So many changes! Josue and I are settling into our life in Toronto and I have to say that the city is treating us very well. So many amazing smart people working on incredibly innovative projects, with lots of ideas in the mix. The last article I posted talked about Toronto 2.0, and boy are we ever on the run. In the last half a year I have been blown away by the amount of cool internet applications from TTCUpdates to my new place of work as Community Evangelist with GetInvolved.ca. The thing that touches my heart is not just the technical talent embedded in this city, but the city's many artists and activists that are creatively forging ahead using the urban landscape as their canvas, from community mural projects to large festivals and conferences.

Not only is this city beaming with talent, it's beaming with opportunity. Collaboration is in the air, and when there is a will there is away. People are enthusiastic about supporting innovation be it social, creative, technical or otherwise. I really feel like anything is possible at this point, and that Toronto is rapidly challenging large American cities for supreme coolness. Will Toronto murals rival San Francisco's? Will our artists challenge NYC and LA as the top North American art market? Will we take over Silicon Valley with our startups, or should we leave that for Waterloo? Either way Toronto is kicking ass!

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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I’ve been on Flickr for a few years now as a Pro user, paying each year (except for that year when Danny got me a gift membership) to host my photos and support the service. I’ve never doubted that it’s a great value for my money and I’ll continue to pay for it for as long as it continues to provide value to me.

However, there are others who feel differently about it, like Colin who wonders if it’s worth supporting the service now seeing as how Yahoo! is tanking. It’s an interesting argument for sure, and he’s asking for feedback via a video:

What do you think?

Read from the bottom up:

FAIL.

I don’t usually try out Firefox themes. For ever i have used takebacktheweb.org’s mac theme, but for some reason i decided to try out Personas. Perhaps because they aren’t themes as much as they are skins… this extension really customizes Firefox’s chrome, mostly by adding a background image to it, but im pretty happy with what it does, it goes well with my menubar.
 
the "persona" you’re looking at now is called Firefox Pipes.
 
Also, the website I have open is one of my latest designs.

I have a long history of trying to use my computers as the sole entertainment center in my home (skipping a TV set completely) and I’m pretty happy with the way it’s worked out over the years, specially after FrontRow made it’s debut, but there’s still a lot of work to be done in this area. Ideally what I want is a rich full screen interface for my computer (kind of like the way game consoles let you do much more with TVs than simply watch a station), a piece of software allowing me to browse the web from my couch, to check my flickr contacts, watch streaming tv, you name it, I want to fully use my computer without sitting in front of a mouse and keyboard.

Thankfully there is a very promising solution which already lets me do much of what I want, Boxee. A fork of what originally was XMBC (Xbox Media Center) has turned out to be pretty amazing. It’s a cross platform full screen interface for your computer (or tv via apple tv) which not only hooks up to the media stored in your hard drives but it connects to the cloud and let’s you access streaming video from torrents and television networks, music from last.fm, pictures from Flickr and basically anything you can find a feed for. It doesn’t do web browsing just yet, but I’m sure it will, soon enough.

The software is free, there’s a great community around it and it keeps getting better every day. There’s not much else to say about it, it works great and is a dream come true for me and I’m sure many others.

Having attended interesting networking events recently, I completely agree with Vergel when he brings up the topic of how to properly network and shares some good tips everyone should follow if interested in really taking advantage of such meet ups.

It’s always hard knowing how to interact with people you don’t know but share common interests. I find it’s hard to really make long lasting impressions, which makes having memorable and useful business cards at hand really important.

I keep meeting people but it’s always so hard to stay in touch afterwards (except for when people are on twitter, which really should simply be a rule if you really want to build relationships and stay in touch).

I’m working on improving the way I handle myself amongst geeks like me, mostly because I really love it. The Toronto Twestival can’t come soon enough.

In a corner of his wife's office in the Centre for Social Innovation, in an old red pile on Spadina, Mark Surman is trying to find a spot quiet enough for a phone interview.

"Tonya, can I sit here or will I drive you guys nuts?" he asks above clattering keyboards.

"You'll drive us nuts, but we love you."

The space is a bit too open to afford much privacy. The centre is a buzzing hive of glass offices and wood beams with a movie-set quality to it; it's an open-concept home for dozens of social-minded groups. Tonya Surman, 39, is the centre's executive director. Her husband, also 39, is the new, Toronto-based executive director of the open-source Mozilla Foundation, the organization behind the popular Web browser Firefox.

"Open" is a hot item in Toronto these days. Mr. Surman is an evangelist for the cause of openness. It's not just free, open software like Firefox, built by a coalition of volunteers and paid staff. It's open ideas, open information, and now, open government. And activists like his wife are pushing these ideas into the realm of social innovation.

Nobody ever accused Toronto of being Silicon Valley North. But the ethos of open-ness has caught on, and it's starting to turn Toronto into a capital of a different kind.

The Surmans are in the midst of an emerging scene that's sprung from geek culture to embrace not only programmers and designers, but also wonks and activists and politicians, right up to the mayor's office. Social change and Internet ideals have gotten hitched, and the results are going to change the way Torontonians live.

If open culture is thriving in Toronto, it's in part because Toronto is a conspicuously connected place. It's not just its modest but vibrant Web-startup scene, or the fact that Google recently opened offices in Dundas Square, in the heart of downtown. The city is a perennial front runner in social-network rankings, most recently coming in eighth worldwide in a survey of Twitter users.

Read more!

This project is a working group for TakingITGlobal members who are interested in mobile communications. The aim of this working group is to share innovation in the field of youth mobile innovation, and to brainstorm projects and solutions for the TakingITGlobal platform. By sharing examples of mobile innovation, we can examine ways of building mobile tools that are compatible with the existing mobile platform. As well this group aims to tap the larger community's mobile practices by developing a Global Mobile Survey. By sharing our practices we can start to brainstorm questions, and a survey will be distributed to the over 200,000 TakingITGlobal members. From the data gathered an environmental scan will be written up to document mobile trends among TIG users and create a list of recommendations for future applications and services. Click here to get involved!

Poladroid is a great application for converting your digital photos into digital “polaroids” applying some filters and producing great results. I’ve fallen in love with the app and have used it on many of my photos, but there’s some which simply stand out because of what’s in the photo or the colours or what they represent for me as a whole; I’m sharing those with you:

Putting up wall decals in our loft:

Some clutter in our place:

Our wedding day:

Downtown Toronto:

Biking in august:

  

Rocks, lake & volcano:

Funny face:

Easter in Antigua:

Panama city from Casco Viejo:

  

This all makes me want to get an actual Polaroid camera.   

Through Twitter I found out there’s been a 6.2 degree earthquake in Costa Rica pretty close to where my family lives. They are all fine but the damage through the country has been substantial (over 100 houses with damage, landslides, 25  hurt and 2 dead). Apparently there’s been over 250 smaller earthquakes after the big one and they are still happening.

The earthquake took place near the Poas volcano and there’s an impressive Youtube video from one of the tv stations that really captures what happened (and is still happening).

There’s a lot of coverage from ticos on Twitter reporting live, which is amazing. Technology has come such a long way for this to be a reality (getting reports live from people experiencing it). I’m in the loop even though I’m nowhere close to Costa Rica right now.

The highways are collapsing with traffic making it impossible to get around the capital. There’s reports of casualties already, people are being sent home by employers and there are still smaller earthquakes happening three hours after the first one. Newspapers websites and local internet is saturated, the biggest newspaper in the country set up a live chat on their home page for people to report on and others to stay in the loop.

I’ll be keeping an eye on twitter for more reports and information.

This morning I had a hard time walking to brunch thanks to the layers of ice and slush all over Toronto. What a pain it is to do that when you’re not wearing winter boots.

Lisa and I have been on the look out for great wall decals to decorate our new loft in Toronto. We feel that they add so much to a space it’s worth the time they take to put together.
 
The best we have found so far are the designer vinyls at the magic pony:

We are looking for something more interesting though, rather than just playful cute desings.
 
We experienced issues with the last set we got (which weren’t from the magic pony), they would not really stick to the walls and actually started falling off the day we put them up.

There have been a couple of storms in the past few days which have left the city of Toronto covered in snow.
It’s everywhere and it brings all kinds of trouble, but it does make for a very pretty sight (without slush):