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Newmindspace

I’d heard about the December subway party, but I hadn’t realized that the organizers had hosted other events. Newmindspace have hosted a party in a streetcar, two subway parties, and staged a pillow fight to make use of the sterile and ugly Dundas Square. Some excellent ideas, if you ask me. They came to my attention today because of an act they labelled the “Queen of Hearts” – basically just chalking hearts all over Queen West.

Yay Toronto. Maybe it doesn’t match Vancouver in zombiewalks, but there’s indie culture to be found.

(Photo courtesy of neuroticjose).

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Tories & Bloc

There’s an interesting article in the Toronto Star today about the Tories’ hold on power. The pundits have been expecting them to ally with the Bloc, with a shared vision of decentralisation. Now that they’ve made major inroads in Québec as a federalist alternative to the Liberals, however, the Bloc will view them as a real competitor. The Bloc has a real interest in seeing the Tory government spin its wheels, and the Tories have to be careful to avoid appeasing the separatists if they want their Québec vote to grow.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Tories find themselves with no allies in the house. Confidence motions will pass, since no one wants to go back to the polls, but much of the rest of their agenda could fail. I don’t know enough about house procedures, but I wonder if a Liberal+NDP+Bloc coalition could push through a few bills while the Tories flail…

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Software 2005

On my old website, I used to keep a list of my favourite software. It was a bit silly and pointless, and I’m sure no one ever read it. But I think the idea’s still useful; everyone runs into some neat new software every so often, and it’s nice to share that knowledge around a bit. So here’s a list of my favourite software and websites of 2005. Please post suggestions, comments and questions!

  • google maps (web). I can’t emphasize how beautiful and elegant this website is. I classify it as “software” because it’s also a platform – you can make websites and tools using Google Maps, like the Vancouver Transit map I made last year. I’m looking forward to their upcoming transit map service, which has already come out in beta for Portland, OR.
  • openoffice 2.0 (windows, mac, linux). The latest version is a big improvement on the sluggish 1.0. I haven’t had a chance to play with all of the features yet, but it feels nicer to me already. It’s serious competition for Microsoft Office now, and I’m sure that’s why Microsoft has embarked on an ambitious overhaul of Office’s usability for its next release.
  • flickr (web). This seems like a simple and old idea, but it’s been done so well that I have to recommend it. It’s just a photo management system, but it allows the one feature I couldn’t find when I first moved my photos online four years ago: the ability to arrange multiple paths through the photo collection. You can put each photo in multiple ordered “sets” and allow browsing through the sets. So, an arty 1999 picture in Switzerland can be in both my “Switzerland” photo set, in my “arty pictures” set, and in my “1999” set. Better yet, you can add searchable tags to your photos, and you can have an RSS stream of photos, allowing friends to be notified whenever you post a new photograph.
  • Really Simple Syndication (web). I finally made the move to the RSS bandwagon this year. It’s a good way to read websites, I must say. I find it especially useful for things that are scattered around the web, like comics or blogs: I have a homebase for receiving them, and can keep track of new posts that I might not otherwise notice. I’ve been using bloglines so far, but I think I’ll move to reading RSS on Thunderbird or Google Personalized Home soon instead. For those curious to give it a try, check out this introduction.
  • wordpress (web). I moved my website from handcrafted HTML to a blog this year, and it’s been a pleasant experience. WordPress is a beautiful free blogging package, with a good set of plugins and themes to manage my website. I really like their category system (not unlike Flickr’s tags) for organizing the posts, and the Flickr plugin I’ve set up is quite attractive. You can find plenty of site hosting companies that will give you a similar WordPress package, if you’re interested.
  • amarok (linux). Sure, it looks like it’s just another MP3 player, with a database backend. But it’s a good implementation of that simple idea, with good automatic organization of the tricky Various Artists category, album covers from your library (or even from Amazon), and a sidebar showing you “related songs” in your library. I’ve been waiting for this for a while. It’s another excellent addition to the KDE project.
  • kcachegrind (linux). Profiling programs to find the slow and fast parts has long been a painful process. I spent half a workterm on this once, and it required a lot of digging through the output of text-based software. Now, with kcachegrind I can get a graphical representation of where time is spent in the software, then zoom in on one function and see where its time is spent. The interface is complicated, but still surprisingly manageable. This is one of the true gems in the KDE suite.
  • xine (linux). I was a long-time mplayer user for video playback, but I made the switch to xine this year. It has equally good codecs, but it can do DVD menus and it seems to play nicer with the colour keying on my laptop’s video card. The user interface is still awful, though. I’d like to see a KDE frontend with the xine backend some day.
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Colombia

I’ve just returned from a week-long trip to Cartagena, Colombia. The occasion was Kathryn’s brother’s wedding, and it was a beautiful visit. We stayed at a resort facing the Carribean, and it was mostly a resort-centred week: bodysurfing in the ocean, swimming in the pools, and enjoying unlimited piña coladas. The wedding itself was lovely, and a great chance to meet Kathryn’s extended family.

Cartagena itself was a surprise to me. My only prior visit to Latin America was a daytrip to Tijuana, and I knew the poverty there was a side-effect of its border location. Cartagena seemed fairly prosperous, but perhaps they keep it looking nice for the large tourist industry. It had a lovely old town, with a very European feel: pedestrian streets, squares with cafes and restaurants, and old cathedrals. The new town was bustling and modern, and the little beach-focused neighbourhoods seemed quiet and easygoing. Overall, the place felt like it would fit in on the European side of the Mediterranean: bits of Marseille, bits of the sleepy beach towns on the Adriatic coast of Italy, bits of the Costa del Sol in Spain. Mind you, there was a strong police and military presence around to achieve this feel: police everywhere, machine-gun toting guards here and there, and even a camouflaged chopper overhead at one point. That didn’t really interfere with the experience too much, though.

And of course it was nice and hot: a comfortable 30 degrees every day, and warm nights. I managed to avoid a sunburn, but I got a wide variety of jellyfish stings crisscrossing my body during a snorkelling daytrip. It was great to visit a reef again, for the first time since my visit to Lady Elliott Island in the Great Barrier Reef at the age of seven. The reef was deeper than I expected: you had to dive a good 3 to 4 meters down to reach the coral and fish. In some ways, that made it more rewarding, since you had to really work at it to get a good view of the brilliant colours.

The buffet served weird and tasty fruits: lulo, pitaya, mora and the tangy tamarillo (tree tomato). Oranges were green, limes and plantains were popular, but lemons and bananas weren’t around anywhere. Confused yet?

I’d highly recommend coastal Colombia to North Americans. It seems to be quite popular with Latin American tourists, but there were few white faces around – probably scared off by press coverage of the country.