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
Hey David, I hope you are feeling better.
I appreciate your comment on my session. I didn’t understand it either. 😉 Seriously, I think it was stream of consciousness flowing waaay too fast after a week on the road. It was my own special language. 😉 I felt like I was in synch with some folks, and in outer space with others. I think I tend to do that. What I would give for a month of quite reflection to organize the noise in my head!
Take care and get well soon.
Hey David. Was great hangin’ with you at NV. Really enjoyed Day #1 and getting your feedback on both days. I always see things a little bit clearer after I chat with you.
Let’s get together soon. Take care of yourself (I seem to be one of the few people who DIDN’T get this dreadful flu).
ouch hope you are feeling better!
Thanks for the good wishes, all. I’m much better now and am almost back to normal (except for a cough that we all should be glad is not spread via adjacent comment blocks).
I saw Boris Mann this morning on the bus and he told me that he had gotten hit as well. I see Jan Karlesbjerg got it, too.
You’d think we’d all spent the weekend hugging and sharing our food…
hi nice site.