Tag: Vancouver Posts

In just three days, I’ll be heading to the airport again on what will undoubtedly be a great tour of North America. I’m meeting Luciana in Toronto, and her and I will slowly make our way via train to Québec City. From there we are going to head back to Ottawa for a weekend, then off to Banff, Lake Louise and hopefully Jasper. After a brief stop in Vancouver, we’re going to head down to San Francisco for some San Francisco Giants baseball action, and hopefully a few winery tours. Many of the places we are heading to are places I haven’t spent much time in. While I’ve driven through Québec City before, I have never spent any time there and am looking forward to wandering the streets with Luciana (plus I need to get my yearly poutine fix in Québec). I also have never been to Napa Valley before, […]

I was doing a Google search the other day, looking for some photos of me at the last company I worked at, when I discovered US patent 7,958,276, Automatic Configuration of Peripheral Devices. When I worked at my previous company I started playing around with an algorithm to automatically configure a voice over IP device. One of the main problems people would have previously is that they would plug in a new audio device and have to spend a pile of time figuring out how to configure it. The same was true with video. So at the time I came up with basically a complicated priority list that would place certain classes of devices above other ones. For example, if you plugged in a $200 Plantronics headset, I considered it pretty likely you would want to use that over the internal microphone and speaker, so it would be configured automatically. […]

Rebecca is over in Victoria right now for Social Media Camp, and it sounds like it’s a great event. WIthout a doubt, everyone is interested in social media right now, and learning how they can leverage it to build relationships and better run their business. While it hasn’t been officially announced yet, I’ll be giving a talk about WordPress and social media on June the 23rd at the monthly WordPress meet-up in Vancouver. It’ll be at the Network Hub, and should be a fun event. Hopefully whoever comes out will be up for hitting a pub afterwards and continuing on the WordPress discussions over a few beers. The first few pitchers of beer will be on me! But if you’re a WordPress user, either personal or business, and would like to better understand how to leverage the platform for interacting with social media, then this will probably be an event […]

About two months ago I was packing up my items in Buenos Aires, getting ready to fly to New York City and then to Europe. I’ve been out in Port Coquitlam now for almost a month and am pretty much back into the swing of my normal routine here. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the summer, and of course what my plans are after that. Everything is still up in the air, but here’s how I think things will shape out. I’ve been planning for quite some time to take most of July and August off. I have a few little personal side projects to work on as well as some house keeping items over at BNC, but mostly I plan to spend my days playing tennis, riding my bike, and of course camping. I managed to go camping a few times last summer, but I was actually […]

I remember taking a summer off from UBC one year and heading back to Chilliwack. At the time gas was sitting at around 39 cents per litre. It’s hard to imagine that it’s only been around ten years since then and gas is now hovering at around 140 cents a litre in the Vancouver area. To put that into context, the $60 I spend filling up my car would have cost around $16 back then. In fact, now that I’m back in the Vancouver area, it’s not lost on me just how expensive it is to own and operate a car. I have a 2006 Mazda 3 Sport that I own outright. My insurance runs me around $135 a month through ICBC, and I’m probably on track to spend at least $200 this month on gas. So that’s $335 in just gas and insurance. To properly account for the cost […]

There’s a new kid on the block in terms of Vancouver WordPress conferences, and that kid’s name is WordCamp:Developers. Unlike previous incarnations of WordCamp in the Vancouver area, WordCamp:Developers will have less content about the beginner aspects of WordPress (like the difference between .com and .org, which comes up at many conferences) and more content about advanced aspects of WordPress, such as development. As many people know, I’ve helped organize three WordCamp conferences in the Vancouver area. The first was a small WordCamp Vancouver that was attached to BarCamp (which is no longer allowed – WordCamps have to be stand alone conferences), the second was WordCamp Whistler and the last was WordCamp Vancouver at the Museum of Vancouver last spring. I’ve been both a WordPress attendee before and an organizer, but never a sponsor. So this time around Dale and I (via BraveNewCode) have kicked in a bit of cash […]

As many people on Twitter know, after four months of traveling I am finally back at home in BC. I was originally going to fly back home on Thursday, but the combination of a friend of mine having a death in the family back home and the fact that I found a really cheap flight leaving Dublin on Sunday made me decide to head back a few days early. Sunday was a long day: I had an eight hour flight from Dublin to Chicago, a five hour layover, and then another four and a half hour flight to Vancouver. Chicago was bursting at the seems, and people were literally camped out in the hallways waiting for their flights. So it made for a long five hours. I realized somewhere at 36,000 feet that I probably was going to need to declare all the items I bought on my trip. I […]

Tomorrow is the kick-off party for BarCamp Vancouver. While I do indeed have a ticket, I’m not entirely sure I’m going to be able to make it at this point. I’m right at the end of a huge client deliverable, and my attendance will depend on whether or not I can get it all done tomorrow. In addition, I’m also hoping to start moving things into storage this weekend if I can. That said, I’ve been to a few other BarCamp Vancouver events before, and am hoping to make an appearance at the party if I can. BarCamp is an unconference – attendees put conference suggestions on a board, and everyone votes on what they’d like to hear about. It’s a great concept, and most people come away not only learning about new concepts, but also helping others to learn new concepts. Tomorrow night is the party down at the […]

In case you don’t know who Garth Turner is, he’s a former MP and now financial guru who has been predicting the troubled real estate market for years. Obviously not many people took him seriously a few years ago, but the majority of his predictions have panned out. Tomorrow night Garth is speaking to a sold out audience at the Four Seasons hotel in Vancouver. Since Vancouver is thought to be ground zero for the impending real estate market implosion in Canada, many people are obviously eager to hear him speak. The event was originally planned for around 300 people, but due to popular demand, is over 1,100 people now I believe. I signed up for the event a long time ago, and thankfully made the list before they sold out. I’ve been following Garth’s blog now for about six months, so it’ll be interesting to hear what he has […]

I spent this afternoon out in Hamilton, Ontario, watching the Canada vs the United States hockey game. This morning I predicted that they would win with a 3-2 margin, which they did. And on that note, thus ends the 2010 Winter Olympics. I’ll be honest — I was against the Olympics. I was against the costs, against the expenditures, against the further widening of the gap between the rich and poor. But truthfully, I’ll carry the three days I spent in Vancouver at the start of the Olympics with me for the rest of my life. I have always loved Vancouver, but I have never seen a Vancouver in love before: a city full of people, not only with pride for their country, but also pride for the city they live in. After leaving, I watched my friends, Rebecca, Dave O, John Bollwitt and John Biehler, continue to give great […]