Chai Blues @ YVR

If you’re fly­ing out of Van­couver Inter­na­tion­al Air­port through gates E91 — E96 (part of the U.S. depar­tures area), avoid the coffee/snackbar there.

If you’re fly­ing out of Van­couver Inter­na­tion­al Air­port through gates E91 — E96 (part of the U.S. depar­tures area), avoid the coffee/snackbar there. It fea­tures stale bagels, con­des­cend­ing and slow ser­vice, and weird-tast­ing chai lattes.

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Balzac and China

This month’s book­club book was “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seam­stress: A Nov­el” by Dai Sijie, which has received rave reviews from all over. I found it a nice, easy read that touched on some extremely dif­fi­cult sub­jects (the Cul­tur­al Revolu­tion, the dif­fi­culties of peas­ant life, life’s inequit­ies, abor­tion, and failed dreams) extremely lightly. The tone feels like sum­mer read­ing des­pite these sub­jects. It was­n’t a sur­prise to learn the author is a film-maker — you can almost see the Chinese moun­tains and the mist and the poverty-stricken vil­la­gers cut off from civilization. 

One advant­age of a book­club is to make you see things you would oth­er­wise miss in a book; in this case the irony of two teen­agers being sent to be re-edu­cated who end up edu­cat­ing the vil­la­gers about music, films, clocks, and dent­ists. And we spent a little time dis­cuss­ing the shifts in tone and nar­rat­or in the book and wheth­er that had deep­er sig­ni­fic­ance, or was meant to indic­ate any­thing in par­tic­u­lar, or not. But most of the time we talked about oth­er things, like every­one’s fam­ily his­tory (ran­ging from Chinese/Japanese through Irish/French), which I think shows the book some­how did­n’t grab our ima­gin­a­tions the way oth­er books have (such as “King Leo­pold’s Ghost” by Adam Hoch­schild). Worth read­ing (and does­n’t take long to read), but not a great book. I hear the film is worth see­ing, though.

Under Construction

Updat­ing to Word­Press 1.2 at the moment; the site may not look so pretty until I get my style sheets sor­ted out and the tweaks put back.

Update: I now have most of the tweaks in place and the site should work much the same as it did before. I’ll intro­duce some of the new fea­tures over the next little while, so expect some changes on the site.

Updat­ing to Word­Press 1.2 at the moment; the site may not look so pretty until I get my style sheets sor­ted out and the tweaks put back.

Update: I now have most of the tweaks in place and the site should work much the same as it did before. I’ll intro­duce some of the new fea­tures over the next little while, so expect some changes on the site.

Using Blogs for Project Management

I chaired the RSS and Web­log day at Sey­bold San Fran­cisco 2003 (I’d put in a link but there’s noth­ing use­ful there that isn’t pass­word-pro­tec­ted). One of the pan­el­ists was talk­ing about using blogs for pro­ject man­age­ment, espe­cially when new people are expec­ted on the team. The idea is that new people can come up to speed quickly and don’t need to have mega-mounds of email for­war­ded to them. Sounds good, but in prac­tice I’m find­ing that people have a hard time adapt­ing to using more than one meth­od of com­mu­nic­a­tion. So many people use email for a simple todo-list track­er and pro­ject man­ager that they send email first and think about maybe doing a blog entry “if they have time” afterwards.

I chaired the RSS and Web­log day at Sey­bold San Fran­cisco 2003 (I’d put in a link but there’s noth­ing use­ful there that isn’t pass­word-pro­tec­ted). One of the pan­el­ists was talk­ing about using blogs for pro­ject man­age­ment, espe­cially when new people are expec­ted on the team. The idea is that new people can come up to speed quickly and don’t need to have mega-mounds of email for­war­ded to them. Sounds good, but in prac­tice I’m find­ing that people have a hard time adapt­ing to using more than one meth­od of com­mu­nic­a­tion. So many people use email for a simple todo-list track­er and pro­ject man­ager that they send email first and think about maybe doing a blog entry “if they have time” afterwards.

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What WordPress Does Right

There’s been a flurry of interest in Word­Press ever since it was announced that Mov­ab­le­Type will be mov­ing to a fee-based mod­el. There already was a sub­stan­tial amount of interest in Word­Press. That’s because the people run­ning it (mostly, from what I can see, Matt Mul­len­weg, and there’s a longer list at About Word­Press) did quite a few things right. So here’s Lauren’s Product Man­age­ment 101, using Word­Press as the example.

There’s been a flurry of interest in Word­Press ever since it was announced that Mov­ab­le­Type will be mov­ing to a fee-based mod­el. There already was a sub­stan­tial amount of interest in Word­Press. That’s because the people run­ning it (mostly, from what I can see, Matt Mul­len­weg, and there’s a longer list at About Word­Press) did quite a few things right. So here’s Lauren’s Product Man­age­ment 101, using Word­Press as the example.

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Popcorn Pilates

The Pil­ates stu­dio where I go is, togeth­er with lots of oth­er stu­di­os, host­ing Pil­ates Day. The first event was watch­ing film of Joseph Pil­ates in action, accom­pan­ied by pop­corn, com­ment­ary, and lots of laughter and aston­ish­ment at his meth­ods. And a hun­dreds com­pet­i­tion, just to get people warmed up.

The Pil­ates stu­dio where I go is, togeth­er with lots of oth­er stu­di­os, host­ing Pil­ates Day. The first event was watch­ing film of Joseph Pil­ates in action, accom­pan­ied by pop­corn, com­ment­ary, and lots of laughter and aston­ish­ment at his meth­ods. And a hun­dreds com­pet­i­tion, just to get people warmed up.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Pop­corn Pilates”