I’m riding in the Ride to Conquer Cancer again this year. It’s a 2 day, 200km ride south of Calgary through the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, June 26-27, 2010. Last year, we were able to raise nearly $7 MILLION for the Alberta Cancer foundation. I’m hoping we can top it this year. But I need your help.

Please sponsor me for the Ride. Every dollar helps. Every donation $10 and over gets a receipt for tax purposes (in Canada, anyway).

And, as a bonus for people that sponsor me, I’ll send you a print of a photo taken during the Ride. I’ll be lugging along my DSLR again this year, and posting photos to a set on Flickr (here’s the set from the 2009 ride). Just pick the photo you want, send me a mailing address (through either through the donation form, or through the contact form on my blog) and I’ll send you a print.

I’ll have the photos from the 2010 ride up within a day or two after the Ride, and I’ll be able to make prints of any of them.

If you’ve already sponsored me, THANK YOU, and I offer you the same thing. Let me know if you want a photo print, which one, and where to send it.

Here’s one of my favourite photos from last year’s ride. It ain’t ugly countryside…

I just wastedspent the evening training the Faces feature of Aperture 3. Wow. It can’t put a name to a face automatically, but as you teach it, it’s spooky how well it does finding photos of people. I’ve been sitting here giggling at all of the photos I’d forgotten of people I care about. Great stuff.

What amazes me is how few pixels it seems to need to be able to recognize a face. It’s finding faces in group shots (of course), in crowds at hockey and football games (even if the shot is a wide angle photo with hundreds of people in it). It even finds faces in photographs pinned to the wall in the background of photos. Fun with recursion. It could also be a bit scary as a latent crowd identification system – but The Man has this stuff already…

The image of Cole above was found in this photograph of my laptop. Cole is only visible in a small iChat window. On an angle. Amazing.

It looks like the University of Calgary is planning a series of TEDx events: TEDxUofC – the first one being next week, just days after the TEDxYYC event.

After previously saying I wouldn’t go to a TEDx event because of the way they’re set up, I’m happy to post that they don’t have to be that way.

Registration for TEDxUofC is open, and cheap. Students get in for $5. Everyone else gets in for $10. It doesn’t get cheaper than that. And there’s no “how awesome are you?” filter on the registration. You prove your awesomeness by showing up.

Now this is interesting. A series of focused events, each on a different topic, open to anyone who wants to come and make a difference. Sure, the speakers are selected ahead of time. Sure, the topics are selected ahead of time. That’s ok, and the way it’s set up looks like it could provide an interesting series of events.

Now, to try to arrange child care for The Boy™ twice a month, so I can head down to Hotel Alma (the new facility on the main U of C campus). Actually, I wonder if he’d like to go. He is a student, after all…

The Blackboard discussion board system is really quite amazing, in that it couldn’t have been designed any worse. It is easily the most awkward, clumsy, and deliberately obtuse discussion board software I’ve ever used.

There aren’t many things in life that are more fun than using the Blackboard discussion board system. But if we find any, they’ll be dutifully documented here.

I slapped the Flip video camera onto the bike for this morning’s ride. Here’s the 43 minute ride, compressed into 5 minutes of video.

(direct link to video, for RSS readers)

I’ve been trying to pick one photo taken in 2009 to be the “photo of the year” but can’t seem to do it. I’ve narrowed it down to 4 photos. So, here are the 4 2009 photos of the year:

I’m really happy with how 74 photos turned out – here’s my 2009 5 stars gallery – and am really glad I’m learning so much about photography (both technical and philosophical) and still having a blast doing it.

OK. I’m a dork. I made some ringtones today to use on my iPhone, based on short clips from Battlestar Galactica. Maybe someone else will find them useful. Please don’t sue me. They were all made from very short sound clips I found online.

I’m using “BSG – Phone Ring” as my ringtone (it’s the sound the telephones make on the ship) and the others are handy alarm notification sounds.

Download the ringtones

It’s time to pick up the Formative 10 Films series, after abandoning it after the fourth entry…

Red Dawn. 1984. A bunch of misfit high school kids work together to defend their town from an invading Russian military force. Patrick Swayze as the cool older brother. Charlie Sheen. Lea Thompson (I had such an ’80s crush on Lea…). Jennifer Grey. What’s not to love? WOLVERINES!

I was in grade 10, a misfit outcast just starting high school, and watched this movie maybe a dozen times. It was set in small town redneck Colorado. Which felt not too different from Calgary…

There was something about the threat and horror of nuclear war, “the enemy” on North American soil, and an underground guerilla resistance movement that stopped and repelled the invaders that captured my imagination. It’s something that would be simply taught in history class for anyone growing up in Europe – but here, safe in Canada, we’ve never had to put much serious thought into aggressive invading armies (well, not for a few years, anyway, but we showed them! *shakesfist*)

I guess what caught me was the forced self reliance, the adaptability, the absolution of caste, and the need to work together to survive. Sure, the movie was violent, but it was a guerilla war movie. It needed to be violent. The fact that it wasn’t a shiny, happy, “good guys always win” story was important, too. The Wolverines didn’t magically kick Soviet ass, as they would have in a Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay film. They struggled. They died. They sacrificed. And in the end the remaining survivors withdraw in the hopes of finding others.

Growing up in Canada, I wasn’t living in daily fear of Soviet invasion, or nuclear warheads raining out of the skies. We figured if anything went down, we’d likely be catching the debris as Reagan’s Star Wars™ shield zapped Soviet missiles over Canadian airspace. Boom and sizzle, sure, but not invading occupation forces. During the olympics in ‘88, the Soviet team pins and jackets were the hottest items for trade. Everyone wanted to get Soviet stuff, and meet the athletes. Certainly no fear, at least.

And now I see they’re doing a remake of the movie, due out in 2010. Not sure how I feel about that. The TV series Jericho, which was a thinly veiled revamping of Red Dawn, didn’t do so well.

I was extremely fortunate to have been a part of the fantastic YYCPhotoBook 2009 project. It’s a community-based photography book project, featuring 32 different Calgary photographers ranging from amateurs to high-end professionals. The goal was to show the city from various perspectives, outside the traditional stereotypes and stock-photo views. From start to finish, the project took 4 months – including recruiting the photographers, sourcing photos, editing, designing, and releasing to print. Duncan Kinney did an absolutely amazing job in wrangling the project and pushing it forward, and Connor Turner did an equally fantastic job in putting the book design together.

I love the project for a few reasons. First, it’s a crowdsourced, grassroots community project. I described it at the first project meeting as being more of a community art project than a photography project. It brought together 32 photographers, with 32 different views, perspectives, and styles. The end result is an incredible, beautiful book of photography that is a wonderful representation of the city of Calgary and those who live here.

The other reason I love the project is that it is a non-profit endeavor, raising funds for the Brown Bagging It for Calgary’s Kids charity – a local charity that is devoted to providing healthy meals to underprivileged Calgary kids.

It was truly an honour to have been a part of this project. The photos in the book are amazing, the photographers are inspiring, and the book itself is gorgeous.

If you’d like a copy of the book (for the awesome page 12 photo *cough*, or to support Brown Bagging It for Calgary’s Kids) head over to the Blurb store to get yours now.

Today was the annual Kickoff event – the home opener for the U of C Dinos football team, combined with a party welcoming students to campus for another year. This year, the whole family went to the game, and we had a blast. Also, this year was different because it was the first time in a long, long time that I was able to score the free tickets offered to students…

We had to leave at half time, because it was just too much sun for The Boy™ to endure, but the first half of the game was a great one. When we left, the Dinos were ahead 10-8 over the Golden Bears. Sounds like the second half was exciting, too, with the Dinos holding onto the slim lead to win the game. Whew.