For those I didn’t e-mail this to:

I just about fell off my chair laughing this morning.

Google has re-invented beer goggles.  Well, sorta.  We’ve all been there.  Even those of us who don’t drink much or at all have had a couple nights in their lives when things went kinda, well, sideways.  And the problem with that “condition” is that some people tend to get more… shall we say… verbose in that state.  Not only with their mouths, but also with their fingers.  As they’re fighting off their hangovers at 2 am, suddenly it seems like a good idea to send that ex-girlfriend a “Let’s get back together” e-mail, or e-mail their boss and tell them what they really think about them.

Google — as always — to the rescue.  With this new feature (now in testing, available through Google Labs) you can setup a time window (say 1am to 5am on weekends) when you must pass the cyber equivlent of a roadside sobriety test to send any e-mail.  Folks, I’m not making this stuff up.  I think it asks you a series of five basic math questions and you have to get them all right, or Gmail won’t send the e-mail.

Of course, I don’t think it would be very hard for a drunk to go into their settings and turn it off.

But it’s still a novel (and hysterical) idea.

Yeah I know.  I change themes more often than I change underwear.  Some people would say that’s a good thing.

I really, really enjoy the themes of Sadish Bala, and this is one of his.  Being a photographer I really like the large image at the top and intend to swap it out a lot to change things.

I had to make some minor modifications to the code to make the blog title and description “not” bleed through the bitmap, but I really hope Sadish isn’t too upset.  I left the credits intact.  I didn’t really “change” anything, I just took two lines out that were getting in the way since I always intend to put the title (and applicable captions) into the bitmap myself.

Hope you like it.  I love it.  I haven’t been this happy with my theme in a long time.  Thank you, Sadish.

I was intrigued when I got home from Day #1 of Wordcamp Toronto 2008 to read my new friend Daniele Rossi’s blog, and to find that he wrote a post that was not very much different from one that I intended to write when I got home.  Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, allow me to proceed with my evaluation of the iPod Touch (in his case, iPhone) as an alternative to a laptop.

In fact, Daniele (god I want to put two L’s in that) found himself in almost the exact same predicament a while ago at Podcamp Montreal that I found myself in today.  Today, I was going to Wordcamp and didn’t own a laptop.  He was going to Podcamp and wanted to see if he could live without his Powerbook.  Our experiences and reactions are pretty much similar.

When we arrived at Centennial College this morning, my friend Matt was happy (and quick) to point out that there was wifi.  I breathed a sigh of relief because unlike my friend Daniele, I don’t have 3G capability.  The iPod Touch hooked into the free wifi without issue, but it was kind of annoying because the wifi provider for the weekend had blocked all the ports that e-mail clients use for IMAP and SMTP.  Oh well.  It just meant I had to check my mail with Safari (the web browser) instead of the Mail application.

I spent almost the whole day (minus the lunch time) reading e-mail, using search.twitter.com to follow the convention’s tag (#wcto08), and tweeting myself.  So essentially I was flipping back and forth between Twitterfon (my Twitter app I use) and Safari.  I have to say something.  I was absolutely FLOORED by how well the battery lasted.  I shut the Touch off during Charles Hodgson’s presentation on podcasting (in my opinion, the best presentation of the day) but I feel it could have lasted the whole day.  I should note though, that I never listened to music once today.  It was solid wifi usage all day and the iPod Touch battery held up like a trooper.  Laptop users (Windows and Mac) were flocking to the charging station at lunch.  My battery still had half left.  I really didn’t think it would do that well in a full-day test like that, and it blew me away.

Data entry?  The iPod Touch/iPhone keyboard is… an acquired taste.  I saw quite a few Touch/iPhone users today and some of them could type on it a LOT faster than I could.  I have to admit that the worst part of tweeting today was entering that #@&*(! hash-code (#wcto08).  The “#” is on one keyboard, the letters are on another keyboard, and the numbers are on a third keyboard.  I admit by the tenth or fifteenth time that I did it, I could do it pretty quick, but… I really wish there was a way to make macros, or that the Touch would support some method of predictive text entry.  Surely it doesn’t take a lot of artificial intelligence for it to realize the fifteenth time it sees me type “#w” in a day that the rest of the “word” is going to be “cto08″.

Aside from that, those who are subcribed to my Twitter feed (or are friends with me on Facebook) will tell you that I had no inhibitions tweeting today.  I also e-mailed a few times through the Gmail iPhone web interface, and checked out the odd website that was mentioned by a presenter.  Admittedly, I did grab Matt’s Macbook Pro a couple of times when “serious” surfing was required.

So what are my thoughts?  If I was stuck on a desert island (that had wifi and a place to recharge the battery) I could probably live with having an iPod Touch as my sole tool to access the internet.  It may not do everything my desktop computer does, but it doesn’t need to, and it wasn’t intended to.  In my humble view, there are very few things that any of those $300 “netbooks” (Acer AspireOne, Asus EEEpc, etc) can do that my iPod Touch can’t.  Sure the interface isn’t the same and the screen is smaller, but the netbooks don’t fit in your pocket either!

I was very impressed with my Touch today.  (But I really hope I find a way to do keyboard macros.)

Tags: apple, ipod touch, wcto08, wordcamp toronto

I’ve spent my whole life watching people who can’t accept change.  People who have to live the same way every day, with no modification, progress or innovation in their lives.  People who can’t accept or acknowledge a better way of doing things.  It’s fun to watch them spin, but it’s sad at the same time.

The Downtown Business Association — or whatever they call themselves — are on a witch hunt.  Their leader, a man who sells obscenely priced antiques, has run-off signs from his laser printer and had them plastered all over the front of downtown businesses.  The general gist is that they’ve caught wind of a new commercial development on the other side of town, and they want the world to know that the only place that commercial development should take place in this little town is on their street.

I live on the other side of town, not more than a block from the location they claim that commercial development is about to happen.  I’ve kind of known for a while that “something” was in the wind because they put a four-way crosswalk on that corner and the south-east corner is a vacant lot.  I would be thrilled if they put a little strip mall on that corner with some essential commercial services in there. Does it mean that I’m going to stop going downtown?  Heck no!  I’m never going to give up my trips to the old bakery downtown, and I’m probably still going to need to go downtown to get a haircut.  But winter is coming and I don’t want to have to get in the car and burn (expensive) gas everytime I need to grab a quart of milk!

Let’s look downtown too, shall we?  It’s really the story of commercial failure in a grand scale.  As I turned the corner onto main street on my walk this morning, let me see if I can remember what I encountered:

1. A computer business that seems to thrive somehow despite the fact that they don’t advertise and don’t utilize their storefront much.
2. The aforementioned antique dealer who will sell you a dresser for $4500.  Gee, I wonder why he’s worried about losing about losing business.  (And yes, I was in his store this morning.  That was the cheapest price.)
3. A bank.
4. A spa.
5. An insurance agent.
6. The local Legion.
7. A closed restaurant that went under because there wasn’t enough traffic to sustain it.
8. A women’s clothing store.
9. I think there’s a tack shop in there too?
10. A bakery that seems to be doing ok.
11. A “tea room” that I hear is on the verge of dieing.
12. A fairly large hardware store.
13. A haircutting place.
14. A garage.
15. A pizza take-out place.
16. A small drug store that I don’t understand how it lives.
17. A building that used to house a big-name convenience store that went under.
18. A funeral home that has been closed for ages.
19. A bunch of offices.

I didn’t get the order right, but that’s just about everybody.  Do you see “appeal” anywhere in there?  I don’t.  I’m not ever going to go downtown unless there’s something down there I need.  I’m sure as heck not going to browse around because there’s nothing of interest there.

In order to make the downtown survive, the merchants down there need to kick it up a notch.  We need businesses with appeal down there so that we can have a restaurant on the main drag that can survive on walk-up business.  I realize the importance of insurance brokers and all those other service-oriented businesses, but they need to pick up and get out or at least get off street level.

Downtown Brooklin IS going to dry up because all the businesses downtown just want to do business like they were doing it 50 years ago.  Antique Guy even says so on a printed sign on his wall.   Something to the effect of “The restoration of quality furniture is an expensive practice.  Prices on items are non-negotiable.  This has been my practice for over 20 years.”

It boggles the mind.

I don’t remember who it was, or what it was referring to specifically but I remember somebody the other day making a comment that Jack Layton had clearly been watching the American election, because something he’d done was reminiscent of Barack Obama.  Good luck, Jack.  Barack you ain’t.

To our American friends, a word of explanation.  We’re not a two-party system.  We used to consider ourselves a three-party system.  But in recent days Elizabeth May and her band of tree-hugging whack jobs would like us to think we’re a four-party system.  Well.  No.  There’s the Bloc Quebecois too, but they’re less of a party and more of a bunch of bass ackwards psychopaths bent on world domination who we try really hard not to feed after midnight.

So really we’re a two-and-a-half party system.  The Liberals and the Conservatives are the only parties that (all things being equal) have a hope in hell of being elected.  The NDP’s sole role is stealing votes, and the Green Party and the Bloc Quebecois’ sole purpose is political entertainment.  They serve no valid and useful purpose, because the day they get elected at the federal level will be Day One of the Apocalypse World Tour.

(See?  Canadian politics aren’t so hard after all!)

Anyway!  Getting back to the issue at hand.  I blog therefore I rant.

The American election, from my vantage point, has been all about demographics.  A black presidential candidate.  A female vice presidential candidate.  It’s all about seeing who they can lure to the polling station who normally wouldn’t give two rips who hasn’t been there before because they’ve had no interest.

So it’s with intense amusement that I click through my 680 News RSS feed this morning and read that our buddy Jack (the NDP leader) has announced in his platform that he’s going to spend vast amounts of money on the aboriginal peoples.  Whoa.  Put the brakes on.  I’m not against aboriginal funding.  I just question Jack’s motives for doing it.  There has never been an NDP prime minister, and there never will be.  If Ed Broadbent couldn’t pull it off, I’m sorry Jack, you can’t either.  It’s all about getting votes.

I wonder if the Liberals could recover from Scandelgate if they appointed (another) woman as leader?  It worked for them.  Once.

All the polls I’ve seen say Steven Harper could pull a majority.  I hope he does.  As far as I’m concerned he’s been the most competant, task-oriented, focused leader we’ve had in my lifetime.

To those who would assert that dogs have a higher role in the world than their feline counterparts.

To those who would say that cats lack intelligence.

And to those who insist that a cat cannot ever be trained or ever demonstrate the smallest amount of obedience…

The house is empty, and I am living it up.  iTunes and my trusty Edifier speakers are screaming loud enough to make the paint fall off the walls and the subwoofer is almost making my (very heavy) desk jump up and ground like one of those trick cars that bounces up and down.  The title track from Jeff Golub’s “Grand Central” album is playing at just about the maximum volume that this system is capable of putting out.  (That’s distortion-free I might add.)   An absolutely stunning B3 player (who I’m gonna wager is Chris Palmaro, but I’m not exactly sure) lays down a absolutely screaming killer mega-lick.

Meanwhile “the two” are out in the living room being adversarial with each other as they occasionally are.  In the middle of the Hammond lick (at nearly the threshold of pain, without turning down the volume) I snap my fingers.

The fighting stops.

Get your dog trainers on that one and let me know how you do.