Assessors, Navigators and Aggregators

One of the chief pleasures of the internet is the serendipitous discovery of sights and facts previously unseen. A few of the tools I use to do this, mostly on my iPad, are Stumbleupon, Flipboard, Instapaper, Pocket, and Zite. (Hmm, see the trend? Face-book, Stumble-upon, Flip-board, Insta-paper, You-Tube...there must be a name for this enthusiasm for naming your company/app with two evocative words instead of the good old brands like Ford, Black's, Kodak, GM, IBM...but this is tangential to my point, sorry).

Stumbleupon and Flipboard both operate on similar principles: You tell the app what kinds of things interest you and then, in the case of Stumble, you are sent on a corkscrew ride through the interweb. Things are a little hit-and-miss with Stumbleupon but the chances of happening upon something truly interesting keeps me coming back. Stumbleupon also asks you to give a thumbs up or down for any given site you are taken to and subsequently refines it's searches to better suit your tastes. So less stumbling as it "learns" you. A terrific time waster.

Flipboard also asks for your interests and then presents sites and articles that it figures you will be interested in reading. Instead of taking you to a specific site, Flipboard shows you a number of sites in the form of a magazine cover. If something interests you, you click and read and then return to the app to peruse more pages. Yet another app, which I don't often use, is Zite: highly recommended by various sites as an aggregator of your personal interests. Zite works pretty much in the same way as Flipboard, including presenting material in a magazine format. It would be only a matter of taste as to which app you choose to use. Oh, heck! Why not live on the edge and download both?

InstaPaper is one of my favourites. It is an aggregator of long articles from such esteemed online and hard copy publications, inter-alia, as the NY Times, New Yorker, The Boston Review, GQ, Vanity Fair, Foreign Affairs and The American Scholar. It is a great app to use if you take transit as it will display articles in their entirety even when your device is not online.

InstaPaper is related closely to a web site known as Pocket, formerly known as Read it Later. This is a service which will save articles/pages from anywhere on the web with one click, allowing you to come back to these saved articles at a later time when you find time to read them. I guess this assumes that you are not going to be rooting around the web all the time, but will take time and read the articles you have archived. My relationship with Pocket is sometimes hot and sometimes cold.

 

Posted with Blogsy

My Bucket List

I have begun, at this later stage in my life, to make a list of things and places I absolutely must see or do, or have done to me. So here goes:

1. Hike the Grand Canyon
2. Visit Gujurath, India with my friend, Anwar and make a documentary of it.
3. Safari through the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Parks with my family and take a side trip to show them the town in which I was born. You will spot my town right next to the Lake Nyasa label -- Songea. And end the trip on the island of Zanzibar.
4. 
5. See the Amazon by cruising down the river in guided tour boat. (I know my limits and I don't want some exotic worm getting in my eye and working it's way to my brain to reproduce.)
6. Ride a Segway for hours on end in Miami Beach or Toronto. Totally doable.
7. Dive in Thailand at the Richelieu Rock Dive Site.
8. Go for a pilgrimmage to Mecca, Saudia Arabia.
9. Visit Jamaica with my family for an all inclusive week-long holiday so the kids can see where mom was born. Again, easy-peasy!
10. Pursue photography and writing. More.
11. Read more. More.
12. To not worry so much what people think about what I do and say....fuck yeah!
13. Quit smoking.
14. Debunk any debunkers!
15. To not use so many commas in my writing.
16. See a great pianist play the Brandenburg Concertos in their entirety.

I will periodically revise and add to this list.

 

Posted with Blogsy

At The Cottage - Pics

We spent five days at a place called Lazy Acre Cottages.  A place on Desert Lake, which is itself just a trailer resort anchored by a general store, a playground and a half-moon shaped beach which at it's widest is only 4 metres wide.

The cottage was recommended by one of our neighbours and, to be frank, was a disappointment.
Nevertheless, here are the pics of, at least the kids enjoying themselves, fishing, catching frogs, over-dosing on sugar (there was no TV at the cottage) and swimming.

In Response to an E-Mail Entitled: Why Are the Jews so Powerful?

Sunni or Shia, Allawi or Hazari, Zaidi, Ismaili, Ithnasheri, Bhora, Khoja, Dawoodi-Bhora (a sub-sect of Ismailism)....why? Honestly, just because. There is not one iota of difference between these people and their continued need to split off from the original faith except that it is human nature. And the original faith was itself a splitting off from the religious ideas present at the time of the Revelations.

So when Muslims, even amongst themselves, endlessly split away from each other, it is not surprising that people (all people) are happy to pounce on and denounce, at various times, the Jews, Italians, Japanese, etc. It is just a bigger way to differentiate oneself from the OTHER. Sometimes the OTHER is a Muslim, at other times a Jew.

It is best at these times to look at yourself and realize that most things in life exist on a continuum. A series of decisions or compromises that suit the individual at one point in time. Everything else follows the individual's decision: Including the need to build a theory which will then support our own selfish decisions.

So whether you are a Twelver, a Fiver or a Sevener, it makes not a bit of difference in the greater scheme of things. Born in Wales, Scotland, England; Dublin, London, Devonshire? Honestly, who the heck cares? And can you really spot the difference on the Don Valley Parkway, returning from work on a Friday at 6 p.m.?

 

Posted with Blogsy

Trip to Kingston, Ontario

Seth and Tarah at Chapters looking for a book to read at the cottage. We weren't in Kingston at this point but since it's my blog, I've taken some liberties with the chronology.

While we were busy getting bored at the cottage, we decided to go into Kingston to find some grub. Ended up eating at a Thai food restaurant called Mango. Marsh and I last ate at this place about two years ago. The food and service were every bit as good as that first time.

Seth pleading his case to mom.

Marsh had the Tom Yum soup....apparently, it's really easy to make this truly delicious dish.




The mango salad and chicken satay were delicious.



Later, we took a walk down, the appropriately named, Princess Street and found a store named Tara Natural Foods. The owner was putting away some wooden pallets in his truck and watched me taking pictures of Tarah in front of his store. I told him the reason why we thought his store worthy of a picture; he promptly said, "I should get her a treat. Wait here a minute, I'll get her a treat." And then returned with some popsicles for both Tarah and Seth. So nice to have these things happen out of the blue.



Aside from horse drawn carriages, handing in a wallet which Seth found to a police officer, we also came across this beautiful truck outside a restaurant by the waterfront.

Posted with Blogsy