randomosity

My niece Mea­ghan gave the gradu­ation speech this past week. It has been pos­ted to You­Tube in a fine mont­age by Christina. In addi­tion to her speech mak­ing hon­ours she picked up a total of seven awards includ­ing ath­lete of the year. Her uncle is very proud! Con­grat­u­la­tions Meaghan!

I don’t nor­mally blog about Fire­fox exten­sions. I have far too many installed, but this latest one is some­thing that should have been a part of Fire­fox on install. If you are run­ning Fire­fox, you owe your­self to test this one out. Thumb­strips allows you to view your brows­ing his­tory as a series of small screensnaps along the bot­tom of the browser win­dow. This is some­thing so logical, so appeal­ing to our visual sense that I just makes intu­it­ive sense. Its well integ­rated and although I have sense its going to start to con­sume stor­age space over time, it may well make the space trade-off an invest­ment. Check it out!

Bet­ter Micing

Append .com etc

Last week­end Toronto ded­ic­ated a starkly breath­tak­ing park/memorial to the Irish Fam­ine immig­rants of 1847. Ire­land Park was opened by Mary McAleese, Pres­id­ent of Ire­land and fea­tures a rather strik­ing memorial wall made up of glass bricks com­mem­or­at­ing those who died dur­ing the exodus and also those who died try­ing to help them. The aim of this park is to com­mem­or­ate this his­toric tragedy and also to remind us of sim­ilar events occur today.
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There is a great dis­cus­sion at Bri­co­leur­b­an­ism on the absence of people-scaled spaces in Toronto’s urban streets­cape. The dis­cus­sion takes as a start­ing point con­struc­tion hoard­ing on two sides of the street near Bloor that inad­vert­ently cre­ated a humane street scale not unlike that found else­where in the world.
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Strange Pho­tos

I atten­ded a great talk by Steven Bed­narski of St. Jerome’s Uni­ver­sity today. His CV lists UQAM, York, Toronto as places of exper­i­ence. His fram­ing ques­tion today: How does a social his­tor­ian make use of a research data­base?
Bed­narski explains that he was trained in the French school and con­siders him­self a storyteller by prac­tise. The leads to a valu­able reminder for me: the quant­it­at­ive his­tor­ian makes good use of his tools and may carry out exquis­ite ana­lysis of data­sets through many means (stat­ist­ical, spa­tial, SNA, etc) but what this allows him to do is con­struct the model and then use nar­rat­ive to illus­trate it through anec­dotal evid­ence.
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While at the Second Cup today and I got a good tip on a rather intriguing grape from Hun­gary — kek­frankos . Toni Burzotta tells me that it’s one that will appeal to people that appre­ci­ate a well struc­tured, smooth and easy drink­ing red. The kek­frankos grape is one many people are prob­ably famil­iar with as the prin­cipal grape in Egri Bikavér (Bull’s Blood) — the first that always jumps to my mind when any­one men­tions Hun­garian wine. It is a unique vari­etal, indi­gen­ous to Hun­gary and has been grown there for cen­tur­ies. Toni says its smooth, soft and supple and most import­ant for we Ontari­ans is that it will be avail­able at your local vin­tages start­ing Octo­ber 13th from the Villa Stephen. My pal­ate is water­ing already. It rep­res­ents a great value for taste and we can all appre­ci­ate that.

Photo Gooder