We’ll be heading out to Surrey again for some of this evening’s performances at Fusion Festival which will run from 11:00am until 8:00pm in Holland Park.
Leave the car at home as this is easily accessible from Surrey Central or King George Skytrain stations. Once again admission is free, and you may want to consider bringing a folding chair and some portable shade as it gets pretty toasty in the afternoon sun.
Last night the Fusion Festival kicked off in Surrey’s Holland Park with dusk performances and all anticipating this morning’s events, concerts, food, crafts and activities. Day two of the Fusion Festival will be going strong until 10:00pm tonight.
Tomorrow things will pick up again at 11:00am until the grand finale performance by Jully Black on the World Stage ending at 8:00pm. This event is entirely FREE for all (and it’s also super easy to get here from the SkyTrain) so come on down and join us.
There are only seven days left until a group of brave bloggers from around Vancouver (and Canada) join me in the inaugural Blogathon Vancouver July 26th.
Based on the Blogathon of the past, which is not in operation this year, bloggers are encouraged to sign up, pick a non-profit of choice, collect pledges (which can be a flat donation, or a certain amount for every hour the blogger manages to stay awake), and blog every 30 minutes for 24 hours straight. [Miss604]
Tips for those participating, some of which can be found on the wiki as well…
– Please make sure it’s clear that pledges can be sent to BlogathonVancouver [at] gmail [dot] com. This is not for payment information but simply a promissory note of encouragement: “Hi my name is Jane, I would like to pledge $10/hour to keep Raul going,” (for exmaple). At the end of the weekend bloggers can then email those who pledged them and provide a link to their charity’s online donation page: “Thank you for your support! Please follow through on your pledge by donating online via this website/link.”
– Bloggers can also get in touch with their non-profit of choice to see if they can track donations received on July 26th or to at least notify them of what you’ll be doing.
– It is imperative that your non-profit of choice have an online donation page, I fully discourage and do not endorse any blogger to take in payment information or accept cash donations in person, in comments, or by email. If you received a pledge from someone who cannot donate online, try to provide them with a phone number or mailing address for the non-profit.
– You might want to notify your readers in advance (and especially your subscribers) that your feed and blog will be flooded with 48 posts next weekend.
– If you have a blog that can handle “tags” or “categories” it will be beneficial to create one specifically for Blogathon.
– We’re hoping to have a badge up soon that participating bloggers can put on their sites this week.
Speaking of participants, we currently have these fine folks enlisted for one of three marathon shifts next weekend:
Tania Morrison (Ottawa), Raul, Shane Gibson, Karen Hamilton, Ayeza Garcia, Isabella Mori, Danny Dang, Mehnaz Thawer, Jenn Lowther/Nadia Nascimento, Barbara Doduk, Chris Richardson, Colleen Vince
For more information please visit the wiki page, sign on up, or feel free to contact me.
Also, if you are a local business that would like to sponsor one of my 48 blog posts next weekend, please contact me. You will get a 30 minute timeslot for a $50 donation (thanks to Shane for the idea) and I will either write a normal post with a note, “this time slot sponsored by…” or can add a quick write up about your business.
Even though it’s summer there’s still a huge hockey buzz in this town with the signing of Demitra and today’s release of the schedule (among other things). However, there are a handful of other local (and Canadian) athletes leaving their mark worldwide and as a part of Major League Baseball.
Tuesday’s All-star game saw Canadians “[Ryan Dempster] on the mound, Russell Martin behind the plate and Justin Morneau in the batter’s box.” [CanadianPress]
Justin Morneau
Hometown: New Westminster, BC
Team: Minnesota Twins
Recent News: Winner of the home run derby at this year’s MLB All-star Game at Yankee Stadium [CBC]
“One day after winning the home run derby, the B.C. lad capped a memorable Tuesday night at Yankee Stadium by scoring the winning run in the American League’s 4-3 all-star game victory.” [CalgaryHerald]
Ryan Dempster
Hometown: Gibsons, BC
Team: Chicago Cubs
Recent News: “Dempster’s Cubs recently acquired Rich Harden from Oakland, giving them two Canucks in their starting rotation. Harden hails from Victoria, on Vancouver Island, Dempster from Gibsons, on the mainland. “We share ferry stories,” Dempster said. “I took a ferry from Gibsons growing up, so we talk about the chili dogs and arcade games.” [NationalPost]
“[Earlier this month] Dempster pitched his first complete game since 2002 when he struck out 11 Atlanta Braves and stretched his record to 8-2 on the season with a sparkling 2.81 ERA, all eight wins coming in the friendly confines of Wrigley Field.” [Canada.com]
Russell Martin
Hometown: Chelsea, PQ
Team: Los Angeles Dodgers
Recent News: “Martin might not have started Tuesday’s game at Yankee Stadium, but he certainly got plenty of playing time in relief of starter Geovany Soto, catching 10 innings of the 15-inning epic game won by the American League, 4-3.” [MLBNews]
We’re hoping to catch Justin Morneau in action this summer while we’re in Kansas City and his team is taking on the Royals. I mean afterall, he and I should have the Pattullo Bridge in common.
Even though hockey runs through the blood of most Metro Vancouverites, this is still a rich region when it comes to baseball – just look at our history and our future.
Walking in to the Cascades Casino in Langley we were turned away immediately. No to worry though, we were actually just redirected to the Coast Hotel around back. We’re sitting in a pretty majestic ballroom with a swanky setup – microphone, projectors, little bitty notepads with the hotel logo on them. Big thanks to Gary for initiating all of this.
There are all levels of bloggers here – from the netorious John Chow to those who would simply like to know how to get into blogging.
I’ll try to liveblog or at least update throughout the night – Raul is up first to tell his story about switching from Blogger to WordPress.
Raul is covering a lot of ground so hopefully he’ll be able to make his slides available (perhaps with something like Slideshare. [Editor’s note: John is uploading some photos on the fly (and blogging at sixty4media) you can view them on his Flickr]
After his slide presentation Raul has jumped into some live walk-throughs of the WordPress.com dashboard, comments interface and stats in order to introduce users to WP and to show how it compares to Blogger.
It appears that Kerry will not be joining us tonight (hope everything is okay!) so Gary will be filling in and talking about Business Blogging. Continue reading this post ⟩⟩
