I tried to resist. Really, I did. The API launched, and the first Facebook Apps appeared, and they were terrible. Awful. Hideously ugly beasts that clogged up profiles, spread themselves like viruses, and served no useful purpose.

And that still describes a lot of the Facebook Apps, especially those from companies like Slide and RockYou.

But out of the gloom have appeared a small number of apps that do genuinely useful and interesting things. And now I’ve added several of them to my profile. Read on…

This last year was one of travel. I was in New York from January to April; back in Waterloo from May to August; then Sydney from September to Christmas. Each time with its own music: unrelated songs but that I’d been listening to them at that time. That’s how I am with music… obsessive. A short list of songs over and over, with high turnover. The result is music that becomes burned into my consciousness, tied to the people and places of a particular time period. Read on…

Here are a few more brief remarks about various things I’ve been up to here in Sydney. I’ve been frustrated looking online for honest feedback from the customers of businesses and services I am considering patronizing, so I’ve structured this post as a series of reviews. Read on…

Sydney is a beautiful city; I’m having a lot of fun exploring and wandering about here. In the spirit of tradition, here are a few early observations and random fun tips, from my first week of living it up down under. Read on…

The Phantom Edit a re-cutting of The Phantom Menace that seamlessly eliminates the worst twenty minutes of the film.

This is old news to hardcore Star Wars fans, but it only just came across my radar the other night, and I thought I’d share. I’ve had some limited experience in cutting together family videos; just enough to have a great deal of respect for the art of editing. Editing is difficult enough when you’re sorting through all the takes, mixing in soundtrack and voice overs from scratch… but to attempt to re-cut a movie from its final theatrical form is almost inconceivable. Read on…

The #1 Matt was in town on Wednesday night, so some folks organized a meetup at the Heartland Brewery. I only took a handful of pictures, none of which turned out very well, but fortunately John Keegan has shared some nice snaps.

It was neat to chat with Matt and find out more about Automattic as a company and what some of their plans are for Wordpress. He’s a really fun, personable guy. It’s awesome to use a product with such a great spokesperson.

About a month and a half ago, I lost my new camera somewhere in New York. I spent a day and a half looking for it, but I pretty quickly accepted that it was gone. I’d only bought it at Christmas, so there was no homework to do—I was getting the exact same model again, the excellent Canon SD600.

Having to replace a lost or stolen item is a frustrating process. But as I dropped $200 on another camera, I stopped for a moment to be thankful for what I didn’t lose: In just a month and a half of service, that first camera covered Christmas with the family, as well as my first few weeks in New York, a total of 681 pictures. In the weeks since I bought its replacement, I’ve been to Vermont, Boston, Philadelphia, and D.C., where I’ve racked up over a thousand more snaps. Read on…

Brandon pointed out to me the new website for the Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering Department has launched, featuring my logo in the document footer, similar to how ECE’s is.

My understanding is that there will be an official unveiling in the summer term, at which I’ll be asked to give a brief explanation of process and inspiration. So you can all come out to that with your clappers and big foam fingers… or just know that the inspiration was doodling on a tablecloth at Montana’s, and the software used was the excellent Inkscape.

One of the troubles with putting a website to sleep is you have difficulty finding a topic interesting enough to be worth waking it up for. Each whack at the snooze button makes trivial posts about nothing that much sillier.

I’ll have more to say about New York over the coming weeks, but this is just a kind of funny side observation from my time in the city, unrelated to the city itself. (For the impatient, there are a handful of pictures here and here)

And it has to do with memory. Read on…

I don’t normally just post random funnies, but this is pretty much the most hilarious conversation I’ve read in a long time: Man hired to kill woman instead warns her. I’ve never been a DND person, but that tounge-in-cheek earnestness is right in line with my prejudices about tabletop RPG players.

For another laugh of a similar ilk, see also xkcd #189. (for the borderline nerds in the audience, str is strength and con is constitution)