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’.