das loft

Elyse made this!!

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My dad and I went to see some presentations on organic gardening with native plants at town hall a couple nights ago. First the winner of the 2003 organic garden contest from two years ago had a slideshow of photos of her garden. Then Dr. Susan Rhodes spoke about the dangers of pesticides (I'd heard her speech before).

And finally Lorraine Johnson, author and very knowledgeable native plant gardener, gave a long presentation/slideshow about which native plants are best and easiest to grow for different garden conditions. Her presentation was amazing - informative, funny, and very inspirational. Now I want to grow native plants instead of vegetables!

She lives in Toronto just a block away from Bathurst and Bloor. She has a tiny yard, yet it's gorgeously jam-packed with humungous native plants. And she only has to spend 3.5 hours a year maintaining it! (She had to calulate that for a study she was participating in.) Then we see how much time people spend maintaining their ugly lawns every week - watering, mowing, raking, spraying, fertilizing, seeding, sodding. LAWNS! The grass doesn't even want to be there - otherwise it wouldn't require so much work to keep it there. It's absurd to me to see how much time and effort people spend trying to maintain such unattractive monotony when they could be surrounded by a lush jungle, doing nothing to keep it happy and healthy.

Yet we grow proud when we successfully force our yards into flawless green pavement. We always seem to feel the need to show that we humans are in control, that we're somehow above nature, that we are god. What it shows me is a lack of imagination and a disconnectedness from the earth.

So I bought one of Lorraine's books, The New Ontario Naturalized Garden, and hopefully I'll get a chance to do some of my own native gardening this year. Mee Ming, get ready! ;)

By the way, these photos are of our old garden at 83 Holyrood that I took two years ago.

The poor dog upstairs has been whining and groaning and barking in distress all morning. I feel so bad for it. Nobody's at home. It just doesn't seem right for a dog to be kept kooked up in an apartment all day long when it's such a beautiful day outside.

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Yeah, so I got a hard drive upgrade for my laptop. So I've been a little occupied with things, as you can imagine. I'm still configuring my new Gentoo installation. Blah blah blah. Definitely not of much interest to most of my blog viewers. :)

Hopefully this weekend my friends and I can go to the AGO finally to see Massive Change... I think we need at least 3 or 4 people (Woo-Jun wants 5) before we can be happy. I think it runs until the end of May. It's just so hard to find a weekend that enough people have free.

I had another dream about Derek. He was being all Dereky, as usual. But also more talkative than I usually see him. I wonder why I keep dreaming about him? Maybe he's secretly harnessing his telepathic abilities.. Ah well. What a curious guy.

Oh yeah, and 38-33-38-33-38-33. Blah blah blah.

Yes, clearly I have little to say these days. It'll get better, don't worry!

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Here's Elyse's snazzy video for her presentation on the book Pilgrim by Timothy Findley:

• Elyse's Pilgrim montage (high-quality DivX AVI, 24 MB)
• Elyse's Pilgrim montage (low-quality MPEG2, 22 MB)

Download DivX here if you don't have it.

I highly recommend playing the DivX version in the DivX Player that comes installed with DivX rather than Windows Media Player, which I'm beginning to realize is perhaps one of the worst video players available.

As for the MPEG version, I'm having trouble playing that in Windows Media Player as well, although it works perfectly in all the Linux-based players I've tried.

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Doesn't Elyse look like Sandra Bullock in this picture?

Sandra	Elyse

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From a silly site:

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I was just at Elyse's all night helping her finish her film and burn it to Video CD to present to her class for first period today. I hope it played all right for her presentation. We spent so much time on that thing! But it was a lot of fun, too. There's always this bit of excitement with finishing a project in the last minute, staying up really late, and actually getting it done. I'd like to post the video here for you to see, but I'll ask have to Elyse's permission first. It's only about 10 minutes long, and very little of it is actually from our own footage. And yet it took something like 40 hours of work. But a significant chunk of that time was devoted to waiting on slow computers and fixing nasty computer problems. I can safely blame Adobe Premiere and Microsoft Windows for the vast majority of the computer problems we experienced. Thank goodness I had my trusty Linux laptop always on the ready.

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Wow. I just dreamt a whole episode of Freaks & Geeks. It was completely original. I've never dreamt new episodes of TV shows before.

It started with the freaks (Lindsay, Kim, Daniel, etc.) going to an amusement park. There was a massive roller coaster that Kim didn't want to go on, because she was afraid, but didn't admit it up front. She was saying how roller coasters were so lame. Daniel could tell she was scared. He said he wasn't concerned if it ever got stuck; the metal restraints would keep them safe if that ever happened. Kim said she did get stuck on one once, and it was a terrible experience. But Lindsay and the rest of them eventually persuaded her to go on it anyway. It was a pretty absurd ride with its insanely abrupt inclines and declines. I ended up seeing Kim finish the track; she was exhausted and looked really sick. And then the coaster began round two, the camera shot ending with Kim's head zooming downwards.

Meanwhile, the geeks (Sam, Neil, and Bill) seemed to be touring university campuses. Neil was complaining because they weren't touring the campus of the best university in the US, Elite University A (I don't know if it had a name). The others were reassuring him that this university was just as estimable, but Neil seemed to know better. I don't remember what happened after that, the scene kind of disintegrated.

At some point, Kim seems to fall off the roller coaster, but into a dream. And she lands smack on a patch of sand where her parents are taking it easy in the sun. Her mom makes some characteristic snarky comment, and Kim just gets up and characteristically sighs.

In this episode, I guess my brain decided that it was Sam and Lindsay's mom who was going out with Sam's gym teacher, Mr. Fredricks, rather than Bill's mom as it is in the real series. Sam was a little upset about it, but it wasn't as big a deal as it had been for Bill. It was causing Lindsay some concern, though. She was trying to figure out why Sam had such different facial features than her. By reading her mom's diary, she realized that Sam's father was in fact not the same as Lindsay's - it was Mr. Fredricks! Lindsay was really upset about finding that out and didn't know what to do. She couldn't talk to anyone about it. She fell asleep and had a dream. In her dream, she was in her house, watching her neighbour water her garden and a black cat creeping around her lawn. Suddenly the cat appeared in her own house in an adjacent room, but in the shape of a human, just completely covered in black fur. It was pretty scary, a little like the freaky rabbit in Donnie Darko. Lindsay tried throwing things at it. The "cat" just dodged them and said it was trying to help her; it said she should be open with Mr. Fredricks and tell him how she feels. She woke up with this thought, repeating "I should just tell him how I feel..." to herself. And she started writing frantically in her mom's diary that was still sitting in her lap. I actually saw what she was writing. Her handwriting was unusually messy. She was writing as if to Mr. Fredricks, describing the pain she felt knowing his involvement with her family.

And then I woke up. Pretty weird, eh?

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I know I haven't really been posting very much lately. I apologize to all my loyal readers. I guess I just haven't had very much to talk about.

Today I've been working on a web project for my friend Sean. It's taking longer than it should, but that's because I'm still getting up to speed with the PHP environment. I'm learning all about object-relational mappers, template engines, the limitations of PHP4 vs. PHP5, and so on. I'm not all that impressed by PHP as a language. It's very dirty. Not much forethought was put into it during design. But then, the original developers never realized how popular it was to become. PHP actually stands for "Personal Home Page." Today PHP is the most popular language for web development worldwide. So maybe if they had named it after "General-Purpose Web Application Platform" they would have gotten it right. It's not their fault, just unfortunate.

Yesterday I was editing Elyse's film for school. It's coming along nicely. We just have to put all the different parts together now.

I've planted seeds of all kinds in pots around the house. I'm hoping I'll be able to grow basil, parsley, peas, and chives indoors this summer. It's too bad our apartment faces north instead of south. Maybe Mee Ming will let me "borrow" some of her vacant yard... :)

I really like listening to Jon Brion. He either wrote or otherwise helped produce the music of some of my favourite films, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I Heart Huckabees, and Magnolia. He's actually got a really nice voice, really clear. It somehow reminds of Rufus Wainwright's voice.

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Wow. Y'all should check out the artist Andy Goldsworthy. Mee Ming just lent me a documentary about him. He creates beautiful art in wilderness settings entirely out of natural materials found on site (including his tools). Many of his creations are very temporary - a thread of poppy petals flowing down a river, a boulder wrapped in sheep's wool denuded by the wind, a chain of dandilions broken by tumbling rapids. See some samples below:


icicle star


pebbles with hole


poppy petals wrapped on boulder


cherry leaves

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Look at these spectacular feats of chainmail craftsmanship! I found them at Chainmailbasket.com.


Chainmail spherical sculpture!


Chainmail chess set!

Imagine making one of these from scratch. That person must really love chainmail!

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I had to dye my hair a few days ago. Well I didn't have to. I wanted to. Elyse needed an actor with red hair and a blue cloak for her film for school. And so I volunteered. It was quite fun. I got to sleep against a tree and dream of what could be.

I made some raisin bread. I think I may have let the sourdough starter sit a little too long before using it in the bread, because the bread tastes a bit... "sharp." Like carbonated water. I guess you could call it carbonated bread. It's good, though. It's lightly sweet with a scattering of raisins.

Meta and I are obsessed with the high school TV show Freaks & Geeks. I think we've watched almost all the episodes of its only season. You can rent episodes on DVD. Go rent them. It's surprisingly great fun.


orangey-reddish Paulski

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la calculatrice

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