Month: March 2008

Monday Miscellany

It’s really a miscellany today. I was half-tempted to title this 88 lines about 44 links, and maybe even do it in some kind of poetic structure, but fortunately a combination of laziness and good sense prevailed. Nice to see that former local (and HGPA-member) Brian O’Malley‘s movie deal is actually happening–at least leads are being cast and a start… Read more →

I love it

Holy “ask and ye shall receive”, Batman! From the CBC The National Union of Public and General Employees, which represents more than 340,000 workers across the country, on Friday wrote to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to investigate the practice of “traffic shaping” and its impact on internet users. “These internet service providers are, with little or no public… Read more →

Watts on Earth Hour

Some of my cynical thoughts on “Earth Hour” tonight are echoed, and then turned up to 11 by Canadian hard SF author, Peter Watts. Hundreds, maybe thousands of Torontonians will celebrate the event by climbing into their SUVs and driving out to Downsview Park, there to light candles in the darkness. The Eaton’s Center up at Yonge and Dundas is… Read more →

An Oldie But A Goodie

The ‘net memes are often easy to pass by, but there’s something about the CD Cover one that amuses me. My result is shown above (click for the larger version). Tons of other ones–many of which are disturbingly plausible–at the flickr pool. The extremely Net-savvy among you will be able to place the font used for the band name. Read more →

Tom Waits For No Man

Why not? More details at the YouTube page–here’s the first bit, but there’s much more: Performed for us live (at the La Brea stage in Hollywood, 1978), and rotoscoped – a process that traces back the live action frame by frame and turns it into animation. The original live action was shot with 5 cameras – 2 high, 2 low… Read more →

Canada Needs Some Net Neutrality Enforcement

Did you see the news about Bell deciding that it can filter and shape traffic even carried over “wholesale” pipes to ISPs? Users of the Canadian family-run ISP Teksavvy (which we profiled last year) have started noticing that Bell Canada is throttling traffic before it reaches wholesale partners. According to Teksavvy CEO Rocky Gaudrault, Bell has implemented “load balancing” to… Read more →

A throne is a throne…

You know, the Pope-throne in the Vatican press room, or wherever it is, reminds me of something… (photo source) Oh yeah, I know what it is. It reminds me of the stage at the No Rest For The Wicked concert I saw in Milan. (As an aside, I know I shouldn’t be shocked at hypocrisy here, but doesn’t seeing that… Read more →

Dismissed with a touch of ceremony

Maybe I will go to Paris. Who knows? But I’ll sure as hell never go back to Texas again. Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry. I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented… Read more →

It Might Surprise You

And now, for a nice long weekend diversion, a selection of songs with a common characteristic: people seem to be surprised that I really like them. First up we have Dino. This might surprise people who know me a bit, since I’m really not a lounge type of cat. It might surprise people who know me better even more, since… Read more →

Something to chew on

Oh, I am going to enjoy reading a bunch more stuff at Bostrom’s site, I can tell already: Wisdom is distinct from cleverness or mental efficiency. Wisdom is about getting the big things right. A prerequisite is the ability to recognize what the big things are, i.e., a sense for proportion, for what is important. I am often thinking about… Read more →

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.