Month: September 2012

In a Carlton University speech, longtime Progressive Conservative pollster, researcher and commentator Alan Gregg sounded an alarm about the Harper Government’s “Assault on Reason”.
For an incisive, succinct summary of our Orwellian present, give it a read.

Ulli is staying with us here on Beach Hill for a few days, so we are dragging her around to some favourite places. An attempted visit to the Ydessa Hendeles gallery was a bust because it was closed for installations, so we walked Queen Street West instead.
The Drake Hotel Café served us lattés and scones and let us wander around to look at the art pieces on display in public areas of the hotel. The sculpture of the bald guy is over a stairway: Evan Penny, BACK OF KELLY, V.2, 2005, silicone, pigment, hair. Donna and Ulli sat in Liang Yue’s The Quiet Room and watched 3 screens of video.
Seeing The Gladstone…

It’s official… well, sort of not really official, but fun official… members of the Gerrard Woodbine Neighbourhood Association have voted on a number of choices and selected the name for our vicinity… Beach Hill.
The vote has been going on all summer, starting with a field of 21 names and paring the list down through a series of ballots. With the understanding that we can still call the neighbourhood anything that suits us, a majority vote puts us on Beach Hill.
Hey, Google Maps, get on it… Right by the lakeside, naturally, there’s The Beach. North of that there’s The Beach Triangle and right above that… Beach Hill. You just need to add that last one and you’re good.

As soon as I finish dictating this message, I will be dumping the Dragon Dictation app from my iPad. Why? Because I just realized that everything I say when I am dictating text goes to Dragon, gets transcribed, and then returns to my screen.
I don’t like having Dragon listen in on my dictation. The app is free and it works well enough, as you can see. Still, I would prefer to do my own typing and keep my privacy.
Apple has added dictation to its latest Mac operating system, Mountain Lion, and it works the same way… same lack of privacy. What happened to the concept of personal computers?