Tomorrow I go back to teaching for another year. I've been on holidays for most of the summer, at home with my family, who have also been home. It's been both a busy and relaxing summer. And tonight, as I watched the sun set on my last full day of…
This fall our Open Source Mozilla course at Seneca will be attended not only by Seneca students, but will also include virtual participants from schools around the world. I'll say more about this next week, but today I wanted to respond to an email I received from one of the…
Earlier this week, Dr. Patricia Janssen's study on home birth vs. hospital births in the care of midwives and physicians was released. The study confirms my own experience, and provides a useful starting point for anyone considering their options for home vs. hospital birth. The study looked at women choosing…
There is a whole category of things I look for that could be there, but mostly aren't. Tonight I saw one. Just before the moment when it would have been impossible to stop the stir fry I was cooking for dinner, I saw it: the Common Nighthawk. [caption id="…
I made a mistake tonight. Chris was telling me about a new command-line bugzilla client called boog. I threw it into Google and by mistake, perhaps out of habit, wrote 'book' instead of 'boog.' And what came back was surprising. Guess who owns the #1 Google result for 'book.…
Lev Grossman's post on the renaissance of storytelling in the WSJ is a good read. I love a good story. The other day I was talking with a friend who told me he loved spy novels, and then went on to say that he'd never read the "Sherlock Holmes&…
I finally got a chance to go and see District 9 tonight, and it was really good. I wasn't totally sure what to expect, beyond what I'd seen in the trailers, and it was different, and good different. It was made even more interesting by the fact that I'm currently…
Today my father-in-law and I loaded a pick-up truck full of old monitors, computers, and old cell phone equipment in order to take it all to a free "electronic waste day" held in our community. The event was generously funded by TD Canada Trust and Greentec, who literally…
This Saturday a local company is hosting an event to allow residences to dump old computer and telephone equipment, and have it get properly recycled or disposed of for free. I pretty much only have old computer equipment, some of which I use, some of which I store for the…
I want to speak of birds' nests. I have very little that can properly relate these ideas, other than the fact that everything I will say is about birds nests; and so I will place them all here, under this title, much as Sparrows will build nests beside one another…