TED Talks for Friday

June 27, 2008

Usually on Friday’s I work on the cartoon for the next weeks Londoner. This week an early deadline to allow for the Canada Day holiday obliged me to have very little to do today, so I caught up on some TED talks.

Wade Davis: Cultures at the far edge of the world
Wade Davis: The worldwide web of belief and ritual
Phil Borges: Documenting our endangered cultures
Stephen Petranek: 10 ways the world could end

Ticket for Robin HoodThere remain a few days left of performance for this wonderful play, an original production. Creative, funny, superbly cast and well acted, and so obviously written for the very actors performing it. Spriet Theatre in the Covent Market is, not just physically, but metaphorically, too small a stage for this production. It wants to be much bigger.


Performance times link cribbed from Theatre in London
7:30 on June 27, 28; 2 pm on June 29. And it’s only $12.00 folks! and better than Mel Brooks.

There is so much fresh and funny stuff all through that the rescue scene, packed with Pirates, Ninja’s, Monks, though funny, flags - it is a short but acceptable state of idea fatigue.

The writing is sharp, the characters well realized. I have my own ideas on resolving the rescue scene; neither here nor there. But keep in mind that these young people are all folks to watch and you will hear about them when they grow too big for this (ha ha) creative city.

Robots on Time

June 26, 2008

robot hand holding apple Image from a photoessay on robots at Time.com, just in time, of course, for Wall-E. Hey! I’m on board!

Joy in the World

June 20, 2008

Where the Hell is Matt?

Thank you, Cheryl.

My tag surfer has Buddhism as a tag to catch posts I’d like to read. Of course, so much Evangelism shows up because they want to tell us how wrong we are. What is worse is, the blog which showed up today doesn’t allow comments. Really folks, You must be very secure in your belief that no one can, uhm, question?, ask or comment?, or try to correct some untrue or misunderstood information? - or is that just your closed-mindedness showing? Do you folks read other genuinely accurate posts on understanding Buddhism? Rather than merely pronouncing, are you so confident in your self-affirming identity that you can’t talk about it?

Zombies and Ghouls

June 19, 2008

Today was the Zombie walk in London. Dates were changed hoping for more favourable weather. Oh, well. Recently a couple of guys were arrested over thefts of 170 bronze urns from a graveyard, which prompted this joke:

Q: What’s the difference between Zombies and grave-robbing ghouls?

A: Braaaiinzzz!

Idling at one of the 150 Tim Horton’s drive-thrus in London, it is said, contributes to poor air quality. There is a movement to ban drive-thrus.  There is an argument that drive-thrus are great for the handicapped and elderly who find it difficult to get out of cars. Well, I guess they didn’t find it too difficult to get into the car. 

Yet handicapped persons, some argue, would be well served by adding nine more accessible cabs to the present fleet of nine.

Jamie Donnelly of Aboutown, one of London’s two main cab companies, told the committee he thinks the city needs three new such cabs, but adding nine won’t do undue harm to the industry.

“That would not do it,” [Roger Khouri] said, using a much smaller area city as an example of how to handle the issue.

“Woodstock has eight accessible cabs — with a population of 36,000. That’s absolutely phenomenal.”

Coun. Walter Lonc has studied how Ottawa handles accessible cabs: That city has 185, so, given that ratio, a city of London’s size should have about 73, he said.

Doesn’t this suggest that London is well served in terms of handicapped access to drive-thru coffee?

Kate Beaton

June 15, 2008

Courtesy of Comics Curmudgeon, Nova Scotian, Kate Beaton. I am happy to be on the same planet with her.

Cat evolution

June 12, 2008

After millions of years of evolution you would think a cat would have evolved that understood feet. Human feet. Like, how not to get in the way of peoples feet. But the problem is, we spay those ones. They can’t pass on the skills. The wild ones who are never near our feet are the ones that breed. 

A cat that understood how to get out of the way of people’s feet; that would be intelligent design.

Random Nexts 7

June 7, 2008

Lemon squares

June 5, 2008

here iI am on the corner of Wortley and Askin fingertipingfingertyping on my ipodiPod touch  pverover an  open network the responiveness leaves a bitto is a bit slpeslow bit this is the gutierfuture ismtisn’t  it? cantcan’t get the cursor to edit my finger typing typos oh and  iI didntdidn’t mention the 

Update:Thursday; June 5, 2008 1:29 PM: at home on the Mac, editing the post:

Here I am on the corner of Wortley and Askin fingertyping on my iPod touch over an open network. The responsiveness is a bit slow but this is the future isn’t it? Can’t get the cursor to edit my finger typing typos oh and I didntdidn’t mention the Black Walnut Café.

I was sitting on the bench outside the Black Walnut, and thought, what the heck… try it… So I was tapping directly into the composition box here at this compose page at WordPress. Response was very fudgy, and I couldn’t see the cursor, nor could I manipulate it on the Touch. Still I was able to call up Wikipedia and solve a dispute over whether a coconut was a fruit or a nut. Welcome to the future.

An excellent cartoon!

June 3, 2008


an excellent cartoon swiped from http://bgtroll.wordpress.com/2008/06/03/wellcome/

FrameByFrame is a cool little app that will allow you to make stop-motion animation’s with any connected webcam, and it’s free.

Boinx iStopMotion will do time lapse. They offer a free five day demo, and it does lots of very useful things with all kinds of different settings. It’s also $50.00 US

FrameByFrame isn’t scriptable, though iStopMotion is. 

Apple’s Automator is a great little wrapper for a lot of system functions. The Loop action affects only the connected action, not the whole workflow, and the Watch Me Do is tediously slow.  I didn’t bust a nut trying to get a very simple workflow working which was supposed to launch FrameByFrame, click the Capture menu item, pause and repeat. This shouldn’t be this hard. Read the rest of this entry »

Forest City Lovers

May 19, 2008

The Forest City Lovers are a Toronto based band consisting of four friends, two rats and eight arms who don’t have a play date in London, The Creative City, The Forest City!

The bands MySpace page.