Wondering what to do in Vancouver next week?

I have a don't-miss suggestion – my friend Thomas Arthur's performance at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre!

A tour de force solo performance pointing to a unity of nature, nurture, mathematics, art, science and mythology. In a masterful weaving of sound and motion, lyrical juggler Thomas Arthur explores the nature of order. With a supporting cast of orbiting spheres, hoops, spirals, geometric solids, roots, sticks, stones and cones – and even a parabolic space-time tunnel! – Thomas spins a hypnotic flowing dance of visual music, poetic narration and projected imagery.

Thomas is one of my favorite people in the world, and if you're around, I urge you to support his work and come to the show, April 24-26, 2008. It'll be worth it.

Rannie Turingan, a great photographer in Toronto, made this video earlier this year. It's 20 couples on 20 couches and it's very sweet!

20 x 2 : What's The Difference? from photojunkie on Vimeo.

There's a few faces I know from Toronto in there (hi T&M!), so that makes it extra-fun for me, but I think you'll like it anyway. Unless you're highly homophobic... you might not like it then. But maybe you should watch it anyway. :P

Communicopia [that's where I work!] is looking for a web creator to join our team and work with some of the world's most exciting and inspiring social change organizations and sustainable businesses. If you like the thought of spending your days doing world-class work that matters, in a fast-moving and fun environment with a killer view, then this is the job for you...

Job Description

The Big Picture: our ideal candidate is a remarkable combination of a CSS wizard and a Drupal theming pro, with strong skills in Drupal development. Good design sensibility is essential, lead designer skills are a serious bonus. This position will test your aesthetic and user interface design skills from start to finish.

The exact job will depend on the skills of the perfect candidate, but one thing is for sure: your work will be diverse and ever-changing. You might start your week churning out beautiful CSS to match a design, move on to custom developing a Drupal site, and finish your Friday with a little Flash animation.

You may be asked to design wireframes, prototypes, or be tasked to design multiple website concepts, buttons, and banners. You could be asked to maintain client websites and give technical training when appropriate, and will be called on to participate in peer reviews of our website projects to improve the quality of our work.

Our skills wish-list is as follows (but we are more interested in finding the right "fit" for our company than in nailing every one of them):

I don't think I've ever blogged about it before, but tonight I'm coming clean online: I'm fascinated by childbirth. Some people seem to think it's weird to take an interest in birth before deciding to have a baby, but there it is. I do. I've even done some work as a doula, and aspire to do more in the future.

This weekend, Pomegranate Midwives are hosting a screening of "The Business of Being Born". You can see the trailer here:

It's at 1pm at the Rio Theatre, Broadway and Commercial. I will definitely be there!

About 18 months ago, I blogged about my concerns about the radiation coming from my laptop, and what effect it might have.

While it's not my most read post, it is far and away my most active, with 24 comments.  Seems like there are a lot of people out there concerned about this... and if their comments are any indication, having scarier experiences that I have had with my Mac.

I wonder how long til it emerges that laptop manufacterers knew all along what they were subjecting their customers to...?  

I got an interesting text message last night from a friend. He said "I use the internet the way some people use weed – I use it to avoid feeling things I don't want to feel."

He's not alone. There are infinite ways for us humans to avoid being uncomfortable emotionally – really this is at the root of all compulsive behaviours and addictions, whether drugs or sex or cookies or video games or internet surfing. There are gross manifestations (like those I just mentioned) and then there are a bazillion subtle ones too.

I engage in a number of such behaviours. One of the more glaring ones is to avoid focusing on a single task at hand, by compulsively distracting myself with the empty calories available on the world wide web. The possibilities are endless, but at the same time, there are a few grooves that I slide into most regularly – the well-trodden paths of Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. (Though I also really like to look at the weather, for some reason.)

I have often idly thought to myself "I wish there was a way I could block myself from those sites". I would hate to have an employer that did that, but I might just get a lot more done. I have tried quitting Facebook... I have tried logging out of Facebook... I have tried making strict rules with myself around access. None of those solutions has really done the trick.

Today I got a little smarter, and found myself a Firefox extension called BlockSite. Perfect! Now I can blacklist my most common distractions temporarily. Obviously it's not hard to go around this... but I find that often it's just that one extra step that is enough to make you wake up and decide not to indulge in your unconsciousness. This time, at least...

Saving ZipCar

Sure makes me glad that I recently decided to sign up as a Deposit-Free member over at the Cooperative Auto Network, rather than trying out Zipcar...

I was a regular share-owning member of CAN for about 5 years before moving to Toronto. They are a great group and I have nothing but good things to report about car-sharing. Oh, except for that pesky problem of there not being a car parked right outside my house... ;)