Natasha and I joined some visiting friends on a haunted walk of Ottawa! I’m probably the last guy you’d want to invite on a haunted anything, but I bit my tongue and had a lot of fun. I learned a few things too – did you know that the east end of Sparks Street is [...]

[Read more →]

I’m really serious about trying to absorb some more French culture. I was embarrassed on Parliament Hill when an American asked me who the French Canada Day festivities host was – I really had no idea. I think a French celebrity could live next door to me and I’d never be the wiser.
Comics
Centerpointe Library has [...]

[Read more →]

I became interested in Ottawa’s hidden lakes when I had an extra-long wait one rainy afternoon at a bus stop. The OC Transpo route map has bodies of water marked out in a weird shade of blue that makes all the little urban tributaries pop off the page. I couldn’t believe how many lakes and [...]

[Read more →]

We hitched a ride with some friends bound for Toronto over the weekend and visited the amazing Niagara Falls! Super cool!

The falls themselves were beautiful and incredible, but the surrounding tourist traps were an eyesore. I feel bad for people who’s first impression of Canada are the falls and then the wax serial killer museum.  [...]

[Read more →]

So Kert linked me to a cool MRI site the other day featuring cross-section views of the insides of various fruits and veggies. The author posted a bunch of DICOM files (the files right out of the MRI machine) and I grabbed them to play around with the layers. Turns out Photoshop will open a [...]

[Read more →]

I can taste them already…

[Read more →]

Whenever I need to make a tweak to an image without Photoshop I always grit my teeth and bear my way through The Gimp* or an evaluation version of Paintshop Pro. But not anymore – I just discovered Pixlr and I’m really impressed!
Pixlr is free, has a UI suspiciously similar to Photoshop (I’m waiting for [...]

[Read more →]

When I was a kid I had an album (on vinyl!) called ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends’ featuring children’s poems read by the author Shel Silverstein. It was brilliant. Like fairy tales but twisted, sometimes darkly, which was a polar opposite to the super sanitized readers in my Catholic school library. I can still hear Shel’s [...]

[Read more →]

Natasha and I were already Roller Derby fans to begin with, so the movie “Whip It” was an easy sell. We haven’t been watching a lot of movies this summer, but with the crazy heat last week we found an excuse to hide out in the basement and get caught up on our movie pile.

Ellen [...]

[Read more →]

On my way to the bus this morning (who can bike in this heat?) I came upon a group of ten or fifteen crows (a murder) sitting across my path, each spaced few feet apart on the street, in the shade of two trees. None of them moved as I stepped through the widest gap [...]

[Read more →]