To assist the police in their ongoing search, Emily Carr MAA students Vanessa + Kristina have assembled a detailed and undoubtedly true-to-life reconstruction of Chad & Larry’s subterranean hideaway, accurate to the smallest detail. The opening reception is this Wednesday, January 26th. I, for one, will definitely be attending–and I urge concerned members of the public to attend as well.

From the event description:

Chad & Larry is an exhibit of new work from the collaborative duo of MAA students Vanessa + Kristina (Vanessa Arnold and Kristina Fiedrich).

At the core of the exhibition is a published work: an open edition book. The narrative deals with issues of identity, community, safety, ownership and media coercion. The books, supported by interactive portraiture and an immersive environment, contain detailed anthropological aspects of these two characters, and allow for multiple entry points into the dialogue. This narrative is loosely based on recent events at the Granville Island campus of Emily Carr.

As a humorous personalization, the artists have created fictional, detailed, and considered identities for suspected thieves featured on posters around Emily Carr. Rather than making light of recent thefts and the serious allegation thereof, this collaborative duo has created a humanized, fictional portrait of the lives of two men, Chad & Larry, known around campus only in surveillance photo form.

Please join us on January 26th, at 6pm for the opening of this exciting new exhibition by an up-and-coming collaborative duo!

January 26 –- February 6, 2011
Opening Reception | Wednesday, January 26, 6pm
Emily Carr University | Concourse Gallery

I hope to see you there!

Justin Carlson has posted the 45-minute video of Tris Hussey and I speaking on WordPress 3.0 and child themes–check it out and listen to me nasally “um” and “uh” my way through the audience’s questions!

Finally, our presentation slides make sense!

For videos of the other speakers, check out Justin’s blog post.

Both during and after our presentation, I fielded a few questions, most of which were variations on a theme. I’d like to go over those now.

WordPress 3.0 and Child Themes: Frequently Asked Questions

1. When should I upgrade to WordPress 3.0?

Right now. It’s ready, it works, and updating WordPress is (usually) very easy. Keeping your WordPress and plugins current is the best defense against having your site hacked. (Assuming your password is not ‘password’ or ‘secret’, that is. If it is, go change it right now.)

2. When should I use a child theme?

All the time. If you want to modify your site’s look and feel beyond changing the background image on Twenty Ten, you need a child theme.

3. Why? That sounds crazy. Don’t you emphasize in your presentation that my current theme will still work exactly the same way?

Sure, and I’m a big proponent of doing as little work as possible while staying current. Yes, the WordPress 1.x theme you’ve been using since 2004 will still work on WP 3.0. Yes, the functionality will remain the same. However, if basing a new theme on an existing one, establishing it as a child both reduces the amount of code you need to change while keeping it separate and independent of the parent.

If you build themes from scratch–say, like me, for example–it’s far better to work from the same initial structure, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel every time. In the past, that might have involved copying the same code over to a new theme and working from there.

With child themes, I can set the background, column width, colours and typography for a new site with fewer than a dozen declarations, isolating only the changes relevant to that site in a separate CSS file. The key benefit of this becomes apparent when performing updates. Suppose I add a new feature to my child theme’s functions.php, or find a cleaner way to format dates in style.css. I can then copy those changes back to the parent theme, allowing me to very quickly add that functionality to existing sites without having to touch their respective child themes.

4. But when would that ever happen? Seriously, isn’t that kind of an edge case?

WordPress 3.0 adds extraordinary new levels of control over author templates, giving us the ability to style individual authors’ profiles for the first time. Future versions of WordPress may contain similar features to allow us to more flexibly aggregate lists of users, a greater range of default fields, and so on. By limiting the changes necessary to your own theme to accommodate these hypothetical future additions to WordPress, you can be assured that your site will gain features as your parent theme is updated, rather than being locked into static functionality long after future versions of WordPress give you blogging and styling features we can only dream about today.

5. Custom content types: should I be using those?

Maybe.

Consider the following scenario: You have a bunch of posts. Some of those posts are reviews. Reviews can quickly fall out of date, so they need updates. These updates should be very clear to users, allowing them to quickly see how old–and therefore relevant–a review is. So, what to do?

• Option A: We need types. Lots of types.

  Create a custom post type called “Reviews” and one named “Review Updates”, that in turn, can be associated with the Reviews type. Both can be easily themed differently than your standard Post and Page types.

• Option B: Custom Fields

  Create your “Reviews” type, but add custom fields to it, allowing for those updates right in the post itself. That might be cleaner, though it would be tougher to add features to your blog like a “Recent Updates” sidebar widget, if that’s something you’d like–now or in future.

• Option C: Just leave it alone.

  Alternatively, you could just add “Update, June 25th, 2010″ to the bottom of the post, surrounding it with a DIV, allowing you to style “updates” accordingly. You’d have much less work ahead of you, and you wouldn’t run into problems with your custom post type not fitting the content.

  

  This latter method is actually what I’m doing on this very site with my new feature, Catherine Uses…. It’s just easier for me to copy and paste a little code, adapting it as necessary.

  As I’ve written before, plain text will always be more flexible — at least, if you’re the only one editing your blog. If this custom post type would be used by a dozen different writers, it can make more sense to standardize rather than train everyone on adding DIV tags to all their updates.

6. When should I use Multisite?

This is actually a fairly complicated answer for a number of reasons.

Short answer: you shouldn’t. If there’s a choice between using multisite and not, my recommendation is that you don’t. If you have no choice, IE, you’re running dozens of WordPress blogs on the same server, well, at least WordPress and WordPress MU have the same codebase now.

Got another question on WordPress 3.0 or parent/child themes? Feel free to ask in the comments!

I’m pleased to confirm that, yes, I will be at WordCamp Vancouver 2010 on June 12. I’ll be speaking with Tris Hussey about the upcoming (Possibly just-released by then!) WordPress 3.0 and child themes. For more information about child themes, check out Tris’ blog.

Personally, I’m excited about the new content types and menu features available in WP 3.0 and I’m looking forward to seeing what people do with them. Remember, WordPress isn’t just for blogs!

As a longtime Drupal developer, I’m particularly impressed to realize that all but three sites I’ve ever worked on could be implemented in WordPress 3.0 as or more easily than the Drupal, ExpressionEngine, or Plone backends they were built with. As such, I’ll be paying close attention to the “WordPress as a CMS” panel discussion with Christine Rondeau, Cam Cavers, and Dave Zille.

I’ll also be volunteering at the WP Genius Bar, where I’ll be free to answer any questions you might have or help fix any problems you might be having with your blog. I’m particularly happy to offer advice on WP 3.0 or child themes, topics I enjoy doing more than just give talks about.

If you don’t already have tickets to WordCamp Vancouver, I’m afraid they’ve sold out, so tough beans. However, as the WordCamp Vancouver site notes:

Tickets are currently sold out, but we’re hoping to release a few more before the event, so hang tight!

Fingers crossed!

I hope to see you there–and if you have any questions about child themes, leave a comment on this post! I’d love to hear about what people are interested in.

See? Photographic evidence:

Catherine Winters, typing on her iPhone. Photo by Jeremy Lim.

“Hey,” you might exclaim, upon seeing the above photo, your voice pitching with excitement in having caught me with my iPhone out. “Catherine’s not paying attention to the speaker at all! Look at her tweeting away!”

Pernicious lies! Zoom in, and you’ll find that’s not this “Twitter” thing all the kids have been talking about at all! No, in fact, I’m using the excellent cloud-based note-taking app Simplenote to take meticulously detailed, hierarchically-indented notes! Ha!

In fact, I took a great deal of notes on my iPhone that day, as FreelanceCamp Vancouver turned out to be extremely useful. I was particularly interested by the session I was at when Jeremy Lim snapped the above picture, Contracts for People Who Hate Contracts. Led by Martin Ertl, cofounder of Vancouver open-source contracts startup LexPublica, it covered a number of contingencies and best practices surrounding the most inconvenient of all business practices: agreeing on things for money.

Martin clarified a few issues for me, including, when I, as a designer, ought to write a single project-spanning contract as opposed to a preliminary contract to determine project scope and one to cover the actual work as outlined in the resulting scope document. Which is as important as it sounds. I’ve used one of LexPublica’s contracts before, and I plan to continue to do so in future. One point he did emphasize: the most important part of such an agreement is a good explanation of the actual work to be undertaken. It turns out that, “I’ll have one website, please” can mean somewhat different things to different people. Who knew?

Other highlights included Kemp Edmonds’ talk on how to ask Kemp Edmonds to not call you a plagiarist when you plagiarize his presentations, and one particularly interesting discussion on “solopreneurs”. Google indicates this is indeed a word, and it seems like everyone is using it to mean roughly the same thing. (“It’s not quite a freelancer, not quite an entrepreneur, but OH MAN–”)

The big distinction between a freelancer and a solopreneur seems to be that the solopreneur has somewhat more infrastructure–they’re able to go after larger projects because they can outsource, team up with, or subcontract to other freelancers and solopreneurs, dividing up labour, while still not having all the overhead of an actual company with employees.

Which sounds appealing. After all, companies are expensive, right?

In any event, whether it ends up being a direction I choose to go in or merely interesting food for thought in a changing economy, the solopreneurs session was fascinating, and you should’ve been there. So there.

If you weren’t able to make it, I strongly recommend any future FreelanceCamps Vancouver¹ and I wholeheartedly endorse it as one of the most informative — and demographically representative – –Camp-suffixed events I’ve ever attended in Vancouver.

1. That’s the correct plural, right?

• To say you are excited to hear I was speaking
• To ask questions about why on earth I would speak at SL Pro!
• Expressing surprise that I have been in Second Life at all in the past 2 years
• Telling me I have no business speaking about anything
• Complaining about a video you saw of me
• Complaining about LSL
• Complaining about a script I wrote in 2004
• Asserting that women who use computers or are literate taint the purity of the Aryan race–yes, even women of colour–and that gays and lesbians should be arrested and sent to concentration camps.

So yeah, I just wanted to clear that up.

“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’ve written recently about why I like the Dyke March: its inclusiveness, the sense of community, the cute girls… but mostly, it’s an opportunity to feel normal without being normalized.

Despite popular rumours to the contrary, Catherine Winters is not a combination of Angelina Jolie as Acid Burn in Hackers and Katherine Moennig as Shane on The L Word. I’ve never been arrested by the FBI, I don’t bring a different–or even the same–girl home every night to my lesbian bachelor pad, and I’m not the greatest programmer ever. It’s true, I’m afraid.

In fact, I’ve only been in a stylized, cyberpunkesque sword fight at most three or four times. (I know, right?)

Still, while I may tend towards the femme/lipstick side of the scale these days, I’ve never exactly considered myself particularly straight-acting–whatever that means. For some reason, some people are still surprised to learn I’m gay though. In a way, it’s actually more irritating than my baby dyke phase^[3] when I buzzed my hair and was assumed to be a lesbian by pretty much everyone I met. At least then, I knew where everyone stood.

In fact, after I decided that maybe being gay and tall didn’t necessarily imply “butch”, I didn’t actually figure out how to come out to anyone for a while. I hadn’t done it since I was a teenager and even today, I’m out of practice. In fact, I still tend to assume everyone just knows at a glance. It’s always quite jarring to me when acquaintances ask about boyfriends or expect some commiserative banter about men: “You know what guys are like!” “Um, sure!”

Sometimes I don’t bother correcting anyone, and I wonder at times, if that’s being dishonest. Maybe. Then again, most of the time it isn’t relevant. What I’ve never become confident about is my ability to tell when it is.

As I pointed out to a friend over coffee recently, I hadn’t actually ticked the “Interested in Women” checkbox on my Facebook profile until a few months ago. On the one hand, if we’re friends on Facebook, you probably already know that about me. Still, what if you don’t? Almost nobody assumes “I don’t know” about people’s sexual orientation–that’s simply not how our society works. Instead, we assume a default of “straight”. In the absence of that bit of information, someone would have an inaccurate picture of who I am.

So what’s the rest of that picture? Well, I’m loyal to my friends. I like coffee. I’m into graphic design and web development and user interaction and typography. I read a lot of novels and like riding my bike. That’s what defines “Catherine”, not who I am–or am not–attracted to. That said, my sexuality affects who I am in a significant way, just as my height does. I see the world differently as a lesbian than I would if I was straight.

I wonder at times if I’m putting too much of myself out there when I share my thoughts about this kind of uncertainty. My overshares usually involve bodily functions, so I can’t use my usual tricks to figure out if this is getting too personal. At the same time, it’s impossible for me to write about queer topics or events without getting into my personal experience–and I do want to write about them.

So that said, how did the Dyke March go, anyway?

Good! Except it was really hot out. That’s definitely my least favourite part, honestly. I managed to escape without a huge sunburn, thankfully, but I still got more sun than I prefer.

I got to McSpadden Park early and chatted with a few women before my friends arrived. By the time it was ready for us all to walk up Commercial, there were a thousand women clustered under the limited shade provided by the trees at the edges of the field. “No, you all have to come over here,” the emcee shouted into her megaphone.

Mable Elmore, currently the Member of BC’s Legislative Assembly for my riding, LGBT and Filipino community activist, transit union organizer, and formerly my bus driver, opened the march. When talking with friends, I’ve been quite enthusiastic about her, (“You grew up in a big union town, huh, Cat?”) but sadly, we’ve never met.

The weirdest part of the day came at Grandview Park once we’d arrived: someone actually recognized me. By reputation.

I finally found a friend and her “lesbrarians” banner, complete with Venn diagram indicating the intersection between “librarians” and “lesbians”. Frankly, I’m guessing her illustration was conservative about the overlap.

She introduced me to a couple of the other lesbrarians: “And this is Catherine, the Drupal developer I was telling you about!”

“Wow, Drupal!”

“Drupal!?” my friend said. “Pfft, Catherine also invented Second Life–”

That is not even close to being true,” I said.

“Second Life? Wait, Catherine Winters?”

Yes, seriously. It was the most impressed anyone has ever been with me. So that part was pretty rad.

As for photos, no, I didn’t bother taking my camera, and my iPhone is not well-suited for outdoor shots in incredibly bright direct sunlight. There aren’t many on Flickr either, as it happens. I guess the crazy social media circles I usually run in haven’t totally spread to Vancouver’s lesbian community yet.

I know there plenty were photos taken, mind you. While walking up the Drive, my friend noticed a couple dudes with fairly serious-looking video cameras.

“Wait, are we going to be on the news?” she asked.

I assured her I felt this to be extremely unlikely.

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Well, the media tends to not be sure how to describe the event…”

“Hmm?”

“Well, ‘Dyke’ is kind of a slur…”

“Ha!”

True enough, there’s hundreds of stories about Vancouver’s Pride Parade in Google News today and three about the Dyke March. So maybe next year.

[1] The rest of it will be spent being a tired old lady and going to bed at 9PM.

[2] Proof I can be wrong about things:

Girl: “Is this the first one they’ve had?“
Me: “No!“
Other Girl: “Like… the second?“
Me: “It’s the eighth, I think.“
Most Engergetic Emcee Ever: “WELCOME TO THE SIXTH ANNUAL VANCOUVER DYKE MARCH!“
Them: “Ha!”

And then they kept mentioning that! It’s like I have some kind of reputation.

[3] Disclaimer: while I had a phase–and it was a phase for me–where I thought I had to identify as butch in order to be a “real” lesbian, I do want to clarify that I’m not speaking of androgynous or butch lesbians in general. This is strictly my own personal experience of figuring out my sexual identity and the implications thereof. It took me a while to feel comfortable with the idea that I wasn’t betraying anyone by being true to myself. (And hey, I’m still compelled to write this footnote, so maybe I’ll get there fully one day!)

Frankly, in a thousand years, when Pride has become all mixed up with St Patrick’s Day and everyone carries a genetically engineered blue cucumber because that’s traditional, the origin of the day’s name–whatever that may be by then–is just going to be a weird bit of trivia mentioned on the news on years when they need holiday filler.

So there.

In his post, Buzz asks if the imagery we’ll see in Vancouver’s Pride Parade this Sunday is really the best way to demonstrate that gays are just like everyone else. This reminded me of another familiar argument, about Critical Mass: are 3000 people on bicycles blocking commuter traffic really helping the image of cyclists?

Honestly, Buzz does raise a good point, though it’s hardly a new argument, going back to the exclusion of activists we would today consider to be transgendered in the immediate post-Stonewall era.

Still, as I wrote in Buzz’s comments, it’s a debate I feel is pretty well moot at this point. As of last week, it’s been four years since we formally enacted gay marriage nationwide here in Canada, an anniversary that totally passed me by due to no mention whatsoever in the media. People don’t care.

At the same time, though, it’s important to remember that Canadians are very cautious not to offend. At all. Ever. (We’re very passive-aggressive, though.) The problem I have with this is that it’s fundamentally dishonest. Frankly, as much as I like not having bottles hurled at my head should I choose to hold my girlfriend’s hand in downtown Vancouver, it would be nice if people advertised their hate and intolerance.

“Catherine, stop blogging while drunk,” you might say.

No, I’m serious. I want to know who to avoid. I want to know who’s trustworthy and who’s biased against me. It may not be popularly accepted that we’re all prejudiced, but I’m sorry, we are. Frankly, humans are a bunch of xenophobic jerks. Our ability to pigeonhole “the other” is why, as I mentioned to @_lisas on Twitter this morning–in the course of explaining why I’m freaked out by birds of all things–there’s a single species of human surviving today.

Everyone’s a little bit racist. Sure, we’re taught that it’s wrong, but I think this leads less to discussion and education, and more to bigots becoming closeted themselves.

So… obviously my friends are cool with it. Very few of the people I know are homophobic in the least. But I don’t date a lot. I haven’t had a girlfriend in… well, let’s just put it at “a while”. Very few people I know have seen me totally making out with girls. Doing so wouldn’t necessarily provoke a homophobic reaction, more “Cat does PDAs? Since when?”

Would my landlady be on board with my being gay? Probably not, but it’s never come up. She’s content to assume that my extreme height is what has prevented me meeting a succession of horrible, chainsmoking boyfriends to bring home to the hottest 300 square foot apartment ever known to mankind. But at the same time, it’s not like I would bring boys there if I was into that sort of thing either.

Last year, I remember her expressing skepticism about Obama and his ability to handle the financial crisis, which I presumed to be of the usual Canadian variety: “Can you believe he doesn’t support single-tier healthcare!?” It turned out that, no, she liked McCain better. I had definitely never heard this view expressed by anyone in Vancouver. I realize I’m stereotyping, but there is a bit of a correlation there.

The majority of Canadians are in favour of gay marriage, with an overwhelming majority at least being on board with some sort of “separate but equal” equivalent. The most conservative government of my lifetime has stated the matter is settled. That may be debatable, but it’s just not something we’re spending time on.

At the same time as this was going on at Buzz’s blog, there was a conversation occurring on my Twitter feed about the VPD advisory regarding the estimated 3000 cyclists participating in this month’s Critical Mass. (Mind you, I’m highly skeptical about the likelihood that so many people will brave 30° Celsius weather just to irritate commuters and climb up on top of the Lion’s Gate Bridge.) Still, the eternal “yay, Critical Mass”/“stop being assholes” debate rages on.

You know what? I support the Burrard Bridge bicycle lane project — which seems to be working out just fine at this point. (I do agree with Vancouver City Council member Andrea Reimer, however: “Enough about the Burrard Bridge.”) I support the construction of increased cycling and transit infrastructure. We need billions of dollars more for transit and millions more to improve bike lanes.

But is Critical Mass the way to convince other people to get on board with this plan, necessarily? Yeah, probably not. I actually do understand the “now drivers know how we feel!” argument. But, dude? No they don’t. Now they hate cyclists even more. And the drivers who didn’t ever consider cyclists much? Yeah, they remember that it took them two hours to make their 20-minute commute home after a long week.

And ultimately, this acts against my interests as a cyclist.

At the same time, Critical Mass looks like a lot of fun. It’s just fun at the expense of other people’s day. And I’m a staunch believer in the idea that we’re all entitled to do whatever we want until such time as what we want interferes with others’ ability to do what they want. Also, separation of church and state.

So how do I pair my this with my moral outrage towards post-Stonewall activists fighting for “straight-acting” gay and lesbian rights 30 years ago, or my position that it was was wrong and ultimately self-defeating to deliberately exclude the rest of the LGBT community?

I don’t know. I’m judging history from the perspective of someone who didn’t live through it, who just inherited the world activists worked towards a generation ago. And frankly, that’s dangerous. Today, it may seem obvious that including bisexuals, effeminate men, butches and transgendered people has always been the right thing to do, but I have to consider the possibility that I can even assert that position today because of the fact that they were effectively booted out of the movement decades earlier. Which is actually really depressing.

So, would a 21st-Century-style Pride parade and LGBT movement have flown in the early 1970s? The spectators and participants definitely wouldn’t have been the same, but the fact of the matter is, if you think The Queers are doing things to the soil, nobody’s going to convince you otherwise with a float covered in incredibly ripped guys wearing thongs.

So maybe that’s not what Pride’s for anymore. Maybe it’s just a party. As Buzz’s commenter EternalCanadian points out, honestly, what’s the difference between Pride and Mardi Gras or Caribana?

Edit: Also see Critical Pride Part 2: Midnight Mass and the Dyke March.

• “Catherine, do you want anything?“
  “No, I’ll get something upstairs at WordPress.“
  ”…what?”
• “Raul, is that your phone?“
  “No, it’s WordPress’–WordCamp–Work. Space. It’s Workspace’s phone.”