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 13th: 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 16th: I had lunch with a friend and attended the Molson Brew 2.0 event, which I had written about a little earlier.

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

September 20th: 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 50th Anniversary Celebration of when the Molson Company purchased the ’6th’ 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 50th 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…