Just got back from Vancouver BC, where I attended the W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group meeting and interoperability event.  Two days of implementers sitting quietly in a conference room banging on each other’s implementations got us much closer to proving that the spec is ready for prime time.  Paul and I had a great time designing the most complicated perl pipeline of XSLT on the planet to aggregate the results and display them.  It really helped build the excitement to see how green squares spreading slowly through the matrix!

Vancouver was quite delightful too.  The residents seemed to be celebrating the depression caused by the twin blows of having 28 straight days of rain, and then narrowly missing the record set in 1953 of 29 days.  But having pouring rain for only half my stay was fortunate for me.  Upon arriving, I found a hungry pair of English blokes (Paul and Marc) at the hotel, and joined them in cracking the shells off a succulent Spicy Black Bean Dungeness Crab and other Chinese delicacies.

During lunch a few days later Paul and I took a tiny rainbow-colored Aquabus over to Granville Island, which is a trendy artist colony with a great market, food court, and lots of art studios and galleries.  I acquired a tiffin (essentially an Indian lunch box) full of savory Indian delicacies — worth returning for another the next day on our way to biking the seawall path around Stanley Park on the west end of the island. We even tried for a couple of geocaches but only the one nearest the hotel succumbed to our investigations.

Pictures snapped during my explorations are now posted on Flickr.