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May 31, 2002
"She said, She said!"
And I quote, ""Jason, you should write this down in your blog: 'Your wife, she is perfect. She should get the nobel prize...'"" But why did she make me type this? Addendum: Oh. Now I get it. She was explaining to me why the airplanes at the kansai airport (the one built on the sinking island) don't blow away during a typhoon. It is, I'm told, because they have special Japanese technology in the form of HelloKitty Jetliner weights. And for this bit of information, she gets the prize. Of course, this HelloKitty Computer from Sarah's page is what started it."
Posted by jason at 09:53 PM
Who else would?
Jason ducts into his discourse and tunnels through the text, firing his pencil rays, loading his missals and dropping metaphor minds."
Posted by jason at 12:04 PM
May 30, 2002
Previewing My Office
Here are some pictures of the new Bahen building, where I'm moving: Entrance, Stairs, office, partial view. You can see my apartment in the left centre (low orange buildings)."
Posted by jason at 06:34 PM
Today was a nice feel good day.
Spent the morning working through things, as per usual, an sauntered off to the KMDI collaborative program planning meeting around 10:30. We're reviewing applications and whatnot. And planning KMD1000 that I'll be co-teaching this fall. Good bit of news is that the course will be open to UofT students not enrolled in the program. Lots of questions as to how we're going to present the course, but we have everything we want to do, and are whittling away to what we can do. On my way back I stopped in the InfoCommons at UofT to see if I could get some help setting up my on campus wireless connection. Couldn't. It is an ongoing snafu, but I'll get it done at some point. Medium Priority. There was some prof lined up at InfoCommons. He didn't speak much english, but luckily the InfoCommonsGuy spoke french. Turned out that he wanted to print out his paper. InfoCommons only can handle floppydisks, not profs with computers. Seeing that he had an iBook, I told him to come with me. We walked back to my office, I plugged him into the network, no fuss, no problem, printed off the paper and we went our separate ways. Very nice guy. Why can't all computer problems be solved in that manner? I love Macs. Came home and wasted the rest of the day."
Posted by jason at 05:48 PM
May 29, 2002
Hazy Dayz of Zummer
Not quite. But there is news afoot. Or a foot of news. 1) I read and signed my contract to teach this summer at OISE. Teaching CTL1000, foundations of curriculum, if you don't know that already. It is something that I can do. And I love it. I have been wondering where to start the foundations. The present plan is the ""art of courtly love"" which everyone I know has heard me talk about. It is 13th C book on how to be a knight. BUT, I was just thinking of St Augustine on Education as a prelude to that. Tasty. 2) While reading the fine print on the contract I noticed the words ""Graduate Appointment"" on the contract. Checking with PeterT, I can therefore say that I'm 'visiting professor' at OISE this summer... and last for that matter. YOU may not care, but it makes a big difference for my poor CV. Wheeeee! 3) I have been boxing books in preparation for my move, which now looks like it will be somewhere between June 17 and July 8. The servers moving on the 8th after the switch goes in, though I may have to move them to the ePresence lab before that. No problem there. I can move my own stuff in as soon as the locks are activated on the doors. 4) After 4 days of trying, I finally convinced Sympatico that they had removed the DSL card from the other end of our neighbour's HSE connection. THey put it back in within 6 hours, and she's back to normal. And I was wondering why I'm tired. And we're not even discussing the Kluwer handbook meeting... which I'm saving until next week to talk about."
Posted by jason at 04:40 PM
May 28, 2002
"She said, She said."
squish: the moon and stars called me ""jason- the coyote of complexity-"" and I'm happy."
Posted by jason at 09:32 PM
May 27, 2002
CyborgChick!
Steve's a daddy!!! What a mann..."
Posted by jason at 09:33 PM
On the rock
Yuka and I went climbing at The Rock Oasis Inc. yesterday... it was the first climing experience since December, which was the first since last June. We've been bad. But we're going to get gooder. The goal is once a week all summer, at least. And since we've been keeping up with our 'evening constitutional', I can't see why we can't get back into climbing. Yuka was able to work on a 5.8 and I was able to get one 5.10a done, and half of another, before the fingers religated us to lesser activities. But she should be able to get up to a 5.10a, and me back to 11b's before too long. Then we'll get out the camera for some pictures. Anyone wanna joing us? Rock Oasis has done some major renovations since December with new changerooms and showers, and a large cave structure and boldering complex, and one new wall. Looks very coool."
Posted by jason at 08:10 AM
May 25, 2002
What's going on?
I guess there's some explaining to do. I've moved my blogging to Moveable type from Blogger.com. Blogger has too many arbitrary outages and generic strangenesses for me. I wish it luck. It is one of the best tools for getting new folks blogging. I'll miss that aspect of it. But I've come to the point that I need more control over the information and archiving. And if something screws up, I want it to be my fault. The set up of Moveabletype was not easy. Much worse than one would expect, because edublog.kmdi is a BSD unix-based Mac OS (OSX), and it does not conform easily to Moveabletype's instructions. That and it asks you to do some strange things that I'm not too comfortable with. But I love how it runs. I've been co-blogging with Salmoon on Pollenation using Moveabletype and it has been a stellar success. As for moving the blog to here? Nothing special. I just direct control over the server. Both emma and I got tired of my pestering her, so I figured that this would be easier all around. Maybe I can even figure out how to move my domain to hang off this server too... wouldn't that be an indication that I'd finally learned apache. Don't worry though. I'll make this site jason-ugly again soon. But today I'm cleaning the apartment. [oh, ya, and the images are mostly broken. That's because I nuked my /images/ directory, and can't be bothered to fix it at the moment. It won't hurt much.]"
Posted by jason at 01:23 PM
May 24, 2002
News of the day... as
News of the day... as if the rest of the world was not newsworth enough. Well it isn't. I am. Just got back from Dr Wong. He doesn't believe me that we're related, but such is life. Anyway. Had my first general physical a month back, and he sent me out for tests. I've not been to a doctor really since 1991 when I had a complete physical before being a bone marrow doner for my brother. So I knew everything worked then. Once a decade is pretty good considering my opinions regarding the health profession's work on maintaining health. Though I hear that they're great when something falls off. Since the early spring, I've been noticing extra heart beats. Not really extra, more like one big Woomph! all the sudden, like for a split second someone had replaced my heart with that of a randy wildebeast getting intimate and interactive in a family sort of way. Then I was instantly returned to my regularly scheduled programming. Calling it strange is like... never mind. Lost that one in a fizzle of braincells. Figured that it was something like my mom has wrong with her heart, or something like dad has with his... sharing genes and all that. Or more reasonably acute angina becuase I had been cutting down on the stressful parts of my life... and if you don't hear from me much anymore then you may be one of them. Dr Wong did all the blood work, and sent me off for the 24 hour heart monitor and the scoping of the bloodmuscle. Went in yesterday for the report, and the heartless heart specialists hadn't sent any reports. So he told me about other things... high choleserol. But it is the good kind. More of that. Slightly high in the bad kind. Told me to stop eating cheese and remove the skin from chicken... since I don't do anything else wrong that would mess with the bad C. I got a borked liver protein too... more on that next month. And slightly low thyroid... but says it is prolly my normal level. More tests later to confirm. So, called at noon to make an appointment today for when my reports come in... and they already were in, so I got an appointment at 5pm. Good doctor. Nice doctor. Waited in the chair for 45 minutes reading Jeff Noon's Pixel Juice. More on that later. And got called into the room. Nothing on the echocardiogram. No blockages, calcifications, enlarged and bloated arteries ready to burst, or stuck valves ready occlude, ie. nothing like parents got. And for the 24 hour monitor? Yep. That big bolus beat. A big fat exta beat. On time. In place. And probably always been there. No problem. Natural. Go away, Mr Nolan. Seems I just noticed after x decades... because I've been removing stressful things from my life. Good to know. I can de-stress myself into distress."
Posted by jason at 06:17 PM
raelity bytesis a call for
raelity bytesis a call for submissions for a section of OReilly's Essential Blogging Book. You can get a draft of it there as well."
Posted by jason at 01:08 PM
GDS: ACP/LPG Press Release ::
GDS: ACP/LPG Press Release :: alienated.net :: you do their own thing... is Canada trying to kill our own publishing industry?"
Posted by jason at 11:02 AM
May 23, 2002
"Ok. I've had it. Jeff
Ok. I've had it. Jeff Noon is wrecking my life. Reading his short stories... in the collection Pixel Juice. It just gets worse. I'm about to start reading a story called Metaphorazine""."
Posted by jason at 02:41 PM
I've been listening to Tom
I've been listening to Tom Waits' Alice and Blood Money. And I'm wondering if he's deconstructing the genre of 20th C Western music. No, that isn't country and western. It is they playful warmth and reverence, facility and dexterity that makes it listen like Derrida seems to read. That and the sneeking sensation of enjoying a surface of unplumbed depths."
Posted by jason at 01:29 PM
Neteka Inc. is a Toronto-based
Neteka Inc. is a Toronto-based company. Doing cool stuff. Historically, email addresses could only be in English alphanumeric characters, ""A-z"", ""0-9"" and periods, dashes and underscores. With patent pending technologies from Neteka, 32101.com has broken this barrier. Finally, the billions of Chinese speaking people could have an email address that truly reflects their identity in their native language."
Posted by jason at 07:28 AM
May 22, 2002
Kingston X 3 is up...
Kingston X 3 is up... Yuka and Mom and I visiting 3 parks around Kingston. Mostly flowers. Some beaver dams. And some Yuka and Mom."
Posted by jason at 10:44 PM
May 21, 2002
Alien
"
Posted by jason at 11:27 PM
Just posted a brief thought
Just posted a brief thought on pollenation: Nymphomation. I've not read this much in a long time. Read some Dick first. Yuka and I spent the weekend at Mom's in Kingston. Went on 3 long hikes. I was so burnt out at the end that I didn't get to see Miao though ;-( Pictures tomorrow."
Posted by jason at 10:58 PM
May 18, 2002
"Ok, this is strange. salmon"
Ok, this is strange. salmon and I are doing this pollenation thing, right? So I'm reading Noon, JG Ballard and Carroll and all that. But I can't drag their books into the bath because they're all hardcovers or rare. So I pull out Philip K. Dick's ""Solar Lottery"" from 1965. There is so much snowcrash here it isn't funny. So much SNOWCRASH. Especially the Raft, media control, and a hacker/biochemist. Oh, and the language is a virus from outerspace angle as well. And I'm only at page 50. Haven't read this in years, so I'm self excused for never noticing it before. But why hadn't anyone told me?"
Posted by jason at 10:47 PM
May 17, 2002
I just had a tour
I just had a tour today of my new office location in the Bahen Centre for Information Technology My office which it seems I'll only have to share with one other person is at the back of this drawing near where the half circle meets the straight line. That's facing south overlooking downtown and the lake. I still don't believe that something won't fall through, but there you go. Moving June 9th... or something like that. I think I'm now finally going to have to bite the bullet and buy a cellphone too, as there will not be any private phone, and I don't know how long I'm going to have this gig, and making up more business cards will be a pain in the ass. But I'll hold off for as long as i can."
Posted by jason at 04:30 PM
May 15, 2002
I think I've lost my
I think I've lost my status as an Envionmentalist mere months before finishing my contract at the Division of the Environment. I bought disposable razors. For the first time in decades. Why? Cause I can't afford the non-disposable any more. $3 buys me 15 disposable razors. $8 buys me 4 replacement blades for my non-disposable. You do the math. I also have a seeky feeling that there is almost no difference between the amount of plastics in the disposable vs the blades of the non-disposable. Certainly the disposable uses fewer composite materials. Hmmm... this is scary.
Posted by jason at 09:51 AM
I think I've lost my
I think I've lost my status as an Envionmentalist mere months before finishing my contract at the Division of the Environment. I bought disposable razors. For the first time in decades. Why? Cause I can't afford the non-disposable any more. $3 buys me 15 disposable razors. $8 buys me 4 replacement blades for my non-disposable. You do the math. I also have a seeky feeling that there is almost no difference between the amount of plastics in the disposable vs the blades of the non-disposable. Certainly the disposable uses fewer composite materials. Hmmm... this is scary.
Posted by jason at 09:51 AM
May 13, 2002
Gawd. I just spend 11
Gawd. I just spend 11 hours on the computer non-stop. I mean NON-STOP. I proggied, and typed, and chatted, and submitted myself to research subjectness, and invited people to do things, and asked people for help. I even got one of my puters hooked up to the UofT highspeed/sympatico network variation, in anticipation for the sympatico download cap. It was just a long day of finger tickling. Now it is time to turn off the puter, and cook dinner, and watch a movie, and read a book... without the puter. That sounds nice."
Posted by jason at 06:15 PM
May 12, 2002
"Puck Art, Let's Dance!"
Puck Art, Let's Dance!
This untitled piece was purchased with funds from Jason's wallet last Saturday at the St Lawrence Market. The artist is Ross Bonfanti, whose other work can be seen at www.awolgallery.com. He's got a show coming up called Heavy Heads that Yuka and I don't want to miss.| |
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Posted by jason at 06:34 PM
I set up a TWiki
I set up a TWiki today, with some careful guidance. It was quite an experience in being very specific. I think I'll do it again, right now..."
Posted by jason at 08:47 AM
May 10, 2002
"I just uploadedSakura 2002,"
I just uploadedSakura 2002, pictures Yuka and I took in High Park 2 weeks or so ago... in perfect Sakura weather."
Posted by jason at 03:49 PM
ENV321 is no more. At
ENV321 is no more. At least as far as I am concerned. After five joyous years of pushing some limits. May 10th is the official end of the year for the course. Now I have 2 months left on my contract with the Division of the Environment. What to do... what to do? Ack... articles and chapters to write, and classes to plan for the summer and fall. I'll get cracking."
Posted by jason at 08:53 AM
May 09, 2002
As of today I am
As of today I am ""Contributing Editor"" with CCL: CANADIAN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE/LITTERATURE CANADIENNE POUR LA JEUNESSE. Thanks to Mary Rubio, and mostly thanks to Ben. This is cooler than cool, as you can well imagine. I don't think it will ever get me a real job, but it helps me to be right where I want to be at the nexus of literature, community and technology. Wheeeee!"
Posted by jason at 03:26 PM
Ben's blog reminded me that
Ben's blog reminded me that I had this bit in KMDiary 2002 Issue #2 on being scholar in residence at KMDI. Neat. Now I know what I've been doing this year."
Posted by jason at 03:22 PM
Mac Users should go to:
Mac Users should go to: http://www.apple.com/iphoto/ because iPhoto1.1.1 is out... and perhaps it works good now...
Posted by jason at 07:34 AM
"Too much to do, too"
Too much to do, too much to say... in point form, to be developed. Today was the last day of the Project Achieve/Triangle Project's third annual workshop on gender and idenity for queer youth! It was a wonderful month with a bunch of kids from the Toronto District School Board, who, along with their teachers Patty and Jim, took over the south east corner of University College. I will announce here when their work is done, and where you can find it. Dave was here with Yoshie and baby, along with Valdo the Violinist for Za dinner before Dave and team went home to England. He brought me cool books. Amazingly cool books... like the biography of Peter Perrett. Like books by Jeff Noon (Cobralingus, Automated Alice, Nymphomation, Needle in the Groove, Pixel Juice). I gave him a rare copy of Lovecraft's Providence. That was Tuesday. Wednesday, I worked all day on ""The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments"" with Joel, Peter and Vera. Getting caught up on our authors... new authors confirmed: Jacques Derrida and Anna Cicognani!!! Then that night I brewed beer for the first time on my own... and destroyed the kitchen, and fixed it up before Yuka got back. It will be called Dave's Undead Stout... for no reason. Thursday, I'm going to the doctor in 90 minutes for some tests to remind myself that I'm normal. Then working on getting some of Sarah's stuff ready for her to send off to an editor. And meeting with Ron about the KMDI course we're co-teaching next year."
Posted by jason at 07:28 AM
May 01, 2002
Yuka commissioned a haiku
Yuka commissioned a haiku for Neko, who passed away recently... First spring bird calling, my cat has left the building memories of fur."
Posted by jason at 10:35 PM
"Solace says, ""Hm. It seems"
Solace says, ""Hm. It seems to me that in between mud tablets and the web came all sorts of other things... everything from pictoral diaries to family newsletters."" You grin. Solace says, ""And before mud tablets were paintings on walls."" You say, ""the idea is the modularity of the post... shortness and focus."" You say, ""and that they're public documents."" You say, ""and that a whole community is participating in it"" Solace asks, ""Ok... but why modularity?"" You say, ""blogs are daily posts, but the way the tech has been implimented, most all blogs have unique identifiers for each post... they can be accessed out of context or within"" You say, ""My post now, was http://jasonnolan.net/2002_05_01_archive.html#76041430"" You say, ""each entry is like a stone tablet."" You say, ""they can be ordered."" You say, ""That takes you to the exact post as you have it... modular, shareable."" Solace says, ""So basically, if you're looking at the history of blog, you'd need to consider public diaries/common diaries."" You say, ""very much so..."" Solace says, ""Ok....So you're talking about each separate *entry* when you do that."" You nod."
Posted by jason at 11:29 AM
[+][beam] Kat [to jason]: oooh
[+][beam] Kat [to jason]: oooh ooh ooh [+][beam] Kat [to jason]: Found a tidbit of information for you [+][beam] Kat [to jason]: the first historical incidence of people blogging their life (before the ""web"", but it still counts cuz its a pseudo-web) [+][beam] jason bounces upanddownandupanddown! [+][beam] jason asks, ""do they use the b word?"" [+][beam] Kat says, ""they don't use english ;)"" [+][beam] Solace asks, ""What/where?"" [+][beam] jason says, ""ah... "" [+][beam] Kat says, ""When Akkadian soldiers (2500 bce) went to war, they would all write their day's story on mud tablets which would then be set to dry in the sun, become really hard and then were distributed amongst the non-war villages for all the people to read so they knew how everything was going. Then the people would do the same and send them to the warfront so that the people there could all feel like they were at home."" [+][beam] Kat says, ""Sounds similar to blogging to meeeeeeeee."" [+][beam] jason says, ""yes, because of the modularity of the 'posts'"" [+][beam] Kat says, ""These tablets are still preserved today."" [+][beam] Kat says, ""When the warfront would be burned, the fire would shrink the mud tablets such that they became nearly indestructable"" [+][beam] Kat nods to jason."
Posted by jason at 11:20 AM
Got my taxes done. Had
Got my taxes done. Had 'em done for a month. But NetFile wouldn't let me send them because I'm missing some 4-10 digit number that they sent me in the mail at some point. I wonder when.
Posted by jason at 12:12 AM