…a few words from our sponsor…
I’ve been crazy busy lately and haven’t had much time to blog. I’ve even been away from Twitter a bit recently (@jeremylatham).
I do want to wish the Vancouver Canucks the best of luck in the 2009 NHL Playoffs and hope to be able to celebrate a long playoff run!
Go Canucks!!!!!!
Thanks to NetChick for pointing this one out…
This is priceless! See you later Mr. Bush.
It’s that time of year again…Ghosts, goblins, pumpkins, candy, fog and full moons…Halloween is just around the corner. (Happy early birthday to Ryan too!)
This year a good friend of mine has put together his annual Halloween Haunt: Black Rose Cemetery. He’s taking food and cash donations. All donations will be given to the Vancouver Food Bank.
Rather than reinvent the wheel – I’ll send you along to Miss 604’s Halloween post, as she’s built a very comprehensive list of things to do around town at Halloween.
There’s always vancouverhalloween.com too.
What am I doing for Halloween? I’m going to enjoy handing out candy to the kids this year, as we’ve been living in a highrise for the last three years and didn’t get any trick or treaters. Now that we’re in a townhouse I’m looking forward to seeing all the little ones’ costumes!
What are you doing for Halloween?
Related Links:
I just found out that some of the the Vancouver Canucks preseason hockey games are going to be televised. Here’s the pre-season schedule. You can get it at canucks.com but I wasn’t able to link directly to it.
September 2008
Mon Sep 22, 2008: Canucks/Oilers @ 6:00 PM on SNET-P
Tue Sep 23, 2008: Oilers/Canucks @ 7:00 PM on SNET-P
Sat Sep 27, 2008: Canucks/Sharks @ 7:30 PM
Sun Sep 28, 2008: Canucks/Ducks @ 5:05 PM on SNET-POctober 2008
Wed Oct 1, 2008: Flames/Canucks @ 7:00 PM on TSN
Thu Oct 2, 2008: Sharks/Canucks @ 7:00 PM
Sun Oct 5, 2008: Ducks/Canucks @ 7:00 PM
Over the last week I’ve seen Clay Shirky‘s Cognitive Surplus presentation mentioned in many really smart people’s blogs (Darren Barefoot, Jeremy Zawodny, Warren Freyburg, Lifehacker…). The presentation took place at Web Expo 2.0 in San Francisco.
I’ve been so busy lately I wasn’t able to find the 15 minutes to watch Shirky’s presentation until this morning. It was really worth watching! Take the 15 mins away from a sitcom rerun to watch Shirky speak. Or read the transcript: Looking for the Mouse.
“He does such a good job at explaining how and why watching TV is no longer the de-facto spare time activity that I’m going to simple force people to watch it when they claim not to understand how I have no time to watch television.” -Jeremy Zawodny
To sum up Shirky’s presentation – we’ve been spending years in front of the TV instead of participating. He believes that “doing” is better than not. That the future lies in interactive media, because that is what we want and the younger generation expects; to participate. To give you an idea of how much time we spend in front of the TV when we could be doing something, he points out:
“So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.” -Clay Shirky
So it seems we’ve got a huge surplus of time on our hands that we spend in front of the TV. If North Americans were to give up their American Idol / Canadian Idol habits and do something with that time, I wonder what we could accomplish?
If you were to spend 30 minutes less time watching TV every day, what would you fill that time with?