SteveCastellano.com

Catastrophes and catalysts

If you learn one thing from this article it should be back up your data – all of it, frequently and redundantly. Or maybe, if you find life kind of boring, and you have lots of spare time on your hands, don’t. Be like Inspector Clouseau, waiting for your man Kato to jump you when you get home, just to keep yourself sharp.

The new look

Stephen Jay Gould posited that evolution isn’t as gradual a process as people often imagine it to have been, that in fact it is more like a series of plateaus punctuated by dramatic leaps. I’ve been meaning to redesign this site for over a year now, and have hashed together a few designs, explored what feels like hundreds of existing templates, and even briefly toyed with the idea of switching to another CMS platform.

Let’s get small

Lest you think there’s nothing going on here behind the scenes at the vast steve of the web internet empire™, in celebration of the fact that I got myself an iPhone last year I’ve mobile-enabled SteveCastellano.com – surf here on your smartphone and you will be automatically redirected to the mobile theme, which should look something like this picture.

Halloween 2010

We saw Penn & Teller for the first time in Vegas this past August, and because we also had tickets to their Toronto show in November they were on my mind when I was trying to decide what to carve for this year’s pumpkin. Of course the project called for two this year, and my task was further complicated by having chosen slightly smaller than usual pumpkins.

From the mailbag

Dear Steve Castellano,

Thank you for using Waste Management’s Bagster® Dumpster in a Bag®. To continually improve our services, Waste Management would like to hear from you to evaluate our performance.

News I read

Google recently added an instant sidebar option that allows me to import a list of my favourite reader articles into a WordPress widget, which you should now see in the right margin, under the heading “News I read.”

Bye bye links page

The links page on this site dates back to days of yore. It was originally created because my bookmarks menu was getting unwieldy, and it stayed up for as long as it did because people seemed to like it. People even linked back to it. But it’s seemed kind of superfluous for some time now. [...]

Gulf oil spill update

I actually had a pretty good weekend and I’ll tell you all about it soon, but first here’s some cold, ugly reality.

The latest bad news about the Gulf oil spill comes via @ebertchicago. Have a look at an animated simulation of a satellite’s eye view of the Gulf spill from April 22 to May 3.

If it makes you feel any better, you can blame it on Dick Cheney. I’m guessing it won’t though.

Conservative talking points on detainee scandal

I recently pointed out Harper’s communication strategy on the Afghan detainee scandal: any discussion opposing Conservative defense policy is equated with attacking the troops. I couldn’t have asked for a clearer illustration than this clip from CTV’s Power Play (Feb. 5, 2010). It’s almost painful to listen to Conservative MP Peter Braid stumble over his [...]

A creative brief for the anti-prorogation movement

I went to a political rally yesterday: the anti-prorogation rally. I’m very frustrated about the current political climate in Canada, and, perhaps like most Canadians, feel powerless to do anything about it. Sadly, I didn’t feel that much more empowered after the rally, for reasons I’ll get into below.