I took a Richard Powers waltz workshop in Toronto a few months ago. I’m not very good at it and haven’t had enough chances to practice, but I can now hold down the basics of cross step and rotary. Since learning it, I’ve begun to notice much more distinctly songs that are in 3/4 or 6/8 rather than common time. All swing and related dances are strictly in four, so the lilting rhythm of waltz time can be a lovely change for the ears and feet.

The traditional music of waltz is, I think, largely Strauss and a number of other pre-20th century composers. And there’s merit in doing a dance to its traditional music. However, waltzing seems to work well to plenty of modern tunes too; here’s a selection of my favourite popular songs in 3/4 and 6/8 time. I’ve linked each to somewhere you can hear at least a sample of it—Amazon MP3, YouTube, or an artist’s page. Read on…

We moved house a little over a week ago, and for the first time, it was to a completely unfurnished pad. My housemates had conspired to acquire common area furniture from various sources, and Melina found us a bunch of flat-pack desks for our bedrooms.

But I still needed to actually get a bed. Feeling inspired by the success of my shelves from last summer and the work of Matthias on a construction lumber bed, I purchased a mattress and decided to attempt another woodworking project. In the end, the cost was about $90 in materials, and 5 hours of time. Read on…

I’ve now been dancing swing for a little over two years. The people I’ve met through it have been overwhelmingly some of the nicest, most generous-spirited people anywhere… and also, a lot of the guys are pretty geeky.

Why?

The least charitable answer is “the geeks are there because there are women there,” but that’s not the whole story. Certainly lots of guys get into dancing because they followed (or were dragged by) a woman into it, but those who stay seem to do so for reasons apart from that. Indeed, the scenes I’ve participated in (Toronto, New York, Sydney) seem almost completely free of the creepy behaviour you would expect given that assertion. And that is despite being totally welcoming to guys and gals who might not be as accepted in other circles.

So what is it about the niceness of the swing community? What makes it so appealing to geeky guys? I think it’s the nature of the dance itself that attracts them, and once there, their presence and personality is reflected in the culture that develops around the dance. Read on…

It’s Easter time, and sermons are now discussing stories surrounding the Passion. One of these that I’ve always had a lot of difficulty with is the story of Jesus being anointed with perfume. It actually appears in all four gospels (with some rather significant variations), but let’s just take a quick look at the account given at the beginning of John 12:

Lazarus and his sisters invited Jesus to dinner at their home. Martha served. Lazarus was one of those sitting at the table with them. Mary came in with a jar of very expensive aromatic oils, anointed and massaged Jesus’ feet, and then wiped them with her hair. The fragrance of the oils filled the house.

Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples, even then getting ready to betray him, said, “Why wasn’t this oil sold and the money given to the poor? It would have easily brought three hundred silver pieces.” He said this not because he cared two cents about the poor but because he was a thief. He was in charge of their common funds, but also embezzled them.

Jesus said, “Let her alone. She’s anticipating and honoring the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you. You don’t always have me.”

Part of the problem here is that there’s a ton of stuff going on, both on the surface and at the more figurative level. Read on…

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…

For anyone who’s curious how Gmail’s chat widget notifies your browser that a new message has arrived, be curious no longer: here’s a simplified page that demonstrates the method used.

This demo itself is of interest to technical folks, because it demonstrates a way for programmers to work around another frustrating limitation that arises from the architecture of the web—that when an interaction over http takes place between a client (browser) and a server (website), the client must always be the one initiating the connection. 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…

A couple years ago I became interested in ambigrams, particularly the work of John Langdon. At the time, I got a hold of his Wordplay book, and began experimenting with some of my own designs.

I recently had a breakthough in figuring out how to create a surprisingly readable ambigram for my mechatronics engineering class. There was a general approval, and we ended up having the design embroidered on about 80 quality Campus Crew hoodies.

As someone with an amateur’s interest in typography and letterforms, I’ve found the doodling of these invertible designs to be an incredibly practical way to teach oneself the fundamental definitions of letters. Read on…