that ring of confidence

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.

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.

Blog ad questions or "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?"

last week I finished off an article for The Georgia Straight about local bloggers.  I'm not quite sure when the article is meant to go in, their tech section is fairly well booked currently so there's a bit of lag between when I hand a story and when it hits the street.  One of the things that two of the interviews brought up, but that did not make the cut in the article, was advertising on blogs and it's a subject that I've been struggling with on this site for sometime with no real resolution.

Raul who runs his own personal blog [h604] was for advertising, though in what he termed a "sustainable" way that had to be both transparent and social conscious.  His model for the model of monetization of blogs is clearly Rebecca's [m604] who is one of the few local bloggers to really make a go of making a living through blogging. Rebecca's site isn't loading right now, so I can't confirm this, but she's mostly using Google ads with some specific product mentions and promotions from local companies.

I could be wrong about the Google Ads.

On the other side of the coin is Jeannette Ordas who runs the food blog Everybody Likes Sandwiches [els], a local food blog which Lydia reads and has a much more national and even global readership than a lot of the local blogs that focus on hyper-local events.  Ordas has a strong policy of not taking ads on her blog and is part of an "Ad Free Blog" movement [afb].

Noting the bit about blogging that she didn't really like she Ordas said:

It’s sort of the business side of blogging, and there does seem to be a businessy side and I’m not interested in that. I guess just for me it’s an outlet for me because I enjoy writing about food and I enjoy taking pictures of food so for me it’s just for me. My zine was about me, and this is about me. Me and food.

Comic by Jeff Weston [pmh][anm]. More after the jump.

I meet the future Prime Minister Stephen Harper

i realize that I've never really told my Stephen Harper story here so as Canada heads to the polls today to potentially re-elect Harper as our Prime Minister I figured now is as good a time as any.  It was in fact five years ago Thursday that all of this happened, so the timing is pretty appropriate.  We can call this an anniversary retelling of the story.

It was October 16th, 2003.  I was celebrating my twenty-fifth birthday and writing for The Phoenix at what was then Okanagan University College.  Jay-Z and Beyoncé were "Crazy In Love", Outkast was riding "Hey Ya!" for all it was worth [mo].  The American lead invasion and occupation of Iraq was only in it's seventh month, and the big debate in Canadian politics was whether or not we'd follow America into Iraq after standing by them for the invasion of Afghanistan.  The Liberals had stayed out of Iraq, and since the political landscape on the right was fragmented with the breakup of the old Progressive Conservative Party into the Conservatives and the Reform Party it looked like nothing was going to change.

In Kelowna The Phoenix as a news outlet had benefited from the breakup of the right because it had eventually lead us to having Stockwell Day as leader of the Reform Party and his George W. Bush-esque photo-ops and buffoonery were like mana from heaven for snarky student journalists.  The party's switch to Stephen Harper was a sad day for us, since he was a) not local (Day had his riding in Westbank/Summerland) and b) he was not an obviously complete fucking idiot.

There were no more homo-erotic press conferences on the shores of Lake Okanagan in a wetsuit.  There were no more hiring of criminals to spy on the other political parties.  There were no more defections of MPs.  There was no more fun.

How to survive my lull in blogging

looking at the incoming links over at Metroblogging Vancouver [mbv] I noticed one from The Province, one of the main newspapers here in Vancouver.  Taking a look at the incoming link I couldn't find anything, but when I did a site search for "Metroblogging" I came up with quite a few times where they've quoted from the Vancouver based blog.  Indeed these quotes go back at least since last year, and since I've never discovered it before today it suggests that we don't get much in the way of traffic from links off of the newspaper's site.

Now I'm pretty sure these quotes were just on the website, and not in the physical paper.

Subjects that I've been quoted on:

• About Robert Pickton [tp]
• About what the nicest McDonald's in the Lower Mainland is [tp]
• The Spice Girls in Vancouver [tp]

Meanwhile I've been blogging over at Metroblogging Vancouver, and a few of those are worth checking out. What should you be reading over there during my blogging lull here?  Well check these out:

• The Canucks win the Stanley Cup [mbv]
• "We Are All Canucks" more than just branding [mbv]
• The Vancouver Sun knows the internets [mbv]

Lastly I thought I'd repost links to my two articles in The Georgia Straight for those who may have missed it:

• Twitter [tgs]
• Location aware social services (Loopt & Brightkite) [tgs]

Dream it up all over again

a

fter touring the Joshua Tree for years, making the concert film Rattle and Hum and generally being the earnest big stadium band of the 1980s' U2 retired, or at least they considered it. At the final concert of the Lovetown Tour where they played with B.B. King, Bono came told the crowd that U2 had to go away and "dream it up all over again". The band needed a new direction, a new sound and a new pair of very big sunglasses.

Having spent the last few hours first blogging about other people's blogs [mbv] and then trying to blog about my trip to Las Vegas I sort of feel like I need a new sound and a new pair of very big sunglasses. Having read through a lot of local Vancouver blogs I realize that the entire idea of personal blogging has really stopped being as appealing to me as it once was. Topic blogging is still something I like, and for example I remain very much in love with blogs like Daring Fireball [df] which for the most part has a purpose and a subject, but I've fallen out of love with the "and then I went to the park and it was sunny and the slide was fun and the sun got into my eyes but it was cool anyway and did I mention the sun? Sun!" sort of blog.

Goodness knows I can be accused of that; I've had this blog since December 2003, and that's pretty much the sole content of it. For a few years before I had a uJournal blog and it was quite similar except it had all the mood icons that I enjoyed setting to the frown-y gothic face on my posts. And yet reading through so many personal blogs I just could not shake the feeling that as much as I might dislike this about other people's blogs I was doing the same thing.

This isn't to discourage anyone else from blogging, or to say that I don't like person x's blog. I read lots of blogs, lots of personal blogs and enjoy them but I just feel that I've lost track of what I'm doing. I don't really have an audience in mind, am not sure that I have an audience at all and am not writing stuff that I myself would read.

So I'm not going to be blogging about Las Vegas, instead I'll direct you to check out my pictures from the trip on my flickr set that I made for it [fkr].

Photo from Young Wing's fickr account [fkr].

Five applications that have returned to active usage

s

ince the great hard drive crash of 2008 [jks] I've been slowly rebuilding my computer from the ground up. No, wait that makes it sound like I'm doing something complex and technical. Rather what I'm doing is slowly re-installing applications onto my hard drive as I have a need for them. The first things on there was the software that I had on discs, like Microsoft Office and the Apple iWorks suite. From there I've been adding the programs that I've acquired from the internet, though I've been far more relaxed about getting those back on.

What applications have worked their way onto my hard drive and back into usage? Well how about a list of five just so that we can give an uneven number to go along with my uneven track record of regular blogging.

5) NetNewsWire [ng]:

NetNewsWire is one of my most used applications on my iPhone and the fact that both the mobile and desktop version of the world's most popular RSS reader is free is pretty damn cool. It's the best way to follow blogs, news websites and pretty much anything with a RSS feed. I don't use it to feed podcasts through to itunes, though it can do that as well. It's probably the best way to add new feeds, manage them into folders and also read them. The fact that it allows me to create blog posts from incoming content could be useful if i used it more.

4) iTunes [ap]:

Okay, this one is obvious. I figured it was so obvious that it might not be worth mentioning, but iTunes is my most used application by far. Whether it's loading music onto my Apple TV, my iPod or my iPhone or just giving my tunes to type by it's almost constantly running on my computer. I'm really enjoying the new iTunes 8 which seems to have solved a problem I had where, since I am using an external hard drive accessed through Wi-Fi to store my music library, iTunes would lose the library forcing me to spend about forty minutes re-acquainting iTunes with my music once a week or so.

3) Ecto [is]:

I have to admit I don't use desktop blogging software as much as I should. It really makes writing, editing and maintaining a blog so much easier, but because I use multiple computers plus my iPhone to blog I tend never to use it. However through Metroblogging Vancouver [mbv] I got a free copy of Ecto and I always give using it a go. It helps avoid having to struggle with HTML, which I often have to use when posting with Safari. Ecto's the first piece of software so far that's not free, but the fact that it's less than $20 should help make it a consideration.

2) Adium [ad]:

Apart from iTunes Adium is the only program that's almost always constantly running on my computer. This free application combines the capabilities of pretty much every instant messaging service known to man into one single app. MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, AOL and others are all there and with the addition of Facebook chatting it's got everything that I've ever used to talk to people online with. In fact between this and the very slick Facebook iPhone application I don't actually ever log in to Facebook anymore.

The one thing it's missing, and I'm pretty sure it's currently technically impossible anyway, is the ability to combine conversations with people using multiple platforms, so that you could merge a conversation you're having with someone on MSN into one you're having with someone else on Yahoo.

1) Handbrake [hb]:

Though it's kind of visually boring, hence the reason for no pictures, Handbrake is so incredibly useful. Basically it's the best, and as far as I know only, way to copy DVD movies onto a Mac. Loading television shows and movies from my DVD collection onto my Apple TV and my iPhone would be impossible without this little piece of software. Having recently loaded the complete series of Yes Minster into my iTunes library I've come to appreciate it even more. Again like everything else I've recommended, other than Ecto, it is free.

Another apology

i t feels like every post I make these days is a post asking for forgiveness after another long period of this blog laying fallow. Each and every entry seems like it's asking for forgiveness for the length of time since I've last blogged and promising to be more attentive to you, my dear readers.  Does it feel that way to you?

Again I've been writing for The Georgia Straight [tgs] and though I haven't been working as much this past week I've been travelling with Lydia.  We took a long weekend and went to Vancouver Island to visit Tofino and Victoria.  Lydia blogged about eating on the island [iatl] and I guess I don't have a whole lot to say beyond that, so I'll leave you with the link. 

One of the things we did do in Victoria was look at venues for the wedding.  We checked a few places, mostly heritage homes and none of them seemed to work for us.  They were either not the right type of place, required us to use their expensive in-house caterers or had the overall feel of a bingo hall.  After already mostly eliminating Kelowna from our list of cities to get married in, it seemed like we were crossing Victoria off the list as well.

I don't know how it came up, but talk turned to the Heritage Hall on Main Street in Vancouver [hh], and since I had been to Curtis's wedding there I sent him an email asking for a rough estimate on how much he paid.  His reply was surprisingly inexpensive and so we booked a viewing for Wednesday and after looking at it and talking to the woman in charge of rentals we've booked the hall for August 9th 2009.

Which is a huge relief, since now that we've got a date and location everything else can slot into that.  I guess the last really big thing is the caterers, and once that's sorted we're just having to deal with a few minor details like the flower arrangements for the tables and whether or not we're going to ask people to sit through speeches or a slide-show or possibly both.  Lydia's for neither and I'm for both.  I figure if we're feeding people the least they could do is pretend to care about us for half an hour, even if they'd rather be watching a rerun of The Office.

You can keep this suit of lights, I'll be up with the sun

i will admit it's been awhile. I got busy writing [tgs], and then my computer crashed and I've spent the last three days fighting to get it working. Thanks to the Genius at the Pacific Centre Mall's Apple Store I figured out my plan of attack, but it's likely that I won't be able to save most of the files that I had been transfering from one computer to another for slightly over a decade.  Though most of it was no big loss, I don't really need a saved game for each of the last three Sim City games, some of it was worth keeping.

Thankfully I'd actually backed up all my photos a few weeks ago onto DVDs.  The last six months or so of photos that I hadn't backed up are mostly on my Flickr account [fkr] so that is not a major problem.  Sadly I've lost a great deal of writing, and while most of it was just scraps and fragments it's still gone.  Most of it I have backups in the real world, with the eVent! articles and a lot of the Phoenix stuff in boxes in storage.  Some of it though is just gone.  All of which makes me wish I'd have been more diligent keeping my writing archive site up-to-date [teotw].

It is though a clean slate, a chance to start again.  My Macbook is running considerably faster with it's freshly erased and near empty hard drive than it was with a nearly full drive with programs and files migrated through three other Apple laptops (an iBook and two Powerbooks). 

My only worry is whether I'll be able to reinstall Adobe CS2.  I've got the actual purchased discs, but for some reason the registration code didn't work last time I tried to install it.

Now though I should be back to blogging on a more regular basis.  Well, hopefully.

The yet unnamed podcast

Nathan and I have been working on a podcast.  Well that's to say we recorded it a bit over a month ago and he's been doing the heavy lifting editing required to bang it into shape.  So now that he's done the hard work of editing, I'm onto the fairly easy work of distribution.  That's right, he's the talent and I'm the manager.  Or something like that. 

Either way the podcast is quite a bit longer than we'll try to have it in the future.  I'm thinking closer to around thirty minutes is long enough, more than that and we start to get more annoying than we naturally are.  My voice in particular isn't something I'm particularly keen on, but since it's the only one I got I'll make do.  If you're wanting to hear the podcast via the internet, then head over to my .Me page [.me] and you can listen to it there. Otherwise you can download the file below, or click on the Podcast feed on the right to subscribe in iTunes or an RSS reader.

Next episode will be in a couple of years at our rate of production. 

Comments are, as always, welcome.

Download Tension.m4a

Photo by Lydia Skinner

The Jesus phone and my other blog

It is completely and entirely appropriate for you to tell me that I'm going to hell for this post.  Or rather for the picture to the left here.  However I've closed the comments so you can't do that can you.

It's just been awhile since I've played with my old friend the Church Sign Generator [csg] and so I figured that I'd have a little fun playing around with it while I try to drift off to sleep.

Meanwhile if you've been wanting to read some serious blogging from me then check out Metroblogging Vancouver.  In amongst some terrific new authors I blog about square watermelons [mbv], give an on the spot live blog of the downtown power outage from my cell phone [mbv] and go to a petting zoo at Maplewood Farms in North Vancouver [mbv].

All of that and more is waiting for you at Metroblogging Vancouver.  It's free, and maybe that's the sort of charity that will repay any existing deities for my blasphemies. 

I'm still closing the comments though.

Let us celebrate 1,000 posts

You looking at blog post number 1,000 here at my personal site.  I've been doing this a long time, and not always as actively as I'd have liked but I finally made it to the four digit numbers.  If posts were money I'd be a thousand-aire.

Which is why I had hoped to have something more to post for you than some more footage of my trip to the Sub Pop 20th Birthday bash in Seattle.  However I just finished working a twelve hour shift today, and I just realized that during this swing of shifts I'm working twelve days in a row.  So you're going to have to get what you take.

Or something.

I did see the new Batman movie.  Post about that soon I'm sure.  Until then though enjoy the Flight of the Conchords.

Wake me when it's fall and we've all relaxed a little

I started work at Elfsar, the Yaletown comic book store, last month and was hoping that it would be a good source of additional income. I was also hoping that working there would break up work at the Rogers, the way that working at the theatre used to break up working at Rogers back in Kelowna. The trouble is because it's been slow, they just have no shifts for me. After two shifts this month, I'm not working there at all in July.

At least I've got my staff discount I guess.

Meanwhile the iPhone hasn't even arrived and I'm starting to get tired of it. Every day is a flood of people wanting to know things, which would be fine if Rogers told us anything. Today we weren't even allowed to tell people about the recently announced plans despite the fact that they were in the newspaper and on Rogers' site. I feel like we should just wear t-shirts that say, "We know even less than MonkeyJizz365 on Howard Forums, so don't bother asking."

Meanwhile the internet's turned into a festival of idiots over the Canadian iPhone plans. Why people expected them to be the same price as the AT&T plans in the US I'm not sure. Anyone who had spent about ten minutes looking at Canada's data rates could have guessed what the plans were going to be within about five dollars. The fact that they're better than any current data rates in the country isn't the issue, the issue is that they're not the best in the world. Or something. People just need to go back to high school and retake economics or business education, of course typing "iPhone FAIL" into their blog gets more hits.

And hey look, I'm not someone who defends Rogers blindly. They make mistakes, but for the most part they make fewer mistakes than Telus or Bell and the ones they make tend to be the classic big corporation mistakes that any company with several hundred employees make.

Telus for example sent Lydia a bill last week for over $1100, even though she hasn't had a phone with them since 2003. It seems that when she closed her home account to switch to Shaw they kept her account open, and kept charging her without sending her a bill until five years later they were about to send it to collections. Or something. They never actually told her why she owed this money, or even how much she owed since the amount kept changing every time she called them.

A few hours on hold later and she got them to delete that, thankfully.

Meanwhile my mother wanted me to delete a previous post mentioning the iPhone, scared that I'd be fired. It seems that some Rogers dealers are firing people for just that, and others are making their employees sign paper work saying that they can't say anything bad about the iPhone or they'll get the sack. The amount of money that people are imagining that Rogers is going to make off of this is turning everyone into fraking idiots. We weren't this concerned as a nation when we helped invade Afghanistan.

I loved my iPhone, that I now can't use or I'll be fired, and I'm sure I'll get a 3G one and love it even more but it's just a phone. It doesn't cure cancer. It doesn't make you good at playing Dr. Mario. It's super cool and the best phone I've ever used but it's just a phone.

I can't wait until summer is over and everyone relaxes a little.

At least Telus doesn't believe that I owe them money. Then I'd really need some Elfsar shifts.

Metroblogging Vancouver: the Device To Root Out Evil, hockey songs and more

I might not be blogging that much here, but over at Metroblogging Vancouver I've got a few posts up that might be worth checking out. 

The first is about the above sculpture named the Device To Root Out Evil which has been in the park next to my parents' apartment for the past few years.  It was new in Vancouver when I first moved downtown, and I used to pass it daily when I'd take the Skytrain to Metrotown for work.  Thanks to complaints about it blocking the sea-view from local condo owners it's been dismantled and moved to Calgary where they apparently appreciate art more than we do in Vancouver.  To learn more about the pieces interesting history check out the Metroblogging post here [mbv].

Meanwhile the notion that the CBC might not use the same theme song for Hockey Night In Canada that it's used since the late '60s has completely freaked out the internet.  It's like some kind of mental meltdown [mbv]. 

Lastly there's a bit about the new Apple Store that just opened in Vancouver [mbv], a post about Krazy! the comic and animation exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery [mbv] and a review of the R.E.M. concert at Deer Lake Part [mbv].

And then I started a photo blog

If I take a photo and it's half decent it generally will end up on my Flickr page [fkr], which acts as a storehouse for all my images.  That way if I ever need a specific image for a blog post, I can find it quickly no matter where I am.  Still the sheer vastness of what I put up there, I have currently uploaded 3,961 photos, means that browsing them can be quite a challenge.  So to start highlighting some of my favorite photos I've started a photo blog [jks].

I mean isn't that how I solve all of my problems, by starting a blog?

I'm going to aim to post a new photo every day, and talk a bit about how I took it and maybe even show some of the shitty photos that went into getting that one image that worked.  So far I've got three days worth of material up, and a few days into the future so staying active on it shouldn't be a big issue.  At least I hope now.

So check it out.

Flickr video

As you might have notice I've been playing around with Flickr's new video feature. Some people, such as Matthew Good [fkr], have been using it to do short form videos and screen casts. That's something I might do in the future, but for now with a few exceptions I'm more interested in using it to do video photos.

Limited to 90 seconds I'm finding it better to capture motion and sound on a subject that I'd normally take a photo of. For example Winger above. The Vancouver Whitecaps mascot would make a good photo, but a very short video of him trying to rally the crowd behind the home team captures it a bit better. Similarly the video of the steaming noodles two entries below [jks] makes for a much more interesting video, as the bonito evaporates, than it does a still shot. That's not to say some short videos won't be something that I'll do, it's just that right now I'm digging the video still shot idea.

Live blogging Arsenal versus Manchester United

If you care I'm currently sat on my couch live blogging the Arsenal versus Manchester United match [av].  Go check it out.  And if anyone wants to stop by with a full White Spot breakfast, feel free.  I'll even mention your name on the internet.

From film to digital: concert photography

I was taking pictures at the Bell X1 show that we went to at The Plaza last week [mbv], and I realized that it was the first time that I had been at a show with the powers of an official photographer since I've switched from film to digital.  Which says a lot both about how long it's gone since I've had a photographer's pass, and also how quickly the world has moved from film to digital.

I used to feel bad about how many photographic fuck ups I made while covering concerts, until I saw some professional photographers running through an easy dozen rolls of films per song.  The fact that I spent $50 on film and development might have hurt my wallet, but seeing what the rest of them use the fact that I could get a few great shots from that was a nice ego boost.

For the Bell X1 show I ran through about 500 shots easy, most of which spent about five minutes in iPhoto before getting deleted.  The bulk of those were either out of focus, blurry or just plain terrible.  Then I ran through those that were left and cut them down to just the best ones, the ones that if I had a page to fill I'd be happy using and those were the ones that made it to Flickr [fkr], which according ot Lydia was way too many.

The one legacy I have from the film era is a few photo albums of pictures in storage that need scanning in, so that I can get them onto Flickr.

Edit:  The first two pictures in the slide show above are actually from my film camera and were scanned in.  The rest were from various digital cameras including my two Canon Rebels, various cell phones and other smaller digital cameras.

It wasn't a hoax, I am getting married

From Garfield Minus Garfield [gmg]

Apparently there's nothing like an engagement announcement [jks] to boost traffic, and incoming phone calls.  I don't know if anyone who actually works at the store I do knows, though it feels like the entire corporate sales team has called to offer their congratulations.  Which I suppose goes to show you that my brother whose in corporate sales spends more time talking about my life at work than I do.  He probably talks about pretty much everything a lot more than I do, since he got the vocal chords and lungs whereas I got the good looks and wilily smarts.

Lydia blogged about our engagement a day after I did [ls], and quickly had several more comments than I got.  I'm putting it down to the fact that girls are far more impressed with this sort of thing, rather than that her blog is more widely read amongst her friends.  She probably also does have more friends than I am, since unlike me she doesn't make her companions sign a loyalty pledge.

Why get married, you might be asking.  Well apart from the fact that I'm totally in love with her, and can't think of anyone else I'd rather spend the rest of my life with, it does help me prevent from turning into the total middle aged loser that John Arbuckle from the Garfield comic strip is.

The wedding planning has begun in earnest.  We're trying to decide between having the wedding in Vancouver or Kelowna.  Vancouver is easier for planning, since that's where we are most of the time, while Kelowna is easier since my parents' house can act as a wedding venue.  Also Kelowna during the spring/summer almost guarantees dryness whereas Vancouver is far more touch and go weather wise.

There is also the question of the engagement ring.  For months Lydia sent me mixed messages about whether she wanted an engagement ring.  Sometimes she wanted a pearl one, sometimes one with diamonds, sometimes no ring.  So instead I bought her an iPod touch, which I figure has far more features than any ring.  Of course apparently that's not the point of a ring, so we're looking to get one.  We've been looking, or rather she has, at rings in the States since they're apparently quite a bit cheaper.  If anyone has anything they're trying to pawn, possibly made of white gold with pearls, please shoot me an email.

New banner for the old blog

Last night instead of prepping for my job interview this morning I got occupied by goofing about in Photoshop and I ended up making a new banner for the blog.  We've had a few different banners but I figured that it might be worth taking a look at a few of the most recent ones.

This is the current header for the blog. It's taken from this picture that I shot in the Seattle Public Library [fkr] and run through a Photoshop filter.

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This one was fairly easy, I just cropped a picture of The Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus from Marvel and put text on it.

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This is some seaweed that I took a picture of in Tofino. As with the next banner I liked how the white blended in with the blog's background colour.

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This was a picture I took of A.C. Newman of The New Pornographers during their last show at the Commodore. The picture turned out looking pretty cool, as though it had been Photoshopped, so all I did was crop it. Sometime terrible mistakes can end up as something neat.