penguins like ice

Wish I'd heard of this on Friday when trying to decide what to do after work. Instead of messing with Microsoft folks and getting a citation with the words "8' inflatable penguin" on it, I wound up ringing in happy hour at a pub four blocks from the invasion.

frosty canadian vista

So my friend Snuffy passed a link along about a Microsoft event going on in the city to promote Vista, so I strolled up there today over lunch to have a look at the setup. They had it stocked with shiny gadgets and very Canadian looking PR folks sporting Vista toques and singing the MS theme song. There were heaters inside but I was glad to have mitts.

Anyway standard marketing speak was going on, the ice crapper was pretty much fantastic, and there was an MS Office(R) compatible toaster on site. I missed out on the free hot chocolate however, so I supplemented with a barley and hops related approach to the rest of the afternoon. More pics yonder.

fourty five nanometers is like uh, pretty small

Intel does a press release about shiny new chips and decides to give some website camera clearance and a guided tour of their research facilities, Q and A provided by Director of Process Architecture and Integration and Senior Fellow Mark Bohr. Cool, great this should be interesting. Oh, wait, what the hell Arstechnica? You were moving so Scoble gets the interview?

I mean, moving sucks and all but I really would have liked to have heard some more detailed questions given the setting. This is just like that time the dude at Tim Hortons left the crullers defenseless while he went to get a roll of nickels to make change only I couldn't decide if I wanted glazed or not and he caught me behind the counter trying to make up my mind. Another fantastic opportunity ... wasted due to bad planning.

Grumble grumble grumbling.

why i read english russia

Besides the fact that something cool does seem to happen daily on one sixth the Earth's surface, cool stuff happened there back in the day too. Yesterdays colour photos circa ~1900 are an interesting glimpse into the past. I'm pretty sure I failed history but I often find stuff like this fascinating.

This photographers stuff washed up on my screen once before when I stumbled onto an LOC archive of middle America a while back. For more of the Russia series surf this way. For a view of Toronto through the way back machine take a look at this unfortunately named but conveniently world readable listing of various city archive photos. For less sifting and more detail there are more conventional sites.

Anyway English Russia is great stuff, read early, and read often. In my suggested reading department I've re-tuned my sidebar from dugg stories to shared items in Google Reader. Hopefully this will provide a more interesting overview of what I'm eyeballing these days. For the rest of the stuff I try to read consistently see my OPML (c'mon 'blogroll' just sounds stupid).

the future conan?

A number of interested parties seem to think its somehow their business what my plans for the days ahead might include. To these nosy types I say sod off! However it has been my experience that people don't just up and sod off when you tell them to, so for the persistent folks out there who want to know what I'm doing with my time these days scroll down and browse my calendar. I try to keep my work schedule (a rotating shift at a 24/7 datacenter aka "the cube") current at the very least, so check here if you need to reach me.