Bastards. I was first.

Just last Friday, I declared the Summer of Skot

Now those bastards over at Google have declared the Summer of Code

This is my summer, not yours Google. I will dominate.

bookmarks bar of the beast

Imagine my horror as I gazed upon my bookmarks bar to see the number of unread RSS articles I had (indicated by the numbers in brackets.)

Coincidence, or the devil’s work? You can come to your own conclusions.

I have, incidentally, put an an entire gallery of Ottawa photos.

My Local Hardware Store

vancouver weekends

It’s a bit of a running joke here that if it’s raining, it must be Saturday. Vancouver is Canada’s rainy city, and since people tend to work Monday to Friday (wait….people in Vancouver work?) of course it rains when you’re not working.

But not this weekend.

This is one of those spectacular, stop you dead in your tracks weekends with glorious sunshine and warm weather and all those things that just positively scream “Get Outside!”

So I am.

I can’t think of a better way to start the Summer of Skot.

End of an Era?

I rode along the False Creek seawall today on my way to work - hammered down to Granville Island and then around the rest of the way - and in the process stumbled on what must, surely, be the end of an era for Vancouver, and the residents of the False Creek Waterway.

The Kmon Iwanna Lei-Ya is up for sale.

I’ll post a photo shortly, as soon as I get my digital camera back. This house boat’s been moored here since the day I moved to Vancouver, so the sale is potentially truly momentous.

Macs are good; Windows is good; Macs are better; Windows is better

Leave it to David Pogue, as usual, to cut through a great deal of the fluff around the Mac vs. Windows debate.

From the Desk of David Pogue: Ground Rules for the Windows-Macintosh War

It’s the New York Times - it’s worth registering.

For what it’s worth, I can use both equally well. I use a Mac because I’m more productive, although neither operating system makes up for my propensity to waste time.

star wars

I saw Star Wars (the first) in a small theatre in Trenton, Ontario when it was re-released in 1978. The film snapped during the climactic Obi-Wan vs. Darth Vader light saber duel. I remember the interminable wait for the film to be spliced back together, and the eventual disappointment when I learned that Obi Wan lost this battle.

I saw The Empire Strikes Back with my grandfather in North Bay, Ontario during a shadfly infested summer I’ll never forget. My grandfather fell asleep.

I saw The Return of the Jedi on the day I graduated from Grade 8, and went with a bunch of friends from my graduating class.

I saw The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones with my ex. There were very few clones in the second movie, and none of them attacked. I watched this movie under duress, having been immensely disappointed in The Phantom Menace.

I am making a commitment - I am not going to see the Revenge of the Sith.

branding madness. redux.

My thoughts on branding are well known, but my boss pointed out this example to me today and I just had to chuckle.

AUCTIONIZE: ebay’s next competitor to sell itself… on ebay of course!

This is a guy who put a “buy now” price of US$250,000 on a brand. Not even an established brand, just a brand.

How many things are wrong with this picture?

Continue reading "branding madness. redux."

trees. baby girls. rings.

As a weekend project, a friend and I took down a tree in our mutual back yard - the friend is also my landlord - producing quite a bit of green debris. The tree provided little shade, and had a misshapen trunk that substantially reduced available garden space, so down it came.

This afternoon we loaded the seemingly endless quantity of branches and pine needles into the bed of a Ford F150 pickup truck; three trips to the Vancouver dump later the alley behind the house was clear, my hands were covered in sap and we were ready for dinner.

We headed upstairs, where his wife and daughter were waiting for us.

Continue reading "trees. baby girls. rings."

The Last Waltz

The Last Waltz ranks on many critic’s lists as the Best Concert Film Ever. Not one of, but the best.

Having not completely reviewed the genre, I’ll reserve comment. With Martin Scorcese behind the lens, I’m certainly not about to argue it’s video credentials. From an audio perspective, this film contains some of the best music ever recorded, with performances by a stellar group of artists. Where else are you going to find Neil Young with Robbie Robertson and Joni Mitchell singing background vocals. The film captures a moment in time beautifully, and a band - The Band - shutting it down before it slipped into obscurity.

This doesn’t concern me today - what concerns me is economics.

Continue reading "The Last Waltz"

Oh, Belinda!

How this woman qualifies for Cabinet, I’m not sure.

CBC News: Sunday - Belinda Stronach Interview

Marie & Martin’s Wedding

A friend getting married is a wonderful thing. Two friends getting married, is even better.

Saint-Exupery

I love the Little Prince, but if there’s one author who’s other works are more under rated than Saint-Exupery I don’t know who it could be. His other works are well regarded and respected, but seemngly little read.

What brought this to mind? Random surfing, and stumbling across this quote:

election day

It’s election day in British Columbia - my second one.

Time to vote; time to make sure this backwards, weird province stay son a good track for the next 4 years at least.

Can’t wait the for the next one of these things - probably Thursday.

ottawa. by ward market.

Mushroom at Shannon Falls

Hey, well, here’s exciting news

Now you can subscribe to this blog through an RSS feed which, for some reason, I had earlier disabled.

I like RSS, although it’s particularly well suited to certain types of content and this may or may not be amongst them. There may be too many pictures, but I’m going to tweak the feed so that it works a little better.

More later. For now, bookmark away using those dedicated readers, or Safari 2.0 if you’ve got it.

why i like my job

One of the crazy kids I work with sent this message around:

Go ahead. I dare you. Try not to have a little fun here.

I’m bookmarking this under news:fake news

The Huffington Post | The Front Page

Arianna Huffington debuted today, calling herself a journalist.

A surer sign of the apocalypse I’ve never really seen before. I still shudder at the thought of her run against Arnold for the California governorship. The horror. The horror.

And really: Arnold won…so that’s saying something, I think.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see what happens here over the next little while. I’ve already nagged a bit about this article in particular but I’m astounded by how many of these articles are written by Hollywood celebrities. Truly amazing.

Moonrise, Bowen Island

There are people who would call this the sunset — the end of a day.

I prefer to remember it as the begining of a night.

Vladmir Lenin

Nestled into a corner next to a Taco del Mar in Seattle’s Fremont neighbourhood stands this enormous statue of Vladmir Lenin. The statue was originally erected in Poprad, Czechoslovakia but was purchased by a Seattle resident teaching there at the time.

The statue weighs 7 tonnes, and the word enormous doesn’t truly do it justice.

Art or politics? I think a little of both, personally, particularly given the neighbourhood it’s located in.

Continue reading "Vladmir Lenin"

tiger : mac os 10.4

Integrated RSS in Safari is pretty slick. It makes RSS feeds much more useful, and much different in my view.

I’m a bit disappointed in Dashboard, which is pokey and not yet finished, it seem. I can’t use the Stickies app which, as it seems to have difficulty entering text. I also find the iTune widget too slow to respond, and if I need to have the application open anyway why would I bother? Perhaps this will improve. There are obvious network issues in Widgets that pull information from the web.

I haven’t even begun to explore Automator, but it’s a powerful tool. Like most such things, it will be come much more so as more apps become enabled.

Spotlight is a very slick operating system wide implementation of an old technology. Apple’s first truly useful desktop search, although there have been windows examples in the past that have worked well.

So my two cents is that I like it, but not as much as I really wanted too.

your blue hood

Continue reading "your blue hood"

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