Year: 2004

Long weekend

Claire, Allison, David, Tamsen, Greg, Lenni, Drew, Adrean, Stich, Brenda. All of the preceding people helped make last weekend (plus two vacation days) one of the most fun and unique I’ve had in some time.

David and Tamsen were kind enough to come out to see Claire Jenkins‘ London debut with special guest Allison Brown at The Ugly Mug. After their performance the five of us talked music, movies, websites and psychology for several hours at a favourite restaurant (even moreso now because they didn’t kick us out for grossly overstaying our welcome).

I’d made plans with Brenda, one of my favourite musicians and a talented voiceover artist, to see Lenni‘s show on Monday before giving her a ride to London, but inexplicably had neglected to inform Greg of the gig in advance. Fortunately I was able to get hold of him at the last minute, and so the three of us enjoyed each other’s company (and Lenni and trio, naturally) at the packed venue before heading out just after midnight. A couple of solid hours of singer-songwriters on CD and wide-ranging conversation later (including, finally, an answer to my question: it’s not by choice) Brenda and I hit London and parted ways.

As a fitting coda to the long musical weekend, on Tuesday I returned to the Ugly Mug, this time to pick up a long-lost album of photos. I’ll be adding them to the Sirens website RSN.

Next up: Andrew, Scott, Donna, Rufus, Emm and Dayna.

Demon Stich

Lenni: I lived in California for a year, and this next song [Rufus Wainwright’s Poses] reminds me of that for some reason.

Stich: Because everyone there is a poser?

Of the people Lenni Jabour could have picked to join her for her jazz-singing debut, I’d never have thought Stich Wynston‘s name would come up. It’s not because he’s not an excellent player–he definitely is–but I associate him so strongly with the Shuffle Demons that it’s hard to think of him doing anything more conventional. Yet there he was last night, drumming away behind pianist Adrean Farrugia, bassist Drew Birston, and chanteuse extraordinare Lenni.

Compact this!

File | Compact Folders for imap accounts now compacts all imap folders in the account…. Previously, this command just compacted the selected folder. To compact just the selected folder, you should now use the folder context menu command Compact this Folder.

I’m a keyboard-shortcut user, and have gotten quite used to the buggy behaviour of hitting Alt–F–F to compact the current IMAP folder, so I’ve written my first Thunderbird extension to work around the new behaviour. (I’ve also entered bug 235153 to have the process changed so it’s more responsive to the user.) The extension adds a new item to the File menu called Compact This Folder with accesskey F; it also renames Compact Folders to Compact All Folders and changes its accesskey to A.

A disclaimer: the extension Works For Me in Thunderbird 0.5+, but Your Mileage May Vary. Please let me know if you have problems and I’ll try to fix them (but don’t hold your breath); similarly, if you have suggestions or improvements, please pass them along.

Version 0.2 now works in Thunderbird 0.7. The accesskey for Compact All Folders is now M because A was used for the Attachments submenu.

I’ve removed the Creative Commons license as it’s not designed for software. However, the removal is not retroactive: version 0.1 is still licensed under by-nc-sa. Version 0.2 is unlicensed for the time being.

It’s over

I guess I made it past Donna… not much point in staying up other than stubbornness since, surprising no one, Peter Jackson and crew pulled off a clean sweep. This may be heresy among my friends, but I’m kind of annoyed that it got everything; at the very least I’d hoped A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow or Belleville Rendez-vous might take best song, and the best adapted screenplay award was obviously given for the accomplishment of the trilogy as a whole rather than the individual film. (I still have my doubts as to whether any of the three screenplays, or the entire set, are actually the best of anything.) Of the non-Rings results tonight I’m most pleased that Sofia Coppola won for original screenplay and Denys Arcand won for best foreign-language film.

Happenstance

In a confluence of events made possible by a silly policy of the City of Toronto’s tourism department, I will not be in that city on March 7 before going to see Lenni Jabour at Cameron House on the 8th. This is quite fortunate, because this evening during the intermission of a Michael Kaeshammer concert at the Wolf Performance Hall I discovered that Claire Jenkins will be at The Ugly Mug Café on the 7th. Seeing as I’ve been a fan of Claire’s since I saw her open for Lenni a few months ago, and as I can claim at least partial responsibility for her being at the Mug, it’s great that I’ll actually be in London to see her!

You–yes, you, the usual suspects–should come out, and bring your friends!

XFN CSS

I’ve just put together a CSS2/CSS3 stylesheet for XFN. It uses Roger Darlington‘s XFN icon to indicate the presence of XFN information for browsers that support CSS2, which is cool but ultimately not a big deal. The interesting part is the set of rules for CSS3, which append a set of icons (currently single characters) to each XFN-enabled link that highlight the relationships in that reference; in a CSS3-capable browser you will see something like this (fmcnr&M♥). (At least, that’s the theory… I don’t know of any browser that can handle the CSS3 rules yet.)

There are actually CSS2 rules for each individual relationship in the file as well, but they’re overridden by the icon rule because only the last value will be displayed anyway. They’re included for completeness, and because they may be useful as examples.

I’ve looked for, but been unable to find as of yet, a set of XFN relationship icons. I’ve used some Unicode glyphs for the romantic relationships, but if anyone has more or (a set of) images they’d like to share, please let me know and I’ll either reference them or provide them directly from here.

As the Creative Commons license in the file suggests, Share and enjoy!

Angel dead?

…we went to Joss [Whedon] to let him know that this would be the last year of [Angel] on The WB.

This looks bad. This looks really bad.

I wonder how much this has to do with the fact that the series for which Whedon is best known, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was scooped from the WB by UPN. From what I understand of the entertainment world (which is, admittedly, very little) it’s possible Angel was included near the end of Buffy‘s WB run as a dealmaker; once Buffy left, WB had no reason to keep Angel going, and indeed they’ve been trying to cancel the series for a couple of years, ever since UPN’s coup.

As Donna and I were discussing earlier today, Angel has gone in a direction we’re not particularly fond of this season, moving away from longer-term story arcs and into one-shot episodes and mini-arcs. (Did network executives learn nothing from Babylon 5?) Even so, it’s fared much better in its new incarnation than the zombified corpse that NBC refers to as The West Wing, largely due to the excellent staff of writers.

With UPN close to cancelling Enterprise (thankfully) I hope they’re looking very closely at scooping the other Buffiverse show, if only as thanks to Joss for keeping them alive for a few more years than they’d have had otherwise. Does lightning ever strike twice in TeeVee Land?