AlexH

the tyee continues their series on local eating with this article: A Local Eating Rhapsody.

It’s got some neat recipes to try out. I’ll have to head down to the Farmer’s Market next Wednesday to get some ingredients.

From Politics in BC ~ From the Heartlands: Re-enact Ferry Accident in Horseshoe Bay!

Don’t crash into the dock! It gets expensive.

On Saturday I got my Pleasure Craft Operator Card. The process was simple, I got a friend to supervise me, and took the test. It was fairly easy, although I got 2 out of 36 questions wrong. One about lights, and another about right of way. The only thing I got wrong about right-of-way was the sharpness of the turn to avoid the other boat. Doh!

I only had a certain amount of time to review the questions, although I wish they had told me that before my time expired!

I never had much use for the blog tracking tools like Blogpulse, Icerocket, Technorati, ad nauseum, until recently. I was using them as search engines, which they can be used for, but the more useful thing IMO is for keeping your finger on the pulse of the blogosphere.

For example, I’m interested in the ‘Hundred Mile Diet‘, but it’s impossible for me to find all of the blogs that talk about it, even with trackbacks.

But with these blog tracking services, they let me create my own queries, and they make an RSS feed out of the search results. I pop those in my RSS reader, and all of a sudden I can keep track of the conversations spread across the web!

According to leanne at Urban Vancouver, Jim Green is running for mayor under the Vision Vancouver party. Now, where are all of those people saying that bloggers aren’t creating their own news stories, and just echoing what the mainstream media publishes. This is citizen journalism at its best!

Good luck to Jim, he has the backing of the popular current mayor Larry Campbell, so I’m sure he will do well.

The Tyee has a very interesting article called Living on the Hundred-Mile Diet, and the second part of the story was published recently.

The concept is interesting. Vegetarianism still has a large environmental footprint. It is better for the environment to be consuming things that are in a 100 mile radius of you. This means that even things like bread made locally can only be bought if the ingredients are all made locally.

In BC, there are a few things that make this a bit easier:

• Wild salmon and other seafood
• Nomad cows (I love that pun)
• Farmer’s Markets

Other links can be found in my del.icio.us page, under the tag ‘organic‘

I’m going to head out to the UBC Farm this weekend to check out the eggs, and after that I’ll head to the Farmer’s Market to get some salad mix.

From the CBC: Sea festival declares bankruptcy.

It was obvious from how the lineups were handled that this was a poorly organized event. There were ferries taking people back and forth to ‘Tallship Island’ in English Bay, and we waited for 1.5 hours to get out there, and wandered around 3 of the 4 boats. The Lady Washington had a lineup to board, and our parking expired at 6:00. Going aboard a ship that was in Pirates of the Carribean wasn’t worth getting a parking ticket.

Apparently people waiting from the other ferry points waited up to 3 hours to get to the island! That’s just not worth it for a 1/2 hour visit on the Tallships.

I was wondering how long it would take for JWZ to weigh in on the Netscape IPO article on Fortune. Since he’s one of the more outspoken ex-employees from Netscape, I thought I’d see some comments from him in the article. When they didn’t show up, I assumed he had a good reason not to be in it.

And he does:

So I blew him off. Well, the article is out now, and I see my instinct was exactly correct: it’s not accomplishments or culture or technology, it’s just about price tags.

Go-go Lazyweb!

I’d really like to see a plugin/ajax module that replaces the text box in Firefox with a vi style editor.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada allows you to apply for Fishing Licenses Online. A very easy process, although I didn’t get a Salmon Stamp because all I need it for is prawns, clams and oysters.

If only they had an RSS feed for Red Tide alerts.