B. Mann Consulting

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...

As I signed up for the umpteenth web service ever (g.ho.st, if you must know), I was thinking about the username I was entering.

Once upon a time, I used 'bmann' exclusively. What's the story? Well, at the University of Victoria, where I went to school, all students had a nice UNIX-y login that was first initial plus first 6 letters of the last name. Mine was nicely recognizable, and really, when you have a first name like Boris, something like "bee-mann" is nice and simple. And sometimes people even call you that. Personally, I liked my friend Mike Kerfoot's username: 'mkerfoo'.

I continued to use 'bmann', but as this whole Internet thing took off, it was often already taken. There must be some Brian Mann's or other such more normal combinations out there scooping my username. So for a while I went with an underscore, and so I have a Yahoo and Hotmail account that are both 'boris_mann'.

Then, as I began to be more heavily involved in online apps, I suddenly realized I might get a chance at just plain old 'boris'. As it turns out, I had a fierce competitor ... whose name only kinda was actually Boris. I'm talking about Montreal-based Bopuc aka Boris Anthony, of course. Since he's a friend of Joi Ito, Bopuc got all the cool 'boris' usernames. I was happy to finally meet him by chance in San Francisco this year.

But then, at some point, I managed to pull ahead! I was getting 'boris'! I think it was my Flickr account where I realized that I could be shooting for the coveted first name only username (it probably helped that they were in my backyard here in Vancouver and that Roland got me in on the first couple of hundred users). I mean, I'm not the number one Matt, but maybe...

These days, here is the order in which I try to get usernames:

• boris
• bmann
• borismann

What's your username? What's its story?

Update: Yowza! Lots of awesome posts in the comments. So far Jeff wins for widest variety -- Jeff / Dingo / henshaj / jeff.henshaw / jeff_henshaw. I didn't mention username / domain name grabs. I think there might be some .ca variations that I could get (and I should really ditch bmannconsulting since it isn't really a consulting website anymore. I aspire to some friendly Icelanders helping me get bor.is ...

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.

Easter 2008, originally uploaded by Anne_M.

I had a great time on Bowen over the weekend. Lori and Todd came over from Victoria and picked me up on Friday and we went over together. A nice hike over to Cape Roger Curtis (set) and cooking and relaxing were the orders of the day.

On Sunday, Lori and Todd headed back so that their cat Fritz wouldn't get lonely, and I welcomed the next crew from the mainland: Suzie, Travis, and Rachael.

We set to work blowing out eggs (yep, it's as gross as it sounds) and then decorating them with various supplies I had picked up and others had brought. My mom took this picture of some of the results. Every year at Easter she makes "Easter egg trees" out of branches from the garden and various saved decorated eggs. Some of the eggs go back as much as 25 years -- it's one of the "traditions" that I really do value.

I guess I specifically remember Wolfgang, using these "brush tipped" pens, to make really intricate designs on the eggs.

And that's a weekend, with today (Monday) being some getting work done, albeit a day "off", so working from home and just relaxing...

So, after all my talk of following me, I managed to lose my power adapter on the first day of the conference. Doh! I got an AT&T SIM, but without computer access couldn't configure any of the services for the new phone number. Doh!

Perhaps it was for the best: I had many great one on one conversations with people, and in general did lots and lots of talking and meeting people. Here are some one liners about great experiences, in no particular order:

Well, we're almost 5 hours past Leap Day -- Feb 29th. I hope everyone celebrated in a manner appropriate to their nationality. I was talking with friends about various schemes to design Canadian Leap Day traditions, and all we settled on was that it should probably involve bacon in some way.

I made it through Northern Voice (see my stream-of-consciousness wrap up) without getting sick, and even had an awesome relaxing day going for brunch and a photowalk on the Sunday afternoon, but Monday morning I succumbed to a sore throat and cold. I'm back in action (sort of) due to the much-Facebooked "crazy German medicine" called Aspecton (it's sort of like the German equivalent of Buckley's, except no sugar or alcohol -- thanks, Mom!).

So, that's a bit of an update from the recent events. I'm off to Boston for a Drupal event in about 20 minutes, so here are links that I'm behind on:

• continuing the tradition of giving links as birthday gifts, Vancouver SEO guy Alex Brabant sent some my way
• I'm speaking at the CCI2008 conference March 12th to 14th here in Vancouver -- yes, this needs a longer post
• did I mention I have a new startup? this SO needs its own post, but I have purposefully not been promoting it here (and this is still a "Personal" category -- so not on the front page / in the main feed). It's called Bootup Labs, and it's a Vancouver-based incubator for startups -- my partner is Danny Robinson of recent Strutta fame. Missing some of my blogging? Yeah, I'm doing blogging over there as well.
• the borisphere page again contains links to external feeds that I'm aggregating
• don't forget about Food Like That -- just added a post about some fine eating in San Fran, and my mom is still busy adding recipes :P
• I swear I had more bullet points to add, but I bet that's the cab outside the door to take me to YVR....take care, see you after the 7th....

Stephanie just posted where her entry ends with the phrase that is the title of this post "a persona who is, above all things, enamoured by the future".

I love the phrase. Maybe time to swap out the tagline for this blog.

Oh, and, Steph actually posted about renewing her Flickr pro account. Related to that, I'm experimenting a bit with Photophlow -- a real time interface for chatting about Flickr photos. Which, for those of us who remember the early days of Flickr, was actually the original implementation of Flickr. Thanks to Rachael for the invite -- I've still got a few to hand out if you're interested.

Finally, great work on the blog, Steph -- I've really been enjoying reading it and enjoying your photos.

I'm relaxing on Bowen for a couple of days and thinking about some fun little projects that I might be able to do. One idea I had was to get a list of in season produce for the Vancouver area, and then combine that list with pictures from Flickr and recipes to make a cool calendar. I wrote up what I found so far on my FoodLikeThat blog.

My funny joke is that meat, of course, is ALWAYS in season :P

Oh, and yes, I have been doing a ton of Christmas cooking, so I posted a partial list of what's been cooked so far.