2011 was my 6th year attending the Northern Voice personal media conference. I took the opportunity this time to play around more with my DSLR camera. I got to talking with photographer John Biehler about shooting using a fisheye lens, and he was kind enough to lend me his for the second day of the conference.
Fisheye is such a different perspective, it took me some time to get a feel for what it works well on. Here are a few of my favorite fisheye shots from the day (click to enlarge):
See all my photos in my 2011 Northern Voice photoset. The first half were with a 'regular' lens, and the second half are fisheye shots.
Statute of the International Court of Justice. Article 10: Election of judges "In the event that more than one national of the same state obtaining an asbolute majority of the votes both of the General Assembly and the Security Council, the eldest of these only shall be considered as elected."
I led a session during the unconference day titled TransitCamp and Open Source Government. It was my first time presenting such a thing, and definitely a learning experience: - good idea to ask audience how much they know about the topic at the start - plan for at least 10 minutes of questions (probably more at unconferences) - work on being a calm and collected speaker
Matt Mullenweg was an excellent keynote speaker. However, I must call bullshit on his suggestion that police can make any meaningful difference containing spam in open systems.
CBC is experimenting with crowd-sourcing Citizen Journalism, at least in Vancouver. I am planning to send them some story pitches, and you can too. This could be an awesome opportunity to open up our media. Hopefully I'll write more about this in the future.
Building a Better Conference Badge is a good read for all organizers. The NV nametags definitely need a redesign. Space for user-tagging is a good idea, but you need to tell people to do it when you give them out.
Vancouver is a high-tech city; tons of people here are bloggers. Here's a clearing house of Vancouver based blogs that have ended up in my RSS reader. I don't actually end up reading them all now, but there's good stuff within.
I recently ordered a MacBook (the White 2.0). I was going to wait until Leopard came out but the new features don't look all that compelling (other than maybe Spaces). I thought there might also be a hardware update in the next few months but I bought the MacBook refurbished (~$250 less) and any new Macbook wouldn't hit the refurb store for a long time.
This is my 3rd Apple product. iPod nano -> Airport Express -> MacBook. Well played, Apple. Boot Camp was the clincher...
Anyways, I've got a few questions:
1) Browser? Safari seems more than adequate but what about Firefox or Camino? I like the Firefox extensions in Windows. Does that give it a leg up on a Mac as well?
2) Torrent clients? For, um, sharing... improv tips...
3) How much space on the HD does OS X take up? Any useless apps that are typically uninstalled to save space?
I'm sure there will be more to come. Any advice or tips to a Mac n00b are welcome. If I remember, I'll post my impressions.
I need a new email program for Windows with both web and hard-drive accessibility (POP). Preferably it should be low in cost and glitches, and high in safety and awesomeness. Good enough? Any Thunderbird or Opera fans out there?
These Are A Few Of My Favorite Tools was one of the last sessions from day 1 of Northern Voice. It introduced a number of helpful tools for blogging or just being more productive on your computer. They're all listed on that page, so check them out (if you use a Mac). I'm going to be trying out a few when I have some more time, since a number of them looked awesome.
Everybody was free to go up and demo some of their fav tools, in true unconference style. It turned out that only Mac users did though. Throughout the session there were a few "Does this run on Windows?" questions asked. The answer was always "uh no... it's mac only... but there might be a windows equivalent" (except for the FireFox extensions, which are cross-platform). As a Macintosh Cult member, it made me smile to see the tables turned, in terms of software choice.
It's great to see the wealth of tools available on Mac OS X now. Full credit goes to Apple for giving out free dev tools, and winning massive mindshare amongst the creatives and hackers who are building the future of software.
It is better to have a handful of dried dates and be content with that, than to own the the gate of peacocks and be kicked in the face by a brooding camel.[quote database]
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