The WordCampEd Vancouver 2009 website was just moved from a PBWiki site to a shiny new WordPress site. It was odd not using WordPress to power the website for a WordPress-related event, but initially I thought it made more sense to just use a free, low-friction service like PBWiki.

But, now we’ve got a WordPress site, configured to behave kinda wiki-like. Anyone can login (either by creating an account or by using OpenID). Once logged in, you can edit any of the pages, including Sessions, Attendees, Logistics, etc… You can also create new pages (although new pages _may_ need to be “approved” before going live).

If the new site gives any grief, please let me know ASAP.

While we were on the 35th floor of the Coast Plaza Hotel in Vancouver for a session at BCEdOnline2006, I snapped a dozen or so photos of the panoramic view. I was thinking I’d stitch them into separate panos to capture the view, but I just spent a few minutes in Photoshop manually stitching each of the 3 autostitch panos into one überpano, spanning approximately 300Ëš of a panoramic view of downtown Vancouver. The full image is 27 megapixels, so if you’ve got a few 30″ Cinema Displays tied to your system, check out the high res. version.

The colour on the left is wonky because I took those shots from inside a conference room, through the tinted glass. The rest of the shots were taken out on the balconies in the other conference room.

One of the extracurricular activities after Northern Voice included a quick excursion led by Jon to The Railway Club (a couple of blocks from Robson Square). We wound up sampling the überbrü – the Open Source Beer.

Brian had written about überbrü a while back, and I was intrigued by the idea – an open recipe for a brew, for sale only in local micrew bars (or at home).

Yet another good conversation, lubricated by a surprisingly good beer.

this post was really just an excuse to post something to help the nice folks at Qumana debug some glitches in the latest beta

Had a good flight over the Rocks this am. Too damned early, but them’s the breaks. Took a psycho cab ride from YVR to UBC – cabbie using GPS mapping to find the centre of campus. Went for a quick walk to the lookout point over the rose garden (holy crap is UBC a gorgeous campus…) then headed up to Buchanan C Penthouse to meet up with Brian and Alan for the morning Pachyderm demo session.

The Pachy session went reasonably well – a quick overview of the software, and some demos of some published content (Mavericks, MSoMA, Education ePortfolio prototype, etc…). Some really good questions from the ~12 people in the audience.

Then a quick walk back to the rose garden, and on to the Studio for the Social Software Salon. Brian and Jason recorded the whole session, which turned into essentially a freefrom roundtable discussion of social software as it relates to education, and vice versa. Gardner Campbell Skyped in, and the whole conversation was really interesting. Jason and Brian will be releasing nuggets of the 3-hour recording as smaller podcasts. Hope that turned out OK.

Hanging out at Casa Del Lamb – great food, great conversation, and Brian makes one mean Manhattan.

I’ll be posting what few pics I took – Alan has his XT here, so I’m feeling like I can chill out and let his Big Gun take care of the photo-documentary…