According to Jeffery, I’m rich since I’m at this event. Sweet. I had no idea. I’ll go to the bank and inform them of this turn of events.

This morning’s keynote speaker was Matt Mullenweg – creator of WordPress and serious spam hater. He’s a great speaker and pointed out how facebook ripped off the wordpress design. Also, did you consider getting invites on facebook spam? I never thought of it before today, but in Matt’s opinion, it certainly is. I would have to agree, but I don’t mind that kind of spam as it’s coming from my mother-in-law mostly. And who doesn’t like to get a facebook poke?

After Matt’s talk, I sat in Dave Olson’s session called “F&*% Stats, Make Art. He’s clever and funny. Dave’s big into the podcast side as well. I also spoke to him briefly after he spoke – very gracious.

I’m not sure what I’m going to blog about next. I have been very preoccupied with this event. So, now what?

Well, I’m here! And I managed to figure out how to log onto wifi with my old school lap top. Wow. Is it ever OLD. I’m very aware of this as I am surrounded by all types of gear heads and computer gear enthusiasts. I’ve attended one un-lecture/great big discussion about wikis and have added myself to the Northern Voice’s Wiki for the photo camp happening after lunch today.

So far I’ve run into Isabella, Jan and David – all local bloggers and I think I’ll add their blogs to the local blog-off tournament. I also met one blogger from New York who came to Vancouver specifically for this conference. Cool, no?

The location is excellent – the Forestry Building is beautiful and open and with the sun streaming in through the glass ceiling? This is a great venue.

Sadly, I’m unable to upload pictures at the moment as the camera cable is sitting on my desk at home. But there’s always tomorrow and there’s always Rebecca’s Blog. She’s ALL geared up.

From Wayan for Metroblogging DC:

Get your XO-1 geek on with VBCXO!

Have you heard about the One Laptop Per Child program? An effort to distribute “$100 laptops” to the world’s children, empowring learning with technology ona global scale? Would you like to see the XO laptop up close and personal?

Then join the VBCXO User Group for its February Meetup. Canadians are just now getting their hands on XO laptops after reminding OLPC that G1G1 Canadians Are Humans, With Kids Too, and the excitement to mesh is palatable.

VBCXO User Group February Meetup
A fun discussion and discovery of One Laptop Per Child technology for the whole kids to geeks XO-loving family.

Saturday, February 16
4:00 – 7:00pm
ShaShuka Art Gallery and Eatery
6555 Fraser St – map
Vancouver, BC

We’ll have Wayan Vota, editor of OLPC News leading the conversation, plenty of XO’s to play with, an even XO-related prizes!

Since I started blogging in 2005, I’ve often thought about attending one of the big blogging conventions – like the ones in the States that Dooce goes to with Mightygirl. I envied the bloggers that were invited to go to Amsterdam, like The Pink is the New Blog guy. I really wanted to go events like this and never thought about looking around for anything locally. I noticed last year that there was a blogging conference right here in my hometown called the Northern Voice, but I’d missed it. Ensuring that I would never miss something like this again, I made sure to bookmark the site and waited for the updated info to arrive. And it has! I got an alert on facebook letting me know that it’s time to register.

Through a series of events and thanks to facebook (Again!) I worked up the courage to contact one of the organizers, Kris Krug, to get more information so I could post about this on the Metroblogger. It sure looks like we could use a few more authors for our site, so perhaps this may help us in that recruiting process.

Kris provided me with a great overview of the event. This will be the fourth year running and it is not considered a technical event, but focused more on content. Topics discussed include getting a blog started, personal blogging and all kinds of blog and podcast related information sessions. It’s also described as being friendly and casual – just how I like it. And affordable – it’s $60 for both days – or if you can only make it one day, it’s $40. Follow this link for more information or if you’re interested in registering.

I’ll be posting a few more times before the event with updates on speakers, topics and other related news. I’ll also be attending the event, taking some photos there and will write up a summary after. I can hardly wait! This is going to be good.

I really dig last.fm [lf] because I’m a statistic nerd with iTunes anyway, and last.fm builds on that and allows me to be even dorkier. It’s also a good way to listen to the music I like on the stripped down Windows legacy machines that I have to deal with at work that we’re lucky that we can get to run a web browser.

It’s also a great way to find new music based on the rythm of its logic, and the suggestions of those people who enjoy the same sort of music I do. There’s even a group for users based in Vancouver [lf] that locals can join. If you’re on last.fm and want to friend me you can hit my profile up here [lf] and laugh at my complete lack of indie cred.

If you’re a Vancouverite on last.fm and want to let people you here know what you’re profile is feel free to post it below, and don’t forget to join the Vancouver users group [lf].

iphone

Originally uploaded by shapeshift.

Hey bloggers, want some quick hits on your blog? Then just do the following, claim that the iPhone is about to be released in Canada and reuse the same fake ad that’s been floating around the internet for the past six months. I noticed a significant pickup in the number of people coming through the store asking about the iPhone the last few days and it appears that once again bloggers have faked a story saying Rogers is about to get it and that stores are taking pre-orders.

That’s completely untrue. I’d link to one of the blogs but a) I don’t want to give them the traffic since they’re just link bait, b) the site that I found it on keeps crashing my browser which is always a testament to poor web design.

If the iPhone was coming this year it would already be announced and on store shelves for Christmas. When/if it does come to Canada you’ll hear about it, and not just through bloggers that nobody has seen before, it’s not like either Rogers or Apple are media shy, they’re not going to sneak it onto the shelves without telling anyone. My guess is that the earliest we’d see it is Feb-March after Macworld. It’s possible that Apple CEO Steve Jobs will roll out the next set of nations ready for iPhone-age during his keynote address, but I am pretty sure that we won’t see it before then.

Still now all you new bloggers have the secret weapon to getting hits. Please use it wisely.

Pakistan

Originally uploaded by drmvrbr2000.

I go to bed complaining about the giant floodlight that Hollywood installed outside my bedroom window, and I wake up reminded that there are bigger problems than what we get riled about here in the western world. In Pakistan the media has been shut down by President Pervez Musharraf and 11 judges on their Supreme Court have been confined to the Supreme Court building over the potential verdict in their decision over Musharraf’s election vicotry in October [bbc].

Since Metroblogging is a world wide network of blogs there are bloggers we know affected by this. Some important Metroblogging posts to check out if you’re following this story and want a local on the ground perspective come from Metroblogging Karachi [mbk], Metroblogging Lahore [mbl] and Metroblogging Islamabad [mbi].

Currently the only media sources in Pakistan seem to be the BBC and Al-Jazeera English. Internet connectivity still seems to be working. What Metroblogging will be doing is if the bloggers at our sites in those cities do not feel safe in posting material under their own names to their own MB city sites, they hopefully will be able to forward information to Metroblogging proper. Any such reports will be posted Metroblogging.com [mb].

From the thread by Sean Bonner on metroblogging.com:

“We are all safe here in Karachi. All news channels are blocked & so [are] all news sites like cnn.com. Local calls are also blocked. I have heard from relatives abroad that it is being reported that traffic in karachi is bleak & Martial Law has been enforced. I want to clarify that there is nothing like that. Yes the traffic is a bit less but only because the president is to address the nation anytime. Also there is no Martial Law announced yet!”

I’m currently talking with a few of our bloggers via IM and things seem calm though they are confirming the news/phone block however the net it still up and running so far. More soon.

We’ll do out best here to keep you updated as things happen. Also we’re all hoping our fellow Metrobloggers, and everyone else, are okay.

On Friday, Workspace celebrated it’s first birthday. This open, creative, alternative working environment in Gastown has enjoyed a successful venture so far. Last week it was also named the best reason to get out of bed in the morning (and go to work) in the Georgia Straight‘s ‘Best of Vancouver‘. It has also been host to various tech community events such as DemoCamp and BarCamp – always welcoming geeks, nerds and tech evangelists with open arms and kick ass coffee.

Unfortunately last week someone broke in and stole 6 computers, including the big iMac at the front counter. You know… the one everyone uses for Flickrbooth fun?

They took with them four laptops and our two iMac’s. We have the crime on tape, but weren’t able to capture a high res. image. [billmcewen]

This morning Kris Krug was checking one of Workspace’s Flickr accounts and noticed something strange… a photo of a tattooed man, “me”, uploaded to the account. Sirens started to go off and everyone soon realized that this was more than likely the thief (or one of them). He was using the stolen computer to upload photos of himself to Flickr without thinking to log into his OWN Flickr account. Busted.

If you know this man, or his tattoos or anything that can identify him, please email INFO [at] ABETTERPLACETOWORK [dot com].

Last week I wrote an article about Stanford’s Folding@home distributed computing project [em], and got to wondering whether many people were doing it locally. I’ve been running the program on my PS3, letting it work through the night and when I’m out on the complex sciency stuff that it’s been assigned to work on. The graphical map showing where else other @home folders are shows that there’s quite a few other Vancouverites doing the same thing.

It’s nice to know that my Playstation is far smarter than me when it comes to the science, and it’s a game that I actually don’t lose all my lives playing. Given that we’re such a wired city, I’m interested to know how many Metblog readers are running the program on the PCs, PS3s or Macs. Any local folding teams out there?

For those not quite sure what I’m on about the Wikipedia article [wp] has this to say about the Stanford project:

Folding@home (also known as FAH or F@H) is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics simulations. It was launched on October 1, 2000, and is currently managed by the Pande Group, within Stanford University’s Chemistry department, under the supervision of Professor Vijay S. Pande. Folding@home is one of the largest distributed computing projects. The goal of the project is “to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.”[

Spock Trek

Originally uploaded by GALE47.

Posting about the Techcouver map yesterday [mbv] got me thinking of Web 2.0 stuff, and I realized I’ve got a few invites for a few new services kicking around my inbox. So even though these aren’t Vancouver specific sites, I’m going to put the invites out there for any readers who are interested. If you want either of these invites just shoot me an email [jks].

The two services, Spock and Pownce, are described after the break.

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