TB or not TB

The whole frac­tured quote (which I learned from my mother many years ago*) goes:

TB or not TB
That is Con­ges­tion
Con­sump­tion be Done About It?
Of Cough, of Cough,
but it’ll take a Lung Lung Time.

I’m begin­ning to think that Feb­ru­ary was named after some God of ill­ness or dis­ease, rather than the Latin term februum, which means purifi­ca­tion, via the purifi­ca­tion rit­ual Feb­rua held on Feb­ru­ary 15 in the old Roman cal­en­dar. (via Wikipedia)

After North­ern Voice, I was look­ing for­ward to a quiet Sun­day, and around noon Pam and I walked down to Granville Mar­ket and picked up a bunch of veg­eta­bles. About an hour after we returned, I started feel­ing weak and dizzy. Then I got chills. By night­fall, I was run­ning a high fever, and awoke sev­eral times dur­ing the night to pray to the porce­lain god. Wonderful.

It’s now Tues­day, and this flu has now become a low-grade fever, aches and nasty cough. I’ve been through 1 bot­tle of Tylenol as well as 3–4 boxes of tis­sues, but I’m hop­ing to be back at work tomor­row and pick­ing up where I left off last week. So the score is: Around the first week of the month, I brought in a cold (which got me sick for nearly a week), which Pam caught and became ‘Flu-like symp­toms’ for her, which got passed back to me and became full-blown flu. I hope she doesn’t catch it back from me again, because this beastie appar­ently keeps grow­ing in strength each time it passes from one to the other.

We’re both just sick of being sick; nearly a whole month has gone by where either one or both of us was either cough­ing our lungs out or shiv­er­ing under the blankets.

So What about North­ern Voice?
My impres­sion was that this year, both Moose Camp (the free-form first day of North­ern Voice on Fri­day) and the more for­mal Sat­ur­day ses­sions were more geared toward some of the less tech­no­log­i­cal sides of blog­ging (community-building, social change through blog­ging) as well as some of the other other media con­nected to blog­ging (Pod­cast­ing, pho­tos for the web, video).

Unlike last year, this wasn’t as much about all of the star­tups and devel­op­ers who were work­ing in the Web 2.0 space. It seemed pretty clear that for an indi­vid­ual blog, a lot of peo­ple (includ­ing myself) swore by Word­Press, but for larger multi-blog sites (like Urban Van­cou­ver) Dru­pal seems to be the soft­ware of choice. Mind you, we do have a sig­nif­i­cant local Dru­pal devel­op­ment house here in Bryght, but at this con­fer­ence, the clos­est we came to a tech­nol­ogy fra­cas was when two edu­ca­tional devel­op­ers squared off about the advan­tages of each of those plat­forms. There was an excel­lent ses­sion by Kris Krug, a local pho­tog­ra­pher and an orga­nizer of the event, about prepar­ing pho­tos for the web (and I was delighted to learn that I make the same adjust­ments in iPhoto that he does, albeit in a dif­fer­ent order). While I was intrigued with Nancy White’s “Hold­ing Para­dox in the Palm of your Hand”, I must con­fess that I didn’t under­stand a word of her ses­sion, what with ‘con­trol ver­sus emer­gence’ and ‘apply­ing con­trol panel slid­ers to online ver­sus offline mul­ti­ple memberships’…As fel­low blog­ger Isabella Mori (who did under­stand it, and whose hus­band is prob­a­bly in my camp) aptly put it “For you, she might as well have been speak­ing in Chi­nese.” Yes, that was it.

Also con­nected with the event, was Tod Maffin’s gra­cious offer of a tour of the local CBC stu­dios after din­ner on Fri­day night. A half-dozen or so of us made our way through the CBC’s very ‘lived-in’ look­ing facil­i­ties, and I was par­tic­u­larly pleased to get a moment or two to hear the CBC Orches­tra rehears­ing Dar­ius Milhaud’s Suite Provençale in the low­est under­ground floor, deep under the city of Vancouver.

I did get some good knowl­edge and handy tips from the ses­sions, and the ses­sions are all avail­able via pod­cast at http://northernvoice.podcastspot.com/. Maybe I’ll try and lis­ten to some of the more techie ses­sions to see if I can still get my geek fix from the event, albeit belated.

*That frac­tured Shake­speare was appar­ently a Pub­lic Ser­vice Announce­ment regard­ing Tuber­cu­lo­sis. I noticed with amuse­ment that it also shows up as part of the schtick by Woody Allen in the first sketch of “Every­thing you wanted to know about Sex” of 1972

Dinner and a Show & Last Minute Walking Directions

I attended a really nice kick-off din­ner for North­ern Voice tonight at the Her­itage Hall on Main at 15^th Avenue (Pasta, Salmon, roasted pota­toes, fen­nel and cel­ery root, salad and choco­late cake) as well as a won­der­fully warm slide show by Lee Lefever, who along with his wife has truly trav­eled to the far reaches of the world. See www.theworldisnotflat.com to get a taste of their plan­e­tary wanderings.

Now I’m get­ting ready for another Infor­ma­tion Fire Hose.

But wait: Any­one who is won­der­ing where to walk on the UBC cam­pus to the For­est Sci­ence Ser­vices build­ing where the event will be held from the Cam­pus Bus Stops should check out John Bollwitt’s excel­lent walk­ing map. Thanks John, and I’ll see you there tomorrow!

In Sickness and in Health & My Employment Situation

The moun­tains were really amaz­ing today, with a snow-line that was as pre­cisely drawn as any ele­va­tion curve on a topo­graphic map. I was lucky enough to be near the north­ern tip of down­town near the Con­ven­tion Cen­ter so that I could cap­ture some­thing. The view in the morn­ing from our bal­cony was spectacular.

Pam has had a really bad cold for about three days now. Actu­ally, it’s a bit worse than a bad cold, but not as bad as the flu: accord­ing to the doc­tor she saw today, it’s ‘Flu-like Symp­toms’ (which reminds me of that ridicu­lous phrase: ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction-Related Activ­i­ties’ that was the reason-of-the-week that the US was invad­ing Iraq). She’s still cough­ing a bit on this third day, but her tem­per­a­ture has returned to some­thing more approach­ing nor­mal, and she’s up and out of bed. We were relieved that it wasn’t pneu­mo­nia, which is some­thing that she had many years ago (and laid her up for nearly a month). I’ve been cook­ing and clean­ing and doing most of the run­ning of the house, but she’s nearly back to nor­mal and hopes to return to her job by the end of the week.

This is very unusual; I’m the one who gets sick more often (although I’d say I’m pretty much aver­age; Pam begs to dif­fer). I did have a cold a few weeks ago and it was very bad, mak­ing me mis­er­able for the first week. I’m hop­ing that I don’t catch what­ever she has (espe­cially if it’s not the same bug I fought off ), espe­cially with the 3^rd Annual North­ern Voice Blog­ging Con­fer­ence com­ing up this week­end (actu­ally, start­ing Thurs­day night, if you count the kick-off dinner).

This year I have not one but two blogs to flog. (Did I actu­ally write that? I should take my own tem­per­a­ture.) There’s this one, and a new blog that I’ve just started. I’ve decided to sep­a­rate my writ­ing on per­sonal mat­ters from pro­fes­sional issues — User Inter­face, Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture, Design, and all of the other sub­jects that fall under the broad moniker of ‘User Expe­ri­ence’. Rather than give it a clever name, I’ve decided to take the oppo­site approach. The name of the blog is drucker.ca . The URL is, well, what you’d expect.

Actu­ally, for awhile I did write a blog about User Inter­face issues when I had the con­sult­ing com­pany called The Kendall Group, but back then I didn’t know much about writ­ing a good blog, gen­er­at­ing traf­fic or even fil­ter­ing out Com­ment SPAM. (It ran on Type­Pad, which I was only begin­ning to learn). I stopped writ­ing in it right when I left the US, and now I’ve decided that it’s time to resume some­thing like it. Espe­cially when look­ing for work.

Yes, that’s right, although I’m not unem­ployed per se, I am down to part-time at my pre­vi­ous employer, and am look­ing for a com­pany that needs a full-time UI Archi­tect, or per­haps a com­pany that needs one in a con­sult­ing capac­ity, at least for the time being. There just wasn’t enough work at my employer for some­one who does what I do (although I still am needed from time to time) on a full-time basis.

So I have my new busi­ness cards, my new URL and new blog, and I’m com­pletely legally able to work in Canada (or the US, although for there, it would have to be via long-distance and/or telecom­mut­ing). If North­ern Voice doesn’t turn up some­thing inter­est­ing, the Mas­sive Tech­nol­ogy Show returns in a few short weeks, and that’s what lead not only to my first job here in Van­cou­ver, but also our beau­ti­ful condo here that looks north­ward toward those phe­nom­e­nal moun­tains. I have high hopes for either of these net­work­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to bear some fruit.

Our Lunch with Wanda

Since it was Sat­ur­day and the sun was out (a rare com­bi­na­tion if there ever was on in Van­cou­ver in Win­ter), we took a walk, and ended up on Granville Street, up near Meinhardt’s. We had met with some­one ear­lier and didn’t have lunch, so we were a lit­tle hun­gry. We stopped and went into the nar­row lit­tle restau­rant that is run by Mein­hardts called ‘Pic­nic’, which offers some of their sal­ads, sand­wiches and quiches from a glass case at the front, and has seat­ing in the form of 3 or 4 tables for two and a large, marble-topped picnic-style table that runs roughly half the length of the room. We took our seats, the two of us next to each other on the bench, and were just about to dig into a lunch of Endive Salad, Chicken Sausage roll (in my case) and Yam salad, when Pam’s eyes go wide and her jaw drops. Across from us, about to sit down right in front of Pam, is Nancy Robert­son, who is the woman who plays “Wanda” in the Cana­dian TV sit­com “Cor­ner Gas”. I knew that Ms. Robert­son and her hus­band (and cre­ator of the show), Brent Butt, were both Van­cou­ver res­i­dents and lived nearby, but this was the first time we’d ever run into any of the cast.

It’s impor­tant to note that Pam is a Cor­ner Gas Fan. Actu­ally, she’s more than a fan. She’s a big fan. As in not ever miss­ing an episode (and thank good­ness for the TiVo, we don’t have to rush home to catch it when it’s on).

After let­ting Nancy eat her lunch and read her Geor­gia Straight, Pam couldn’t hold back any longer and said what an hon­our it was to meet her. We chat­ted for a lit­tle while, and Nancy was very gra­cious, and hope­fully not too put upon. We noted that it was a nice thing for her to be able to get a vaca­tion, and she related the shoot­ing sched­ule (4 1/2 months) in Saskatchewan, where the series takes place. She told us that the series was being released in the US this com­ing Sep­tem­ber, and Aus­tralia as well. I’m hop­ing it’s a hit in the US, partly because it will be nice to see Cana­dian char­ac­ters on Amer­i­can TV who are not Moun­ties or the <a href=“http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Academy/9134/” target=_blank” >McKen­zie Brothers .

After we said good­bye and headed out for other errands, I asked Pam if this made her day or per­haps her week? She just grinned from ear to ear.

A Bakery Renovation

At Granville Island, you don’t usu­ally see one of the ven­dors rebuild­ing their stalls (or booths, or what­ever it is they call their space). It’s espe­cially unusual to see one of the more equipment-intensive estab­lish­ments doing big changes, like the 2 fish ven­dors, the dairy stall, the 2 Ital­ian food ven­dors, or one of the 2 con­fec­tion­ers. So it was pretty shock­ing to see Stuart’s Bak­ery com­pletely dis­as­sem­bled and what looked like years of crumbs that had fallen between the pas­try cases and other bits of the floor behind yel­low tape and traf­fic cones.

I asked one of the work­men if the bak­ery had gone out of busi­ness or if this was just a ren­o­va­tion and he anx­iously assured me that Stuart’s was doing just fine, and don’t worry, they’ll be back after the work is done.

Of the three bak­eries at Granville Island, I like each for some­thing dif­fer­ent: Terra Breads is the nearly leg­endary arti­sanal bread shop that boasts large sour­dough bagettes and incred­i­ble blue­berry bread. Just out­side the mar­ket form­ing a back­drop to the whim­si­cally named ‘Tri­an­gle Square’, “La Baguette et L’Echalote” is where I like to get crois­sants and the occa­sional half-baked loaf to fin­ish at the oven at home. Stuart’s was where I pre­ferred to get sta­ple breads; a good, dense white bread loaf or raisin bread, some superb fresh home­made pitas, and every once in a while, a piece of pas­try or pie. It was the most old fash­ioned of the three and despite the fact that it was a lit­tle dowdy, it nev­er­the­less fre­quently had a line (although rarely as long as the ones at Terra Breads). Again, despite the fact that I’m speak­ing of it in the past tense, Stuart’s is not gone; It’s just being redone. I will be very sur­prised if the new incar­na­tion changes any­thing but the dis­plays and sig­nage. I’m sure that there are a few things that never change, and prob­a­bly shouldn’t.