I decided to treat myself tonight and give into the cold, silky, smooth temptation of ice cream. While doing so I was reminded of two dessert-related campaigns for good causes that are currently running…
Being the first-ever Canadian flavour for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, the Barenaked Ladies‘ “If I had 1,000,000 Flavours” truly doesn’t disappoint. However it’s not the chocolate and vanilla ice cream that makes this so wonderful, nor is it the chocolate-coated nuts, toffee bits or peanut butter up chunks. It’s the fact that proceeds from every tub sold support ABC Canada.
“ABC Canada Literacy Foundation is Canada’s private-sector voice championing adult literacy. Launched in 1990 – International Literacy Year – by a group of business, labour and education leaders concerned about the social and economic effects of wide-spread literacy challenges among Canadian adults, the national charity raises public awareness of literacy issues.
Working with influential Canadians from a cross-section of disciplines and business sectors, ABC CANADA fosters an environment where all adults have access to opportunities that increase their literacy skills and prepare them to realize their full potential at work, at home and in the community.”
In case you like to shake things up a bit, you can also purchase a Dairy Queen Blizzard treat on August 13th for Miracle Treat Day. $1 or more from each Blizzard sold that day will go to the Childrens Miracle Network partner in your area, in this case the BC Childrens Hospital Foundation.
“Miracle Treat Day encourages the support of many communities who work together for local kids who may, someday, require the care they can only receive at a children’s hospital.
On this special day in August, proceeds from the sale of their popular Blizzard® treats will be donated to Children’s Miracle Network hospitals. They have even incorporated the use of the Internet to pre-sell Blizzards® to businesses in cities and towns across Canada.”
So go ahead, indulge, cave in to the sweet silky chocolate and the fresh blast of the Girl Scout Thin Mint Blizzard knowing that even though that sugar’s probably going straight to your thighs, funds are also going straight to some deserving causes as well. At least that’s how I’m justifying the ice cream kick I’ll be on until August 14th.
Surrey’s Holland Park is the site of several free outdoor movies this summer. In conjunction with their screening of the Mamma Mia movie this Saturday, there will also be a special AirBand competition open to youth and children.
All kids, 16 and younger, can enter the Movies Under the Stars Long & McQuade AirBand Extravaganza prior to the free screening of the film on August 8th. Each contestant will be able to perform their favourite track with instruments supplied by Long & McQuade if needed. There is a super secret mystery prize for the winner as well.
Registration must take place ahead of time and you can do so by calling (604) 580-2321 or emailing joyce [at] downtownsurreybia [dot] com.
The AirBand competition runs from 5:00pm – 7:00pm and the North Surrey Lions Club will be hosting a BBQ in the park with proceeds going to local charities. The film will begin at dusk.
With VinoCamp CheeseCamp happening tomorrow, I’m in a wine kind of mood.
This morning I went searching for a list of wineries on Twitter and I found the motherload here.
Despite the list being very long, a few local wineries were not represented so since the site is a wiki, I was able to log in and add some entries. Here are just a few BC wineries that are on Twitter (some from the wiki and some I added):
@Black Cloud Wine
@Herder Winery
@Nk’Mip Cellars
@Road 13 Vineyards
@Sumac Ridge Wine
@Tinhorn Creek
@Township 7
@Stags Hollow
From Vancouver Island to the Okanagan Valley, BC is home to some of the world’s best wine produced by hundreds of vineyards big and small. If you know of any of them who are on Twitter, but not on this wiki, feel free to add them or let me know in the comments. You can follow @VinoCampVan for updates during VinoCamp tomorrow and tickets are still available if you’d like to attend this premiere event.
This morning as the #5 Robson/Downtown bus turned right onto Thurlow, instead of heading straight towards Seymour, I obviously knew something was up. Usually when there are temporary route changes they take the trolley buses out of comission but this bus was following the lines down Thurlow, left on Smithe, and left on Burrard. The bus driver explained that due to paving and the completion of the Granville Street revitalization they aren’t able to cross Granville at Robson until further notice (or what he estimated to be a month). When I got home the first thing I did, of course, was to tweet this information and that’s when the trusty Buzzer Blog chimed in with the pertinent details of this route change.
(Left) Normal Robson #5 Route Map (Right) Robson #5 Re-route Map
“Owing to construction at Granville and Robson, there will be reroutes for the 5, 17 and N6 for about a month: Monday August 3 to Sunday September 6.” You can read more, including updates for the bus lines, over on the Buzzer Blog.
What does the population do when Twitter goes down? I’m not sure but hopefully they turn to blogs. This morning the microblogging service used by millions across the globe went down, and I’m not taking “Fail Whale” down.
The entire site is unavailable (as well as services that connect to it) so the best place to go at a time like this is the Twitter Status Blog:
Update (9:46a): As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.
Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.
Thursday August 6th: “Ongoing denial-of-service attack – We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.” Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.
Thursday August 6th: “Site is down – We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly. Update: we are defending against a denial-of-service attack.”
Once they have the time to publish to the regular Twitter blog, updates will appear there as well.
The morning hours on Twitter are usually rich with hot news topics of the day, and many just getting into work and publishing updates such as “why did I even come in today” or “the line up at Starbucks is huge this morning”. In case you’re missing Twitter, try watching “Real Life Twitter” once again. It’ll still make you giggle and ease of pain of not being able to Tweet at this time (and maybe commenting on a blog post will scratch that itch).
Update: Here’s a bit more of an explanation about the nature of the outage (attack).
HowStuffWorks.com
A denial of service attack means that somewhere, somehow, an overload of computers is massively bombarding Twitter — making it impossible for them to manage regular traffic on top of this overload. This is similar to the attack notorious Canadian hacker Mafiaboy used to cripple Amazon.com and Yahoo years ago. Twitter is back up and running however services and programs that use its API (application programming interface) such as Tweetdeck, are having a hard time connecting. With the DEFCON hackers’ conference going on right now (and with Gawker, Facebook and Media Temple being other recent targets) fingers are pointing in all directions.
