Vancouver

I just had a listen to this CBC interview with some writer about the housing situation in Vancouver: Young Adults Leaving Vancouver.

Travel to many cities in the world and you will find street food all over the place. Delicious street food. Walk in Vancouver and there is almost no street food. I can only think of 2 hot dog vendors on West 4th or West Broadway west of Granville St. The one near Future Shop just west of Burrard and the one at the corner of Graville and Broadway in front of the Chapters. You can walk a long time downtown before stumbling across any street food, and it's mostly just hot dogs or Crepes.

DOXA, Vancouver's Documentary Film Festival starts. There are definitely a few films in their program that I would be interested in seeing. The Living with Grizzlies show looks good but I will be checking out an apartment that night.

This Sunday, the Vancouver/Zope User's Group (maybe the Zope part should be removed? sorry guys) is having a "Django Jam", a hands-on session where you can see how to create some simple applications or perhaps here some people talk about things they have developed in Django. Unfortunately the two applications I am working on are immature right now and I don't have a laptop, but I'll be there checking out what other people have done.

Tuesday is even more exciting as Adrian Holovaty, the lead Django developer/founder is going to give a talk to the Python User's group while he is in town for another conference. If you are interested in web frameworks (especially simple ones done in a cool language) come and check it out.

Vancouver DjangoJam.

Full invite text follows:

Mmm, tacosI am a huge fan of authentic Mexican food. After going to Mexico in June 2005 I looked around for some authentic Mexican and found Vallarta's at Renfrew and Broadway, which was close to my work. I started started making a list on paper of other Mexican restaurants that I saw in the local Spanish newspapers (that I picked up at Vallarta's). I had no idea there were so many REAL Latin American restaurants here. You will never have to settle for Las Margaritas or Andales tex-mex again (although I still love tex-mex as well, but it's a whole different cuisine)! You will never hear about any of these authentic restaurants unless you read the Spanish newspapers, drive by them, or know someone who has ate there (UPDATE: some of these restaurants have been reviewed by the local English papers as well).

With a co-worker's encouragement I finally managed to get my list online. Initially I was just going to make a simple HTML table but I decided to go big instead. After seeing zacker's drupal mashup machine screencast I was inspired to make a Google Gmap mashup that showed the locations of all these restaurants.

Map of authentic Latin American/Mexican restaurants in Vancouver

Table of authentic Latin American/Mexican restaurants in Vancouver

Vancouver's Python and Zope User Group will be having a talk on Python web frameworks, ie. Django and Turbogears at their upcoming meeting on October 3rd. I'm looking forward to learning about web frameworks in general a bit more and perhaps what differentiates them from each other and from Ruby on Rails.

I attended the Vancouver Python Workshop this weekend and had a great time. What follows is a brief chronological discussion about the talks I attended:

Friday:

I just officially registered for the Vancouver Python Conference. I am really looking forward to it even though it will take up my entire Saturday and Sunday. It is too bad I don't have a laptop that isn't ancient, otherwise I might give a lightning talk on numpy since it is completely absent from the talk schedule. Had I thought about it earlier I would have prepared and offered to give a talk on how to use NumPy for the beginner's track of the schedule.

It was 29 degrees Celsius in Vancouver yesterday which is about as hot as it gets here. Although it has dropped to 20 degrees outside tonight it is still 29 degrees in our apartment and even hotter in this office with two computers in it. Which is why I can't sleep. I'll think I'll have a cold shower then give sleeping another try.