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 while she was freelancing for them after she had come back from a break and got the idea of freelancing from a website she visited. If you want to know the best freelancing jobs, then visit website.
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’.
Thanks for helping out with the party preparation, David! It was really fun 🙂 I am sorry I missed the actual BarCamp but I was feeling really ill.
Hi Raul,
Thanks for your help as well. It was fun to be involved in the prep for a change.
Camp went well — you would have enjoyed it. Next year, you’ll be at both events. In the meantime, hope you’re feeling better soon.