05.26.2009 – The Cat in the Blue Sedan would not forget.

¶ The Cat in the Blue Sedan had been driving for days, only pulling over to the shoulder for cat naps. He’d close his eyes and memories would flood back. Sleep was hardly restful.

¶ It was only when he let the road hynotize him that he could keep the memories at a comfortable distance, but The Cat in the Blue Sedan would never forget.

¶ The above is mostly for my own amusement. Only a few people would remember The Man in The Blue Sedan, a character I dabbled with in mostly unpublished comics many years ago.

¶ More adventures in symmetry (Flickr slideshow).

Recent city block portraits, April 2009.

05.26.2009 – As the leaves come out I have been getting ready to capture block portraits of Queen West for the summer.

¶ I recently grumped on Twitter that parking rules on Queen have changed this year. In previous years there was no parking on the North side in the mornings rush hour, and on the South side during the evening rush hour. Coincidentally these times produced very similar light on the respective sides of the street, rich light with shadows cast at 45° angles from right to left.

¶ This year there is no parking on the South side in the morning, when the sun is a little bit behind the street, and very different from the evening light on the North side. I will have to be both patient and lucky to get pictures to match previous years.

11.08.2008 – I’m proud of working with my cousin Adrianna Steele-Card on her first book. Adrianna Art: For the Young at Heart is a feast for the eyes showcasing her unique collage art. You should give a copy to a young person you know this holiday.

¶ It was fun and satisfying making this full colour 32 page book. Working with Adrianna’s art was a blast, and modern print production technology did not let me down, nor did it punish me for abandoning it years ago for interactive media. Books are fun. Paper feels good. We will plant more trees. Let’s all make a book.

¶ Let’s be brutal; in the early days of desktop publishing digital was a lot of promise and hype but the reality was mostly head pounding stress. WYSIWYG? Yeah, right.

¶ Computers made all kinds of things possible, including new kinds of errors like the dreaded font substitution. At the last moment the most expensive piece of equipment in the chain would claim ignorance of your fonts and would arrogantly substitute Courier.

¶ Shudder.

¶ Things are different, today. I will admit to never once printing my book design before sending it to the printer, and when I saw the proofs they were exactly what I expected. I was able to get away with this because I have a large colour-accurate monitor and I maybe got a bit lucky. WYSIWYG? Abso-effing-lutely.

10.06.2008 – Well, that summer truly sucked. I had some plans and ideas but most of them fell by the way side when my eleven year old tabby Xena fell sick with cancer. For my Flickr friends I posted a self-portrait with Xena a few days before she passed on.

¶ Both photos are of 1042 Queen Street West. Top: September 23, 2008. The way it looked in the second picture, from January 2006, is the way this storefront had been frozen in time for decades.

03.11.2008 – This June I will be showing something in the window of the Fly Gallery, 1172 Queen Street West. (Thanks, Tanya and Scott!) The window is the complete storefront gallery space, open 24 hours. It is one of the older and more expressive faces on the stretch of Queen West pictured above.

¶ In the last two weeks my portrait of Queen west, East of Bathurst was featured on local blogs Spacing and Torontoist and in NOW Magazine. I have since been able to update parts of the collage with more recent source from my archives, for a more accurate picture of the final incarnation of this stretch:

02.23.2008 – The morning of February 20 a six alarm fire consumed more than half a block of Queen Street west of Bathurst. No one was harmed but homes and beloved neighbourhood businesses were lost.

¶ The picture above is that block, taken last summer. From 609 to 625 Queen were seriously damaged or destroyed. That’s most of what is to the left of the large tree near the middle of the picture.

¶ I was glad that I was able to share the portrait of the block while it was most relevant to people. Most of the changing Queen Street I document turns over more slowly, usually with warning. We don’t notice the losses so much when they are like small cuts, but this is a big scarring wound.

¶ While I feel for the people who have had their lives uprooted — we survived a home destroying fire when I was a child — this disaster has reinvigorated my commitment to the personal project of recording Queen West, because I know there are times the pictures are relevant to others. People want to remember what has been lost, like the Suspect Video outlet.

¶ East of Spadina, Queen West is now dominated by mammoth storefronts for global brands, with only a few local joints. The big brands have already spread past Spadina. The incursion was launched with the trojan horse of American Apparel. Now a Home Depot is already slated for a parking lot on the block that burned.

¶ As the community decides how the block will be rebuilt, the struggle for the soul of Queen West moves east from the Triangle — already abandoned by the fates to developers — to Bathurst.

02.23.2008 – This is a screen from Version 3 of Rosetta Stone language learning software, released last fall. The new version is a significant upgrade to the popular product and is already available in nearly a dozen languages.

¶ My design company Smackerel and I are part of the version 3 team, responsible for the final look and feel of the interface. With so many great people contributing to the project — writers, editors, photographers, coders, cleaners, testers, etc. — it has been a joy to help bring it all together.

¶ Rosetta Stone is the most worthwhile interactive multimedia project I have been involved with. To prove that it works I will use the program to learn French, and then I will try a language I have had less exposure to, like Russian or Chinese.

¶ Smackerel continues to be busy with Rosetta Stone and one of these days we will be updating the Smackerel site with the story of our contribution.

¶ A couple of my pictures of Xena made it into the final release. That’s my world famous tabby in the screenshots.

¶ Xena helps people learn languages, inspires discussions of quantum physics, and in my dreams she can fly.

02.23.2008 – Not willing to be outdone by Xena, Toby has a new greeting card! It is from Avanti Press, who found the picture on Flickr and licensed it. They were great to work with and the card puts a smile on faces.

¶ If anyone sees one on the racks, could you snap a picture for me? When I know how people can order them online I will post the information here.

02.23.2008 – One of the things I did this winter was rediscover symmetry, exploring various sides of each of my cats. Please check out my Fearful Symmetry slide show on Flickr.

¶ And that is almost the end of this first website update for 2008, full of cats and streets and software, oh my. As well I have added a few updated notes to older posts later down the page.

¶ The site remains hand-built, although I know how much simpler life would be if blog software was generating this page. There are other irons in the fire, including a project with my cousin Adrianna, but news of that can wait for later.

06.05.2007 – Recently, while I was away from the internet, the above photo of mine was lolcatted. Lolcat is the term for combinations of cat pictures and odd captions that are currently popular on the internet. (Wikipedia entry)

¶ I’ve secretly hoped that one of my pictures would be turned into a lolcat, and it has been a mostly fun experience.

¶ I made the picture above of Xena, added the text one cat and posted it on Flickr a year ago, where it has been popular. It’s been my buddy icon on Flickr, and I have considered using it as a personal trademark. It was also my first cat picture to make the cover of a magazine! You probably did not see it on the newstands.

¶ The Canadian Journal of Family Physicians used it on the cover of their March issue for an article called Uncertainty Principle, making official the association with Schrödinger’s cat.

Cut to some time in May, somewhere on teh intarweb...

¶ Justin Wick and Dan Lurie were chatting online about quantum cryptography, you know, like everyone does, and they hit upon an instance of the notion of Schrödinger’s lolcat.

¶ When Dan went looking for a cat in a box he could look no further when he found my picture. Xena’s expression is perfectly indeterminate while the textures and shapes suggest the mathematical precision of an Escher print. Combined with a lolcatspeak caption suggesting Schrödinger’s cat-threatening thought experiment, it would prove irresistable to lolcat fans.

Dan posted the captioned photo May 30. (Dan’s story)

¶ Friday morning, June 1st, the lolcat came to the attention of Accordion Guy Joey Devilla, who was amused and reposted it to his very popular blog. By then the lolcat was already travelling the internet unattributed. Coincidentally, Joey and I were working together at Mackerel back when the web was brand new and not so shiny.

¶ Another friend of Mackerel, Cory Doctorow, saw Schrödinger’s lolcat on Joey’s blog and posted it as an anonymous lolcat at Boingboing where it’s been seen by thousands of people, and picked up by dozens of sites. Meanwhile, a Digg user noticed Joey’s post and linked to it.

¶ My little Xena was really getting around! This is about where I found out about it (thanks, Rob!), although I was away from my email — or even a modern web browser for web mail — for at least another day.

¶ There was some frustration along with the excitement because at first so many were seeing the image without proper attribution, but that situation has been remedied. The big sites now have proper attribution (thanks Rob, Cory, Joey!) so no one should assume the work is anonymous. While I did have to ask one person to take down a commerical product with this lolcat, it was not a serious problem.

¶ Inevitably the lolcat was found by lolcat aggregator I Can Has Cheezburger where it was properly attributed. Fans of lolcats rate this one highly.

¶ Some geeks will never be satisfied, of course. At Digg a number of posters eventually soured the comment thread by arguing scientific inaccuracies and suggesting that anyone that gets the joke and laughs does not actually understand quantum physics.

Xena and Toby are born lolcats

¶ I think I have some other pictures that will make good lolcats, but nothing that will capture the geek imagination like Xena in a box. That won’t stop me from tossing a lolcat out there:

So you wanna make a lolcat with one of my shots?

¶ The bulk of my photos are available for some Creative Commons uses. To use one of my CC photos for a lolcat, please email me. I will most likely approve the change in CC license necessary to submit to some sites.

¶ Dan Lurie has my permission for the non-commercial lolcat. I do wish to assert that my picture of a cat in a box remains ©all rights reserved. This one has been special to me.

UPDATE 02.23.08 – My lolcat was a hit at I Can Has Cheezburger which was satisfying. I have a put a few more out there and probably have more lolcats in me. The phenomenon has not lost any momentum. New people are still discovering lolcats.

02.23.2005 – When Multimedia Was Black & White is a hypertext article that I began writing in 2003. I have just finally published the first ‘final’ draft at the Smackerel site. Contains zero photos.

Various entries archived and removed from circulation.