I spent the day at Word on the Street. Toronto's biggest writing event. Must be 100000 plus people there. I've heard that there were 150,000 last year. Seemed a bit less busy this year. But I bought two books. One is Maureen Harris' poetry. Maureen's blog is on the right. I mean the OTHER right. It is called "A Possible Landscape" and is quite wonderful. I also bought Don McKay's "Another Gravity, a book of poems that I know nothing about, except that Maureen's put his work on the course readings before. This is totally not me. My idea of contemporary poetry is Lawrence Ferlingetti and Ted Hughes. And Canadian poetry? please! But these two work. Not enough aliens and dark dank moodiness, but such is life. If the words work, I can forego the bombast.

Oh, and I went to my bi-weekly meeting of the Toronto Dark Writer's Association at the Tiquilla Bookworm on Queen. Steph, Mikey and I were there along with two newbies. I'm sorry I have forgotten their names, one was Tom? I'll find out if they come back again. The Tom guy was too shy to read his stuff, but he finally did let me. It was suprisingly good. Better than much of what I read when I was poetry editor for the harrow (www.theharrow.com). It had a nice combination of explicit sex, shipping metaphors and dark humour. More sophisticated than what I would expect from a stoned, nervious 22 year old. I hope he sticks around. He certainly writes better than I did at that age. But that's unfair. Everyone writes better than I did at that age. Luckily, now only 75% of the people write better than I do. That's progress for you.

LILIN JAPANESE INTERIOR SHOJI TATAMI ROOM FACTORY needs to send me something!!!

Costs of Microsoft upgrades increase Costs are going up because Microsoft will no longer allow corporate customers to buy software upgrades at a volume discount whenever they choose. Instead, firms will receive upgrades when they are released, whether they want them or not.

An interview I did last week was played as part of a spot on the World Trade Centre and vitual communities on CBC Radio this morning (11:40 or something). This is just my section, out of context. I wasn't near a radio, so Dave in London recorded it for me, and sent me this clip. I'll get the longer thing done later, when I get to work and get the recording from my offfice.

I was thinking, after I went out for some Za, and ended up at Salmon's house talking about blogs. My mouth and mind were badly out of synch after 2 days of working on my SSHRC post-doc application. I don't know what we were talking about; probably didn't now what we were talking about at the time either. But at somepoint I realized that I just couldn't handle binary dialectical criticism and the marxist stuff... not for political or metanarrative ideas, but because I'm dyslexic and I can't handle such arbitrary signifiers when there's only two. I realized that I'm dialectically dyslexic. And that made everything seem ok.

I want one!!!!

LaBrea - The Tarpit LaBrea is a program that creates a tarpit or, as some have called it, a "sticky honeypot". LaBrea takes over unused IP addresses on a network and creates "virtual machines" that answer to connection attempts. LaBrea answers those connection attempts in a way that causes the machine at the other end to get "stuck", sometimes for a very long time.

Traveller put me onto this... cool.
The Rantings of Lum the Mad When asked if he takes into account consumer input Flock is dismissive, relying instead on the expertise of his staff. "No, we never talk to consumers ? they just fuck us up. Someone asked for a copy of our market research which made us take the decision to do EverQuest. I said we hadn't done any market research. Had we done, the game would never have been made. We never focus on them. Gamers don't know what they want. We just want to know if they have a valid credit card."

[+][beam] Jason says, "wow, salmon's writing a paper, and she's referencing a paper that I've not written yet, so now I have to write my paper to conform to what she says it will be about."

":-:squish:-: working against a deadline today- writing about- what else- MOO poetics. Actually, I'm beginning to think my prof was right. I'm writing about semiotics..." thus spake da fish.

9-11peace.org Action for Justice, not War--9,812 emails sent. We believe that a non-military response is the best strategy for a permanent end to terror.

Baudrillard in Cyberspace is a paper that Kat pulled out for me when I mentioned that she'd someday be hacking reality. She pulled it out of her hat of course.

I've got a new blog called (re)flections. It is intended for my course ENV321Y. Students must blog reflectively on the readings and the course, and Maureen suggested that we all do it, so they have a series of models. (re)flections is my participation. At least there will be one weekly extended reflection.

Micro$loth controls you now according to an article by Ed Foster, as I tripped across on EVhead's blog. "While we're on the subject of license enforcement, let me throw in a term one alert reader just spotted in the license for FrontPage 2002. "You may not use the Software in connection with any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, or their products or services ... " the license reads in part."

I'm out at Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute helping salmon teach blogging to her wonderful kids.

VideoScribbler: Overlay on Live Video now this is something cool for annontating video when you're doing research on students!!!

Cow Parts "If BSE disease does come to the United States, it will inevitably wreak havoc because nearly everything we touch or taste has cow in it. A lesson in truly efficient recycling."

The science of recycling in the technological age has unexpected results. I was aware of BSE and rumnants, but not the extent to which bovines have infultrated society. I have sometimes commented that a vegan must avoid petrochemcials because they are merely the processed bodies of dead animals converted into oil over millions of years. That bombastic statement, meant to imply how difficult it is to escape from consuming animal products, it much more true than I thought.

For the record, however, I'm not vegitarian. I just prefer organic/freerange pepperoni.

[a reflective post]
This is an article on intolerance and extremism, with the quotePepsi, he explained, wasn't American - it was made in Pakistan.. It made me thing of Jerry Fallwell's christian hatred. I don't think I believe in the notion of Muslim or Christian extremism. To tie it to a faith, faiths as beautiful at their core as these two is to perhaps take up, in part of the opposite extremism. In the course I'm teaching this year, I'm taking up Lyotard's challenge against meta-narrative, as it relates to the environment and the social construction of knowledge. Simply put, Lyotard situates the postmodern condition as a skepticism to all metanarratives (cosmologies, belief systems, world views) but perhaps less to banish them, but to remind us that we cannot even give respect to a belief that is unchallenged in our hearts and minds. Because if it is unchallenged, by reflection, prayer, inquiry, research, discussion, then perhaps we don't ever really know it, or ourselves. This article, like Fallwell's blaming of the boming on abortionist and queers (there's a link of Sarah's page) just reminds us of the horror of the unchallenged metanarrative, the unquestioned belief, and the dark humour when someone can drink pepsi and demand the destruction of american values. That's someone who'd certainly not be getting top marks in my class. Neither would Fallwell for his logic. Hmmm... simply put, extremism is the empowered stupid, not merely ignorant, or unworldly, or unlearned, as we all are that at some points in our lives/day/journey, and have much to learn from each other. The stupid are those who have decided that the act of learning is no longer necessary, and that they know what needs to be done. This is what makes this event so important to my teaching this year. I only hope I've stated it with relative clarity.

I think it is safe to consider the world again, sort of.

America Under Attack -- Sept 11, 2001 is a nice list of links for info, as well as ways to help and background information.

Hil's pointless blog of random stuff has some very interesting and personal commentary from someone in NY.

Yuka just told me why she thinks that the attack took place yesterday. Aside from the fact that it was world peace day. Well. September 11.
That is, 911. As well, it is 9am when the first attacks take place.

reEducated.org has a cooler addy than I have. I need a new domain... er I need a domain.

The 1 Billionth Second of the 1st Epoch is coming today, as the Unix operating system. "Unix(tm) time is measured in seconds since this point in time; the 1st of January, 1970."

Rue Morgue Magazine, canada's great horror mag has a new version out... look and buy ;-)

Helga's Cowches made my day. Mostly because I was watching yuka freak out over the pictures. Oops. We may end up with one. You want one?

If everything goes well, I'll have edublog.utoronto.ca up and running today, as part of edublog.com project.
I sent my rose iBook out for repairs, as the video kept going insane. After dragging it all the way over to the bookstore, they tested it for a week. Told me that the warranty on the new video card had expired a week before, and that they could see nothing wrong with it anyway, and I should just move it to another part of the office.

Cooking with Jason, as said on Achieve:

[+][beam] Jason2 says, "I made the best pizza ever last night ;-)"
[+][beam] Hildegarde asks, "did you?"
[+][beam] Hildegarde asks, "what was on it this time?"
[+][beam] Jason says, "a whole basil plant, 2 peppers, onions, garlic and 3 full tomatos. I boiled all that senseless for hours. then froze it for a week. thawed it, drained it, mixed it with 20% of it's volume in tomato sauce, put it on pizza with old chedar cheese and organic peparoni"

EvaB has the coolest POMO links.

I've been a member of The HTML Writers Guild for years. But for some reason I never have done anything about it. Perhaps now that my HTML skills are so far out of date, I should get more active on that front. Eh?