Ian Bushfield

Last night was the first night of Vancouver’s annual fireworks show, the Celebration of Light.

From my balcony I was able to listen to the accompanying music over Shore FM (104.3 MHz) and could see all the big fireworks over neighbouring condo buildings. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see the smaller ones, but at least there were plenty of big ones to entertain me.

The show lasted about half an hour and was hosted by Team USA. Their music selection was mostly jive and swing music. Overall the show was okay, but I have seen better fireworks shows. Perhaps I’ve just been spoiled by Calgary’s GlobalFest and the 2009 Edmonton Canada Day fireworks show that featured two 16-inch shells.

There’s 3 more shows coming up on the upcoming Saturday, Wednesday and the following Saturday, and I should have a good view for Saturday’s show from a friends BBQ at Jericho Beach.

It’s mid-July already, when did that happen?

I can’t even really account with what I did through May and June.

I worked on setting up a terahertz spectroscopy system (which is still jittery and noisy) and trying to get half-decent data about this one sample (with another sample already in line). I filled out an NSERC Industrial Postgraduate Scholarship application, which ended up taking about 2 months to satisfy all the criteria (and it may have been accepted within a mere 48 hours of submission).

Outside of work/school I got the BC Humanists a spot in the 2010 Pride Parade. The membership of the BCHA is rather old, but hopefully members of the campus groups and CFI can fill the group.

I’ve been running around to Skeptics in the Pubs, weekend events and a Lawrence Krauss lecture. Soon PZ Myers will be here and Christopher DiCarlo in August. I’m also trying to organize Armageddon Factor author Marci McDonald to speak here in late October.

With the Freethought Association of Canada we’re working out final details with out soon-to-be-launched national freethinkers website that will (hopefully) serve as a community for all of Canada.

I’ve been meaning to get a freethinkers book-club going since April with Sonia, and it looks like it will actually be starting in August. We’ll be reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s debut book Infidel (which will hopefully prep us for reading Nomad in a later event).

Sonia also got some money for her graduation so together we bought a new 2010 Nissan Versa SL (with an xtronic CVT automatic transmission). I meant to post pictures here, but maybe I’ll get to it once my shiny new Darwin fish and FSM are pasted on the back.

The car’s working out great and we’ve already seen a drive-in triple feature in Langley – Toy Story 3, Prince of Persia and Alice in Wonderland. We also went camping last weekend to Yoho National Park where we met up with some friends from Edmonton. Again, pictures to come (including a beautiful panoramic stitch of the glacier above Lake Opabin).

Also, I finally got around to renting and watching the movie Creation, about Charles Darwin’s fight (with illness, his wife and memory of his dead daughter) to get On the Origin of Species published. It was a fantastic movie, and I highly recommend it. The only slightly disappointing part was how Thomas Huxley was made into a raging anti-theist (quote: “Mr. Darwin, don’t you understand what you have done, you have finally killed God.”)

Other than that, at least the weather’s getting nice, although it seems like I rarely have time to write or just sit on the beach anymore. Hopefully I can find a way to work around that.

At the very least, I have an article half-done about buying our car (we saved over $3000 off sticker price), so hopefully I can crank that out soon and submit it somewhere a bit more prestigious than a campus newspaper.

I think that’s about all for now at least. As any procrastinating blogger will say before another several month hiatus, I promise to post more soon.

At the BC Humanist Association’s annual general meeting last night I was acclaimed to their board of directors.

The BCHA is a registered charity that has existed for over 25 years, but like many humanist associations has seen its membership drop in recent years and its median age has steadily risen. Hopefully, I can reverse these trends and keep the organization alive and healthy.

The BCHA has carved a nice niche out for itself in providing a very community-oriented model with weekly breakfast gatherings and monthly lectures. Unfortunately, room costs are rising and there may be a need to find a new venue in the coming year (which may have the added benefit of dropping the unfortunate “Seniors Centre” name from the current location). While there might be some desire in the BCHA to let itself amalgamate into CFI Vancouver, I think there is a place for this group, its history, and its democratic structure.

So hopefully this next year or so will see the BCHA reverse the declining membership, sponsor a few new event ideas, and increase fundraising levels.

Hell, if it’s really successful, it may be able to launch Cafe Humanism in a few years.

I think I’m approaching the look and feel that I want for this blog.

While I wanted to keep it simple and clean, I realized that I needed to put a sidebar in on the right otherwise text would go on and on and on across the screen, making for a really unreadable chunk of text. So here’s a sidebar with minimal use beyond breaking up the length of text that spans your screen. I also gave up on RSSInclude for the home page and just found a simple customizable RSS widget that let me format the feeds for this blog and Terahertz simply.

Anyway, let me know if you have any feedback for my design or ways to improve this site.

I picked up a couple books from Chapters yesterday.

The first is Writing for the Web by Crawford Kilian. I’ve started reading it, and after only a few chapters it already gives some pretty simple advice for online writing. These include basic things, like understanding that your audience is impatient, so write short, readable sentences.

The other book I got was the The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009.

My goal between these two books is to continually improve my writing skills (please note that I tend to write my blog posts in a single draft, stream-of-consciousness format, see my articles for writing that I’m more proud of) and by the end of this summer I’d like to have my first writings actually published for profit (as opposed to in student newspapers or otherwise).