Photography – Nicolas Demers

The Road to Kamloops

Oh, and I took pictures before, during and after Imagine No Religion! The weather was fine throughout and if I do say so, I took some awesome shots. I’m particularly proud of my shot of Merritt after we left it, lightly kissed by the setting sun.

Plus, the Kamloops flora and fauna. I didn’t see any magpies this time because I didn’t go on a long walk, but there was this species of tree growing by the convention centre parking lot. It had very thin leaves, of a light silvery-green colour. What kind of tree was that? My googling suggested some kind of spruce, but I don’t know anything about trees, so… All I know is, I’ve never seen one in Vancouver. They must like the drier climates.

Oh, and a moonshot. This was pretty much the only time of day I can take photos of the moon: late enough that it’s clearly visible, but with enough light for my camera to work.

I think I heard one of my friends say this is the Coquihalla summit.

Some thoughts on the Calgary skyline

It’s been a month and I’ve kept postponing writing this post. Partly because I still have hundreds of pictures to upload, until I realised I could attach only the required photos to this post, and worry about uploading the rest later.

So, Calgary. I’d flown over it a number of times, connected through its airport a couple times, but I’d never really visited until this Easter weekend. The occasion was Western Cup, an annual volleyball/curling/dodgeball tournament that I heard was tons of fun but never got around to. But a couple months before, I’d been hunting for a team for Queen Vicki, Vancouver’s own queer volleyball tournament, and a friend invited me on his QV team, his Western Cup team, and his Ottawa team (there’s a gay volleyball tourney in Ottawa two weeks before, which I also went to, but that’s another story.)

I had a great time, and met tons of amazing people. But my view of the actual city wasn’t so positive. Downtown Calgary looks pretty ordinary from the air: a cluster of high-rises surrounded by urban sprawl, not too different from Vancouver.

From the ground, though, actually walking through it, it’s a different matter. Downtown Calgary is full of massive, shiny buildings, monuments to the giants of industry, oil and finance. Catch them from the right angle, and they’re attractive enough. But they also easily become dark and oppressive, since they’re far more crowded together than Vancouver and block out much more of the sunlight.

But in the midst of these ultra-shiny highrises there are older buildings, smaller and more modest, showing that Calgary does indeed have a history. Some that were previously commercial space have been converted into condos. I found them comforting, architecture on a much more human scale.

Down side: some of them, like the old City Hall, are utterly dwarfed by the surrounding highrises. Which is not unfamiliar. Christ Church Cathedral, anyone?

And some of these old buildings are just… old and sad. The eastern edge of downtown feels empty and run-down, maybe in the middle of pre-redevelopment, I don’t know. Just empty lots, gravel, and faded commercial façades. In fact, a lot of the eastern and southern edges of downtown feel very haphazard, with apartment buildings, heritage homes and commercial lots arranged seemingly at random. It had the feel of a city that had grown very fast with little actual planning—which, well, I guess is exactly what happened.

In fact, it was while walking back from Fort Calgary towards downtown that I formed my strongest impression of downtown: it felt like a herd of sleeping behemoths, shiny and faceless, as forbidding as the not so far-off the mountain ranges. It was not a pleasant impression.

What would Colonel MacLeod say if he was still alive? I’m sure he’d be happy to see the city prosper, but wouldn’t it look weird and alien to him?

Gut impressions aside, there was a very real downside to Calgary’s highrises: they blocked part of the view from the Calgary Tower. To the north I could see only straight up Centre Street; to the south and east I could see forever; to the west my view was half blocked by downtown. This being so close to the equinox the sunset was pretty much exactly due east, and it was just barely visible by one of the big shiny highrises. Any later in the year, and visitors to the Tower would be minus a sunset.

Shame, isn’t it? Just a few short decades after its construction, the Tower has been passed by the rest of the city. What good will it be as a tourist attraction, if Calgary keeps growing around it?

Luminescence at the Vancouver Aquarium

It’s been over a week, and I’m finally getting around to uploading my photos of the Vancouver Aquarium. I hadn’t been in… almost 5 years? Really? Damn. Well, it was high time I fixed that. The special exhibit was called “Luminescence,” and showcased what underwater critters look like under black light.

Turns out it wasn’t really one exhibit, but several, scattered all around, plus one very cool interactive display where you could make a swarm of jellyfish light up from a computer touch-screen.

In hindsight, I should have brought my regular camera with me. Though my new phone does better in low light conditions, it seems to be crap at focusing through glass. Also, the battery was draining way too fast. Which means I don’t have photographic evidence for the amazing discovery that scorpions totally luminesce! Really, under normal light, they’re this dark red-brown, but under black light they’re this weird soft blue colour.

The focus was on anemones, though. And holy cow are they pretty!

One of the Luminescence displays was an electric eel, which sadly didn’t light up anything unlike the one in Ottawa’s Sience and Tech Museum. It just sort of sat there at the bottom of its tank, not even zapping any prey or anything. Oh well.

The Aquarium doesn’t have just water-dwelling critters, though. The Amazon section has butterflies!

(With warnings to not let the butterflies out when we enter and leave.) And birds!

Back to the aquatic (or at least amphibian) beasts, we have frogs!

And penguins!

And if you’ve ever wondered what the underside of starfish looks like, well, wonder no more.

The Aquarium featured jellyfish both tiny and ghostly…

…and huge and sumptuous.

But you know what wins the prize for most memorable animal? The humble Dwarf Cuttlefish. I went to see it twice that day. The first time it was swimming among some rocks, too hard to see (plus, I think it’s got some kind of camouflage thing going on). The second time it was swimming right up to the glass, not trying to hide, but it kept drifting sideways, always angling up and to the left. Was that some kind of defense mechanism, trying to get higher than then big scary predator (ie: me)? Maybe. All I know is, on the only halfway good shot I managed to get, my damn phone just focused on the rocks in the background, leaving me with this weird blurry cuttlefish.

Then again, it’s kind of a pretty effect. I could tell people it’s engaging its cloaking device. Or that it’s really a Drakh cuttlefish. Anything’s possible with sci-fi!

(Except taking good pictures of otters, belugas or sharks. The former were too fast and hard to see, and the others just wouldn’t focus through glass or water. Yeah, next time I’ll bring a proper camera.)

Perspectives on golden fog

Thursday January 3rd, my second day back at work. The weather was cold but clear, with low fog that burned out by mid-morning. But as I walked along Bute to Georgia, I enjoyed the unusual feel, the romance of the fog… and then, Georgia Street.

I’d already noticed that, depending on the time of day, the morning sun shines straight up Georgia like downtown was Stonehenge or something. A cool effect usually, but with the fog… it was beyond gorgeous. I took a couple pictures with my handy new Android phone (almost better than I’d take with my Canon G10, and light-years ahead of my pokey old iPhone 3GS. But I digress).

Here’s the picture I took:

Later, I cropped it and set it as my Twitter and Facebook header, like so:

You’ll notice I tried a little clumsily to remove the traffic lights at the far right. The pedestrian walk signal wasn’t too hard, but the traffic signal just wouldn’t go away. I guess there was enough fog in the air, and the light was strong and/or omnidirectional enough that there was a bit of haze around it. I didn’t even notice this when I photoshopped it, and then it really bothered me for a while. It looked out of place in that composition, the only red patch in a sea of gold and black, but I couldn’t find any way to cleanly take it out, or tone down the colour. So, oh well, I guess it stays.

And then, a few days later, I started playing around with that picture again, trying for different compositions. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, that kind of thing doesn’t come naturally to me. Here’s what I came up with. First, a bit of cropping, and different aspect ratio. Still centred on the sun.

I like this one. The proportions of the buildings are more pleasing. Not exactly sure why; maybe it’s just because the crane is gone. Or, maybe it’s because the picture is more symmetrical. I think I would have preferred it to be completely symmetrical, with the sun shining exactly up Georgia… But hey, maybe complete symmetry would be boring! I don’t know. And maybe it doesn’t matter. You work with what you’ve got, am I right?

While we’re wishing, I would also have preferred not to have those overhanging traffic lights in the shot. Oh well. Next time I’ll wait for the light to be just right, or at least move to the east crosswalk so the traffic lights aren’t a problem.

Now here’s another composition, focusing on the dark buildings.

Basically I just wanted to follow the Rule of Thirds, with the sunrise being an obvious focus point. What was not obvious was that the building in the center would end up neatly dividing the picture vertically in thirds as well. Cool.

Letting my eyes do the thinking for me, I’m much more drawn to the line of cars still in the shade. This photo is much darker, which brings out their headlights. I kind of want to see movement, the cars emerging from the sun… maybe it needs different composition to really bring it out? If so, I just need to keep practicing.

And here’s a slightly different look, even more postcard-worthy, I think. This time I’ve eliminated the problem of traffic lights by cropping them out entirely.

But the moral of the story is: every photo has a story to tell, and the best part is that it’s a different story every time. And step by step I’m learning how to bring out these stories out of the places and things I see.

My nerdiness has grown up: thoughts on the Science and Technology Museum

I’ve been in Ottawa for the last 9 days visiting with my parents. Today we were supposed to drive to Montreal, see a couple of museums and have dinner with my brother, but a major snowstorm was moving in, and we decided to call it off. (Good thing, too, because Montreal was hit really hard and we would have had a horrible time.)

As a consolation, my dad and I decided to go to the Science and Technology Museum. I don’t think I’d been there since my teens, and jumped at the chance rediscover all the cool sciency stuff that had thrilled me as a budding nerd.

I’ve been in Ottawa for the last 9 days visiting with my parents. Yesterday we were supposed to drive to Montreal, see a couple of museums and have dinner with my brother, but a major snowstorm was moving in, and we decided to call it off. (Good thing, too, because Montreal was hit really hard and we would have had a horrible time.)

It was kind of disappointing, to be honest. Most of the old hands-on exhibits designed to teach little kids about science were gone. I remember one place where you could measure your hand-eye reaction time, another where you could create an electric arc between two poles, by cranking a handle over and over. And there was another big huge pendulum thing, filled with sand, swinging over a large circular space, and as it swung it traced its arcs on the floor below, back and forth, left and right. (There may have been more than one pendulum, too, though I wouldn’t swear to that). I think that last one was replaced by an interactive exhibit and quiz on Canada’s energy policies. Where the pendulum/pendula used to be, is now a big planet Earth. Where you could fill up swinging buckets with sand, are now four or five monitors where you can answer simple questions about renewable energy sources, your energy consumption, whether or not politicians, corporations or individual people should make the decisions about Canada’s energy future, and so on.

Still around, though: the Archimedes screw. Also still around: the gravity well simulator, where you could roll a little metal ball and watch it circle around the central hole as though it were actually orbiting it. They’ve got a similar device at Science World in Vancouver. But this one, in Ottawa, doesn’t use balls anymore (it used to, right? I think it did), instead using coins. And yes, coins do work pretty much as balls do—except loonies, their corners slow them way down—but that’s just weird. Did they run out of little balls at some point? Were toddlers swallowing the balls or something?

I didn’t actually use money, but I saw a family try it. I hope they were able to collect their money afterwards.

Other familiar stuff: the big locomotives. In my mind’s eye I kept seeing them as absolutely gigantic, five storeys high at least, instead of the 12–15 feet high they really are. We got to climb in the engine rooms and figure out what all the levers and gauges were for, and imagine what life must have been like for these men, zooming along at almost 100 miles an hour, only a couple tiny windows allowing you to see ahead, constantly having to monitor the health of this metal monster you’re riding, and shovelling coal in its maw…

Oh, and the Crazy Kitchen is still there. Always popular with the kiddies, even though back then I was too sensitive to motion sickness to really enjoy it. But that’s not so much of a problem these days, and, well… just like the locomotives, the kitchen is way smaller than I remember. I went through it in just a few seconds, and it never occurred to me to stay and enjoy the spatial distortion.

But here’s the thing: what if the museum had remained completely unchanged from the days of yore? And what if I found out the old games and exhibits weren’t quite as awesome as I remember? The Archimedes screw kept me amused for all of 10 seconds and a couple photos. The big locomotives were better, since I could read up on their history and enjoy them on more levels than as a kid.

Likewise, the new exhibits: on the Canadian space program, the cool science that came out of it; on cars, from the very oldest to the newest and coolest electric ones; on Canada’s energy use and resources, kind of didactic but overall very good; on communications, networks and connections, featuring old-timey phones, radios, computers and TVs (plus, interesting history and Canadian milestones); other interesting science instruments. All of that was very, very awesome and educational, and—nerdy and precocious as I was—I don’t think I could have appreciated what they had to offer when I was younger.

I realise now I was doing the museum a disservice by seeing it only through my nostalgia goggles, and not giving the new stuff a chance. Things change, and that’s okay. I’ve changed, and that’s more than okay. Nowadays I get to enjoy googling Anik satellites and lovely arithmometres (so deliciously Steampunk!), tagging Flickr photos and of course blogging about it. My nerdiness has grown up, that’s all.

On the way out I donated $5, all the cash I had on me. Though the museum doesn’t have the magic I remember, it has a different magic, and is still just as kick-ass as it ever was. Although, my biggest disappointment? The gift shop didn’t have the cool phrenology head that was on display alongside other 19th-century paraphernalia. Now that would have been a hell of a souvenir!

Imagine No Religion 2

It’s been more than a week since the Imagine No Religion 2 conference in Kamloops. I’d never been to Kamloops, and in fact had only ventured into the Interior a couple of times. So hey, this was a little closer to home than TAM, a lot of the local skeptical crowd would be there, why not go too? It’d be like a 2-day long Skeptics in the Pub.

May 18

Road trip! We left Vancouver in the late morning, and decided to take Highway 1 to Kamloops. Longer, but more scenic. We stopped for lunch in Hope, snapped some pictures, and moved on.

After that, it gets a little confusing. I took lots of pictures but for the most part I only have a vague idea of where I actually was. One stretch of Hwy 1 looks pretty much like another, and I had very few landmarks to guide me. Still, it was a great experience. How often do I get to see a semi-arid landscape like this? Don’t think I’d want to live there (I do like the green), especially with nothing but tiny-ass town for miles around, but it’s nice to visit.

And then we got to Kamloops. A pretty little town!!

There wasn’t much going on Friday night except a debate (not covered by conference fees, because it was open to the public). You know the drill: two atheists and two theologians debate the age-old question: does God/Gods exist? Actually, they only debated the Judeo-Christian God, with the same lame arguments you’d expect: Prime Mover, the fine-tuning argument, the argument from absolute moral values, atheism requires omniscience, if you consider the evidence with your heart you’ll see it, etc… All of them have been debunked, all of them show these theologians have never debated in front of a mainly skeptical audience. Not surprising, really. The other debaters, Matt Dillahunty and Christopher DiCarlo took them on and demolished their medieval arguments, though of course no minds were changed. Oh well.

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2010 was a good start

It’s been an interesting year, that’s for sure. A year of transitions and new beginnings. After being laid off in late 2009, I spent the first few months of 2010 trying to look for work, and not having much success. After a while I began to wonder if maybe there wasn’t another way to go about things. Tentatively I reached out to other freelance web designers, getting a feel for the industry, still unsure of what I really wanted to do, and what I was ready for.

Eventually, I landed a couple of small contracts, just enough to give me the confidence to continue. And I started a long-term contract at a small web development shop, doing interesting things with Magento and Drupal, and possibly other CMS’s down the line, exactly the kind of skills I want to develop. Plus, it’s a steady paycheck, which is nothing to sneeze at. But the difference with all the other steady paychecks I had in my career, is that this is something I really enjoy doing, and that I can see myself doing in the long-term. I’ve still got a lot to learn, both in technical skills and the freelancing life in general, I believe I’ve finally found my path.

Some other important firsts:

And they won’t be the last, that’s for sure.

What else? Well, there’s going in drag for the first (and probably last) time.

And here’s to 2011! Time to build on everything I’ve accomplished last year.

Vancouver WordCamp

So I’m finally blogging about WordCamp. I had a great time, met some cool people, and learned so much I almost needed an extra brain. Well, I had my iPhone, does that count? Now I just need to digest everything I’ve absorbed and apply it to my present and future projects.

It was such a beautiful day. I strolled down to Vanier Park via Burrard Bridge, unused to getting up so early on a Saturday, but not really minding, because the streets were peaceful and quiet. Then I got a little lost, because I wasn’t too clear on just where the Vancouver Museum was. Turns out, it’s attached to the Planetarium. Huh. How long has that been going on?

Socializing Your WordPress Blog

The first presentation was by Nadia Aly, showing various social media tools to add to your blog. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon, all these and more should be used to bring more readers in, and add value for your established readers.

Tweetmeme, a retweet button. Also shows how many times a post has been tweeted. Available as a WordPress plugin or standalone as a bit of Javascript code.
Facebook share. Same as above, but with Facebook.
Social Bookmarking Reloaded adds a series of graphical links to all kinds of social media sites, from Facebook to Delicious to… a whole bunch I’ve never heard of. Seriously, there are over 60 options.
Flickr Photo Album, a plugin that allows you to insert Flickr photo sets or individual photos in your posts
WP Followme adds a Twitter “Follow Me” badge to your blog
Facebook Like button plugin: exactly what it says on the tin
Twitoaster automatically tweets your posts as they’re published.

And that’s only the tools Nadia explicitly recommended, I’m sure there are a million more.

WordPress Dev Environments: MAMP and WAMP

Wouldn’t it be great if you could set up a WordPress install right on your own machine, to poke and tweak and experiment to your heart’s content, play with the most unstable beta builds without worrying about taking down your live site? John Biehler introduced us* to MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP), a completely self-contained environment separate from the existing Apache server on MacOS. Wish I’d known about this before; in the future I won’t have to set up a subdomain with a separate WordPress build to test new themes. Hey, live and learn.

(* Well, me, at least)

WordPress As CMS

A panel of three speakers (Cameron Cavers, Christine Rondeau and Dave Zille) discussed how WordPress can be used as a CMS, using some great examples of “non-WordPress-looking” sites. Here’s one. And here’s another. They argued that it’s even appropriate for small static sites, because though it may take a little more time to set up, updating becomes much easier. Plus, you’ve got things like the versioning process, to help clients not panick. With the coming of WordPress 3.0, with its custom post types and menuing system, CMS usage will become even easier, though still limited. For instance, there’s no built-in approval process, though there are kludgy workarounds (e.g.: conditional displays on certain custom fields, each one acting as a signoff).

Some interesting CMS-related plugins mentioned in this discussion:

Improved include page: lets you display multiple subpages on a template. Great for reusing snippets of text without mucking about with widgets!
Pagetree lets you view your pages in a tree structure, in the admin panel. Great if you have a complex page hierarchy!

Being Curious for a Living

Why ask why? Lauren Bacon argues that asking questions of your clients leads to better sites and loyal clients because you get to the meat of what they really need instead of what they think they want. You want a new widget? What purpose will it serve, exactly? How will this fit in your business strategy? WHY DO YOU WANT THIS NEW FEATURE? Answers like “Everybody’s doing it” are not acceptable.

Instead of writing from my notes, why don’t I link you to Lauren’s post on her own presentation?

Designing For WordPress

Colin Ligertwood is the speaker here (and I am just totally in love with his logo). Among other things, he coaches designers in working with WordPress. Unfortunately I didn’t take extensive notes for this talk; I think it’s because not a whole lot was new to me.

He advised designers to create our themes from scratch. The problem with adapting existing themes is that there may be unknown design issues, unnecessary features, or may not be appropriate to the content
Speaking of, content may be unpredictable, so we should design accordingly. Allow for both very short and very long posts
Keep navigation simple
The 960 grid system is really awesome, and I can vouch for it. I’ve already used it a bit for some quick prototyping.

WordPress and Drupal

WordPress is:
joyful, resourceful, quick

Drupal is:
flexible, dragon-slaying, comprehensive

Amye Scavarda comes to us all the way from Portland, to talk about how to decide between WordPress and Drupal for a given project. What sets Drupal apart from WordPress is that it’s so powerful. It is a sword, and if configured right it will slay any dragon you want; but use it wrong and it will cut you.

Will you need many different user roles? Are you building a large content-heavy multisite? What do user needs? How much training?

The dividing line between WordPress and Drupal is blurring just a tiny bit, though; with its new features, WP 3.0 is becoming a pretty robust CMS (as we’ve already seen). This cross-pollination is a good thing in the end. It shouldn’t be WordPress versus Drupal, both have different strengths and different niches.

Here are the slides for Amye’s talk

Parent-Child Themes And Frameworks in WP 3.0

The bottom line here, say Tris Hussey and Catherine Winters, is that WP 3.0 is an evolutionary, not revolutionary, update. Custom post types, just to pick one example, were around in 2.9, there just wasn’t any real front-end to manage them. Still you’ve got a lot of really neat stuff in this version, like custom menus and child themes.

Child themes are great. Tris gave a simple example of a child of Twenty Ten, the new default WordPress theme. All it took was one CSS file, consisting of two lines, in addition to a few bits to refer to the parent: one overriding the header graphic, and one to show a new font. Simple, but it got the point across. It looks like all you need in child themes is to add whatever styles (and templates? I’m not too clear on that) you want to override. Easy-peasy.

Get Found Easier: SEO Tips For WordPress

Tell you what, I’ll just link to Mark McLaren’s site, McBuzz.com. It’s got the slides for his talk. Bottom line, WordPress is already quite good at SEO, with its customisable permalinks, post description, etc… Of course, you have to choose good keywords (and figure out which keywords will actually lead people to your site), but WordPress can’t do everything, eh? There are other tools to help you along, such as:

Closing: Art and Technology are Old Pals

Goddamn, but Dave Olson is fucking hilarious. Oh, also smart and insightful. He took us on a roller-coaster ride through his past, mixing and matching metaphors with the greatest of ease, from the bottom of the Grand Canyon to Moab, Utah, from floppy disks to WordPerfect to CB radio to blogs. Art and technology together, open technologies and open data, people chatting with each other as equals, they’ve been around for a lot longer than I (for one) thought. And we, valiant WordPressers, are continuing that proud tradition.

WordCamp ended around 4:00, with a social on Granville Island at 6:00. How to kill a couple of hours? Well, first, I could explore the Museum of Vancouver. They were kind enough to give WordCamp attendees the run of the place for free, so I got to look at some fascinating exhibits on Vancouver’s history, and a bit about shoes. Kinda cool, but anyone who knows me would tell you I’m not one for fashion.

Then I went for a walk. The weather was still sunny and fine, so I moseyed along the seawall towards Charleston Park and Stamp’s Landing. Very pretty neighbourhoods, with a spectacular view—close to downtown, close to everything, lots of bike and pedestrian access, what’s not to like? If I’d had my camera I would have taken more pictures, but all I had was was my dying iPhone. Still, here’s something, mostly because it intrigued me:

Ironwork Passage & Foundry Quay

Now those are some weird street names for such a residential neighbourhood. But then I thought back to the history exhibit, especially this map right here (the museum had a colour version). Back in the day, this place, as well as Yaletown, were places of industry. Did you know there used to be a rail bridge linking downtown and what’s now Vanier Park? How things change. Nowadays, the only train you’ll see in Yaletown is the old locomotive in the Roundhouse.

Had another blast from the past in Stamp’s Landing, too, but that’ll have to wait for another day. It’s a much longer story, and not connected to WordCamp.

Now that the party’s over…

And, just like that, the 2010 ~~Spring~~ Winter Olympics are done.

Frankly, I’m not missing them. The choppers flying around day and night, the road closures, the crowds, the noise… It could have been worse, though. I could be living right next to one of the venues.

And, just like that, the 2010 ~~Spring~~ Winter Olympics are done.

And I realise I probably would have felt differently if I’d gotten more in the Olympic spirit. And don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed some of the events, but overall I wasn’t as flag-wavingly fanatical as some of my friends who put up a Canadian flag on their Facebook profile, or spent every hour of every day watching the events, and who are now all going on about Olympic withdrawal.

Here’s what I enjoyed: first, watching a friend of mine run with the Olympic torch.

Second, the opening ceremony, which I’ve already blogged about. It managed to stir some patriotic pride in me, which I hadn’t felt in a long time.

After that, I followed the events somewhat, though never live (I’ll say this for CTV, their dedicated Olympic site kicks a lot of ass. I did cheer for Alexandre Bilodeau, our first gold medalist of the season; I cheered and wept with Joannie Rochette; I high-fived strangers on the street whenever we won a medal, and sometimes when we didn’t. And on Sunday, though we were supposed to play volleyball, the director agreed to let us listen to the hockey game live on the radio. I totally didn’t mind. Go Canada!

What else? Well, I did the tourist thing in my own city, and checked out the mint and cauldron, and Vectorial Elevation, and the cauldron again. Swung by to visit a few of the houses (such as Maison du Québec and Place de la francophonie) but those places aren’t really touristy places to visit, they’re to hang out in and drink and watch the games.

Oh, and I went to see Laurie Anderson’s show Deluded. That was… pretty fucking surreal. Which I expected, of course, so it’s all good.

And… that’s about it, really. I caught part of the closing ceremony online; that wasn’t nearly as impressive as the opening ceremony. Besides the nice pomp and circumstance, and an Olympic anthem I could actually understand (and a Russian anthem that kicked so much fracking ass), there wasn’t much that really grabbed me. Michael J. Fox is made of awesome, as are William Shatner and Neil Young, but the rest? All those cutesy self-deprecating jokes? Meh. Also, John Furlong should never, ever try to speak French again. Ever. The live feed died about halfway through, and after a couple minutes’ trying I gave up.

Though I will tell you, my heartstrings were tugged at the end of Young’s Long May You Run, when the torch just… went out. And I though, Oh, wow, it’s really over.

Okay, I admit it. Part of me will miss the games. But you gotta move on, right? I just hope all our guests left with a good impression of Vancouver. And, congratulations to our Canadian athletes. First in gold and third in overall medal count? Awesome.

Night Lights

A few photos I took last night, as a friend and I went out on the town:

I wanted to see Maison du Québec, especially since I heard some Cirque du Soleil acrobats were there the night before. Nothing much was happening when we got there (6:00 — 7:00) so we wandered around Ontario House and Hockey House and a couple of other houses, swung by Robson Square, watched some foreign dancers for a bit and listened to the screams of people going by on the zipline above.

Off to Sunset Beach to check out the lights (I meant to go back with a tripod. My camera dealt with low lights very well, but the pics were still a little blurry). I tried to experiment with taking different exposures of the Burrard Bridge to play with HDR photography, but all photos ended up more or less the same. Damn. I’m not sure what I was doing wrong. Oh well, it’ll still be there tomorrow.

Then cutting right across downtown again to check out the Olympic Cauldron. Which I’ve never seen at night. Bowing to popular pressure, the powers that be did cut a little band in the surrounding fence at about eye height, so people could at least stick their cameras in and take proper pictures. I don’t know, I understand about security and safety, but surely there were better alternatives than some dreary chain-link fence?

I don’t remember if it was near Robson Square or the Art Gallery that we saw this little structure that smelled of delicious cedar. Mmm. Was that Haida Gwaii House? I’ll have to go back and check.

Next on the list: Granville Island attractions. Maritime House and Place de la Francophonie, anyone?