This Saturday, June 25th, I’m participating in Blogathon 2009 for the Canadian Cancer Society.
“Huh?” Simple: read my introductory post here.

Donations can be made at the CCS’s donation site. Afterwards, why not drop me a message or tweet that you’ve donated and I can mention your donation in my next post? (Anonymously, if you prefer.)

Read below for the latest updates!

I just finished reading the interview and I’m happy to confirm that I didn’t sound insane or say anything terribly inappropriate this time. I find I do have something of a tendency to do this. If we’ve spoken in any capacity, you may have confirmed this for yourself.

Case in point: at the end of the interview, Stephen said, “We did a story last December on Second Life and Google Lively. I wish our writer had been able to get in touch with you for it.”

“Oh, am I not the top hit on Google for ‘Second Life Vancouver’ any longer?” I asked.

I really can’t believe the things that drift out of my mouth sometimes.

But more importantly, no, no I am not the top hit for ‘Second Life Vancouver’! In fact, I’m not even on the first page.

Currently, the top hit is an article about the Vancouver Police Department’s recruitment/awareness project undertaken by the Masters of Digital Media program, prior to my employment there at the Great Northern Way Campus.

That’s only peripherally related to me! Man.

Anyway. You should go read the Q&A at Straight.com!

Unfortunately, my ability to hammer out posts dried up shortly before I literally tipped out from exhaustion, so those of you at home missed out on the effects of that.

Thanks to those of you who donated directly and to those of you who pledged per-post to the Canadian Cancer Society! The final count was 28 posts on my part and $108 raised on yours.

I did manage to have fun, at least. Thanks to Rebecca, Raul, Raincoaster and everyone else at Workspace last night who helped us all along!

On a brighter note, I did work on many more post outlines than , so at least I have a backlog of material to finish up over the next few weeks.

Ultimately, I suspect I’ll roll this site into it.

Anyway, while the art style I’m using is very, very different than this, both use a nice slab serif typeface called Rockwell. While selecting it, I came across this this video I liked from a couple years ago: the “Say ‘what’ again. I dare you.” scene from Pulp Fiction, in type form.

So I got it, only to discover that all the config fields were empty. Apparently version 1.6.4 has a bit of a problem with not prepopulating the fields with the proper strings and escape characters. Whoops.

Fortunately, Tris found a site that had a giant screenshot of the actual settings here. So in the event that you’re taking advice about the version 1.6.4 of the All in One SEO pack for WordPress, do check that out, won’t you? You’ll have to retype everything, but still, awesome.

I really don’t want to see this yellow “All in One SEO Pack must be configured” message at the top of all my posts, and hey, better SEO stuff would be super, too, so I’m fixing that right now.

If you’re not using it, you should be. More hits are better hits.

(Thanks, Tris!)

Want. Seriously.

I spent so much time playing Lemmings when I was younger. What an awesome game. June of PlanetJune has included crochet patterns and suggestions for accessories on her blog.

And to crocheters out there: what better than crocheted Lemmings to go with my Weighted Companion Cube? I mean, really.

(Via jwz.)

So… yeah, we’ll see how that goes tonight.

However, I couldn’t help but notice a number of interesting searches by which people are coming here.

Okay, that’s different.

This sums up my day fairly accurately.

Other bewildering search terms people used to arrive here include:

• bridget botelho chocolate sweet deal
• omega.com robot chat
• pentagon demon
• the omega point that could make the end
• vacuum ejaculator

You people. Seriously, what the hell?

I really can’t say that I was expecting a massive thunderstorm instead.

In retrospect, I wish I’d taken the bus, letting me get in another post about how the #8 bus is crazy and how it was much better when my MLA drove me to work every day. Sadly, it was not to be.

I have to say, I’ve never seen a thunderstorm like this in Vancouver. From the streams coming up on Twitter, it doesn’t appear to be stopping the fireworks in English Bay though, so if they can press on, so can we!

I’ve been convinced for a long time that the biggest threat to free speech in the 21st century is not, as in past eras, some kind of trend towards authoritarianism, but rather, intellectual property encumbrances. The idea that VANOC can trademark lines from O Canada is appalling to me. It’s bad enough that the Olympics have become so branded and mired in the exclusivity of the brand that they’ve threatened Olympia Pizza in Vancouver’s West End, to say nothing of the actions taken since then.

Thus, I wholeheartedly support the choice to the True North Media House in response to the line trademarked by VANOC.

But I’ve been thinking about situations where The Authorities have confiscated memory cards or deleted photos and so, I’m wondering about technical workarounds to this: I would consider using an EyeFi card in my camera to tether with a 3G phone (say, a jailbroken iPhone or possibly something with reasonable battery life.) to automatically upload my photos to my website or Flickr so that I wasn’t actually storing any pictures, I was posting them live. Short of jamming or Iranian-scale network monitoring and packet inspection, there would really be little anyone could do, assuming the images themselves were legal.

If I take a photo of a poster with the Olympic Rings, is distribution of that photo a trademark or copyright violation? Is my use of the words “Olympic”, “2010”, “Winter”, or “Games” in this post actionable? No, but what if I’m doing so in protest of something involving one or more of those words?

I mean, I don’t seriously consider myself at risk for having the last name “Winters”, or for writing under that name, but it’s so important to explicitly affirm that I have the right to do so when proposing –or passing!– any law that purports to restrict speech.