One of my new fav blogs is Feministing.com. Usually the stuff I read over there makes me rather angry… things like Canadian doctors refusing to perform pap smears on unmarried women because they disagree with unmarried women having sex, or the US Senate passing an amendment that bans the use of federal Indian Health Service funds for abortion, or, and I’m not making this up, a politician saying that gay people cause earthquakes. I mean, I guess a feminist blog is going to contain lots of things that make me angry because there is so much unbelievably awful shit going on in the world.

But the other day I saw this video over there and I just had to share it with you:

Ms. Pac-Man – you go, girl!

I love the internets because it gives me such wonderful things as this picture.

And Flying Spaghetti Monster bless Flickr user Eric B for having a Creative Commons license on this photo so I can post that here, for your viewing pleasure.

Matt for Matt

As was expected, the Canucks did very little at the trade deadline today. The only thing we did was trade one Matt for another Matt¹.

Now, as is my custom in the event of a Canucks personnel changes, I give you my in-depth analysis of the trade:

This is Matt Cooke. He was sent to Washington.	This is Matt Pettinger. He plays for the Canucks now.

As we can see by having their pictures side-by-side, they are about equal levels of hotness. So it’s a pretty even trade.

Also, Matt Pettinger has 2 goals this season. *I* also have 2 goals this season. So, really, they should have just traded for me.

¹But not Matt.

Byelection!

And speaking of politics, there is a byelection happening in my riding on March 17¹. According to this CTV News article, the seat will probably be staying Liberal.

My favourite part of the article was this:

Conservative candidate Deborah Meredith isn’t in Ottawa yet but she’s already refusing requests for interviews.

Oh Tories, how you hate to actually have to talk to the people. Always afraid you’ll put your foot in your mouth. Which, of course, you would.

It went on to say

Her campaign manager, Dan Tidball, said Meredith wanted to “focus” on the local media “and you’re the national media.”

Hmmm…. I have an idea. I’m “local” media – a blogger from this riding. Maybe I should ask her for an interview!

Considered the sixth wealthiest riding in Canada, the west-side Vancouver riding includes posh ocean-view homes and the leafy University of British Columbia.

First of all – I live in the 6th wealthiest riding in Canada?? I knew it was affluent, but yeesh!! Second, they forgot to mention the :”cramped, spider-ridden basement apartments with a view of a whole lot of nothing” when they spoke of the “posh ocean-view homes.”

Also of interest in this byelection is that the candidates from all three of the major parties are female. It got me thinking about the whole debate in the States about whether women should support Hillary Clinton because she’s female. Some feel that women should vote for a vote because women are appallingly unrepresented in government (which is true). Others point out that to vote for someone just because of their sex, regardless of their policies, is, well, sexist (also true). I think that the bigger issue is that we have so few female candidates to begin with. If half of the people running were female, as they should be, we wouldn’t feel this pressure to elect the few that we do have running just to ensure that females are represented in government.

So, here’s the links to the main candidates in my riding (Vancouver Quadra):

• Joyce Murray (Liberal)
• Rebecca Coad (NDP)
• Deborah Meredith (Canadian Allliance… er, Reform… er, Conservative)
• Dan Grice (Green)

The byelection is on March 17 so, if you live in Vancouver Quadra², get out and vote!

¹Unless, of course, the government falls before then. That would rock.
²or Desnethe-Missinippi-Churchill River, Saskatchewan; or Willowdale, Ontario; or Toronto Centre, Ontario, which are also holding byelections that day

In bed with Canada’s 3rd Prime Minister1

So, the third Canadian P.M. was some dude named Sir John Abbott. Seriously, why does that name not ring a bell to me? I swear I’ve never heard that name before in my life².

Name	Sir John Joseph Caldwell Abbott
Born:	March 12, 1821 in St. Andrews, Lower Canada
Died:	October 30, 1893
Party:	Liberal-Conservative
Held Office:	June 16, 1891 – November 24, 1892
Best known for:	-seeing as I don’t recognize his name at all, he’s not “best known for” anything to me-but according to my extensive research, he was a Senator, not a member of the House of Commons, while he was the Prime Minister. Weird!
Some Things I Didn’t Know About This P.M.	Acto Wikipedia: “His “most memorable”political comment is “I hate politics.””

---

If you are just dying to read more about Sir J.J.C.A.? Check out:

• Official Office of the Prime Minister John A. bio
• Wikipedia entry

Image credit: From the Wikimedia Commons. Originally from the Library and Archives Canada, copyright is expired.

¹For the record, I’m not actually in bed with Sir John A. I’m in my bed, with my laptop writing about him. Because it’s late and although I’m tired, I *must* post this today. *Must!* (It appears that WordPress does not want to put a superscript into my title. Bah!)

²Well, other than the character on the Young & the Restless. And that’s just sad. Clearly, I need to be doing this little exercise in Canadian history!

Hockey News

This week’s installment of my Prime Ministerial series will have to wait until tomorrow because (a) I’ve already blogged a hellava lot this weekend and I’ll have to actually do research on the next P.M.¹ and I can’t really justify spending the time it would take to blog that today and (b) I have far more exciting *breaking news* for you!

Wait for it… wait for it….

I scored the game winning goal in my hockey game tonight! My long, long scoreless streak is over! And, to make it ever sweeter, I got an assist² on the first goal… on the *same shift*! We jumped out onto the ice and scored quickly, then took the next face off, got it into their zone, my centre shot the puck and I crashed the net to pick up the juicy rebound. Seriously, the rebound trickled out from the goalie, no more than half a foot in front of the goal line, and the goalie had gone down on the left side of the net on the initial shot, leaving me with *half* the net open, the puck right there in front of the open space and I was already skating right at it. All I had to do was tap it in. It’s what we like to call “picking up the garbage.” And you can just call me the “garbage woman”… er, “sanitation engineer.” Honestly, I don’t care if my goal is pretty³ or not… it still counts on the score sheet and it still wins the game!

I just checked the team stats and my last goal was on Sept 30… and it was also a game winning goal and it was against the same team as I scored on tonight. I guess I just have it in for them or something.

¹Because, truly, I have no idea who the 3rd Prime Minister of Canada was. There, I said it!
²Fingers crossed that the refs actually counted it as my assist!
³I have the worst shot in the known world and so my goals are never pretty. What I lack in ability, I make up for in effort. My shot might suck, buy my positioning is good and sometimes just being in the right place at the right time is all it takes. Good things happen when you go to the net!

Random Thoughts NV08

Notes to Self:

• Don’t wear thigh highs when you are wearing a skirt with a high slit in it.
• I didn’t hear the word “granular” once at this year’s conference. Last year, every second word was granular.
• I *totally* have to try out all of the 50 Web 2.0 tools for telling a story. Maybe make some cool stuff for my lectures.
• Buy a Mac.

In other news, I decided that both of my cool boots should get the chance to enjoy the NV glory.  As you know, I wore the boots I bought on Christmas Eve on Day #1. Which means that the eBay boots made they blogging conference debut on Day#2…. Phillip kindly took a pic for me, I’ll share that with all y’all once it has been posted.

Northern Voice – Education Session

Hmmm.. just noticed that I had typed this up during the session yesterday, but never got around to posting it. Anyhoo, here’s my notes:

Brian‘s section:

• I don’t have to take notes. Just go here to see all the cool stuff.
• Wondering what the infinity symbol throughout represents. Brian, can you shed some light on that?
• Some good points about using WebCT (and other closed course management sites) – students can’t preview a course to see if they want to take it; students can’t go back to the material (in a course that they paid a lot of money to take) after the course is over; students don’t even have access to their own work in the WebCT site after the course is over.

Next dude’sJim Groom‘s ¹ section:

• have all the students writing their own blog, then make one blog that is an aggregate of the feeds of all the students. That way each student can blog wherever they like. Very cool idea.
• Talking about how easy it is to use WordPress to make a site for students to publish in (rather than just a reverse-chronological-diary type blog): “This is something even a professor can do.” It’s funny ‘cuz it’s true.

¹Didn’t catch his name. I suck.Thanks, Brian, for filling me in on the names!

Northern Voice – How Not To Use PowerPoint

Alan Levine just showed us what Cinderella would be like in PowerPoint. That is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

Northern Voice – Day #2

Today started with a keynote address by Matt Mullenweg from WordPress¹. Unfortunately, while I staked out a good seat for the talk, I neglected to stake out one of the 3 electrical outlets in the room and my laptop battery only lasts for 14.3 minutes, so I didn’t get to take notes while the talk was on. I’ll have to check out all of the other blog postings for more comprehensive notes, but here’s a few things from the keynote that stuck in my brain:

• “spammers are equivalent of terrorists for the online world”
• English Wikipedia has 2.1 million entries in total. WordPress users create 4 million pages a month.
• attention is finite – content can grow, but we only have so many hours in a day and that’s not going to increase, so we need to find ways to filter content

Next, I went to a session on advertising on blogs. A really good discussion about the pros and cons of advertising on your blog. One thing that really stuck out to me, which Miss604 is Twittering about, is that this site² that scrapes other people’s content off their blogs and then charges $500 a week for ads on their sites. $500 a week for stolen content. That’s just bullshit.

Then I went to the session with the coolest title of all the session – “Fuck Stats, Make Art.” Totally cool.

After that was lunch, which was good because I was starving. The good news: it was a cool make your own wrap thing where they actually had beans (!), the first time I’ve seen any non-cheese vegetarian protein at the conference. The bad news: the beans were gone before I got there. Well, there were beans at the food table that I didn’t go to, but the one I went to was all out. And by the time I got far up enough in the line up to see that, it was too late to go to the other line-up Boo-urns! =(

And now I’m in There Are 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story… a PowerPoint-free presentation that’s dependent on flaky internet. Looks to be interesting.

¹Not WordPress. WordPress, not WordPress.
²This is who is scraping content. http://www.peoplevancouver.com/ I didn’t want to give them a link.

Live Blogging 101

Now I’m in a “how to live blogging” session. I would live blog it, except I don’t know how to live blog… yet.

Update #1:

Programs for Liveblogging:

• MS Live Writer
• Scirbe Fire (Firefox plugin)
• Cover It Live – I’ve seen this one in use; it’s pretty cool
• Ecto
• Twitter

Note to self – check these all out.

Update #2:

Check out this cool live blog of Live Blogging 101.

Next Up: Photocamp!

I’m about to head to the after lunch session – Photocamp.  Back when I got my digital camera, I specifically got one that would allow me to fiddle with all kinds manual settings, as I was under the delusion that I would spend some time learning what all the settings meant so I could take nicer pics.  And, of course, I rarely use anything other than “auto.”  Here’s hoping that Photocamp will teach me something.

And, in honour of Photocamp, here’s a pretty pic, featuring *my boots*, taken by photographer extraordinare, Duane Storey.   Thanks, Duane.

Moosecamp ’08

Here I am at Northern Voice! I’ve actually been here since 9 a.m., but it’s taken me this long to make my lovely computer connect to the internets. Well, it said it was connected 3 hours ago, but wouldn’t actually let me see any, like, websites. After the fourth person in a row that I asked for help said, “PC? You should just buy a Mac,” I decided to take a coffee break and it appears that the old “turn it off, turn it back on again” computer cure-all worked.

So now that I’m all connected, check out this cool photo of me, taking a photo of my name tag. That was at last night’s Tiki Party – it was at the Waldorf hotel – a place I’ve never heard of that has a super cool Polynesian room. But I digress…. the thing with a name tag at a blogging conference is that you tag yourself, on your name tag. You may remember name tag from last year. Here’s this year’s version:

Also of note, since I’m volunteering again this year, I get to wear a sheriff’s badge.  You know you are jealous!  I’ll post a pic of that later, as I haven’t quite gotten around to taking a pic of that, what with the spending all my time trying to make my wireless work.

What I did take a picture of for all y’all is the building this conference is in.  It’s the Forestry building.  My task as a volunteer this morning was to tape up the signs saying where the rooms are… but the instruction “You can’t tape anything to the wood.”  In the *Forestry* building.  Ya, good times.

OK, I’m going to go grab some lunch.  Free lunch!

Bloggy bloggy blogginess

It’s here, it’s here, it’s here. The thing you’ve all been waiting for. Northern Voice has arrived!

OK, so I still have a full day of non-bloggy work ahead of me before tonight’s Tiki Dinner, which kicks off the conference. Which reminds me – it’s open mic where attendees can read one of their blog postings and I, being the attention whore that I am, totally want to read something. Does anyone have any suggestions on which of my blog postings would be good for reading in front of a bunch of rowdy bloggers?

Also, to get you excited about NV, here’s a reminder of the highlights from last year’s conference:

• I got a really sweet purple Bloggable T-shirt (see above)
• I met a guy wearing a dragon costume
• I got to show off my neat printing skillz
• I was in the social pages
• My boots got a lot of attention¹

Oh ya, and I learned a bunch about blogging and suchlike.

But speaking of my boots, although the ones I wore last year have now retired from active duty, I, fortunately, have this pair and this pair to choose from. Because, really, what’s a blogging conference without some CFM boots?

¹Did I mention that I’m an attention whore?

Oooh, shiny things!

Anyone going to Northern Voice this weekend can add their blog to an aggregated¹ feed. That way, you can read all the blog posts of attendees leading up to, during, and after the conference in one handy dandy location (i.e., here or by subscribing to the feed).

I sent an email in to add my blog to the feed.

And now I’m all nervous about what I write, knowing that there will actually be a much larger audience than normal reading my stuff. With the potential of gaining me some new regular readers. And I am, after all, a passive-aggressive attention whore. Or at least an attention whore. At any rate, I feel the need to say something impressive. Which means I will now give you… hey, look, shiny things! Oooh, shiny!

Shalu gave me these earrings for my birthday – pretty, yes?

¹I nearly just typed “aggravated” instead of “aggregated” here. An aggravated blog feed?