If today’s commute on the number 3 Main Street bus was any indication, it would be quicker for me to walk to work during the Olympics. There was a lot of mostly negative news today in the media about the DTES and the Olympics, or homelessness and the Olympics, or social housing and the Olympics, or drug use and the Olympics. I set aside a few stories as they were in big main stream media, mostly American.
On Twitter you see more and more reports of athlete sitings, my coworker described them as big black guys in tracksuits with a flag on the shoulder she didn’t recognize. What can I say, she is from Saskatchewan. Don’t expect athlete’s to blog that much, the IOC has put restrictions on what they can and cannot do and say.
Bloggers are gearing up from Dave Olsen to Miss604. I keep bumping into them online and off, my employer uses WordPress and we offered to host WordCamp Vancouver but they are looking for an even bigger event space, so maybe we’ll host a satellite or shoulder event.
Wes and I have been raising BOB’s profile online with several posts related to the Olympics or at least how Building Opportunities with Business contributed in some small way to Vancouver 2010.
There is only going to be more and more text online about the Olympics and my Googlejuice does not rival the New York Times, but hopefully all three of my regular readers will appreciate my straight forward and slightly warped take on things.
I didn’t take any photos today, maybe I’ll take some at the Blue Dragon later if they allow them there are plenty on Flickr with more to come.
I’m at Smart Mouth again with my promised update. I promised some people I’d take photos and I’ve taken a few with my iPhone, but there are many better photographers, with better cameras, and more time taking pictures in Vancouver. A lot of those photos end up on Flickr.
Today’s celebrity isn’t as famous as Johnny Depp, but on Abott Street I saw Chin from Base is Base, his solo carer, and perhaps most famously recently his production work. He is a Vancouverite, though I understand he spends a fair amount of time in LA. I’ve seen him play solo on acoustic guitar, he is quite talented, even if his music isn’t necessarily my bag baby. ;-)
Note all of these photos weren’t taken today, but the first one was from the number 8 bus.
Everyone is going to write about the Olympics, so why not me? As mentioned yesterday I know a lot of the top bloggers in Vancouver, I know the folks at W2, or True North Media House, or even the Network Hub. I send them all business. Also having talked to some other entrepreneurs it has become apparent that no one may know more about the cafes in Gastown than me, so it is good Nicole ran into me yesterday.
I’m Gastown at Smart Mouth right now, which besides the obvious of Starbucks is the cafe people are looking at as competition when they plan their business. Waves, JJ Bean, Acme, Quik, etc. are not consider as stiff of competition, even the recently arrived Trees wasn’t on their radar too much, too far West perhaps from their proposed location…
Enough of work, I’m officially on my break. I may have more breaks in the future as apparently I have 18 banked days of earned vacation, of course I may have all the time in the world again, so I’m not in a hurry and I can’t afford to just take a couple weeks off. Plus BOB, coworking@BOB, and Chinatown are pretty busy, I’m even marching the New Year’s Parade.
I looked at my traffic number the other day and I think I had 17000 plus visitors last month, which worked out to 6-7000 unique visitors. We’ll see if the Olympics affects my traffic much. My miniature painting website gets most of the traffic and I don’t think it will be affected by the Olympics at all.
I’ve written extensively about online reputations, social networks, and the dangers of electronic communication. Alas some people are still just plain stupid and it is starting to cost them. I’m not stupid, naive maybe, but not stupid. I googled myself the other day and noticed that two of the top ten results were social networks I never kept up to date. Luckily or skillfully depending on how you want to look at it, my top result remains my resume.
I deleted my hi5 and Friendster profiles. It wasn’t hard. I also was trying to catch up on email and noticed I’m subscribed to way too many things I don’t care about and one of them is another social network called Xing. Xing isn’t bad but I have over 100 contacts in LinkedIn and had four in Xing. I’m told it is popular in Europe and Asia… It was harder to delete my Xing profile, so if you’re trying to, here is a direct link.
I’m at Smart Mouth and was telling an out of town blogger the lay of the land in the Vancouver social media scene. Which due to seniority and sheer refusal to disappear I seem to have become a part of. Though everyone I know is more famous than me.
I was going to write more, but I must return to my day job, where I’ll do more blogging, not likely I’m trying to catch up on email that piled up during the hecticness of last week. Having a laptop is way better than using webmail. Though I still don’t have my new laptop completely backed up or had the time to update all my apps.
On my way back to work I suffered another panic attack. I kept it together, not sure why people persist in pretending nothing is wrong, nothing happened or that no one was negatively affected. Do people still think I’m lying? Do you honestly still insist Anne that the threats, accusations, words, and actions of others had no negative affect on me and didn’t impact my ability to enjoy or participate in the Sauder MBA program at all? Do you still maintain you followed the policy when doctors and councilors at UBC stated you did not? How long was your investigation, an hour, a day? Did you perform the required reasonable person test? Is it not reasonable for a person to help another person? For a classmate to help another classmate? For a friend to help a friend?
Maybe if I wait another five years some people will finally believe me? Maybe it is a source of pride for the girls in Kill Matilda to know they traumatized someone for life?
I wanted one, but I didn’t really have the money, so I upgraded my old laptop’s hard drive. Then on Wednesday this week, just after being admired for it’s size or lackof, the 12″ PowerBook up and died. I took it to Simply Computing and sure enough it needed a new logic board.
I’d rather spend $1299 on a new computer than $800 upgrading one that is an evolutionary dead end. $1299 is not the final price though. I bought three years of AppleCare, which didn’t register correctly. I also got an external harddrive enclosure so I could get the info off and continue to use the 2.5″ 240Gb drive.
All went well, though I fell asleep listening to Lucinda Williams and waiting for things to install/upgrade. I also needed to install Rosetta from the DVD to use my older Mac software such as Microsoft Word which is the 2003 version I think.
Anyway it is certainly bright and shiney. The backlit keyboard is pretty nice. I wonder how long before the sweat in my hands eats into the aluminum again? It has a higher resolution and a bigger screen, also I think it has a wider ratio. I never really got to shop much, it was either this or the cheaper MacBook. Not having a laptop and using a PC at work wasn’t a valid option.
I have FireWire 800 now but I need an adapter as I don’t think I have any devices that use it. A lot of my accessories such as extra power adapters won’t work, but the extension cord does. I’m still curious about video out. I had all the adapters for the old laptop, but this one I think I have to buy all new adapters…
Anyway the Internet wasn’t working for a spell, but I got that sorted.
I’ll have to look at my previous results, but I knew why I would fail, too many questions about European VS American accounting standards. I actually managed to get oer 70% in many categories including Corporate Finance. The sad part is I used to be pretty good at accounting, but they changed the curriculum sufficiently from when I first wrote it and I didn’t realize that until it was too late.
Further proof on how inconsistant I seem to be on this exam I got over 70% on Economics which last time I did poorly on and as always I get over 70% on Ethics… I need to improve my score particularly in FSA by 20%. I’m going to have to think about it, I was planning to take some time off regardless as I’m busy enough with work and other stuff, but coming so close. I’m pretty sure my best score in every section would be enough to pass, but I always seem to not do well enough in FSA. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over 70% in it. Every other section I have gotten over 70% on, just not all on the same exam.
Oh well I don’t plan on losing any sleep over it. I’m good enough at bonds to help people pass the CSE, something always goes wrong when I write the CFA. This time I took more time off to prepare, but I was horribly sick, especially in the afternoon. I was a zombie by the end, I think I speed guessed through the last Economics questions…
I then called in sick for three days… Being sick and preparing for the CFA exam was my vacation for 2009.
Not that people should automatically assume I’m lying like Anne DeWolfe and Margaret Saskin did, I’ve actually proof of the 100’s of hours I’ve put into this exam, well over the recommended 250 the first two times. At least this time I didn’t suffer any panic attacks…
It is running on WordPress version 2.9.1 with the theme created by Burst! and Flightdeck Media. We are using the following plugins to get our social media and network integration working correctly.
Simple Flickr Photos, which isn’t what I’m using on this website.
TinyMCE Valid Elements, this was installed before I even logged in, I don’t use it on Muskblog either.
Tweetable, I actually tried a number of Twitter related plugins, it and Facebook gave me the most grief. I’m still not happy with our Facebook plugin. Needless to say I recommend this Twitter plugin over any other I tried.
Twitter Followers, this plugin works really well if you want pictures of your followers in your WordPress sidebar.
Ultimate Google Analytics I do use on this blog so knew exactly which plugin I would use to track the popularity of BOB’s blog. Alas our template doesn’t seem to call wp_footer or whatever…
Check out the BOB Blog tomorrow and leave a comment here and there as I’m still getting the hang of DISQUS.
Ask yourself do I really, really need to upgrade? If you don’t, don’t upgrade most times it is more work than it should be especially if you’ve had your blog online for years like I have.
Backup your database. It tells you to do this, but really do it. Not just an export of the data from WordPress itself but some backup from your host. If your host doesn’t let you make quick easy free backups of your database, get a new webhost!
Write down your current version of WordPress. You may have to roll back so you need to know where you came from. Plus if you haven’t upgraded in a while, you may have to make a number of modifications for different fixes and releases. WordPress has archives of old releases so you can roll back.
If things don’t work, delete plugins. This is a usual source of upgrade headaches, some plugins are not well maintained nor were they designed necessarily for the current version of WordPress. As WordPress has developed, more features are built in so you need less and less plugins.
Beware the database language encoding issue. Next to bad plugins or necessary changes to themes, the biggest problems I have is with my database having non-latin characters in it and my desire to keep them displaying correctly.
You may need to update PHP, MySQL, or some other server library, this can put an end to your WordPress upgrade if your host won’t do so, of course you could get a new host, or you could ask yourself again, “Do I really need to upgrade WordPress?” Ignore the box at the top of the dashboard.
Although I am no longer running the latest version of WordPress, I have installed Disqus which works fine with WordPress 2.7.1 which is what I have installed for the most part. I’ve retired a few more plugins and my latest comments seem to be a lot different than I remember. We’ll see if Disqus leads to more comments. Someone leave one and see if it is easier to comment, also let me know if you notice any other weirdness.
Wes thinks I can write new Asian language content, but I want my old content to not be gibberish, especially the trackbacks and my account of my time in China.
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I’m no good at Korean, send hot Korean chick to tutor right away…
Well maybe not, but the recent updates to my G4 aimed at bringing digital audio out to Loretta combined with my NAD receiver and Paradigm speakers is a big improvement both in volume and clarity, not that I needed the former. I still don’t have a subwoofer for 5.1 surround sound, but more pressing is replacing the combo DVD/VCR I traded off my mom as it keeps skipping while playing DVDs and completely refused to play one I rented.
I might have the most expensive Sawtooth G4 in Vancouver, I could update the video card again, but more likely I should totally max out the RAM. It’ll never run Snow Leopard but if it keeps down track skippage, RAM is so cheap now. What I’d like to waste money on is one of those Time Capsules, I bought a big SATA hard drive when I upgraded the CPU, but I can’t back my laptop up to that using Time Machine, it would also speed up my wireless network and maybe got down on wire clutter. Behind my system is a cable jungle, unusual for me.
I was always going to be at this place for a limited time. Next time I set up my system, I plan to put more of the computer stuff off to the side, buy a longer optical digital cable, I have quite the light show going, though during movies I sleep the Mac. I suppose I could look into eliminating a DVD player from the setup, but my formerly quiet G4, now has extra fans in it. The loudest thing I own is the external CD burner, but that stays off 99% of the time.
I still have to reconnect all the rest of the USB and Firewire devices, but I got the machine up and running with a bare minimum of do-dads, then got the optical out working, my test song “Sweet Old World” by Emmylou Harris from the Wrecking Ball album produced by Daniel Lanois. That is a great sounding album and if you’re a music fan you owe it to yourself to buy it. It’ll really test the quality of your speakers, system, or headphones.
The song was of course written by Lucinda Williams who I’ve been listening to a pile lately. Music really influences my life, it is definitely influencing my business planning. Now I have to get Wake Over Lan and Simplify Media working with my iPhone for maximum coolness. I hope my router doesn’t cause grief, wonder if the Time Capsule will?
