Upcoming

A couple of months ago I was seriously thinking about moving out of Saskatoon.  The real estate market is hot and until you have lived in Saskatoon for a winter, you have no idea how cold and miserable it can be from November to March.  Now Saskatoon in the summer is a wonderful place.  Festivals, parks, long hot summer nights, most restaurants have a patio to relax with friends on and literally thousands of lakes within driving distance.  Winter it is different.  Around 300,000 people just try to stay warm.  Even Al Gore idles his car when he doesn't have to in Saskatchewan.  Now I could drive to Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, or Regina but I only gain a degree or two in warmth at most in any of these places and only Calgarians have managed to enjoy the winter and only then because they get chinooks all of the time.  I haven't seen a true chinook in many years and this winter is as cold as any others.  Now to be fair, there is hockey but the Saskatoon Blades are brutal this year and are in yet another rebuilding season so driving to an arena to pay good money to watch bad hockey and then not have your car start, is not a fun way to spend the winter. 

Since I decided not to move to someplace warm, I decided to make the best of Saskatchewan this winter.  To keep us from going crazy this year, Wendy and I have had to start looking high and low for things to do.  There are a couple of sites that do list things in Saskatoon but none that I find do that great of job.  After bookmarking a lot of different sites in trying to see what was up around town, Wendy and I started to enter the interesting items at Upcoming, which is a pretty great service by Yahoo!  To sum it up, Upcoming is a community for discovering and sharing events. It can help you find stuff to do, discover what your friends are doing, or let you keep private events online for your own reference.

For Wendy and I, it is also our calendar of social events which gets used to schedule holidays and day offs around.  For me it also gives me something to look forward to and our friends a site to plan around.  I also use it with Resonate, our group features events that are interest to the emerging church in Canada (check out our group and add anything that you know of if you are so inclined).  If you haven't signed up for Upcoming, you may want to check it out, check out your city, and see what you can find and add to the community.  I should also point out that it now integrates with Flickr so when you post to Flickr, add the correct Flickr tag, your photos show up on Upcoming.  Of course it comes with things like RSS, integration with Google Calendar (which surprised me), and other Web 2.0 bells and whistles.

If you are wondering, here is my profile on Upcoming (it is also on the blogs footer).  Wendy's profile can be found here.  Remember if you know of anything interesting and worth going to...

Technorati tags: Upcoming.org, Upcoming, Yahoo!, events, Flickr