I head this on CBC Radio this morning. The main site is gasbuddy.com. The local site is vancouvergasprices.com one of many north american sites. They seem to have members posting the best gas prices found in the last 60 hours. Might be even more useful when planning a road trip.
I heard an interview with the Broad Coaltion this morning explaining that Noam Chomsky had endorsed their effort toward "Strategic Voting". Following is his endorsement from their website:
I would like to join the Broad Coalition in urging British Columbians to reject the BC Liberals on May 17th. It is essential that voters think hard about voting without compromising their values. It is equally important that voters consider voting strategically. So the work of the Broad Coalition, generating grassroots discussion and getting progressive voters to cooperate, is an important initiative."
I just overheard on CBC Radio an alert to this story:
VANCOUVER (CP) - The B.C. Centre for Disease Control has launched a vaccination program for gay men to protect against a bacteria that can cause meningitis.
The centre said that since the beginning of October, six cases of meningococcal C disease have been reported among gay men, and of those, three have died.
It said the outbreak suggests the bacteria may have become more widespread among gay men.
As a result, health agencies across B.C. are offering free vaccinations against meningococcal C to gay men and teenagers, as well as bisexual men or other men who have sex with males.
The centre said gay men who may be the most at risk include those who live in, or travel to, Greater Vancouver or southern Vancouver Island, those who have more than one sexual partner or who are socially active in the gay community.
Symptoms of meningococcal infection include high fever, headache and stiff neck.
I found this at medbroadcast. From their site:
Medbroadcast health news articles are now available as an RSS news feed entitled "Canadian Online Health Information". RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication," and it's another way for Medbroadcast to make the most up-to-date health news and other content available to our visitors.
There only seems to be one feed for the entire country. Thought it should be added but also thought I should post to main page as it sounded pretty serious.
The picture is taken from the site I found through World Changing. Here is a link to what the submitter calls the best stencil artisit in Vancouver.
I was thinking of posting asking how people find out the best charities to give to. Today I saw a report about a new Vancouver company that is trying to make it easier to find and give to charities. From their website:
With more than 100,000 non-profit and charitable organizations in Canada alone, finding the group that best matches your passions, beliefs and aspirations is almost impossible.
As far as I could tell the site itself was disappointing. They did have a list of charities but no hyper-links or taxonomy to search/browse types of charities. I guess Weblogs, Wikis and Web 2.0 have spoiled me. There must be better directories out there.
Unfortunately I wasn't aware of these people or that they were both speaking at the Fraser Basin Council Conference in Vancouver on Friday and Saturday of last week. I only noticed after the fact in the "Observer" section of Saturday's Vancouver Sun.
Miro is a 22 year old student who has an exemplary sustainable lifestyle. It is quite inspiring to read about her efforts. She is quoted in the article as wanting to "Break down the hierarchy, with academics at the top and the community at the bottom".
Boothroyd is a professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of B.C. Boothroyd believes that "We can't count on politicians and their narrowly focused institutions to make tough choices and develop long term sustainability policies because they are beholden, yes, to the public but also too often to special interests".
From the article: "Boothroyd encourages governments to become more transparent", he argues for more funding for civil societies such as Better Environmentally Sound Transportation and the David Suzuki Foundation, he warns of the dangers of public private partnerships like the Vancouver Airport Authority and Ravco.
I noticed Dave Winer writing about a blogging network. I think he's missing the point. Similar to Sun"s "The Network is the Computer" I believe the "Bloggers are the Government". Is Biology at work here and how they are now designing buildings to put electricity back into the grid. Blogging has created a network and tools that allow citizens to put knowledge into the political grid. The question is not how to apply blogging to the current political system it's how to change the current political system so that Bloggers can easily connect. How to Save the World has an interesting article today questioning the system.
And if a government becomes so dysfunctional that it no longer appears capable of reflecting the will of its constituency (because it tolerates gerrymandering, for example), maybe we need a process to permanently and completely revoke its charter, and simply disband it. That would be an extreme action, I admit, but I'm sure there are lots of other levels of government who could and would step into the void. Why should the institutions of nationhood be prohibited from evolving to meet changing public needs, just like any other public institutions? Such a model might allow political entities to evolve naturally, enable the simple elimination of duplicative levels of government, and for the first time ever, allow the people the true right to self-determination. Why should a community be forced to stay an unwilling part of a state or nation if the large majority of its citizens chooses to secede, establish their own political infrastructure and provide their own public services? Why couldn't communities be allowed to self-manage their political, social and economic affairs? Yes, it's a recipe for anarchy, but the Internet has shown that with some very loose coordination, anarchy works very well indeed.
I noticed yesterday that Ross Rader has linked to Gigadial. In the words of Phil Windley Gigadial "let's you create your own custom Podcast feed from other feeds". And you can browse stations that interest you to see what feeds they are listening to.
It's good to see Windley involved. I remember him as an early blogger who was, I believe, the CTO for the state of Utah. I think he believed in blogging so much that he personally paid for any state employee to have a blog. This quote caught my eye:
I could create a custom feed for students to listen to or for my employees. I think there will be lots of applications for this.
I wasn't aware until today that Roland Tanglao from Urban Vancouver has a Podcast. I found the link to his show "Dogma Radio" here.
Podcasting seems an easier way to showcase the benefits of blogging. It's sometimes hard to get people to read things and easier to have them just listen. Trouble is keeping the quality consistent. Hoping Gigadial will help with this. Interested in any other people's attempts to find the good stuff.
I'm not sure how many Urban Vancouverites are into Podcasting but I found this to be one of the best I've found for a mix between content/message Besides it has a description that just draws you in:
Random Bytes Radio - Show #8: Is it live or is it a Podcast?
Topics: New gear, new setup and a new attitude! Where are all the hardliners? Podsafe music: Should we care?
Tunes: Jet By Day, The Melismatics, Swingset Champions, The Southern Backtones, Minus 5, Josh Jennings and Eurovox...
I've been finding the good stuff few and far between with Podcasts. Speaking of good links I have to mention Darren Barefoot in case people aren't finding him in the "Vancouver Blogs" column on the right or in the News link here. I find his writing, content and presentation to be first class. Really enjoyed the Flash Video "Everyone has had more sex than me" that he linked to.
This is getting good. I've been using del.icio.us (a web based bookmark) more and more. I find it more interesting to surf tags at del.icio.us than to use Google for search. Now with Foxylicious my online tags synch up with my Firefox based tags. I've been reading about Flickr and understand that they use the same tagging system but because I don't have a digital camera I wasn't that interested until: this This is so cool. You can change from Vancouver in the URL to Birds or whatever and you have slide shows of your favourite topics.
