Another month, another Vancouver Bloggers Meetup. This time we were at Shenanigans on Robson (by Bute).
The venue started out pretty ideal: Lots of space, very quiet background music. It stayed roomy, but got crazy loud quite early. Drinks were expensive, service was a bit slow, and what I saw of the food they served made me postpone my dinner. Shenanigans were lucky that John Chow wasn’t with us; he’s been critical of the pub foods we’ve gotten at The End Cafe and other places, I think he would’ve raised a storm about last night’s food.
The people
- Rob Jones from The Delete Bin (twitter), BuildDirect (twitter) and Watch Us Wreck a Floor (Update 2010.03.08: Changed the floor wrecking link at Rob’s request)
- Me from A Great Dane in Vancouver (twitter)
- Barbara Westly from Tips for Entrepreneurs (twitter)
- Raul Pacheco from HummingBird604, the organizer of our meetup (twitter)
- Pete Quily from Adult ADD Strengths (twitter) and ADD Coach4U
- Karen Hamilton from Tiny Bites (twitter) and KarenHamilton.ca
- Lorraine aka Raincoaster (twitter)
- Airdrie Miller from Lipgloss And Laptops (twitter)
- Shane Gibson from Closing Bigger and Knowledge Brokers International (twitter)
- Chris Mathieson from Vancouver Police Museum (twitter)
- Cathy Browne (twitter)
- Sheree Morgan from Match-Works Matchmaking (twitter)
- Jen Wiederick from WorldWideWaterCooler (twitter)
- Larry Yatkowsky (main site, blog) (twitter)
- J. Karen Parker (twitter)
- Gus Fosarolli from Gus Digital (twitter)
- Jeff Swan from Start-Up Pains (twitter)
- Tanya Davis aka NetChick from This Chick’s Life (twitter) and her business Netstudio (which is still under construction)
- Rebecca Bollwitt from Miss604.com (twitter)
- Rodger Levesque from Not Left To Chance (twitter)
- Ganga Narayanan from Story Analytics (twitter)
- Erika Rathje from Thirteen Cent Pinball
- Colleen Coplick from Miss Manifesto (twitter)
- Diane Thompson from Global Peasant (twitter)
- Gillian Shaw from the Vancouver Sun’s Digital Life column (twitter)
- Simon Seah from The Fantasy Art Blog (twitter) and The Fantasy Art of Computer Games
- David Morton from The Inspiratorium (twitter)
- Colin Armstrong from Vancouver Moose (twitter)
- Amoura Rose
- Bonnie Sainsbury from Connecting the Dots (twitter)
Absent friends
- Two fellow Vancouver bloggers were apparently waiting for us in the wrong location (?)
- David Drucker from LoudMurmurs.com (twitter) and Drucker.ca
- Jonathon Narvey from Currents (twitter)
- Nancy Zimmerman from Moneycoach (twitter) was “Regretfully in Absentia” in the arctic North
Some of the topics that came up when I was around
- Barbara Westly told us that Microsoft Canada is doing a PR push to techies in Vancouver this week about Windows 7 with presentations of the new operating system and its new features, even holding install parties where Microsoft staff will help you install the current beta on your own hardware, etc.
- Sheree pumped Rebecca for social media tips. Rebecca mentioned that she had recorded some videos about using Twitter for business. I think it’s these two quick tips videos: Part 1 and Part 2. Nope, it was this one: Twitter for Business, run time 22 minutes.
- I told Larry about the low opinion of realtors in Denmark; he countered by having a low opinion of Danes, what with them coming from such a small country and eating pickled herrings! Larry and I always have fun.
- Even when companies pay you good money for advice, they often don’t take it. Sounds like when people buy the services of personal trainers.
- When (like me) you sometimes write technical tips on your blog, which audience do you aim for? Would you expect super techies to be bored of writing basic techie tips? Or do you go for audience size, i.e. aim for the beginner or the intermediate level because there may be more readers there? I usually like to make a difference when I give tech advice, or at least feel like I do. A couple of the technical tips hints I’ve posted have received dozens of comments thanking me for the information. In those cases I made the posts to document a solution I found to a problem I experienced. I just thought that if I had the problem, maybe others did too. I’ve also written technical articles that try to clear up common misconceptions or misunderstandings that I encounter. I’m not sure how to measure impact or the level of satisfaction I get from writing it — but it’s definitely cool to get appreciative comments, and it’s also cool when I findan old blog post that I’d forgotten about and see that it’s well written and still useful.
- Airdrie arrived late after helping her daughter study for a 5th grade math test (fractions). Is it a new phenomenon that parents help their kids with their homework, or is it a cultural thing (North America versus Europe), or an individual thing (independent kids not wanting help), or…?
- Shane Gibson is writing a new book with Stephen Jagger from Ubertor. The book’s title is Sociable! and its website is still a parked domain. Tsk tsk, guys.
- David Morton is an ESL teacher at Global Village English, and he’s interested in immigrants’ stories of how they learned English. I told him I learned English in school in Denmark.
- We got off track before I could tell him that I also learned a lot from self-study. I got far ahead of the other students and was quite bored much of the time. And in our highschool exams I got a better grade in “English” than our American guest student and our Irish guest student. 🙂
- My mother has told me that when I was about 12 years old, I declared that when I grew up, I wanted to live somewhere nice and warm. Toward that goal, I wanted to get good at English and work with something that I could use internationally. Voil? : Software design in Vancouver. 🙂
- Ganga Narayanan is the third Vancouver Telus blogger I know. The other two are Matt Musselman from Onomatopoeia (twitter) and Keith Murray (twitter). Talking with Ganga reminded me of my old friend and colleague Ram that I worked with at Aalborg University in Denmark.
- When Jeff Swan wanted to leave to go home and take care of his sick girlfriend, we got into a really interesting discussion that delayed him another 20 minutes. Sorry, Lexie!
- Jeff already posted about the meetup, as did Raul.
- The ever-green topic of anonymous blogging almost came up again, this time in a more mature twist. One of the participants said they’d like to scale back their online recognizability — or at least manage different aspects of their online persona differently. Maybe put some activities under a pseudonym and keep others under their real name. This particular blogger had received a hint from their employer that customers were looking up staff online
- I just read on Danish news sites this week that some police officers from my old home town had been advised to moderate their online expression after someone documented that several police officers who had taken part in police actions against left-wing demonstrations were members of a Facebook group that called for a local left-wing hangout to be closed. Their membership of the group wasn’t illegal or against any internal rules, just one expression of their individual freedom of expression; on the other hand it did make explicit that these guys had strong personal opinions about some of the people they’re dealing with on the job, and it could give the impression that sometimes they weren’t “just doing their job”, but maybe acting out some of their personal political views? Grey moral territory.
- The Meetup came to a natural end when very loud and quite horrible Karaoke began — at that point the became VanTechKaraoke and I escaped.
If you were there on Wednesday, please leave a comment with some of the topics you discussed. Also, if any of the information above (names, blog URLs) is incorrect, please let me now.
And if you think all this sounds like a lot of fun and you want to join us next time we have a Vancouver Blogger Meetup, join our group on Meetup.com. It’s free to join the group, and going to the meetups is also free, at least when Raul forgets to collect the usual $1 or $2 from each participant at the meetup.
April 10, 2009 at 1:23
Thanks for this, Jan. As usual, I can always rely on you to record our meetings. You are awesome, my friend. You really are.
April 10, 2009 at 9:12
Thanks for the convo Jan. Of course, Lexie appreciated your apology 😛 See you at the next event!
April 10, 2009 at 12:15
Hey Jan… Thanks for the write-up! It was great to see you!
Couple of quick notes: I’ve migrated my blog to .net (last year) to become more mainstream. And, NetStudio is actually been running for over 12 years, and I’m currently rebranding and accepting new clients again. 🙂 Thanks for the mention!
Additional topics I was a part of:
— congratulating Colleen on her brand new position
— discussing the drink prices
— talking about my new car (I’m still excited about it)
— yacking with most bloggers about why they blog and how they gain readership
April 10, 2009 at 13:54
Cheers for taking all those notes, and for the links too. It was great to chat with you, and I know I have a lot to learn about the wonders of Denmark. Thanks for the tip on how not to pronounce Copenhagen. 🙂
Cheers!
Rob.
April 10, 2009 at 14:07
Well, how can you come back from “You eat pickled herring?” You do!
And you missed my big announcement: as of May 2nd, Kris Krug will be teaching for http://raincoastermedia.com
April 10, 2009 at 14:20
Jan, next time I’m bringing a quart of roll-mops with me. You bring the Harvarti. At least that way we can share a meal together and not have to rely on the restaurant. :>))
April 10, 2009 at 14:37
Hey, I know Ganga — didn’t know he was a blogger though. Too bad I missed him!
April 11, 2009 at 10:33
Excellent recap, Jan! Had a great time meeting everyone! Talking to you and David about stories of us immigrants gave me an idea for a blog post! Hmm… Now I just need to get off this “blogger’s block”!
Matt – Didn’t know you were a blogger either, until I saw your name in the meetup list! I’m just getting my feet wet in blogging myself. Look forward to meeting you in the meetup next time and talking about something other than our BT projects! 😉
April 12, 2009 at 0:35
Thanks (or should I say, tak) for taking such detailed notes, Jan! It was great to meet you. I wish we’d had more time to chat — I had to run like hell to just barely make the bus! — but I’m sure we’ll get a chance at the next one.
Topics in my vicinity included design, food issues, the tar sands, hybrid cars, and various other sustainability topics. Nice to have such diversity. Cheers!
April 29, 2009 at 12:04
Jan, you kill me! Love the comment about you getting a better grade in English than I did!!!!! Of course you did – it was all translation and I didn’t know a word of Danish when I got there only months earlier. Good to see you are still as big a bag of wind as ever and putting it to great use 😉 Might just be worth following your blog from now on. Get in touch someday and come visit if you ever make it to California where it is MUCH warmer (at least in summer) than DK!
– From a former (Danish) classmate from the USofA
(Sharon Lobbes)
April 29, 2009 at 13:32
Hi Sharon, loooong time no see! 20+ years(!)
Nice try with the exam excuse there, but no go. I was talking about the English oral exam, not the year grade. The exam had two texts: An extemporaneous text (a short story in English) and a chapter from one of the texts we’d read that year. We had to read out loud from the short story and then discuss the chapter. There were no translations in the exam, no Danish, it was all English all the time.
Your move! 🙂
About the weather, yeah, I know. I’ve already upgraded considerably weather-wise by moving from Denmark to Vancouver (the winters here are very mild compared to DK), but California would be better still for sure.
April 29, 2009 at 15:22
I didn’t take the oral exam. I only took the part where they discussed something about military service and I had never seen any of the Danish words, so had no idea how to translate any of that. I couldn’t remember much English when I returned, however. That was an experience!
Besides, once I got back State-side I didn’t get credit for my Danish as a foreign language, (I had to take Russian at the community college to get into University)and I didn’t get credit for taking the English class, either! Nevermind that my parents decided to move 2000 miles from my hometown to a State and City I had never visited.
Still, it’s great to know y’all still exist and even remember I ever existed for a brief period in your youth. Can’t wait to get reacquainted.
April 30, 2009 at 20:20
Very peculiar how different our experiences were. Good thing it’s not important anymore. 🙂
And a bummer that you didn’t get credit for the languages. At least you had a jump on the Russian classes.
And yes, we all still exist. I see you’re reconnecting with everybody on Facebook, that’s great.