Monthly Archives: March 2009

Don Mills Road at Earth Hour

Don Mills Road, Earth Hour at OSC. Originally uploaded by grabka dot org. We went to the Ontario Science Centre for Earth Hour; lots of fun, free hot chocolate, $1 popcorn, instructions for star-gazing, and some passionate African drumming. I guess nobody told the apartments across the street to turn their lights off for that …

March 29, 2009 – 18:54 | By dariusz | Posted in Personal Stuff | Tagged | View Comments

Earth Hour @ the Ontario Science Centre

To anyone who is looking for something to do on Saturday afternoon, it’s Earth Hour (shut off everything electronic for an hour, @ 8:30pm).   The Ontario Science Centre is running a bit of an event. The Google calendar event for the Toronto Activity Club (TACKY) calendar. For anyone who’s interested, I’ll be there at 7:30pm!

March 27, 2009 – 12:54 | By dariusz | Posted in Personal Stuff | Tagged , , | View Comments

Techno-update: Feedly, Twt.fm, and Super-Cache

Newsfeeds were all the rage a few years ago when the news agencies and blog platforms started syndicating content this way.  For the most part any blog, newspaper, TV station, or anyone who needs to syndicate a stream of information (articles, posts, comments, scores, etc.) has done so using RSS or Atom.  This is great, …

March 23, 2009 – 10:31 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , , , | View Comments

Bike is out for the season.

New colour for the spring. Originally uploaded by grabka dot org. The weather has been co-operative, so I spent a few hours in the last couple of days doing a little bit of maintenance. Changed the oil, cleaned up the accidental oil spill, de-rusted the chain, adjusted the chain slack. There is something wrong with …

March 20, 2009 – 12:45 | By dariusz | Posted in Personal Stuff | Tagged | View Comments

Bridging the digital divide between rich and poor using cellphones.

Today is the 20th birthday of the World Wide Web, and in celebration there was this telecast on French TV from CERN about the future of the web. Stéphane Boyera’s five minute talk stood out as being particularly interesting to me. There is a digital divide in the world, as there are 5 billion people …

March 13, 2009 – 12:46 | By dariusz | Posted in User Experience | Tagged , , | View Comments

Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner on the chaos and rewards of open source

On March 4th TorCHI hosted Mike Beltzner (blog) who is the Director of Development at Mozilla, though he prefers to call himself the “phenomenologist.”  His talk focused on how Mozilla has harnessed the power of the open source community to build Firefox: managing the chaos of open source and have good ideas rise to the …

March 13, 2009 – 12:02 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , , , | View Comments

Toronto hip-hop: Get ‘em Down South.

This is part two of a series of posts about Toronto hip-hop.  Part one featured Famous and Luu Breeze, two up-and-coming MCs that are making an impact on the mainstream with their lyrical game.  This issue will focus on two others that are harnessing the power of the American hip-hop machine, but repping T.O. just …

March 12, 2009 – 01:25 | By dariusz | Posted in Music | Tagged , , , , | View Comments

Toronto hip-hop: whazz happenin’ baybee?

For as long as I’ve been listening to hip hop (arguably, not that long .. Wu-Tang Forever was the first album I cared about, which was in 1997), I’ve been trying to figure out why Toronto specifically, and Canada to a lesser extent, doesn’t put out mind-blowingly good hip-hop non-stop.  Why is there no buzz …

March 10, 2009 – 12:47 | By dariusz | Posted in Music | Tagged , , , , | View Comments