Firefox 2 is awesome for so many more reasons besides not being IE or Safari. For one, I find the spellcheck really handy. Until today, I didn’t know you could load additional dictionaries as easily as other extensions. Just go here and click on your language of choice. Now if you’re in your webmail and [...]

There was a long hiatus of a hundred years where drawing did not play any role in mathematics because hand and pencil and ruler were exhausted. They were well understood and no longer in the forefront. And the computer did not exist… One had to create intuition from scratch. Intuition, as it was trained by [...]

This photo is pretty old. Maybe 1995? Can’t be certain. It was taken at the Chicago Comicon. I still chuckle every time I see it.

I have no idea why I haven’t been clued onto this sooner, but TED.com has got to be one of my new favourite sites. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual [...]

Originally published in the July 1945 issue of Atlantic Monthly, Vannevar Bush‘s post-war article, As we may think, is cited often because of its intertextual breadth. In the paper, he proposes a new and radical information retrieval system called the memex (based on microfiche) that would facilitate access to the sum total of humanity’s archived knowledge.

A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

The memex is a prototypical hypertextual system…

I came across this U.S. WWII pre-electronic guidance system initiative called “project pigeon” which basically used trained pigeons to direct bombs on target by consensus. My entry point on this was a really great book called Universal Principles of Design. Click on the image at left to see the full page. There is also wikipedia [...]

As part of our History of Interactive Media module with Jerry Durlak, Sharon Rotman and I created a prototype for a social networking site called Police Report as an exercise in citizen democracy and a response to notions of surveillance. A recent CP article describing a Youtube video showed how police agent provocateurs allegedy were [...]

As of September 4, 2007 I am officially a resident of the Canadian Film Centre Media Lab. The Lab is comprised of 3 programs: TELUS Interactive Art and Entertainment Program Interactive Project Lab Interactive Narrative Feature Program Ours is the IAEP, though amongst the 10 residents, we just call it the Media Lab or the [...]

Sanaz and I had a great time in Nova Scotia, a really laid back and scenic province. Neither of us had been to the Maritimes before. Although the Canadian dollar has been doing very well, we decided to stay within our borders, as we didn’t have much time to plan a trip, or money to [...]

My blog is about to undergo some fundamental changes. It was originally created as a means to bring my wife and my families’ members together around a pivotal event in our lives: our marriage. November 11, 2006 is now some time away, and my life has changed significantly (for the better) since. The wedding content [...]