Taken today when chilling on the grass by the water with Louis Armstrong playing in the background.

Today was a very nice spring day in Vancouver, so we went out to Stanley Park to enjoy the air. I captured the following beautiful sunset:

The quality is not 100% as it was taken with a camera phone (my N73), but it still looks nice. I stitched it together with Double Take.

Ahoy from the Vancouver PHP conference. I gave a talk titled "A Closer Look at Drupal 5" earlier. Overall response was positive, although according to Boris I wouldn't have managed to squeeze everything in 1 hour if I hadn't put on my zippy fast presentation speaking voice, so there might have been some information overload at times.

Oh well.. I figure anyone generally only remembers at most 50% of a talk, so I might as well blast you with a bunch of things and hope some of it sticks ;).

Thanks to Dries and James for letting me use their earlier presentations as a base.

The slides are no longer available by Dries' request, as he has had problems with people stealing slides without permission before. Sorry.

So, today I've been living in Vancouver for a month and a half. I've had time to get settled in, so I figured it was time for a little retrospective.

Tomorrow I'll be boarding a plane heading to Vancouver. Unlike the last two times, this trip will be one-way. Once I land, I get to walk the immigration gauntlet, after which I'll hopefully get a valid work permit.

Apparently, my life comes down to a big bag of clothes, a suitcase stashed with media, a backpack full of electronics and a box of books trailing behind. Plus, two bottles of beer.

Aside from my friends and family, I'll be missing the national sport of sandwich-making, sweet sweet Pêcheresse and fries that have anything but ketchup on them. Oh, and buildings that are older than 150 years.

The Belgium-Vancouver Beer Pipeline is the first of several steps intended to remedy this problem.

Well I guess a little status update is in order, as I've just had a very busy and exciting week go by ;).

Vancouver, Canada

... is not bad at all. The people are friendly and the sights are amazing (coming from someone whose land of origin is flatter than a pancake). Pretty from most angles, anyway; -1 on the expensiveness, all the homeless people and the difficulty in finding a proper sandwich. Seriously people, meat salad is only the beginning.

Bryght

... is a fun place to work at. The environment is very relaxed and the Bryght guys are a very sensible bunch (which all Drupaleers should already know). Part of the deal I have with Bryght is that I can spend a certain amount of my work time on arbitrary Drupal stuff (e.g. writing or reviewing core patches), which is working out great.

BarCamp Vancouver

... was a blast. This is the second BarCamp (and third *Camp) I've been to, and it just gets more fun every time. A ton of people showed up, all with tons of ideas buzzing around in their head. The opening party was at Bryght's new office, but the actual event was at Workspace in Gastown, an awesome shared working environment for geeks and non-geeks alike.

The Weather

... has been awesome. Today was actually the first overcast day I've ever seen in Vancouver, and even then it didn't actually rain. I wonder how long my "Rainless Vancouver" streak will last (18 days and counting).

The Scenic Tour

... starts here as I'm borrowing a digital camera at the moment. I've been uploading the photos that don't suck to flickr.