Yesterday at the office I went all-out and put together a salad bar as part of a charity lunch fundraiser for the Ottawa Community Gardening Network. 3 kinds of lettuce, 22 fixings, 5 dressings, 4 pasta salads and over 25 hungry customers later I had raised over a hundred bucks.

Weirdly, a bunch of people made [...]

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I’m still tinkering with that Reaction-Diffusion algorithm, this time training it to grow around regions I’ve marked off (kindof like pouring ink onto wax resist) so it forms shapes. It’s quite cool to watch the ‘algae’ sprout and grow… I promise I’ll get an animation up soon when I find the settings that work best.

I [...]

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The parking lot where I work had a pretty big snow hill that’s taken a beating over the past few days of summery weather. When I was a kid, I’d spend all day out in my rubber boots stomping around and channeling the puddles all over our driveway. As an adult, I’m still captivated by [...]

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On a lark I stopped by the comic book store on the weekend, and right at the front shelf, facing the door as you walk in, are the exciting new Hunger Games figures! The lineup: a 7 inch tall Katniss Everdeen armed with a bow and looking fearsome, a slightly shrunken-headed Peeta Mellarck with a [...]

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In Grade 5 my classroom had a set of shelves at the back loaded with National Geographic Magazines, which, if you got your homework done early, we were allowed to browse through back at our desks. Mayan pyramids, man-eating sharks, mountain expeditions in far-flung locales. This kicked off a lifelong love of the magazine. I’ve [...]

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We’ve had an unusually warm and rainy March, leading to a few early surprises like these spring flowers pushing up out of the flower beds.

To be honest, I’m still not able to distinguish tulips from other bulb flowers like crocuses (crocii?) and irises at this early stage, although I vaguely remember tulips growing in this [...]

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For breakfast this morning I had a still-warm Maple Bacon Doughnut in the parking lot of Suzi Q’s on Wellington. I’ve been hearing about this place all week from friends who are making doughnut pilgrimages out to the west end to try them, and it was totally worth the trip. They’ve got a bunch of [...]

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Natasha and I spent the morning attending Seedy Saturday in Britannia Park, a yearly gardening nerd event where people get together to swap seeds and stories in preparation for the upcoming gardening season. (It roughly corresponds to the start of indoor seeding time)
The Seedy Saturday event is much bigger here than in Manitoba! Although we [...]

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I had a gang over to watch Rio on my birthday, which takes place in Rio de Janeiero during Carnival – a huge street-parade party that looks like a lot of fun. Here’s another chance to get a sense of that Carnival spirit in a cute film shot through the “tilt-shift” + time-lapse technique to [...]

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I watched a very interesting documentary online a few weeks ago, and have since been recommending it to people while I digest some of the thoughts the film put forward about art and culture and the internet. This backlash against the internet seems to be a prevailing theme in the content I’m consuming lately, and [...]

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