Yes people, it’s that time again. BarCamp Vancouver is only a few hours from kicking off down at WorkSpace in GasTown.
For those of you not familiar with it, BarCamp is an unconference where people get together and determine the topics at the conference the day of the event. Everyone who attends is potentially a speaker, so it’s a great forum for learning new things and being expose to new ideas.
Rebecca Bollwitt and I are organizing a session of WordCamp tomorrow down in Granville Island, which should be a lot of fun. I currently have a desk full of WordPress swag to give out tomorrow (courtesy ...
Just got back from my appointment this morning. Some lady spent 20 minutes giving me impromtu eye tests, and measuring my face and eye positions. There’s one tool they use to measure eye displacement which is actually slightly painful because they force it to sit on the edge of your eye socket and press it there. Unfortunately, my left orbital bone is slightly out of place so it’s hard to get an accurate measurement using that device.
Anyways, once I finally talked to the surgeon, he basically indicated that another surgery at this stage is probably too risky. He said even though the end result ...
On Wednesday, I’ll get to meet Dr. Peter Dolman, who is one of the best ocuplastics surgeons in the country. I’ve been on the wait list for about three months now, and I really have no idea what to expect to be honest. I went to the extra trouble to try and make sure my CT and MRI scans were there waiting for him, but I suspect that somehow they will have been lost come Wednesday, and we’ll have nothing to talk about.
Truth is, I really don’t know what the end result will be. Tonight I told some friends that it’s really a lose-lose at this point, which is true from my perspective. Option ...
Right now, in Las Vegas, is the huge Blog World Expo. Most of the Vancouver tech-scene is down there, including Rebecca, & Arieanna and Ianiv. Last night I decided to head down this morning and join them until Monday morning, since it looked like they were having such a great time. I actually found a pretty decent flight special late last night, and I booked it for this morning.
Unfortunately, when 5am rolled around and I had to get up for the airport this morning, I didn’t really feel all that well. Plus, doing six hours worth of plane travel seemed less fun than it did the night before. ...
On Tuesday night I had the privilege of attending a private party at the Molson brewery put on by Molson. Molson decided to have a little get together with some of the local social media individuals and bloggers, and while pounding back a few beers. The event was called Brew 2.0, and it took place down on Burrard Street at the big brewery.
I’ve actually never been inside a brewery before, and it was a really cool experience. It’s amazing how many beers Canadians are consuming every minute, something you get a sense of as the machines pump out cans of Rickard’s Red and Molson Canadian.
I ...
I haven’t written on here in a few days now. That’s a long stretch for me. Truth is, I’m just kind of busy and a bit bagged. I haven’t been sleeping all that well lately, and feel like I’m a walking zombie. I was feeling pretty nauseous all yesterday, and didn’t really eat that much. I hardly slept at all last night and woke up feeling like I was going to throw-up, so I decided to work from home today and try to save what’s left of my body here.
I decided a few weeks ago that I’m taking this weekend off. I don’t know what I’m going to end up doing, but I’m really hoping it ...
I ended up doing a bunch of work on Saturday night, and just hung out close to home. A quick twitter by me saying I was going to have a few casual drinks at my place led to Dave showing up for a few beers. After that, we went down to the Six Acres to meet up with Trevor, and then ultimately over to Matt’s house for a few quick drinks.
When I got home that night, I realized just how tired I was. I passed out on the couch around 4am, and quite literally woke up sometime around 5pm last night. I got up here and there to answer my phone and check email, but I just couldn’t force my body to wake ...
I do tons of flying compared to most people. The last few years haven’t been as busy as normal, but for a while there I was getting on a plane on average of about once a month to go somewhere with work. I chronicled some of my trips over the last few years here.
One of the things I’ve always sort of snickered about on planes is the need to still blatantly point out that smoking is not allowed on a plane. I always thought it was fairly self-evident that one shouldn’t light anything while sitting on top of several thousand pounds of kerosene, but apparently I was wrong. It turns out some idiot ...
I read this article a few minutes ago about a certain company in Silicon Valley that is sending a few people’s DNA into space. It’s called Operation Immortality, and it’s meant to preserve the DNA of the best and the brightest (and seriously, please turn the sound off on your website — there’s nothing worse than navigating the web and having something chirp in your ear randomly when you hit a page).
Who have they chosen to represent mankind? Well here’s the short list so far:
Kevin Rose, creator of the social-bookmarking website Digg
Robert Scoble, one of the world’s most popular ...
I woke up to an email inviting me to a big Molson event down at the Burrard Street Brewery next week. It’s an event geared towards some of Vancouver’s web 2.0 saavy people and bloggers that involves sampling various beers as well as a special blogger brew that they have cooking up just for us.
It actually sounds like a ton of fun. Given that I can demolish a few beers without much effort, I think I’ll definitely swing by and check it out. A few other of the night’s attractions will be:
Kerry Scarsbrook & Gord Rickards, creator of Rickard’s Red, will be in attendance.
Molson Brewery ...
Time comes, time goes. Yesterday was June, and today’s September. No fierce battles, only casualties. Last night I picked up a nice steak and threw it on the BBQ. Half way through cooking I ran out of propane. First time in two years that’s happened. I guess change is floating in the air these days, little wisps of something else to do, somewhere else to be. The leaves will fall soon, and then the rain, and then the snow. Turn a few more weathered pages in the book and it’ll be June again. Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s cold in here – grab the axe and help chop down another few years for ...
I read the headline for an article today that said a gene has been identified that increases someone’s chance to living to 100 years old by 300%. Without even reading the article or having any idea of the content, I already knew that the gene would somehow be involved with insulin signaling.
It turns out, I was 100% correct – you can read about it.
I spend every Sunday night reading the latest and greatest in medical research. And while 99% of medical research is redundant and not worth reading, the other 1% is rather fascinating, especially when you have enough pieces to put the larger puzzle ...
Well, I’m back home.. Currently I’m lying on a bed in the spare room at my dad’s house. Last night I hung out with my grandma and my mom, and then ended up drinking and playing pool at my uncle’s. Unfortunately, I drank a wee-bit too much, and woke up with a splitting headache today.
I think I’m going to take a nap and then hopefully be rested up enough again to do a bit of web work. On another note, the alarm on my car has started going off for apparently no reason. I almost had to disconnect the battery the other night because I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. Turns out you ...
Ok Mac guys, please don’t kill me. But for you windows people, I’m trying to figure out who has the .NET framework installed on their machine. Using some javascript trickery I’ll populate this box below with information regarding whether or not you have .NET installed. If you’re on Windows, please visit this page using IE.
Can everyone please answer the poll answers after reading this post. Thanks.
For you Windows users, the box will have something like this in it:
“Windows, IE
.NET CLR 1.1.4322,.NET CLR 2.0.50727,.NET CLR 3.0.04506.30,.NET CLR 3.0.04506.648”
That means you are running ...
This weekend I’m going to do something I haven’t done in a long time — I’m going to head home.
To be honest, I don’t think I’ve been back to Chilliwack since easter, which is a very long time for me. I’m not entirely sure what my plans are for the whole weekend, but I’m heading back to Chilliwack at least for a few days. I might end up in Osoyoos visiting a few friends, but I’m going to hold off making any plans until after I get caught up on sleep Saturday. I’m also hoping to spend a bit of time with my grandma, since I haven’t seen her in quite a while and she hasn’t ...
Over a few beers a few weeks ago at the AdHack launch party, Jay Grandin and I started talking about Twitter and thought it would be pretty cool to have some place to showcase all the best tweets from the web. We did a quick domain name check and realized that TweetDuJour.com was available. Since I had my iPhone with me, I quickly purchased it.
After work tonight I decided to finally whip something together really quick for it. We created a user on Twitter called TDJ (Tweet Du Jour) and tied its @replies into the TweetDuJour website. We’re hoping people who encounter cool Tweet’s during the ...
Lots of people in the WordPress community know about Dancing Matt, but I thought I’d put this up for those who haven’t heard of him. This guy named Matt has been bouncing around the world and doing a little YouTube-like video dance whenever he stops. I’m not entirely sure how it started or what it was supposed to be, but it’s amazing what it finally turned into. Here’s a little ensemble of shots from Matt’s journeys:
It actually took me a minute or two to figure out where he was dancing in Vancouver. The background looked like Yaletown, but the foreground looked like the Inuqshuk at ...
I recently had the priviledge of attending WordCamp San Francisco, a conference dedicated to WordPress enthusiasts in the Bay Area. It was a great time, and I met a lot of great people.
Next month, Rebecca Bollwitt and I are organizing the WordCamp Vancouver event to coincide with BarCamp on Sept 27th. For those of you who are unfamiliar with BarCamp, it’s a day long conference where the participants, first thing in the morning, decide the format and the topics for the rest of the day. Everyone who attends has the potential to be a speaker, and it’s a lot of fun.
This year, the event is over ...
I was going through some of my old videos tonight, and realized I have a pile that I haven’t uploaded yet. Here’s one of Feist singing 1234 at the BC Festival 150 in Victoria.
[easyvideo video=”http://blip.tv/play/AcnFUAA”] ...