“We can go out to the airport,” the mom said as they were leaving.

“Oh, that’s a long drive!”

Yes. Yes it is. With the opening of the Canada Line now moved up to August 17th, less than two weeks away, it will actually be quite a bit faster–for me, at least. The closest station is a 2km walk, bus, or bike ride away, but I expect door-to-door travel time to be much, much shorter than calling a cab.

It remains to be seen how well the existing bus service will integrate with the new stations, and if more frequent east-west buses will be needed to funnel Vancouver residents into the Cambie Street corridor. In any event, by opening early, Translink and InTransit BC will hopefully have some extra time to work out many of the bugs before the old bus routes out of Richmond get discontinued.

I probably won’t use the Canada Line much myself, still being closer to the Main Street bus myself. Since I tend not to go to Richmond or Oakridge Centre much, I don’t see a lot of opportunity to use it, but it would definitely make getting to Yaletown or Davie Street from my neighbourhood much more convenient.

Plus, as has been pointed out to me by friends and drinking buddies alike, now that I’ll be attending Langara College, the 49th Avenue station makes it extremely convenient to blast down to Gastown for a drink immediately after class. (Guys, you get that school isn’t 9–5, right?)

Still, this really does hammer home the point that for a pedestrian and transit user, the shape of our city really is defined by which buses go where. (Hint: they go downtown.) Personally, when I’m a passenger in a friend’s car, I never think about taking 12th Avenue to cut across town because there aren’t buses that go there.

These fascinating travel-time maps of Great Britain effectively illustrate what even a densely-populated country like the United Kingdom must contend with when moving people and goods around.

Also interesting is the implication of what “central” means to different people. This week, there’s been some discussion over at the Vancouver League of Drupalers, of having some coworking meetups to chat about Drupal projects we’ve been working on, get some coding down, and so forth. But where to actually meet? The Grind at Main and King Edward? Sweet, I’m there. Waves in New West? Yeah, not as convenient. However, if I lived right beside any Expo Line SkyTrain station in Vancouver proper save for Stadium or Main Street, it would be faster to go all the way out to New Westminster, hands down.

Fortunately, having my spiffy new bike has opened up a lot of options too, particularly with the ability to switch to transit when I need it, now that all the buses have bike racks.

So far today, I’ve ridden just under 8 kilometres to three out of four scheduled errands. The last one will double that. I’ll spend most of it on the cross-town 10th Avenue bike route. In the end, I will have spent about the same amount of time on the road as I would have, had I driven, if you factor in parking. It’s pretty liberating, I have to say.

But hey, even if it isn’t something that’s totally useful for me, a link to Richmond and the airport was necessary. I wish different choices had been made in construction and planning, but it’s definitely something we’ll be getting some use out of as a city. Plus, hey, Vancouver’s the first Canadian city with a subway link to the airport. Go us.

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!

Digg is ostensibly a link-sharing site, where the most popular sites people are reading and voting upon are promoted to the front page. The downside to this is that popularity does not equal relevance. When we summarize what’s popular, we get this:

• Five Awesomely Stupid Infomercial Products
• 150 Dogs Found Dead in Freezers in Michigan Home
• N. Korea Publicly Executes Christian for Distributing Bible
• Stretch Limo in San Francisco FAIL
• Ubuntu to make Linux application installation idiot proof

Yeah. It ends up being some mix of scary, depressing, and generally button-pressing news, as well as silly pictures and reviews of expensive hand-held electronics. Unless you’re the sort of person who obsessively reads and up/downvotes articles on Digg all day –and I’m willing to entertain the idea that a significant number of its visitors are– most of those stories are not useful to you.

There’s also many CMSes and template engines capable of implementing a Digg clone. There’s Drigg, which is based on Drupal, Blinkk, FolkD… suffice it to say, there’s a bunch of them.

Just as others have argued that Slashdot has lost relevance as it’s grown, I think Digg has come to the same point.

Smaller, more focused community sites like Buzzfeed or Kirtsy, a straightforward Digg clone run by a group of women, are simply better positioned to communicate information to their respective target audiences.

Seriously, what’s the value in waiting for a site to aggregate pictures of baby zoo animals that you have to pick through when you can go right to the source?

My “outsider” paranoia was made poignantly clear when the older gentleman sitting beside me during lunch asked out of sincere curiosity, “So, why do you write about technology? Wouldn’t you rather be writing about fashion or something?” My imaginary response was “Why, Yes! I would also love to spend my days writing about the latest additions to the My Little Pony collection and playing with Barbie dolls.” In reality, I was too insulted to think of anything witty to say, and was trapped in a flashback to when my brothers told me I couldn’t play G.I. Joes because I’m a girl.

Wow, that sounds awesome, Bridget. (Fortunately, her experience there wasn’t all negative.)

I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot lately. I routinely attend the Vancouver Drupal Users Group and while female attendance is predictably low, it is in line with the estimated figures for the broader Drupal community: About 10%. More to the point, I definitely haven’t ever felt like my presence there was questioned because of my gender. (My terrifying physical stature and violent temper, sure, but gender?)

This makes me wonder if there’s a difference between the development and IT communities. Aside from LSL and web development, my techie cred is largely limited to networking — and that world seems pretty impenetrable, frankly. I’ve definitely encountered my fair share of guys from the IT sphere who question my technical credentials, and while I’ve never worked in formal software development, I know it has are far more similarities with web development than with networking.

On the other hand, this presentation did come up at a recent Ruby conference, as did one at this year’s DrupalCon, that asserted Drupal developers’ experience could be gauged by beard length. Web development is certainly not an egalitarian, bias-free zone. However, in the ensuing aftermaths of both, there were plenty of guys speaking out against them, and that’s important.

What’s your experience?