Sami beat me to the punch, but it's worth publicly repeating. Garth Turner, MP for the Halton Constituency in Milton, Ontario, was booted out of the Conservative Party yesterday. For blogging. An elected member of parliament was Dooced.

Here's the comment I posted on Sami's blog, but I want to repeat it here as well (in case someone like the MP for my riding happens to see it):

It's strange. This is our Government, and they boot someone out for documenting meetings and voicing honest opinions. Isn't that what we do every day? Isn't that what we should expect, even demand, from our representatives? The MPs represent US, not Harper. They have (IMO) an obligation to be honest (and open, and public) participants, not party mouthpieces.

I was contacted this morning by someone from Lexi.net to let me know about the upcoming "Your Online Identity" conference in Calgary on November 17, 2006. I hadn't heard of the event before, so had to check out the conference website for info. It sounds like a really cool event. Not as by-the-people-for-the-people as Northern Voice, but still sounds interesting. They've lined up an impressive list of speakers, including The Dooce herself.

I think it's pretty cool to have an event like this in Calgary. I've been toying around with the idea of a Northern Voice YYC since I went to the first Northern Voice YVR. I'm not sure Calgary's ready - Vancouver's much more plugged-in and seems more aligned with the whole "web 2.0" / blogging / yaddayadda stuff. But, maybe this is a sign...

Got back from Peachland last night. Had a great week relaxing in Okanogan wine country - even though the lake was too cold to actually go into the water. That was a bit tortuous for Evan, but he adapted OK. Thankfully, there were LOTS of rocks to throw into the water...

I wound up taking way too many photographs - probably took 1000 shots, nuking 90% of them and really liking only about half of the survivors. I was driving Janice nuts by dragging my "camera purse" everywhere. But I got some shots that I'm really happy with. I'm not going to write a long, boring (especially to me) post recapping the week. That's why I took pictures.

I'm packing up and heading to the interior of BC for a week. The family will be hiding out in a lakeside cabin with no phones or internet. Although apparently there's wifi nearby. Dangit. I'll have to bring the Powerbook to offload photos from the camera, so will have to fight the urge to check in. See you in a week, internets!

I went to the Nickel Arts Museum on campus during lunch today, to explore the Ancient Peru Unearthed exhibit. It's a collection of the first archaologically recovered artifacts from northern Peru, from the Sicán era 900-1300 AD.

It's a pretty cool story. Until this find, all previous artifacts from northern Peru were recovered through looting. Amateurs with shovels or even bulldozers. No concern for archaelological preservation or documentation. But, the groundwater level in the area was high enough to protect the tomb of the Sicán Lord as looters couldn't get past the groundwater. In the early '90s, the water level dropped low enough to allow excavation, and the team went to work properly documenting and carefully extracting a ton and a half of artifacts.

Woah. Dreamhost is celebrating their 9th birthday, and decided to party by increasing limits on accounts. Account holders now get 200 GB (200 gigabytes - a fifth of a terabyte) of disk space. And 2 TB (2 terabytes) of bandwidth per month.

That's insane. Three things must have happened, in order for them to be able to offer this at $7.95/month.

1. bandwidth costs have come waaaay down over the years
2. the cost of hard drive space has come waaaay down over the years
3. almost nobody comes even close to using their full allotment of either

It's awesome that Dreamhost is doing this. It's pretty cool knowing I've got 200GB backing my account, and that I'll never have to worry about bandwidth. Now, if only the performance of the MySQL server would get a boost...

I've been using an rsync-based script to backup my iPhoto library to another computer, just in case my Powerbook blows up or something, so I don't lose every photo I've taken for the last 4 years. It's worked flawlessly, run every now and then from home, to squirt changes in my Pictures directory to my desktop at work, where I further back it up on an external drive using another rsync script.

I got a copy of Aperture this week, just in time to get to play with the new 1.5 update. I'm really impressed with the application. It blows iPhoto out of the water.

I was trying out some of the new features, and thought I'd see if I could tweak one of my favourite photos of Evan to make it "pop" a bit more.  On the left, the original, "in camera" image. On the right, a version with white balance correction, and an application of the new "Spot & Patch" tool to remove some blemishes.

The UCalgary Flickr Group has really taken to the new Flickr Geotagging feature in a big way. The almost-30 group members have tagged 154 photos of campus already, providing a pretty impressive coverage of the major areas of campus.

UCalgary Flickr Group Geotags

I've been spending the morning doing mind-numbing copy-and-pastery, so I'm going to grab the camera and try to fill in some gaps. I might hit the Olympic Oval, or even as far west as the new Children's Hospital. (the brown spot on the left side of the map above is now the most advanced children's hospital in north america - opened on Wednesday)

I went for a quick walk around campus at lunch, and dragged along the camera to get some shots of the leaves turning colour. Sometimes this campus can be really beautiful. We may not have a rose garden or a nude beach (or any other kind of beach) but it's pretty nice sometimes.

Apparently, I'm on a quest to become the unofficial UCalgary photographer... :-)

iUofC.com is a community forum site created by students at UCalgary, offering a central off-campus student-managed place for students to share information about classes. It's currently a rather empty shell, with forums created for every class. As students find out about it, it's starting to slowly grow.

iUfoC.com Screenshot

The thing that blows me away about this "web *.0" stuff is that students are willing to take on large scale efforts completely on their own. Set up an open wiki, and students create tons of pages about what's important to them. Open up a forum system, and they fill it with topics important to them. If these tools had been provided by The University, would students be interested? It's awesome that the students don't need to wait for The University - they can come up with solutions as effective (or moreso) on their own. Power to the people. Right on.

I had the pleasure of attending a presentation/workshop by Craig E. Nelson this morning. The Teaching & Learning Centre hosted the event, which brought faculty members from the various sides of campus together to discuss critical thinking and implications on pedagogy.

It was a really interesting session, with Craig telling stories and modelling effective use of the strategies and activities he was talking about (and getting us to talk about). My takeaway points from the session: