WordCamp Whistler is a go for 2009!
January 24th and 25th in Whistler a meeting of WordPress minds will meet up in Whistler, BC. The keynote speaker for the event will be Blogging Evangelist Lorelle VanFossen.
If you’re in the Vancouver-Whistler area, or can plan to be here the $35 entry fee is a great price for such a high-quality event. If you’re already registered, grab a badge and pimp the event on your site, your twitter or anywhere else!
I just got back from the BarCamp Vancouver 2008 networking party. This is the meet & greet prior to the actual unconference which takes place tomorrow down at Granville Island.
It was great to see a few familiar faces like Rebecca and Raul.
I also got to meet some of the folks who I’d only known online. Duane, John, John & Andy. Looking forward to meeting lots of other great people tomorrow.
I did forget one thing tonight: Business Cards. However, I did manage to find a few spare sheets of my Avery business card blanks tonight. I also discovered (somewhat to my surprise) that Google Docs supports Avery business card templates.
sample business card from google docs
The implementation isn’t quite as slick as MS-Word, but it will more than do in a pinch. I managed to whip up this snazzy little number in a matter of minutes. Now I feel more prepared for tomorrow. Hopefully Dave doesn’t mind that I borrowed the show logo, I promise I’ll promote the show! 
For those of you who haven’t been following recent security news, there’s been a major defect found in the DNS protocol which has led to a series of patches for all forms of DNS servers. Though the issue doesn’t affect most peoples’ home computers, it does affect pretty much every ISP on the planet as it makes older versions of DNS vulnerable to a DNS Cache Poisoning attack.
With a vulnerability so wide-reaching, security researchers decided it would be wise to keep the exact nature of the vulnerability something of a secret until the patches were ready. They did however announce that a vulnerability had been found.
This announcement was all it took for security-savvy netizens (the ones who know just enough to be dangerous) to start speculating and researching the nature of the DNS defect. The good thing? They figured it out. The bad thing? They publicized it.
As a keen observer of the whole mess, security expert and blogger Chris Hoff decided to dedicate a poem to the DNS Debacle. I’ve included a short excerpt:
A bunch of big egos called Dan on a bluff said his vuln was a copy of 10 year old stuff So Dan swore them on handshakes and details were provided and those same cocky claims soon all but subsided
Go and check the poem out. It’s extremely creative, and as far as I can tell factually accurate to the events that took place. My hat’s off to Chris Hoff for providing the prose, now we’ll all cross our fingers and see how it goes… 
This Saturday marks a major milestone for the city of Vancouver. Well, perhaps not for the city, but definitely for the mac-geeks in the region. This Saturday is the long-awaited opening of an Apple store west of Toronto.
Photo Credit: xtianyves on Flickr
I’m not the only excited local blogger. See some posts today from DuaneStory and Miss604 (via the twittersphere of course).
The Apple Store announcement on the Apple website provides all the necessary details for the grand opening and even provides links to start booking your “genius bar” appointments. Time to get my MacBook case fixed again, the timing is wonderful.
As I promised in last night’s post, I’m using Boston’s free Wi-Fi network to drop a quick email to the Mayors of both Burnaby and Vancouver. The gist: Free Wi-Fi in urban centres is a great thing. I decided to include a copy of the email on the blog for anyone who might be interested.
Good morning Your Worships, I’m writing this letter to you from the city of Boston where I’m currently on vacation. The subject of this letter is also the service which is allowing me to send it; Boston’s first open-Wi-Fi project. The city has partnered with local companies to provide free Wi-Fi access to residents and visitors of the city’s Faneuil Marketplace. I would like to promote the idea of starting up a open Wi-Fi project in the Lower Mainland. With the pending influx of international visitors to the region, providing an easy way for them to stay connected to their families and report back on their adventures in BC would cast a brilliant light on our ability to embrace new technologies and the region’s vision for the future. While covering the entire region in time for the Olympics is hardly a feasible option, placing the free access in some key locations around the region could be both cost-effective, and provide basic access to a large number of people. A couple of examples would be: - Key Olympic Venues (GM Place, Skating Ovals etc.) - Library Square, Vancouver - Robson Square, Vancouver - Pacific Center, Vancouver - Metrotown, Burnaby - Deer Lake Park, Burnaby I know there was talk about placing Wi-Fi access points in Vancouver a few years ago, in fact I believe it was mentioned on Mayor Sullivan’s blog. With the coming international attention on the city, I feel this would be an excellent opportunity to showcase the region’s growing technology sector and to make the Olympic and Paralympic games that much more accessible to the world. Thank you, Keith Murray
That’s it! I’ll let everyone know if I hear back from either Mayor. It’s really windy, and I’ve chosen an outdoor location. Time to run!
The city of Boston along with a couple of partners offers free open Wi-Fi in a public area near the harbour. While the news itself is more than 18 months old, I felt the need to post about it since I only discovered it today.
This is a move by the city of Boston which will help to improve the level of technological livability and help the local residents to take advantage of high-speed Internet access where they wouldn’t have necessarily had the opportunity in the past. This got me to thinking about the situation with Wi-Fi access in the Lower Mainland.
Vancouver has no such municipally supported Wi-Fi efforts, despite some rumblings from the Mayor’s office a couple of years ago. With the large influx of international visitors that will be descending on the city in the run up to the Olympic games in less than 21 months (642 days as of this writing) the city is in danger of becoming a technological relic. Wi-Fi coverage in the city is rapidly improving, but it’s all being done by local businesses. Private companies who are offering free access to the Internet to to their customers. The problem is that these Wi-Fi networks are not standardized or linked in any way. Though there are many places in the city that you can pick up a signal, you need to constantly re-connect as you move throughout the city. This makes technologies like voice-over-IP inconvenient at best, and unmanageable at worst.
The City of New Westminster is once again evaluating the merits of city-wide Wi-Fi. The issue was raised several years ago but never made it to council. That delay has provided time for the city to learn from the successes and challenges experienced by other cities across North America and around the world. Michael McQuillan recently published a piece on this discussion and notes that New Westminster’s small physical size make it an ideal candidate for a “mesh”-style Wi-Fi network.
Tomorrow I’m going to head down and try out Boston’s free Wi-Fi. I’ll use it to send an email to Mayor Sullivan, and Mayor Corrigan of Burnaby to see if I can get their thoughts on municipally-supported Wi-Fi initiatives.
Cross-posted with Miss604.com
So much in today’s world needs to be justified with numbers showing us that there is a quantifiable value for every decision. When a company spends money, more often than not they want to know how spending that money will make them more money. This is the concept of return on investment (ROI). How to spend $1 and make $2 as a result. (OK, finance lesson over with).
But not everything is easily quantifiable, or measurable. How to measure employee satisfaction or my personal favourite “engagement” with verifiable, hard numbers? These are by nature qualitative measures.
Photo credit: SqueakyMarmot on Flickr
With a new generation of employees moving into the workplace, the so-called Millennials (Gen Y), that values a balance between work and their personal life, companies are having to adjust. In areas where younger workers are the norm, or at least make up a significant percentage of the population steps are being taken to introduce an atmosphere targeted at attracting and retaining talent. By providing games tables, comfortable seating or in some cases refreshments to employees as a “perk” of the job, some companies are aiming to make work a more fun and balanced place to be.
But if you’re wanting to get some leather recliners or a foosball table into the office, how do you justify the benefits of this to the powers that be? Where are your numbers? There is precious little in the way of hard facts to “prove” the beneficial nature of these perks. There is, however, mounds of anecdotal evidence to show that happy and relaxed employees are more productive and more creative during the hours that they are performing their duties.
This is one of the intangibles that make up a balanced work culture and lead to a more relaxed and creative workforce. By providing a “chill-out space” something with comfortable seating and (god forbid) maybe a television, your hard-working employees have a place to recharge their batteries mid-day and continue to deliver for the company until late in the afternoon.
Photo credit: tojosan on Flickr
I’m not saying that companies should employ masseuses, or servers to cater to employees while they’re on the job (as alleged by 60 minutes), but provide some benefits that help to enhance the experience of going to work. Why does work need to be dull and boring? Invest some money. If even one employee stays instead of leaving for another company, it will be worth your time. The return on your investment comes in the form of not wasting productive hours training yet another new employee (probably another millennial).
So in an effort to collect some more of those anecdotal stories, and maybe even some hard numbers, tell us about your workplace. Do you have a “chill-out space” to use? Does it help? Is it something you would look for in a prospective employer?
Last night the CBC, Canada’s national public broadcaster, aired a quiz show which pitted six different groups from all walks of life against one another on a show they’ve called Test The Nation.
This time around the groups were: Chefs, Cabbies, Celebrity Impersonators, Backpackers, Flight Crews and Bloggers. Members of the blogging team included Vancouver’s own Buzz Bishop, and Rebecca Bolwitt from Miss604 and the Crazy Canucks.
At the end of the day, the Bloggers prevailed winning all three of the available prizes. Check out Rebecca’s post on the victory and the official Test The Nation website for more.
Announced at MacWorld yesterday, the MacBook Air is an ultra-thin laptop that is… well… ultra-thin. It skimps out in almost every other facet from storage to expansion ports and still has the same footprint as larger thicker models.
Kevin Naits put together a great little video montage poking fun at the obsessive nature of the thin MacBook. Don’t get me wrong I appreciate that you can put this bad boy in a manila envelope and be none the wiser that there’s a whole computer in there (well, most of a computer)… The video is quite funny though.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQkdVymW8C8]
YouTube has launched a Canadian focused version today.
The Canadian portal will focus on Canadian content, and content uploaded from Canadian YouTube members.
[youtube:http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=_y5MfzSnFLM]