the big party for St-Jean, aka Fete nationale, in Parc Maisonneuve, and today is a (very lovely) holiday here in Montreal. Traditionally there have been big problems associated with this event, but reports are that last night was calm. I was sitting in a window on St-Laurent with some friends and I was amazed by the numbers of riot cops, who, as one should expect by now, seemed to have started the fracas mentioned in the last part of the above-linked story. Funny sight of the night: riot cops in full gear driving up the Main in rented vans. It looked like a family vacation from hell.
New download from
the good folks over at OpenCOLA: the OpenCola.com soft drink formula. Noted with interest: the typically Canadian use of the term “soft drink”. I assume that’s one Cory Doctorow’s influences. Be sure to read the following: “this is *not* the recipe for “OpenCola” — that is, the canned beverage that you may have received at a trade show or similar venue. Making canned cola requires millions of dollars in abstruse gear and manufactory gizmos. Making that kind of cola is unrealistic. You need to manage your expectations better. Grow up already. This is a kitchen-sink recipe that you can make all on your own.”
Radio silence is golden
. I was away and offline for the weekend, which was even more appreciated in this time of resume chucking and general wonder that every email I receive might be a really cool proposition. I haven’t swung into high gear on my job search yet, preferring to take some time and concentrate on some personal projects that I want to do for the joy of them. But I have received some very exciting nibbles – even though many of the emails I have sent to people were of the “less than 1% chance” variety.
In contrast, the offline-ness of the past few days has been great – and even more, no one I was with really works in the web world, or not primarily anyhow (not many can escape it in some form at work).
I should also mention
that it was pretty cool to show up this evening with all my gear (tower, 2 monitors, TV tuner box, Zip drive, scanner, printer, etc.) and just plug it all in and have the ADSL working – nothing to it. Props to Bell and Bell Sympatico High Speed for their service on this one. I’m not even getting killed with service charges – it just works. This 1-Meg modem thingie isn’t real ADSL in that it doesn’t offer a static IP etc., but it’s a no-brainer to set up and use. And evidently easy to transfer.
Digital Camera News:
I bought the cheapest decent one I could find today, and actually got a pretty good deal. I got the Kodak DC215, and the store gave me a small deal on the floor model AND threw in a 20Mb flash card instead of the standard 4Mb. At a quality good enough for the web, that’s about 200 pics at a time.
