First successful implementation of the Gorillapod, on the sidewalk outside C’est What after a few pints of “Hop Addict.” Note how, like the party guest that no one remembers inviting, the CN Tower insinuates itself into another photo of the Toronto skyline.
Found street art.
Edit: Pardon me. Sprit killers.
Not knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing, while you’re doing it: isn’t that madness? Holding on to a slime-covered rock at the bottom of a lake, pondering the balance between the weight of sodden corduroy and cotton and the buoyancy of your lungs and the water sliding under your belly to wedge you up, under your chest, telling you this is silly, that it’s a little thing, they’re your friends, let go. Come back up. Float back up to the surface. Put your shoes back on. Everything will be forgiven. It’s just a ring stamped out of nickel and chrome. They’ve got dozens. Hundreds. The secretary keeps the extras in a cardboard box in a desk drawer behind a lock you could pick with a bent paper clip. Let go.
“I’ll get it.” Ian forced a laugh, a shrug. As if it was nothing. And wasn’t it? More silence, more crying. Dave shook his head slowly, his lips pulled tight into a line.
“Look.” He pulled off a Topsider, hopping backward on one foot while he tugged on a sock. “I’m getting it. I’ll get it.” He reached down to the bottom button on his shirt, still hopping. He glanced at Jennifer. It’s nothing they don’t see when you’re swimming, he told himself. But he hadn’t been swimming with Jen since they were kids, and that was a lifetime ago.
Then somewhere between the shirt button and the other shoe she was coming at him. He couldn’t understand what she was screaming. It started with “You!” and disintegrated from there. He couldn’t run, holding his left foot in two hands and jumping around on his bare right one. Wouldn’t have, moreover. He wanted her on him, pounding on his bony chest with her fists.
But she only got far enough to push him onto his ass and swing a wild slap that didn’t connect. Dave ran in and stopped her midway, picked her up off her feet from behind. Ian tried to laugh but the fall had knocked the wind out of him. When his tailbone hit the ground he’d felt it in his molars. And now he was crying too. He rolled over and started crawling toward the lake, then launched himself into a sprint. He tried to remember where he’d thrown it, diving in, picturing an Olympic dive that sliced through the water gracefully, but feeling a clumsy bellyflop, and clothes that were suddenly like a packing blanket around him.
“Come on, let’s see it.”
Jen was smiling, dangling the ring on a thin gold chain. “You see with your eyes, not with your hands,” she taunted him, but she was already reaching around for the clasp. Ian caught Dave’s eye and he nodded. And then it started and it was like they were playing from a script. Keep away. Monkey in the middle. She was angry but not really angry. Everyone was laughing.
A losing entry in the 4th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest.
you know, for kids
I gave a mouse a cookie this weekend. The mouse was a new Motorola KRZR K1m, the cookie was Parallels Desktop for Mac with Windows XP Pro. No one who hacks phones uses a Mac, as near as I can tell.* So if you want to hack your phone, or even use the bundled Motorola Phone Tools software, you need a PC or an Intel-based Mac running Windows under either Boot Camp or Parallels. I did consider both, but I’ve been running Vista on a MacBook at work using Parallels without too many complaints, and I couldn’t spare the drive space for a Boot Camp partition.
When I saw XP running in coherence mode though I was more excited about finishing the WordPress theme that I started a few months ago entitled The Foundation Remains (after the picture that I shot this past summer). Without wanting to start a Mac-PC debate, I’ve never been too crazy about how IE 6 makes my web sites look – mostly because of the way pre-Vista Windows handles text aliasing, i.e. doesn’t alias text. I had also run across some well-documented inconsistencies in how IE 6 deals with CSS, particularly in the way it adds padding to containers so that your pixel widths don’t add up, and how it tends to ignore minimum width and height specifications. But as the majority of visitors to this site are still using IE6, with IE7 (which I haven’t tested yet because I don’t have it at home, and from my limited experience it seems to play a little nicer anyway) just edging out Firefox for second place, I can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist. See? I care, sort of.
Once I no longer had to run from one machine to another to reload the beta site it took me less than a weekend to put the finishing touches on the template. It started out as a full-bleed fluid centre, static sidebar “holy grail” template with a minimum width, but shortly after I discovered that it was indeed the “holy grail” I decided that it was more trouble than it was worth (see above) and set my expectations a little lower. And what I had left was still plenty to do.
This template was coded pretty much from the ground up in Coda, tested in IE6, Safari and Firefox. But really, if you’re currently using either of the first two you should switch to something else. Let me know if you run into usability issues in whatever browser you are using.
*Edit – I just saw a VersionTracker update for BitPim 1.0.2.20071001 for OS X, released the day after I posted that. That means someone must be doing it.
Firefox has a pantload of cool features, not the least cool of which is the multi-engine search tool. If you live in Canada though, you may be a bit weary of getting your eBay search results in $US. It just occurred to me that there must be a simple way to revise that plugin to automatically search eBay.ca, and there is.
Select the Firefox application in the Finder, right/control-click to get the contextual menu and select “Show Package Contents” (or use the pull-down advanced tools menu from the sprocket icon in the finder window toolbar). I find it easiest to switch to column view at this point. Navigate to Contents/MacOS/searchplugins/eBay.src and open this file in a text editor. Now it’s just a matter of looking for the URL, which you’ll see on the fourth line:
action="http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll"
Now change that to read:
action="http://search.ebay.ca/search/search.dll"
Save that file, restart Firefox and viola. Search to your heart’s content à la canadienne.
I don’t have much in common with Stephen Hough. He plays piano, I play piano. He is regarded by some as Britain’s finest pianist. I am… currently supporting myself by working for an advertising company.
One other thing that we have in common, if I can believe the programme from the concert that I attended at the St. Lawrence Centre a while back, is that neither of us like knowing our neighbours can hear us practice. Mr. Hough’s solution was to win a prestigious fellowship and use a portion of it to finance the soundproofing of his rehearsal space. My solution was to ask my wife to pick up a few yards of felt and a dowel at the mall.
As any fool who reads Wikipedia on a regular basis can tell you, some modern upright pianos are equipped with a “practice pedal” which, when depressed, lowers a curtain of felt between the hammers and strings. My Yamaha U1 is not. I duplicated the effect, if not entirely the convenience, by the following method:
It’s been said many times that there is nothing to be gained from practicing on a “dumb” piano, and this procedure, like the practice pedal after which it is modelled, only renders my U1 slightly better than a dumb piano in that respect. You’re not going to develop a lot of nuance while this mute is in place. But even the most patient neighbour or housemate will tire of your scales and Hanon exercises sooner or later – and this mod will help you develop finger strength with impunity.
The K2000 is a real tuner keyboard, and what with the going rate on eBay dropping every day it’s a less daunting proposition to crack yours open and drop an upgrade into it every time you stop to consider it.
The day you realize that your bandmates and the more eagle-eyed members of your audience consider you to be a grade A piker for standing on stage squinting at the LCD display on your keyboard with a micro torch keyfob in your hand is the day before the day you put a crowbar in your wallet and order a new backlight. If you’re anything like me, while your knowledge of electronics might be barely enough to get you a passing mark on a grade 10 shop class quiz, your somewhat decent spatial intelligence limits the damage you are likely to inflict while replacing a major compent to crossthreading a vital screw or just plain spilling half a bottle of cheap plonk on the whole deal.
