A Life In Motion

One of the rea­sons that I haven’t been post­ing as often this month as last month, is that it seems that I’m always in town, busy attending/watching/participating in some­thing. You’d think that being on the job hunt and not tied down with a 9-to-5 com­mit­ment would mean that I have tons of free time to spend on blog­ging, clean­ing up my office, and doing all of those other ‘things I’d do if I had time’. No such luck.  It seems my calendar’s clut­ter increases to fill the allot­ted time. I do want to at least men­tion, and pro­vide a snap­shot or per­haps a snip­pet of video (because I can) of some of what’s been going on for the past 2 1/2 weeks or so:

Sep­tem­ber 13^th: To cel­e­brate my (and my brother’s) birth­day, we took a week­end trip down to visit him and the rest of the fam­ily down in Belle­vue, Wash­ing­ton. This included a trip to the Sculp­ture Park:

and a cel­e­bra­tory Din­ner out at Wild Gin­ger, a favourite Seat­tle restau­rant of theirs:

Sep­tem­ber 16^th: I had lunch with a friend and attended the Mol­son Brew 2.0 event, which I had writ­ten about a lit­tle earlier.

Sep­tem­ber 17^th: Met with sev­eral peo­ple dur­ing the day and attended Launch Party 5 at UnWined.

Sep­tem­ber 20^th: Attended Bar­Camp­BankBC, a real eye-opener about the con­cerns of the peo­ple in the Bank­ing and Credit Union busi­ness (Ques­tions included: “If increas­ingly, every­body does most of their bank­ing online or at ATMs, what’s the new design/experience of a Bank branch sup­posed to be?” ):

Sep­tem­ber 21: Made it to the first Annual Canary Derby in Gas­town, a fundrais­ing race of soapbox-style rac­ers, mainly to cheer on the team of Web­names, who regard­less if they won or not (they didn’t), still had the classi­est look­ing race car of the day. Here’s one of the ear­lier tri­als that they won:

Since that was mov­ing pretty fast, here’s what the car looked like stand­ing still:

(Note: The child at the wheel in this shot is not the dri­ver in the race)
Sep­tem­ber 23: Thanks to the gen­eros­ity of a dear friend, Pam and I were able to get to one of the Pre-Season games of the Can­nucks. They were play­ing Edmunton, and despite that team’s (appar­ently well-known) speed, the Can­nucks won! Here’s a snip­pet:

Sep­tem­ber 26: The Party for Bar­Cam­p­Van­cou­ver 2008, the yearly uncon­fer­ence, took place at Work­space. This year I helped out in the plan­ning as well as the food prep (and even played bar­tender a bit).

Sep­tem­ber 27:We lucked out, and the weather was gor­geous, which helped since Bar­Camp was held on Granville Island, at 3 sep­a­rate loca­tions includ­ing the Revue Stage, Emily Carr Uni­ver­sity, and the Playwright’s The­atre. I had pre­pared a talk on Ubiq­uity, the fas­ci­nat­ing Fire­fox plu­gin that extends some of the ideas about inter­act­ing with infor­ma­tion on the Inter­net. Unfor­tu­nately, I was bumped because the con­tract for the room had us there until 5PM, not 5:30 as we had been led to believe. Moral of the story: Never resched­ule your ses­sion to what you think is a bet­ter time (orig­i­nally I was early in the morn­ing and oppo­site sev­eral other ses­sions that I wanted to attend myself!) I am work­ing on refor­mat­ting the pre­sen­ta­tion and slides so that I can put them online on my other blog and will try and let folks know when it’s done. Here’s me pitch­ing my ill-fated presentation:

Sep­tem­ber 28: Word on the Street, the Annual fes­ti­val of books, writ­ers and other things lit­er­ary took place down­town, around the library. Pam and I man­aged to make a talk by the enter­tain­ing and inspir­ing Colin Moor­house, a free­lance speech­writer that Pam had man­aged to hear at a BC Edi­tors Meet­ing last year.

That brings me to today. I nearly feel out of breath just recount­ing this. And it doesn’t include a cou­ple of job inter­views, meet­ings with friends and col­leagues, and the usual day-to-day stuff. It has been a busy month, to say the least.

I think that what’s been going on is a grad­ual accrual of yearly events. We noticed a cou­ple of years ago that there seems to be a tacit agree­ment that in Van­cou­ver, any­thing worth doing is worth doing annu­ally. Our year is get­ting busier, which is prob­a­bly OK, but soon we’ll have to pick and choose what we can or can­not make and say instead that we’ll catch what­ever we miss ‘next year’.

The Sarah Palin Movie

Some­times truth is far, far scarier than fic­tion. In the meantime…

Apolo­gies to all for being so out of touch. Will try and catch up later this week­end (Not Sat­ur­day, though, as I’ll be at BarCampVancouver08 all day).

One Crisis, Two Speeches

The Jed Report posted a short video that jux­ta­poses pas­sages from the speeches made this past week by the two pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates. While I know that it is pos­si­ble to edit video in such a way that it makes one per­son look bad and another look good, I don’t think there was that much pick­ing and choos­ing of worst/best moments in each of these speeches. And you don’t even have to lis­ten hard to the words; just look at the speak­ing styles of each man:

The dif­fer­ence between the two in tem­pera­ment couldn’t be clearer. If McCain is look­ing to be the strong leader who takes charge dur­ing a crit­i­cal period, he’s going to have to work on less petu­lance and blame, and present a more calm, mea­sured mes­sage. Like many, I was ner­vous about the melt­down in mar­kets in the the US this last week and gov­ern­ment takeover of AIG. I had also feared that typ­i­cally unin­formed Amer­i­can vot­ers might flee to Repub­li­can John McCain dur­ing such a cri­sis because he might be a sym­bol of sta­bil­ity and matu­rity, like a father fig­ure. Instead, in this speech, he’s more like a cranky old gent you have to humour dur­ing a meet­ing on the street, blam­ing oth­ers on the cur­rent state of affairs.  Obama, on the other hand, is act­ing like the grown-up. After eight years of a man with a child’s mind inhab­it­ing the Oval Office, a true adult would make me a lot more con­fi­dent in the US’s abil­ity to make their way in the world.

Brew 2.0: Molson Throws a Sudsy Event for Bloggers in Vancouver

The event: A 50^th Anniver­sary Cel­e­bra­tion of when the Mol­son Com­pany pur­chased the ‘6^th’ Brew­ery in Van­cou­ver (that would be in 1958). The crowd: Van­cou­ver Blog­gers. The pro­ceed­ings: Well, we got to taste a lot of great food, took a tour of the brew­ery, met some of the top peo­ple within the com­pany, and even downed glasses of some spe­cial 50^th Anniver­sary Beer cre­ated just for the occasion.

I under­stand that most of the atten­dees also got a deliv­ery of a case of beer from Mol­son (Mine never came; I sus­pect there was a bit of a snafu since I entered by a dif­fer­ent door than most — even though I was fol­low­ing the instruc­tions of the invi­ta­tion to the letter).

Update: The case of beer, with a hand­writ­ten thank-you note for attend­ing the event, came about a week or so later. Mol­son def­i­nitely sweats the details. Colour me impressed.

Post­ings include:

Miss604, who cov­ered the event with some nice pho­tos by her hus­band and also fel­low blog­ger, John. Arieanna of Blo­ga­holics also got some great pics from her hus­band, Ianiv. Tanya (aka, NetChick), Ryan, new blog­ger Danny Dang , Tris Hussey, Colleen Coplick, Duane Storey and Hummingbird604 all did a fine job describ­ing most of what went on, and took tons of photos.

So what do I have to add? Ah, I do have a video of some of the begin­ning of the event, thanks to the Flip Video Cam­era:

Another Opportunity for Obama

I couldn’t resist point­ing to this newly-created site when I saw it today.

I’ve been work­ing two dif­fer­ent drafts of post­ings, depend­ing on who wins the Amer­i­can elec­tion in Novem­ber. If McCain does win, I guess the bright side will be that I might be able to encour­age a whole new group of friends to join us here. If, how­ever, there’s a Con­ser­v­a­tive major­ity in Par­lia­ment by that time, it might be a lit­tle tougher…