This upcoming weekend is the 2011 incarnation of Northern Voice. I went to my first Northern Voice back in 2007 and met so many great and inspirational people. In actuality, that event was the catalyst that started me playing with WordPress and meeting some of the people that I now call my close friends. A Mosaic Of 1600 Northern Voice Photos Since I lived out in Chilliwack during last year’s Northern Voice I didn’t get a chance to catch it all, but I swung by for an hour or so and said hello to some friends. This year I should I live a lot closer and will be there on both Friday and Saturday ...

It’s been a long time since I did a technology post, but I’ve recently had security on my mind and thought I would give a quick primer for SSL. For those of you who don’t know, SSL stands for secure socket layer, and is the technology on the internet that makes all eCommerce and web security possible. And here’s how it works. First, you need to understand the two different types of encryption. Symmetric Encryption Symmetric encryption is any encryption that involves one key and can be decoded in exactly the same manner that it was encoded. In fact, often decoding a message is simply the ...

So I’ve had my website on Rimu for over a week now, and so far things are going quite well. I’ve actually had a few support requests in with them, mostly trivial items, and they’ve answered everything in about 30 minutes, which is great. The one thing I’ve found out is that their base plan (which only included 160 MB of memory) just isn’t powerful enough to run more than a small WordPress site. I spent a bunch of time reducing the memory requirements of Apache and MySQL, but my efforts just weren’t successful. Every once and a while an application would crash with a kernel out of memory ...

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 ...

A few weeks ago, I started reading over craigslist and frequenting a few of the online dating sites I used to go to in the past. A few emails have been passed around, and some of those have ultimately lead into online conversations via IM. What bothers me the most is that there’s this trend where people initiate a chat with you, and then are either too busy or too uninterested to spend time chatting. For example, this one girl will always IM me whenever she sees me and ask to chat. So I say sure.. Then, I spend 5 – 10 minutes waiting around for her one or two word response to every essay I ...