Roland Tanglao's Weblog

[Original MP4 file]

More info:

• Mark's blog post
• Heart of the City Festival

Dogeaters (a play based on a famous Filipino novel by Jessica Hagedorn) at Langara's fantastic Studio 58 is a must see if you are interested at all in the Philippines. And a bargain at less than $20! The play is unsettling, funny, melodramatic, corny, religious, profane, profound, and sacrilegious, and shows the seamy, corrupt side of the Filipino style of religion, military, politics, and nepotism. In short it mirrors my relationship to my Filipino heritage :-) And the flashbacks and parallels to Benigno Aquino and his life are uncanny and chilling.

Quibbles: accents were off, in particular the frequent mis-pronunciation of "lang" and "di ba" was grating. C'mon there are over 50,000 Canadians of Filipino heritage in Metro Vancouver, could we not have had at least one Filipino actor who could do the accent perfectly? Please? Next time?

UPDATE: For those who can't play the Viddler flash version of the movie below, here's the original MPEG-4 movie

I have a brand new shiny Nokia N95-1 phone for a week and have been tasked with recording my commute.

So here's part of my East Van to Gastown commute from yesterday (I would have done the whole thing but I accidentally forgot to turn the recording on).

Download full res 65 Megabyte MP4 file

Shaky video shot on my Nokia N93 live from my bicycle handheld as I ride from The Tyee school in East Van to Bryght in Gastown.

According to Google Maps, my commute via bike to/from work in Gastown to home at Woodlands and 15th i.e. Clark Park is approximately 5km.

Check out the map of my bicycling route below. What's your route? Leave a comment.

View Larger Map

Ray sent me this hilarious look at cycling in Amsterdam. Hilarious because it's written from a naive point of view from somebody who doesn't seem to have travelled much or lived in a non car-dominated city :-) . Also funny because it does have some good insights. I have "new skool" type front and back generator powered lights on my 1997 Swiss bike which uses a cool relatively friction-less generator.

However it's not enough light (but great that it's always on and doesn't require batteries and the back light flashes when I stop) for those Vancouver winter nights and cloudy days in my opinion. What type of supplimentary lighting should I get? Cheap and cheerful $10 helmet mounted front white and rear red LED lights from MEC? Let me know in the comments please.

How do we learn from the lessons of the cycling network in the City of Vancouver to the rest of Metro Vancouver? Check out Paul Hillsdon's Surrey Cycling Initiative for some ideas.

September 11, 2001 was the start of a whole series of life changes for me:

1. New job at a new company that I helped found: Bryght
2. Got married 3 weeks later and now have a great kid
3. Moved from a small 2 bedroom condo in Kits to a wonderful much larger place in East Van.
4. Feel less secure. Security is superficially better but I don't think that the real challenges and problems have been addressed.

What's happened in your lives?

Thanks:

• Thanks to Vancity for having the Bike Share Program.
• Thanks to Richard for joining up because without Richard joining I wouldn' t have joined and got back into biking. I have reactivated my Villiger Silvretta from Switzerland that I bought in Germany and am happily biking to work on it two or more times a week.
• And thanks to Nokia for giving me the free Nokia N93 phone which I used to take 502 photos from the Vancity Bike: here are the 10 flickr sets of photos: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Suggestions (now that I bike regularly to work):

• have the bike path signs show: direction, name of bike path and where it leads to e.g. Commercial, Strathcona
• Adanac is the same as Union which is confusing since this is not clear
• a dedicated bike lane on Burrard on the right, not in the middle of traffic, the current one in the middle of traffic is dangerous; I almost got run over by tourists from California the two times I took the Burrard bike path going North
• tech stuff: bluetooth transmitters and/or Wifi and/or SMS numbers at each major bike path crossing that I can use to get a map with 'you are here' on my mobile phone (it's doable so why not?)
• dedicated bike paths where no cars or motorized vehicles are allowed; let's have a plan and start doing this, why not make the 10th avenue bike path for bikes and residents and deliveries only for starters?

Movie:

This movie (4:11) was made from 502 photos taken from my Vancity Bike Share bicycle from June 27 to July 11 2007 from my Nokia N93. Music from teru used under a Creative Commons license: Technology (ft. MTGakaCaraMelG) and Start a Digital Revolution (ft. tacet, KCentric), http://terumusic.blogspot.com/

[Cross posted from Change Everything]

I have lived in Vancouver since July 12, 1998 but I never biked from Gastown to Granville Island to East Van !

Impressions:

• Columbia Street is a mess. The Carrall Street Greenway will fix this methinks
• As I said to a Vancouver Sun reporter, I want it to be like the bike paths in southern Germany where I lived for 3.5 years. No motorized vehicles because there will always be accidents when the two share the same space.
• Canada Line construction is omnipresent and disrupting every mode of transit!
• Biking is the best way to learn about a city next to walking.

I took 80 photos of my journey today (yes I am crazy enough to take cameraphone pictures everywhere :-) !)

Here are my favourites (guess where they are :-) ! )