New Set of Wheels
So with about three weeks to go (eek!) until my much-anticipated move to downtown Toronto, I’m making big decisions about how my “downtown lifestyle” is going to go. One of those that I made a long time ago is that I would not have a car. Originally it was due to the absurd prices for buying a downtown parking spot (which has now reached an average of about $35,000), but now with Rising Fuel Costs, it’s all the more reason for me to ditch it and go the simplicity route. There’s also a lot to be said for a car-less life. For me, my car has really just become a point of stress in my life, so while it’s a great little car and I’ll miss it a lot, I’m not really going to shed a tear when I get to ditch that expense.
That’s why I decided to go shop for a bike, which I determined would be my primary mode of getting around the city 6-7 months of the year, saving substantial public transit costs, and giving me an awesome set of legs in the process! It took me several weeks of testing a whole variety of different bikes, but I finally settled on one that, like my Mini, I just fell in love with the moment I set eyes on it.
The Trek Soho S is an “urban” bike by their classification, one that’s ideally suited for city living, and is a single-speed - meaning not gears at all. Just me, the pedals, and the road. Again, getting back to that simplicity word, there’s something so pleasant about riding a single-speed that I never really thought I’d go for. I’ve always had a mountain bike with lots of gears that could take me up a 70 degree hill if I really wanted.
Then again, I’ll be living in downtown Toronto, an area where you’d be hard-pressed to find anything more than a 20 degree incline. Surprisingly enough, through my first few weeks with the Soho S, I’ve been able to tackle big, suburban hills in and around the city with little to no issue. It takes a little more gusto on the pedals, but I appreciate the workout.
iPhone Remote App with Airtunes
There’s no doubt that Apple’s Remote application for the iPhone is pretty nifty. It lets you control your iTunes from anywhere within your house or wherever you’re connected to the same WiFi point, giving you a really cool smart remote. (It even lets you control the playback of video, give ratings, etc.)
One thing that I think many people haven’t yet seen is that it has full support for Apple’s AirTunes technology - that is, where you have an Airport Express connected to a pair of speakers anywhere within the WiFi network, and iTunes will relay the audio through those speakers wirelessly.
So, using the Remote app, as you can see above you can choose the (truly geekily named) Airport Express to pump out your audio, disable the Computer audio output, and take a book and your iPhone to relax with your music away from the computer. Nice.
Disposable Culture
This is what $140 a night gets you. A lousy paper/styrofoam cup the likes of which you wouldn’t even find included with the purchase of a watercooler.
When some American hotel chains were reportedly caught not cleaning their rooms properly last year, most chains panicked after a ridiculous public outcry.
So here’s what we are left with. The Lowest Common Denominator. Forget solving the actual problem of lazy cleaning staff (Edit: or poorly equipped, as Paul rightly points out in the comments below), and take the bottom of the barrel route by doing away with glasses entirely and putting an even greater burden on the environment.
Oh, and that yellow paper the cup is sitting on? It’s a reminder to place it on your bed if you want your sheets cleaned to “help reduce the amount of water and energy we use.”
Long live disposable culture.
(This post was written with the new Wordpress app for the iPhone and while it’s not perfect, it’s a big step in the right direction. With ubiquitous wireless access everywhere I go, it’s less of a barrier to blogging!)
Good Music: Ratatat
I’ll get it out of the way and say that I’m not the biggest fan of instrumental music (read: music without lyrics). Ratatat falls almost squarely into that category with their electronic-instrumental mixes (and the occasional lyrical track thrown in), but with one exception - just about everyting I’ve heard from them is well-produced, crisp, and really, truly sonically stimulating.
They’ve got a new album coming out at the end of the month called LP3 that Dillon turned me on to, and by the wonders of the Internet, the whole thing has already leaked and I can say that it’s another good one. Stand out tracks for me are Mirando, Imperials, and Shempi which you can check out above.
How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse
Reading for me has become a passive activity - one that I only take to when I’m waiting for the plane to take-off, taxi to the terminal or eating alone at a restaurant in Denver. I still thoroughly enjoy it, but since I base a lot of what I do on efficiency, there’s rarely a time when I can justify spending the time to do so.
I picked up the novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War quite some time ago, but have only now started reading it that I’m in full-swing travel mode again and have an ample amount of idle time. The novel is a series of interviews with survivors from the fictional (?) zombie war - how they survived, and what they experienced.
The story is peppered with really thought-provoking social commentary and gives an epic stage for showcasing the human condition. I’ll keep from spoiling it foryou (since I haven’t finished it yet myself), but I thought I’d share a strategy that one of the characters explains that they proposed in containing the zombie scourge.
A problem they faced in this war is that conventional war tactics were completely useless against the zombies. American “Shock & Awe” strategies were completely ineffective against an enemy that could not experience fear, and there was no salvation against an enemy who could survive drowning, burning, being torn to pieces or exposed to extreme environmental conditions. All you could do is blow their brains out.
Stick together
The outbreak was way too far out of control by the time any sort of defense could be organized, and armed forces were so weakened and spread out to do anything about it. They would have to withdraw to a special safe zone like an island or mountainous area to eradicate any immediate local infestation and then defend against further attacks.
There’s no way to save everyone
Only a small fraction of the population could be safely evacuated, and this fraction would have to be selectively chosen to keep society going once things settled down in terms of labour pool.
And easily the most controversial suggestion by this character…
Herd the rest of the survivors as bait
Distracting the living dead from the actual evacuation would be of critical importance due to their numbers, and this would involve herding the survivors that would not be evacuated into isolated areas, defending them, and even resupplying them to keep the hordes away from the rest of the survivors.
I haven’t read far enough ahead to see how effective this strategy is, but it really gives you an idea about how unsettling the book is in how it forces you to think logically, but often that is contradictory to being humane in a situation like this. The really intriguing parts of this novel are those that deal with how different societies and governments reacted (or failed to react) to the enormity of the situation. I’d highly recommend giving it a read!
Photo by James Calder
Good Music: Weezer
Weezer’s new album, the Red Album is out today. The group’s past few albums haven’t been met with much critical praise, but there’s a lot of great stuff on this new one. Besides their first single, Pork & Beans (shown above with a delicious assortments of Internet memes), The Greatest Man that Ever Lived and The Angel and The One are both some great tracks.
Scout
Mars Phoenix on Twitter
I’ll be the first to admit that Twitter has somehow made its way into my daily browsing routine. The simplicity of it compared to Facebook is what appeals to me, but it’s the really cool applications that people are thinking up that I’ve been really drawn to.
Case in point, someone over NASA’s Phoenix Mars Mission have started Twittering, reporting the current status and location of the Phoenix scout. It’s not automated, which I think is an advantage - the updates are written by a human in a personified voice of the scout, and as a result, readable by humans. Very cool.
blogTO This Week: Jewels, Bikes and Doors
I’ve been making a concerted effort to start writing more lately, and stepped it up this week a bit over at blogTO. This week’s posts I wrote included:
Swap Your Jewellery and Mash It Up
Washington DC Gets Bike Sharing - Where’s Ours?
Your Guide to Doors Open Toronto 2008
Screw the Spotted Owl
Kudos to the guys over at Wired this month for their 15th anniversary edition cover. That’s one hell of an engaging lead-in to the issue - it alone already pulled me into a discussion about carbon emissions a little earlier today.
I read just about everything online these days, but I’m still a loyal subscriber to both Wired and Dwell. They offer something really special with every issue that is really hard to replicate online. Wired’s articles and ‘infographics’ have really elevated to a superb level recently, and Dwell’s recent re-design has made the thing so readable that it’s really a joy to go over every word of their articles.
Keep it up, guys.
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Adam is a User Experience Specialist at IBM in Toronto and also produces content of all kinds around the Web.
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