Lisa Tilson

The Sullivan Family has brought us news that the remains of Hilary Sullivan were found yesterday in Pacific Spirit Park. The Sullivan’s would like to express how much they appreciate all of the love, support, prayers and seva the sangat has offered to them over the past days.

In light of this news, please support the family by directing any thoughts, love and prayers towards the blog that has been set up in memory of Hilary

If you wish to continue your seva, kindly take down the posters you put up. If you have any questions about this seva contact Dyal Singh at 604.773.6315.

In memory of Hilary, the sangat will be gathering in the Gurdwara of Raj Yog Nivas tonight, for chanting and meditating from 7-8pm. Everyone is welcome.

May this beautiful woman, that has deeply touched so many lives, be loved like never before, and feel it forever. -Bachan Kaur Sullivan

Since my string of realizations over the weekend, I began exploring the web looking for ways to further develop my writing, increase my blog and website traffic and increase my page ranking. This search led me to find Blogher, an internet community and blog directory for female bloggers. They are particular about which blogs they list, which is the sign of a great directory and community. So, of course, I applied.

Turns out that they are so particular about which blogs they list, that I didn’t make the cut. I was briefly derailed by the trauma of only making the cheerleading B squad in high school, Read the complete Post.

I spent most of today outside of my box expanding my horizons. I went to my first web conference (my first anything conference) called Northern Voice 2008.  There, I learned things about blogging and social media on the Internet that I don’t entirely understand the basics for. I went alone (which means I had to make friends with people I wouldn’t normally get the chance to be around and thus have a really hard time relating to with such a basic technical awareness!).  Next, then I came home to update my blog software, only to find myself learning command line, of all things! I will talk more about command line in another post as it is its own little box.

Northern Voice is a conference about the voices of the web, blogging - live, video, micro and otherwise, pod-casting (weee!), social media, wiki, tagging, stats etc. Today’s schedule had two streams: either spend time in the 101 section learning about each type of media or attend the random sessions of interest pertaining to the media. Myself, having never had formal instruction in any of the above, decided that it would be best to establish the basics. Wrong. The basics meant: why should you blog? what is a podcast, what is a wiki? was therefore, believe it or not, below my skill set! So, I hit up the instructors for pod-casting tutelage on the lunch break and learned how to fix my broken podcast, which now works but is incredibly slow to upload due to the formatting of the file (I believe). Tomorrow I will learn about how to make that more efficient. To be honest, if the only thing I come away from this conference knowing is how to get my podcast up on my site, I will be more than happy. My one suggestion would be that they have 200 level courses for those who want to develop basic skills in the function of their media of choice and consequently make the sessions longer.

Tomorrow there is a whole gamut of things on the NV08 schedule, I am mostly interested in the future of social media (for Yoga West) and getting published (book to blog or blog to book). Then I have a choice, I can stay for the afternoon events, or I can go to the library to participate in a workshop on fantasy writing called “Possible Worlds”. Since I will have enough to run with on the blogging front I think it will be time for a break for computers - writing workshop it is then.

I am going to go and rest my brain, here’s to renewed zeal for the blogosphere!

L.