10 posts tagged “vancouver”
I was worried, and I think I sort of freaked out Lydia who is a nervous passenger at the best of times. Still it cleared up before Langley and we made it home alive. My car is covered in about a million inches of mud, but that's a small price to pay for safety.
How mud is a price paid for safety I don't know, but it sounds good.
Today it snowed lightly downtown, but nothing stayed on the ground. I'm anxious for the winter to end and the eight months of rain to begin. When does that happen again?
Hurricane force winds, rain and power outages. Is this Vancouver or is it Florida? Vancouver I hope, since I don't think I could handle dealing with the anti-Castro faction all day, everyday. Plus Vancouver is pretty much the best city in the world and Tampa or Orlando is not, plus all the boy bands.
Anyway a good source of coverage of the weather and the aftermath of it is from Metroblogging Vancouver [mbv]. There was a collapsed apartment building, power outages and now the water is undrinkable, a story we were the first to report on managing to get the word out a day before any of the media outlets or even the City of Vancouver itself.
That's some investigative journalism there. Vancouver Province eat your heart out.
Over at Metroblogging Vancouver [mbv], the community city blog site that I post at, I've been trying to get back into a regular swing of posting after running into a busy real life spell. As such I've been able to get up three posts today, and hope to be able to continue that trend over the next little while. Metroblogging Vancouver is of course the premier city specific blog for Vancovuer, and has nearly a dozen bloggers posting all the time.
So what have I posted about today?
To start with I blogged about the recently released game Bully [mbv]. It's from Rockstar the same people who brought Grand Theft Auto into the world to much noise from the content police who think that a game of fighting mobsters and sleeping with hookers isn't suitable for not just children, but anyone and everyone. Well it's the first game from the company's Vancouver studio and it seems like despite not being anywhere near as violent or sex filled as GTA is still bringing the controversy. Check out my post (linked above) for the full sorrid tale.
Then of course there is far more average and everyday concerns to blog about. Things like how I've just recently discovered the great taste of Vancouver's Flying Wedge Pizza chain [mbv], or about the ongoing problem of trolly buses coming unhitched from their over head cables. This causes traffic jams, traffic jams, as the drivers have to get out and re-attach them to their power source.
Sounds like fun doesn't it? There's lots of other things going on at Metroblogging Vancouver, and so whether you live in the world's nicest city, or whether you're just a visitor head over to MBV and check out what's going on in Vancouver Canada.
What food or drink do you love when it's cold out? (Recipes and recommendations, please!)
Oh dear, cold day food. Truth be told between living in Kelowna and Vancouver for most of my life I dont really remember what a cold day is like. I mean real cold like it was living in Edmonton where we'd get three feet of snow and still be expected to go to school on the bus the next day.
But from remembering what I enjoyed then, as well as my first few years in Kelowna when we'd go sledding, I'd have to go for the obvious answer of hot chocolate with marshmellows. That's right, it's not that original but it's the truth.
I'm tired and there's the chance that I might still be hung over. I had an open bottle of red wine and I felt that I should do my best to try to finish it off last night. Today I woke up with feelings for drinking water that can not be expressed in words. I drove to work because the act of walking for half an hour was so distressing that I had rather upset Al Gore and pump chemicals into the air.
Drinking at home alone while writing an article for eVent! might be one of the signs of a problem. It might be one of the signs that I shouldn't have woken up at 7:30 the next morning for work
Last week Lydia and I went to Kelowna for our days off. We had fun with my family, both my parents and my extended dance re-mix family as well. I convinced Lydia to go on a jet-ski and we had a general all-round good time. The chance to catch up with Chad and Delme, even if just for a round of mini-golf at Scandia, was enjoyable. Sadly I missed Chris whose going to be in Kelowna this week while I'm in Vancouver. He's also in Vancouver, right as I blog this apparently, but his old college friends are holding most of his attention so it's doubtful I'll hear from him.
When we got back we saw both The Phantom of the Opera at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre and the HSBC Celebration of Lights on the last night of the fireworks. I blogged about the fireworks here [mbv] and then here [mbv]. The long and the short of it was though that over 3,000,000 people streamed into the English
Bay area and the cops had to deal with it. There's video that I recorded with my Nokia 6682 phone of the cops plowing through the crowd on bikes trying to get to the scene of a stabbing that had happened about two blocks up from us on the corner of Robson and Denman.
What else has happened since then? I don't know actually. Well okay, I've got a few ideas of what may have gone down based on the black box recorder that I carry strapped to my chest at all times.
Nathan was over one night. We were supposed to go the the B.C. Lions' game but neither of rated our interest in the sport above a 3 out of 10 so instead we went to the HMV and I picked up the first season of The Brak Show on DVD and went back to my apartment to watch that. We realized that it was the first time we'd gotten together in over a month, when he had come over with Krista for my Canada Day gathering.
Lastly I suppose it's worth noting that Lydia and I cooked the other night. Or she cooked while I had to listen to her list off the different cooking tools that I lacked. This ended up as fodder form my next article in eVent! which brings us back to drinking the red wine left over from our cooked dinner late at night while trying to write an article.
Actually where we began was with me hung over blogging about the past week or so. Which is where I am, hung over blogging about the last week in Me-town. Where have you been my tiny little flight simulators?
I thought I wouldn't just give my blog love to my creamy new Vox account but spread it around, so I posted a few new things over at Metroblogging Vancouver. Metroblogging Vancouver is the city blog for Vancouver, and has a really strong collection of local bloggers posting there. I post there as well and have since the site launched.
I wrote a bit about the HSBC Celebration of Lights [mbv] and about the upcoming Science Fiction convention being held in Richmond at the start of August [mbv]. I even recently posted an offer to any Vancouver blogger who wanted an invite to Vox since I have an extra one [mbv]. I have yet to be taken up on the offer.
There's a few new posts in the waiting line so keep heading over to Metroblogging Vancouver for all the latest information on Vancouver life from not only me, but other Vancouver bloggers as well.
The first CDs I ever bought was a compilation of the movie theme songs that John Williams wrote and conducted for Steven Spielberg movies, and the original cast recording of The Phantom of the Opera. For some reason both Neal and I were on an odd Phantom kick, odd because we were like 13 and 9 and because we'd never actually seen the show on stage. But I'd just bought my first CD player, one of those combo home stereo bookshelf systems, and I needed some hip tunes and Andrew Llyod Webber was hip.
I guess.
We ended up seeing the play like five or six years later in Edmonton, and now Lydia and I have tickets to see the play on Thursday at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver. I'm definitly not into the Phantom like I used to, and it's been probably ten years since I've listend to the CD even though I think it's actually on my iPod. I didn't see the feature film version of it that came out a year or two ago either. Still truth be told I'm looking forward to seeing the production that's coming to Vancouver.
My transfer to the Seymour and Robson store is on hold because apparently the Metrotown store is going to be short staffed during the summer holidays as everyone takes time off for travel and weddings. So it'll probably be September or October before I start to work downtown, which will mean I'll miss the busy time at that store. Still I'm looking forward to the change of pace and ten minute commute time.
So meanwhile I'll stay in Burnaby and keep my hour long Skytrain commute every day. Which is okay, since I like the people I work with such as Victor (left).
Time for lunch I think.
I got sent a new Nokia 6682 phone as part of a marketing program that's trying to get the phone in the hands of bloggers in both Toronto [mbt] and Vancouver [mbv]. The hope on the part of the marketing company in charge of the program is that I'll use it and blog about it.
I got it last night and started to charge it. Today I've loaded on Nokia's Lifeblog software [nok] which I guess will help me organize photos and notes on the phone, though it won't sync with my Macbook. I then loaded ShoZu [sz] on it to let it easily load my photos to my Flickr account.
My only complaint, aside from the lack of Mac compatibility, is that it's not got a full keyboard which would make mobile blogging so much easier. Posting from my BlackBerry is simple, even though I can't add photos, with the Nokia 6682 I'll be able to add photos but typing is going to be annoying. Still it'll be a nice portable video camera / camera that will let me take it out on the town. I'll be blogging more about it in the future.
I'm trying out a new blogging service called Vox that's designed by the people who host my regular blog. It's sort of a much more Web 2.0 feature rich enviroment, with a lot more options for interacting with other users. From the looks of it Vox combines a lot of the stuff that makes LiveJournal popular, like having friends' blogs easily linked to yours, and some really nice intergration with Flickr and YouTube.
This is the first post on my new creamy Vox blog [jks], but I'm cross-posting it onto my regular blog at jefferysimpson.com. I'll be playing with the service for a bit, but anything of interest will be cross-posted at both places so if you're just wanting to check one place the place to check will remain the main site.
Over at Metroblogging Vancouver [mbv] I've offered one of the invites that I got with my account up to any Vancouver based blogger whose looking for a new service. I'll offer my other invite up here, anyone of my regular readers who wants to pick up a new blog or switch service drop me a line. I'd try to get Lydia to join since it's got some neat features that would let me keep track of when she blogs, but she was just yesterday talking about how she never blogs anymore, so I figure I'll leave it open to someone else.
Unless you want to switch from Blogger or Blogspot or whatever it is dear.
