Vancouver
Archived Posts from this Category
“It Gets Better” in music: 7. Vancouver Mens’ Chorus
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 31 Jul 2011 | Tagged as: LGBT, Vancouver
In honour of the Vancouver Pride Parade and Festival today, which celebrates the spice which lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people contribute to our community — by means of a parade that ran literally past our front door — I’m kicking off a blog post series featuring my top seven favourite musical contributions to the It Gets Better project.
If you haven’t come across It Gets Better, then run don’t walk to the It Gets Better project site. Watch some of the over 10,000 videos contributed by people, from all walks of life, with a common theme: encouraging youth who are being bullied, and perhaps contemplating ending their lives, to believe that life gets better after high school — and that they too should stick around to see it happen. Continue Reading »
In honour of Derek K. Miller
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 31 May 2011 | Tagged as: Vancouver, culture, digital preservation, meetings and conferences, personal
I never met Derek Miller. I take that back. I may well have met him, say at the Northern Voice conference, the annual gathering of the B.C. blogging and social media scene. I almost certainly heard him play drums; I’m told his band, The Neurotics, played at the start line of the Vancouver Sun Run, our annual 50,000 person 10k stampede. Certainly we had a lot of friends in common. But I became aware of Derek Miller through one of his intriguing ideas. I then grew to admire his bravery, his unsentimental clarity, his humour, his compassion, as he compellingly narrated his own journey towards death. And as the community, in which he made waves and I bob in the ripples, mourned him, it became clear how many people loved and admired him.
I first came across Derek when researching what people were learning about digital legacies: what happens to one’s online persona and works when one dies. Derek apparently coined the term “digital executor”, the person who has the responsibility to take over all one’s blogs and accounts and presence on the net on one’s death. I think it is a brilliant term. Continue Reading »
How about an IMLIG (Internationalisation, Multilingual, Localisation Interest Group) for Vancouver?
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 27 Jun 2010 | Tagged as: Unicode, Vancouver, i18n, language, meetings and conferences, multilingual, web technology
There is a lot of international, multilingual, and multicultural activity in Vancouver. Also, there’s a thriving tech scene. But there’s no place for the people in the intersection of those two circles — those interested in and working on the internationalisation, localisation, and multilingual aspects of technology projects — to get together and share ideas. I think there ought to be.
And I’ll even propose a name: IMLIG1604, the I18n L10n M11l I6t G3p (Internationalisation, Localisation, and Multilingual Interest Group) for North America’s 604 area code. If you can decipher the title, you’re in the club!
Birdwatching the 2010 Olympics police
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 28 Feb 2010 | Tagged as: Canada, Vancouver, meetings and conferences
As the cheers still resound outside my apartment, from the street party below, let me report on my own Olympic sport: police-spotting. It’s like bird watching, but for police agencies.
Some 118 different police agencies from across Canada came to the Vancouver area as part of the $900 million 2010 Olympics security effort. The RCMP sent over 4000 officers from provinces across Canada; various municipal police departments sent some 1700 more. (20% of Canada’s policing power was at the Olympics.) I figured it would be fun to say hello to a constable from every one of those agencies. I didn’t get to them all, but it was fun trying.
How to plug in to the Vancouver Social Media scene
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 14 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: Vancouver, meetings and conferences
A colleague from Green College, UBC, freshly graduated with an MFA in Poetry, but also with work experience in editing and publishing, is looking for a job in the Lower Mainland. At a party yesterday, we talked about the Vancouver (British Columbia) social media scene, and how she can get plugged in to it, and make it part of her job search. I’ve posted my ideas below. Do you have other leads for newcomers to plug into the local social media scene? Please post them in the comments. Maybe, together, we can build a useful resource for other seekers.
Urban British Columbia in general, and the Vancouver metro area in particular, has thriving technology and social media communities. (There’s industry in there somewhere, also.) This community exists in part through face-to-face relationships, and in part on-line. Through this community, you can meet interesting people, learn what is happening in the industry, network for job leads, and of course have a good time.
There’s nothing terribly unusual about the techniques for plugging into this community as opposed to any other. But here is my advice for specific starting points.
Basic Identity and Persona
The first thing to have is an identity, a way for people to refer to you and link to you. From this identity you will grow an online persona.
“Getting in touch with your Joomla’s inner database”
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 30 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: Joomla, Vancouver, meetings and conferences, web technology
I’m giving another talk at the coordinates:
Getting in touch with your Joomla’s inner database
Monday, 30. November 2009, 18:30-20:30h. At The Network Hub, 422 Richards Street, 3rd floor, Vancouver, BC V6B 2Z3. tel +1 604 767 8778.
A monthly meeting of the Vancouver Joomla User Group. Admission free. All people interested in learning more about the content management system, and helping others learn more, are welcome.
Agenda
- Introductions.
- Featured topic: Getting in touch with your Joomla’s inner database, by Jim DeLaHunt.
- Q&A.
- Door prize drawing.
- Networking.
“Going live: adding a staging server to your Joomla development process” at Vancouver Joomla User Group
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 08 Oct 2009 | Tagged as: CMS, Joomla, Vancouver, meetings and conferences
Going live: adding a staging server to your Joomla development process
Thursday, 8. October 2009, 18:30-20:30hAt The Network Hub, 422 Richards Street, 3rd floor, Vancouver, BC V6B 2Z3. tel +1 604 767 8778.
A monthly meeting of the Vancouver Joomla User Group. Admission free. All people interested in learning more about the Joomla! content management system, and helping others learn more, are welcome.
Heads up for 1234567890 day!
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 12 Feb 2009 | Tagged as: Vancouver, software engineering, time
During a high school class, my teacher interrupted his discussion of classical Greek history to say, “it’s twelve thirty-four on the fifth of June, 1978″. In other words, 12:34 5/6/78 (in the British notation). Alert people in the United States had already celebrated that moment on May 6th. If you missed that moment, you have another chance on Friday: 1234567890 day.
Humans love to find patterns, and dates have rich potential for that. For instance, I was walking through a train station on a business trip in Tokyo in February, 1990. I noticed that people were making an unusual fuss about the train tickets. 1990 was 平成２年 , or “Heisei year 2″, in the calendar based on the Japanese era name. The date was printed on the train tickets as “H2-2-2″. The symmetry made them collectors items. (I wish I could lay my hands on a ticket from that day, to convince myself I didn’t invent this memory…)
I have a fondness for finding leaks in the software engineering abstractions that represent our messy real world. I wrote last year about POSIX time, and the limitations in its representation of modern calendars and time zones. So when a leaky abstractions turns up as a pretty pattern, it’s irresistible. And that’s what happens this Friday.
IIMA talk: “…successful multilingual web strategy”
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 31 Dec 2008 | Tagged as: Vancouver, meetings and conferences, multilingual
Right! I was supposed to announce this three weeks ago!
I’ve posted the slides from my Dec 10 presentation, “Expand your reach with a successful multilingual web strategy”. I gave this talk to the Vancouver chapter of the International Internet Marketing Association (IIMA)’s monthly meeting.
International and multilingual Drupal sites
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 22 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: CMS, Vancouver, drupal, i18n, meetings and conferences
I gave a presentation about “International and multilingual Drupal sites” to the friendly folks at the Vancouver Drupal Users Group on November 20, 2008. Follow the link above to see the slides.
This was a great opportunity for me to investigate Drupal 6’s internationalisation (i18n). As part of the research for my paper, I set up a basic Drupal 6 site with UI strings and content translated into Japanese and English languages. I found that Drupal 6 has very good support for multilingual site hosting. However, there were some tricky aspects to installing the right modules and then setting up the system configuration. I summarise them in the presentation, but it’s probably worth writing some better documentation.