I woke up this morning at around 10am, close to being rested, but not 100%. The stupid alarm clock in my hotel room started going off at 4:30am, and it took me like 10 minutes to figure out how to shut it off. No matter. I cabbed down to the University this morning to check out the Juno Fan Fare. It’s basically a huge event where the fans can line up and get autographs from their favourite groups. Media access to this event wasn’t that great. They had set up two photo pits on either side of the autographing areas, but due to the location of them, the angles on the shots were fairly horrible. ...

Wow. That’s all I can say. I really had no idea what to expect, but the event so far has completely blown away all my expectations. Sometimes when you get a media pass you can’t really do anything. Contrast that with my pass, where I can basically do whatever I want. I literally have walked into any room I’ve wanted and photographed whatever I have wanted. I was up front, literally three feet from the stage, using both my SLR and my video camera during the whole night, all while drinking free beer and chatting with cute girls in cowboy hats. I’m not coming home. I uploaded a pile of photos ...

It’s 6am, and I’m currently sitting on a chair at the Vancouver International Airport waiting to get on my flight to Calgary. I was really looking forward to having a nice hot eggs benedict at the airport, but the airport decided to close Milestone’s for me, so I’m SOL I guess. My only options right now are unripe raw bananas or my favourite liquid diet, diet pepsi. If I would have had eggs benedict though, they might have looked like this: Photo by lehedonist on Flickr I didn’t get to sleep until well after 2am, so 5am came really early for me. I’m pretty beat, and can’t wait to ...

Well, in exactly 12 hours I’ll be getting on a plane and heading to Calgary for the 2008 Canadian Juno Awards. I haven’t really had time to get excited or to even think about what I’m going to do for three days in Calgary. I picked up a few new clothes today, including that fun black shirt I’m wearing in the photo. All my camera equipment is charging in the other room, and I’m slowly adding stuff to a suitcase (and having a hard time deciding how big of a suitcase to bring). I’m heading over to Miss604’s house in a sec for some quick Thai food, and to borrow some podcasting equipment ...

I just got back from an invite-only press conference inside the Calgary Saddledome. Inside, we got to get our first glimpse of the set for the 2008 Canadian Juno Awards. A Shot Of The Stage At The Junos To be honest, I was a bit worried about being here, given that I’m not really a mainstream media person. But after seeing how everyone else handled themselves, I no longer feel that out of my element. Ben Mulroney, The Host Of Canadian Idol In fact, watching everyone else take photos and set up huge camera equipment, I realized I’m probably one of the only people there that will be able to ...

Here’s another video I took when the lights were going wild on the stage. A couple of questions were fielded with regards to the Saddledome. [blipit id=799870] ...

I currently just flew past Kelowna, and according to the in-seat GPS unit, am hurtling across BC at around 32000 feet. It was raining on the ground in Vancouver, but the sun is shining way up here amongst the clouds. Latest weather report from the cockpit says it’s -6C in Calgary (I should have packed some warmer clothes), so it’s going to be a slight adjustment when I land. I spent the last 15 minutes reading all the emails I’ve been sent from the Junos media committee (something I probably should have done a few days ago). It turns out there’s a lot more going on than I originally realized, ...

Here’s a quick video from over at Rebecca and John’s house. As you can see, I’ve been mucking with my theme a bit for the Junos. We’ll see if it’s still up in the morning. I’ll probably be promoting my Juno posts to the front page in the morning as well. [blipit id=797982] ** no beers were hurt making this broadcast ...

I took a quick video of Russell Peters when he came out. The quality isn’t stellar, but you can get a sense of what it was like being inside. [blipit id=799742] ...

So I’m pretty stoked on blip.tv. Here’s a short video from my patio that I uploaded. The conversion was done is less than 60 seconds. Plus, using my blip.tv plugin, this video should render properly on the iPhone or iPod Touch as well (so try it if you have one). Here’s the video I shot the other day: [blipit id=789757] And another one I just converted: [blipit id=795411] ...

I met my friend Keira-Anne for a quick lunch down at Pacific Center a while ago, and then hit the mall hard on a quest to buy some clothes. I rarely shop for clothes, not because I don’t like buying clothes, but because I’m really picky and always end up leaving frustrated. Since I only had 45 minutes, I decided to be less picky and just go with the flow. I ended up buying two pairs of nice jeans, and a few cool shirts for the weekend. Pretty much everything I bought was on sale, but it still ended up being around $400 after tax. Not bad for 45 minutes of work. I have so much to do tonight ...

At this time tomorrow, I’ll be bouncing around Calgary trying to get my media pass before the press conference at noon. Which means I get to spend most of tonight getting my camera gear ready and packing some clothes. Photo from Russell Peter’s WebsiteMy flight is at 7am in the morning, and I hope to have a few minutes in the airport relaxing with a coffee and an eggs benedict. I’m pretty excited about going to the Junos, and really have no idea what to expect. Russell Peters will be at the press conference tomorrow, so hopefully I’ll get to chat with him a bit — I’m a big fan of some ...

So I’m not one to gloat, especially considering I recommended Media Temple to a few friends. But Media Temple just went down again, two days after I moved my blog back to a server in my house. Thankfully, my Linux box is chugging along nicely, and I didn’t experience an outage. Rebecca was Twittering how lame it was that web hosting companies struggle to keep a simple blog up, and I totally understand her frustration. It’s one thing to pay $6 a month for hosting and have the odd outage, but it’s another when you’re paying $20 a month and expecting three to five nines worth of service. ...

I live in this weird apartment complex with a bunch of dictators who seem to enjoy flexing their muscles and causing trouble every few weeks. The entire building is managed by some local company, and there’s a strata council which presumably some of the people in the building are part of. The thing is, our building isn’t very ship-shape: the elevators haven’t been working for nearly two years now, the security guards spend more time collecting bottles from the recycling area than they do securing the building, and there’s always someone giving you flack for something. The one thing I hate ...

Good news is I’m fairly happy with the outcome, especially with the branding part of it. Plus transcoding only took about 3 or 4 minutes. I signed up for a Pro Account on a month by month basis for this upcoming weekend. It gives me priority transcoding and the ability to automatically generate iPod specific versions at the same time. The only question left is weather to shoot at 320×240 or 640×480. If I were at home, I’d just shoot 640×480, but the files end up rather large, and if I’m limited to a crappy hotel connection, might prefer speed over quality. Plus, 320×240 is basically ...

Up until about a year ago, I used to comment entirely using the name “Duane”. There wasn’t really any big motivation for doing so, it was simply something I was used to doing from my old IRC chats. At one point though, I realized that it seemed a bit weird leaving big, technical comments on web-sites but not having my name associated with them. At the bare minimum, it felt like it lessened the impact of what I wrote if I use only my first name, or if used an alias. After a year of going by “Duane Storey” pretty much everywhere I write or comment, I can say that without a doubt it’s ...

I went out tonight and bought a new digital camera, the Canon SD 870 IS. I did some basic research before hand and that was one of about three cameras I considered buying for this upcoming weekend. What sold me on it was that a guy at work recently picked it up and heaped a pile of praise on it. Also, it’s the only camera in it’s class that had image stabilization *and* a useful wideangle end (something most cameras lack of this size). This is, unfortunately, probably the 8th digital camera I’ve purchased in about as many years. Several of them had untimely deaths, and one was even the victim ...

On Friday morning I’ll be flying out to the Juno awards in Calgary. There’s a press conference at noon sharp where the media will get to view the entire setup as well as talk to Russell Peters, the host of the Juno Awards. I was originally going to fly out around noon, but I just got the email about the press conference so I might take the full day off and fly out at 7am, assuming I can change my flight. I’m still waiting on a few image assets from the Juno organization, but I’ve started putting together a page that I’ll use when I’m out there. If you can, please throw some link love ...

I spent most of the last hour on the couch, just thinking by candlelight. It was a nice break from the norm, having a dark apartment sans the sound of computer fans spinning or other randomness that goes beep in the night. Looking out my window, it’s hard to tell just how many people participated. It seems slightly darker than normal I guess, but for the most part it looks like business as usual in this city. For those of you who missed it, I took my site down for a few hours in support of the event. Here’s a snapshot Rebecca took: And lastly, I just want to mention that WordPress 2.5 was ...

After setting up my RAID 5 array last night, I decided that maybe I would take a stab at self hosting my blog again. Up until two years ago, I had always run my blog from home. It’s not really that hard to set up your own Apache server, and Linux can literally run for months or more without requiring a reboot. The downside of course is that home internet connections can be flaky, and most co-locations and hosting companies have UPS backup when things go wrong. I recently upgraded my home fiber internet connection to a small business plan, so my internet connection at home is actually fairly ...