Geeky Cat Miusings

What a Facebook platform developer feels like. The startup company where he works decided to allocate time and resources to developing an app for the great exposure - Facebook membership is rising exponentially and people love to add apps to personalize their space - I have added several apps and subsequently removed them because I did not find them useful or appealing. The developer is lamenting the fall of app users and explains why in this article.

Soundpedia is a legal Singapore based music sharing community that offers a music streaming service with Web 2.0 sharing functions. It helps you to discover new tunes and share them with friends. I have not spent a lot of time with it yet, but my initial experience was fabulous when I discovered I could listen to the entire When I Was Cruel Elvis Costello album. I have a collection of 100 CDs but I find that it is not enough and the radio is very repetitious, so I welcome the chance to listen to a wide variety of music.

Anyone that knows me knows that summer is my favourite time of year - a time to be outdoors and enjoy the city festivals, events, or just walking around. The Toronto jazz festival is running this week so I thought I would head down to Nathan Phillips square to enjoy some live music and be surrounded by happy people, watch the soaring birds (I think I detect some coordinating movement with the music), and enjoy a coffee which I really shouldn’t have. But I was mistaken, all the free jazz at the square is on during the day when the unemployed and the tourists can enjoy it. I think it would serve people well if the committee members decided to schedule concerts at the square immediately after work when people can enjoy something relaxing for an hour or two before heading home.

Here is some nice things I have done this summer so far:
Getting ready for Taste of Little Italy

Luminato

Playing Giant Scrabble

Really wanted to capture a shot of the girl drinking when they poured water from the pan…it was the funniest thing

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse???

Mexican dancers twirling away

I would be sad too if I had to wear those dresses

Now I must think about what I will be doing this weekend. Have a good one.

While I was waiting for the bus this week, I was approached by a very pregnant squirrel begging me for some food. Fortunately I had an emergency stash of trail mix in my purse to prevent me from feeling light-headed, which often happens when I am very hungry. So I held out some almonds and peanuts and she was not shy at all - she came very close to me and stuffed her little cheeks full of nuts and then turned away to munch on the free goods and she then turned around for more. I hope to see her again…I will definitely have lots of nuts in my purse.

Here is a singing bird that I captured:

Tammy and Pumpkin love it when I play this video!

Talking about nuts here are a few things about nuts:
Almonds are related to the apricot, but the shell is surrounded by a leathery green casing which splits when the nuts are fully ripe.
Almonds are high in protein and are rich in potassium, calcium, magnesium and phosphorus.

Last night I attended the Coro Giuseppe Verdi concert at the Columbus Centre where my friend Susie and her fabulous choir sang varied pieces of opera accompanied by an accomplished pianist. I was really impressed with their work - and it reminds me that I need to get Nessun Dorma from Turandot in mp3 format so that I can enjoy it anytime: I only have it in LP format at the moment.

You will probably never guess who was singing at the concert …. Remember Pasquale, the singing chef? He had a show called Pasquale’s Kitchen Express - you can tell he loved to sing if you ever saw his show - he would spontaneously break into song when cooking (something I only do in private). He took opera classes at the Royal Conservatory of Music and met his wife through singing - she is a soprano. If you guessed Pasquale was at the show, well you would be wrong because I am sorry to say that he is no longer with us. But his wife and daughter were both singing there and his daughter performed a few solo pieces and she was wonderful, she has a lovely voice. I wonder if she inherited his cooking skills as well - that would be so unfair.

Painting is a good way to express creativity and explorer deeper corners of the mind. The experience does not stop when the painting is done: I move the painting about and see what emotions it stirs when it is placed beside another painting - do the two paintings talk to one another? Do they see eye to eye or do they have different perspectives on the world?

How does it look on the wall? Does it beautify the wall? How about taking it out to the garden? Is it expressing peace in the garden or does it stir up emotions?

1. In the late nineteenth century fashionable women were taught to practice saying words that began with the letter p so that their mouths would pucker as they discussed prunes and prisms with desirable bachelors. I have tried it myself and saying “Paris” does indeed cause my mouth to pucker.
2. Many doctors have made mistakes in their treatment of patients but never get sued while some highly skilled doctors are sued a lot - the reason why some get sued and others don’t is because people don’t tend to sue doctors they like.
3. You should not use certain words in your blog: they tend to attract a lot of spam comments. Obviously I will not say them here but anything suggestive, such as this blog entry, is prime target.
4. Over 19,000 Americans die each year in alcohol-related crashes. If a vehicle defect or food contamination caused some 50 people to die, there would be an uproar - everyone would be talking about it and criticizing everyone involved. Where is the uproar?
5. Cellphones are the new cigarettes. People like to flutter their hands - it used to be cool flicking cigarettes - now it is cellphones. Think about the poses people strike with cellphones. If you aren’t using a cellphone you are probably way too stationary. Just watch people with a cellphone: first is the grand pull out from the pocket, they flip it open to see if there are any missed calls that they could have been attending to instead of the bore in front of them, the hands flutter expressively as they punch in some numbers, all eyes are on the phone scanning it for tell tale signs of owner’s status and taste, they flick the phone shut, and then they lay it down beside their drink. Uncanny similarity.
6. Penguin Books experimented on a fully collaborative wiki novel, A Million Penguins. They discovered that you can’t have any sort of coherent trajectory when everyone has a different idea of how the story should develop and end. A fun experiment, I am sure. I tried something like that a few years back when I collaborated writing a witch tale with my niece, Sara. And that was just two of us writing in the same room but we had different ideas of where the story should go and just how much silliness is acceptable.

There is a tremendous amount of work to be done on search products to improve people’s experience with the web: currently average information workers spend 25 percent of their time looking for information. Many ordinary folk are also having a tough time finding the information we need on the unwieldy Web and sometimes give up and try referencing a book. We know a few basic tricks like using quotes to search for an exact phrase or using the “-” to exclude the word from the search, but there are many more tricks available for narrowing a search. Have a look at 20 tips for more efficient google searches, you may want to commit a few useful ones to memory. I am trying to understand how Google determines similar terms to the user’s search keyword when the “~” symbol is used: I searched for [~dumb little man] and Google returns sites with funny and stupid in its results.