that ring of confidence

The Jeffery Simpson World Tour 2010: Whereby the world is defined as Edmonton

     

ive and on stage you can see me doing the public speaking thing that I used to win awards for back when I was in grade four and five.  Granted my voice has broken and I've gone through puberty since then so I will warn you that it's not quite as melodious as it once was nor will I have a graphic of the human heart to refer you to.  However I will probably have had my hair cut before then, at least if Lydia has her way.  So that should add some kind of fashion flash to the proceedings.  No graphs though.  Sorry.

What will I be talking about?  How much are tickets?  Will there be punch and pie?  Are there any audience participation chants or songs that will be needed?

To go you'll need to register at a Canadian college or university and quickly get a job at the student newspaper before this weekend because I'll be talking at the Canadian University Press's 72nd annual conference this year titled Natural Selection [cup].  I'm actually doing a few sessions, to help justify the cost of them flying me out there.  The first one, and main one, I'll be talking with Matt Attwood who works in Bioware's [wp] media relations department on tech writing and how to work with PR departments of tech companies.  Next I'll be on a panel discussing new media with Matt Frehner, Matthew Ingram, Bryan Murley and hosted by CUP's Chris Berube.

This is the panel that a fist fight is most likely to break out in, since I tend to be a bit crotchety about the term "new media" and the idea that "old media" is dying.  Newspapers might be dying, but I don't think that's what people mean by "old media". 

The next day I'll be a part of a panel discussing freelance writing with Iain Ilich, Erin Millar, Elizabeth McMillan, Karen Unland hosted by Nick Taylor-Vaisey.

These are all names that I'm going to have to Google in the next day or so. 

Meanwhile I've come down with the sort of head cold that used to kill people back in the middle ages.  It essentially feels as though someone has stuffed my head full of phlegm and at night it starts leaking out my nose.  It's quite a mess.  Of course given that I'll be exposed to CUP Conference SARS this weekend probably means that I should work on my will.  A combination of head cold and whatever ailments a few hundred university students fighting their livers with weapons of mass intoxication are carrying will be a most interesting experience.

Now if you'll excuse me, my face is leaking.

The Georgia Straight geek gift guide is online

 

The Georgia Straight's "Geek Gift Guide" written by yours truly is up online now [tgs].  It's a pretty good collection of some of the coolest gadget gifts that you can get this Christmas.  I was pretty happy that the Kindle was able to make an appearance, since I was going to go with the Sony eReader instead since Amazon's device was not available in Canada until a few days before the article was due.  There was also a really cool set of Sony Ericsson headphones that I ended up leaving off the list because I could not find them for sale anywhere in Vancouver and Sony Ericsson would not get back to me with where one would buy them in Canada.

The Canon PowerShot S90 is especially tasty looking.

Also for the record the Teddy Ruxpin reference was in there before 30 Rock made a Teddy Ruxpin joke in their last episode.

Techvibes

I'm doing some writing for Techvibes, a technology blog that's based in Vancouver but covers most of the continent and a few places beyond.  My first post is about a new iPhone application that helps users pick out outfits to wear based on what they have in the closet, and it's online now [tv].

Vancouver internet start-ups in The Georgia Straight

One of the things I told students at the Canadian University Press conference

that I spoke at was to always take any assignment offered [jks].  The life of a freelance writer is such that we really never know what will be our last job, and saying no to work is always a risk especially when you're trying to build a relationship with a publication.  While I've been writing for The Georgia Straightfor over a year the spacing between each article is long enough that I'm always a little concerned that maybe they'll forget about me.  The technology section only really has one regular writer (Blaine Kyllo) and having heard enough stories about freelancers who said no to one job and had publications just assume that they were no longer interested in writing, I pretty much say yes to anything and everything. 

Looking back on it I probably should have said no to an article being due just over a week after my wedding.  However I had been pitching the story since I first started writing for the Straightand it was the fall technology issue so it was hard to say no.  I also completely underestimated how much work a wedding was, and moving my wife into my apartment would be.  Which is a long way of being honest and saying that tech editor Stephen Hui had to do a lot more on this one than normal and so while I think the interviews went well the structure of the article is mostly thanks to Stephen, in however good it is.  Anything wrong with it is my fault.

The article is in the Straighttoday and on-line [tgs].  It turned out well in the end though I think if I ever do my song and dance for mold-able minds, I'll ad weddings as an exception of a time when begging off an assignment is probably a good idea. 

A last note about the article that

I feel I should mention is that I did a lot of interviews with people that did not make it into the finished article.  It turned out that I just had too much material and given that it takes at least 100-300 words to introduce and give details about a start-up company, some of the ones I spoke with had to be left out in order to keep in the assigned space.  Those interviews however aren't going to be lost, and I'll be turning them into short pieces for The Georgia Straight's website's tech section [tgs] over the next week or two. 

My article on open social networks appears in The Georgia Straight

My latest article is in this week's The Georgia Straight in all the finest newspaper boxes around Vancouver and on-line [tgs].  This one was a bit trickier to get my head around, because while I know what "open" means when it comes to having social networks like Twitter, Facebook and the like be more open not everyone agrees what that means.  For some people it's part of a larger view that all information should be open, while to others it's a call for users to actually have more control over their data and privacy than they do now.

So some people are for more privacy, others are for less, and yet they're all on the same side.

The other issue was that it's hard to get the other side of the argument.  Facebook never got back to me, and nobody is going to really stand up for less openness and user control over data but yet there may be legitimate reasons that it's necessary sometimes.  These might not be the strongest reasons, but it's a bit hard to look at an issue objectively when one side really won't talk.

I'm happy with how the article ended up though, and it's a case where it was nice to have an edit on it to help focus it a bit and make sure that I was making sense to anyone aside from myself.

New Georgia Straight article: iPhone games

 M y latest article for The Georgia Straight is now up online [tgs] and on the newsstands in the Meatspace edition.  Of the articles I've written for the Straight so far this was probably the most difficult, in that it was by far the most tightly focused.  The idea of doing an article on local schools that taught iPhone development seemed like a good idea, but the fact that only BCIT seems to be doing any thing like that limited my potential subjects.

For my Twitter article [tgs] for example I had pretty much every Twitterer in Vancouver to draw upon for interviews.  With this one I had far less in the way of options, and while I think everyone I managed to interview did a great job and I'm grateful there was less variety in the type of people I spoke with.  In the end I talked with three software developers, one who had taken the iPhone course and another who had taught it, and an administrator from BCIT.  There's no real opposing view to the notion that the course taught by BCIT, and the potential program, is a good idea.

Not that I was expecting to find someone who was against the teaching of iPhone development, it's not exactly abortion training or any sort of hot topic like that.

Still I'm happy with the outcome, and the fact that it made the paper.  If you're in Vancouver be sure to pick up a copy this week at the newsstand.  If you're not then use the internet and check it out.

Picture taken by Stephen Hui for The Georgia Straight.

My new Georgia Straight article on geotagging is out

My latest, and last assigned, article for The Georgia Straight is running in this week's issue so if you're around Vancouver you can pick it up.  This article is about geotagging photos, which I got really excited by but kind of discovered that it's not quite ready for prime time.  It's really cool to have the geotagging information added automatically when I take a picture with my iPhone, but until it's seamless to put the same information onto photos taken with my other cameras I can't see it being something I do regularly. 

I used to use Flickr's map to drag photos around to position them, but now I'm so far behind on keeping up with that task that it's obvious that I'm never going to be able to finish.  For every photograph I position on the map I take twenty more.

The newest version of iPhoto, which just came out yesterday, adds a lot of geotagging functionality in it but again there's no easy way to get the information into the photos.  I think it's maybe a year or two off before somebody, maybe even Apple, figures out a good and painless way of doing it or GPS devices are built into every camera so that it's done automatically.

If you're not in the Lower Mainland and don't see The Straight on every street corner then you can head over to their website to read the article here [tgs]. 

Don't worry, there will be more articles on the way I just need to get a few new assignments with the paper.

My article on virtual worlds is in The Georgia Straight

The article I wrote for The Georgia Straight on virtual worlds, most notably Second Life, is in today's issue and online [tgs].  Because of the backlog of tech reporting the Straight currently has one of the virtual worlds I wrote about, Google's Lively, has actually closed down since I submitted the piece. 

The closure lends some weight to a blog post I wrote for the Straight earlier this month about Pownce closing, and how it's important to keep local backups of anything you store in the internet cloud but want to know is safe [tgs].

The Georgia Straight Christmas party

Our hero goes to a Christmas party, drinks some beer and talks about how awesome the past was.

With Lydia no longer working full time at the hostel, and my work deciding that in the year of the iPhone money was too tight to afford a Christmas party, the only Christmas party that I got invited to was the Georgia Straight's.  Having written a number of articles for the Straight, with another two still in the can, I guess I'm not considered a regular freelancer and thus worthy of two free drinks and some appies.

The thing is unlike most jobs where you know the people you work with as a freelancer I've never been to the Straight office and apart from Stephen Hui who I know from my years in the Canadian University Press (CUP) I'd only met the Editor Charlie Smith once over a year ago for about five minutes. So since Stephen wasn't there when I arrived I basically stood in a corner picking at food as it passed by carrier by waitresses with trays. Thankfully Amanda Growe, the Straight's copy chief, and her boyfriend, introduced themselves and were my party Sherpas for the first while. Eventually they introduced me to my fellow tech writer Christopher Poon [gs] whose also an intern at the paper. Stephen showed up a little later, and the next few hours were spent reminiscing about our days in CUP, and trying to explain what CUP was to Christopher.

Normally I don't really like Christmas parties, staff gatherings or parties at all, but I had a good time. I met a lot of people who had clearly did a better job of planning their careers than I had, and so that was slightly depressing. Also hering about old CUP people who had gotten high powered media jobs, including Stephen, was nearly enough to send me to the bar to buy myself a few rounds of drinks. I didn't though, and as I said I had fun. It was almost had a CUP feel to it, though since nobody peed in anything inappropriate so it never quite reached that same fever pitch.

Because what's a party where nobody breaks health codes?