminable hike scrambling up a thousand metres felt like the end of the world. In that moment, for some reason, Moishe's face and his story popped into my mind. I remember thinking, how can I possibly feel so terrible when what I was experiencing was not even an iota of what he experienced? The reality is though, unlike people I have met in Europe, in Canada, and the United States, I do not have any family ties to this war. There are no strange Sri Lankan great-uncles who found themselves traversing the countryside of Europe in World War Two. But it doesn't matter. It shouldn't matter. The lessons of the Holocaust and of the German Concentration Camps are there plain and simple. The hatred on display was staggering: groups of people, most of all the Jewish people, were made out to be nothing more than animals to be experimented upon and finally exterminated. Do not hate the German people; what happened and this hatred is possible for anyone, anywhere, "anywhen". Do not say, "It cannot happen to us." Instead, ask the question, "When will it happen again?" In the 20th century, genocides have happened in too many societies, from the Rwandan genocide to the Cambodian Killing Fields. There are of course many theories on why we commit genocide as a species. The one I ascribe to starts and ends with the mushy stuff between our ears. Neuroscience tells us not only that our brains are incredibly malleable, but that we also basically function in an illusion of the world as we have created it. For example, you can actually manipulate the brain to think you have a third arm. If you are reading this on your daily commute, I am sure that you cannot even imagine hurting one of your fellow passengers. Then again, that annoying mosquito, well, that's another story. Unfortunately, our brains can create models where you are part of an in-group and the others, well, they could just as well be one of those mosquitos. The term is "otherization". It's when we refer to "those people." I have heard this term so often. A well-educated person used that expression to describe a homeless First Nations man in Edmonton, Canada. A Sinhalese person I met used it to describe a Tamil person some decades ago in Sri Lanka. A Finn used that term in a professional setting when talking about African immigrants to Finland. Politicians the world over use it to refer to their opponents. "Those people," the ones who are not like us, the ones that don't belong, the ones that ought not to be treated like you and me. Heck, I know, judging by at least one beer bottle thrown at me, I have been one of "those people." There's not much distance from referring to "those people" to a place where you condone violence or aggressive action towards that same group. From there, it's not very far towards the extremes we have seen the world over. For the reader that says you are crazy, that's fine: I just know that I am no different than anyone else. I can be swayed, I can be desensitized, I can commit violence through inaction as much as action. I have seen the "other" in business settings: leaders who denigrate their staff in whole or in part and staff who talk of their leaders like some caricatures from Dilbert. We create mental models of people around us, we group them into our in-groups and out-groups, we perform actions against them whether that be simply in thought, by voice or, in the extreme, with physical violence. There is a solution. There is very little that differentiates us as human beings. We all have different external colours and appearances, we have different beliefs, we have different preferences. However, for the most part, the similarities outweigh the differences. When I show you a green leaf, you nod at our shared greenness. We laugh, we cry, and we love in the same way. The more you talk to another person, the more you learn. The more you share, the more you connect. The more you listen, the more you understand. Thank you! If you enjoyed reading this, please subscribe! The solution, if I could make it happen, is for everyone to meet every other "type" of person. When you meet the homeless person and understand that he was like you until his divorce left him in a depression where he lost his job and couldn't afford the medication. When you meet the gay man and you realize that you share a passion for the same movies. When you meet the immigrant and you realize that you both had mothers who loved gardening. The solution is the continuous updating of your mental models through new meeting new people. I would love for each person to experience life in another country, in another state, in another province. We can seek to bring those of differing views together so they can have a sensible dialogue, maybe by starting with what makes us similar instead of what makes us different. We can try not to lump "right wing" and "left wing" people into groups and instead seek out people with different views. I don't expect people to change overnight, but I do believe the more you experience, the more you change your internal assumptions. This is when I remember Moishe, and not just him, but so many other people that I have met who have changed my internal assumptions and models. We must never forget history; we must never fail to pass on our history; we must always tell our stories. In those stories, we have the possibility to change one person, and just maybe, that one person is enough. I hope that when you hear someone saying "those people," you remember that some of "those people" never saw their parents again because other people saw to it that "those people" were exterminated. Moishe Kantorowitz passed away in 2008. He received an honorary degree from Memorial University of Newfoundland for his work in Holocaust education. His book, published by Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program and distributed by Second Story Press, is called Lament. I never knew Moishe beyond that one single time that I met him. That one time though, he told me a short story of his life, which I have remembered ever since, and I thank him for this kindness. * In the podcast episode, you can listen to excerpts from the film reels produced when the United States Department of Defense liberated German Concentration Camps in 1945. This film is in the Public domain and available on the Internet Archive * The excerpt from Moishe Kantorowitz’ memoir Lament is read with permission of the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program the book Lament will be launched in St. John’s on September 18, 2025. It is entirely by coicidence that this is happening at the same time as this episode. Please purchase your copy of Lament at Second Story Press * The biography I read is from the Montreal Holocaust Museum and can be read in full here. There are also photos of Moishe throughout his life. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tales.dups.ca

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Ep. 18: My Parent Cafe / Pondering hyper-personalized software

One of my hopes for the rise of Generative AI is its ability to bring highly technical skills to a wider audience. I hope that it means the rise of applications, systems and networks that change the lives of people in a more meaningful, personalized way. But is my hope too overblown and the hype too overwhelming? Will this new world of personalized applications even arrive? And if it does, what does it mean for software as a business? First though, I have my friend and former colleague Derek Sidebottom on the show talking about his new venture, MyParentCafe.com. An application and a network which is already changing lives. Dups: And today, I’m very happy to introduce a very good friend and a former colleague, not once, but twice. I want to welcome Derek Sidebottom to the podcast. Derek: So excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Dups: Hey, how did we meet? I think we’re going back to the first company we worked at. What was that small little company? Derek: Yeah, we were working together at BioWare up in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Dups: Yes. And for those that don’t know BioWare, it produced things like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Give me a short, brief history of where you’ve been since then. Derek: Yeah, we were purchased by Electronic Arts and I moved down to the San Francisco Bay Area in the summer of, wait for it, 2008, right before the financial collapse. It was an exciting time to be in the Bay. And from Electronic Arts, I went on to all sorts of other places. A couple of in-house organizations, and Kabam, Rocket Fuel—we were the number one AI marketing technology company five years running in the world. Forty million to 400 million in kind of two years, we went public, just crazy growth. So I’ve been working in software, in gaming, in AI and marketing technology, fintech, you name it, probably spent a bit of time in it. I just really enjoy growing organizations. And on the HR side, it’s always about how do you make people better, faster, stronger in what they’re doing. Dups: And that’s an excellent segue into My Parent Cafe, which is what you’re doing today. What is My Parent Cafe? Derek: My Parent Cafe, it is a parent resource network. We were stunned when we were doing the research—it takes 184,000 hours and about $350,000 right now in the United States to raise a child. They say it takes a village, and the joke is, like, do they just show up? Is there a number to call? And the answer, stunningly, is there isn’t. There’s an app to date, there’s an app to fix your house, there’s an app for your career, and there’s no dedicated network out there for parents. And that just became our focus in terms of, like, well, what would that look like? And how could we make that happen? Dups: So I mean, there’s parents of all types, right Derek? Who is this actually for? Like, who are you targeting in the beginning? Derek: Yeah, no, that’s a great question. We talked to parents in France, in Costa Rica, Canada, the United States, you know, everywhere. And we narrowed it down to our real purpose is to connect the people who need to the people who know. And so our quest then became, well, let’s find the people who are most in need, right? This isn’t about sharing what I made for breakfast or my summer vacation. This is people who really need the connection outside of their normal networks. And so we began to focus in on the moments that matter the most… But we also then specialized in some of the harder special needs journeys, right? It would be chronic illness, cancer, kids with cancer, type one diabetes, autism, ADHD, chromosome disorders. These are the journeys no one signed up for. And you became a member of a club you didn’t want to be part of. And then essentially, we give you that club to be part of. Dups: Let’s actually dig into that a little. Because Facebook groups and Reddit are there already. And there are groups for parents in both those places. What does My Parent Cafe add to the mix of this? Derek: You can think of it like… we’ll call them social networks or entertainment networks for the generations, through MySpace, through Facebook, and even more Instagram, Quora, Reddit, now into TikTok. What we’ve found is that the parents are everywhere. They’re trying to use each of these different platforms to connect. None of it was purpose-built. We then figured out, like, let’s build it purpose-built for that parent to connect in a way that I don’t have to tell who I am. I can stay anonymous, which is the best-of-breed feature from one platform. I’m able to accumulate, we’ll call it credibility, right? So we have a coffee bean mechanism. The more helpful you are with other people, the more coffee beans you accumulate, that unlocks certain things. As you go, you are able to post and reply, but it’s not an algorithmic platform trying to sell you things. I will add, we threw an AI co-parent in there as well to play with. So there’s now a 24/7 AI co-parent in every one of our various villages—and villages for us are topic areas—ready to help you. And once you’re done getting what you want out of that discussion with the bot, right? Like, now let me ask humans. And so we’ve linked together questions, answers, support, and solutions specifically around the parent. And that’s just something the other platforms don’t do. If you look at the people who need help the most… their existing social networks probably don’t include people who had any expertise in that area. You need to transcend geography. You need to reach out well beyond your normal networks. The connection to people is still core. We don’t really think AI is ever going to be able to genuinely say, “I understand how you feel.” We’re just not going to believe that. So we’re going to end up still needing to connect the parent who is, in many ways, desperate, scared, nervous, to other folks who have been there, done that. But the people who’ve been there, done that do not really always want to pile on with the 101, 201 answers. And so our AI bot can actually give you the research component, can give you the core information you need, so you’re not taxing the parent network with the same questions over and over again. And we notice that that’s ultimately why a lot of traditional group forums die. People are just kind of tired of seeing the same things again and again. So the AI carries the repetitive, and the parent humans are able to sort of give the extra insight and intel. Listen to more interviews on Tales under the cat tree for free! Dups: Derek, how do you make money from My Parent Cafe? Derek: We’re a startup, we’re staying lean. Originally, we thought we were going to be more of a direct-to-consumer play where the parents would pay a couple of dollars per month. We decided to remove the friction on that because as we were talking to organizations that already existed out there that serve the parent market, we heard a lot of these organizations were like, “Well, this sounds great. Could we create a group on this thing?” And we realized we’re actually sitting on a B2B-to-C model. And so how we make money is ultimately we charge organizations who want to essentially have their own private group on our platform. They pay for that. Dups: Why My Parent Cafe? What is the personal story behind this? Why did you think this was the direction you wanted to go? Derek: Yeah, thank you for asking. For me, after 25 years of building great workforces, so human resources, it’s not a big jump to do parent resources. It’s very similar. In the HR seat, we would always come across people who desperately needed help in their family life, but we had to stop at some point in time because we were the employer. And on that other side, my own little one, when she was born, ultimately she’s a type one diabetic and she’s on the spectrum. And we’ve moved a number of times. And so this idea of, you know, “find your village” was real. We’re like one of the high-need journeys. This just became part of the fabric of building My Parent Cafe. After a year of thinking about this with my co-founder, we couldn’t figure out why this shouldn’t exist. Like, why doesn’t it exist? And then we realized, well, we’re going to make it exist. And then, you know, probably the last filter was, what do I want to do with the rest of my life? And what will fuel me over the next 10, 20 years? Helping parents in need is an easy one. And so that became the fuel behind this, for sure. Dups: That’s one of the wonderful things that I love about startups and founders is that you are solving a passion. So talking of the journey, where are you going next? Derek: Yeah, so we are very carefully—we’re in what we call our pioneer period. After that, we go gangbusters. We are going to open up another vertical for looking after your own parents. We’ve heard “elder care” again and again. It’s just one of these things where, unfortunately, you get a call sometimes in the middle of the night and boom, you need to become an expert in long-term care or insurance and financial planning and assisted living facilities. Even more exciting than building our own product, because when you’re building a resource network that helps people run their lives better, is you just keep coming across other innovations and entrepreneurs who are crazy enough to do the same thing. We’ve seen robotics and AI companies helping non-verbal kids speak, which is just unbelievable. We’ve got another organization that runs marathons with cerebral palsy kids in wheelchairs. It’s an ex-Marine who, unfortunately, his child passed away, but as a legacy project continued onward and has literally thousands of people running races every year with these kids who are grinning at the idea of moving in their wheelchair again. All we’re doing as a resource network

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Ep. 17: Project Frederika and the Finnish Archipelago

Listen to Part 1 of this interview. Welcome to Part 2 of my wide-ranging conversation with my dear friend Kaj Arnö in Nagu, Finland, in the Finnish Archipelago. For those who don't know Kaj, Kaj was one of the Finnish contingent of leaders at MySQL AB that shepherded the open source database to becoming the world's most popular before being sold to Sun Microsystems in 2008. He is one of the founders of MariaDB, former CEO, and now executive chairman of the MariaDB Foundation. To know more about all these things, please listen to last week's episode. Kaj and I became friends because of our love of the outdoors. Kaj spends much of the summer, when he can, in Nagu and on the islands there by boat and kayak. I have written about the joy of spending Midsummer in these islands and even a kayaking trip to one of the more famous islands called Jurmo. This area is primarily inhabited by the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland and is therefore the subject of this episode. Please note, as with the previous episode, we recorded this live in Nagu while walking and playing with Kaj's young son. As such, you will hear wind noise and the sounds of frisbees and a football. Today, however, let's start with a poem by Finland's National Poet, J. L. Runeberg, first in Swedish, then in English. This poem talks about the birds that fly north to summer in the Finnish Archipelago. Subscribe and listen to more great interviews with amazing people. Project Frederika and the Soul of Swedish Finland: A Conversation with Kaj Arnö (Part 2) Our conversation then turned to a new passion project: using open data to preserve the rich history of Swedish-speaking Finland in the age of AI. Dups: Now, Kaj, you are involved in something called Project Frederika. First of all, what is Project Frederika? Kaj: Project Frederika is about making Swedish Finland better represented on open data, meaning Wikipedia and Wikidata. It's also part of the general mission of making objective fact more used by humanity. We know that there's a bias in LLMs. They can be sexist and racist in several ways because they are trained on data that is sexist and racist. This is a way to change it. The way you change it is by ensuring that the data on which the large language models (LLMs) are centrally trained—namely Wikipedia—has correct information. That is the goal of Project Frederika. Yes, we start from the luxurious, quote-unquote, problem of Swedish Finland, but the general case is a much more important one: to ensure that the base data out there is correct and unbiased. Dups: That is really important. In a previous episode, I talked about the case of the "disappearing internet," but also how bias is entering so much of our reference material like Wikipedia, and therefore we're actually changing our own past. How do you ensure the accuracy or "correctness" of the information? Aren't you just as biased as everybody else? Kaj: I think that's a valid question. My answer is that I don't need to provide the mechanism for accuracy; it's already provided by the design of Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a peer-review mechanism where others are checking the validity of data, and that's a functioning model. What is broken, though, is that the amount of interest going into certain areas is not representative of the overall interest of humankind. For example, computer games happen to interest young males, and these young males are writing a lot about them on Wikipedia, which means that data is over-represented. That is an issue I noted for Swedish Finland. Here in Nagu, I inherited five paintings from two semi-famous artists, Johan Knutson and Dora Wahlroos. I didn't know about them, so I thought, "Well, I need to check Wikipedia." They only had articles in Finnish, although they were Swedish-speaking. I thought that must not remain the case. Somebody ought to do something. At the same time, I realized that if that "somebody" is to ever appear, I have a special responsibility to take on that role because I share an interest in both openness and Swedish Finland. And through my work with MySQL and now MariaDB, I've been in close contact with the infrastructure people at the Wikimedia Foundation, because Wikipedia ran on MySQL and has been running on MariaDB for many years. So I had both the technical opportunity and the personal interest to make this happen. Dups: This archipelago that we're sitting in is how many islands? Kaj: We're now in Nagu. Nagu has about 1,400 to 1,500 inhabitants and way more than 3,000 islands. And if you look at Wikipedia, I think there were 1,212 articles on different islands in the Nagu archipelago. Dups: As I understand it, the Swedish-Finnish archipelago in this area has had an outsized influence in the world. I believe seafarers from here went all around the world? Kaj: Yes, there's an extraordinary influence from this area just because of the geography. If you look at Jared Diamond and his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, he says that geography has an influence. People are just as smart or as diligent, as good and as bad everywhere, but geography influences things. This is very much the case in the archipelago here. We who live here have been the interface between the outside world and Finland since time immemorial. You had to pass through here; the archipelago was the road. That means we became experts on logistics and travel by sea. For instance, if you take the Russian conquest of Alaska, the Russians themselves were not seafarers and didn't have naval officers to the extent that the Germans in the Baltics and the Swedes in Finland did. The knowledge we have here about how to build boats and how to sail was what made the traffic from St. Petersburg to Alaska possible. It turns out that two of the governors of Russian Alaska came from this group of people speaking Swedish in Finland. I've been to Alaska and I went to what's now called Sitka; it was called Novo-Arkhangelsk by the Russians. You have buildings there where Americans say, "Oh, don't you see this Russian architecture?" Well, no, it is Nagu architecture, or specifically it's Åland architecture. The houses look like what the seamen built at home on Åland, and they built the same type of houses when they came to Sitka. Dups: For a lot of listeners, they won't know the difference between Swedish-speaking Finland and Sweden. Swedish-speaking Finns are very much Finnish, and you do not see yourselves as Swedes from Sweden. Why is that? Kaj: Correct. Sweden and Finland were one country until we were attacked by Russia in 1808-1809. There was a war of conquest where Russia conquered the eastern part of Sweden, which is today's Finland. At that point, about one person in five in Finland spoke Swedish. It’s not like the Baltics, where the ruling class was German and the peasants were Estonian or Latvian. Oh yes, the ruling class in Finland was Swedish-speaking, but the general population along the coast—all classes of society—was also Swedish-speaking. After 1809, everything continued in Swedish from an administrative perspective until the 1860s when the Finnish language started to grow in prominence. Ever since, Swedish has been an integral part of Finland. So yes, we have ancestry from Sweden from hundreds of years ago—our ancestors immigrated to Finland around the 1200s. But if you have been living in a different place for 800 years, you are not associated with that mother country. Look at Americans—are they associated with the UK? And that's a question of the last two or three hundred years. One thing you should know about Swedish-speaking Finns (finlandssvenskar) is that our association in sports is always with Finland. We will always cheer for Finland. There's no chance that anyone, even those who don't know any Finnish, would cheer for Sweden against Finland. Dups: Are there any unique words or foods from the finlandssvenska culture or the archipelago that are very different from in Sweden? Kaj: Yes. For instance, haru. One of the island types close to us in the outer archipelago is called Gråharu. Even the fact that you pronounce it with short vowels, haru, is something they don't do in Sweden. So yes, we definitely have different words. As for food, gravad lax (cured salmon) is one that everybody knows. Then we have what Swedes call skarpsill, which we call vassbuk. It's a small fish, about 10 centimeters long, and it's super delicious. There are various ways of preparing it, and it's a typical dish here in the Nagu archipelago. Dups: You've mentioned Åland a couple of times. Now, Åland is very interesting because it is neither Finnish nor Swedish, in a way. It was established before the United Nations, correct? Kaj: Correct. The predecessor of the United Nations, the League of Nations, ruled in 1921 that Åland was to be part of Finland, not Sweden. Why did that question even pop up? Because when Russia occupied Finland in 1809, Åland was part of the territory. After World War I, many people on Åland wanted to be part of Sweden because they don't speak Finnish there and are culturally very much associated with Sweden. But the League of Nations, based on a plea from Finland, made the decision that Åland should be part of Finland, but be autonomous and monolingually Swedish. It was also demilitarized as a result of the Crimean War in the 1850s. This was confirmed by the League of Nations—Finland was not supposed to have any military presence on Åland in peacetime. That, of course, changed when peace was no longer there. During World War II, my father was on the frontlines on Hammarland in Åland. And that demilitarized status is interesting today. Russia has closed all its consulates in Finland in other cities except for one place: the capital of Åland, Mariehamn. Dups: If someone wanted to find out more about Project Frederika, how would they do that? Kaj: They can go to our website, which is projektfrederika.fi, or through our Wikipedia project page, which is als

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Ep. 16: MySQL, MariaDB, and AI – A conversation with Kaj Arnö

In 2007, I joined an open-source database company called MySQL AB. While I was at BioWare, I was part of the team that built the BioWare Community, which launched with the game Neverwinter Nights in July 2002. In a future episode or two, my friend and I will be delving into the nerdiest of stories around those times that even the most dedicated BioWare fans have likely not heard. But back to the story... During the process of building the community, we had to do many things that were new to the time. For the scale we were looking for, we had to use an open-source database called MySQL; in fact, we had to use an alpha version due to what we needed to do. Yes, we launched the Neverwinter Nights community—one of the most important things we as BioWare had done as a business—to millions of people on an alpha version of MySQL 4.0. I was hooked on this database software. Many years later, as a BioWare staff member now helping to run a very highly-trafficked database, I attended the MySQL conference in Santa Clara, California, to see if I could learn a thing or two. There I met the CEO of MySQL AB, Mårten Mickos, and I had this unshakeable feeling that I just had to be part of this open-source database story. I scoured their job listings, and they were looking for a web programmer working with Jeff Wiss and the MySQL Marketing team. To many people, this seemed a step down from where I was going at BioWare. For me, it was a chance to learn about a totally different type of business. I had no idea then how life-changing that decision really was. My career as a web programmer lasted all of a year before I joined Kaj Arnö's team at MySQL to become the technical community manager for North America, working for Giuseppe Maxia. My first company meeting with MySQL AB was quite different from anything I had witnessed up to this point. I really didn't know Nordic, let alone Finnish culture. The CEO, Mårten, finished that very frank and open meeting with a shot of vodka. I followed along remotely in Montreal, using the MySQL shot glass I had been gifted as part of joining the team. When Sun Microsystems bought MySQL AB for the then-astronomical sum of 1 billion dollars in 2008, Kaj, Monty, Mårten, Zack, and others led the company in a rousing Finnish drinking song called "Helan Går." This is my first-ever two-part episode. It is a wide-ranging conversation with my now-dear friend Kaj Arnö while visiting him at his home in Nagu, Finland, in the Finnish Archipelago south of the town of Turku (also known in Swedish as Åbo). The interview was recorded while walking near Kaj's house in Nagu with his young son. It was a bit windy, so please pardon the various noises of us playing football and frisbee on a windy archipelago day. [Listen] In true MySQL tradition, let's start with Kaj doing "Helan Går" in his kitchen. A Conversation in Nagu: Kaj Arnö on MySQL, MariaDB, and the Dawn of AI Dups: Kaj, you are my former colleague, my former boss even. We have been partners in building software and friends for a very long time. In fact, you are one of the prime reasons I moved to Finland. So here we are, walking down a lovely country road in Nagu, having a conversation. Tell me a little bit about yourself and how we met, because it all started with a database called MySQL. Subscribe and listen to more great interviews with amazing people Kaj: Yes. First of all, I have to tell you how I ended up in Nagu, and that's because of genetics. Lots of my ancestors come from here. I hadn't been in Nagu more than a couple of times until I was seven years old, when my father's aunt died and we inherited her place. I've been here every summer for more than 50 years. I think it is sort of the center of the universe in many respects, and that's why you and I ended up here right now. But how did we end up working together? That's MySQL, or some people pronounce it My-S-Q-L. At that point in time, it was the biggest open-source database and, by a couple of measures, still is. Dups: What is MySQL, and why did it change the world? Kaj: MySQL is a database. If you look at what is needed in IT, the most fundamental thing is the operating system, which makes the computer work at all. But the second most important thing is how you store things. Where do you store not just your written documents, but all of your data in a structured form? That predates any of the open-source databases; we've had databases since computers were invented. But applying open-source logic to databases—that's what created MySQL. It addressed the second biggest domain in IT, and MySQL was and still is the key database in that realm. Dups: At the time I joined MySQL in 2007, it was already a very successful company. One of the attributions to that success is that it was the foundation for something called Google. Kaj: And I believe something called Facebook. Dups: Oh, yes. Something called LinkedIn. Kaj: Yes. Dups: And I think at that time, something called Twitter. It's called something else now. Kaj: Yes, it was the foundation for about 18 out of the 20 biggest websites at the time. Dups: Do you think that all those services we became so enamored with probably wouldn't have happened if they had to pay for a database from someone like Microsoft or Oracle? Kaj: It most definitely would not have happened without an open-source database. You can, of course, ask, "Is it all thanks to MySQL?" And I would say no. It's about the timing. MySQL happened at the right point in time, and if MySQL hadn't been there, then a year later something else would have filled that spot in a slightly different way. MySQL filled it in its own particular way, which is based on the pragmatism of a database that does the basic things right. Stability, performance, and ease of use were the keywords. Other databases have other criteria, but the web as we know it wouldn't have happened without open source. Dups: But I seem to remember, if I recall correctly—and the founders were Monty Widenius and David Axmark... Kaj: Yes, Monty and David. Dups: The original MySQL was actually shareware. Was that not the case? Kaj: You're right. In 1995, it wasn't yet formally open source, and the term "open source" wasn't really used at that point; it was more "free software." The point in time where they decided to go with a formal open-source license, the GPL version 2, and not shareware, was in the year 2000. So you're correct. Dups: If I remember correctly, you have been friends with Monty and David for a long time. Kaj: With Monty since the '70s and with David since the mid-'80s. So it's been a fairly long history. Dups: And how has Nagu figured into that history? Kaj: We have a common friend who has been arranging so-called midsummer parties here on Biskopsö in Nagu since 1989. Hence, all the people around MySQL come here very, very frequently. Also, the CEO of MySQL AB, Mårten Mickos, has had a place in Nagu since 1966 or so. Dups: So, Nagu is almost central to the history of MySQL. Kaj: It is, absolutely. And I think this is not just a figure of speech or a romanticization. It is also the culture that you have in the Nordics, where there are two concepts that are very conducive to open source. One of them is Allemansrätt and the other one is talkoot. Talkoot is more a Finnish word; Allemansrätt is more a Swedish word. Allemansrätt means "the right of everyman," where you can, here in Nagu, if you find a place you want to go with your kayak, you can go there. There's no need to ask for the permission of the landowner. Yes, it's privately owned, but part of this right is to land on an island and camp there. That, I think, has led to a focus on underlying societal needs as opposed to just selfish needs. The Finnish word talkoot means that you help each other. Today, you're building your house. Okay, I help you. There's no financial compensation, but there's an implicit expectation that when I build my house, you help me. Dups: You played many roles in the MySQL organization as it grew. What are some of the things that you did? Kaj: I started by doing training because we realized at MySQL that you need people who know the product. Some users learn by themselves, but not everybody does. The organization at MySQL was, of course, an ad hoc one at first, where people would fulfill many roles. An engineer could sometimes answer support calls and sometimes develop the software. We didn't differentiate in the beginning between support engineers and developers, which is the most basic division of roles in any organization. Over the years, those roles became much more specific. My role was in the transitioning of an ad hoc organization to a mature one. I was VP of Engineering, I was VP of Services. I said jokingly that except for CEO, the only roles I did not have were being in charge of sales or finance. Interviewer: Then MySQL was sold to Sun Microsystems in 2008 for an astronomical number at the time: a billion dollars. Kaj: That was astronomical at that point. Interviewer: From there, the founders started a second open-source database called MariaDB. Kaj: It's actually more the founder, Monty. David has been with us in a certain way also, but it's mostly Monty who realized this is not the end of the journey for creating databases. And the starting point of that was more Oracle buying Sun than Sun buying MySQL. Dups: For those who don't understand how open source works, you can take any project and "fork" it to continue development on it. That's how MariaDB came about. But of course, MariaDB is very different from MySQL these days. Kaj: Let me first protest against the comment that MariaDB is very different from MySQL. Of course, it is not MySQL; for the last 15 years, it has been something different. And if you think about development in 15 years, lots of things happen, so in that sense, you're completely correct. But in another way, it is super similar. You can take an old version of MySQL and upgrade it to M

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Ep. 15: From Russia without love

No Trial for Papa Please read the original short story by Erwin J. Warkentin featured and discussed on this podcast Interview with Dr. Erwin J. Warkentin Dups: You just heard me read out a story called “No Trial for Papa” by Dr. Erwin J. Warkentin, who is here with me today. And welcome back to Tales Under the Cat Tree. Erwin: Well, you know that I always enjoy talking to you. This is just a little bit of a different forum. Dups: It’s the second show, so part number two of Erwin and Dups Do a Podcast. Erwin, that was a very hard read for me. It’s quite an emotional story from start to finish. I first want to ask you the very simple question: Is this fact or is this fiction? Erwin: In German, you would say jein. That is a combination of yes (ja) and no (nein). In other words, yes, there’s a lot of truth to it. It’s based on truth. But it’s fictional in the sense that it’s a very generic story, that it’s made up of different bits and pieces. And then, of course, my own imagination filling in blanks. So, yes, it’s true. And no, it isn’t. Dups: You and I, of course, had a chat about this story before I read it out. I have a picture that you gave me that I have published with the story. So you can go have a look at it. This picture revolves around the people about whom part of the story is about. Erwin: On the left, there’s a young boy. He’s about eight years old. That’s my father. This is 1929 or so. And next to him, that’s his sister, and the lady in the middle, that’s my grandmother. At this point, she’s all of about 32, and she looks considerably older than 32. And then, of course, next to her is my grandfather. These are the people about whom the story is about. They’re the characters in the story. Their name, of course, is Warkentin and not Classen, as I indicated in the story. And so this is a little bit of that alienating effect that’s taking place for me, where I’m taking some distance from it. It takes place in the Ukraine at the time of the Soviet Union. They are the drivers behind the story. And for me, each of them kind of holds a very special place. Dups: So in the story then, if I’m understanding it correctly, the young boy is your father. The mother is, of course, your grandmother. And David Classen, who gets shot, is your grandfather. Erwin: Exactly Dups: First of all, what is the year that you’ve set this story in? So when did this happen? Erwin: This story actually takes place in 1937. So the people in the story, in the picture, are actually a lot older. My father is about 16 at this point. His sister is about 14. And then, of course, my grandfather and my grandmother are older as well. This was the time of the great purges in the Soviet Union. Stalin decided it was a good idea to kind of get rid of all of what he called the kulaks. These people, these undesirables, people that he considered to be parasites on society. And oddly enough, in this part of the Soviet Union, it was mostly the Germans and particularly the Mennonites that made up this class of people that he wanted to get rid of. Essentially, he wanted to take all of their stuff. He wanted to take their land from them, which they had already effectively done, but he needed them out of the way. And so that’s kind of the historical background of what was going on at the time. Now, specific to this, my grandfather and my grandmother and my father were actually taken prisoner in 1937. They were grabbed by the local powers that be. And my grandfather, I found recently, was executed on October 31st, 1937. The Soviets were actually very efficient. It was just a single bullet to the back of the head. And so there were thousands upon thousands of people that died in this way. My father, for the longest time, assumed that he had died of starvation. He had been sent to Siberia. That was the typical story. He disappeared to Siberia. That didn’t happen. He was killed before he actually had the opportunity to die in Siberia. My father was saved by his age. He didn’t like left-wing politics at all, and that’s really putting it mildly. But he did say there was one communist in there that came into the prison where they were being held, took one look at him and his documentation, and said, he’s not of age of majority. He’s not old enough. He’s not 17. It was 17 at that time in the Soviet Union. So he has to go home. And since he’s not of the age of majority, his mother has to accompany him home. And so they were sent back to their village. In the meantime, his brother and two sisters had been put into an orphanage. They then had to go and collect them and try to put the family back together. So he then survived that part of what was really a horrible beginning to life. It was not a pleasant time to be alive. Not for many people. Dups: And then from there, somehow your family managed to make it to Canada and to Manitoba. Erwin: My father did. My grandmother was eventually… She had actually made it as far as Berlin in 1944. And then she was grabbed by the Russians once they took over Berlin. And they sent her to Kazakhstan along with her other three children. My father had been in the German army and he’d been taken prisoner at the end of hostilities. And so he was safe as it were, although the Russians did come for him too. There was an American officer, again, there’s this strange thing about kindness of strangers along the way who told him that they were coming for him and that he should under no circumstances leave his barracks on a particular day, no matter what. And so he didn’t. This American officer simply told the Russians that this guy had been a problem since day one, and they’d eventually shot him. And his body had kind of gone down the river. He was trying to escape or some story like that. And I always kind of took that with a grain of salt, my father’s story, until I met the American who came and visited him. This was years and years and years later. I was already married at this point. And it turned out the whole story was true. So there’s this whole idea of sometimes truth can be fiction and sometimes fiction can be truth. And, you know, we simply don’t know. Dups: Well, I think this then comes to the very important question that I have for you, which is, why did you not write the absolute truth here? And why did you make it into a story with some truth and some fiction? Erwin: Yeah. Honestly, my first thought was to spare myself. It’s an incredibly emotional story for me because of who’s involved with it. If you think of it, that night in many respects determined who my father was going to be for the rest of time, for his time anyway, and what kind of a father he was going to be to me and all the rest of it. It also determined that I would essentially grow up without a grandparent. My grandmother did live until 1964, and I do have letters and postcards from her, but that’s it. And some pictures. And so for me, it was to kind of step back from it, but also make it relatable to other people. This was not an isolated incident. This repeated itself over a period of two years or so, in countless different homes. In each and every case, it was a little bit different. And so what I wanted to do was borrow from these other stories so that others could kind of latch onto a part of the story and say, this is part of who I am, or I can relate to this because. And so it becomes an amalgam of truths that in and of themselves are fiction once they’re all put together. Dups: And why do you think this kind of story is important today? Want more interviews like this? Please do subscribe! Erwin: It’s a warning in some respects of things that can happen if you allow authoritarian-type governments and people to have too much power in the world. It also passes my story on, hopefully, to another generation so that they know who I am, but even more importantly, that they know who my father was and who my grandparents were and my aunt was, you know, the young girl in the picture. I mean, they don’t figure prominently in the story, but that’s by design. It’s important for the reason of keeping their memories alive and allowing for some sort of emotional connection between the present and the past. In some ways saying, well, you know, we aren’t that different. Sometimes people of today consider themselves perhaps a little superior to the people of the past because we know so much more. And the thing is, this notion of my grandfather reaching out and kind of comforting my father, you know, that’s something that we would expect today. But somehow we have this notion of the fathers and grandfathers of previous generations being so stoic and distant that they didn’t do this. The fathers have always done this and they will always continue to do this. So it’s those sorts of things to kind of break down some of these historical stereotypes that we might have. Dups: This goes back to the idea of the role of creative writing. And for me, one of the problems that I have is when we write anything about history, we tend to put what is happening today into the past, even though we have absolutely no idea how the past was. Because we really weren’t alive then. And a lot of things actually were different then. A lot of expressions were different then. Even the way that they did treat children was different then. How does this fit? Like in terms of trying to reconcile the two things. One, the past was very different, but it is at the same time very similar. Erwin: What we want to do is we want to also recognize and know these people as human beings. I think that’s part of it. So we try to modernize them. And in some ways, that’s what we’re doing with historical fiction today. I mean, it’s all the rage. Every which way you look, there’s historical fiction going on. And that’s because we’re trying to fill in these blanks and make this thing perhaps a little more

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In this podcast we'll explore the wonderful worlds created by words: from technology and the future to fiction and other realms. Come join me and my friends for a weekly exploration of our present, future, and humanity through storytelling. tales.dups.ca

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