Just a Gwai Lo awkward flow, to some it's even unorthodox [?]

If you really must know, yes, I'm getting an iPhone. It was not a no-brainer until very recently, when Rogers/Fido offered a promotional 6 GB plan for $30 on top of a voice plan. Still not a no-brainer, because after some speculation, about whether my plan was eligible for the most coveted of mobile computing platforms, I called Fido today to find out if I'm eligible for that which must be worshiped and/or bitched about. The plan has nationwide Fido-to-Fido calling, necessary for calling the girl while we had our long distance relationship, my being in Vancouver and her being in Toronto; unlimited weekends and evenings; something called "Can. ID" (can someone enlighten me as to what that does?); and that's it for exactly 30 dollars a month. That last point is important because it qualifies me for the $249 8 GB iPhone, not the $199 8 GB iPhone, which comes with a plan of more than 30 dollars a month.

Added to my current plan are Caller ID and 50 monthly text messages. No voicemail for quite some time now: it was always quicker for me to call the person back and ask them what they were calling about then to listen to the message, find a pen to write down the number (which requires rewinding not being as fast a write as people are talkers) and forget to delete the message, then listen to my voicemail later on wondering if it was a new message or not. Visual Voicemail looks interesting, but I don't get enough phone calls to warrant paying for it. Forgetting to ask the helpful French-accented Fido representative if I could keep the add on features, I still assume the answer is yes.

Jan has the recap, and Raul liveblogged it: on Wednesday I attended the Vancouver Blogger meetup and met with some people who actually read this blog. Jan, among others, encouraged me to keep writing this thing, not to worry about quality too much. There are times when I'm in "flow", and I finally realized that one of those times is after having read offline materials for about an hour. Yet again, the solution is to read more books!

At the meetup, I continued to work through what I thought about citizen journalism. NowPublic has a great concept for a site, but I've been following the 'vancouver' tag for over a year and have yet to find a story they've broken or led with in reporting. The overwhelming majority of stories are conspiracy theories or re-posts of stories from established media. For one very recent story I had hopes for (happening on a college campus, so you know there's going to be lots of intelligent, web savvy energetic young folk with cell phones and cameras), a NowPublic user kept me up to date with the lockdown of a building at the University of British Columbia. I heard about it first from Phillip Jeffrey's Twitter stream. The NowPublic story fueled rumours that the police were responding to someone with a gun. Any confirmation on that, two days later? There's also the usual social media triumphalism in the comments, but don't we hate it when CBC and CTV and CKNW claim they had the "exclusive"?

I met lots of people I had only heard about, and some I hadn't.

I'm speaking in a few weeks at the Northern Voice blogging conference, 2008 edition. About blogging. Yes, the very subject I once declared I had lost enthusiasm for. You'll see me at 10:45 AM on the Friday, during the Internet Boot Camp. That's later in the day than I thought it would be, happily so. I'm looking very much forward to Dave Olson's "Fuck Stats Make Art" presentation and Stephanie Vacher's "Apparatus for the Future" talk. Otherwise I will try the conference lobby provocateur role this year, talking with as many people that I've only heard about as possible.

http://justagwailo.com/shared/feed is the link to my "shared items" feed. It will never change (the one to my Google Reader account might). It reflects only what I find interesting, without comment, and includes not only my Google Reader shared items, but also my YouTube 'favorite' videos, my Flickr 'favorite' photos, and my Digg "diggs". There are individual feeds for each (there is no official RSS feed for my MetaFilter 'favorites' sadly: if there was, I'd include those too), so I feed them through the Drupal aggregator here on justagwailo.com. To track how many subscribers there are to it, I then use FeedBurner. http://justagwailo.com/shared is the "HTML" version of this, but I don't like the idea of syndicating other people's content on my site, so it just looks like they're big links. There's something to be said about aggregating decentralized low-threshold sharing mechanisms. I'm not the person to say it, at least not yet.

The press release announces it and the announcement over at my company's website confirms it: starting January 1st, I'm going to be an employee of Raincity Studios. On Tuesday RCS acquired Bryght, the Vancouver-based Drupal-based hosting and hosted service company I've been working for since 2004. My role, currently as community support guy, will change slightly, details we'll work out in the following days and weeks. I'm excited and nervous at the same time, both usual for me when change like this happens. To say this came at the right time for me, however, is an understatement.

It maybe took a little longer than it needed to, but it really hit me how impressive their design chops were when Mark Yuasa's offered to redesign my blog back in 2005. 2005? Seems longer ago. I remember meeting him at BCIT and going through what theme I wanted for the look. Since it was around March, cherry blossom trees started losing their petals and the smell and sight of pink leaves all over the streets of the Lower Mainland filled my senses. With a little trepidation—pink not being the manliest colour—that I asked him use that as the concept, and his two original concepts floored me. One, while beautiful, was a little too white for what I thought of, but the other, overwhelmingly pink design made the choice obvious. I was impressed with his holistic approach (he asked me to write down what music I liked as part of the design consideration) and his attention to detail and his flexibility in the changes I requested. I've since reverted back to a default theme for the site (changing the colours to match the previous look), and I've committed to releasing the theme to the Drupal community.

Raincity is cataloging the social web's reaction to their announcement, and if you visit that link, you'll get to see me a little more than halfway down at the Cambie Pub, during my first week officially working for Bryght, in September 2004. That's a fairly iconic photo of me, so much so that Karen has taken to calling me a "support cowboy". Think I can get away with calling myself that? Probably not: I'm the strong, silent type, and besides, I don't like horses that much. I'm still going to celebrate by buying another cowboy shirt.