Party the 1st : Blackout on Ossington Avenue, Dundas to Queen, 8 pm to close – 28 venues, buskers, live acoustic music, parking meter parties, candlelight

Party the 2nd: Group bike ride – bring your lights, meet Bloor and Spadina at 8:45 – at 9:15 let’s ride!

Party the 3rd: Circus geeks and dance freaks, meet NW corner of Trinity Belwoods near Simon de Bolivar bust at 9 ish, bring glowsticks and dancing shoes

…don’t miss the big surprise at 10pm when three parties become one…

Coming down Ossington from Dundas, the first parking meter party you may have seen was an accordion-led game of musical chairs.

Further down, a parking space hosted the communal jitz.

Shortly after 10pm, the pedestrian parade moved up Ossington, marshaled by a fire juggler.

Not realizing it at the time, I caught Brian Sharwood of Homestars.net taking pictures.

You might notice the crowd seems preoccupied with something directly over my head. That something was a buildering busker (a builderer?)

There were also plenty of great signs encouraging everyone to GTFO.

Once the street was completely occupied, the “surprise” was revealed. As everyone chanted “black-out”, the streetlights magically responded, shutting off one by one. Spooky.

While the lights were out, sparklers started materializing.

Of course, the party wouldn’t be complete without what Milton Bradley’s competitor’s called “sex in a box”.

Video has surfaced from Urban Repair Squad and atochillin.

P.S. Post style shamefully appropriated from hyfen.

To add some detail:

• I’m not normal. I don’t have a landline or a mobile. Big Canadian Telco’s are clueless when it comes to pricing this stuff.
• I have Skype at ~$36/year to make unlimited calls across North America. Annoyingly, Skype can’t receive calls (“SkypeIn“) in Canada, although people have been asking for it since at least 2006.
• I use Gizmo5 at $20/3 months to receive calls, in Skype’s stead. That basically gives me a “real phone number” in Toronto’s 416 area code.
• I can receive live calls if I’m running Gizmo5′s desktop application (similar to Skype’s desktop app), but I rarely do, unless the call is scheduled ahead of time. Usually, calls and texts go straight to my voicemail, and those voicemails are immediately emailed to me as attachments. I like isolating things to my inbox.
• At one time, I played with DIDWW, which offers a “real phone number forwarded to Skype” service. Voicemail didn’t work, which was a dealbreaker.

This isn’t for everyone, but if all you want is a phone, voicemail, and you don’t mind “living in software”, it’s the cheapest option I’ve found.

And up close:

According to the awful type and clipart smeared across their window, they offer “website architecture”, “software development”, and “search engine marketing”. Yet something tells me they’re not the best choice for such services… and that something is their website. Consider yourself warned.

It’s a longer episode, at just over 30 minutes, but trust me and watch the whole thing. He tastes some really weird stuff, like raw white pepper and um… rock:

I know what you’re thinking: how can I introduce more innernetz memes into my sex life?

Fortunately, I have an easy answer for ya. Head over to this contest and vote up my lolcat condom! Also be sure to check out my Soviet-inspired ‘dome.

First things first: good luck to the developers. I hope they’re well-acquainted with the challenges they’re about to face.

When I read this bulletin, I caught a whiff of some strange smells. For instance,

• “Refinements to our site navigation to make browsing and product search faster and easier.” Sounds awkward at best, and at worst like it came from a “coder”, rather than an “enlightened developer”, “software craftsperson”, etc. I wouldn’t say “fixing site navigation” really captures the scope of this project, but maybe that’s just me.
• What is the meaning of “more descriptive pictures”? Pictures composed of text? Or images with text layered on top? Maybe they mean very long alt attributes, but that would be more descriptive markup. Either way, the thought isn’t clear.
• “The site will also look a little different”? Err, wait. How’s it gonna “look a little different” while making “many refinements to our site navigation”? I “get” that you’re trying to not scare me. But the mixed message is scarier than any proposed change could be.

The weirdest part is that they announced “no more online store”, and in the same breath, admitted the online store is crap. Okay, they didn’t admit any wrongdoing, but they aren’t fooling me:

• If I had a dime for every time http://www.canadiantire.ca barked at me for my postal code, I’d have truckloads of dimes.
• There’s also that severe case of gibberish-URL-itis. If you can tell me http://www.canadiantire.ca/browse/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCT%3C%3Eprd_id=845524442669579&FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=1408474396672077&bmUID=1232403481602 is a Folding Resin Table without clicking… you’re probably their senior-most DBA.
• The trim just ain’t polished. I think they chose “optimize for EGA” when rendering some of those buttons.
• Don’t forget the requisite insane user experience. Check out the navigation scattered around a typical page:

Hopefully those whiffs of muddled thinking don’t turn into a stench of confusion. I’ll be watching with interest, either way!

Gotta love the public batphone. If you want to see more, check out 2600′s Payphones of the World. I checked the wikipedia article for stats on the decline of payphones, but I was surprised to find it pretty barren. I guess that comes with the whole decline thing.

• Installed iTerm.
• In iTerm, hit option+cmd+B for “Profiles”.
  • Under “Keyboard Profiles, Global”, I removed all the mappings and set the “Option Key as” to “+Esc”. This allows me to switch channels in irssi with option+number.
  • Under “Terminal Profiles, Default”, I changed “Type” to “xterm-256color” and checked “Blinking cursor”.
  • Under “Display Profiles”, for “Dark Background” and “Light Background”, I tweaked the “Cursor” colors to be more visible.
• Grabbed this perl script that prints a 256 color test palette to the console. Ran it outside of GNU Screen, and everything looked good.
• Added the following lines to my ~/.screenrc:

#terminfo and termcap for nice 256 color terminal
# allow bold colors - necessary for some reason
attrcolor b ".I"
# tell screen how to set colors. AB = background, AF=foreground
# the first two are for other terminal emulators, just in case.
termcapinfo xterm "Co#256:AB=E[48;5;%dm:AF=E[38;5;%dm"
termcapinfo xterm-color "Co#256:AB=E[48;5;%dm:AF=E[38;5;%dm"
termcapinfo xterm-256color "Co#256:AB=E[48;5;%dm:AF=E[38;5;%dm"
term xterm-256color
# erase background with current bg color
defbce "on"

• Ran the test script inside of GNU Screen, everything looked good.
• Added the following lines to the top of my ~/.vimrc, because apparently “set t_Co=256″ must appear before any syntax and color settings:

set t_Co=256
:colorscheme railscasts

• Started up vim inside GNU Screen, and voila!
• Wrote about it here so I never forget this stuff.