Month: March 2013

I asked for a photo from award ceremony day and it just came in, so I am sharing it. Everyone is very proud of Rowyn’s achievement.
More photos below.

500px.com is a photo sharing site for photographers (and aspiring photographers), offering a place to showcase and even sell their best work. The site is a Canadian startup that has been online for over 3 years. It has over a million and a half members now and accounts are free. It also has one of the easiest to read Term of Service pages I’ve seen. (Legalese on the left, plain English on the right)
If you are prepared to lose some time pleasantly, check it out. I did a search for Toronto, of course, to start my exploration.
Free apps are available for all popular operating systems, devices, etc.

I think there was a time when names were called proper nouns… you know, the kind of name that starts with a capital letter. When we were downtown yesterday, it occurred to me that “temporary nouns” might be a useful term for buidings and facilities that sell naming rights.
The notion popped up as we walked past the Sony Centre (formerly Hummingbird Centre and O’Keefe Centre before that). We had just left the SkyDome (named Rogers Centre at the moment), after having lunch at the former BCE Place, now called Brookfield Place. Hotels play the name change game with great frequency, too, as various chains swap real estate.

Friends Crawf and Ulli are in town today from Victoria, enroute to Europe, but first they are doing a whirlwind visit to relations in Ontario. Ulli was away visiting a cousin in New York until the evening, so Crawf, Danica and I went downtown to Brookfield Place. We checked out the parking situation at the Marché Restaurant because we’ll all be at a baby shower there on Sunday. The stars of the shower? Julianna and Brendan, daughter-in-law and son of Crawf and Ulli. Got all that? Good. That’s Julianna in the photo with Crawf and Danica. She joined us for lunch. They are posing in Brookfield Place’s Allen Lambert Galleria, in front of a colourful piece of artwork called Starburst. More details about the artwork below.

Click the type image to find out more about this good looking font.

Stuxnet is significant because it is the first cyber weapon known to have been deployed and used successfully. As the video explains, it certainly won’t be the last.

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

Pretty quiet down there today. I went to see if the shoreline offered any icy views but here is what I saw. Nice, but nothing like the visions we saw at this time last year.
I have a couple of souvenirs below.

A Standing Wave is John Robert Colombo‘s 2012 book of poems and literary “effects” as he calls them. Ideas, insights and impressions that came to his active, curious mind over the year. He has included his annual “dream diary” too, which he records month by month. It is revealing in its own right.
This latest book is hot off the press. John and I collaborate on covers for some of his books and this is one of them. John envisioned an homage to the Group of Seven’s Lawren Harris. I fired up Photoshop and took it from there.
A standing wave is a phenomenon that occurs when two waves of equal force are bounced back into each other. Equal and opposite, the forces combine to create a single wave held motionless in a dynamic balance.

Our local vote last summer made Beach Hill the official name for our neighbourhood. Now it come up in a Google Maps search, too. See?
I like it because Beach Hill was my entry in the naming contest and it won by a (squeaker) majority.