One of the groups I sometimes work with, The Vancouver Public Space Network has been putting together a big competition that I thought I'd share with you called Where's the Square?. The idea is fun and Good things could come of its results so if you have a creative streak, you might be interested:

Have you ever dreamed of what Vancouver might look like if it had the type of celebrated public square or plaza that characterizes other cities around the world? Think of the festivals, markets and concerts, as well as the opportunities to meet friends, have a coffee and people watch! There's no shortage of reasons why good public squares are the most popular and memorable places to congregate.

So what about our city? Here's where you come in.

The Vancouver Public Space Network is currently running a Design Ideas Competition. The "Where's the Square?" contest is open to anyone who feels like they have a plan for a grand gathering place inside the city boundaries.

We're looking for ideas from city-lovers, planners, artists, philosophers, architects, urbanists, students of any discipline and visionaries from all walks of life. The competition has some fairly straightforward parameters covering the size, accessibility, programming and utility of the square... but after that, it's all up to you. Most importantly, we don't have a set location in mind. Instead, we're looking for entrants to come up with a plan for where the square could be situated.

The "Where's the Square?" competition runs until March 20, 2009 and is open to individuals or teams. There will be two prizes, based on a juried review of the entries as well as a "people's choice award." A variety of other supporting events will also be taking place throughout February, March and April.

Interested in participating? The Competition Brief and other related materials can be accessed at http://www.WheresTheSquare.ca.

One more thing: we're asking participants to send us an Entrant Form to let us know that they want to submit a plan. We're looking to get these by the end of the month. According to one of our participants, the record for completing and submitting an Entrant Form is under 60 seconds. If you feel so inspired (and we hope you do!), you can try and beat this time by downloading the form here.

For more information, please email info at vancouverpublicspace dot com or call 778-239-7544.

The Discovery Channel commissioned this commercial from a company called 72 and Sunny and it's been bouncing around the internet lately. I thought I'd share 'cause it's pretty cool. However, since their embed code seems insistent on forcing an annoying autoplay "feature", I've taken it off my site. Here's a link if you're interested :-)

You may have already heard, or you may just have seen it, but for those who don't know what I'm talking about, I'm sporting a brand new shiner today. That's right, I've got a black eye -- though strictly speaking there's nothing all that black about it. It's more of a purplish red, and it's not so much a whole "eye" as it's a long ugly line under my left eye accompanying a scratch on my nose and a swollen temple and jaw.

Now, in an effort to save myself from the long list of repetitive Q&A sessions, I'm just going to recount it all here. In fact, if you ask me about in person, I'll just redirect you here or even make up a more exotic story since I'm already tired of re-telling the whole thing.

Now, to begin: Langley is a shithole. Yep, that's an excellent start to all of this.

So after work on Friday, I headed out to the aforementioned shithole by way of SkyTrain and then the 502 bus from Surrey Central to Langley Centre. As I approached the heavily fogged-in bus loop, I called Chris to let him know that I'd be there in five and then hopped off when we pulled in.

Not seeing Chris yet (turns out, he was in the parking lot, wondering where I was), I walked out toward the street corner where I was passed by a couple of really hyper, giggly girls running toward the bus. One of them chucked an empty chip bag into the air and I (in a friendly way) slowed them down with "hey there, you just tossed your garbage in the street". "I don't care!" she yelled and continued down the street with her friend. I leaned down, picked up the bag and tossed it into the can (3ft away) and in a similarly friendly tone yelled "fuck you too!" -- I felt it only appropriate, but clearly, not the smartest move in a near deserted bus stop in a shithole town swallowed by fog.

I then continued onto the corner where I waited a few minutes and was soon re-approached by the same coked-out girls. The litterbug was irate with my choice of language, despite her own consistent use of it. She began slapping, kicking, the typical flailing coked-out girl stuff. Then she grabbed my $300 glasses, bending them and yelling at me so I grabbed them back. No, I didn't hit her, but in her messed up little head, my pushing her away and grabbing my glasses constituted as such. She and her friend then started yelling about how I'd hit her etc.

Enter the equally coked-out roid-monkey boyfriends. "Fucking Langley" I mumbled to myself. Much punching ensued, no amount of reasoning on my part was working, not that expected it to. For my part, I didn't fight back and instead opted to spend most of my time trying to block and insist that I'd not hit anyone. My thinking being that presently, they were taking turns punching me in the face, but if I landed even one good punch I'd be facing both of them, along with whatever other fabulous new joys awaited me in the fog.

Chris had decided to start driving around in the soup looking for me as he couldn't find me in the parking lot, and pulled up just in time to see them leaving -- they'd decided that they'd done enough damage. Thankfully, Chris hadn't seen the whole incident (or the blood on my face due to the dark in the car) or he'd most likely have wanted to go back and return the favour. Instead, I had to ask him if he had anything with which to clean myself up in his car as I was dripping on my jacket, and at that point, too much time had passed to be able to find them again.

At the time, I chose not to call the police because, as messed up as it may sound, I didn't want the run the risk that they'd believe the crazy chick when she insists that I hit her. With the kinds of things I want to do with my life, a record for assault and battery didn't seem like a good idea. Looking back on it all now though, I regret not calling them at the time because it's likely that I was not their last target for the evening. It's too late now though, I couldn't describe them any better than "coked out fuckers" if I wanted to.

In retrospect, I keep going over the whole incident in my mind thinking about what I could have done differently. Like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure novels, I see myself asking for the return of my glasses, or punching out one of the guys, or more importantly, not yelling (even nicely) at the girls int he first place. I honestly don't see how it could have gone any differently though. Sure, it's possible that had I said nothing, I would have avoided all of this mess, and that probably would have been the better option, but it's just as likely that these kids, fuct out of their trees as they were, would have attacked me for any other reason. However in future, while I won't stop yelling at people who litter, I will be more discerning with my selection of who is worthy of a good bitch-out.

For the rest of my stay in Shithole, Chris and Trish were really kind. They ordered pizza and Chris even endured Mama Mia for my sake (sorry Mom, not as good as I'd hoped). They helped patch me up and drove me to King George station in the morning. So yeah. Langley is a horrible, horrible place, but the friends I have there are awesome.

Linkage is important to the Internet. Search engines index you based on the number of people who link to you and for the marketing types, the buzz generated by blog posts is important as well. With this in mind, I've had a number of people ask me to post about them in my own heavily trafficked blog (seriously, I only get about 15 unique visits a day for chrissake). But regardless, here are the people:

Downtown Eyewear in Kelowna, BC. This is my father's optical store in downtown Kelowna and in case you can't tell from the exceptionally bland aesthetics, I built it visuals and all. My dad's been working in the optical industry for something like 40 years and has own and operated his own stores for 30 of those. Some of you might remember what it was like coming to visit me back in the days of Focal Point Opticians in Willowbrook Mall back when we had a store there, well he's still doing much the same thing, though a lot of his stuff is custom work for the wealthy Kelowna folk these days. If you're ever in town, I suggest dropping by and having a look around, if only to say hi to my dad :-)

Work [at] Play here in Vancouver, BC. For those of you following my Twitter feed and/or my Facebook status, you might have noticed the bit about me now working at Work [at] Play Social Media Labs Vancouver. No, I didn't quit my job and find another one overnight, my company merely re-branded itself and has asked us all to promote it's new name with linkage and the like via Twitter etc. Frankly, while I see the reasoning behind it, I think the confusion generated around this whole tweet-everything strategy probably negates the majority of whatever buzz the brass hoped to produce. The site is cool though, and the new direction we're taking in the kind of stuff we're making is also cool. My new software project, Velocity is featured on the site's products page, and if you look carefully, you'll see the back of my fuzzy head there right in the middle.

Go-Go Carpet Cleaning also here in Vancouver is pretty damn cool. The whole business is one guy with a machine and he keeps pretty busy. He's friendly, professional and cheap ($70 for my whole apartment). I told him I'd post about him so here he is :-)

And that's it for me. I don't really like the whole idea of manipulating the linkage system with intentional links, but I like these people so I guess that's why it's ok in my head. Happy Friday!

I had a fun conversation with my coworker Jordan today that I'd like to share. Usually, he explains, people are categorised into two groups: optimists and pessimists. He feels that this is an unfair classification though, and that the system should be more fine-grained. To him, people are no only either optimistic or pessimistic, but it's also a question of whether the person is realistic. Behold, Jordan's Axis of POV:

After my previous post with ukulele girl sweetafton23 doing her rendition of John Coulton's Tom Cruise Crazy, I had a couple people ask about whether or not I could turn it into an MP3 for them.

Well for those who have asked, here it is. I would remind you that it's simply a YouTube rip so the audio quality is only as good as the (YouTube) source, but it's good enough for my own listening pleasure and even as a ringtone if you like :-). For those of you interested in how I did it, the steps are below. I used the following programs which should be available in all major Linux distribution trees: youtube-dl (MIT), lame (LGPL), and mplayer (GPL).

$ youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRvm0PfayR8
$ mkfifo /tmp/pipe.wav
$ lame /tmp/pipe.wav TomCruiseCrazy.mp3

At which point I opened another terminal and ran this:

$ mplayer -ao pcm:file=/tmp/pipe.wav /home/daniel/pRvm0PfayR8.flv

My brother sent this to me today and I wanted to share. Brilliantly done, and with a nice take on the future:

Lost Generation

And Melanie posted this to her twitter feed. The Ukulele is coming back I tell you:

sweetafton23: Tom Cruise Crazy

Some time ago, something rather big happened in my life and I didn't blog about it. It's kind of odd really: one's blog is not necessarily an accurate record of his/her life, but rather a record of events which are both worthy of account and have passed the author's personal filters for "shareability". I'd never really thought this topic suited for a public sphere, but since a considerable percentage of my family and friends follow my life in part by reading this blog, it seems appropriate that I share this element on it.

A few months ago, I took off my silver pentagram necklace and put it in a box. I've not replaced it since.

To understand the significance of all this, you have to understand how I came to call myself a witch in the first place. I'd always had a personal understanding of how the Universe worked -- understanding in the sense that I make assumptions of how thing "are" based on a mixture of what I observe in my life and a healthy dose of intuition.

I've come to believe that the Universe is conscious in a way we cannot yet understand, that it is alive, and that all elements within it are connected. I believe that these elements can be explored and even manipulated in a variety of ways including chemistry, physics and math, but that we must acknowledge that these are all simply understood representations of a field our ancestors would have considered to be "magick".

I've held these beliefs for as long as I can remember, and when I discovered what witchcraft was, I felt that I'd finally found the label for me. I was never comfortable practising with other pagans -- in fact, I was rarely comfortable practising at all. To me, my faith was always more of an understanding than anything else.

But that's just the problem really. Faith, as Dawkins puts it, is a "process of non-thinking". By definition, faith removes all possibility of contradictory thought, even in the face of quantifiable evidence. How then, could I claim to be both a rational person and one of faith? I couldn't, and so I cannot walk that path anymore.

It's important to stress though that calling myself an Atheist does not negate my belief that the Universe is conscious and that everything is connected, but I feel that it's important to stress that this is theory and not faith. I honestly feel that blind faith is too dangerous a mentality to be encouraged and will place my bet with my friend Galileo when he says:

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same god who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

Melissa and I had a good conversation last night about the overwhelming nature of email. I explained that I had twenty-one emails marked as "unread" in my inbox to which I intended to respond but every time I had the opportunity, the task seemed too arduous to undertake. Her suggestion was a simple one that had never even occured to me: respond to two each day.

So today I'm going to take two off the end of the list, and starting tomorrow, I'll work my way down from the oldest. Annie has, after all been waiting for a response since July 3 2008.

Yeah, I know. I'm a bad person.

I stumbled upon an ugly PHP bug today and thought that I would share. While PHP is supposed to be a untyped language, this isn't always the case. The following code snippet for example does not do what you might expect:

switch ($output->status)
{
  case 0: $output->status = 'fail'; break;
  case 1: $output->status = 'ok';   break;
  case 2: $output->status = 'stub'; break;
}

With this code, passing in a string such as "ok", $output->status is set to "fail". This is due to what I assume to be a bug in PHP's lack of keeping everything untyped. For some reason, it would seem that PHP parses $output->status as an integer (therefore all strings return as 0) and then compares them to the list. If however you change the cases to strings:

switch ($output->status)
{
  case '0': $output->status = 'fail'; break;
  case '1': $output->status = 'ok';   break;
  case '2': $output->status = 'stub'; break;
}

Everything works as expected. Pretty lame if you ask me, but there it is.