- Bruce Cockburn, from Lovers in a Dangerous Time

This is a test post; I’m testing a new tag plugin. Please disregard. 2nd Try.

NorthernVoice is a “budget” conference, so you can’t really expect much in terms of swag. They’ve done a good job, though, of getting some really passionate sponsors. So far the best free stuff is a pen from Royal Roads (my wife’s target university), and a very nice water bottle from webnames.ca.

Didn’t do any blogging during the last session, about citizen journalism - was too engrossed in the conversation. It ended with a debate over whether just anyone can call themselves a journalist. The consensus was that since there is no real accreditation that makes you a “journalist”, it’s perfectly reasonable to use the term to describe someone who writes publicly. This is not to disparage “professional journalists” though, just a widening of the definition of the word.

Currently in a session about microformats. Lively discussion of tagging at the moment.

I’m ready to throw this laptop out the proverbial window. NorthernVoice is providing free wifi on UBC’s network, yet my computer (maybe it’s my wireless card) refuses to acquire an IP address. I’m watching everyone else online, and can’t get there from here. I suppose I could just listen to the sessions, but c’mon already!

[Update] Okay, for no good reason, my computer decided to connect.

Tags: wireless, wifi

Following a link my dad sent along, I just spent about an hour wandering through some fascinating pages of stories relating to the history of Vancouver. The mystery of the 9 o’clock gun, the story of the collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge, Canada’s first gas station, even a story about the land that Rudyard Kipling owned on the same street my mom grew up on. Seriously fun stuff, if you’re from around here. Hit up the archives if you’re interested.

Tags: Vancouver, History of Vancouver

If you, like many people, have made some health-related New Years resolutions, you may want to check out Free Online Health. It’s a site dedicated to helping people get healthy by beating obesity and heart disease. I don’t see any ads on it, so I can’t quite understand how they stay in business, but I’m glad that they do. They even have a 7-day email primer that will send you a message each day to help you get prepared to lose weight. Here goes nothing - or hopefully something!

Remember that British kid who decided to put up a homepage and sell 10 pixel by 10 pixel ads for $100 each (a dollar per pixel)? Well, he’s managed to actually sell 999,000 pixels, and is now selling the last 1,000 pixels on eBay.

This gives hope to those of us that fancy ourselves “idea people”. I have tons of crappy ideas, but maybe one day I’ll get a great one like this.

If you’d like to use Google’s Safe Browsing Firefox extension but you don’t live in the U.S., you might have thought you were out of luck. However, as it turns out, you can simply use Google’s translation services as a poor man’s proxy service by translating the extension’s page from English to English. Hey, it worked for me.

Technorati Tags: safebrowsing, SafeBrowsing, GoogleSafeBrowsing, translationhack

There’s nothing quite like having holidays during the Christmas season. It’s been 4 years since I’ve been able to take any time off at this time of year, so I intend to really enjoy myself. Josh is already getting used to the idea that I’ll be home for more than a couple days, and has already roped me into watching “Wiggles Space Dancing” with him this morning. Can’t beat cuddling with they boys in the big brown chair though! (and the Wiggles aren’t really that bad…)

A few weeks ago I installed a WordPress plugin that will list the most popular posts on your blog based on post views. The numbers it reports are as of the time it was installed. My most popular post was one I almost didn’t write. I was experiencing an eye twitch for a prolonged period of time, and I felt the need to vent about it a little bit. As it turns out, in the past three weeks, that post has been viewed more than 1380 times, which is more than double that of my next most popular post. The Eye Twitch post also has 128 comments on it as of the time I write this, which is far more than any other post here.

This makes me wonder if there’s a real need for people with eye twitches to have a site that would allow for a community to thrive where people can support one another and help to collect information about this affliction. Since I really have no desire for this blog to become a touchstone for the eye twitch community, it makes sense to try to redirect the energy that is going into all of the wonderful comments on that post to a more appropriate forum. I’ll have to work on that.

What strange things we learn when we start posting personal gripes for all to see!

Google Web Accelerator tells me that I’ve saved 3.7 hours of my time using their caching program. I hadn’t realized I’d saved so much time, and now that I have almost 4 hours, I’m trying to decide how I should go about using it! Here are some initial thoughts:

- Read more blogs
- Find more stuff to post here
- Drink beer, and veg out in front of the TV
- Sleep

Ooh, sleep – we have a winner!

Wait a second; how does this extra time work? Is it tacked right onto a day at midnight? In that case sleep is definitely my first choice, since I’ll be able to take advantage of it without even thinking about it. But what if it’s tacked on to the end of my life, you know, like penalty time in soccer? That would be kind of cool – at least I’d know I was nearing the end because there’d be an indicator that I’d run out of regular time, and was now using my extra Google time.

What would you do with an extra 4 hours? Or better, what kind of trouble could you get into with 4 extra hours at the end of your life?

Thomas Hawk posted a photo to Flickr that he took of a man driving around with a Starbucks ™ coffee cup affixed to the roof of his car. That’s right, not forgotten on the roof, put there, on purpose. The point is to get people to notice it, and when they try to tell him the error of his ways, he simply says “Happy Holidays from Starbucks”.

Now, I suppose this is a clever marketing tactic. But I can’t help feeling that it borders on being dangerously distracting. Maybe I’m getting curmudgeonly in my old age (is that even a word?!), but the idea that someone is driving around doing something that will no doubt attract more attention than it deserves where people are supposed to be driving makes me a bit nervous. On the other hand, I love that billboard on my way to work where the woman is showing all that cleavage… oh, never mind.