Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

Tonight I skipped out on the pre-event party, and instead enjoyed a quiet night of book reading, presentation preparation, and t-shirt ironing before the Northern Voice storm. (Who irons their t-shirts? Me, that's who.) Tomorrow morning I'll present very briefly an intro to blogging, then conspire Lloyd to get people started on WordPress.com, then attend a Moosecamp session or two—a potential session on multilingual blogs looks interesting—and finally attend a blogger meetup. I'll try to sneak in some alone time, at which point I'll have yet another good hearty laugh about what Darren Barefoot wrote yesterday. Then on Saturday I'll attend the conference part of the conference.

I probably won't respond to your email until Sunday.

I've finally checked out Darren Barefoot's Gnomedex talk about geeks doing good, where he invents a currency called the Stacy, named after a woman he helps feed sometimes in Vancouver, designed to track how much good you do. The talk has helped inspire some good deeds already, including delivering pizzas to Pigeon Park in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (instead of participating in the BarCamp Vancouver thread where the idea first appeared, I decided to donate to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank). Since reading Social Acupuncture, I've dropped my objection to talking about the good deeds people have done as self-serving, since done right bragging about doing good can influence people others to do so as well. I'm not going to keep track of whatever good it is I do: I lie enough to people asking me for change that I'm sure it balances out in the end.