After Barcamp today, K-dot, Cas, Greg and I went out for food at The Cat's Meow for dinner (absolutely horrible pizza... I mean, their sauce stated like ketchup!). The conversation was good, and I finally got to meet Cas, which was pretty damn cool too. When the fooding was over however (thanks be to Cas and Greg who helped me with my ketchup-pizza), K-dot and Cas offered Greg and I free tickets to see Bill Maher's new flick: Religulous.

After a hurried commute (we had 30min to get from Granville Island to the Granville Cinema... further than it sounds) and a few wrong turns (I'm an idiot) we got there with 5min to spare and practically no seating available. Greg and I caught a pair of seats in the forward left corner and settled down for roughly two hours of hilarious flickage.

The gist of the movie is Maher's going from religious nut to religious nut, asking them rational questions about their irrational faith and then trying to get them to justify themselves. Peppered between funny stuff like comparing Santa Claus to Jesus, and the talking snake to Jack and the Beanstalk, he also interviews some rational believers (can you imagine a Vatican astronomer mocking fundamentalist Evangelicals? It's good stuff.) He then bookended his movie with serious notes about how the people who believe this stuff are the same people with access to very dangerous things and that it's about time that the rational among us stand up to this kind of sanctioned non-thinking, or we risk serious environmental and political repercussions... you know, that "end times" stuff the religious nuts are all excited about.

Great movie. I muchly recommend.

I spent most of my day today at Barcamp Vancouver 2008, the third incarnation of its kind in this city. For some of you, the name might ring a bell since I blogged about going to the Toronto Barcamp back in 2006. The ideas behind the Vancouver version were similar, though the experience was quite different. For the sake of brevity though, I'm going to do the rest of this post in point form... in part because the sentence structure of this paragraph is painful to me:

The Good Stuff

• Lots of people using Twitter, Flickr, blogs and wikis to their full potential. It's so nice to see technology being implemented the way their creators (and pushers) hoped.
• Really smart people who like talking about stuff. I sat through a lot of really interesting presentations regarding the mobile web (and how it doesn't exist), django-bloom (REALLY fucking cool), and cloud computing (it may not be as cool as you heard, but it's still really cool).
• Had some really great conversation outside of the presentations. I met Karen Quinn Fung, an activist and organiser for the upcoming Skytrain Security UnConference. She's a striking young woman with a solid understanding of social media and community activism and with a few others in a small group we all tackled the touchy subject of activist infighting and community outreach.
• Granville Island doughnuts. Best I've found in this city. Seriously. Go there. Now. ...and bring me back a few ;-)

The DoublePlusUnGood Stuff

• Really short presentation times. Seriously, who holds an unconference in three separate buildings, offers no time to move to different venues between talks and then makes each session only a ½ hour? There was no time to actually flesh out any ideas in any session.
• Presentations, not conversations. The Barcamp I went to in Toronto was all about multi-way communication. You didn't attend a presentation, you joined a conversation. All parties contributed to the greater whole that was Barcamp. This was much more in the form of a unidirectional dialogue and therefore far less interesting.
• No mixing space. They got three buildings, and four rooms to hold presentations, and barely a hallway for space for people to talk about stuff. Barcamp is supposed to be about people talking to each other, not just listening to speakers... If I just wanted to hear one person's opinion, I'd read a blog.

So yeah, good things and bad about Barcamp this year. I hope that they're not all like this and that some of these things will be remedied in future incarnations. Until then, I'll probably be hitting other unconferences around town as I hear about them. It seems that they're becoming pretty popular lately.

Translink is organising it's own unconference probably in much the same form as Toronto's Transit Camp. This one coming up will be based around security, but I imagine that it will be a good place to meet smart activist types and learn more about how transit works and what it needs in Vancouver.

I've you've got the time, I encourage you to register on the SkyTrain Security Unconference website. I've managed to schedule it into my day just before my interview with NextUP as they've accepted my application (yay!), and I was just invited to an interview with them on the same day at 3pm.

I just read a nifty post on monkeycycle about how to geocode an spreadsheet with free tools from Google and Yahoo and it occurred to me that this is probably the kind of thing people go looking for so I thought that I'd post my latest shiny new bit of code here.

I call it a cascading geocoder. The idea being that most of the time, a single geocoding service is pretty good, but sometimes it goes down, and other times it can't understand the address. For the purposes of the project I'm working on, this wasn't permissible, so I wrote some code that attempts to code an address first with Google, then if that fails, it uses geocoder.ca's engine.

It's fully object oriented and very clean. It's also GPL. Download it here if you're interested ^_^

A lot of interesting things have been happening lately that I've yet to document properly here. My apologies to those involved for falling behind, but as you'll see, I've been rather busy.

For starters, Melanie has finally moved to Vancouver. After months of preparation, fear and goodbyes, Mel packed her bags (and her two cats) and hopped on a plane to YVR. In the space of less than a week, she had 4 interviews for two jobs and it's very possible that she'll be offered one of said jobs today or tomorrow. The cats were comfortable in my place almost immediately, and I'm already beginning to notice the effects of Mayday's fur all over the place. (She's such a princess).

It's been a bit of a shock to Melanie so far. I don't think that it's completely sunk in that she's a Vancouverite now. I suggested that she "take the day off" today and wander through Stanley Park while the weather is still pretty. I hope she takes my advice.

Chrystal has also broken some rather big news: she's moving to Kandahar. You know, that place from where we keep shipping people home feet first? Of course she won't be serving in the military, rather she'll be working in the diplomatic office, on a military base, surrounded by big people with guns. This is a really exciting career move for her and she's been wanting something like this for a very long time. I can't say that I'm glad she's going, but I suppose I have to be happy that she's doing what she wants with her life.

Just come back alive ok?

Long forgotten by most of the planet, Green Goddess is probably the best salad dressing ever made. I used to have the recipe in my computer somewhere, but I've done too many hardware upgrades -- I appear to have lost my only copy.

Thankfully, Melanie helped me dig it up online last night. I've posted it below for posterity and for my own records. Please feel free to try this at home:

• 1 c. Real Mayonnaise
• 1/2 c. parsley sprigs
• 2 green onions, cut up
• 2 tbsp. tarragon vinegar
• 2 tsp. sugar
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1/4 tsp. dry mustard
• 1/8 tsp. garlic powder
• 1/8 tsp. pepper
• 1/2 c. plain yogurt
• Place first 9 ingredients in blender container; cover. Blend until smooth.
• Fold in yogurt. Cover; chill. Makes 1 1/2 cups.

Note that the yogurt ingredient above can be substituted with sour cream if you're so inclined.

A short time ago, my grandmother told me about this leadership program running here in Vancouver thinking that I'd be interested. I looked into it and she was right: this kind of thing is right up my alley.

I decided to apply, which was a rather complicated process. It involved a reference letter, a resumé, and a series of open-ended questions, so I've had my work cut out for me in my off hours lately.

The real problem for me is that while I already have a long list of reference letters and an extensive resumé, neither of these are really geared toward a program like this. Thankfully, Stephen came through with a wonderful reference letter, and a few hours with Open Office saw me through updating my resume.

The fun part was the series of questions. I had the option to choose from a list, and I thought I'd share this one:

Q: Is there anybody that has had a particular influence on your way of working and thinking? Who and why?

A: When I was roughly ten years old, my mother asked me: "If you could have either power or influence, which one would you choose?" It was a difficult question for a young child, but it didn't take long for me to realise that while power is transitory, influence has lasting effects, becoming part of the cultural fabric.

It's with the above thinking in mind that I chose Gene Roddenberry in answer to this question. He painted a picture of humanity's future, and his hard work had considerable influence on my development. I came to understand the importance of diversity in a society, and embraced the idea that we can learn to direct our energies toward bettering ourselves rather than exploiting others for personal gain. This is all Gene's fault, and I intend to thank him by doing everything I can to get us all closer to his vision.

That's right, I picked Gene Roddenberry :-P Who better to inspire you?

I'll let you know if I'm accepted.

I just saw Hamlet 2 tonight and my review is rather simple:

• It was terrible
• It was also fucking brilliant!

Seriously, I laughed so hard at the pure absurdity of it all and that's what makes this movie genius. Of course I've always had a soft spot for teach movies, so consider the source ^_^

I just got a call from the Green Party today asking for money. It's a typical thing when you're already on the donors list that your party will give you a call trying to milk you for that list bit of cash when an election is called so I wasn't bothered at all. In fact, I did the math and agreed to top up my contribution to total the $400 mark for the year (you get $300 back the following year in your tax return).

I'm posting this here because it occurred to me just as I was about to give the guy my card number that he called me. He could have been anyone claiming to be from the Green Party and I was about to give him my credit card info.

So I quizzed him and he passed. He had my account number, address, email address etc. etc. I'm not worried. But I thought I'd point this out to the rest of you for what it might be worth. Remember who called whom before you give out any personal info :-)

Slate has a humbling article about the past few years in Canadian politics:

If you're at all confused or curious about how things have been going in our country; who's said what, or changed what laws, it's worth a look. Among the topics mentioned, it covers our about-face on Kyoto, the disappearance of our financial surplus, and censorship in our cultural sector.