Month: April 2013

May 4th and 5th. They are free, fun and informative. Click the map to pick a walk and learn things about your neighbourhood that you never knew before.

Jane’s Walks are named after the late Jane Jacobs, champion of livable cities. She was a person of international stature but chose to live in Toronto until her death in 2006. The Walks happen in cities around the world.
Have a look… Danica and I go on Jane’s Walks every year.

I may as well share some images of Helen’s work as I make scans from photographs. The locations of many Helen Andersen paintings remain unknown, so there are some lucky owners out there. I am developing a database of images that will be a bit of a treasure hunt. I hope that people will recognize pieces and get in touch, letting me know where the originals are now.

Title: Sophie. Bill Reid’s Mother as I Imagine Her To Have Looked
Medium: Acrylic
Date:1989
Bill Reid, of course, is the famous Haida carver, probably best known for his monumental bronze Spirit of Haida Gwaii which appears on our Canadian $20 bill. Both Helen and I knew Bill Reid personally and were great admirers of his work.
Going though photos, I was delighted to come across this one (after the Read More…) of Helen and my high school English teacher Harry Locke when they visited Bill Reid’s Vancouver studio. They were seeing Haida Gwaii as a work in progress.

If private companies want to hobble their products with Digital Rights Management code, that’s their business. I just won’t buy their stuff. I like products I can move from one device to another without having to pay again.
But putting DRM into the World Wide Web’s fundamental language (HTML)? I say NO, that’s going too far and invading the public space.
Click the graphic if you’d like to sign the petition.

Lloyd Cooke and I would like to hear from the other 4 people who use a Blackberry Playbook. Until I saw this Globe and Mail review (mostly positive) about the new Blackberry phones, I thought Lloyd and I were the only ones.
Thanks for the heads-up, Crawf.

I borrowed Kathleen’s old baby photo to scan and repair with Photoshop. The new prints came out great, but that’s not what I mean by seeing double.
Kathleen is the grandmother of Charlotte, who isn’t a year old yet. Kathleen’s baby picture could have been of Charlotte, they look so much alike.

Only a few short days ago, my sister was making her first fractal stills and planning to animate some of them. Her first animation has already arrived, accompanied by Joni on her flute.
She says,”This was an attempt to make it seem like the fractals came from amino acids.”

Sandy Zwyer thought this might amuse me… and she was correct (not right). The Illustrated Men present:

Anna and Thorne are visiting from Victoria, so Danica suggested a visit to the Distillery District. That’s Thorne on the left, looking on while Danica takes a tourist shot of her sister.
Before we enjoyed an afternoon of gallery hopping and shopping, I took Thorne with me to help pick up garbage on Beach Hill Clean Up Day. He volunteered, honest.
City councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon snapped us with her cellphone camera. From left: Jeff Good, who did an outstanding job of organizing the clean-up. Thorne Won, our guest cleaner-upper. Kate Tennier, “benevolent dictator” and leader of the neighbourhood association. And me.

Pardon my brotherly pride while I show you my sister’s first piece of generated fractal art. She writes that she is using open source algorithms and is aiming to animate some fractal designs, too.
Joni has a boundless reservoir of curiosity and makes full use of many things the internet has to offer. Her explorations have made her quite knowledgeable about PCs… hardware and software. Combined with her talents for music (flute, mandolin, guitar) and visual arts (very good at drawing), her computer skills are always taking her in interesting directions.

The City of Toronto made a mistake guaranteeing a 4.8 million dollar loan for the bike rental operation that is in financial difficulty 2 years after its Toronto launch. We had better cut our losses rather than dig a deeper hole. The Montreal operation has 7 or 8 times more subscribers and a MUCH bigger debt. That’s not the kind of growth we need.