Category: FreeForm

  • Observations on an Urban Campus

    30,000 people live, work, and study here. It is a university. If you were to walk into the soaring atrium of the central campus building, and were to stand for a moment, and really notice where you were, you would know that you had entered a temple. In ancient days such an edifice would be…

  • Who Wants to be a Billionaire?

    I’ve had this song stuck in my head since I went dancing last weekend: (Contains the word “fuck” a couple of times. Visuals completely acceptable in public.) [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aRor905cCw] I started off thinking, “But, I don’t want to be a billionaire.” Now that I’ve read the lyrics, and watched the video, I’m smitten. Love the song,…

  • Urban Homesteading, Rural Interneting

    … I’m afraid that the subtitle is, “Why we have no soap movie today.” Today, people are peppering the blogosphere with posts about their Urban Homesteading projects. I spent a significant portion of the morning making a movie about making soap, but each 1 minute segment takes about 20 minutes to upload, and I am…

  • Stoking the Unknown Wants

    My internet is slow: It also has 14% packet loss, for those what care about such things, so it is slow, and it stutters. I didn’t know that my internet was slow until the recent foofaraw over internet caps in Canada. But now that I know that my internet is slow, I kind of want…

  • Finding the Holy Grail

    Before Holy Grail, Fix Cars, Ferry Children. After Holy Grail, Fix Cars, Ferry Children This week we finally got to a point that we’ve been working towards for the last twenty years: my husband got tenure. I think that this is an occasion that should include a ceremony involving funny hats, because lacking such ceremony,…

  • Taking a Deep Breath

    On social media conflagrations. OK. Yesterday, I was writing about the moral legitimacy of a particular trademark. Understandably, there has been a social media firestorm over this issue, as people feel that their contributions have been marginalized. In return, the owner of the trademarks has issued a press release accusing the bloggers of the community…

  • Winter Wordless Wednesday

    January Sunset One Snowfall (the table was empty before the storm): Digging out the solar panels: I found myself dreaming of summer:

  • Book: Rational Mysticism

    Rational Mysticism? Surely she mistyped. But no, fair readers (I’ve been into the Austen recently), Rational Mysticism it is. I’ll give away the ending, shall I? “Mystical awe is the inverse of knowledge; it is a kind of anti-knowledge. Instead of seeing The Answer to the riddle of existence, you just see how impenetrable the…

  • The Ecstasy of the Dance

    … and then, halfway through the evening, the dance floor cleared. And I found myself hovering at the edge of an empty floor, with a great DJ and some hot music, and I finally didn’t care. I didn’t care who was watching, I didn’t care if I could do it, I didn’t care that I…

  • Pursuing Home

    Where are you from? I never know how to answer the question, “Where are you from?” I’m Canadian. Sometimes (outside Canada) that’s all that is required. But I was born in Scotland to Canadian parents, who are “from” Saint John, New Brunswick. I grew up mostly in Newfoundland, with a brief stint in England, and…

  • But is it Technology?

    My daughter and I were working on her social studies project last night about technologies that are important to her. She had to have 10 pictures to paste onto a piece of paper, and to be able to talk about why she picked them. She quite quickly looked around our house and recognized that pretty…

  • Cheese, comma, pictures of.

    I was having a hard day of writing earlier in the week, and I wrote (in an early draft of one of my posts), “It’s OK. If this doesn’t work out, I can just post a picture of a cheese tray or something.” Then I realised that I do, in fact, have a recent picture…