In less than 8 hours, Blogathon 2009 will begin. I’m currently hanging out at Rebecca’s house, watching Stand By Me and eating popcorn. I started working on a little spreadsheet of blog entries for tomorrow, but only filled in about 15 spots or so, which means the other 34 will have to be decided sometime tomorrow. To be honest, I’m fairly beat. I don’t even recall last year’s Blogathon at this point, although I do remember hanging out at my place with Rebecca, John and Raul, sometime around midnight. I imagine somehow I’ll make it to the end tomorrow, but at this point I think it’s ...

Welcome everyone the Blogathon 2009! Over the next 24 hours, I will be consuming insane amounts of caffeine while writing blog entries in an effort to generate some exposure and hopefully a bit of financial support for the charity of my choosing, the BC Children’s Hospital Foundation. I can’t imagine many things worse in this world then being a parent and watching your child get sick. The BC Children’s Hospital is known Canada wide for the work they do with children, which is why I’ve chosen it this year as my charity of choice. I decided on the way to Workspace this morning that I was ...

When Apple introduced the iPhone 3GS, they added a new piece of hardware: a magnetometer. That little do-dad can pick up magnetic field lines, and basically act as a virtual compass. While kind of a neat feature, I don’t think it’s very practical. I mean, pretty much every iPhone 3G user I know has the data plan, which basically means they can access Google Maps whenever they want. Yes, you can’t get a real time indication of your direction using Google maps, but if you move around you can obviously watch what happens and see which direction you are facing. But to be honest, it’s pretty ...

Another great city that I’m fortunate enough to spend a lot of time visiting is San Francisco, California. I was recently down there in June for a big WordPress conference, and will probably be down there again in a few months I imagine. Here’s a shot I took of San Francisco about a year ago from just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. I also just picked up a few diet cokes. Which means that today so far I’ve had three coffees, and one 500ml diet coke. Here’s a shot of the current carnage: ...

I’m no old timer yet, but I’m definitely past the point where’d I’d consider myself a spring chicken. This year is really the first year where I’ve noticed any grey hairs, and is also the first year where I’m starting to recognize the odd pain. One in particular, a sharp pain in the heel on my left foot, tends to cause me some grief. Years ago I jumped off a big wall and landed pretty hard on my feet. I never got it looked at, but I’m fairly certain I cracked my heel bone, since I basically had to limp for around four weeks. Unfortunately, I now wake up with a sharp pain in the same ...

A bunch of us are currently hanging out down in Gastown at a little place called Workspace. Because of how important Blogathon is and the amount of dedication involved by the participants, several organizations have offered to sponsor the event, namely in the area of food. The first sponsor of today’s event is Dairy Queen, and they’ll be supplying all of us with burgers, fries, chicken strips, sundaes, blizzards, and onion rings. Back in high school, I had a bit of a crush on a girl who worked at Dairy Queen. Given that we went to different schools, and the only chance I’d have to run into ...

A lot of my fellow bloggers around here have installed WordTwit today so that they can have their WordPress posts automatically show up on their Twitter feeds. While WordTwit doesn’t officially support hashtags yet (those crazy things that look like #someword on Twitter), there’s a quick little work around for events such as Blogathon. First, navigate to the WordTwit administration panel. Typically you’ll see something like this under general options: The trick is to edit that text such that the hashtag you’d like to be added is automatically inserted after each post. So for the case ...

I just wanted to personally thank everyone who has donated to my Blogathon campaign so far. I’ll list the people who have indicated that they don’t mind their name being given out. Right now, I’m sitting at about the $750 mark $1,000 mark, which is great considering I’m only about 1/3 of the way through the event. Here’s a list of the current donators: Tia & Richard Everitt Darren and Nicole Johnston Tom Storey Raised on Indie Cathy Webber Jane Smith Lorraine Toor Kimberley Schellenberg Jamie Billingham Peter Andersen Kasia Finkelstein Paul Schaap Keira-Anne Mellis Austin Paul Eileen ...

Without a doubt, one of my favorite events to shoot is a sunset. I used to live a stone’s throw away from the Pacific Ocean, and walking down and watching the sun set was pretty much a weekly or a semi-weekly event during the summers. I know that many photographers think that sunset photos are a bit cliche, but I’ve never thought so. To me, watching the sun set highlights some of the real beauty of this world, and reminds me of all the great things that bring me joy in it. So, here are a few of my favorite sunset photos that I’ve taken over the years: ...

This entry represents post 18 out of a total of 49. So, I still have a fairly long ways to go. To be honest, I was pretty beat when I woke up, and feeling pretty worn out around 9:30am or so, but thankfully I seem to have gotten another wind. I’ve been consuming diet pop like it’s going out of style, so that might have something to do with it. Or perhaps, it could be the big bottle of water I also started drinking in an effort to rehydrate myself. Whatever it is that’s keeping me going, I sure hope it lasts for a while. Photo by John Biehler Various friends of ours have been swinging by ...

My friend Kelly sent me along this information, and I wanted to share it with everyone. Apparently Shaw Cable has been aggressively trying to hurt Novus in the Vancouver market. Here’s some information from the 10buckstoo.com website: Shaw has been offering residents in buildings wired for Novus wildly aggressive rates that it’s not offering anyone else. This appears to be an attempt to eliminate Novus, its only local cable TV competition, which is unethical and unfair. One of these offers is selling their Shaw Digital TV with: Two months free 200 digital channels $9.95/month for 10 months One ...

The BC Children’s Hospital Foundation is an organization that works to improve the lives of every child who enters and leaves the BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver. For many families, the BC Children’s Hospital becomes a second home for a period time, often while they are helping a child of theirs get back to help: BC Children’s Hospital Foundation (BCCHF) supports the people, places and things required to ensure BC’s kids have access to outstanding pediatric care. Since 1982, BC Children’s Hospital Foundation has worked with children, families, caregivers and hundreds of thousands ...

I was one of the first people in Vancouver to experiment with HDR (high dynamic range) photography a few years ago. I definitely wasn’t *the* first, because I actually got a bit of inspiration from a few other photographers in Vancouver who had been dabbling with HDR. For yucks, I thought I would include the very first HDR shot I ever put together. It’s a shot of Vancouver on a really storm day. I shot it from my balcony using a tripod, and merged three photos together using a tool on the Mac called Photomatix. Here’s the end result: ...

We just had a pile of Dairy Queen here, which was awesome and much appreciated. So thanks Dairy Queen, for the food, and thanks Rebecca, for organizing it’s delivery. Things definitely seem a bit less active around here right now, probably because everyone’s stomachs are all full of food now. I wouldn’t be surprised though if people are losing a bit of stream — we’ve all been at this nearly 8 hours already, and still have 16 hours to go. If my brain were a car engine right now, it would probably be firing on only one cylinder. I’ve been having a hard time constructing complete sentences ...

I posted a photo of a cruise ship this morning surrounded by the mountains: I was just reading the news though, and apparently that very same ship ended up killing a baby whale: What appears to be a baby minke or fin whale has been impaled and killed on a cruise ship that docked in Vancouver Saturday morning. The whale, about 20 metres long, was wrapped around the bow of the ship in full view of tourists at Canada Place. A worker from the cruise ship, who didn’t want to be named, said he was not sure when the whale had been hit. The boat — the Sapphire Princess — had come in from Alaska ...

Vancouver is without a doubt one of the prettiest cities in the world, something that I appreciate more and more every time I go on a trip. In fact, I was just mentioning to a friend yesterday just how clean and inviting Vancouver is compared to most cities, specifically San Francisco and Los Angeles (both of which seem grubby and dirty by comparison, even though I happen to like aspects of both). And while Vancouver is a pretty city, it is not without its problems. In fact, Vancouver’s lower-east side is one of the poorest neighbourhoods in all of Canada, which is ironic given that it’s ...

Since I wrote in detail about Vancouver in my last post, it’s only fitting that I talk a little bit about my current place of residence, Chilliwack. Chilliwack is a little farming community nestled between a mountain range, approximately 100 kms east of Vancouver. My apartment is probably only about 5 minutes from one of the nicest provincial parks in the province, complete with it’s own picturesque lake: I currently rent a 1200 square foot apartment for about $100 less a month than I was paying in Vancouver for my 700 square foot apartment. A new grocery store opened about two blocks away ...

One of the hobbies I have that brings me a lot of enjoyment is photography. It’s something I’ve slowly honed and improved over the years to the point where I’m fairly comfortable with my camera, and with taking photos in most situations. Given how much enjoyment it’s been to me, I thought I would periodically do the odd photo-entry for blogathon and talk a bit about the photos I share. This shot of Kitsilano beach is one of the shots I’m most known for. It’s currently used on the Kitsilano.ca website, and also in a few brochures. I was actually just randomly driving back from UBC ...

While I don’t have any kids of my own, what I do have are a really great niece and nephew that I love very much: Despite not really spending much time with them over the last ten years (mostly because I lived in a different city), I’m actually fairly close to both of them, and have really been enjoying my time with them since moving back to Chilliwack. Last night my niece gave me a phone call and told me about all of the boy crushes she had while at summer camp (count ’em people, 11 boy crushes). So this post is dedicated to all the kids in everyone’s lives, and how special they all are. ...

As we all know, the flux capacitor is what makes time travel possible. Blogathon, on the other hand, is made possibly by everyone’s favorite stimulant, caffeine. And so this post is dedicated to caffeine in various forms. I’m currently on my third coffee. I woke up and had a 7-11 coffee (because that’s all I could find at 5:30am), then pounded back some coffee here at Workspace, and just picked up a new coffee from a little Gastown coffee shop called Lunas. I imagine I’ll probably average a coffee every two hours or so, which would put me somewhere in the neighborhood of about 600 – ...