Roman Mars of 99% Invisible spoke about city flags at the 2015 Ted Conference in Vancouver. It’s awesome, brilliant and speaks to the urbanization of our culture and our love of design. Give it a watch it is certainly worth you time.
oh ps. I asked Roman about Vancouver Canada’s Flag and he gave it a thumbs up.
I wanted to post quickly about what Brian Krogsgard coined The Trojan Emoji.
This seemed to many as frivolous, unimportant and most useless feature ever. (These comments were three months old at the time of this posting May 10, 2015)
What a lot of people didn’t realize even at that time was that the 4-byte unicode characters in WordPress that makes those fun emoji’s happened also allows for Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters is important to making WordPress more global.
I had even played around with the development plugin Gary Pendergast was creating to solve this problem it was affectionately called x1f4a9 or 💩, I though this is cool, can I make this work on my local installation running trunk and oh my that Gary Pendergast is one funny dude.
Except for a couple people on the WordPress security team. No one really knew how important enabling emoji support were going to be to fixing the security with in WordPress until Andrew Nacin spoke at the recent Loop Conf.
I wasn’t able to attend Loop Conf in person but they had an amazing live stream which was completely free (major props organizers) and Nacin walks us through the Anatomy of a Critical Software Bug.
I had a hard time following the code in Nacin’s talk it was well over my head. Ryan D Sullivan tweet exemplifies this completely. But instead I tried following the story. As Nacin walks us through a two year journey to fix a vulnerability and it was a fascinating story.
A lot of patches in WordPress aren’t this hard… but they are similar rabbit holes of problem solving to make something better.
I recently had a guest post on the WPTavern on lobbying trac tickets, IPTC captions and photography. Check it out.
Great UX, hard demanding but fulfilling work. NOTHING is ever as easy as it appears.
For a nation that is still quite young in many respects it certainly has had a large number of flags flown over it’s soil. Although I don’t know one that suits it more then our Maple Leaf, Happy 50th Birthday.
I come from a family of teachers. But I never took up the trade myself. While it may not be the highest paid career in the world many people find it completely rewarding.
Sure I train clients on how to use their website and I’ve worked the odd Happiness Bar at a WordCamp, but I had never actually been in a tutoring role.
Some months ago at a SaturHack I met Meredith Underell who runs the Vancouver Chapter of Ladies Learning Code or for short LLC. I thought it was a totally cool project and friends like Mandi Wise and Christine Rondeau have both volunteered as tutors in the past.
I made one wrong assumption about LLC was their tutors were only women. Nope! male tutors are invited to volunteer as well.
So when I heard that LLC was having a Girls Learning to Code and was in need of some volunteer mentors for a HTML / CSS course. I had some time and I decided to sign up and give it a try.
I was a little nervous as what to expect but was warmly welcomed when showed up. I got myself a name tag and sat down next to a girl who was having a little trouble getting started.
Turns out she wanted to make a photography website. Well did I ever pick the right girl to sit next to. I was a photographer for 7 years before I switched to web design and I have built a few photography websites in my day.
The hot topic of website creation was Minecraft but also cats, grumpy or other wise, dogs, fashion tips and bagels!
Clio ( Legal Case Management Software for Law Firms Tech as a service ) provided the location, bandwidth and a wonderful lunch. ( Along with a couple beers with the fellow tutors after our apt pupils left for the day. )
Just before we broke for lunch one of the tutors overhead a girl saying.
“I don’t want to have lunch, I am still coding”
We’ve all been there. Trust me.
I also met a number of developers from the wider Vancouver Tech Community. Great networking time at lunch and over beers afterwards.
The girls used Mozilla Thimble code editor which gives real time updates of their code.
I’d highly suggest any developer sign up for a Saturday of this. It was fun, lite, easy, rewarding and filled me full of good karma.
This guy has been parading around twitter for years as “The Real Bansky”. He until recently still linked to Bansky’s website and posted Banky’s art work as his own claiming we own nothing shared. He is nothing but a “fan” or imposter account and this latest image the imposter claimed as the work of Bansky when it fact it was artist Lucille Clerc.
To set the record straight.
Banksy is not represented by an art gallery, is not on Facebook and has never used Twitter. ~ Banksy
via the only thing he has ever claimed to own… his website. http://banksy.co.uk/faq.asp
Don’t get me wrong I love a good parody account on twitter as much as the next person. the9oclockgun and BCferrys are some of my personal favorites.
But I absolutely hate Internet hoaxes who are out to miss lead and profiteer from ill gotten gains. I hate when other people take credit for another persons work so I also invite you to check out this awesome podcast from On The Media’s TLDR on the subject.
Sunset on the first day of 2015 at the newly renovated Davis Bay Pier in Sechelt BC.
Your site is not a clown car. Decide what is most important and do that. Adding stuff doesn’t fix what’s broken below.
(speaking at WordCamp San Francisco)