Year: 2005

Milestone

Congratulations to my sister Anne, who is now officially the most educated person in the family. One might say she’s a jack of all trades but master of one.

Having, like, a killer time

The people I met tonight who helped make this evening at the Drake one of the most enjoyable so far:

  • Erica, who chatted about Africa despite her laryngitis
  • Cameron, who has some pretty sweet T-shirt ideas
  • Siglara, who reminds me of Genevieve Gorder
  • Glen and Jenn, who resemble each other in absolutely no way
  • Craig, who I actually met a few weeks ago [hey, my list, my rules]
  • Lawrence? Wallace? Drat… I had it when I started this note, sorry! (Alex, please help me out!)

To Lenni and Alex, the two people for whom I was in Toronto in the first place, special thanks for introducing everyone above while we caught up during the unexpected delay. You (glock) rock!

Blog. Play. Enjoy.

…if you really like a particular artist and want to support them… the very best thing you can do is tell other people. Swap those MP3s, burn those CDRs, blog about them, play those tunes in your podcasts. Bring a friend, two friends, ten friends, to a show. Anything you can do to put the art in front of ten more potential fans. Get involved in the quest for fans and help make it happen.

Oh, and by the way, Lenni Jabour and Alex McMaster are playing at the Drake Hotel on Sunday night at 8. Just in case you’re interested or anything.

Robot blocking microformat

How about I rename my robot-blocking profile as a microformat and see if that gets any discussion going?

And while we’re at it, can someone please explain for the record why microformats aren’t encouraged to specify HTML profiles (think namespaces for metadata) to formalize the idea that User agents may… perform some activity based on known conventions for that profile? Because a profile only applies to the document’s HEAD element is not a valid argument.

Nonsense

[London Knights hockey team] governor Trevor Whiffen… said fear of cold weather prompted organizers to cancel the May 19 opening parade through downtown. It has been replaced with a paid ticket opening ceremony….

Let me get this straight. The parade—a free, public event—for a hockey tournament—which, for those unaware, is a winter sport, played on ice, both outdoors in cold weather and indoors in refrigerated buildings—that was to occur in mid-May—when the outdoor temperature averages 13 degrees Celsius and a low of 7 degrees—in other words, temperatures suited to a light jacket—is being cancelled in favour of a paid-ticket event because it might be too cold‽ Is it possible, just maybe, that the organizers saw a way to squeeze more money out of the people for whom they’re purportedly putting on this event and are trying to spin things to their benefit?

No, of course not: we’re assured that there are enough activities that will involve the community. And, of course, the event is injecting an estimated $10 million into the city’s economy.

Or not.

In its bid, the Knights outlined plans to create a virtual beer garden involving 15 downtown bars. The beer garden will [now] take place in the parking lot of the John Labatt Centre…. We want to keep the crowds centralized in the immediate John Labatt Centre area, he said. We thought it would be better on balance to create the festival area in the immediate vicinity of the JLC and not lose that opportunity.

Wouldn’t it be a shame to lose that opportunity to isolate people so they won’t wander off, as far as 5 blocks away, and forget about the hockey that they’ve come from across Canada to see? To lose that opportunity for the event organizers to keep as much profit for themselves as they can at the expense of a downtown that’s already suffering financially? To lose that opportunity to show that the CHL and its teams are in any way different from the NHL in their approach to the supporters of the product it produces?

Yup, that would be a real shame. Why, it would be almost as bad as lying to the community—which overwhelmingly supported the competition for the tournament in the first place—about the purely avaricious reasons for which the events in that community are being cancelled.

Apparently I’m not the only one who had these thoughts.

Backlog

I’ve got almost 20 partially-finished posts cluttering up my admin page that date back almost two and a half years; in several cases I’ve started a post and then lost the train of thought that initiated it, but mostly I’ve just wanted to add another paragraph or two before hitting Publish.

Well, no more. Starting with Comedy Jazz, I’m going to try to clear out the old posts, either by finishing them off or by deleting them. As a bit of self-prodding, here are some of the titles of items I want to finish soon: Enterprise blogging, Promised the Moon, Reach for the Top, Last Tango in Nia, and Oh! The places you’ll go.