I started riding again this morning. I’d been on my butt for far too long, and almost 2 weeks of constant eating and relaxing on tropical beaches didn’t help by any means. I’m not going to be hardcore. There’s some craptastic weather scheduled for tonight, and the next couple of days, so I’ll likely wuss out and bus it if it’s white out. But at least I started.
I picked up a bike computer on the weekend, so I don’t have to track stuff manually (or through my blog). It turns out that the ride is actually farther than what Google Earth calculated. It’s just a hair over 13km, as opposed to the 12.54km I’d thought it was.
It was pointed out to me in a recent email exchange that it’s a little odd that I don’t have a cell phone.
There. I said it. I don’t have a cell phone.
My wife has one, for work, but I don’t have one. Never have.
Why?
The cell telcos in Canada basically suck. By design. Every transaction with the phone is intended, designed, counted on, to suck cash from my pockets into theirs.
We got back into Calgary early this morning (possibly the last flight to land at YYC for the night). Maui is great. A little more developed than I’d have liked (CostCo™ and Wal-Mart™ don’t fit into my ideal mental image of relaxing tropical islands) but we had a blast nonetheless. Photos are now on Flickr, and I will try to do a braindump about the trip so I don’t forget the details.
I’m heading out of town on vacation for a few days. Offline. No phone. No internet. No Flickr. No RSS. I’ll have to settle for sun, sand, and mai tais. I’m going as far as disabling comments on my blog while I’m away, because I don’t want to have to even think about punting spam before Google indexes it. There shall be no spam while I’m on vacation.
I’ll see you on the 21st! I’m sure I’ll have a couple photos to post to Flickr. Maybe even an entire set or two.
On Monday, I attended a memorial for a family member that passed away recently (part of the reason I was in a bit of a funk during Northern Voice). It was the culmination of a long illness, but was still a shock.
At the memorial, a friend of hers stood up to say some words. Not a bad speech, and a nice gesture. They had met while working to pass some legislation to protect self employed individuals in the province. I talked with him after the service, at the reception upstairs. And then he did something that really unsettled me. He handed me his card. He is a politician, working he crowd for support. I saw him handing out cards around the room, making sure to talk to everyone at every table.
I’ve been meaning to make the time to put together some reflections on Northern Voice 2007 before the memories start to do that thing that memories do. Life intervened, and so here I am, almost a week afterward, trying to remember with as much clarity as I can muster, the defining moments of NV2007 (for me).
First, the openness and generosity of the Lamb/McPhee family continually blows me away. I had the pleasure of imposing on them while I was staying in Vancouver, and I truly felt (feel) like I’m a member of the family. As H. put it “You’re a Lamb boy, but you’re slow because you like the Stampeders.”
It sounds like the dreaded Moose Fever has afflicted nearly everyone who attended Northern Voice 2007. Some nasty flu bug got circulated through the cavernous halls of the Forestry building at UBC, infecting everyone there, then being carried across the continent as the attendees returned home. I had my flu shot before Christmas, so I wasn’t completely laid out (as many folks apparently were), but it still sucks pretty badly.
I’m feeling MUCH better than I was on Monday and Tuesday. I may even risk heading into the office on Thursday, since I’ve got a fair number of deadlines that got summarily blown away this week. Thank the gods for Tylenol Cold & Flu liquid medicine.
I’ve been off-blog for a few days, and haven’t had a chance to deal with this yet. I received a couple of email from folks saying they were having difficulty commenting on my blog. I thought maybe Akismet might be blocking them, so I’ve just switched back to a Drupal 5 development snapshot of Spam.module. Yes, it’s a continuing ongoing saga of switching back and forth between Akismet and Spam.module. Hopefully this solves the comment problem without subjecting this blog to a torrential spamstorm.
I just finished presenting a session with Jim Groom called “More than just a blog” where we where showing some things we’ve done with WordPress and Drupal that might be a little outside the box for a pure blogging platform. Jim’s done some really amazing and cool things with WPMU at MWU.
The session was a total blast for me. It evolved into a pretty lively discussion that wandered around a very wide range of topics - I hope it wasn’t too scattered.
I’m sitting in the kitchen here at Casa del Lamb, and we’re bashing around some ideas for mashups and cool ways to display data for MooseCamp and Northern Voice. We just had (what I think is) a really cool idea. What if we could take the OPML file from the planet.northernvoice.ca aggregator (which contains a reference to many/most of the blogs representing the people attending the conference), and run some analysis on that to figure out what the relationships and subgroups are within the larger group of Northern Voice Attendees.
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