I’m off to Vancouver! I’ll be there from Wednesday afternoon to Monday afternoon, primarily to catch HackVAN. Want to catch up? Drop me a line or tweet!

I’ve been travelling quite a bit this week. On Monday, I moved to Ottawa for the summer, spending the better part of the day on the road in miserable weather. My first week at Shopify was a short one, running only from Tuesday through Thursday because I spent all of today in transit, flying from Ottawa to Minneapolis by way of Toronto. I took the above photo earlier today on the Ottawa-Toronto leg. (I will have to write about the Shopify new employee handbook sometime; I’ve never seen anything like it at any of my other workplaces, or at any of my friends’ workplaces.)

As I write this, I’m in Minneapolis, getting ready to go to the MinneBar pre-party to catch up with my fellow BarCamp Tour representatives as well as a number of Minneapolis-based friends. The actual MinneBar event takes place tomorrow at Best Buy Headquarters, after which I’m sure some form of mayhem will ensue. I’ve been shooting pictures like mad on my new camera (a Canon PowerShopt ELPH 300 HS, and it’s a pocket dynamo) and along with the photos will a lot of blog entries.

Speaking of blog entries, my article That’s Not OCD, You’re Just a Slacker racked up 79,000 hits on Global Nerdy yesterday and 47,000 today thanks to StumbleUpon. The comments have been quite interesting — the photo on which the article is based might as well be a sort of Rorschach test based on the variety of responses.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Sri Dhanush.

I’m helping out with BarCamp Minneapolis, a.k.a. MinneBar, which takes place on May 7th. The event takes place at Best Buy’s headquarters out in Richfield, and we out-of-towner helper-outers are staying downtown. If you know any good and reasonably-priced hotels in an interesting but not sketchy part of downtown, please let me know in the comments or drop me an email!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

This week, EnergizeIT heads out to New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and Quebec.

This Week in New Brunswick

Creative Commons photo by Stu Pendousmat. Click here for the original.

On Tuesday, Damir and I fly to Moncton for EnergizeIT, where we’ll be doing the EnergizeIT Community Connection presentation. It’s a non-stop no-slides-till-the-very-end demo in which we build the applications and IT infrastructure of a business right in front of you, giving you a grand tour of Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Office 2010 along the way. We’ll be presenting at the Mapleton Rotary Pavilion on 600 Mapleton Road at 6:00 p.m.; if you’d like to catch this free presentation, you can sign up on the registration page.

Creative Commons photo by Stu Pendousmat. Click here for the original.

On Wednesday, Damir and I will drive from Moncton to Fredericton, where we’ll do the same presentation, this time at University of New Brunswick’s Gillin Hall (540 Windsor Street), once again at 6:00 p.m.. As with Moncton’s event, registration is free; you can sign up here.

This Week in Saskatchewan

These aren’t the only places with EnergizeIT Community Connection presentations. In Saskatchewan, we’ve got John Bristowe and Rodney Buike doing these presentations:

• Regina: Tuesday, April 20th at Casino Regina (1880 Saskatchewan Drive)
  in the Telegraph Room (2nd floor mezzanine)
• Saskatoon: Thursday, April 22nd at University of Saskatchewan’s Arts and Science Building
  (9 Campus Drive), room 143

This Week in Quebec

Meanwhile, in Quebec, Christian Beauclair and Rick Claus will be doing the French edition of the presentations in these cities:

• Quebec City: Tuesday, April 20th at École Nationale d’Administration Publique (555 boulevard Charest E) in the amphitheatre
• Trois-Rivières: Wednesday, April 21st at Musee Quebecois de Culture Populaire (200 rue Laviolette) in the Cogeco Room

Next Week in Mississauga

Creative Commons photo by Ian Muttoo. Click here for the original. 

And the final city of the EnergizeIT Community Connection tour is Mississauga, where Damir and I will do the presentation in the MPR room of Microsoft Canada’s headquarters (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard). It takes place at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 27th.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Photo by Tom Purves.

I’m boarding a Porter flight bound for Montreal, where I’ll be attending CUSEC (Canadian University Software Engineering Conference). I’ll be there from today through Saturday afternoon, watching technical presentation, flying the Microsoft banner, hosting DemoCamp and having a beer (or twelve) with my fellow conference-goers. I’ll be posting notes and photos from the presentations and other goings-on, so watch this space!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’m going to be in Vancouver from the afternoon of Friday, September 11th until the morning of Friday, September 18th. I’m there first and foremost to manage the “Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform” track of the TechDays conference, then to meet up with the local tech community, but also to enjoy the city I fondly refer to as “Vangroovy”.

Here’s what I’ll be up to:

Coffee and Code Vancouver: Saturday, September 12th

My coworker John Bristowe and I will be holding Coffee and Code on Saturday, September 12th from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Pacific time, of course) at the Take 5 Cafe on Granville (429 Granville, near Hastings). We’ll be there to talk about TechDays, The Empire and the tech industry in general – but it won’t just be geeky stuff; we’ll provide scintillating conversation about accordions, the Calgary Flames, deep fried snack foods, “Am I metrosexual or not”, life, the universe and everything. I will have the accordion with me, so tunes are definitely on the menu!

You can register for Coffee and Code Vancouver on its event page.

TechDays Vancouver: Monday, September 14th – Tuesday, September 15th

TechDays is Microsoft Canada’s cross-Canada tour, where we highlight what you can do with currently-available Microsoft tools and tech that you probably aren’t doing yet. We take the content from the infinitely more expensive TechEd North America conference (admission fee USD$2000), update it, and have local techies present it near you at a price you can afford (CAD$299 if you caught the early bird rate, CAD$599 otherwise). You get great content at a great price, and we get to make contact with tech communities across the country. Think of it as “Geek Global, Spend Local”.

TechDays Vancouver will be happening at the Vancouver Convention Centre, which is also the venue of…

Demo Ignite Camp: Monday, September 14th @ 7:00 p.m.

Since we had the Vancouver Convention Centre booked for two days, it meant that we had these big rooms lying fallow on the first night. I wanted a pajama party for accordion players, but since that idea got nixed, I called on Boris Mann and suggested we hold a DemoCamp-style event. The end result: Demo Ignite Camp!

Thus far, we’ve got 5 out of 8 presentation slots filled:

1. Joey deVilla’s Ignite Presentation: Do the Stupidest Thing That Could Possibly Work.
2. Avi Bryant will demo Clamato, a Smalltalk dialect that operates within the JavaScript runtime.
3. Dima Berastau will demo RestfulX, a RESTful framework for Flex and AIR applications.
4. Carson Lam will demo TransitDB, his Vancouver transit information web app, which won the PHP FTW competition earlier this year.
5. The folks from Ayogo will present their iPhone games built using the PhoneGap cross-mobile-platform framework.

I’m more than happy to drop my Ignite presentation to make room for a demo or Ignite by someone local. I’m already hosting, and Demo Ignite Camp is about the Vancouver tech scene, not me!

For more information, see the Demo Ignite Camp event page.

Launch Party Vancouver, Wednesday, September 16th

My fellow TechDays coordinators and I will be attending Launch Party Vancouver, which is:

…a lively mixer for the city’s brightest entrepreneurs, tech junkies, and bloggers, who are doing it, have done it or want to make their ideas happen here. The goal of the event is to connect BC’s growing community of Internet and new media leaders with investors and other trailblazers across Canada and abroad.

Founded by local entrepreneurs,  LPV is not your typical networking event. There are no presentations or panels to be found.  But what you will discover are the individuals responsible for making Vancouver one of the greatest start-up cities in Canada.  Every event features local, early stage new media companies strutting their stuff and sharing their ideas with the community.

It’s happening at Circa Resto Lounge from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.; tickets are available via EventBrite.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Flying to Vancouver today to speak at TechDays Vancouver tomorrow. If you’re in the ‘hood and want to catch up and talk tech, accordions or whatnot, drop me a line!

This article was originally published in Canadian Developer Connection.

Next week’s a travel week for me and a fair number of the Developer & Platform Evangelism team. On Wednesday, January 21st and Thursday, January 22nd, we’ll be at TechDays Canada Vancouver, the last leg of our cross-Canada tour where we show Microsoft developers how to best make use of today’s Microsoft tech and development tools. I myself will be do the Deep Dive into ASP.NET AJAX presentation (I’ll post a little more about this tomorrow) on Wednesday, and on Thursday, I fly to…

…Montreal, where I’ll be attending CUSEC, the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference, where I’ll be giving a presentation titled Squeezeboxes, Start-Ups and Selling Out: A Tech Evangelist’s Story. CUSEC runs from Thursday, January 22nd through Saturday, January 24th. Once again, I’ll post a little more about this presentation tomorrow.

If you’d like to catch up with me at either of these cities, get in touch with me! Send me an email, message me at Twitter, or give me a ring on my mobile (416-948-6447). I’ll be staying in Vancouver at the Fairmont Waterfront on Tuesday and Wednesday nights and in Montreal at the Omni Mont-Royal (the conference hotel) from Thursday through Saturday nights. 

[Vancouver Convention Centre photo by Footloosiety; Montreal skyline photo by Anirudh Koul. Both photos are licensed for reuse, commercial use and remixing under Creative Commons.]