It is a mere technicality that winter does not officially begin until the 21st of December. I've always found that to be a bit ridiculous, because I've always lived places where autumn is fleeting and is almost always ended early with the abrupt arrival of the ice and snow. Of course what comes with all this ice and snow is the cold and an increasing dependence on the automobile. Even my ardent pedestrianism wanes when the temperature dips below -20. I find myself taking the train to work and happily accepting rides from friends when we are headed out in the evening.

But even during warmer times this city is autocentric. This was made painfully apparent to me the other night when Tom and I met after work for a little photo excursion downtown. We had been planning this for a few weeks as I had been so busy during the fall that I hadn't spent much time taking photos or visiting with the silver fox. Tom had been prowling about on his own recently, taking some fantastic night shots of the city and my jealousy was growing. So we arranged for a little evening shoot.

Our original plan had been to photograph the downtown library from the outside looking in, but we quickly became sidetracked by a visit to the the downtown parkade that Tom had photographed the week earlier.


I don't know if such an idea would work, but it could be a way to make downtown's surplus of parkades into something more functional and interesting.

There was a brief time this past summer and fall where my trusty SLR went unused. It was the blasted gadget called the iPhone that was to blame, it being small and capable of some stunning photographic results with only a few simple taps of a finger.







In fact, the results from the iPhone were so consistently lovely that I even began to be accused of favouring it over my 'real' camera.

Maybe it was the constant heckling from the elitists that got to me or maybe it was being required to take photos and video for work plus the sale plus having just been paid and my dreams of shooting with high ISO. Whatever the reason, now I have a new camera as part of my collection. The results are also consistently lovely.




The camera bits of my iPhone are now getting dusty.

No one seems to be complaining.

And just like that it's winter. Talking about the weather seems like a pretty boring thing to do, but when you're as moody as I am, then the change in seasons is a big enough deal to require some sort of cathartic release. The one consolation of all this new snow and the cold has been that it's sunny. Clean, fresh snow and sunny days reminds me of the winters of my youth. You know, when I was young and optimistic. This makes things a little bit better.

In my defense I do try to get out and do things when it is cold outside. On Sunday, despite the chilly temperatures I ventured out of doors to go to the Luminaria festival at the Devonian Botanic Gardens.

Sometimes I feel bad about neglecting my blog, but then I take a look at my photostream and I realize that the gaps between posts are most often filled there.

One of my big projects at work has been to set up an online photo gallery for the City. Unlike the blog project, the idea for the gallery did not originate with me, but it's become a major part of my responsibilities. Like the blog, the gallery will be launching soon and once it does it will be viewable both by City staff and by the public. The image gallery will not be segregated by department, but will instead be categorized by event and related content and will utilize tagging to help people search and sort. Right now the tags are set by staff only (uh, so me and another colleague), but I'm hoping to open up that process so that tagging can be more of a collaborative effort involving staff and the community. However, dreams about folksonomies aside, what I find most exciting is that the default license for the images shared with the public will be under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License, so users will be able to share and remix the works as long as they provide attribution, are using the images for non-commercial purposes and will share-alike under a similar license. To use language that is not so eloquent (I've been reading up about privacy and copyright legislation which is drier than melba toast and I think the legalese has robbed me of some of my vocabulary), I think it's super rad that the City is going to be sharing images under a CC license. It is such a simple step, but with really powerful implications.

Perhaps I'm just feeling inspired, having recently watched Lawrence Lessig's keynote on copyright from the recent EDUCAUSE conference (video below). Take the time to watch it. It's really rather good at providing a history of copyright and addressing the state of confusion that surrounds copyright today, as well as the potential to change the culture surrounding creativity and models of compensation.




Tomorrow I'm presenting the photo gallery to the Strategic Communications Team at the City. I don't know on the exact date that this project will go live, but if I finish up all the documents that need to support the gallery (FAQ, links on the various sites, other bits and pieces as needed) it may go live as early as December 1st. The first of December, of course, also being the day that the City blog will go live. Oh my, that's a lot to look forward to next week.

It's four thirty in the morning and I can't sleep. I woke up half an hour ago and haven't been able to fall back asleep since. Knowing my body I could just lie in the dark and become increasingly frustrated that I can't sleep because my mind is too active, or I could do something productive with this period of wakefulness. That is what I am choosing to do.

There has been lots going on in my life recently and I've been busy to a point that I haven't felt like I've had time to properly document it. This is a shame because even though I think that during the moment I was present, because I used to write down or photograph things in my life as they happen... that being present wasn't really enough. Documentation is part of how I process things - it's part of how I continue to think about things after they happen. It's funny, because part of the reason I think my body woke up is because my dreaming was too real. In fact I was dreaming about how I would document the Open Data meeting that I'm going to later this morning. In my mind I was visualizing the shots I would get with the video camera, thinking about what lenses I would bring with my SLR, imagining the angles I would shoot so that I would make a bunch of people sitting and talking tech seem interesting. And that's about when I woke up, once I started to think about how I would piece together the footage of the event into a cohesive media piece. I wouldn't be complaining except my sleep is precious.

Really though, I'm not all that bothered by my waking up because of some sort of creative thought process. Sometimes ideas and inspiration arrive when it is least convenient. Ideas can interrupt - and sometimes we can shelve them for later, but at other times if we don't give them the attention they need they may pass. Being photographically inclined I know a bit about this. Images are sort of like ideas. A good opportunity for a photo may present itself, but depending on when we wait to capture it certain aspects about that image may have changed. This is just like an idea, where, depending on when we decide to pursue it, it may still have the same basic structure, but certain details about it have changed.

Take these three photos for example. They are all the same basic idea. Each image is of the view from the window by my desk at home. The window overlooks the parking lot of the shopping complex across the street, but just behind that parking lot is a row of apartment buildings. When I am sitting at my desk, all I can see is that particular stretch of building with a peaked roofline and the hint of the neighbourhood that stretches out behind them, above it, an expanse of sky. However, depending on when I chose to photograph this view, the image has changed. Some days the sky is an intense shade of blue and dominates the photo, other times the mood is gloomy and the clouds are low in the sky, other days the weather has turned cold and snow covers the rooftops.

I used to think I enjoyed editing and then I worked on a project where I had to copy edit hundreds of little horribly written profiles. It was then I realized how much I disliked it. Which is why when I was sort of delighted to read about this free crowd-sourced copy editing 'service' called Goose Grade.

Personally I think this service is pretty rad. I frequently make foolish grammatical errors and dislike getting corrected in my comments. I like when someone lets me know if I've made a mistake (I want to correct it so I don't look like an idiot), but at the same time I don't necessarily want the whole world knowing I'm a dunce. I think this service will sort of alleviate that shame. The little copy edit button is sort of a little badge that says "hey, I'll probably make mistakes on this blog, please help me correct them." At least that is how I'm looking at it. I'm hoping it will help soften any blows to my writerly ego.

There's a wordpress plugin that I'm going to install it on my other blog that will even make the edits automatically after you approve them. But the service isn't just restricted to blog, you can actually edit any page on the internet. I know a few people who are going to go wild about this. You know, the type who carry a red pen in a breast pocket, ready to redline at any given moment. The type that cringe when they read some of my wandering epic sentences.

One thing I have noticed though, the little widget is not displaying properly in Safari. I'm not sure what the problem is, because it loads just fine in Firefox and Opera. Why Safari? Why do you not like my blog?

I was told today that I live in a very blue world. I suppose that's true. I like blue a lot. That's just how I roll.

I haven't posted anything in ages. I've been busy I guess, because suddenly it's November and it's almost been a month since my last post. I feel a bit like an absentee friend, excusing my behaviour saying, "well, I was always meaning to write..."

I finished up Dexter's little toque over a few evenings and when it was done I was feeling a bit lost without an easy project to work on. So I dug into my stash and began to knit a simple rib scarf out of this lovely green wool/silk blend that I picked up at the yarn shop in Parkallen last year. It's the type of knitting project that I don't have to pay attention to. Last night while hanging out with Sarah, Baby D and gang, I knit while standing and listening to an impromptu cabaret performance by a visiting guest. The week previous I took it to a weekend meeting with some colleagues where we were talking about open data. If only I could knit during meetings at work then I would get my projects finished so quickly.