: If I am ever injured or otherwise debilitated to the extent that I can no longer walk or stand under my own power, please walk right past the standard wheelchairs and buy me this one – the Independence 3000. There’s a story about it in Wired News today and I saw a long news piece on TV about it a few months ago. This thing is excellent. Knowing (and having known) several people who use a chair, I would do anything to go for such an alternative.
I think a lot
of people will dismiss Steven Brill’s latest venture, Contentville. That’s a mistake though. I can’t exactly get traction on why this might work well – but there’s something in here worthy of some note. Maybe it’s just that Brill wants to grow the business carefully.
I should also mention
that it was pretty cool to show up this evening with all my gear (tower, 2 monitors, TV tuner box, Zip drive, scanner, printer, etc.) and just plug it all in and have the ADSL working – nothing to it. Props to Bell and Bell Sympatico High Speed for their service on this one. I’m not even getting killed with service charges – it just works. This 1-Meg modem thingie isn’t real ADSL in that it doesn’t offer a static IP etc., but it’s a no-brainer to set up and use. And evidently easy to transfer.
Found!
Today when packing up some stuff I found the following gems:
- My old issues of Mondo 2K, lovingly preserved. I stumbled upon the first issue I ever bought in a corner store in Prince Albert, SK, of all places.
- My copy of Time Magazine‘s ridiculous and shameful Cyberporn issue.
- a draft copy of Latvia’s official citizenship law circa 1994, pre-passage – “Confidential, not for distribution”
- The 1997 Ars Electronica catalogue.
- An early copy of Shift Magazine, before they’d moved to New York, before they started covering net culture. Back when it was still a literary journal with a round logo and 24 pages. Back then, practically every writer in Shift had gone to McGill with me.
Next Saturday, Belgium
kicks off the first game of Euro 2000 in Brussels. I’m not a huge football (aka soccer) fan but I love the big tournaments. And Montreal is a particularly great place to be a soccer fan – it really comes alive during a big event. My neighbourhood (le Plateau Mont-Royal) is a mix of artists and students – but also of tons of first-generation Canadians, just here from Portugal, South and Central America, and little Italy is just up the way a mile or so. During the last World Cup if you had walked down boul. St-Laurent, you would have noticed that every business had a TV in it – barbershops, hair salons, cafs, bars, restos – and they were all tuned to a game.
My friend Roel splits his time between here and Amsterdam and tells me that Holland is particularly dangerous this year.
