I need to take a moment to take stock of the friends I've hurt or alienated in the past few months:

• Pavel: He calls all the time, and I never call him back.
• Colin: I call to talk about computer stuff 'cause I need his help, but we never see each other outside of that.
• Chris Rhodes: Forgot to call him on his birthday... again
• Emily Jane: I book a trip to South Korea and don't bother to tell her.
• Melanie: I put a countdown on my blog marking the days 'till I move to Vancouver, not bothering to consider her feelings.
• Annie: Forgot to talk to her about how I can't make it to her wedding, instead she has to find out about it here.

There are most likely others, but as we've already seen, I'm not very good at remembering much of anything, especially these days.

I won't try to justify any of this -- I can't and I shouldn't try. I'm trying to do too many things, to be too many things to too many people and I'm failing miserably. I'm so sorry that you all are bearing the brunt of it. I will endeavour to do better, and I will make it up to all of you.

This is probably the coolest development I've seen in wind technology ever. According to their site, these new MAGLEV Wind Turbines operate in a near-frictionless environment leading to BIG gains in energy production. How big? roughly 1000 times that of traditional wind turbines. In other words, you can build one of these on a farm and save the 64,000 acres of space you would have had to use for a traditional wind farm.

If the claims are true, the potential here is really big, so they're putting one up in Arizona as a pilot project. If I hear anything new, I'll post about it here.

More information on this turbine and the technology supporting it can be found here:

• The official MAGLEV Wind Turbine site.
• TreeHugger article covering the initial MAGLEV Turbine press release
• WorldChanging's take on the technology
• Wikipedia's article on Halbach arrays

Big thanks to Margaret for finding this and sending it my way.

I just sent this to The Toronto Star. If it gets printed, I'll let you know:

It is wrong for the Toronto Police Board to claim that every aspect of its budget is vital to the longevity of this city. The CCTV camera project currently being run in the Entertainment District, Jane & Finch and Malvern is running at a cost of $2 million for the pilot alone and we have plenty of research that proves that these cameras do nothing to prevent crime. In a time when the city is hurting financially and the people do not want a reduction in officers, why is this expensive and ineffective project not on the chopping block?

Daniel Quinn
Coordinator, Cameras in Public Spaces Campaign
Toronto Public Space Committee
http://publicspace.ca/cameras/

I've booked my tickets, and the travel time looks insane, but they're booked, so I'm going. Some of this might change, if it turns out that I want to change something along the way, but for now, this is the most accurate stuff I can give you all:

If you want more detail (like flight numbers etc.) log in, 'cause I have a private post for friends & family with that kind of info.

An interesting bit to note here is that I chose to take the shorter route home (Seoul » Vancouver vs. Seoul » Singapore » Frankfurt » Vancouver) not because of the time, but because of the cost of carbon credits for the return journey. The cost of the credits for the whole longer trip was in the range of $500 -- given that I was only going to save $600 by going the long route (44026km), the shorter option (26110km) seemed only logical.

This post is no longer relevant since CBC has postponed the story to a later date. I'll probably re-post when I hear about it again.

I've not been posting a lot lately, mostly because I'm just stupid-busy. I'd forgotten what an incredible hassle it was to move my life 4349.9 kilometres away in the first place and doing it again is generally un-fun.

For starters, the cost of moving is ridiculous. Most moving companies will only accept a minimum of 1000lbs (they charge by weight, not time), and since I live in a bachelor, that's typically an aweful lot of extra space. On top of that, I have to pay for storage (since I'll be in Europe for a couple months before getting to Vancouver) and insurance, and movers. My latest quote was $2429.54!

Clearly, I have to keep looking, but time is running short.

Once I have a mover, I need a moving day, and since I'm not likely to leave Toronto 'till September 11th (yes, you read right, it is the cheapest day to fly), I could be living at Melanie's out of a suitcase for nearly a month.

Then there's the flight itself, I've been working with a travel agent and the routing is insane. I want to visit these places:

• Stockholm
• Berlin
• Amsterdam
• Geneva
• Prague
• Rome/Vatican City
• Seoul

So one would imagine that the cheapest (and most efficient) option would be:

• Toronto » Stockholm
• Rome » Seoul
• Seoul » Vancouver

But sadly, because of the way the airlines work, not only do I have to use Frankfurt as my entrance & exit for Europe, and route my Seoul trip through Singapore, but in order to get home, I have to fly back through Europe!

• Toronto » Frankfurt
• Frankfurt » Singapore
• Singapore » Seoul
• Seoul » Singapore
• Singapore » Frankfurt
• Frankfurt » Vancouver

This trip is about $3500. I can't be the only one that thinks this is insane. Obviously, I can get a direct Seoul » Vancouver flight, but that costs roughly $600 more and a RoundTheWorld pass is nearly $5000.

I may still take the more direct route, if only because it means I'm not in transit for 26hours on my last leg, not to mention the environmental implications of adding so many more kilometres to my trip. I'll also be buying carbon credits, but somehow, that doesn't make me feel any better about it all.

I'm also leaving my life in Toronto, of which Melanie is a big part. She's going through a rough spot in her life lately, and sometimes I feel like I'm not helping enough because of all of these other complications, not to mention the fact that I'm likely to make it worse when I leave. Even though we both knew this was coming the day we met, it doesn't make things any easier.

I have responsibilities as coordinator for the Camaras in Public Spaces campaign of the TPSC. I have yet to find a suitable replacement. We have a big event coming up for August, but someone will have to be here in October to field questions from the press when the pilot project is over and the one I had in mind to replace me doesn't appear interested. Stephen has expressed interest, but he's always got so much on his plate, I wanted to bring in some fresh blood to run the show, but I'm not sure who that would be at the moment.

Then there's my job. I don't have one lined up in Vancouver just yet, though my current boss has been kind enough to look into available positions with Riptown's Vancouver office. Whether there's a spot for me there or not, I'm not too worried about finding work in what I understand to be a competitive market, but that spectre of joblessness is still pretty scary.

Lastly, I've started re-coding my site using the new techniques I've been learning at my current job. The new site (still in development) will use a true MVC system and include nifty stuff like Ajax and JQuery as well as a Modified Preorder Tree Traversal algorithm for storing the hierarchical sorting structures in my Imager. This is mostly in preparation for when I'm in Europe and want to remote-blog and upload images -- I want the site to be better equipped.

So that's all for now. Wish me luck I suppose. If my heart & brain don't implode from the pressure, those of you reading this from Vancouver should see me in a few months.

It's now roughly 1:30 am and I've just finished the series. Really, really, a stunning series to watch. More pretty than plot though, I'm afraid I found the storyline kinda hackish and with the lead character played by a not-too-sharp emo-kid, the series had it's frustrating moments.

However, shots like this one were just too good to forget. The artists behind Fate / stay night really are quite amazing.

If you'd like to see more shots like this one, just head over to BayImg. It's where I found out about the series to begin with.

Like one of those dumb memes that float from blog to blog, but with a geek twist. Found on iMarc.net via The Codist, here's a list of stuff I use for web development, including, (among other projects) this site:

• Gentoo Linux
• Xorg
• KDE w/ Compiz (shiny!)
• Konsole
• Kate
• Konqueror
• WindowsXP (for Photoshop)
• Photoshop (why won't it ever work in wine?)

Found on IllegalSigns.ca in a post called "Sorry Girls", Rami writes:

At Bloor and St. George, at the entrance of Canada’s largest university, on the wall of a building owned by the City of Toronto, Titan Outdoor has re-erected an illegal sign that the City of Toronto ordered removed on multiple occasions.

Titan Outdoor should be ashamed, as should the people who put that sign up, but most importantly, City Hall should be ashamed for allowing this sort of shit to happen.

What else do you do when you're couch-ridden but surf the internet looking for new and interesting stuff? Last week I found myself cruising through BayImg, a copyright-free anonymous image hosting provider. Naturally, it was originally saturated with porn, but now that the general public has started using it, it's got lots of interesting stuff in there. I looked around in the anime tagged stuff and found some shots of Fate / stay night, an anime series that looks a lot like Chrno Crusade.

I then turned to my good and dear friend TorrentSpy, found a 5GB collection of the series, logged into my fileserver, started a download and forgot about it... until last night.

Exhausted from the weekend, I looked through my computer for something to passively entertain me and I was met with Fate / stay night. I watched 11 of the 24 episodes in one shot. It's both wonderfully written and absolutely stunning to look at... I only hope it continues in this fashion.