As many of you know, I ventured south, across the border, WITHOUT my family this past weekend to meet up with some friends and attend a sciencey-type conference in Las Vegas. I also realize that many of you have mixed ideas or feelings about what exactly that conference was about. And that’s fine. (In fact, there were a couple sessions at the conference that spoke directly to the public language that is used to define and explain those… for lack of a better word… “philosophies and ideas” to others without sounding like a pretentious wanker, particularly in this modern climate of anti-intellectualism. But that’s another discussion, and one I’d prefer to have in person rather than on this particular blog.) I thought I’d share a [...]

For the entire month of June I’m planning on writing a series of blog-a-day posts based on a set series of open-ended questions to myself. This is one of those posts. June 20th // Something You Are Feeling It is Monday morning after a very wet and rainy weekend. The streets are gleaming, cars whizzing by the cafe window, raising that little bit of mist from their tires. We haven’t had this much rain in years. Between Saturday morning when I emptied the rain gauge until I checked this morning we had five centimeters of water fall. The grass was a sloshy mess, admittedly a vibrant green and sloshy mess, when I dashed out to the garden to check. Between cloudbursts the dog did get [...]

For the entire month of June I’m planning on writing a series of blog-a-day posts based on a set series of open-ended questions to myself. This is one of those posts. June 14th // Something You Are Watching For whatever reason it has been the year of home movies. Well, I write “whatever reason” but what I should really write is that the reason is linked to a string of acquisitions relating to digital media and a whole lot of spare time last summer: a multi-terabyte media server, a high definition television, a Playstation 3, and — cheapest of all, actually — a waterproof, hi-def, pocket-sized video camera. I’ve been encoding old movies — and I do mean old, dating back as far as the [...]

For the entire month of June I’m planning on writing a series of blog-a-day posts based on a set series of open-ended questions to myself. This is one of those posts. June 2nd // Something You Have Lost Something tells me that part of writing these daily posts is definitely going to be one whole part ‘interpretation and clarification’ of the question. For example, when I ask myself what’s something I’ve lost, I do not think that the spirit of the question will be fulfilled by an answer that reaches into the intangible or philosophical by saying something such as “I’ve lost my trust in the innocence of society” or “I’ve lost my freedom to get up and do things on a whim causing to [...]

Back in — oh, let’s say — November, I spent some of my collector miles and ordered a little video camera. To be precise, I ordered a high definition, pocket-sized, water-resistant video camera. Between two major vacations and lots of little weekend-like video experiments, it is not a stretch to say we’ve got our value out of this little thing. Problem is, like I’m sure most people encounter when they drag a video camera on vacation, not only do I have (literally) gigabytes upon gigabytes of video footage to store, but I need to process that video and make it watchable for future generations — or at least for myself in the coming years and decades. For example, when we went to Hawaii in March [...]

Three things have prompted me to give readers a bit of an update on the banoffee pie saga I wrote about here a little more than a month ago. First, I’ve noticed that about thirty percent of the traffic that came to this site since I’ve posted that ‘informative’ anecdote has been as a result of people searching for “banoffee pie” in Google. Second, I made a very successful banoffee pie over the holidays — on the 24th of December to be precise — and the family enjoyed it that evening, and; Third, I’ve finally (as in just this past weekend) posted the pictures from the holiday season and thus now have a photograph of the aforementioned banoffee pie for everyone to see (and presumably [...]