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