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The fish monsters of Lost Lagoon

Yes, another post about Stanley Park, but a long standing question of mine was answered this morning. Are there any fish in Lost Lagoon? The answer is a resounding yes.

We were passing by this morning and only had my cellphone on us. The quality isn’t the best, but a lot of people were stopping to see all the splashing. The fish, as I say numerous times in the video, are huge. At minimum, a foot long, and their swarms were creating ominous waves in the middle of the lagoon, making it seem like some sort of X-Files[imdb] like creatures had moved in.

We had seen good sized turtles basking in the sunshine sometime ago, and Rebecca found that hard to believe but understandable. After that, I kinda imagined that if there were fish in there, they wouldn’t be much in terms of variety and size. Of course, I’m wrong, but this is amazingly surprising.

Update: Almost uncanny timing, a new video of Nessy has surfaced.

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Wikis in Plain English

As if they were paying attention, CommonCraft has produced another video to help explain the world of Web 2.0. I often link to Wikipedia in my posts, but there might not be a lot of people who know how it works. Better yet, there are some out there who don’t know that you can apply the same functionality that they use on that site, called Wikis (creative, huh?), to nearly any site that you want to.

Curious to learn more? Watch this video.


Click To Play

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Two screens are better than one

My dad had an epiphany while he was visiting us in Vancouver back in April. Instead of one really huge monitor, you can get a lot more out of having two. When I told him about having three, I think that kinda blew his mind.

Chris Pirillo, who apparently I am a lookalike of, posted about this today, so I sent it on to Dad. He replies, “I already have one.”

Dad’s Duel Monitor Setup

“There is no way I’ll go back to the single monitor on my work setup. It is too nice; too productive; too fun; and a new world all together.”

Designing electronics like he does, it makes a whole lot of sense, eh?

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Guest editing for the Canucks Outsider

HockeyNW.com DaveO had the opportunity to catch the celebration of the Vancouver Giants success in winning the Memorial Cup at Vancouver City Hall this past Tuesday afternoon. He captured some great audio, even snagged an interview with the legendary Pat Quinn!

The only issue he had was cranking out the audio into an all out podcast episode, so he asked if I would help him out. We’ve talked about this concept before, and it worked out fairly well. When you have all the audio laid out for you, it’s easy to put it all together. It also helps that Dave is really good at formulating an entire episode in pieces, all set up for sliding them together and splicing music to segue between all the parts.

It was a treat to do it, and I could really get used to the production side of things if I ever found myself doing this on a regular basis, full compensation, of course.

You can find episode #54 of the Canucks Outsider at HockeyNW.com, edited by yours truly.

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RSS in Plain English

I am in the midst of a relaunch of JEMM.com, a small business back in my home state of Iowa. We are taking it into new directions, many of which they have never witnessed or knew about before I got my hands on the site. I’ve also been muttering the words “Drupal” and “RSS” quite a bit, not to mention “search engine optimization” and “content management system”.

The Drupal part is something they are grasping well, and it is so nice to have a CMS in which nearly everyone at the business can have a helping hand in building the site with. The learning curve is getting easier everyday, and I’m discovering what it’s like to teach Drupal to new eyes, especially those who are still on the outside of what Web 2.0 really is.

The RSS part is another story. When I pointed this video out to them, they came back to me with a much better understanding of what I was trying to teach them. Plus, it’s hard to convey my daily interactivity with this stuff on a regular basis.

Still wondering what RSS is? Watch this video by the folks at CommonCraft.


Click To Play

Talking to Boris about my adventures, I’ll try to convey more about the creation of JEMM.com on a Drupal platform. If anyone wanted to help me out with some design input, I’m all ears. At this time, we’re much more focused on content.

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Jeff Buckley (November 17, 1966 – May 29, 1997)

I was going to let my last post about Jeff Buckley ride, but there has been a little bit of commenting on that post to make me do a little bit of a quick update.

It was today in 1997, Jeff Buckley passed away.

On May 29, 1997, as the band’s plane touched down on the runway to join him in his Memphis studio, Buckley went swimming in Wolf River Harbor, a tributary of the Mississippi River, while wearing steel-toed boots, all of his clothing, and singing along to a radio playing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”. A roadie of Buckley’s band, Keith Foti, remained ashore. After moving the radio and a guitar out of reach of the wake from a passing tugboat, Foti looked up to see that Buckley was gone. Despite a determined rescue effort that night, Buckley remained missing, and the search was called off the following day due to heavy rain. One week later his body was spotted by a tourist on a riverboat marina and was brought ashore. [wikipedia]

A new album has been released, as of today, featuring some best of studio tracks as well as recordings of certain live performances.

The recognition of his brief time in rock and roll history is getting a lot more attention from fans than I expected, but it’s not too surprising. Amar Bakshi for the Washington Post left a comment about an interview he did with British singer Karima Francis, and it’s worth checking out the effect that Buckley is still having on musicians, ten years after the fact. NPR has a nice story about him as well.

I want to do more and explain why I’ve come to appreciate his music like I do, but the fact is that we don’t have much to go on. As he was rising up as an artist, the world lost an incredible talent. We’ll never know how good it could have been. When I go back to the small catalog that is, it makes you wonder. Plus, there are only so many people who can cover “Lilac Wine” and do it well, especially when you consider that Nina Simone did the same.

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Horse vs. Dog in the park

This is purely an observation, but there is something that I have noticed for a long time when it comes to the numerous trips I make into Stanley Park. The place is a bit of an obsession, but I’m not the only person who likes to run in or around the place.

Expensive Dog Beach In my best Seinfeld impression, what’s up with all the horse poop on the trails? Not only that, but it shows up on the Seawall path as well! Big, honking clumps of horse manure, green in all of its glory. Little land mines just waiting for some sucker to not watch their step and get a nice, aromatic surprise.

The thing that kills me is that dog owners face fines for not having their pet on a leash, taking their animal is prohibited areas, or not picking up “the business” of that all dogs must do. If it’s not a few hundred dollars of a fine, it’s got an extra zero or so tagged on to the punishment.

Now, I am not a dog owner, never have been. Love all sorts of animals, but this is something that still confounds me. Why is it that horses can crap where they please without punishment, not to mention a complete lack of clean up? I’ve ran around piles of these green apple treats for a series of days before the rain can come around to help wash off the pathway, and this is in high traffic areas like around the Nine O’clock Gun or the little information center by the aquarium.

The worst speculation that I have is that a potential, common offender here is horseback police patrols, as I’ve passed just a few in the park while living here. If this might be true, then I really think something needs to be enforced to deal with this horse crap. Double standards stink. Literally.

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Lou Barlow – monkey begun

Lou Barlow[wiki] has been a guy that I’ve been following for a long time, but I fear that I am going to completely embarrass myself right now. It wasn’t until this past Friday that DaveO gave me the full back story on the guy, and I discovered that Barlow was one of the founding members of Dinosaur Jr.[wiki], a piece of rock and roll history that has alluded me up until now.

Like any bit of discovery that I stumble into like that, I try to get the complete story as much as I can. Venturing down the YouTube route, I found this clip of Dinosaur Jr. performing on the Jenny Jones Show. Wait, what the… Jenny Jones? Yeah, that floored me, too.

So many years of flipping through CDs at the store and thumbing through station libraries, always thinking, “Hey, I should give that a spin sometime.” I never did, and now the price is being paid. I feel like I should be flogged.

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Wondering why we don’t do a PABwest

cpb-66.jpg The guys at the Canadian Podcast Buffet ran an audio comment that I sent them in their latest episode. I was wondering about the awesomeness that is Podcasters Across Boarders and asked why we don’t do something like this on the west coast. Their responses are great, and I hope I keep their gears turning so that something might happen.

This is an idea that I mentioned to Tod Maffin at the recent DemoCampVancouver, and he had the same conclusion that I did. We should just do it ourselves.

Mainly, I like the approach that PAB takes with the whole concept of their conference. I think that if we combined that with the mentality of what goes on at a BarCamp and/or Northern Voice, we could come up with something really good out here on the west coast.

Remember, this wouldn’t just be a west coast of Canada only thing. People from anywhere and everywhere would be welcome to attend, and I’m sure that we could pull an interesting crowd from the U.S. side of the border. I mean, you can’t tell me that folks from Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and on down the coast wouldn’t think about the trek, andI say this with the folks from Geek.Farm.Life in mind. Andrew drove from Indiana for last year’s PAB in Kingston, Ontario. Not a huge amount of distance, but a commute nonetheless.

Yes, if you build it, they will come. Wrapping my head around it is another story, but I think Vancouver could pull it off.

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DemoCampVancouver01 follow-up

The Demo Board If I don’t sit down to hammer out some quick, follow-up thoughts about DemoCampVancouver01 right now, I won’t get to it later. Better yet, the freshness of the event won’t be there, even though it’s been about 24 hours since the event. If you missed it, check out Rebecca’s live blog of the event.

Basic low down about DemoCampVancouver is that it is a outstanding concept. It’s a very open sourced, controlled environment that is what the name really implies. You show up, people have a limited amount of time to present their idea or product, and then you move on.

The best way that I can sum up the experience is that it’s like watching a commercial but being able to ask questions, and you completely understand what I’m talking about. For instance, I caught a spot for a cellphone service via TV that offers a really great package and literally spit out in response, “yeah, but what’s the catch?” The tube doesn’t interact with you at that point as you would like.

30 second schpeal time At DemoCamp, you can pelt as many questions as you want to the presenter, as long as there is time. The crew running the show, namely Boris, Kris, and Bill, did a crack job of keeping everything on track. It moved from one to the next, and I got my fill of things that I knew nothing to little about.

There is to be another one of these in the near future, and I’m pretty confident that I’ll do my best to make it out to see what’s going on.