DuaneStorey.com

Blogathon 2009 – BC Children’s Hospital

Duane Storey — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:32:39 -0700

This year’s Blogathon takes place on July 25th, starting at 6am PDT. As most people know, last year I teamed up with Rebecca Bollwitt to help support the Union Gospel Mission in Vancouver. With some help from Matthew Good, the three of us raised around $8,000 I believe for Vancouver’s homeless.

Without a doubt, Blogathon is an event that I wanted to be a part of this year. I briefly debated supporting a local Chilliwack charity, but given that I really don’t know of many here, I decided not to go that route.

Lately I’ve found myself spending quite a bit of time with my niece and nephew. Thankfully, they’ve been healthy their whole lives, but it’s not lost on me that one day one of them might hurt themselves, or possibly get extremely sick. Even though I’m relatively young, I’ve lost some of my friends, some of which even passed away in high school. My own cousin Darren was out with his girlfriend one night years ago, felt sick, and ended up dying in the hospital that night from an undiagnosed heart defect. My friend Katherine here in Chilliwack also has a little girl with an inoperable brain tumor, one that nearly cost her her eyesight just a few weeks ago.

This year I’ve decided to support the BC Children’s Hospital for Blogathon. I’m still working out the details, but on July 25th, I’ll hopefully be doing a 24 hour writing marathon to see if I can raise both money and awareness for the hospital and the families there. I’m also hoping to profile a few kids to showcase their stories during the event.

Hopefully I’ll have my new website up before July 25th, in which case I’ll have a special Blogathon section going. Last year was a bit of a rollercoaster ride for me during the event, since I had never done it before, but this year I should be an old pro, so it should be quite a bit smoother.

Working On The New Theme

Duane Storey — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 10:43:25 -0700

I had a bit of time yesterday (really, I didn’t, but the creative juices were flowing and I wanted to start dabbling), so I started tinkering with some ideas for a new theme for this site. While I routinely update the theme on this site (I average about every four months or so), I really want the next one to be up here for quite some time, so I’m not going to rush development on it.

I have a few basic goals for the new theme:

The theme should put more focus on aspects of my life such as photography, and less on my other content
The theme will focus more on my life, and some of my passions (such as blogging and WordPress development), and less on random blog entries about nothing
The theme will basically update itself from third party services

I’m debating deleting a really large chunk of content from my current site. Some people will say that’s stupid from a search engine or SEO perspective, but I really think some of those entries (and the traffic they generate) don’t really lead to any useful traffic. For example, if someone gets to my site looking for a JPG of the Kool Aid jug, it’s not really that likely they’re going to want to read about WordPress or current events.

I’d like to only have four or five main categories on my site — currently I have about 20 I think. Unfortunately too, I think I installed a version of WordPress a year or so ago where the taxonomy system wasn’t completely cooked, and a lot of my tags are messed (lots have hyphens instead of spaces for example). So part of me wants to kind of start over and fix all of that. I haven’t thought it through very far yet, so I need to think about it a bit longer.

I’d really like to spend more time taking photos in the future, and I think if my blog were more photo-centric I’d be inspired to post more photos. I’ve actually sat down a few times to do a photo-centric site, but I’ve always had problems making it work. For one, photos are usually either landscape or portrait. From a design perspective, that gets a bit clunky, especially since several portrait oriented photos can have completely different aspect ratios. I might end up writing some PHP code to letter box photos such that they’re all the same size, but I haven’t made it that far yet. Since photos look brighter and more colourful when shown on a black background (the same way a stereo sounds “better” when it’s louder), I’ve made the new version have a dark background instead of the white I’ve used a few times in a row.

I started working on version two of my Crossroads plugin a few months ago. Crossroads was a pretty popular plugin for people wanting to put Flickr photos on their websites. Unfortunately, I never spent a lot of time improving it, so it’s kind of rotted on the sidelines. So version two was meant to be a pretty substantial improvement, especially since I’m also adding support for SmugMug. The good news is that Crossroads 2.0 already interfaces quite well with Flickr, so I’ve been extending it to do most of the heavy lifting on my site.

I’ve created a photography section of my site that basically shows all the photos and sets from a Flickr collection. It looks sort of like the following image:

If you want to see a live demo, head over to the demo site and check it out.

With this setup, I can basically just upload photos to Flickr, but them in the appropriate sets with the proper descriptions, and my site will automatically update itself. I’ve also created a special page for viewing each individual image (where in the past I would have just redirected people to Flickr). This method actually has several advantages. First, the verbiage and those images will essentially reside on my site, and not on Flickr. Given that my website has more Google juice than my Flickr stream, in theory I should start getting a lot more traffic based on my photos. I’ve also made the theme CC license aware, such that the proper form of attribution along with a link to the associated license is displayed under each photo. I’ve always liked EXIF information, so that’s included as well. If you want to see an example, head on over here.

Lots of designers use Photoshop. Unfortunately, I’m sort of Photoshoptarded, so I don’t really use it that often. So when I design a theme, I usually just start hacking out ideas using PHP and CSS, and slowly refine them with each iteration. So undoubtedly what I’m working on will end up being different than what I’ve started putting together, but at this point I’m just trying to flesh out the functionality.

I’m really not sure the best way to integrate Twitter at this point. Given the amount of Tweets I do in a typical day, it’s really not very useful to have them in a list anywhere. I might figure out a way to do something with the Twitter favourite system and have only those Tweets shown somewhere. I’m also probably going to put some type of FriendFeed or LifeStream on my main page, such that it represents a snapshot of everything I’ve been doing. I’d also like to find a way to merge Flickr and SmugMug, such that someone viewing a Flickr photo would be presented with a “Buy Photo” which would redirect them to the same photo on SmugMug. I’m pretty sure I can come up with some clever tagging system to make that work.

Anyways, that’s my little project for July.

On The Verge Of Being Debt Free

Duane Storey — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:22:17 -0700

I’ve slowly been chipping away at my loans these last few years, hoping for that day to come when I’ll be debt free. My net worth is positive, thanks to some RRSPs and the down payment I put into my car, but having debt hanging over your head obviously kind of sucks. I have a little spreadsheet that sort of tracks where I’m at. In April of 2008 I owed around $25,500 in both student loans and car loans. At my peak, I had around $40,000 worth of student loans, a fairly hefty debt load by anyone’s standards.

Back in January I finally paid my car off. The payments on that were $400 per month, so it was nice to have that money back in my pocket each month (and somewhat of a necessity for moving back to Chilliwack). The current value of all my loans today is around $11,500, which means I killed nearly $14,000 of debt this last year.

The good news is that I’m actually only a month or two away from getting rid of that last chunk. I have a bit of a rainy day fund going that I set aside in case we ever ad a few dry months at BraveNewCode. Thankfully that doesn’t seem to be the case, so I’m going to put some of it on my student loan. With any luck I’ll have it completely paid off either at the end of this month, or hopefully no later than next month.

No Justice For Megan Meier

Duane Storey — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:08:41 -0700

I wrote an article last year about a girl named Megan who committed suicide after a boy named Josh on MySpace told her that the world would be better off without her. The tragic element of that tale is that there was never a boy named Josh – it was always a fake person, invented by a friend of Megan’s and Lori Drew, that girl’s mother.

The two of them together gained Megan’s confidence on MySpace, and then proceeded to toss insults at her, eventually leading directly to Megan wrapping some rope around her neck and hanging herself to death. Despite a previous jury ruling that Lori Drew was guilty, today a judge reversed the decision, and passed a full acquittal.

There’s lots I could say right now, but I really don’t have the heart. Maybe in the legal world Lori Drew deserves to be acquitted, but that doesn’t change the fact that a 13 year old girl is now dead. She’ll never get to attend her high-school prom, or to kiss another boy. She’ll never graduate from college, and she’ll never know the absolute delight of getting those braces off.

The world sure isn’t fair sometimes.

Photo from KTLA.com

Six More Days

Duane Storey — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:17:49 -0700

I have an appointment on Wednesday to get a few moles removed from my face. I’ve had them most of my life, and for the most part they haven’t really bothered me. That being said, this last year I’ve found myself cutting two of them while shaving from time to time, which usually results in them bleeding for hours at a time (real attractive, I know).

You can see two of them in this photo. The first is the one on my right cheek, and the second is the one on my left upper-lip. The third one is really tiny, and it’s in the center of my lip (I don’t cut it shaving, but I figure I might as well get it out at the same time).

There are three options with regards to removing moles. Option one is to use a laser to remove the pigment. This works for flat moles, but not really for any moles that are raised (the one on my cheek is raised slightly). Option two is to shave them flat, in which case you basically end up with a large freckle. The disadvantage to that route is that many moles will simply regrow back to the way they were. The third option, and the one I’ve opted for, is to have them surgically removed, in which case they’ll be gone forever.

The surgery is fairly simple, and is done under local anesthetic. On July 8th I have an appointment at 5pm in Vancouver to have the procedure done. It’ll take roughly 45 minutes, and I’ll walk away with about 3 stitches in each area. After that, the moles are sent to a lab to make sure they’re not cancerous (just a formality, as mine display all the characteristics of being benign). I’ll have stitches in my face for about five days, after which they’ll come out and I’ll have to stay out of the sun for a few weeks (or put on some of the SPF 60 sunscreen I recently purchased for the event).

I probably could have made the argument with my GP that they should be removed free of charge, but in that scenario usually the GP will do the surgery, which ends up being a hack job. So in my case, given that I’ve already had experience with a plastic surgeon (the one that put my eye back in the right place and fixed my eye-socket), I simply opted to pay for the procedure myself out of pocket, mainly for piece of mind, and to know that a board certified surgeon would be doing the operation (one that has a vested interest in doing a good job, since we’ve dealt with each other before).

Having been through a few surgeries on my face in the past, I can’t say I’m particularly looking forward to it. That being said, it’ll kind of be nice not to have any moles on my face anymore, especially when it comes time to shave.

Lynn’s Blog

Duane Storey — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:15:00 -0700

Turns out that my friend Lynn down in Seattle has had a blog for years and years, but for some reason I never knew about it until recently. It’s actually a really good read, with quite a few personal entries as well. So if you’re looking for some new reading material, definitely head on over and check it out. She’ll probably kill me for posting this, but I like living dangerously, so.

Lynn was nice enough to send me some fruit flowers for my birthday years ago, and even though I’m not in Seattle very often we’ve kept in touch online (which is challenging, considering she doesn’t use Facebook or MySpace). The last time I hung out with Lynn we did pretty well in the liquor department, which is always a good time.

You can read about Lynn’s life over at the Lair of the Curmdgette. Maybe one of these days she’ll take a break from blogging and finally get her butt up to BC for a visit!

Facebook Photography Page

Duane Storey — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:46:01 -0700

I put together a Facebook photography page a while ago. If you use Facebook, and like some of the photos I’ve taken, then please become a fan of this page. I’m going to be redoing my personal website shortly to be more photo centric and mostly reflect my online photography as opposed to some of my writings.

Vancouver Scenic Photography Sale – Limited Time

Duane Storey — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:04:24 -0700

About 18 months ago a few people encouraged me to put some of my photos online for sale. Given that my Vancouver scenery ones are the most popular photos in my portfolio, I’ve pretty much only focused on that. I’ve actually made a decent amount by selling them, probably enough to be able to afford a cheap lens, which is pretty cool.

The next item on my wish list is the Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera, which is one of the most affordable full frame cameras on the market. Unfortunately, the list price of that camera is around $3200, so it’s a bit outside of my price range at this point. So, I’m going to try to come up with a few different ways to try and close the price gap.

The first way I thought I’d raise a few bucks is by offering a sale on some of my Vancouver HDR photos. For a limited time (probably only a week or two), I’ve cut pretty much all the prices on my photos by around 50%. If you’ve been looking for a few scenic shots of Vancouver, now’s your chance to get one for a fairly cheap price. If you want to browse the gallery, simply click here.

I’m also going to be selling some of my old camera gear. The 40D will probably go, and I’ll keep the 20D as a backup (I’d rather do the reverse, but there’s still a good market for the 40D, so I’ll probably sell it). I have a quad-core server here too that I rarely use, so I’ll probably sell that as well. Hopefully that’ll bring me half of the way there.

Happy Birthday Alison

Duane Storey — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:01:46 -0700

Today is also my step-sister Alison’s birthday. Strangely enough, I went through my Flickr photos and I don’t really have any good shots of her, so I had to grab one from her Facebook profile instead. Tonight we’re having a little BBQ over at my dad’s house for her, which should be fun (although I probably won’t be staying too long, as I’m pretty swamped with work).

Happy Birthday Alison!

Home Garden Update

Duane Storey — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:13:30 -0700

I was wondering today just how long my little garden has been growing for. Looking at my Flickr set, it looks like I had moved a few of the tomato seedlings outside on May 22nd. Here’s a shot at the time:

I took a few photos today, and wanted to do a little comparison. It’s been roughly five weeks since I started, and here’s what things look like today:

As you can see, things are progressing nicely. I had a little mishap about a week ago where I accidentally broke the main stem on one of my roma tomato plants. I actually managed to fix it up such that the wilting disappeared and it started coming back to life. Unfortunately that made God angry, and he destroyed that little guy with some wind instead. So I lost half of that tomato plant. Thankfully I planted a few extra (the engineer in me, always have a backup people), so I should be ok for the season.

A few other of my plants took a pretty big beating during that little wind storm, so I decided that it was probably a good time to stake most of the bigger plants. I went down to Canadian Tire and bought some bamboo sticks along with some velcro tape and spent about 30 minutes yesterday staking all the main stems on the larger plants. So I think they’ll handle the elements a little bit better.

I planted a pile of lettuce back in May, but I think I screwed up and planted them all too close together. The end result is that the lettuce is growing really slow (or possibly not really growing at all anymore), which is surprising since it’s supposed to grow rather quickly. One stray lettuce plant somehow managed to end up in another pot, and it is almost at full size now, leading me to believe that I planted the lettuce a little too densely. So, I’m starting over (since lettuce can basically grow year round), and doing a proper lettuce planting using Romaine and a green leaf lettuce.

Strangely enough, I’m actually getting a lot of enjoyment out of my little patio garden. I sometimes find myself just sitting outside with a coffee and staring at my plants. My only real regret is that I don’t really have enough room to grow anything else (which sort of makes me want to start thinking about investing in a house).

The good news is that most of the plants have started to flower. My pepper plants have also started to produce peppers, which has been rather cool to watch. Here’s a shot of a little red pepper starting to grow in one of the flowers:

I’m not really sure how long it’s going to take for the tomatos to grow at this point. Most of the tomato plants I have are determinate, and they’ve pretty much all flowered at this point. So I’m hoping I’m only four to six weeks away from making my first batch of pico de gallo using fresh ingredients. So exciting.

Happy Birthday Matt

Duane Storey — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:11:53 -0700

There are actually a few birthdays tomorrow, so I thought I’d mix the entries up a bit here by starting early. Tomorrow is my good friend Matt’s birthday. Yesterday a bunch of his family and friends met at a little place in the country outside of Abbotsford and spent the day sipping a few beers, watching kids kick soccer balls around, and eating some really awesome grub from the BBQ. It was the first sunny day in well over a week, and it was pretty great to sit outside and just enjoy some sunshine.

So, have yourself a great day tomorrow Matt – happy birthday!

The Summer Solstice

Duane Storey — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:42:09 -0700

..apparently came and went, and I missed it. I guess that means the days are getting shorter now instead of longer. Strangely enough, while I like summer and am looking forward to a few heat waves, my mind always wonders to the next season. For example, the other day there was a bit of rain, and it reminded me of sitting in front of the fire and watching movies a few months ago. Of course, when autumn rolls around I’ll be thinking of Christmas and of course being trapped in my apartment due to the snow (something that I actually like, probably because some of my best memories from Ottawa involve snow).

Back when I was in Whitehorse, the summer solstice was around the time of the big Yukon Storytelling Festival, which celebrated oral tradition, and provided a weekend of food, stories, and the occasional drink. It was at that event where I met Cheryl and Marilyn years ago. I was actually renting a room in the burbs from this crazy German lady. She insisted on snooping through my room from time to time, so eventually I decided to leave. Cheryl, who was a single mother with four kids, invited me (despite hardly knowing me) to come stay with her and her family for the rest of the summer, which got me out of a pretty big bind. Over that summer I got to know her kids really well, and spent a lot of evenings playing mario cart with them or helping out with the odd bit of babysitting. Thanks to Facebook, I still keep in touch with Cheryl, Marilyn, and all her kids, most of which have graduated high school now and moved on to bigger and better things. I briefly debated heading up to the Yukon this summer, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have the same mystique it did when I was there years ago, so I probably won’t.

As for me, I’m cleaning up a few big projects, and am then going to take some well-earned down time in July. I’ll still be working on a few things, namely shoring up some of the final changes on some of our plugins and building out both this site and the inthewack.com site, but other than that, expect to see mostly posts about camping or sleeping in the near future.

Women Only Conferences

Duane Storey — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:56:31 -0700

So, I gotta ask, and I’m probably going to get raked over the coals for doing so. I’m curious as to why there are so many technology events that focus exclusively on women? Some of them actually look pretty good, and I’m actually a bit disappointed that I can’t attend. In fact, some of the people I really look up to in the community are female, which makes it all the more disappointing that I’m excluded by nature from some conferences.

And that’s really my question I guess — why can’t I attend some of these events? Obviously there are a lot of women in technology these days. I’d be the first to point out that there are still more men (at least, the statistics tell me), but walking around Northern Voice or WordCamp San Francisco, I really couldn’t say whether there were more men or women there, which to me sort of implies it was roughly the same.

It reminds me actually of a time about ten years ago when there was an event in Vancouver called Take Back The Night. Many of the guys in the university found out about it, and wanted to support the cause. I’m not sure if things have changed since then, but at the time we were politely thanked for our support, and told not to show up at the event, as no guys were allowed. Obviously we were disappointed, since we strongly felt that standing up against rape was the right thing to do. It really called into question the nature of the event at that point, since it seemed wrong to have a supportive event of that nature where men weren’t allowed to show up.

And truthfully, I don’t think I could name a single conference that caters to men only. I imagine one or two exist, but certainly not to the extent that I see with regards to women-only conferences. Some people will probably read this and think this post harbors sexist tendencies, but truthfully, I’m just naturally curious. Given that some of my best friends are women, some of the smartest and most influential people in my industry are women, and that there were many women in my engineering classes, it honestly just feels a bit strange to me that we’re still segregating based on sex. In a lot of ways, I almost find that tendency self-defeating — that is, as long as we focus on the differences of groups of people instead of their similarities, we’ll always be creating divides instead of bridging them.

‘New Victoria’ Weekend, Courtesy Of Coast Hotels, Part I

Duane Storey — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:18:33 -0700

I had the opportunity to spend last weekend in Victoria with some of Vancouver’s best food and travel bloggers, courtesy of Coast Hotels, BC Ferries, and Tourism Vancouver. The trip started as nothing more than a quick email from Danny Dang, social media coordinator for Coast Hotels, in which he invited me to participate in an all inclusive weekend on the island. Given that I really enjoyed myself last year in Victoria, I thought it would be a great opportunity to spend some time on the Island and visit some of the local attractions.

I left my apartment Thursday evening and ended up at Arieanna and Ianiv’s house for the evening. We went for a quick trip down to the Quay so that I could take a few photos. I ended up snapping an HDR of the sun setting over downtown Vancouver:

We woke up bright and early and made our way down to the Coast Hotel near Denman street where a bus was waiting for us. We met everyone who was coming with us on the trip, and proceeded to the Tsawwassen ferry terminal. We were treated to the Pacific Buffet on the ferry, which is a nice buffet breakfast/lunch in a private area on the ferry.

The food was great, and the area was secluded enough that we managed to relax for a bit and get to know each other before we arrived on Vancouver Island.

Upon arriving on the Island, we boarded another bus that was waiting for us and headed to our first stop, the Sea Cider Farm and Ciderhouse, a local cider brewery. The only real exposure to cider I’ve had in my life is from Strongbow (which is a funny story, because I ordered it in a Seattle bar thinking it was actually beer). Truth be told, I’m not really much of a cider fan, so I was looking forward to tasting the various incarnations of cider at the brewery.

We were given a nice tour of the facilities, complete with the history of the Sea Cider Farm and the two owners. Afterwards, we met in the tasting room and were treated to approximately nine different tasters of various ciders. Given that I’m from Chilliwack, I set it upon myself to not only taste all the cider, but to actually finish each glass as well, something that John Bollwitt thankfully participated in. Needless to say, at around the seventh cider or so I was feeling a tad tipsy.

All in all, seeing the cider farm was a great experience, and I highly recommend the trip to anyone in the area. I learned a great deal about cider, and even managed to pick up a few bottles for home on my way out the door.

Stay tuned for the next part in this series, which involves the annual Wine and Oyster event at the Coast Hotel in Victoria.

Happy Fathers Day

Duane Storey — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 12:24:45 -0700

I’m currently on the ferry heading back to Vancouver frm an awesome weekend on the island, courtesy of Coast Hotels. I should be home sometime later today.

But in the meantime, as it’s fathers day, I wanted to wish my dad, Tom, and my step dad, Marty, a happy fathers day! Happy fathers day guys!

Random Thoughts From Home

Duane Storey — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:51:40 -0700

Some days I wake up and still find it a bit weird that I’m back in my home town. I’m totally enjoying myself here, more so with each passing month, but certain aspects of being here are still strange to me. High school literally feels like yesterday to me, probably because I spent so much of my 20s in school, but when I think back to high school here, I have a hard time putting all the pieces together.

For example, I went by my old house I lived in when I was 17. Strangely enough, I couldn’t remember how I got to school in the mornings. I’m pretty sure I walked to school, and I’m pretty sure I met my friend Landy on the way, but I really couldn’t say what route we took or where we met in the mornings. It’s hard to believe that it’s been about 13 years since I was in high school.

There’s a certain tranquility that comes from living out in the country here that I found I’ve really been missing these last few years. The other night I was sitting on an outdoor chair swing with my niece Jessica, staring up at the stars and talking about all the boys in her class and what-not, and it was pretty awesome. In fact, just being able to walk out my front door and walk over to my sister’s house in about 10 minutes is a pretty nice feeling.

I have a couple of goals this summer. First, I want to reconnect with a few old friends back here, something I’m slowly starting to do. I’m also trying to undo about five years of abuse on my body, mostly as a result of lack of sleep and eating crappy restaurant food non-stop. To that end, I’ve been going to the gym fairly religiously for the past few weeks, and have been trying to eat at home as often as I can (something I rarely did in the city). I’ve been strengthening my knee at the gym, so I’m pretty sure I’m going to try a hike one day soon and see if I can get back into that. I’d like to do Mount Cheam this summer, something I missed out on when my friends did it a few years ago.

I’m hoping this will be a really memorable summer. Given that I’ve already visited San Francisco and am currently preparing to go to Victoria this weekend, it’s off to a great start already. A couple other random things I want to do this summer are :

A wine tasting tour in the Okanagan
Camping up at Cultus Lake
A road trip, either to Banff or Oregon
Play guitar at a coffee shop

That’s it off the top of my head, but I’m sure I’ll come up with many more items over the summer.

New Victoria For New Media – Weekend Adventure

Duane Storey — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:28:23 -0700

About a month ago I got an email from Coast Hotels asking if I’d like to partake in an all-inclusive weekend in Victoria with a few other bloggers and social media people from Vancouver. Given how much fun I had in Victoria last summer with Arieanna and Ianiv for the BC Festival 150 concert, I jumped at the opportunity, especially since Coast Hotels was supplying the accommodation and transportation.

The trip will start off on Friday morning at the Coast Hotel in Vancouver — everyone is meeting and boarding a bus for the Tsawwassen Ferry terminal. From there, we’ll all travel to the Tsawwassen Quay for a coffee and to browse through the market, eventually boarding the 11am Coastal Celebration ferry to Victoria.

The itinerary for the rest of the weekend is as follows:

Friday

11:00am: Board Coastal Celebration ferry. Buffet lunch will be included.
12:45pm arrival time: Ferry docks at Swartz Bay (Victoria). Welcome to Victoria!
1:30pm: Sea Cider Farm & Cider House for cider tasting and tour compliments of Sea Cider Farm & Cider House
4:00pm: Check-in at Coast Victoria Harbourside Hotel & Marina
5:00pm – 7:00pm: The 15th annual BC Wine and Oyster Fest

Saturday

8:30am: Meet for group breakfast at Blue Crab Bar & Grill in hotel
9:30am: Royal BC Museum
11:30 am: Victoria Harbour Ferry tour and trip to Brew Pub
12:00pm: Lunch at Spinnakers Gastro Brewpub compliments of Spinnakers and Tourism
Victoria.
1:30pm – Evening, exploring Victoria

Sunday

9:15am: Meet in hotel lobby. Departure at 9:30 to Swartz Bay ferry terminal for 11:00am
sailing.
1:30pm: Drop off at Coast Plaza Hotel & Suites to end the tour!

So, I’ll probably be back home in Chilliwack around 3pm or so on Sunday.

Without a doubt, I’m totally excited about this trip, and am very thankful Coast Hotels and Tourism Victoria extended the offer to me. I’ll be bringing my camera gear and will do my best to return the favour by taking some photos of the hotel and as much of Victoria as I can fit on an 8GB compact flash card.

I’ll be heading into the city tomorrow night and will probably be spending the night at Arieanna and Ianiv’s house (since I haven’t seen them in a while, and they’re also coming on the trip). Friday morning we’ll head down to the hotel, and start our weekend adventure — a big thanks to Danny Dang, Coast Hotels, BC Ferries and Tourism Victoria for making this happen!

Help Iran With A Proxy Server

Duane Storey — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:09:45 -0700

As many people know, there are protests going on in Iran, and the Iranian government is actively trying to stop the flow of information both in and out of the country. Twitter has been instrumental in helping getting the word out about what is going on there, so much so that they recently postponed a critical maintenance period simply so Iranian users could continue to use the service. A few hours ago I saw some requests on Twitter from Iranians asking for international proxies such that they could continue to use the Internet.

Creating the AMI on EC2

Given that I have an EC2 account, and that setting up a proxy isn’t too difficult, I decided to set one up. If you’ve never used EC2 before, this is a great primer article, so I’m not going to do an EC2 tutorial here.

First thing I did was to fire up a Fedora core image using my generated key-pair:

ec2-run-instances ami-225fba4b -k ec2-keypair

Then I logged into that instance as root so that I could configure the proxy server:

ssh -i ec2-keypair root@ec2-174-129-169-124.compute-1.amazonaws.com

You’ll have to substitute your own instance identifier for the login information, which you can get using the command ec2-describe-instances.

Once inside, I went about editing the httpd.conf file in the /etc directory. I activated the proxy server and restricted access to Iranian IP addresses only, which I found on various lists on the Internet. The actual blob I added can be found here.

I then restarted Apache, and proceeded to test it using Safari on my local machine (I also added my public IP address to the Allow list). It seemed to work like a charm.

Next step is to allocate a public IP using EC2. This can be done using the following command:

ec2-allocate-address

You’ll then get a public IP address. All that’s left is to assign it to your running instance using a command like:

ec2-associate-address -i i-5d478934 some-ip-address

At that point you’ll have a public web proxy on port 80 that will only allow proxy connections from Iranian IP addresses.

I did a quick Google and found a few people begging for an AMI image to do this for Iranian users, so I’ve bundled one up and made it public. In theory you’ll just have to launch a new instance based on this AMI, and assign a public IP address to it. Everything else should be taken care of. Remember to only distribute proxy IP addresses privately, as Iranian officials are blocking them as they find them.

The AMI that does this is ami-a37b9dca. If you have any problems, drop a comment.

Update – apparently I accidentally included my cert file in the AMI. I’ve since regenerated it, so it can’t be used for anything. The AMI still works fine though, so feel free to use it.

How does it work

Once you setup a proxy server and give the IP address to someone, they can simply set that IP address as their web proxy. For example, in Safari you set it in Network preferences:

For everyone outbound request, the browser will contact the proxy instead and ask it to grab the actual information itself and forward it along. That way, if a service such as Twitter is blocked, the proxy will get the information from Twitter itself and forward it onto the client. So once you have a public IP address associated with your EC2 instance, simply get that into the hands of someone in Iran, and they’ll be able to use your proxy server to access sites on the Internet that are blocked in Iran.

New Site Coming

Duane Storey — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:49:02 -0700

I’m going to overhaul this website again, most likely starting in July. To be perfectly honest, writing content just isn’t as satisfying as it once was, partially because I don’t have as much to write these days, and partially because I am just enjoying other aspects of my life more (such as going outside to hit some tennis balls around or heading up to the lake for lunch). Something I’ve always wanted on this blog, and that I’ve never really been able to achieve, is to have something that’s predominantly photo-centric. So my goal in July will be transform this blog into something more photo oriented, and pushing most of my other content to the sidelines.

One thing I’ve realized is that my current content dictates a lot of the design when I do each iteration. To that end, I’m probably going to scrap a lot of the main content and start over. I’ll probably leave my current blog entries so that search engines can still get to them, but other than highlighting a few of my favorite entries from the last few years, probably won’t cater to my previous content in the new design.

Another element I’d like to incorporate are my Flickr and Twitter streams. Flickr is fairly straightforward, as I’ve done that numerous times, but I’d like to come up with a neat way to show Twitter activity as well. My main page will most likely be a snapshot of what I’ve done on the web each day, with a little slideshow showing photos or what not. The purpose of that is to put more focus on photography, and less focus on blog entries.

Since the site is called duanestorey.com, I’m probably going to put the focus on me instead of my entries. That is, more about my life, what I’m doing, the photos I’m taking, etc. That will undoubtedly appeal to less of an audience, and I’m ok with that. I do WordPress related entries on BraveNewCode, so I’m ok with putting most of my technical presence over there. It would be nice to have my blog be almost entirely personal again (which is how it started in 2000), and I think that’s the direction I’m going to go.

I haven’t even started designing it yet, so I have no idea what it’ll turn out like. But having a photo-centric site has always appealed to me, so that’s the direction I’m going to go.

Also, the first batch of speakers was just announced for WordCamp Portland — I’ll be giving a little talk on WPtouch. Portland is pretty close, so I’ll probably drive down and do a bit of camping that weekend, i.e. put the “Camp” into WordCamp.

Gym: Week 2

Duane Storey — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:46:05 -0700

So this was my second full week at the gym. Other than Wednesday (where I missed going because I had to go to Vancouver), I was there every day this week. I’m definitely noticing an improvement in fitness, since my heart rate has come down while doing cardio, and I find it harder to get out of breath when I’m whacking a tennis ball around the court. I’ve been doing my normal routines in the morning, and also trying to get out and do something in the evenings as well (either go for a walk, hit some tennis balls, or rollerblade).

I generally eat fairly well when I’m at home (depending on your definition of well I guess). I’m a pretty big low-carb advocate, mainly because I feel way better when I don’t eat a ton of carbs. I still splurge from time to time and eat a “normal” meal, or grab popcorn at the movies or whatever (more so now that I now I’m hitting the gym regularly), but a high carb meal usually makes me feel kind of crummy a few hours later, so I don’t do them too often.

I’m meeting with my surgeon on Monday in Vancouver, partially to give him a final glimpse after the two rounds of surgery I went through, and also because I want to get a mole out on my cheek. You could argue that it’s a beauty mark or whatever, but it’s right on the edge of where my beard grows, and lately I’ve been nicking it enough that it’s pissing me off. A normal shaving cut is sort of a pain, but a bleeding mole sometimes trickles for hours, and it’s no fun at all. So I’m probably going to schedule an appointment later this month or early July to finally have it removed. I briefly debated going to my GP and having it done, but GPs are sort of like the brick layers of surgery, and I really don’t want to trust anything on my face to one. So I’ll probably end up shelling out a few hundred bucks to get it done by the plastic surgeon who put my eye back in the right place (surprisingly, you can’t even really see any scars from those surgeries — all you can see is the faint outline of some scar tissue under the skin), but having a board certified plastic surgeon do it is a big weight off my mind.

Other than that, not too much else new. We’re about to launch another BraveNewCode website shortly, so I’m going to be putting in some weekend hours to try and shore it all up. I’ll post a bit more about that in a few days probably.