Pie Palace

Bart has put together an extensive list of the downtown options for Canada Day. Read it and… uh… go!

I used to pick up the XPress for Tom the Dancing bug and Savage Love. Saturday’s TtDB is nothing short of fantastic.

Folks wandering around Centretown in the past few weeks may have noticed signs like these. Apparently there’s a pilot episode of a sci-fi TV series being filmed by some folks at Carleton U and Algonquin (methinks it’s a class project, but that’s by the by).

It looks like we working stiffs aren’t eligible however. Filming is one day a week from mid July to September. For more info, take a look at http://www.factorymonkey.com.

As much as I dislike posting memes, this one is too good to pass up:

You are in a mall when zombies attack. You have:
1. One weapon
2. One song blasting on the speakers
3. One famous person to fight along side you.

My answer:

• Weapon: chainsaw.
• Song: Air’s Talisman.
• Posse: Ghandi Zatoichi Ghandi. As awesome as Zatoichi is, I’m sure Ghandi has lots of pent up rage that he could let loose.

Feel free to post your own.

Via Brandon Perry.

It might seem obvious, but it’s worth saying: blogs are about communication. Communication isn’t the same thing as dissemination/syndication, as it implies that readers can participate in a post with critiques, questions, and additional information. Reader participation makes a blog more than simple announcements, it elevates a blog from a simple homepage¹ to being a bazaar of ideas.

Participation can take many forms: comments being the most immediate (since the reader can easily browse them when reading the article); but automatic backlinking works too (see pingbacks). The irony is that adding that kind of a system to a blog makes it intrinsically more interesting, both to the reader and the writer.

Rant trigger: some guy presents an idea without any mechanism of receiving feedback. Honourable mention: dmo asks for tips on his blog, without providing a mechanism for readers to comment..

1. Remember homepages? Shambling monstrosities constructed of dead links, animated gifs, and text surrounded by <blink> tags. (back)

Did you know that there’s a <q> HTML tag? Neither did I. It doesn’t act as a link (natch), but it’s nice to know that it’s there. Carry on with your activities. I just thought my loyal readers would like to know.

Dear Teenage Boys,

It has come to my attention that girls of your generation are:

• Skateboarding (on longboards no less)
• Dying their hair wonderfully anime-ish colours
• Playing video games (yes Nintendo, I’m looking at you)

Back when I was your age, creatures this perfect existed only in my dreams. I could tell you how nice it is to see young women in video game shops, riding gracefully down city streets, all with such attractive shades of blue/purple/green/red/pink in their hair. But I don’t need to. You already know how good it is to be a child of the third millennium.

Lets hope by the time I have children gender equality will have marched evitably¹ forward, and they’ll find their happiness doing whatever it is they want, regardless of gender role. Unless it’s watching TV. TV will be verboten.

Photo credit: bmh4you.

1. No dear reader, there is nothing inevitable about the march of equality. The cost of equality is constant vigilance. But the reward, dear reader! Think of the reward! (back)

I was taking a photos at the Icebreaker soccer tournament this weekend. A few things worth noting

• 1/100 of a second isn’t nearly as fast as I thought it was. With a telephoto at around 100mm, there was still significant motion blur from the movement of my camera. I’d consciously turned off shake reduction (WHY? WHY? WHY?). If I’d had SR on, maybe I would have been able to use a few more of the shots.
• I was shooting at low shutter speeds to try and create a feeling of depth. At 100mm, f12-f16, with a subject ~40 feet away, I had a depth of field of about 35 feet. In my books that’s too much. If I’d forced my camera to stay around f8, I’d have had a much more dramatic DoF: 10 feet; but that would have started interfering with my motion blur. I’m starting to wonder if a monopod would have helped. ¹
• Shots from behind the net were the most dramatic. A few of the games I was watching went to shoot outs, so I had a nicely choreographed play to track. I opened my focal length up to 50mm, which was probably a mistake, as it didn’t compress the kicker to look close to the goalie, nor did it give me enough of an angle to catch the ball hitting the corners of the net, although stepping back 5 or 10 feet probably would have helped.
• I didn’t have a chance to take many “vertical” shots (ie, the camera 90° to horizontal), mostly because the action was moving too quickly.

1. Numbers from DOFMaster. (back)