I put the call out on Twitter a while back for some interesting stories or people involved with entertainment and red carpets in Vancouver. Lorraine, that I profiled yesterday, suggested I speak with Raj from Urban Mixer – a social community empire for young professionals in Western Canada.
Raj Taneja worked his way up from being “that computer guy” in the office to running his own company across the globe in cities like Kiev and Bogota, to Hong Kong and Tokyo. After career moves and changes brought him back to Vancouver and from 2001 onward made all the right moves to acquire a unique party company. Think of “a house party with house party rules… only in a new restaurant. Invite people you would only trust coming to your home,” said Raj about the exclusive nature of his first local venture to be involved with called Social Empire.
After building up an empire of his own, Raj now operates Urban Mixer, “a social events aggregator in Vancouver, Calgary and Seattle.”
Urban Mixer is a social organization. Its mission is threefold: 1) Plan engaging, interactive events that people enjoy. 2) Provide a fun, friendly environment for young urban professionals to meet. 3) Disseminate information about events occurring in the city. [Urban Mixer – FAQ]
It was originally formed in 2003 and since then Raj has been able to change things up and drive enormous amounts of traffic to his site. “UM is open for anyone wanting to be social in the city. It’s roots are in being a singles club but that changed in 2006,” Raj noted. “Now the membership is ‘Social Singles’ and ‘Dynamic Duos’.”
He was able to take the exclusivity of the Social Empire and transform UM into a user-friendly website and a powerful resource for those wanting to get out and be social throughout the Pacific Northwest.
“The main idea is to meet fun people and make new friends. If you’re bright, interesting, friendly and like to have fun, you’ll fit right in!” [Urban Mixer].
You can browse all upcoming events in the Urban Mixer Newsletter, or click here for the week of August 18th.
My Blogger Profile series has celebrated its anniversary, sharing link love and promoting some of the great online writers of our region for over a year now.
Lorraine Murphy, probably better known as Raincoaster (her internet-famous handle) is more than just a blogger in this town, she’s a prolific queen of social media knowledge sharing and pro-blogging.
Who are you? Or “WHAT are you?” Other than the tentacles, I’m a pretty normal blogger, but then again, I live on the Downtown Eastside and it takes a lot to startle people here.
Where do you blog? raincoaster.com is my personal site, and my most popular. It’s where I dump all the entertaining weirdness I’ve collected throughout the day. I have runningthroughrain.wordpress.com as well, which I use to get the word out about my blogging classes, and blog at the FearlessCity.ca site on issues of interest to my neighbors on the Downtown Eastside. I also have the ShebeenClub.com blog for announcements relating to my literary group of editors, writers, publishers and booksellers. I’d like to get more information for it, but that’s very time-consuming.
I also do corporate blogging by contract. One of the blogs I’ve been involved with is Secusolutions.
I also get paid to read gossip blogs and linkblog on ayyyy.com (my sister is so jealous!), and have started lolebrity.net since, even after the lolfad dies, everyone will still like making fun of celebrities. It’s three months old and doing very well. And (god help us all) I’m mommyblogging at TeenyManolo.com, which is not exactly your mother’s mommyblog. I love working for The Manolo; we don’t know his real name, we don’t know where he lives; it’s like being a Charlie’s Angel!
Are you originally from Vancouver? I am firmly of the belief that no-one is originally from Vancouver. I have met only two people in my entire life who were born here; the rest who make that claim turn out to have been born in Squamish or White Rock or some other godforsaken place. I was born in France and did the grand tour of Europe as a baby (gee, thanks, parents! you couldn’t have held off on that?) but went from Paris to Winnipeg at the age of eleven months. I’m still not over the culture shock.
I came to Vancouver in 19-mumble-mumble to go to UBC. Now I love it here. If I had a gun to deal with the noisy 5am seagulls, this city would be about perfect for me.
Why do you blog? and what’s your unique angle? Tentacles. I’m all about the tentacles. It can be a stretch, working it into a parenting blog, but somehow I manage.[TeenyManolo]
What is the BEST part of blogging The best part is the lone wolf aspect, although I must say my co-bloggers in the Manolosphere are a great help and fun to work with. Still, there’s nothing like getting up and sitting in your PJs catching up on Gawker and the rest with a license to snark at will. Who’d have thought there’d be money in it?
Do you write for yourself, your readers, for Google, for a living? I write for Posterity and Posterity, I fear, will be terribly disappointed with me.
Sometimes I linkbait, sometimes I clickbait just for recreational purposes (I’m #5 on Google for “Beaver Shots!” Mother would be so proud) but since Technorati went insane around December of last year I no longer do anything specifically to increase my standings in the blog rankings. I leave that stuff up to WordPress and God’s holy crapshoot. Continue reading this post ⟩⟩
Last week I was one of the lucky judges in the Vancouver regional Grey Goose Vodka Arbiter of Cool competition.
The winner has been announced and so Kerren Bottay of The Mountain Club will be joining those from Montreal, Toronto and Calgary back here in Vancouver at the end of September for the national championship.
In case you were wondering, here is the recipe for Kerren’s drink, the goggle tan:
2 sprigs of fresh cilantro
45 mL GREY GOOSE© Vodka
15 mL Giffard Ginger of the Indies Liqueur
25 mL Aloe Vera juice
10 mL fresh pressed lime juice
Garnish: Half rim of ground cayenne pepper, and a Thai chili
I have to give my sister credit, after having four kids she is the grand master of stealthy breastfeeding in your presence; it’s like she’s got some kind of cloaking device.
What I have learned over my 8 years of being an auntie is that when the baby is hungry, the baby’s gotta eat. Some women slip away to another room, others use a blanket to mask the process, and others just whip it right out and let the baby go nuts. Admittedly the latter makes me somewhat uncomfortable for the first 10 seconds, but all in all, it’s a perfectly normal and natural act.
Recently two stories about breastfeeding have made headlines in Canada. The first involves an incident in Windsor, Ontario where a mother started feeding her child while waiting to check out at a local La Senza lingerie store. She was asked to move into a fitting room after being told that breastfeeding was not allowed in the store. [source: Canadian Press]
The second mishap of this nature happened here in Vancouver at our shiny new H&M store in Pacific Centre. Once again a nursing mother was told she had to move to a change room as she could not breastfeed on the store floor. [source: CBC]
At both of these locations, protests have been held in order to express outrage at the stores’ policies and/or the staff’s behaviour. Moreso it was also to show support and solidarity for mothers, as demonstrated in the Nurse-In at the H&M a few days ago that saw crowds of nursing mothers gather inside the store to nurse.
“I don’t want to live a world or city where that’s acceptable to shun women for breastfeeding,” said nursing mum Sonia Tilley-Strobel.
As for H&M, their corporate spokeswoman Laura Shankland flew in from Toronto for what could have been a public relations disaster to openly welcome the nursing moms.
“We apologize. And it seems to be a miscommunication and a misunderstanding. Our policy is to allow breastfeeding nursing mothers to breastfeed or express milk freely in our stores,” said Shankland. [CBC]
I can almost see the Breastfeeding is not a crime tshirts now (complete with easy-access flap of course). I’m curious to see the reaction of everyone else regarding these incidents and their escalation (by the Vancouver mother) to the Human Rights Tribunal [24 Hours]. As such, it’s time for another Miss604 poll and feel free to share any other thoughts in the comments.
[poll=12]
Last week Manga Mania was taking Twitter by storm. A website that allows you to customize an avatar with your personal traits was quickly commandeering everyone’s profile photo and I’d say about 70% of my contacts currently have the out-of-the-box cartoon images of themselves applied. Continue reading this post ⟩⟩
