One of the last conversations I had at Northern Voice was with Michael Klassen, and it was about how Microsoft had completely forgotten about the end-user. Sure, maybe they spent five years working hard to make a new OS that they hoped everyone would like, but the user-experience just isn’t there. Which is really the prime area where Apple excels — they listen to the end user, and make the experience simple and productive. Other companies simply want to focus on the “how” and not the “why”. Having a really elegantly coded application with a crappy user interface is just a waste of ...

I’m sitting in room 1005 at the Forest Sciences Center at UBC, eagerly awaiting the “User Generated Content and Activist Campaigns” session to begin. Prior to this was the keynote address by Anil Dash, which gave some great insights into the importance of blogging, and a few allusions to where blogging may go in the future. One of the most interesting part of this conference, for me at least, is a glimpse into the nature of bloggers. The other night at the social, Lee LeFever gave a presentation about his trip around the world, and one sentence that stands out in my mind from his presentation ...

Last night was the first event of the Northern Voice conference. Everyone met down at Heritage Hall on Main Street for some great food served by some local chefs here in Vancouver. The beer flowed like Vancouver rain, and people seemed to have a really great time hanging out and getting to know each other. Having been to many conferences, it was a pleasant surprise at how smoothly the events went and how social most people were. Here are some sample photos northern voice so far, along with a live shot of Photocamp: ...

Tomorrow officially marks the start of the Northern Voice 2007 activities. Northern Voice is a Vancouver based conference where web-bloggers meet up and discuss various technological and social aspects of blogging. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it, and Boris and his company Bryght are the main organizers for it. The main social is tomorrow night, which will be a great chance for everyone to meet each other and break the ice before the main activities begin. Friday is “Moose Camp”, which is an opportunity for conference participants to gather around and form their own agenda based ...

I finally cleaned up the main plugin for this website enough that I’m ready to release it to whoever wants to test it out. You can read about it and download it from the Crossroads Page. Basically all the flickr pieces on this website are handled by that plugin, so if you like what you see on this website, then feel free to test it on yours. I still have a ton of work to do on it, mainly in the speed optimization area, but I figured it’s good enough now for some people to test out. Enjoy. ...

So if you hadn’t noticed, my blog has been really flaky for the last week or so. For some reason, all the hard drive space on my machine keeps disappearing, and it’s causing mysql and apache to occasionally crash. I spent a few hours this morning trying to figure it out, so hopefully it will be a bit more stable soon. As for today, I’ll probably hang out by the water for an hour or so, and then maybe do some grocery shopping. I’m going to get a membership tomorrow at the Bentall Fitness Center I think (gotta look good for Mexico right?). Looking forward to the long weekend coming up. I’d ...