B. Mann Consulting

Buzz Bishop put a request for cloud computing experts. I'm not exactly an expert, but it is something that I've been looking into more deeply lately (see my cloud links on del.icio.us). And, of course, I'm advising TrevorO's startup, Layerboom, through Bootup Labs.

Anyway, I ended up writing a fairly lengthy set of answers to questions that Buzz sent across, some of which made their way into his article in today's 24 Hours -- Head in the Clouds. Thanks for the opportunity, Buzz!

Yes, I'm getting involved in yet-another-event. I was overjoyed when I heard that Lori Pike had made the jump out of tech and into a great marketing position with Mission Hill. I mumbled something about a WineCamp, a similar-but-different* event that started down in San Francisco / Napa Valley.

Lori took the idea, went off and got approval, and then came back and called me on actually helping organize this thing. A bunch more volunteer organizers were called out, meetings were had, and now, we bring you ... VinoCamp! Here's the blurb:

This is definitely not the wine festival. In a more unstructured form than a standard conference, VinoCampVancouver brings wine, people and technology together in one place, making wine accessible, educational and fun. As a different type of conference, VinoCamp is designed for those interested in technology and wine, and people are expected to take photos of what's happening, and to blog or tweet or message about their experiences.

Join us! Whether you're speaker, sponsor, or a wine-drinker, our aim is to make this day memorable, fun, and interesting. You will learn more about wine and viticulture, meet interesting people, and enjoy yourself in one of Vancouver's loveliest gardens.

It's a full day (approx. 10-4) and is being held on August 16th at UBC Botanical Garden. We're expecting about 125 people. Registration is open now, and tickets are $50 for the full day event (t-shirt, lunch, wine, and food pairings included) please head on over to Eventbrite to register now. I fully expect this to sell out as we push out the word this week, so get your tickets soon.

We're also looking for sponsors and speakers.

Thanks to launch sponsors Redwerks for helping put together the website with their Kommonwealth tool, and to Artisan Wine Company for being the wine sponsor.

And, of course, a tip of the corkscrew in the general direction of my co-organizers: Degan, Tanya, Colleen, Megan, Cyprien and Lauren (yes there are some Northern Voice co-conspirators in that list).

* For the record, the WineCamp one liner description is "an ad-hoc gathering that brings together the best of the old world and the new... wine, non-profits and geeks!" -- connecting non-profits with technologists over wine. A great goal, but we really were interested in reaching out to wine and food enthusiasts and skip technology all together -- aside

Rachael is participating in the Camp Moomba Yogathon this Saturday at Thunderbird Stadium. She's look for a few more sponsor donations to reach her goal. As you can see from the picture at left...you won't like her when she's angry, so please donate. I don't want to have to show you my bruises...

What's a yogathon and what is this for? Rachael blogged the 4 day countdown, where she explains:

The yogathon means a 108 minute long session of yoga for the thousands of people who participate. The funds raised through the event go towards sending children whose lives have been affected by HIV/AIDS to Camp Moomba, to give them a chance at a normal summer of fun. This will be my third time participating, and it’s something I look forward to taking part in every summer if I can. Last year we did the yogathon in heavy rain, which was not something I was expecting to enjoy as much as I did.

So there you go. I've done a short yoga session all about once, so I won't be yogathoning. I'm not sure what the support team does at these events. Eat hemp ice cream at the blissfest, I expect.

And, of course, once again my personal life and Drupal community collide: the Ghost Brothers are playing music at the yogathon, and I got given one of their CDs from Chris Bryant of Gravitek Labs. Ha! And that new email I just got was a Facebook notification from Chris letting me know that the Ghost Brothers are playing with DNA6 on July 24th. Small world...

Well, contrary to the lack of posting here, I actually have a ton of stuff tumbling around my head right now. And so, an Omnibus post that covers a couple of different items.

I've been heads down busy and haven't been attending (or organizing!) any social media type events lately. I did get out Wednesday night to attend the Freshbooks / Redwerks BBQ. Look, there's me holding a puppy (photo by Ianiv)! It was a beautiful sunny evening and the Redwerks rooftop patio is awesome. I ended up manning the grill, my secret ploy to meet everyone (at least, everyone that was hungry). It was nice to meet some new people and catch up with a bunch of regulars.

I'm trying Jungle Disk for my personal backup. In short, it's a cross platform app that both serves as a kind of iDisk as well as some simple backup operations, except that your data is actually stored on Amazon's S3 service. You pay a one time license for the application (and you can install it on as many computers as you want), and you pay as you go for storage. And can get your files from any machine.

I'm currently backing up my Documents folder to a Backup area, and then I also have a second "bucket" (that's actually Amazon tech talk, but it makes sense) that is a true archive -- I copy old stuff there and delete if off my local disk. I'm still debating whether it's worth it for me to put my entire iTunes collection online -- it would solve being able to get my music from anywhere, and it would cost about $12 / month (for 60GB). Not sure what the calculation is for streaming that music some of the time? And yes, this is like MP3 Tunes music locker.

So that's my use, but Jungle Disk *also* launched the WorkGroup edition -- which is the same thing, but lets multiple users in a company use it from a single Amazon account, with things like their own storage space as well as granular user permissions. So you can have a Finance folder that only senior management can access. And if you don't have senior management, then just think about how great it would be to have a small business shared file system that you can access from any computer, anywhere. That's $2/month per employee, which I think is a good price.

WordPress! I've been mucking about in WordPress core and theme code. Once was with Rachael's site, which I upgraded using the FTP dance. I really hate not having command line access.... The second was for the Bootup Labs Blog, which I moved off of WordPress.com so we could add some more plugins and do stuff like have a feed for every category / tag. Except, when I went digging around, it seems that the main feed is the only one that is ever injected into the link rel header. So, here's my feature request if you're interested in the gory details: http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7190 -- heck, I might even submit a patch :P

Well, before I knew it, DrupalCamp Vancouver has snuck up on me. I mean it when I say it snuck up on me: I had pretty much zero to do with organizing it -- massive kudos have to go to Dave Olson, Dale McGladdery, and Ariane K (I know there are others, like the guys from Image X Media and jkparker on kick off party duty and and and...).

DrupalCamp Vancouver is this Friday and Saturday, May 9th and 10th, with a kick off party on Thursday night. As with all Drupal events, it's sold out (how are we ever going to fix this? more training!), and it looks like a great group of people are going to be gathering.

I spent this morning with Dale and Ariane reviewing the session submissions. We have a nice mix of newcomer, developer, and soft topics, as well as 2+ double sessions: one on organic groups, and one on design and theming. I say "2+" because we tried to schedule the talks so they "fit" together nicely -- like the back to back views + arguments segueing into panels 2, or the intro to module development that then continues with forms API advanced development. The sessions are up -- but the presenters are still "in progress" of being contacted.

I'll be doing a talk on install profiles with a couple of co-presenters, and leading a close out session on Drupal 6 and beyond. Frankly, I'm more than a little worried about Drupal 6, while at the same time so looking forward to Drupal 7, testing frameworks, and more RDF. It will be interesting to see how the discussion goes.

There are lots of talks to look forward to (I know lots of people have been asking about an intro to SVN). I've got my eye on the infamous heyrocker -- he's coming up to talk about the gnarly issue of staging Drupal between servers. It would be great if we could pool our solutions and get to more *code* in this area. I think drush is likely the proper building block.

Again, thanks so much to the organizing team that pulled this together: we're lucky to have such a great group of motivated people.

If you are missing DrupalCamp here in Vancouver, the next two I know of are DrupalCamp Toronto May 23rd - 24th and DrupalCamp Seattle June 26th - 27th.

First up, I'm going to do the call out of upcoming Vancouver events:

• Wednesday, April 30th (tonight!) is WordPress Camp, put on by the folks at Tazzu - I've got Dad night every other Wednesday so I won't be making it this time. Maybe someone should set up a Vancouver WordPress Users Group and do this regularly? VanWUG!
• May 9th and 10th is DrupalCamp Vancouver - I'll be talking about install profiles and likely a "getting started with Drupal" talk where I go through all the core modules; more on this in a full post
• early June date TBD DemoCampVancouver07 - back to the "regular" format of 30 second pitches and voting on stage for full talks; maybe we'll do this right after the F&F event

Check Miss 604 for another recent event round up.

In general, I'll mostly be doing full descriptions of events that I'm hosting / help organize around startups will be over at the Bootup Labs blog. Coming soon there is a Vancouver Founders and Funders in June after the Toronto event.

OK, on to the topic of "one calendar". Or rather, a consolidated calendar. There really are a lot of events going on in Vancouver, and it's hard to schedule new ones, it's hard to get a central overview of them, and it's hard / annoying to cross post Upcoming / Facebook / wikis / etc. Several people coming to DemoCampVancouver have said something along the lines of "I'm new in town, how do I find out about more events". Answers like "read these 10 peoples' blogs isn't really a solution.

I had lunch with Rob Lewis from TechVibes the other week. TechVibes continues to work on re-vamping their site (they'll be going through a major re-tooling over the summer) and we came around to the subject of events.

TechVibes has an events calendar, but it's painful. Yeah, they know it :P We talked about adding value there, specifically getting the community involved and providing something of value that the wider community could get involved with and rally around (e.g. not a TechVibes direct "property" per se).

I came up with two concepts.

One is for TechVibes to enable cross posting from TechVibes to Upcoming and other sites (Facebook? can anything post an event to Facebook using the API?). Post in one spot, get cross posting goodness "for free", which sounds like a good reason to post to TechVibes for those of us organizing and promoting events.

In general, I'm a fan of Upcoming. As Brendon said, it's great to use in San Francisco, since it's got full coverage of everything from tech events to arts. Here in Vancouver, coverage is a little spotty. I try and enter everything there because it is on the public web with a permalink (as opposed to Facebook...).

The second concept is around TechCouver. Buzz Bishop is leading the media charge to make this another Vancouver nickname - and that's great. So let's make TechCouver a local aggregator of tech-related blog posts and events.

The map is great as well, and we could use both. Basically, have tech companies and bloggers enter a listing for themselves including an RSS feed. We aggregate all the feeds, and run our own TechMeme for Vancouver. Well, minus the secret algorithm -- I'd like to do voting so we can see "best of" posts as well as the "river of news" of recent stuff.

So, one central spot for tech related postings and events, one central spot we can direct people to, to find out what's happening in TechCouver.

What do you think? Is this interesting? Useful to you? Would you visit it? Would you subscribe to it and/or use the OPML file it would generate? Let's use this TechCouver wiki page to discuss features and such, or comment here.

Just as spring is hitting the east coast, Mother Nature decides to play a trick on us here in Vancouver. I heard that this has been the coldest spring since sometime in the 1950s. This morning the snow is on hedges and building roofs, but has essentially all melted from the ground. But still...

To put this in perspective for how wacky the weather has been, last weekend was spent wearing short sleeved shirts, getting a sunburn on my nose, and finding a place to stop for popsicles. Check out my Pitt Lake set on Flickr to see more.

And now some quotes to think about:

James Russell Lowell - "Fate loves the fearless."

Free Will Astrology (Pisces, April 17th, 2008) - "If you don't articulate your conscious desires, your unconscious patterns will come true."

I hope your spring is going well, wherever in the world you are.

Last night I ended up staying at the Strutta offices until the wee hours of the morning, cheering the team on as they worked towards their launch today.

I worked with Jordan Behan to do a fun spoof of Michael Arrington (and yes, Strutta got a TechCrunch posting) -- I did the Fox news guy voice over. The posting from Jordan is, of course, meant to kick off a competition for the best Michael Arrington impression. Personally, I think someone should get out the sock puppets... :P

We actually ended up dragging Kevin Marks back to the Strutta HQ, in town for Open Web Vancouver. It was great catching up with him in his new role as Developer Advocate at Google -- oh, and a kick ass paper airplane folder, so I expect him and his sons to compete in the Strutta best paper airplane round. Kevin, you wanted me to complain about Google's messed up identity system -- I did this last January and some pieces are better, but the big thing is that I can't use any of my Google Apps for Domains accounts to sign into Google Groups. Since I don't want to use my personal Gmail account to be on random mailing list, this seriously hampers me pretty much every single day. Please fix :P

Congrats to the Strutta team, I know you've got some Beta Bug-lets, but looks like people are having a lot of fun. We've been amusing ourselves flipping the little Flash widgets back and forth -- there are lots of nice touches like this all over the site.

P.S. Yes, it's Drupal. And, oh, look it's multi-lingual: I predict many more interesting multi-lingual sites as people focus beyond North America.

Have I mentioned that most of these startup / tech events I'm posting full details on at the Bootup Labs blog? For now, you'll have to suffer the cross posting:

• April 3rd: DemoCampVictoria01, with Mark Lise posting a buzz summary on his blog -- anyone else heading over to Victoria for this?
• April 10th: DemoCampVancouver06, a full posting including speaker details over on BUL
• April 14th - 15th: Open Web Vancouver, a great new event put on mainly by the Vancouver PHP crew that is expanding to cover the entire "open" web.

A bit of an embarrassment of riches, really. We've got lots of great tech related events happening here in Vancouver, and more to come.

Update: oh, yeah, and of course Bridging Media is this coming weekend, March 29th, but I think they may already be full (I'm speaking).

I just wrapped up my presentation at the CCI2008. Here's the slideshare for it:

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A much longer post is up at Raincity Studios.

See you all on the other side of the weekend, I'm going completely offline...