Travels – Page 14

Apr 04 2011

Blogcamp Yellowknife

This past weekend I attended the first Yellowknife Blogcamp, like I mentioned earlier. It was a fun and informative afternoon. It was good to catch up with old friends and to meet new people from different walks of life.

blogcamp yellowknife

I’ll do my best here to recall the events of the camp. Once we were all settled David Maguire to the stage first, figuratively of course, and spoke about design and usability. Actually a lot of what he talked about was very informative and much like what I was hearing a lot about while at Drupalcon.

design

As soon as David wrapped up Liz Hargreaves started speaking about Adobe Kuler, which is a very neat tool. I think there is a lot more to it than I even understand, but what I gather is it helps collect colours. It will show all the colours of a photo, but will help you figure out what colours go together.

liz

From there we move on to Taylor Moore who has some pretty amazing stories I’m sure. He shared with us what it is like being a Game Developer and his journey of developing a children’s game that helps teach language. The final thing he showed us was a free online game like Rock Band or Guitar Hero, called iRok2. The idea is a user chooses music video from a site like YouTube and then by either keyboard or controller they play the game. Everyone should try it.

To end off the day Nancy and myself got into the real blogging/social media topics. I started off by talking about how being social got me to where I am today, that being a very social media oriented job in Northern BC. One thing I liked doing was to only get the conversation going and to see how it unfolded around the room. So on the flip side Nancy took hold of the conversation and questioned how being social and blogging could be a negative for our lives and impact our jobs or futures.

Nancy

The afternoon was great and really reminded me of a Bird of a Feather session at Drupalcon. I hope to be able to attend another one in the future.

Apr 02 2011

I ride the bus in Yellowknife

Riding the bus in Yellowknife is something I actually enjoy now, but it hasn’t always been that way. When I was in school I feared the bus.

When I was in middle school and high school I refused to take the bus into town. I would be riding with all the other students who were on it, it would be packed, people everywhere. I just did like that. That being I would ride it when when it wan’t 8:05am or 3:50pm. So it wasn’t that I didn’t like the bus, it was more I didn’t like a large amount of people crammed into a small space. I would do horribly if I tried to commute in New York.

Nowadays, every time I am in town I ride it, mostly because I fly back and don’t normally have a vehicle. It is peaceful for me in a strange way. I don’t have to worry about driving, I always ride it when it is empty, I can just do what I want.

Downtown Yellowknife

Actually one of the things i have always wanted to do, is conduct interviews on the bus. The bus gets through town and back in about 30 mins, so it would be perfect to either do an audio interview or even video. It was add a good backdrop or background noise. Obviously I have yet to get to that point of actually doing it.

Yellowknife bus

When I’m heading downtown my route consists of going from Finlayson Dr to Woolgar Ave to Northlands Trailer Park and finally onto Franklin Ave into downtown.

Yellowknife Bus Hospital

Yellowknife bus hospital

I must say I do really enjoy Yellowknife’s Public Transit now, which for me is such an odd things having been so against it as a kid and also so determined to have my own mode of transportation.

Road Yellowknife Bus

Do you ride the bus in your town?

Mar 31 2011

I’m on a plane, again!

Alright here I am on a plane again less than a month since the last time I traveled. Man I seem to be getting around these day. This time I’m headed to Yellowknife, but let’s back that up for a second.

My first flight was out of Grande Prairie and originally I was going to get up really early in Fort St John and drive to Grande Prairie, but then the Twitter Folk of #GPAB planned a Tweetup the night before so I decided I wanted to attended. Then that plan went from just me going to Andrew and Brent going as well. So we left early in the day and spent perusing Grande Prairie.

The Tweetup was a good turn out I think, about 15 people in attendance at Original Joes. I have some photos, but they are still on my iPhone.

So then after a night of waking every hour in the Motel6 and feeling sick this morning, I’m in the row with the emergency exit on the plane with no one beside me.

Once I land in Calgary I will have a hour and a half layover before I jump on another Air Canada flight to Yellowknife. As an added bonus, I’m feeling better after I got some Ginger ale in me.

Mar 16 2011

Crazy Night in Chicago

Friday night in Chicago went from new and interesting to crazy and exciting. Drupalcon was finished and we were just enjoying ourselves at this point.

We left the Hotel looking for a couple of taxis to take us to our restaurant and ended up taking a limo around Chicago for a good 20 minutes. We ended our ride at Lou Malnati’s where we had to wait 30 minutes for a table. We walked up the street to some fancy looking bar, where Dayan accidentally ordered a $20 bottle of beer she had to finish before going to Lou’s. Once we got to the restaurant we had amazing pizza and Andrew had his incident which ended up getting us a free meal.

After supper we took yet another taxi ride to the John Hancock Tower. At the tower, on the 96th floor is a rather Ritzy feeling bar. It was packed. Windows and people everywhere. Oddly enough because we were a group of seven we got seated rather quickly. We weren’t up the tower very long before taking the roller coaster of an elevator back down to ground level.

It was an odd evening. One I don’t think I will forget anytime soon.

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For some reason not all of the photos are showing, so head to Flickr to see them all.

Mar 15 2011

REVIEW: Free Supper at Lou Malnati’s Pizza

Okay I’m back on Fort St John now, so I suppose I really should catch up on all the blog posts I wanted to do on my trip to Chicago. I figure a good way to continue posts about Chicago I should tell you about Lou Malnati’s.

Lou Malnati’s is a famous Chicago Deep Dish Pizzeria. The pizza is like no other. A thick 2″ tall crust, cheese underneath pizza sauce and all the ingredients. It is almost impossible to eat by hand it is so hardy.

The atmosphere of the place is great, so was the service. You could see the history on the walls and in the staff.

What makes our story of Lou Malnati’s so special was the fact we ended up with a free meal, which we can thank Andrew for once again. While our waitress was serving us our drinks her tray lost balance and tipped towards a wall behind Andrew. So Andrew reacting to the falling glasses reached out to prevent them from falling further, unfortunately one of the glasses had broken before hand and sliced one of Andrews fingers. There was blood, but it didn’t seems all that bad. Martin and Andrew disappeared to bandage him up. You could instantly tell the restuarant was very sorry about it and did everything they could to accomidate us.

We ended up with a completely free meal with dessert. Thanks Andrew.

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See all the photo from Lou Malnati’s on Flickr.