For those of you who don’t know (which may very well be all of you right now), I will be presenting a talk at WordCamp Montreal July 12th. The title of the presentation, if you haven’t guessed, is “Hacking WordPress: Introduction to custom plugins and advanced templating“. I’ll explain how you can use your own plugins and functions to make your WordPress site sing. In other words, it will basically be a relatively improvised primer on the following things:

• Introduction to creating WordPress plugins
• Managing your sidebars and widgets
• Using WordPress’ Codex and API documentation
• Hacking up your templates to use all the power provided by WordPress

If you’re not registered yet, you have until July 9th to do so on EventBrite. For more information regarding WordPress Montreal 2009, check out the official site, mailing list, blog, Facebook group and Twitter account or see what’s going on by looking up the #wcmtl tag.

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There’s a Montreal magazine called Urbania, that happens to have its offices in the same location CloudRaker is, so we often share and comnunicate amongst ourselves. Such occurence happened today, and left me thoughtful. They will be coming out with a new issue shortly, and I’m assuming – wildly – that it will be something about beautiful ladies. So, they emailed everyone a simple question: “Who is Quebec’s female sex symbol?”

It may sound easy or obvious, but I assure you it is not so! Wikipedia defines “sex symbol” as such:

A sex symbol is a famous person of either gender, typically an actor, musician, model, teen idol, or sports star who is found to be sexually attractive by the public or by a substantial niche audience. The celebrity “star system”—the tabloid papers, paparazzi, and gossip talk shows — play an important role in creating and sustaining the public perception of which stars are viewed as attractive. These media industries are in turn sustained by a strong public demand for sexually alluring photographs or footage of celebrities, including both posed, scantily-clad publicity shots for magazines like Maxim and unauthorized beach or nightclub photos taken by pararazzi with zoom lenses.

Obviously, Quebec is not the United States: we have very little paparazzis, beaches and international celebrities. So I started thinking about who I thought was worthy of being labeled as a nation’s sexual symbol. The problem with that is pretty fast to emerge: it’s all a matter of taste. And I don’t mean taste like “I like brunettes more than blondes”, but rather one’s influence, how much one watches television, goes to sponsored parties, hang out in celebrity spots and such. There’s also a big factor to consider: generation. older people are not necessarily in touch with today’s young rising starlets, and they tend to stick with a fantasy that has stuck with them throughout the years, dating back from the days they actually paid attention to such things (on a more serious level anyway). So I made my own personal list, sent it to the editor and then figured it would be amusing to ask around and see who the people I know deem sex-symbolism worthy.

My personal choices, along with the ones I found along the way after the jump.

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The Montreal tech scene is thriving, especially in 2008 – or maybe I just became more involved and hence notice and participate in more things. Either way, last night was Montreal’s first CelebrateCamp which was held at the newly renovated Radio Lounge on the Main. “Camp” events, for those of you who are not familiar with the term are basically a kind of “open source” unconference. Wikipedia describes it as such:

An unconference is a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose. The term “unconference” has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations.

So there, it was basically a big meeting of select people who have a marked interest for that specific event. It was organized by Austin Hill and the profits generated from ticket sales were given to Montreal Children’s hospital. We raised around 4000$ so it can’t be considered a bad thing. It was pretty nice actually, we had plenty of room to talk and meet people. I’m guessing that the fact that it was held on a Thursday night kind of slowed things down a bit, but then again people weren’t going clubbing, they were socializing. With that in mind, I have a few deceptions. First of all, most of the attendees were Twitterers. I walked in there with the feeling that I knew everyone, but that I couldn’t identify anyone. Name tags with Twitter usernames would have been great to identify people. I didn’t meet everyone I wanted to meet, mostly because I had no idea who they were. However the whole thing was organized in what, 2 weeks? So I’m considering it a success anyway. Also, people didn’t really hang around. By midnight there were about 50 of the 150 people that were there at 10 that were still there, and when the bar closed I can safely say that we were two left. Are geeks early sleepers? Or was it because it was Thursday? Or because everyone was keeping their party stamina for the Station C party the next day? Well, whatever it was, I met three people, which is disappointing.

But I had fun, and we raised 4k$ for kids. Can’t be bad.

See the Twitter tag and the Flickr tag. For an accurate tweet-recap of the party in two nice animations, head over to Michelle’s blog and have a chuckle on me.