Gels Saby Demoing at DemoCamp Victoria

While at An Event Apart SF, I went to look up something on the Victoria Better Web Posse’s site, and was saddened to find that it’s offline, “Address Not Found”. I’ve emailed Gels Saby hoping to find out the status, but haven’t heard back from her yet.

Joan McIlmoyl Cleghorn on the Victoria Linux User Group (VLUG) wrote

As I understand it from someone who was a member of Web Posse, it has folded. OTOH, WEAV amalgamated with Big Blue & Cousins about a year and a half ago. Currently, a former WEAV member is running a Web Tools Special Interest Group monthly.

If this is the case, this is a big bummer. I found the Better Web Posse to have a refreshing design focus lacking from WEAV before it and Big Blue & Cousins still today. The Better Web Posse brought together many talented designers, developers and other workers of the web.

It seemed like Gels and a few other people did a lot of work to bring the posse together. Thank you!

It’s a free event, and if your work is any way related to the web, you will be missing out if you don’t attend. Register now before the event is full.

Besides, we need to support the grass roots Victoria tech scene — stop the Vancouver tech drain

Dave Olson points out that it’s “strategically scheduled for the same weekend as The Great Canadian Beer Festival”. So it seems safe to expect a good turnout from Drucouver. I know Boris Mann will be in attendance, and participating.

I hope to at least make an appearance. I’ll be looking for opportunies for WordPress collaboration. But me making it there is based on the whim of my baby son — and I won’t have it any other way.

Victoria is one of the stops on the book tour. Get your copy of the fresh minted book signed by Christian Lander at Chapters on August 10th, 2:00 p.m. He’ll be in Vancouver a couple of days later.

I was a little surprised that Christian was coming to Victoria until I thought about it. Victoria is the most homogeneous city of it’s size I’ve ever been to, so I’m sure it is a great stop to visit with fans and to do research. Whenever I travel and return to Victoria I think, “Dang Victoria is white!”

I’m really looking forward to meeting Christian. SWPL started as a blog on WordPress.com at the beginning of this year and over night became an internet phenomenon. We got in touch and he joined our WordPress.com VIP program. I’ve enjoyed helping host his blog.

I’ll be there getting my copy signed.

Bounty Up is a service to collect online donations for a project, like the wildly successful MyFreeImplants.com, but for the rest of us — I wish I was kiddin’ about that site’s success. The tagline on BountyUp is “Ask for what you want, let the crowd pay for it.” Like the tagline, I’m being tongue in cheek, BountyUp has actually been used for a lot of wonderful projects.

It’s awesome to see an article about BountyUp’s service in the Times Colonist. The TC is Vancouver Island’s only widely distributed paper and is owned by CanWest Global Communications.

There is at least a couple of egregious errors in Tom Mcmillan’s article. The first “crowd-surfing” being comical, the second “millions” being a reminder of BountyUp’s potential.

The article also shares some of the wonderful details of the BountyUp story so far including:

• “… donations to fund projects for Oak Bay science students, North Carolina choirs and Middle East social activists.”
• “Starting out, I really wanted to change the world,” McKenty said.

I think I was among the first Joshua shared the idea with, and the passion to change the world was an important part of the equation from the beginning. He has done a great job applying his Web 2.0 expertise on this service, while continuing to work on other projects.

Hopefully, this article reflects momentum for the service, and BountyUp will have much deserved success!

Based on the BarCamp and Open Spaces concepts, the first DemoCamp was held in Toronto and inspires events of the same name in many Canadian cities and other locations around the world. Victoria organizer Mark Lise was inspired by attending DemoCamp Vancouver.

The following demos are currently proposed:

• Why DemoCampVictoria was created (Mark Lise)
• Fortuno (Jesse and Jason)
• Genetify (Andrew)
• BountyUp – Social Commerce (Joshua McKenty and Todd Khozein)
• DailySplice (Rian)
• Flock – the social web browser (Clayton Stark and other Flockers)
• Songbird (Steven Bengtson and Peter Van Hardenberg)

The format usually has the audience (participants) vote on what demos they want to see. What doesn’t get voted in at one event, often gets voted in at the next.

As BabyCamp could start any day within the next month, I hope to make it for the first hour tomorrow night.

Hat’s off to Mark and crew for putting this together. I’m sure it will be an awesome event.

Update: I did make it to the first half of the event, and took some photos. It was an awesome event! Dave Chard and team were incredible hosts! Dave is the founder of the real estate development company Chard Development and behind the Juliet condominiums being developed in downtown Victoria. Urbanist Yule Heibel made the introductions that resulted in this venue, and it seems this relationship will continue to grew and be a great benefit for entrepreneurs and technologists in Victoria– Dave welcomes other opportunities to host similar events!

I had a very interesting conversation with Yule about urbanization of downtown Victoria, got to catch up a little with Boris Mann, and have a little face time with the incredible — and recently relocated to Victoria — Darren Barefoot. I saw some people I haven’t seen in a while and met quite a few wonderful people. The demos were great!

Looking forward to the next one.

Thursday Update: Yes, it seems that it was temporary!

I was already in a bad mood because of a combination of personal challenges and work-related quandaries from the day before, and then while working this morning my laptop shut down suddenly and in a manner I hadn’t seen before.

When I tried to start it back up I get 2 beeps, and the only text on the screen is Fan error. Wait a second something smells bad, like burnt plastic. Wow, the bottom of the laptop is hot.

The floor falls away and me on my chair plummet with the crumbling room falling on top of me.

It is almost embarrassing how bad I feel with the sudden loss of my Ubuntu Linux running laptop, but it is my trusty hammer. The hammer I have grown attached to; the one I know best.

I shouldn’t be surprised that it has failed me:

• I have been flushing more of my time on the Dell desktop running Windows Vista lately.
• I have been thinking about what parts of Windows and Mac OS I find much more productive than my Ubuntu experience.
• Recommending Apple Mac to some people!

Its feelings were probably hurt!

The laptop is out of warranty. I always recommend people get extended warranties on mobile or expensive hardware. This laptop does not because it was purchased by Flock in the US, and I bought it off them when I left.

First, although it seems likely that the fan is fried because I can’t hear it when I start the computer and the smell is worse in that area of the case, I still look to see if I have misdiagnosed the problem.

Error messages – ThinkPad General:

Fan error: Fan

Not very useful.

For a different ThinkPad model, I found that error could be caused by a problem with a bad battery. So I removed both the batteries and tried with just A/C. Same symptom.

While searching I discovered a great ThinkPad forum called thinkpads.com Support Community — you know you are using a good product when there is a community freely helping each other.

So I think my original diagnosis is correct. Burnt out fan. It is a mechanical part almost always on, and like the hard drive it will fail.

Lets see how I can get this fixed. I’m not encouraged that it’s the start of a long weekend.

Thankfully, I know a lot of good sys admins, and the best PC hardware person I know is my friend Aaron Greengrass.

He quickly found me a link to the schematic with part #, and the IBM/Lenovo contact information:

IBM hardware, software, and systems support
1-800-IBM-SERV
(1-800-426-7378)

And from there a support technician guided me to find a local business partner:

1. http://www.ibm.com/ca/
2. Learn about
3. IBM Business Partners
4. Find a Business Partner
5. Find a PC Warranty Service Provider

Six results for Victoria.

The first two I call I get voice mail before noon — yup, it’s a long weekend.

The third one, NexInnovations, the answering service says to call a 1-800. I speak to someone back east who says there is local service, but no “walk ins” I would have to courier it or otherwise ship it.

Next, I call Microserve Business Computers and the receptionist connects me right away and the person I spoke to was helpful, but they don’t carry an inventory of parts (shipped by air only a day or two) and turn around time is at least a week, and service is at $85/hr.

The reality of not having my laptop for at least a week sinks in, and my priority becomes setting up a full work environment on my desktop PC — yes, I will leave the OS as Windows Vista.

That $85/hr quote immediately reminded of what Daniel Lackey recently wrote “It’s a bit like cars. You simply HAVE to know the simple mechanics behind a car, and a bit of knowledge and experience with the car yourself before you take it in to a shop” before he went on a total car tangent.

When I was searching on all of those sites and forums about ThinkPads and “Fan error” I found out that people consider replacing the fan fairly easy and included in the response to most hardware questions is a link to the HMM, the Hardware Maintenance Manual.

This is another reason why the ThinkPad is a great family of products, manuals.

The next step is taking apart the laptop. Confirming the smelly part is the fan, and ordering that part.

I will let you know how it goes. My thoughts are also with my colleague Mark Riley who is also having his own severe computing problems.