Categories
It Happened to Me Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Scenes from a Chinese Mall

View of a hallway with stalls in the Pacific Mall, Toronto, Canada

When Lisa came down to Accordion City for a visit, we — that’s me, Wendy, Deenster, Chris, Rich and Elana — took her to “North America’s Largest Indoor Asian Mall”, the Pacific Mall for Dim Sum and other goodies that are a bit hard-to-find in her home city of Tel Aviv. After a delicious and filling lunch, we cruised the stalls and shops that make up the bulk of the mall, where I captured this photo of one of the more quiet zones. If you’re looking for a change of pace from your standard shopping, and especially if you’re looking for Asian ingredients, Chinese food, Pocky, computer parts, really good hair gel (it’s a major Asian concern), a worthy opponent for Dance Dance Revolution, computer stuff and anime, the Pacific Mall might just be what you seek.

By the way, if you’re looking for Lisa’ blog, On the Face, it’s moved — I’ve set her up with a Blogware blog and she’s now at http://ontheface.blogware.com. Same Canadian-born, New York-seasoned journalist-living-in-Israel action, newer, better Blogware-based location.

Categories
In the News

Here Comes the Wikipimpslap (or: Recent Edits to Sam Bulte’s Entry)

A user going by the name Nick Dillinger made the first edit to Recording Industry puppet / Parkdale-High Park MP Sarmite “Sam” Bulte’s Wikipedia entry (click here to see the specific revision), shown below. The change, a single line, has been highlighted:

She also stands for draconian copyright laws and recieves heavy contributions from the Canadian Entertainment industries.

Could someone with a little more time than I do right now do some editing and simply state the facts? Although I agree with th that last line and also find it amusing, I believe that it breaks Wikipedia’s “neutral point of view” rule.

Categories
Geek In the News

Watch Out for the Sober.Z Worm

(I posted this to The Farm and Tucows Developer — I also thought I’d post the warning on this blog as well — Joey)


“Nazis.

I hate these guys.” — Indiana Jones

The

Sober.Z

worm is a worm that runs on the Windows platform. It began

infecting computers worldwide back in November and goes by a number of

names:

  • W32.Sober.X@mm
  • W32/Sober@MM!M681
  • WORM_SOBER.AG
  • W32/Sober-X
  • W32/Sober-Y
  • W32/Sober-Z

The

source code for the Sober.Z worm suggests that it

will launch another

attack on January

5th and 6th to coincide with the 87th anniversary of the

founding of the Nazi Party. On these dates, PCs infected with the virus

will be instructed to connect to numerous servers to download malicious

code that will likely send out German and English language email hate

messages.

Tucows encourages network administrators to

protect themselves by blocking domains believed to host the malicious

code, which

are:

  • http://people.freenet.de/
  • http://scifi.pages.at/
  • http://home.pages.at/
  • http://free.pages.at/
  • http://home.arcor.de/

Be

sure to tell people you know — especially if they aren’t tech-savvy —

not to open suspicious email, even if it appears

to be from a sender they know.

For more details on

the Sober.Z worm, consult these

sites:

Categories
It Happened to Me

The Webcam Appears to be Operational


A still capture from the webcam.

Excellent. It’s all falling into place…

Categories
In the News

An Appeal to My Fellow Voters in the High Park/Parkdale Riding

I do so love it when I can repurpose a picture!

Yes, it’s time to unseat Sarmite “Sam” Bulte, who’s in the pocket of the entertainment industry, who think that it’s our duty to “gulp down products and crap out cash”, as Doc Searls puts it.

More on this later. In the meantime, I’ll let two different sites with pretty much diametrically-opposed politics — BoingBoing and The Western Standard’s Shotgun blog — and Michael Geist (lawyer and Canada Research Chair in Internet & E-commerce Law) do the ‘splaining.

Categories
In the News It Happened to Me

Oh, NOW He Promises to Drop the Fee

Barely hours after we paid the immigration processing fee of CDN$975 (US$847 at today’s rates), Prime Minister Paul Martin announces that if elected, the Liberals will drop the fee. Wendy and I had better get the full-on tasting menu dinner (with wine pairings, natch) for four at Susur’s if you win, Martin!

Some reality checks:

  • Oh, quit yer whinin’. If you’re going to immigrate here, the least you can do is cover the administrative costs of doing so. Perhaps some system can be put in place so that young-but-capable immigrants from countries with bad economies can defer the payment, but really, if you’re going to ride the Canadian Roller Coaster, you’ve got to pony up.
  • The fee was introduced as part of a 1995 budget (here’s the “Budget in Brief”, PDF version; here’s the HTML version) drawn up by the Finance Minister at the time, who just happened to be…Paul Martin.

But hey, I could throw a good party with that $975…

Categories
Music

Music for the Year of the Dog

Year of the Dog

January 29th marks the start of what is the Year of the Dog (if you want to get pedantic, it’s the year of the Yang Red Fire Dog) in the Chinese calendar. I ususally throw a Chinese New Year’s party, party because it’s fun, and partly because very few people do, and it means that there’s little risk for scheduling conflicts (unlike Valentine’s Day or Christmas). I was thinking of putting together an iTunes playlist of dog-related songs (the shizzled-up variants “dawg” and “dogg” are acceptable), and here’s what I came up with:

Did I miss any? Let me know in the comments!