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…

it’s consistently the most interesting, varied, relevant, and mind-opening conference. go. register. now. even better – there’s still time to submit a proposal for a session.

I’m going. May in Vancouver? What could be better than that?

Rereading Alan’s post on his blog hiatus, where he takes a month off of posting on his blog to comment elsewhere, I was struck (as always) by the patterns in activity he described. I decided to take a closer peek at the activity on my own blog – I’ve been thinking a lot about discourse analysis lately, so it’s at least partially non-navel-gazing.

Here’s the graph for the first few years of life for my blog. It started out as a private, personal outboard brain, then kind of took off with a life of its own.

Interesting. This blog’s heyday was 2005-2006. A lifetime ago, in intartube years. Then twitter happened in January 2007. It would be _really_ interesting to run some latent content analysis on both posts and comments, to see if they’re different BT vs. AT. Are the activity patterns different? Is the content different? Linking patterns? etc… It’d be completely nonscientific, but fascinating nonetheless…

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…

That’s pretty scary. And the article sounds pretty accurate.

While there is a public perception that cyclists are usually the cause of accidents between cars and bikes, an analysis of Toronto police collision reports shows otherwise: The most common type of crash in this study involved a motorist entering an intersection and either failing to stop properly or proceeding before it was safe to do so. The second most common crash type involved a motorist overtaking unsafely. The third involved a motorist opening a door onto an oncoming cyclist. The study concluded that cyclists are the cause of less than 10 per cent of bike-car accidents in this study.

The available evidence suggests that collisions have far more to do with aggressive driving than aggressive cycling.

Also, the U of T has an article with an interview with Dr. Chris Cavacuiti, who is looking into cycling safety.

I was really excited that a TEDx event was being planned for Calgary. I was looking forward to TEDxYYC, and was planning to attend and help out in any way that I could. The website for the event went live today, so I went to register.

I got to the registration form. Except it’s not a registration form. It’s an application-to-register form. okaaaaaay… That’s unusual…

I proceed to fill the form in.

First Name. check.
Last Name. check.
Company/Organization. (hmm… whatever.) check.
Job Title/Role. (ummm… why is this relevant? fine.) check.
Email address. check.
Address. (maybe they mail the pass?) check.
Phone. check.
Tell us about yourself. (maybe for a bio on the website? um… okay.) check.
List some of your lifetime achievements. (wait. what? To attend? Really? No. Not appropriate. Closetab.)

The demographic info, I get. The address, sure, for correspondence. The company and job title may even be okay, but questionable for just attending the event.

But Lifetime Achievements? What the fuck? That’s not cool. That’s an elitism filter. That’s exclusionary. Even if they “allow” people with lesser lifetime achievements, it sets the tone for the event. It’s about Awesome People™ being hand picked to hang out together and watch Even More Awesome People™ talk about Awesome Stuff™.

I told my wife about this, and she wondered why I was so upset. “Hey, you’d probably get in. What’s the problem?” She may be right. I don’t know. But there shouldn’t be a worthiness filter to register to an event about making the world a better place.

Not interested. I’ll stick to the TED Talks website, where I don’t need to prove my worth to gain access.

In setting up WPMU sites for classes, I often wind up using the Text widget to add a bunch of important links – login, Dashboard, Add Post, Add Page, etc… to each site. Manually. I finally decided to save some time and just write a plugin that provides a generic widget to give the links on any site that uses it.

If you’re not logged in, it provides a link to login:

If you are logged in, it gives you some handy links:

I’ll eventually add a way to customize the widget (display Add Page? display Add Post? something else?) but for now, it’s an easy fire-and-forget widget for the most common links used by people in a course blogging site.

Get your copy over at the WordPress plugin repository: Important Links Widget

I’m trying the rating features baked into the latest version of the PollDaddy plugin. It looks pretty cool – you can set it to allow rating of posts, pages, and even comments. Not sure how it’ll be used, or if it will be useful at all, but there it is. Rate away. If you have nothing better to do…

A great manifesto. 43 guiding principles to live by. (via David Gillespie)

My faves:

6. capture accidents
12. keep moving
13. slow down
14. don’t be cool
20. be careful to take risks
32. listen carefully
33. take field trips
38. explore the other edge (everyone crowds the leading edge…)

Stuff from this morning’s romp through my RSS reader:

• a link to an old article on how to hack a disposable camera into an automatic flash slave unit. gotta try this. (via Photojojo)
• an awesome Helvetica t-shirt, rendered in Comic Sans. So wrong. So awesome. (via boingboing)
• Tuper Tario Tros – Tetris meets Super Mario Bros. mashup game. (via boingboing)
• Knustler says the economy has 6 months to live. Of course, he’s been saying that for years now, but what if he’s right eventually?
• TEDxCalgary – coming April 29 2010. Theme is “Humanity 3.0″ (gag), and it’s limited to only 100 attendees.