that ring of confidence

I'm now Web 2.0 Complient

Thanks to the Web 2.0 Logo generator [wlc] for my new online identity. I'm dropping the vowels and adding meta-data to my person to be fully Web 2.0 ready. I'll be capturing data driven wikis all night long.

Vancouver don't vote

Last night Lydia and I were having an argument about the importance of voting in Saturday's Vancouver Civic Election.  My view was that after going through a Federal Election, a provincial bi-election and the Obama Election Miracle of '08 I'm pretty damn electioned out and frankly I don't really give a shit about civic politics anyway.

Lydia pressed me saying, probably correctly, that it's important and that I should care to which point I made the point that my general feeling is that most people who run for Mayor are idiots.  Now granted my view is probably skewed after growing up in Kelowna where mayoral candidates tended to either be failed business people, punk anarchists looking to make a political point but not win, or complete freaks.  By freaks I don't mean the sort of politically motivated hippie/freaks like Hunter S. Thompson when he ran for Sherrif of Aspen Colorado, I mean just complete nutbars.

But maybe I'm not giving Vancouver a chance.  I respect Don Iveson who was elected to Edmonton's city council [di], so I guess I can't really argue that the only people who run for civic office are complete douche monsters.  Maybe I should give the Vancouver mayoral candidates a chance.

Then they went and had a talent show, and basically proved my point.

From The Georgia Straight [tgs]:

Scott Yee, for example, was basically booed off stage for his collection of increasingly sexist and homophobic “jokes”; Menard Caissy, dressed in an oversized ski jacket, listened to an MP3 player through headphones and began yowling, sometimes crouched in a semi-fetal position, to what he said was a track by The Stains, all the while punctuating the racket with disconcerting hacking coughs; and the decidedly odd Gölök Buday joined Yee in the naughty corner for a racist and misogynist one-liner that offended everyone in the room.

Leon Kaplan's stand-up bit was fairly amusing, as he explained that he would split the right-wing vote with his plan to take tasers away from the cops—and give them to the Downtown Ambassadors. And Bill Ritchie performed a rather effective three-minute play that encapsulated the lives of five Vancouverites, from the wealthy businessman to the Hastings Street addict. 

The Nude Garden Party’s Patrick Britten did not, thankfully, appear sans clothing; in pyjamas and a bathrobe he sang "Don’t Fence Me In", then delivered Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Independent Marc Emery opted not to perform anything, instead delivering a rant about the economic crisis facing the city; and independent park board candidate Jamie Lee Hamilton delivered a bawdy set of one-liners: “I’ve counted 15 lesbians and 15 politicians here tonight—that makes 30 people here who don’t do dick.”

Vision Vancouver’s Gregor Robertson appeared alongside councillor Heather Deal and council candidate Geoff Meggs for some Tom Lehrer fun, and responded to a question about his top three skills by listing watering plants, flipping pancakes, and playing tuba.

Well there's one argument I win.

Tiny Tony Stark says, "Work harder."

At least that's what he seems to be saying to me. The thing is he just keeps showing up in my microwave and demanding I fix the economy.

If I don't he says he'll hit me with his chest mounted uni-beam. So I'm either going to have to avoid using the kitchen, or bail-out Wall Street.

Wendy's for lunch it is.

In the classroom they have wi-fi

I guess it dates me to say that when I was in high school nobody brought laptops to school. When I got a very old Powerbook to take with me to France, and would use take it in class on my return to Canada, it was a novelty. Even when I hit university the only other students using laptops tended to be the special needs students who the school supplied with computers to aid in their studies. There certainly was not wi-fi available anywhere around campus, and if I wanted to get my laptop online I needed to unplug one of the computers in the Phoenix's office and stick the stolen ethernet cable into my computer.

By the time I left it was more common to see laptops, but university wide wi-fi was still in the future. In the newspaper office we'd finally set up our own private wireless network, simply because we were always short on ethernet ports, and that seemed cutting edge.

These days though wireless internet is the norm in post-secondary schools across Canada. Karen Pinchin wrote an article for The Georgia Straight about how that's taxing student's attention spans in class [tgs], and I guess the fact that I'm blogging as the teacher is trying to get his laptop to display the correct slide, is proof that it does divide attention. Myself though I'm of the opinion that students basically find ways to let their minds go on mini holidays with or without technological advances.

I was generally attentive in high school but when the teacher was having to go over a concept for a third or fourth time for someone my mind would wander. Back then I'd write short stories, work on terrible lyrics to terrible songs that I intended to write one day when I finally learned to play guitar (I never did and likely never will), or came up with names for the terrible band that would never perform my terrible songs.

On notable class was grade eight English. I was an avid reader and would generally finish a novel within a week, which since we studied a novel over a month or two, meant that I had a great deal of time during the class' reading time. Seeing this, and seeing that Curtis Seaman was also reading ahead, Mr. Brooks would send the pair of us out to wander the school and write short stories and plays for extra credit. This never resulted in any great pieces of literature, since they were generally very silly parodies that only really made us laugh.

Still it was the type of thing that made us really enjoy the class, and I think that year was probably the best mark I ever got in English.

So here I am blogging. The projector is almost fixed, and the class is ready to continue so I guess I'd better go. I probably won't get extra credit for this, but at least I'm not unleashing more terrible lyrics to terrible songs to a yet unformed terrible band out into the world.

Even Superman needs a break and I'm no Superman

Between school, work and freelancing I'm starting to feel a little bit tweekish [wp].  Being busy is of course good, since work and freelancing pays the bills, I'm starting to feel like I've been on the go for so long that I could just curl up right here and have a nice long nap.  I've had a fairly recent vacation [jks], but while Las Vegas was fun it certainly was not relaxing.

I just deleted two full paragraphs explaining why I felt so stressed out, including a large section on the ins and outs of my days off, but at the end of the day that doesn't matter.  What does is that I feel like I need to have a nap, or at least a nice comfortable spot in the store near the iPhone display where I can lay down and cry for awhile.

I need a staycation [wp]. 

What I really want to do is to get two days off in a row, and just disconnect.  I'd like to stick my iPhone in a drawer for two days, grab my iPod and just enjoy life without a telephone, email or anything else.  These days I try to go a day without using a phone and I inadvertently start a citywide manhunt for my lifeless bloated corpse.  I need to find a way to modularly unplug myself from life for awhile, without everything else falling apart.

Now excuse me, I need to go lay down and have a nice cry.

Oh yeah, by the way That One won

By the time I was done work on Tuesday the American Presidential Election had already been called, and Obama had won. Nathan came over, and Lydia roasted some chestnuts and we watched the coverage of the victory.

Though as a Canadian I didn't get a vote, and really did not have a horse in the race, as it where, but I was certainly pulling for Obama.

Vancouver bloggers in print

My most recent article appeared in The Georgia Straight today [tgs] in one of the paper's regular tech focused issues.  I'd mentioned this article awhile ago [jks] when I was talking about advertising on blogs, a subject I am still thinking over.  That part, the role of advertising on blogs, did not really get touched on with the exception of a few words during the interviews but it really did not fit into the article as a whole.

This is the first article that I've done for The Straight that's had a photo run with it.  That photo, which is to the right, was taken by the technology editor Stephen Hui and of the bloggers interviewed he went with a photo of Jeannette Ordas who blogs at Everybody Likes Sandwiches [els], a food blog that Lydia is into.

If you're in Vancouver then pick up a copy of the article on almost any street corner.  The paper's free so you've got no excuses.  If you're not in the lower mainland you'll find a link in the first sentence of this post that will take you right to it's online version.

So far the feedback has been mostly positive.  As always though these sorts of articles are by their very nature incomplete.  I'm sure there's a few dozen other worthy local bloggers around town who deserve a mention, and at least one reason that Vancouver is such a blog-centric city that I didn't touch on.

I'm not even supposed to be here today

Through a series of not particularly interesting occurances I ended up having both yesterday and today off this week. It was unintentionally perfect, since it was going to give me two whole days to work on the sizeable load of school work that I'd been given in my first two technical writing courses [jks]. They did not look particularly hard but rather time intensive, and one is even just a major copy and pasting job that requires pasting various recepies into a basic Word File for use in a cookbook that is going to be a class project.

Two days.  It seems easy enough, especially given the way I used to be able to crank out a 15,000 word essay in an evening back at Okanagan University College.  Yesterday I had a relaxed morning as Lydia got ready for her baking class, and then went for a walk with my mother who was taking Charlie for a walk.  Around three in the afternoon just as we were returning to my apartment Mirco called and asked me to work tomorrow... I mean today

Dante's plea/mantra in the movie Clerks "I'm not even supposed to be here today." is my rallying cry as I shuffle through the day with my school work half finished.  Once the rest of the staff arrives I'll make a sneaky exit out the backdoor, but until then I'm on the customer service frontlines.

Locals

It's official, nobody who lives in Vancouver is actually from Vancouver. I'm currently in my technical editing course and half the class is from Ontario and more students are from South Africa than Vancouver.

Ask around, you'll see I'm right. Does everyone born in Vancouver move to the US or Ontario?

Rejected wedding invitation ideas

We've been working on the wording on our save-the-date cards and our wedding invitations, but yet oddly enough every suggestion I come up with gets rejected. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, so I'm throwing it out to the masses. Below are some of my rejected wedding invitation pitches, phrases and slogans. Read through them and leave a comment supporting my vision for what really ought to go on the invitations.  With the overwhelming support of the public, she'll have no choice but to let me write the invitations my way.

• "Yo we're having a wedding, why don't you come?"
• "Neither of us are preggers & we're still getting married. It must be love."
• "We have so few friends, so please come or it'll be sad."
• "If you're planning on taking your own life, hold off until after August Ninth."
• "If you promise not to eat much we'd love to have you at our special day."
• "No babies."
• "No Homers."
• "Yes I'll probably look fat in the suit, deal with it."
• "Star Trek Themed."
• "Marriage FTW."
• "No MC Hammer Rap Pants."
• "BYOB"
• "Admission $45"
• "With special guests The Mighty Mighty Bosstones"