Mission Accomplished ... mas o menos

Glad to be back to blogging!

The move is over and I am now finding my way through a new city, but I am up for it.

I will hopefully be able to start publishing this blog on a regular basis again, but for now it may be in fits and starts. So, please forgive me for now.

It will however, show you some of the things that I thought were cool, funny, conceptual, ironic, well-designed, inspiring, satirical, heart-warming and/or life-changing along the way.

If you get why I put it here, please let me know as a Comment - it will inspire me to share more.

Douglas

Put your mouse where your mouth is ... Eyeball it !!

This is a very cool and surprisingly fun visual challenge that you must try. WARNING: It may show you whether ... or not ... you have ACTUALLY been right all these years!

THIS IMAGE | Featurepics.com

Some people are bothered by pictures on the wall hanging slightly crooked. Others may not even be aware that something may be amiss.

If you are somebody who is into woodworking or construction, its good to be one of the people who notice when things are crooked. But I suspect the ability to notice that things might be just a little off square, off centre, or not quite straight, varies greatly. I thought it would be fun for people to try to test their abilities to see if things are straight or crooked in a little game.

And thanks to LCD monitors, its possible to display geometry with absolute accuracy on a computer now. So what better way to try this game concept than to put it on the web!

How the game works
The best way to figure out how the game works is to simply play it.

Support companies that support LGBT equality

More than 300,000 people have used The Human Rights Campaign's Buying for Equality Guide to make informed choices about their purchases. This year, you can do your part to support fair-minded businesses by requesting or downloading Buying for Equality 2009.

Next time you are buying groceries, planning a trip, or making investment decisions check out who supports the advancement of LGBT rights and who doesn't.

TTC barns finally become artists' colony

A community initiative has transformed a set of 95-year-old streetcar maintenance barns into an artists' colony and community centre in mid-town Toronto.

The Wychwood Barns Project (Christie + St. Clair, Toronto) opens Thursday after a $21.2-million redevelopment of former Toronto Transit Commission barns unused for more than 25 years.

The barns, built between 1913 and 1921, were converted into:

• 26 units of housing for artists and their families.
• 15 affordable studio spaces.
• 13 offices for non-profit arts and environmental groups.
• Two theatre spaces and an art gallery.
• A community space that will be home to a farmers market.
• A year-round greenhouse.
• Parkland and playgrounds.

Brief Hiatus

Hey everybody,

Just a short note to let you know that I won't be posting for a week or so ... in the process of moving house.

I will be back soon with bigger and better stories for you.

Until then,
Douglas
The Sympathetic String

Old and new

Up near Nottingham in England, is the estate of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, called Chatsworth [website]. About 20 years ago, I took a tour of this extravagant mansion and its grounds (that were landscaped by Lancelot "Capability" Brown so that the Duke and his family didn't have to look at the nearest village!). At the time they were looking for ways to use the spectacular property to pay its own bills, and this exhibition puts the site to dramatic use.
'Beyond Limits', a selling exhibition of modern and contemporary sculpture, at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, held in association with Sothebys. September-November 2008.

Here is a link to some beautiful Flickr photos of the same exhibition.

Flaw in smart cards poses security risk for transit, building access

Transit systems across Canada stand to lose tens of thousands of dollars to fare fraud, and access to office buildings could be compromised, after a security flaw in some of their smart-card technology was widely publicized this week.

Computer-security researchers at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands revealed how the smart-card technology, called Mifare, can be hacked to let anyone with a computer and $100 worth of parts create counterfeit transit and building-access passes.

Mifare uses a radio-frequency-emitting computer chip embedded in a plastic card. Transit riders wave the card over a reader to pay fares, while employees and students flash it at secured doorways to gain admittance in many offices and schools.

The technology has been implemented in transit systems in St. John's, Gatineau, Que., the Greater Toronto Area and the Ontario cities of Kingston and Brantford, and is under consideration for use in Saskatoon.

Rust to dust

I have been a collector of (clean-but-)rusty objects for a number of years, and this article fits right in with my own fascination for the inevitability of Entropy!

The Beauty of Decay

Take the stairs instead

This trompe-l’œil staircase inside an elevator is actually an ad for Becel margarine in Istanbul, Turkey!

HIV 'Fossil' reveals virus history

A preserved specimen of lymph node nearly half a century old has revealed how rapidly the HIV virus has diversified, according to international research.

A team of researchers from around the world has been trawling through decades-old tissue samples from African hospital archives in the hope of finding samples containing the HIV virus.

They struck it lucky with a sample that was collected back in 1960, from a woman living in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

This is the second-oldest sample of the HIV virus ever found - the oldest is from 1959.