DemoCamp Vancouver Beginning

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DemoCamp Vancouver is officially starting right now. Rebecca Bollwitt, aka miss604, will be doing live coverage of the event. You can check it out by clicking here. ...

Homeward Bound

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I’ve decided to head back home for the weekend. I haven’t been back to Chilliwack since Christmas time, so I figure I’m long overdue. A whole whack of conferences start soon, and I’m going to by fairly swamped up until mid April. So, I’m going to grab a book and curl up on the couch back home this weekend to relax a bit. Also, for those of you that have been patiently waiting for more information about what was previously called “Startup Weekend Vancouver” or “Beer Camp” — the wait is nearly over. Stand by for the unveiling of the website along with more information. ...

I Hate You Subway

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I eat subway pretty much an average of one time per day. In the little food court where I work it is the lesser of many evils, including A & W, some Pizza place and a greasy chinese food place. For the most part, I always order a little wrap, either filled with chicken or like this morning filled with ham and egg. It’s not a hard thing to make really. You take some egg, put it in a wrap, but some ham and cheese on it and call it a sandwich. However, it doesn’t matter how many times I order a wrap, EVERY SINGLE TIME I DO it’s like watching some huge elaborate machine grind to a freaking ...

A Journey Through Stupidity

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if (is_single()) { ? digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/This_is_why_the_world_hates_Microsoft'; } ? So tonight (after a bit of wine) I decided to blow my hotmail account away completely and never look back. Unfortunately, as soon as I tried the circus music started playing and the adventure truly began. Step 1, tell hotmail to go fuck itself. This involves telling hotmail to close down my account. While fucking itself. Oh no! Danger Wil Robinson! Cannot close down your account. Apparently there’s some Microsoft mail thing associated with my account, and I have to close that down first. Not ...

Vancouver Sunset From Downtown

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You know, there was a time when I actually sort of considered my blog a photo blog. Truth is I haven’t really posted many photos lately. Here’s one I took with my little Powershot camera a few days ago: ...

Wednesday Drinking Nights

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Rebecca and John swung by tonight for 2.25 L of wine drinking fun. Don’t shake baby. Also, my hosting account over on another server basically expired. I did my best to move everyone’s websites over, but turns out that it’s rather difficult to change over DNS entries for websites you don’t own. I tried my best though. ...

And You Thought *My* Lens Was Big

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Image from PBase.comThat, my friends, is Canon’s biggest lens, the Canon EF 1200mm f/5.6L. For obvious reasons, they only make a handful of these every year. The cost? Approximately $10,000 $100,000 if I remember correctly. ...

Apple's Expensive Solid State Add-On Drive A Bust

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This guy just did a huge Apple comparison with the new Air notebook computer, both with and without the solid state add-on drive. The verdict? The Air in general is slower than both the Macbook Pro and the Macbook, and the battery life is only average. Photo by John BiehlerThe writer was optimistic that the solid state drive would be a good investment. Unfortunately though, it provided rather lackluster performance, and hardly increased battery life at all. I’ve had my own Macbook Pro for a long time, and most of my friends have Macbook’s. I’m purposefully holding off the Air because it ...

Digg Categories In Need Of A Serious Overhaul

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I love Digg. I surf it at least a couple times a day, usually when I’m bored, sitting a work waiting for something to compile. I would say that without a doubt the majority of my “cool” news actually comes from Digg. Lately I’ve begun submitting the odd story on my own to Digg. No matter how many times I try to submit something though, I always seem to get stuck on the same old problem — what category does the story fit in? The main problem I think is that Digg categories are more mainstream news oriented and less about the things I actually am interested in (even though I think most ...

The Endless Spiral

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Throughout my life, I have always had a hard time sleeping in the evenings. Although in the odd instance I can put my head on the pillow and wake up in the morning refreshed, most evenings I not only have trouble falling asleep, I have a hard time staying asleep. While I have gotten used to not sleeping very well (during the eight years I was in university staying up late and getting up early was a requirement), this week has been particularly difficult for some reason. On average I think I’ve had about three hours of sleep an evening, and I find myself running completely on fumes during the ...

Tush Lingerie Charity Fundraiser at Sanafir – Roberta Cheema

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This Thursday, I’ll be photographing a charity fundraiser down at the Sanafir Restaurant & Lounge in Vancouver. The event is put on by local fashion designer Roberta Cheema from Tush, and will consist of swimwear and lingeree. Lingerie by Tush, photographed during Vancouver Fashion WeekI’ve spent a bit of time hanging out and getting to know Roberta, and she’s really a dedicated person with a real passion for design. It’s what underneath that counts – hot spot’s upscale swimwear and undergarment fashion show fundraiser – February 7 Join host MC Musician and Funny Man Rick Baker ...

Website Data Analysis Starting

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Big thanks to all of you who pinged me about helping with my little web experiment. So far we have six hosts represented, but I’d love to have a lot more. So if you have any friends that have blogs and can help out, please direct them to me. I’m collecting data in real time right now, so it will be interesting to see what it’ll all look like after a few days. When this is done, we should all have a pretty intimate insight into all the various hosting companies out there and how they compare to each other during normal wear and tear. The teaser is over for now! Stay tuned, in a few days I’ll ...

Screw By Wire, A Strip Show At 40,000 Feet

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Curious to know what happens in the cockpit on French airlines when your dinner is being served? You might have though that the pilots were busy doing complicated fuel calculations, or checking safety systems. Think again! The stewardesses are coming up from and putting on a little strip show for the pilots. Added union incentives no doubt. Makes me wish I would have gone to pilot school. You can read more about the strip show here. I’m guessing that lady is in need of a new job. ...

Web Hosting Experiment

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Hey guys. I want to do a fairly simple web experiment this week. I want to try to assess real-world uptime and latency for a bunch of popular hosting sites. I need a bunch of volunteers to help out. Basically all I’ll need you to do is upload a file to your root directory and allow me to ping it from time to time to do some measurements. I’ll tabulate the data next week and put it online for everyone to see. So, if you can help out, drop me a comment and let me know: The name of your hosting company The address to your site Your email address where I can contact you about this The more people ...

Where The Internet Stops And My Blog Begins

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So here’s some food for thought for the blogosphere. Lately I’ve been pondering a few of the legal aspects of the Internet, namely what it is we are all allowed to do, and what it is some companies think we shouldn’t be allowed to. Let me give you a use-case to demonstrate what I’m talking about. Photo by Ben Sheldon on Flickr Let’s say I set up a blog, and I’m checking out Flickr and I see a photo I like. Let’s say for a second that the CC license is set in such a way that I can use the photo on my blog. So, I right click on the image, say “copy image address”, and slap it ...

WordPress Media Burner Plugin

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Tonight I had a few people over at my place to watch movies, drink some beer, and hack out a few techy type things. My little project for the evening was to try and media-ify my blog somehow. One of the ideas I was playing with was extracting all the media out of all my blog posts and having that in a separate player somewhere. There are other players for WordPress (based on the popular flash FLV player) that do something similar, except with those you have to manually input a playlist or set up a special directory. A snapshot of the media player The main benefit of the way I’ve done it is that ...

Duanelander

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Yes, this is what I look like before I cut off your head and steal all your powers, bitches. Big thanks to Clay for misusing all our web design resources at work to make this possible. Apparently he thought the whole Star Wars thing was too retro, and came up with something better. Thanks for supporting my cause against the evil guys against me, dude. Watch out for my sword. PS – I’m commando under all that shit. Believe it. Also, tomorrow is a big nerd session at my place. John Bollwitt, Boris Mann and John Biehler are definitely swinging by to drink some beers, watch some movies, and play ...

Nerd Camp

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There are a bunch of guys over at my place right now, messing around with blogs, media, podcasts, and of course, beer. Right now it’s John Bollwitt, John Biehler, and Boris Mann is downstairs with the next shipment of beer. I’ll update this as the day/night goes on. We all have a few projects we want to do. I’m currently moving all my websites over to Media Temple, which is basically easy but requires a bunch of grunt work to pull off. After that I’m going to attempt to make really awesome movie/mp3 player for WordPress. John Bollwitt making scrambled eggs, photo by John Biehler Wow, ...

South By Southwest — Help!

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So, here’s the deal. I really want to attend some of South by Southwest this year. The only problem is that all the hotels in Austin, Texas are pretty much sold out. I worked the phones for a bit tonight trying to find a place to crash, but haven’t had any luck. So, a friend of mine told me to put something on my blog to see if any fish would bite. So, is there anyone that has a floor or a couch they could possibly donate for a few days during South by Southwest this year in Austin, Texas. I’d happily trade some photography skills or web skills in return. Drop me a line if you can hook it ...

Folksonomy Updates

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One of the changes I made on the site the other day was the inclusion of wordpress related entries plugin when viewing single posts. Unfortunately wordpress has completely overhauled their folksonomy system in the 2.3 version, and not all my posts are tagged properly. In fact, I’d say only about 20% of them really are. I’m going to try and do about 10 of my old posts a day or something like that to try and get them up to snuff, but it’s a fairly boring process, only made possible by this bottle of pinot beside me. In other fairly exciting news, Boris Mann, everyone’s favourite Vancouver ...