I had a brief clip air on Global TV BC this evening, commenting on the news that Facebook is opening a temporary office in Vancouver. Here’s a link to the written article. Thanks to Greg for tracking down the Global TV News Hour clip (starts at 15:20).

I do think that the difficulty in getting a US Visa is a contributing factor to make Canada / Vancouver an attractive place to put an office. It was back in July 2007 that the Microsoft opening an office news broke. Looking back, the Microsoft office out in Richmond was basically a non-impact on the local community. So, where Facebook puts its office and how much it interacts with the local community will be the determining factor on the potential impact of having them here.

I’d like to talk about local Vancouver talent. My general feeling is that the developer and designer talent that Vancouver does have are treated like raw resources. Like our logs and other natural resources, we do very little “secondary processing”, and the best are shipped off elsewhere.

It’s that time of year again, when I face the same question: my Flickr Pro subscription has expired, and I need to pay so that all my photos are accessible online. But maybe I should self host? Is paying for a Flickr Pro subscription still worth it?

I’ve been working with Contractually for the past 2 weeks¹. I’ve always loved Martin’s vision for Contractually² – both the concept of moving past “digital representations of paper” to more fluid, data-native documents, as well as modernization of the legal business.

I’m just getting back from 2 days in Seattle. In general, I’m trying to spend more time there, getting to know what’s happening in the Seattle community and seeing if Vancouver can connect more regularly (Cascadia!).

Startup Riot is actually run by a team from Atlanta, with Sanjay Parekh playing the front man. The event is run as a pitch contest, including feedback from experienced entrepreneurs as judges, plus several keynote talks and lots of opportunity for connecting with other attendees. Here’s the description and agenda for the day.

I loved the event. It was well run, it was curated (no service providers allowed¹), it had great sponsors (MailChimp, Gist, Twilio, etc.), and there was a great crowd of people there. I was surprised to meet one entrepreneur who flew in all the way from the Ukraine to attend, but having attended one Startup Riot, I can definitely see why.

As I’m sitting here manually adding blocks of “break” time to my calendar around meetings I’ve booked, I’m getting a little frustrated.

I’ve used Tungle for several years now, and it’s quite a good tool. Rather than playing the are-you-free-on-Wednesday dance (or as I like to call it, “Calendar Tetris”) with multiple people, you can quickly find time when everyone is free to meet.

My friends at Common Craft have a book called The Art of Explanation coming out this fall, and it will include QR codes. In the book, there are multiple references to Common Craft videos, and Lee wanted to make it easy for people to go from reading a page in the book and then easily viewing the referenced video. These QR codes link to the explanation videos on their website. Since there is only one chance to get the codes right before they get printed, we talked about different ways to generate & track QR codes¹.

I gave a quick 10 minute lightning talk at the HTML5 Vancouver Meetup group about static site generators (SSGs).

I ended up putting the presentation together using Hekyll, which is, itself, an SSG for making presentations using impress.js. impress.js is an HTML5-based clone of Prezi, the panning / zooming presentation app; I just opted for simple presentation mode.

Check out the SSG Lightning Talk or view it in the iframe below (use arrow keys to advance).

I attended day 1 of Northern Voice 2012, including Moose Camp, which is a block of time that is run unconference style.

I hosted a discussion on the concept of web literacy. I went into the discussion thinking along the lines of being a web maker - being able to understand HTML and code. But as we tossed concepts back and forth, it’s clear that web literacy is a very broad term, and that there are different levels of literacy.

I’ve added a link to this blog post on the Northern Voice wiki – please add your own notes and links relevant to web literacy.

I’ve long used Norse Mythology to name my computers. The tiny but powerful 11” Macbook Air got named after Skidbladnir, Freyr’s collapsible ship.

I had a great discussion yesterday where the phrase “the post I didn’t write” came up. This is a fantastic phrase, and led me down the route of examining why and when I don’t publish posts, and thinking about why others – especially in the context of working for an organization – don’t publish posts.