Culture & Leisure Archives - Page 4 of 6

Stage Presents: See Live Theatre For Free

May 3, 2012/0 Comments/in CANADIAN CONTENT, Culture & Leisure /by Editor

Get more out of live theatre performances by working behind the scenes—save on ticket purchases, too.

GIVE & GET | Calling all theatre junkies! If you can’t survive the summer without multiple doses of Bard on the Beach and TUTS: Theatre under the Stars (where you can see Titanic The Musical this summer), are biting your nails until the next batch of Fringe Festival offerings and love all the live-and-in-your-face independent theatre, well, ticket prices will add up. Volunteering is a way to see more theatre for less money and be an insider to boot. Read more

How To Become A Successful Pinup Girl

March 30, 2012/0 Comments/in Culture & Leisure /by Editor

Like millions of others, I am hooked on Pinterest, the hugely popular virtual bulletin board website.

ON THE DOWNLOAD | OMG! Just what I needed, another way to waste huge amounts of time on social media. I was already maintaining Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts—now my up-to-the-minute tech friend Giorgio (vanhit.com) was suggesting I jump on Pinterest, the social media website that allows you to organize and share images you find on the web. That was eight months ago when it was just gaining steam, and he sent me the link for an invitation because you need one to join. “It’s going to blow up,” he told me, and it did—to the moon! Read more

Top Universities Offer Courses For Free

March 16, 2012/0 Comments/in CANADIAN CONTENT, Culture & Leisure, HOW-TO KNOW-HOW /by Editor

Crazy about learning but not about the costs of higher education? Some of the world’s top universities offer their courses online—for free.

FREE IS GOOD | If the best things in life are free, what’s the deal with university tuition? In B.C. the average tuition fee has increased 96 percent in the past five years.

As it happens, you can get a university education without paying a cent, and what’s more, from top-flight institutions like MIT, Stanford and Cambridge. As long as you’re more interested in learning than in obtaining a formal degree, many universities provide courses and lectures online for free. Read more

Watch 65 RedRoses, Oprah’s 2012 Hot Doc

February 14, 2012/1 Comment/in Culture & Leisure /by Editor

Make Valentine’s Day more than a Hallmark moment—give someone a new lease on life.

PASS IT ON | Talk about hot documentaries. The locally made film 65_RedRoses about New Westminster’s Eva Markvoort, the irrepressible artist/writer/blogger who squeezed 10 decades of loving—and living—into a quarter of a century before succumbing to cystic fibrosis two years ago, is the 2012 official selection of Oprah Winfrey’s Documentary Club. The film, which has won a boatload of other honours for filmmakers Philip Lyall and Nimisha Mukerji, will premiere on OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network, sometime this spring, but you can watch it for FREE on March 8 (and meet the filmmakers) at the Nat and Flora Bosa Centre for Film and Animation at Capilano University. Read more

Superswoon.com Printable Valentine's Day Cards

Download Fabulous Valentines For Free

February 11, 2012/3 Comments/in Culture & Leisure, HOLIDAY /by Editor

Why would you ever buy another box of classroom cards for Valentine’s Day when you can download, print out and personalize dozens of fabulous ones for free!

FREE & EASY | One Valentine’s eve, a few years ago, I arrived early for a movie date with a friend so decided to kill the time at a bookstore nearby. Inside I saw red (and pink and lots of hearts), and it hit me: we hadn’t bought or made cards to give my daughters’ classmates. I needed 40 cards, but was I prepared to spend $20 for boxes of 15? No. Read more

Exterior Wing Sang Gallery On East Pender Street, Vancouver

Visit The Wing Sang Soon—It’s Free!

January 31, 2012/1 Comment/in CANADIAN CONTENT, Culture & Leisure, Go Here Now, TRAVEL, View All Travel Stories /by Editor

Kudos to Bob Rennie for giving us another spectacular reason to love Vancouver.

FREE & SPECTACULAR | Vancouver real estate marketing mogul Bob Rennie’s private art gallery in the Wing Sang Building on East Pender Street has been open to the public just over two years now. I had been putting off seeing it for a completely irrational reason—you need to sign up in advance to get in. Lucky for me, friends added my name to their group of four planning a visit, and we all went for a free one-hour guided tour last week. Read more

Turn Your Instagram Images Into Prints

January 13, 2012/1 Comment/in Culture & Leisure /by Editor

Two of our favourite dead simple web apps can turn your digital Instagram photos into more permanent art-house prints.

FREE + CHEAP = AWESOME | If you own an iPhone and are not among the 15 million people who have already downloaded Apple’s FREE Instagram app, what are you waiting for? This dead simple photo manipulation program includes filters and other photo effects that can alter the way your iPhone 4 and 4S photos look. One of the reasons for Instagram’s instant popularity is that it makes photo sharing on Facebook, Twitter, et al., super easy, but I like it because it makes even my grossly pedestrian photos look infinitely more exciting. Read more

Finding Photobooths In Metro Vanvouver

January 6, 2012/7 Comments/in Culture & Leisure /by Editor

Photobooth portraits are all the rage. Here’s how and where to get yourself shot in Metro Vancouver.

DIRT CHEAP & VERY COOL | Isn’t it ironic that, with legions of rabid snappers out there pointing and shooting their digital phone cameras at everything moving and otherwise, the automatic photobooth, the last bastion of easily accessible print photo strips, is enjoying a renaissance? Rented-by-the-hour photobooths are the currently hot commodity at private parties, corporate functions and wedding receptions, and people are increasingly snapping up shots at the 25 freestanding “photomats” in public locations dotted around Metro Vancouver. Read more

Newsmap: A Cool Way To View Google News

November 8, 2011/0 Comments/in Culture & Leisure /by Editor

There are other ways to stay on top of trending topics besides Twitter. This clever, free application lets you see which news stories are getting the most attention worldwide.

FREE & USEFUL | Top 10 Trending Topics is a feature on the Twitter website that lists in order of importance whatever subject matter—from hard news to twaddle—is most on the minds of tweeters at any given nanosecond in the Twitterverse.

Newsmap is an application that tracks trending topics, too. It employs a hierarchy of colour blocks to highlight the currently hottest stories on the websites of legitimate news outlets in 15 countries. This free service is news you can view, and although it isn’t interactive the way Twitter’s Trending Topics is, it can be addictive if you’re any kind of a news junkie at all. Read more

filigree pumpkin - Martha Stewart Living

Supersimple Ways To Decorate Pumpkins

October 20, 2011/4 Comments/in Culture & Leisure, HOLIDAY /by Editor

We’re jacked about Halloween—and these supersimple ways to decorate pumpkins.

EASY DOES IT | This whole pumpkin-decorating thing has gotten crazy out-of-hand in the past few years, with elaborate designs like the filigree-carved jack-o’-lantern pictured here that’s posted on Martha Stewart’s website (CLICK here for more of her beautiful ideas). It’s not exactly easy to cut through a pumpkin, let alone arrive at a design like this one (can’t imagine how long look it took a pro to do it). We propose getting back to basics with quick and simple pumpkin décor like the two options offered below. At the very least, going easy on the pumpkins will give you more time to perfect your costume. Read more