Tomorrow night — Thursday May 13th — the Greater Toronto Area Bloggers will be having a pub night at the usual haunt: Paupers Pub. We’ll be celebrating that fact that spring has come to Accordion City as well as special LA guest blogger Kristine’s visit.
Pauper’s Pub is located at 539 Bloor Street West, deep in the heart of The Annex, a short walk from Bathurst subway station. We’ll be hanging out on the second floor from 7 p.m. onward.
Okay, Blogware users and wanna-users, here’s a new feature that made it into the 1.0 cut for Blogware. If you have a Blogware blog, open the Blogware Control Panel in a new browser window and log in. Once you’ve logged in, click on the Settings tab of the Navigation Bar.
Now take a look near the lower right-hand corner of the page, near the
bottom of the Options sidebar. Notice a new checkbox — the one marked Enable Slideshows?
That checkbox, Gentle Reader, is the gateway to photoblogging coolness.
Checking that checkbox enables Blogware’s new slideshow feature,
which turns your blog’s photo albums into a slideshow with just a click.
Let’s take a look at a photo album I recently posted: one featuring my
photos of a billboard near Queen Street West. Here’s what the photo
album’s main page look like.
Notice the icon above the photos? That’s the slideshow icon. Clicking
that icon opens a new window containing the slideshow. The slideshow
starts, displaying all the photos in the album (click the photo below to start the slideshow):
The controls along the top of the window control slideshow playback.
Each photo in the album is shown for a short period of time (which can
be set to 1, 3 or 10 seconds), after which the next photo is shown.
Once the slideshow finishes showing the last photo in the album, it
starts over from the beginning.
We know that the slideshow works fine for the following browsers:
To whet your appetite for Blogware’s slideshows, here are some direct links to some of my own:
The tamer photos (safe for work, gah-ron-teed)
The saucier photos (some images might not be so safe for work)
I’m going to have a lot of fun with this new feature.
I’ve been writing about ailing relatives for the past little while. How
’bout a couple who are hale and hearty? Ladies and gentlemen, here are
my nephews, Nicholas and Aidan!
Nico and Aidan. Awwwwwww.
They’re cute fellas, and they’re always happy to hang out with Uncle Joey.
Here are a couple of videos from last Saturday, a lovely evening spent with some GTABlogger buddies — Jeremy, Graig, Carla, Paul and special guest blogger from LA, Kristine — at the superfabulous and full-of-cute-well-dressed-women Drake Hotel.
The first one features Jeremy enjoying a glass of Couvoisier that Kristine had bought him. I’m the other voice in the video.
Livin’ in a rap video. Jeremy gets the Courvoisier passed to him.
[ Click on the picture to see the video — 1.2 MB Quicktime ]
Jeremy later got to witness the power of the accordion. One of the
group of women (seen at the end of his video) asked me to take their
picture. My birthday senses were tingling, so I asked if one of them
was celebrating a birthday. They pointed out the birthday girl, I
strapped on the squeezebox, played Happy Birthday and won more converts to the Accordion Cause.
There’s nothing like having a hand-powered machine that can turn music into free drinks, let me tell you.
Teeth-clenchingly hip. Graig tells us how much he loves the Drake Hotel.
[ Click on the picture to see the video — 1.0 MB Quicktime ]
Speaking of those turds on toast known as the Unicorns, a little Googling found me an article on the band in the upcoming issue of Macleans magazine. Here’s a snippet that explains everything:
The trio’s antics have only added to their
growing legend. They hired homeless people as fill-ins for a couple of
shows and claim to have eaten magic mushrooms in preparation for an
interview with the New York Times. Topping things off, the
bandmates gave away all of their possessions last August and moved into
an RV (which has since died) to live a transient beatnik-style
existence. They still don’t have a fixed address. “The nights are
cold,” says Diamonds, during a recent 3 a.m. interview in the parking
lot of a 7-Eleven in Toronto, “but you get to walk around a lot.”
Despite inhabiting a twisted fantasy world, the Unicorns have a pretty
good idea why things are going so well. “Girls start with horses, then
get into unicorns, and then nice boys,” says Tambeur. “We like to think
of ourselves as halfway between horses and nice boys.”
Halfway between horses and nice boys — yeah…on the IQ scale or the evolutionary ladder!
Report On Business Television anchor Mike Hainsworth, whom I know from my days at OpenCola, where he did some sysadmin consulting.
[Click the photo to see the interview.]
Boss Ross, whom I know from this place where I hang out for hours every weekday.
[Click the photo to see the interview.]
Boss Ross’ interview on Report On Business Television in which he talks
about the launch of Blogware (mentioned in this entry) is available online [Windows Media Player reuqired]. Check it out, and keep and eye on the Blogware site, where I’ll be talking about some cool features that put us ahead of the blog tool pack.
And hey, don’t take my word for it; Suw Charman thinks pretty highly of Blogware too.
[ Update:
Yup, I’m now using a small image from my own file system rather Ross’
mondo huge 2500-by-3600 pixel image. He’s a great boss, but I have no
desire to see his tongue in such striking detail again. I’m going to
pound back Crown Royal all week in an attempt to kill the brain cells
storing that image, believe you me. ]
Boss Ross: The man just oozes authoritah! Oozes, I say!
If you have access to the Report
on Business TV channel, tune in this afternoon at 2:13. Boss Ross will be on Danielle Bochove’s
show, Business
Day, to talk about the best damned blogging tool there
is.
Here’s a pic of my friend and former bandmate, Lederhosen Lucil, wowing the audiences with her Yamaha Portasound keyboard wizardry and her songs about boyfriends, food allergies and candy:
This was taken at the fomerly-fleabag-now-fabulous Drake Hotel on West
Queen West last Saturday night, where I caught the show with my
housemate Paul and friends Jeremy, Carla, Graig and special guest blogger Kristine. The occasion was CBC Radio 3’s Connect the Dots tour, a showcase of indie art and indie rock and fairly indie settings across Canada.
To the Unicorns: I want those thirty minutes of my life back, you talentless turds on toast. You guys aren’t even worthy of the witless slash fiction written about you. Taste my future generations, you poseurs.
Nick informed me the
next day that he and his friend saw the drummer after the show vomiting
effluently, to which I say “good”. The taste of his vomit will be
sweet ambrosia next to the effluent bile I will unleash upon him should the little
future gas-pumper be hapless enough to cross my path.