We're back in Montreal again after more than two weeks in San Francisco. It was great being in the Bay Area, especially since this time of year in Montreal is kind of crappy. Cold rain knocks all the red-yellow-orange leaves off the trees and into the gutter, where they turn brown and gray. Everything's damp and muddy and icy, but there's no snow yet. Blech.
Our friend John Usher stayed at our apartment while we were gone, which was great for us since he watched our cats. We had our regular Friday Night Pizza together last night at 9PM, after a very long day in the plane. Traveling eastward is hard on the sense of time. But pizza night made it a little better.
We went up to Le Comptoir on rue Masson this morning for breakfast. It's a nice little place that you can always get into, regardless of the time of day (like, say, if you try going out for brunch at 11:30 on a Saturday...). The menu is a little too much in the Montreal Kitchen Sink style (10+ pages of every kind of food under the sun), but the bénédictines are good, they have mimosas, and they serve café au lait in big bowls. So what's not to like?
John rented a new apartment in Old Montreal while we were away. He's been a vagabond since early this summer when he left McGill and went back to his hometown of Beer in Devon. His new place is great -- 2000 ft² top-floor loft around the corner from Basilisque Notre Dame. I plan to abuse his hospitality and throw big parties in his home, if I can get away with it.
One nice thing is that he found the place on Montreal Craigslist. I think that's a pretty good sign that CL in MTL is becoming worth using, although they still don't have an interface in French. I don't know how you get away with an non-localized international Web site in 2006.
tags: montreal john usher le comptoir old montreal craigslist i18n
Web 2.0 Summit Wrap-up
LinuxWorld.com published my article on Day 1 of the Web 2.0 Conference, which I have to say I think is pretty OK good.
I had originally written a gossipy article about who was where and who announced what and what it meant for Linux users and the Open Source community. Don Marti, who edited the article, didn't like it. He told me to identify the key technologies mentioned at the conference that people could actually use and should know about, and write more about them. So I did, and I think the article is much better for it.
Days 2 and 3 of the conference coverage come out next week. I really liked writing about the Web 2.0 Summit; it gave me a chance to talk to people in-depth about their work. I didn't draw as much out of the conference itself as I would have liked, but by working press on it, I had to find stuff that interested me and communicate that interest. Which made it fun.
tags: linuxworld.com web2con don marti web 2.0
Que Rico
I'm pretty psyched that planning for next spring's Wikitravel Get-together 2007 is going so well. The Get-together (despite my finest effort, this seems to be the final name for the event) will be a convocation of Wikitravellers from all over the world on one spot to meet, talk about issues, but most of all, travel.
Our chosen destination for this year's event is Puerto Rico (the product of a months-long selection process, with two rounds of voting). Our coverage of PR in English Wikitravel is sub-optimal, and we hope that by bringing a bunch of wiki people to the island for a week to hang out and explore, we can greatly improve the travel guide for this big area.
Participants will be doing research before the event (April 14-22 2007) to determine those parts of the island that need better first-hand coverage. Then, we'll convene in San Juan (Puerto Rico) for a weekend before spreading out to cover the rest of the island. We'll meet back up in SJ the next weekend for some discussions and meetings before flying off to our respective homes.
It should be a really fun trip -- I've never been to the Caribbean at all, and I think PR sounds like a really amazing place to visit. And I think this style of meetup for Wikitravellers could be super-fun for future events; it will be cool to see how this one goes.
tags: wikitravel get-together puerto rico san juan
Poppies
One endearing custom in Canada for Remembrance Day is wearing small, red poppies on one's lapel, evoking the classic Canadian poem ''In Flanders Fields''. It's a beautiful tradition, but hard to watch a bit on this day in 2006, when Canadian soldiers are being killed not in Ypres, but in Kandahar by, among others, heroin drug-lords, for whom poppies have other meanings.
tags: poppies in flanders fields remembrance day canada afghanistan