It is snowing lightly outside, and it is a very quiet morning. The snow is unbroken by prints from boots, shoes or tire treads, and its colour is a most un-Toronto white. To me it seems symbolic of the new year: promise, potential and fragility. One set of tire tracks will break the spell. The sense of fragility comes from knowing that so far this year at least, Toronto has not had any murders, no Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan, and we have not yet had the first occurrence of what seem to be sadly inevitable events; this is the soap bubble part of the year; filled with beauty, yet heart-breakingly ephemeral. However, the fact that the bubble exists at all shows that this special time is not impossible; the challenge is to make it last as long as possible.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

I finally got my malfunctioning blog fixed, or rather reinstalled, and all content restored, but the comments are lost. I feel like I am in mourning.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

On of the things I really must do this fall is get back to blogging on a regular basis, so what better place to start then getting the long overdue 6 Random Things About Me Post done!!

Here are the rules:

Random rules (hat tip to ):
1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on the blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post.
5. Let each person know they have been tagged.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.
I was tagged by (in no particular order):

Sean McGaughey

Mark Blevis

Rob Lee

Keith Burtis

Danielle Rossi

Katherine Matthews

Bob Goyetche

Wow. What a list of amazing people!! If I missed anyone, my sincere apologies!!
Anyway, here is my list of random things about me:

1. Among my wide variety of musical tastes, I like loud organ Tocattas and Renaissance choral music.

2. I can’t ice skate to save my life. (Don’t turn me in – I could lose my Canadian Citizenship over that offence!)

3. During my life, I have lived in three different provinces, two countries, and have called about 16 or 17 different addresses home. The next time I move, I will be in the box!

4. I used to be a chain-smoker (two packs a day) up until 1990, when I quit cold turkey, and joined the ranks of sanctimonious ex-smokers. (Marrying a singer with asthma and a tobacco allergy made it easy to stay clean!)

5. I have been a user of the Linux Operating system (on and off but recently mostly on) since 1996 (Slackware 2.x was the first version I ever tried, for those who are curious).

6. I remember Gopher with fondness.

Now at this point I am supposed to tag six more people, so:

SuzeMuze

David Fisher (aka Tibbon)

Colin McKay
but I think I will leave it there though.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

A week ago at this time I was immersed in the first Niagara On the Lake Podcasting and Social Media Meet-up. All in all, I’m quite happy with how it went; I have to thank once again my co-organizers Keith Burtis and Bill Deyes. Look up the word  Dynamo in a dictionary, and you’ll see their pictures!

At the end of the event, things, as normal, were a blur for me. I always need a few days to process what I hear, see and experience. Over the course of the last few days, points made in various presentations, such as Mark Blevis’s brilliant presentation using The Police as an extended metaphor, and Sean McGaughey’s great presentation about metaphor, as well as Jim Milles and Kristina Lively’s presentation on couple-casting have come together and given me a message; we in the podcasting community must embrace change, re-examine our goals and assumptions, and be prepared to work even harder to keep podcasting going.

From Sean, we are challenged to look at words like friend and community. How will their meaning evolve? From Mark, the example of the willingness of the Police to shift musical gears and break with the past challenges us all to avoid ruts, and the easy way of doing things. A consistent dream does not mean a consistent and predictable sound.

Jim and Kristine demonstrated one of the most important lessons to be learned. They produce their podcast for their friends; they are not gunning for hundreds of thousands of listeners, or holding their breath waiting for a monetization deal. They define success on their own terms. Any time we can do that, we achieve true independence, and true freedom.

And that is the door to magic!

Tags: NOTL08

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

Here is some funny graffiti on a mailbox in my neighborhood in east-central Toronto:

It’s a bit faint, but underneath “Question everything” someone else wrote “why?” It points out a fundamental contradiction in the original comment; to question everything, we also need to question the need to question everything ….

Well I thought it was funny

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

I saw an ad on TV last night for one of the five-bladed razors, with a “great new feature” : a strip along the top that tells you when it’s time to throw it away and start using another one. Right. I wonder how many good shaves would still be left when the company decides it wants you to move on to the next razor to keep up your consumption (and therefore spending) levels.

I’m reminded of the stories on how ink jet printers will claim an ink cartridge is “empty” when it still has usable ink left.

Bastards.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

I read a recent post by Mitch Joel a couple of days ago, in which he likens Social Media to Punk Music. It is an interesting comparison, and Mitch focuses on the positive aspects of the comparison, but there needs to be a cautionary flip side to this metaphor.

Firstly, the intrinsic quality of one’s content matters, after the novelty and trend buzz begins to wear off; a lot of punk bands were made up of appallingly bad musicians, and are now only of interest to socio-musicologists and historians. The bands who had both the energy and the talent and technique still matter, either as active musicians, or through their influence on the music of today. The hangers-on, those with inchoate rage but little else are forgotten. The good news is that in the Social Media space, espcially in areas like podcasting, producers take the quality of their content seriously; I see very litle of an attitude that says “I’m podcasting, that’s all that matters.”

And before we get too hung up on the Sex Pistols (as much as I liked them at the time…I remember being in first year residence at school and a couple of other students and I set up a 300 watt amp outside the residence and blasted the song “Bodies” across a field to see if we could hear the echo off the library 250 yards away), we need to remember that to a large degree, they were about as spontaneous as Reality TV, put together by a self-serving manager who cynically saw a trend and constructed a band to make a profit. There are better examples out there.

Tags: Social Media

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

I am currently in heaven, on vacation at a cottage on the beach in Inverness, Nova Scotia. (This explains why it has taken me so long since my last entry).

One thing I am struck by is the amount of sea glass on the beach. Sea glass is a fragment of broken glass that has been worn smooth by the ocean. To me, it seems that this is an example of nature fighting back; it is taking an act of desecration (littering), and turning it into a thing of beauty, to persist awhile before returning to sand, from whence all glass comes.

It also seems to me a gentle reminder of a more somber truth: that ultimately the world will overcome almost anything we do to it. In the long run, we have no power over her. She was here a long time before us, and will persist a long time after we leave the scene, however that may occur. And once we leave, the silence and beauty of a pristine world will slowly return, and in time, not even the odd bit of sea glass will remain to mark our species birth, existence, and passing from the miracle that is Earth.

no loan questions asked $60,000loan ace student consolidation financialfor learning all loans to accessservices student loans financial acspayday loan $200at $300,000 5.7 loanloan $20,000100 loan ltv commercial401k loan taxes hardshipfree absolutely loans

per pay movies adult viewmovies wife amateur fucking homemademovie anal clipsex anal movie freesex links anime moviesanal movie asian sampleasian movie teenmovies asian teens Map

training accredited schoolloan credit secured personal adversepicks 2007 top card creditcard credit national 1staccreditation abet revisithomelenders accreditedsale agricredit tractors foraccreditation expo 2005 certificate for gsa Map

schools aircarft accredited piolotcredit lender remortgage adverse httpaccount merchant wireless hawaii credit card10000 creditscheck credit bed with no adjustablechoice credit union lincoln 1stcalifornia account canadian merchant card creditleave additional tax credits maternity Map

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago, where a comment was made about people (podcasters at a conference in this case) armed with digital cameras and camcorders, shooting and posting anything and everything on Flickr, etc. to a point where over a thousand pictures of a three day event were posted, resulting in some good pictures being lost in the shuffle. The podcaster wished that people would actually edit their work, do some cropping, be a bit selective, etc. I for one wholeheartedly agreed with him, but after thinking about it, I think this kind of thing is not only inevitable, but a desirable part of a medium’s growing pains, as it seems to me that every medium that eventually becomes accessible to the general population seems to go through the same artistic cycle.

When a new artistic medium arises (using photography as an example), initially the cost, expense, and complexity of the medium engenders a certain respect for the medium, and the involved process that one had to go through to get any results. Certainly, if one goes back to the dawn of photography in the early 19th century, when photographers prepared all their own photographic plates, and mixed their own chemicals, and developed their own images (and in the case of daguerreotypes doing so using mercury vapour!), one did not take the image lightly. You certainly did not hear the term “snapshot” applied to the photography of this era. To even get a recognizable image took a lot of work, skill (and money), and the failure rate was quite high.

When roll film became available in a mass market sense (thinking specially of the first Kodak camera that came preloaded with 100 pictures in 1888, through to point and shoot Brownie models that were so popular in the first half of the 20th century), many photography “old timers” sniffed at what they saw as a debasement of the medium, as a reaction to how easy it had become, resulting in so many thoughtless pictures being taken. Their sense of “elite,” of exclusivity was threatened. When 35 mm photography took off in the 20th century, the same murmurs of complaint were heard.

But even in the early/mid 35mm era, a certain level of skill was required to take a technically successful picture of a higher quality than the pictures produced by Brownie type cameras, and until the Polaroid came along, there was certainly no instant gratification. I remember mailing (yes, mailing!) film in for processing, and the magic (often mixed with disappointment) of seeing the printed pictures upon their delivery to me. It certainly was not cheap to get photographs this way, and a photographer would not normally burn through a roll of film in an eyeblink. The first “good” camera I had access to was my father’s Voigtlander Vito B; when my father bought it for his own use in the mid-1950’s it cost $106 1950’s dollars. A beautiful camera, (which I still have and will always treasure), which was absolutely and completely manual, including focus. If you didn’t have some basic skill, you wouldn’t get pictures. Period.
Later, when I learned how to develop film and do my own enlarging, I felt a different kind of magic, seeing ghostly images appear before my eyes in the darkroom. Still, the film and equipment cost money (and I didn’t have much back then), and I wasn’t shooting hundreds of images a day.

Today it is cheap and easy to instantly get perfectly focussed, properly exposed images. As a result, the world is getting inundated by forgettable images, images that rather than stand alone, appear as mere single frames from a movie of someone’s stream of consciousness in a sense. I wonder if this is becoming a new medium, with a new set of conventions, or if more owners of digital cameras will free themselves from the shackles of instant gratification and become photographers? My guess is a bit of both, but I am cheering for the latter. Today’s camera can automate all the technical aspects of photography, but I hope it never automates, or even replaces, the human eye, the human heart, and our sense of wonder.

Tags: Photography

warrington agencyalcatel system ringtones phoneringtone 12345165 ringtoneringtone ac mobile dcfree nextel ringtone i 8603595 ringtone downloads nokiafree ringtone 426 samsung Map

6563 4555 levitra freemp3 acidjazzed eveningus credit acermade ac who dc who ringtonehookup 1800 mp3 goldwingfiona mp3 apple addict468 ads 674 levitramp3 teena marie 14k Map

inc ace america loanloan advance charlotte cashpayday advance military loanloan application housing affordableloan student alaska programunsecured america problem loancash loan $1000no 100 loan doc Map

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

I was walking back home from getting my hair cut this morning (and now my hair is the shortest it’s ever been, it’s nice to know that my hairline is receeding), and listening to my iPod, and the song I was listening to was Even in the Quietest Moments by Supertramp; this is another song that has special significance for me (a moment of teenage angst back in the 70’s when I was told by my then future girlfriend that she was going to go steady with someone else). The song begins with the sounds of birds chirping, which was also the sound that I was hearing on the street this morning — it was hard to tell where the street ended, and the song began, and it was a lovely effect, real hi-fi!

I just hope I never hear the same effect if I’m listening to Armageddon by the band Prism. (Boy am I dating myself!).

Tag(s): Supertramp

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post