Like many other Canadians, specifically Vancouverites, I woke up on Monday morning with a sense of loss and a bit of an emotional hangover. The euphoric buzz of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games, over less than 24 hours, quickly wore off. It left me with a question that I’m sure many of us are asking, “Now what?”

Photo by kennymatic on Flickr

In 17 short days Vancouver hosted the biggest extended party it has ever seen and, possibly, ever will see. I’m even going so far as to say that a Stanley Cup win by our beloved Canucks would not even come close to the carnival (as fugitivephilo says in a thoughtful blog post about consumerism & patriotism) that we saw. Wow!

A better fictional account of the most dramatic Canadian Olympic games could not have been written.

Day one started with the horrible news that Georgian Luger Nodar Kumaritashvili had been killed during a run at the Whistler Sliding Centre. There has been much speculation as to the reasons for the fatal crash and a complete analysis is yet to come. With this tragic event came the ringing true of that old adage, “the show must go on.” All but one of the Georgian athletes, the other luger, decided to continue their participation in the games.

The extended torch relay crossed Canada, traveling approximately 45,000 kilometres, and wound through Lower Mainland neighbourhoods and had us frothing like Pavlov’s dogs, tweeting madly about who was going to be the final torch bearer lighting the Olympic cauldron. The speculation was more fierce than a Next Top Model photo shoot with guesses ranging from the very possible like Betty Fox, mother of the late Terry Fox, to the extremely unlikely and downright silly, like the ghost of Mr Dressup.

Protesters attempted to thwart the torch’s progress but succeeded only in having it re-routed around them. The spectacular Opening Ceremonies were tarnished by a few ‘technical difficulties’ (which seemed to be a recurring theme with the CTV coverage of the games as they went on). Watching Wayne Gretzky (actually the most speculated final torch bearer), the great one, chased by maniacs while riding through Vancouver in the back of a VANOC pickup truck, torch in hand, off to light the Olympic flame on the waterfront seemed perfect. How Canadian.

The 17 days of the games went by in a blur. It was certainly a roller coaster ride for Canadians. Jenn Heil came ‘this close’ to capturing Canada’s first Gold Medal on Canadian soil with her moguls run, but that honour went to another freestyle skier, Alexandre Bilodeau, for his defeat of bad boy Canadian turned Aussie, Dale Begg-Smith.

Gold Medallist Alex Bilodeau - photo by John Biehler on Flickr

Things continued along the same lines for our country throughout the games. There was medal after medal by the Canadian female athletes. We learned that Canadian girls really do kick ass. After a bit of a rocky start, yes even the hockey team, the men finally began showing up and then the gold rush began. Although Canada didn’t own every step on the podium it certainly owned the gold medal podium winning 14 gold medals, breaking the all-time record for golds by any country in the history of the Winter Olympic Games by one. That one medal happened to be the last of the games, won by those dudes from the NHL and that over time goal against Team USA by the now legendary (and fellow Nova Scotian) Sidney Crosby in the most epic hockey game I can recall in my 40 years on the planet.

Here’s what that win sounded like from across False Creek. If you watch the whole video, take note of the “Loooouuuuu” Luongo cheer as he makes a save at 1:00, and then at 1:20 the entire city goes insane as Crosby scores his goal:

Nice.

Then the city celebrated…

Canada Wins Gold - photo by John Biehler on Flickr

“Booze free”, of course, as the VPD closed down liquor stores early after learning some hard lessons during the the alcohol fueled ‘94 post Stanley Cup riot. I’m sure people managed to find their booze elsewhere, or just did something else. This is BC after all.

I didn’t get to see as much as I would have liked to due to massive lineups (of oddly friendly and happy people) and insanely high prices for the sporting events. Two trips to the Hudson’s Bay official Olympic store saw me go away empty handed. No red mittens or Canada hoodie for me. Oh well. I don’t need more crap anyway.

Those were the biggest downsides that I experienced.

For me, the traffic every day of the games seemed extremely light and I had no trouble with my usual commute. Translink did a very good job of scaring enough people out of their cars and onto transit to make that part of the games go off without a blip.

The protests were under reported in the mainstream media, although a group of self-accredited social media reporters, myself included, came together under the True North Media House banner and did our best to report the other untold stories and other perspectives during the games. I think we did a decent job getting the alternative word out considering our rather noisy competition.

It appears there is still some work to do before social media is the ‘go to’ place for the masses to get their news. The main flaw with any form media is that people must be tuned in to receive the message and the masses it seems remained glued to the more traditional television coverage of the games. That said, the amount of people tweeting comments during all of the events especially the opening ceremonies, hockey games and closing ceremonies proved there is plenty of crossover between the old and the new. Eventually the convergence of technologies that we’ve been hearing/dreaming about and we’ll be seamlessly commenting on events to a communal stream ticking across the bottom of our giant TV/computer screens.

Anyway, I had a ton of fun, and I think we made some new and closer friends in the process. Isn’t that was life should be about anyway?

As someone who poo poo’d the games I was pleasantly surprised by my experience. When I ask myself, ‘what now?’, today I think we had better start saving up for a trip to London in 2012 and/or to Sochi in 2014. The Olympics are coming. For now I think we’ll check out some Paralympic events. Wheelchair curling and sledge hockey look kind of cool.

**I’ll add some links to others’ awesome coverage of the games later on. This post pooped me out. I need a break. **

Carol, always pursuing the next great pin, and me on a quest for an official Vancouver 2010 mug a former teacher braved the crowds and traffic and headed downtown in to the Olympics related madness. It took over an hour to get to the parking spot Carol had for us in the building where she works. As soon as we walked out of the building onto Granville Street, this is what we saw:

There were buskers busking, clowns clowning and men in pink underpants putting on shows all along the usually traffic laden Granville Street in downtown Vancouver. There was a different type of traffic today. No cars. Just a mass of humanity aimlessly milling about watching the mass of humanity aimlessly milling about.

Here’s another shot:

I’ll do a post tomorrow about Carol’s pin mission and my quest for the mug. For more you can read Carol’s post about our day out and about.

I’m pooped, but what a load of fun.

Yesterday a team of us from DOXA Documentary Film Festival headed down to Creekside Park to see day one of taping for the Colbert Show in Vancouver. We were hoping we would be able to get a camera package for our upcoming EXPOSED! Celebrity Camera Auction fundraiser to Stephen Colbert. We passed our package off to an AD and hopefully Mr. Colbert will get the package and agree to participate.

I took Carol’s camera and got a ton of great shots from my vantage point back stage and running around through the crowd snapping away.

We weren’t the only ones to show up. There are estimates that over 5000 people were in attendance and the patriots were out in force.

The place went nuts when Stephen Colbert arrived and he did not disappoint. I was especially impressed with his improv. He is more charismatic in person than I thought he would be.

Oh look, Colbert must have seen me in the crowd as he waved right at me. He was actually counting down from five, but hey, a guy can dream can’t he?

Here’s a slide show of the best shots I snagged of Stephen Colbert, his guest Michael Bublé and eTalk Canada’s Ben Mulroney, as well as a few other lucky shots from a great day.

Many thanks to Carol Browne for letting her camera out of her sight for the day and to Miss604 for posting a couple of my photos .

Showing appreciation is nice. “And that’s the word”.

I have been working at DOXA Documentary Film Festival as the Social Media Coordinator / Blogger for the past two months. The office is on Commercial Drive, one of the funkiest neighbourhoods in Vancouver. One of my favourite things about this block is the number of fantastic coffee shops I have to choose from.

Yes, I can go to the most recognized, corporate shop with the green awning and mermaid in the logo if I wish, and often do. This morning rather than heading there for my usual latté and an apple fritter I was introduced to Fratelli’s bakery by my co-worker Desirée.

While I was eating two ham and cheese croissants and drinking a dark roast coffee at my desk I got to thinking. I realized that some folks, perhaps in town for the 2010 Olympics, may be looking for a more authentic Vancouver coffee experience. So, here I am dioing a quick post about Fratelli’s and the other two fabulous coffee shops nearby Continental Coffee and Café Calabria.

Literally two doors down from Fratelli’s is Café Calabria where if it’s authentic Italian coffee, cuisine, atmosphere and service you want, this is the place to go.

Years before the airing of The Sopranos series on HBO, my wife Carol and I had an argument about the existence of the Italian mafia while drinking coffee and eating paninis at Café Calabria. She has since become a believer. The argument had nothing to d with the family that owns and runs Calabria who happen to be very nice folks, it just took place there.

Finally, kitty-corner to Fratelli’s is Continental Coffee. I am drinking a latté from there right now. It’s pretty tasty, but they are best known for their amazing café mochas made with with real chocolate and lots of freshly whipped cream.

In the above photo you can see the aforementioned green awning of the evil corporate giant directly across the street. As well, is the fine young gentleman who, upon seeing me taking photos along the Drive, called me an “Olympic rat-bag”. That’s him in the red baseball cap with a skateboard at his feet drinking water in front of the shop. I am unsure what would have set him off other than my camera as I am not wearing anything even remotely Olympic. And if you look at me lately athletics are clearly not something I’ve been participating in.

They can’t all be winners.

Today makes only 30 days left until the start of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics and Paralympics. Being in a position to blog as a Vancouverite during the upcoming games is kind of cool. Especially interesting is that these are going to be the most covered games of all time with every second of every event available either on TV or streaming online.

I wasn’t exactly sure I wanted to participate at all after seven years of listening political blather about infinite subjects relating to this fast approaching event. All the negativity has left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. However, the closer we get, the more I feel myself being drawn into it. After all, there are thousands of athletes who have worked basically their whole lives to come here to compete. I am looking forward to seeing that.

Without a doubt our day to day lives are going to be impacted. Things that we take for granted like commuting to work, going out for lunch, even shopping and picking up groceries are probably going to change. The sheer number of people coming to the city from all over the globe is going to put a massive strain on our infrastructure. Getting around Vancouver under normal conditions (like most cities) tends to have its moments of frustration for commuters. But this is going to be a gong show.

We’re being told to walk, bike or take transit into work during the games as there are going to be road closures around venues as well as lane closures specifically for Olympic vehicles, all starting on the 15th of January 2010, this Friday. Walking and biking are pretty much out for us as we live far enough in the burbs that transit is the only viable option, unless of course we want to get up and go three hours before we have to be at work. No thanks.

Transit? Yuck. It can have that third world I am a sardine in a can feel on a good day. I am looking at all of this as an adventure. I’m sure we will figure some kind of routine. It is only temporary after all. Maybe travelsmart2010.ca can help to put my mind at ease about the transit situation.

Finances are such that we won’t be attending the Men’s Gold Medal Hockey game (tickets are $2500+ per seat) or any other sporting event. We will most likely head downtown for a bit of fun on a Saturday or Sunday to watch celebrations and maybe meet some people. Carol will be more likely to get photos during the week as she will be sporadically heading to the downtown core to work.

I’ll be blogging during the lead up to and throughout the games as well as, I am sure a bit about the aftermath. There a strict guidelines for bloggers to follow according to VANOC and the IOC, but thankfully places like True North Media House have put a ton of work into providing detailed resources for people like myself who are interested in covering the games.

As mentioned in my last post I have been scanning photos and postcards from a very old album that was obtained by a friend of ours at a local estate sale. The album, it turns out, belonged to a woman from Vancouver named Jean M. Story. In 1938, she traveled with one or more people across Canada to Quebec and through Europe documenting her trip with photos and postcards. She saw pre World War II versions of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, Germany, France, England and Ireland.

It has been fascinating following along, but I wondered why, I of all people would be doing this project. Then I came across her photos of Winchester Cathedral in England. One photo immediately stood out. It is of a tombstone in the cemetery adjacent to the Cathedral. The text of the tombstone is as follows:

In Memory of Thomas Thetcher

a Grenadier in the North Regiment of Hants Militia, who died of a violent Fever contracted by drinking Small Beer when hot, the 12th of May 1764, Aged 26 Years.

In grateful remembrance of whose universal good will towards his Comrades, this Stone is placed here at their expence, as a finall testimony of their regard and concern.

Here sleeps in peace a Hampshire Grenadier Who caught his death by drinking cold small Beer. Soldiers be wise from his untimely fall,
And when ye’re hot drink Strong or none at all.

This memorial being decayed was restored by the Officers of the Garrison A.D. 1781 An Honest Soldier never is forgot, Whether he die by Musket or by Pot.

The Stone was replaced by the North Hants Militia when disembodied at Winchester on 16th April, 1802 in consequence of the original Stone being destroyed.

This is a very significant find for me and many of my friends for personal reasons. Of note, this stone was once again replaced in 1966, making this photo even more meaningful. It would have been standing during World War I when a young American doughboy on furlough was so moved by it that he wrote about it years later in one of the most important books I have ever read.

I’ll tell you privately what it was if you want to ask, and will delete any comments that identify the book or it’s author. Sorry for the mystery but it is in keeping with tradition. It’s easy enough to find out if you are familiar with Google.

Thanks Jean M. Story, where ever you are. What a neat find.

Our friend Mark picked up an old photo album at an estate sale that he went to last year. For some reason he gave it to us. It has been sitting in Carol’s office gathering more dust for the past months. After a visit from another creative friend last week I felt inspired to deal with it.

Here it is in all its antique glory:

I have decided to scan the photos and postcards within to try and determine who the creator was, what their lives were like, where they traveled and perhaps learn a little bit. Oddly enough there are many pages with no photos or photos missing. I presume this is where the photos of people used to live as there are not many faces in this album. It sort of adds to the mystique.

So I have set up my special scanning station at the kitchen table for this undertaking.

This is the set up I am using to import the photos so I can share them. From left to right on the table are the photo album, MacBook Pro and a Brother MFC-210C scanner. On the chair is my assistant, Oscar Madison Bigglesworth Browne.

As of this writing I’m three pages in and have many, many more. I am uploading the scans to a Flickr set to share with folks and, maybe get more information about the photos as there is not a lot to go on other than the pictures themselves.

Here’s a Flickr slide show of the progress so far.

This is going to take a while.

On January 18, 2010 it will be exactly 12 years since I quit smoking. It may not seem like a big deal to you, but to me, and my family, it’s a really big deal. I had tried to quit many times and always went back to it. I was smoking over a pack a day at the end and sometimes even go up in the middle of the night to smoke.

It certainly sucked being chained to something like that, but no more. I am grateful everyday that I don’t smoke anymore. I think that’s a part of what has helped me to stay stopped. I had plenty of my own reasons to quit smoking, health being the most obvious. But, I couldn’t quit for good until I decided that what I really wanted for me and no one else. Sorry Mom.

Anyway quitnow.ca, along with the BC Lung Association, is running a little contest that may give you that extra little push toward quitting yourself:

Quitting smoking is easier with support from on-line contest

November 23, 2009 – QuitNow & WIN, the contest that successfully convinced more than 7,000 British Columbians to sign up to quit smoking last year, is back.

The contest encourages smokers to turn to a buddy for encouragement, register online for support, and have the chance to win prizes totaling more than $20,000, provided by corporate sponsor McNeil Consumer Healthcare Canada.

“I had been thinking of giving up smoking for a while, and the contest was the push I needed,” said Justin Tournier, last year’s grand prize winner. “Cigarettes were no longer my companion, and I had to find new ways to deal with stress, boredom, social activities and habit. It was great to have a community of support to get past the rocky points and to learn new coping tactics. Once I had adapted to a new way of living, the need for cigarettes vanished. It’s been almost a year now since I quit and now, I wonder why I waited so long.”

“QuitNow & WIN had a very successful first year, and I am very excited that we can help more British Columbians go tobacco-free this year,” said Ida Chong, Minister of Healthy Living and Sport . “I am a big fan of this contest because everyone who participates in it is a winner. It provides great prize incentives for people to sign up, but the whole philosophy behind QuitNow & WIN is that participants help each other ‘cross the finish line’ and reach the first goal of going five weeks without using tobacco.”

QuitNow & WIN is an online contest that uses a combination of traditional and social media supports to help people quit smoking. Participants sign up with a ‘buddy’ who provides friendly encouragement. They can use QuitNow by Phone (1-877-455-2233), a free telephone-based counseling program available 24/7 in over 130 languages. They can sign up for supportive emails, text messages, Twitter “tweets” and Facebook updates. They can also join online support groups on www.quitnow.ca, an Internet based quit smoking service that offers individualized programs to participants – anytime and anyplace.

Organized by the BC Lung Association through grant fun

]]> http://blog.mikebrowne.com/gratitude/quit-now-and-win-contest-and-my-story/feed/ 4 http://blog.mikebrowne.com/mac/using-marsedit-as-an-offline-blog-editor/ http://blog.mikebrowne.com/mac/using-marsedit-as-an-offline-blog-editor/#comments Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:38:42 +0000 Mike Browne http://blog.mikebrowne.com/?p=5232

As we use only Mac here at DOXA I have, thankfully, been able to leave my PC alone for a while. Yesterday, I was editing blog posts and our hosting went down leaving me only with a text version of the post I had been working on.

This got me thinking about offline blog editors. Some nice folk gave me some great suggestions.

I have ScribeFire, a Firefox extension installed and it works great, but it is dependent on my browser being open and I don’t like being chained to Firefox. I would rather have something standalone so I went searching and saw a lot of chatter about MarsEdit.

What a beautifully intuitive interface for offline blog posting. The fact that it has a live preview window is nice as well. I can see my ramblings appear on my second monitor as I type.

I like that I can save a draft of my post with out the worry about a sketchy hosting service losing all of my hard work in the ether. I’ll keep tinkering with this until the 30 day trial is up, but am fairly sure I’ll pay the $29.95 USD to keep using it.

That said, there are a couple of others I want to try, ecto for example, before I make a final decision.

]]> http://blog.mikebrowne.com/mac/using-marsedit-as-an-offline-blog-editor/feed/ 3 http://blog.mikebrowne.com/media/hootsuite-iphone-app-is-just-around-the-corner-and-more/ http://blog.mikebrowne.com/media/hootsuite-iphone-app-is-just-around-the-corner-and-more/#comments Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:33:21 +0000 Mike Browne http://blog.mikebrowne.com/?p=5223

I love HootSuite. Since their most recent update that included support for Facebook and other social media networks, like Ping.fm and LinkedIn, as well as beta support for twitter lists, it has been my application of choice for updating my status across all of my social media profiles.

There was only one thing missing — mobile support. I have been using atebits’ Tweetie 2, TweetDeck for iPhone and SimplyTweet, but have not really committed to any of them. Hopefully, that is about to come to an end with the upcoming release of the HootSuite iPhone application as announced via email this morning:

Coming Soon to an App Store Near You

Our HootSuite iPhone app is coming soon! Once it is released, you will be able to schedule your tweets, check stats and manage multiple accounts from the palm of your hand.

You’ll have to salivate a little while longer, but don’t worry, we’ll let you know as soon as it is available.

Follow HootSuite for all the latest info:
Twitter | Facebook

I am looking forward to the app for sure. The was no mention what the cost was going to be for the application in the email. I will look into it further and update this post with what I learn.

Also, Facebook fanpage integration has also been added to HootSuite as of this morning according to their latest twitter update:

UPDATE Hootsuite dev team pushed Facebook FanPage integration. To add your FanPage go to Settings > Social Networks (FanPage) and add. [source]

Way to go invoke. You folks are awesome.

]]> http://blog.mikebrowne.com/media/hootsuite-iphone-app-is-just-around-the-corner-and-more/feed/ 0