Just a quick post to say that I’ll be returning to regular posting by the new year, and hopefully even before then as I should have some time over the holidays.  There’s a number of things broken here, as when they’ve happened I’ve just had time to fix Karin’s blog; but I should have time between Christmas and the New Year to clean my own blog up, so please be patient.

I hope everyone is having a great holiday season (I’ll say Christmas, I’m not scared of being politically incorrect, but if you celebrate something else this time of year I hope it’s going great too!) and that you are all safe in this snowy weather. Drop back real soon!

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Two years ago Rebecca from Miss604.com participated in a fundraiser for charity called Blogathon.  I had recently discovered her blog at that time and read each post of the posts she made every 1/2 hour for 24 hours straight.  The next year several more blogs that I followed participated, and so now it is a bit of a tradition.

This year the web-wide organization did not materialize, but Rebecca herself has organized Blogathon for the Vancouver area.  Having a dismal readership myself, there was no point in participating as a blogger (the whole point is to raise some funds for a charity rather than to pollute the web with drivel no one is reading); but hopefully the few people out there who do read me might be so kind as to swing by some of the participating blogs.  You might discover a new favorite read or two, find some great content, and hopefully be inspired to donate to one of the worthy causes choosen by the bloggers.  My goal is to have enough readers by this time next year to participate myself.

Rebecca has a list of the blogs here, but by far the easiest way to follow them all is to use the Blogathon 2008 combined feed Duane Storey has just created.  I have been following Duane and Raul’s blog this evening, as they started their 24 hour shifts at 10pm, and will catch up with all the bloggers with my morning coffee.  There are numerous blogs that do not begin their 24 hours until tomorrow, so if you feel like it you can stay up the entire time along with the authors.

I’m a little confused as to what constitutes news.  The CBC has just published this report that states that a Swedish newspaper has said that unrestricted free agent Mats Sudin has accepted the Vancouver Canucks offer to play for them next season.

photo credit: Aaron Webb

For a reporter, the next step when writing a story is supposed to be to confirm it through other sources.  The piece states that when they checked with Sudin’s representatives, they denied it.  The rest of the article is then just fill on Sudin’s career and the massive offer made by the Canucks to entice him to join the team.

Basically this seems very much like just another rumour.  So what is the headline?  The CBC choose “Sundin accepts offer to join Canucks: report”. I guess they feel that the last word is supposed to indicate that this is all just second hand rumours that are being denied by those involved; but to me it seems like they are attempting to make it sound pretty definite in that headline when in fact this is a non-news story that probably should not have been written.

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Karin and I have never managed to attend any of the many tech events held in the Vancouver region.  Most are held downtown or at UBC, and we are at the opposite side of this sprawling metro region.  This makes a mid-week event especially difficult, considering my alarm goes off at 5:30am for the workday.  I do love the three day weekends that working 10 hours shifts gives me; but it certainly makes weeday events tough.  Weekend events are rare, and until now have always managed to conflict with something else we need to do.

We therefore were excited when WordCamp Fraser Valley was announced, as it was a short drive to Langley to attend.  The entrance fee of “free” was also something attractive.  We signed up looking forward to learning more about WordPress and finally getting to see and perhaps meet some of the bloggers we regularly follow.

Leading up to the actual day, I was unsure if we’d be able to go as Karin’s recent dental work has resulted in pain that builds up throughout the day and usually has her heavily medicating by the evening.  She was determined to go, though, even if she wasn’t able to socialize and network due to the pain.  So I left work a few hours early and we drove to the Cascade Casino.

I will not try and summarize every detail as Rebecca Bollwitt; otherwise known as Miss604, live blogged the entire event save for her own presentation.  You can find a link to her excellent notes below.

The evening started with introductions by Gary Jones from BlueFur web hosting.  Gary was the primary organizer and his company was a major sponsor.  He introduced Raul Pacheco, otherwise known as Hummingbird604.  Raul is a prolific blogger who only recently made the switch to WordPress, but once he did he dived in quickly.  Raul spoke about transitioning to WordPress from other platforms and starting a new WordPress blog.

Gary had received a last minute cancellation, and therefore had to unexpectedly speak next.  Despite not having time to prepare, he gave an excellent presentation on business blogging, explaining why almost any business can benefit from blogging.  Many of his points apply equally well to personal blogs and I will therefore implement them.

After a short networking break, Kulpreet Singh spoke about security in WordPress.  His was the most technical talk, but contain a lot of useful and important information and I hope the less technical people in the audience were able to take away a few good points.  Being a geek myself, I have already secured our blogs using a lot of the methods Kulpreet covered, but I did learn a few new ones that I will use.  Kulpreet was also the one speaker whom I did not already have in my Google Reader, which I have rectified as he is a knowledgeable source.

Up next was the infamous Rebecca Bollwitt, often better known by her moniker Miss604.  Her’s is one of the first blogs I followed, likely because I myself often cannot grab the “Flash” nickname on many sites and have to go with Flash604.  Rebecca spoke about customizing sidebars in WordPress based on what page is being viewed.  She did a good job of making it sound simple, which it is but I’m sure many a non-technical person has been too scared to try.  Hopefully she encouraged a few people to expand their boundaries.  During the Q&A portion of her presentation Rebecca demonstrated Twitter, as it had repeatedly been mentioned throughout the evening.

Evil entered the room next when John Chow took the podium.  I was unsure what to expect, as John is extremely knowledgeable but often comes across on his blog as approaching such commitments casually.  John spoke about bringing traffic to your blog, and it was very organized and informative.  John covered quite a few good tips, many which I have already read on his blog but some which he shared only with us and asked that we not reveal them as they will not work well if they become widely known.  His blog has so much information that it was nice to know which he considered the most important.

In addition to the knowledge gained and the chance to meet other users of WordPress, part of the reason I attended was to kickstart me with regards to this blog.  I have had several personal items recently clear up, and so this conference was perfectly timed.  I do hope that we can attend more soon.

My thanks also go out to the presenters that do live in Vancouver; you had to do the trek that we have so far avoided.

There is no way you can absorb everything at such a conference, and so since I didn’t get to network as much as was hoped, I have been searching for the presenters and my fellow participants online and reading their summaries.   Below are as many links as I could find to other participants’ blogs and Flickr photos.    Please leave a comment if you know of more and I will update.

• Raul Pacheco Summary Flickr
• Rebecca Bollwitt Live Blog Flickr
• John Bollwitt Summary Flickr
• John Chow Summary
• Gary Jones Summary
• Kulpreet Singh Summary Presentation Slides
• Tyler Ingram Summary Flickr

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Michael Kwan is running a contest on his blog, with the prize being a bag full of swag he picked up at two recent conferences. He decided to add a creativity component this time, and came up with a challenge to photoshop John Chow.

Luckily, he isn’t judging this based on skill; but rather on making him laugh.  To this end I put together something during my lunch hour at work that is pretty much a hack job, but will do as my entry.

For those of you not familiar with John Chow, he is a local blogger who decided to moniterize his blog as an experiment and is now one of the experts in the “Make Money Online” realm.  Last month his blog earned $40,125.99.

Click on the picture to see a larger copy.

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I have been pretty silent as of late as Karin’s dad was quite ill.  Peter had prostate cancer for a number of years, and it was expected that it would eventually enter his bones.  He had bone scans every 6 months in order to detect when this occurred, and was warned that once it did he should be prepared for severe pain.  Once the cancer was in his bones, the prognosis was for no more than a year left.

Despite his ill health and onsetting dementia, my father-in-law still made his annual trip to California and Arizona for a month at the beginning of this year.  Upon his return it was obvious that his health had worsened, and his next scheduled scan confirmed that the cancer had progressed into his bones.

Even with his pain and rapidly declining health, he still showed his strength through his determination to be at family events.  Many of us did not expect to see him at his granddaughter Angela’s wedding, as he could barely sit up for more than an hour each day during the preceding week; but he showed his resolve by attending both the church ceremony in the afternoon and then a large portion of the evening reception.  This took a lot out of him, however, and he did not leave home again.

My mother-in-law Gertrude was faced with the fact that she would not be able to keep him at home much longer, even with several visits a day from palliative care nurses, but Father’s Day was approaching and she hoped to have one last day with the family.  Again he showed his resolve and sat in his easy chair in the living room all afternoon as his children and grandchildren gathered, but again it took much out of him and he did not leave his bed again.  We did not even see him during a several hour visit the next day, during which we visited the hospices in Langely and Mission, met with one of the palliative nurses, and made our decision to move him to the Christine Morrison Hospice in Mission.

He was transferred the next day, and just in time.  The facility is lovely, and it allowed Gertrude to stay with her husband 24 hours a day while he received pain management and care from nurses around the clock.  The facility even took great care to make sure that Gertude was cared for also, with meals available to her at any time, shower facilities for her, and even professional massages to help with stress.  Within a couple of days, the nurses told her that she should make sure that the family all knew that they should come say one last goodbye.

Peter Nickel passed away at 5:07 pm on Sunday, June 22nd.  It was a grey, lousy day all morning and afternoon, but once his suffering stopped the clouds parted and the sun shined down.  We all gathered at the hospice to say our goodbyes, and then we spent the past week planning and holding the funeral.  We laid him to rest on Thursday.  While it was a sad time for the family, we all were relieved to know that his pain had now ended.

Instead of documenting the events that were occurring, I was busy offering my support to others in the family.  I will miss Peter and value the time I did have to get to know him, but of course my loss is nothing compared to his wife and children.  If you want to know more of the events that occurred, both Karin and Waltrude blogged during Peter’s struggle. I would only ask that you not fill their blogs with comments offering your condolenses as they have ended their tears and are moving onward.

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Image via Wikipedia

I have been pretty well offline for the past few days as I attempted some computer upgrades.

That doesn’t sound like I’m much of a geek, but let me explain. First, I’m not counting my time at work; I am online on at least two computers at once while working, but I’m working. Right now I’m writing the first half of this post on my work notebook during lunch. Even if our network goes down at work and I am not online, I support computers for a living and that is geeky in itself. But I have to consider the work time different than the home online time; otherwise I probably would not go near a computer when I got home.

The upgrade was supposedly a simple memory upgrade. Karin and I built identical computers 6 months ago when it became impossible to continue on our old dinosaurs. I ensured our motherboards were capable of running 8GB of memory each, but for budget reasons we put 2 gigs each in at the time to see if it was enough. The computers run well, and we’ve had none of the problems everyone complains about with regards to Vista or a 64 bit operating system, but when I had multiple photos open in editing software while also keeping track of my favourite blogs, I could notice the slow down. This is to be expected when photo editing; it is a memory hogging task.

So last Monday we headed into Langley both to make a stop at the dentist to pick up pills for Karin, and to also stopped an NCIX to purchase extra RAM. If you have a dual-channel capable board, information in the memory can be accessed quicker if you have two sticks in the same coloured slots on your motherboard. Basically, this allows the system to access both at once, which lets your memory keep up with the speed of today’s CPUs.  We had put 2 sticks of 1GB each into each computer, and so my plan was to put all 4 sticks into one computer to give it 4GB, and then buy a package of 2 sticks of 2GB each for the other computer. The best available for budget minded people such as ourselves was some OCZ Platinum XTC for $75. This meant we each got to double our RAM for $38 a computer, a deal in my eyes.

But then the struggles began. I put the 4 x 1GB sticks into Karin’s computer, and then I Monday night I could not get my computer to boot with both sticks of the new RAM. I had to finally leave it so that I could get enough sleep for work the next day. Karin’s appeared to work fine, but then she messaged me Tuesday morning from my home computer to say hers was frozen. I had to have her pull the two extra sticks out so she could get it to reboot.

Karin’s solution was simple, I just had to bump up the RAM voltage in the BIOS because the RAM runs at a higher voltage the the board provides by default.  But for mine there was no such luck.  I flashed my BIOS to the latest version, and then began changing the voltage and many other settings.  Each setting has a range within which it could safely be set without voiding any warranties, but to try every combination took quite some time as I would have to insert just one stick, boot to the BIOS, change settings, shut down, insert the second stick, reboot and test.

After a couple of nights of this and some advice and research on the OCZ support forums, the possiblities were all tried and it seemed I might actually have defective RAM.  I ran Memtest86+ and confirmed that one stick is bad; and then kicked myself for not testing it sooner.

So this entire week has been one of working on my computer hardware, which is geeky; but wasting time when I should have tested for defects sooner, which is not so geeky.

We’re now off to Langley to exchange the RAM, and hopefully I will be up and running tonight.

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My planned schedule of alternating blog posts with editing and posting some Mexico pictures was somewhat sidetracked, but in a good way. My niece Angela Nickel married Chris Fielding on May 5th at the Bethel Mennonite Church in Langley, followed by a reception at the Matsqui Community Hall here in Abbotsford. You may remember that we attended their engagement party last year. Rudy, the bride’s father and Karin’s brother, lives a few blocks away from us and so we heard numerous updates in the wedding planning. I knew that they had hired a known and expensive photographer, but just before the wedding they found out the price did not include his presence at the reception! They asked that I bring along my full camera gear, but stressed that I was there as a guest and to not devote all my time to taking pictures.

The wedding was a nice ceremony that lasted just the right amount of time, something very important if you want your guests to remember it as a good experience. Karin had convinced me that I should leave my camera in the car for the church portion, only for us to find out that everyone else had their cameras and the pastor started with an announcement that they were welcome, but you were asked to remain seated. That did not bother me too much, as they had the professional photographer; but I was not to sure after I watched him for a bit. To begin with, I was a little surprised that someone that works weddings every week would show up in just dress pants and a t-shirt, but I was even more horrified to notice that he spent most of his time taking pictures from a distance, and rarely got in close. He had a decent zoom on his camera, but you do need some variety!  We had sat in the back at the end of the pew, so that we were right at the door that each of the bridal party and then the bride herself entered, and I would have loved to grab some shots there.

After the ceremony we killed some time at Waltrude’s house while the wedding party went to Mill Lake Park to take pictures, and then we headed to the reception. When Karin and I were married, location had been a worry as there are not many nice halls in the Abbotsford region. Matsqui Hall was too big for our wedding, but is the best one in the area for a sizable crowd. The only issue was that I was probably one of the few people that knew where it was located, so I found myself giving a few people directions.

Once I got to the hall, the bride’s mother Gisela looked especially relieved that I had brought all of my equipment, explaining that she had broken her own camera two days before the wedding and imploring me to be sure to take pictures of every table as there were many guests from her family that came in from far places such as Ontario. I therefore snapped even more pictures than I had planned to take, and editing them took a while (quite a few got a “good enough” grade, and would not be pictures I would usually show). I finished them yesterday, and then started them posting to our Flickr account as I went to bed last night. The upload took until 1:00 this afternoon, but they are finally all up. I’m also pleased that I learned a few things about the various software I was using that I will be able to apply to the Mexico pictures.

If you were there or are just curious, and want to look at them all, you can see the set. Alternatively, you can view a slideshow or see them all on black. For the ultimate experience, I recommend PicLens, but I’ll save explaining it for another post.

Realizing that many of you probably don’t want to sort through well over 100 photos of people that you don’t know, here are some of the ones I would have posted had I been restricting myself.  As always, clicking on them takes you to the original on Flickr, where you can view the full sized version.

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Do you ever get so many tasks going at once that you become overwhelmed and get very little done?

That has been what I have encountered as of late. I have all of our Mexico pictures to catalogue, edit and publish; a task I wanted to have finished long ago. However, we had also decided that we would help out friends in Playa del Carmen that run the Peanut Pet Shelter by building them a new website. Andie and Jen devote their lives to rescuing the many stray dogs in the streets of Playa, and their shelter and they themselves depend on people donating to their registered charity to keep their dream alive. We had hoped to help them by creating a site that might increase donations and awareness to their cause. Also on my agenda is this site; both my blog and the plans we have for PlayaParadise.

The end result of it all was that nothing was getting done. After work, I do like a bit of down time before I start in on the necessary tasks. Once it was time to do these tasks, I would end up working on each a little, never accomplishing anything because each would only get partially done. I have numerous half written blog posts. I have some of the photos almost done. Add to that what seems like an endless stream of all sorts of unplanned items, such as relatives computers that needed to be fixed, trips to the dentist and wedding present/card/clothing shopping. When I would try and continue one of the partially completed tasks, I would waste a lot of time just trying to figure out where I had been before. Beating myself up about being behind on all my tasks was making it even harder to get motivated on any of them.

I had to find a solution, and I feel that i have done so. To start, a big item is now off the plate. Andie and Jen let us know that a professional publicity company has started designing website for them. They were quite embarrassed and apologetic; apparently they did not even know this had been started, but in reality it was sort of a relief considering that we’ve been constantly behind as of late.

In order to get other things done, I am going to apply some time management techniques to the tasks. Nothing to fancy, but simply I will do a blog post each time I complete a half day of pictures. By following this schedule, I’ll remove the pressure I placed on myself that was resulting in me getting nothing done.

So look for both regular posting to return, and pictures of our favourite place.  Once the pictures are finished, we’ll start with our revamp of the main page, as the plans rely on the pictures.

In the meantime, you can read about Karin’s adventures that added to our dentist trips.  Be sure to read all the posts that followed.

This post is for those bloggers out there that don’t read all the various posts from the WordPress team that can be found in your dashboard, but rather wait for a notice at the top telling you it’s time to upgrade. WordPress 2.5, which is considered a major milestone, was released a few hours ago, though there is no upgrade notice yet. If you want to upgrade, got to the WordPress download site.

I have been reading information as the betas and release candidate were made public, and I understand that due to this being a major upgrade, there may be plugins that do not work, more work to do the upgrade, etc. We are heading out for the evening, but I will work on upgrading later tonight or tomorrow, and will report on the difficulty.

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