http://ambientvector.com/suthakamal/shakiro.3gp
You might need QuickTime to play this (it's a .3gp file from my
Treo). Anyway, it's a video clip from the weekly Tam Tams event at
Mount Royal in Montreal. It's brilliant. One particular individual is
really having a blast dancing... and the only apt name for him...
was... well... Shakiro.
Enjoy.
So, Mike and I went to a Royksopp concert last night, where Annie
opened the show. On the way there, we spent much time trying to find
the Norwegian translation of "Will you marry me?" and yet all our
effort was for naught, as Mike never DID end up proposing to Annie.
Oh well.
Royksopp was also pretty good... definitely a different (and much
higher energy) experience hearing them live vs on disc... and we had
a great time with some of the Royksopp fans in the audience... so no
complaints on the whole... well, except for the guy in front of us
who was prancing about as though he was at some sort of mid-90's
rave... jerk. :)
Okay, so more about the Montreal trip (I told you it'd take a while)...
We're sitting at Globe (review below :-) ... when the guy next to us
stands up and stars off with "Excuse me... excuse me... ladies and
gentlemen." Now at this point, the guy's about 5 inches away from me,
and the urge to put my elbow in his abdomen is palpable... but I
resist... "8 months ago, I met the girl of my dreams..." (Cue freaked
out, nervous as all hell, in front of 200 strangers, girlfriend)...
Anyway, she says yes, and the guy's heart rate drops to near-
normal... but here's the question: Why do people do this? It's not
all that romantic... it's actually kind of idiotic... no? Am I just
jaded?
Anyway... Globe. Okay, so we get there... we have reservations for 9.
We're there 5 mns early. Our table's not ready, so we wait at the
bar... no big deal. As we stand there, a table's being set, right
next to where we stand. 15 minutes go by... finally someone comes
over and seats us at the table... the SAME table that was set 10 mns
ago! WTF!?
Now, our waitress... friendly, beautiful, super helpful, and just
generally a pleasure to have. Thank you Julie :) The rest of the
experience? Overpriced food, that ... well, wasn't all that good. The
best part was my friend looking over at me, visibly disappointed...
"Dude, we could do better than this." He wasn't wrong.
Oh, and Julie aside, the service was horrifically bad... with staff
literally snatching plates away before we were finished with them. I
mean, REALLY bizarre stuff
It's clearly a see and be seen place. Will I be back? Perhaps... I
doubt it... Montreal's got a tonne of restaurants with great food,
service, and ambiance, without the pretension... (btw, if you have
the chance, hit L'Express on Saint-Denis... fantastic French bistro
with great food and wine.)
Spotlight acting a bit slow on your mac? Le sigh. Try:
sudo mdutil -E VOLUME
(note that this could be /MacintoshHD as well as /Users/homedir if
you have filevault on)... it blows away the spotlight index, and OS X
automatically starts rebuilding it (which can take a while, so you
might want to do this at night)... anyway, Spotlight's nice and
snappy afterward. If only it could do this self-optimization in the
background itself.
One more on our quest to build the best team on the planet... Terry,
a Ph.D. candidate studying Artificial Intelligence has just joined
the team. He'll be responsible for constantly improving (and making a
few quantum jumps for) our search, modeling and analytics tools.
Welcome aboard Terry!
Finally saw it today on a friend's laptop. Looks neat. Task launcher stuff is pretty cool... But we noticed the search didn't always find all docs, the browser interface is somewhat slow, and all in all it just misses the clean, elegant feel that Spotlight has... Though I'm sure they're working on it!
Just got home from the gym (yeah, long day)... About 20 minutes into my spin, the gentleman next to me started a conversation (a damn good thing since I had 70 minutes more to go, and 90 minutes on a spinning bike is pretty mind-numbing). Anyway, it turns out that he's the executive director of the country's largest anti-tobacco organization... The org responsible for a whole number of lawsuits against the industry, they even design some of those anti-smoking ads that are on the cigarette boxes themselves. Cool guy.
Anyway, I remarked that Montrealers seem to be smoking like its going out of style (a real culture/lung shock for someone from Toronto)... And much to my amazement it turns out that Quebec is tired of being the smoke capital of the country and by June 06, the province will be entirely smoke free. Woot! Go Quebec... Now get started with that tech cluster already!
Wow... all pop-iness aside, Michelle Williams has a fantastic voice.
Her version of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" on the Gap album
isn't to be missed.
Okay, so all my hipster friends are going to disown me...
1) I bought some jeans at the Gap today. (well, maybe that's not so
bad).
2) Because I bought the jeans, I got the "Gap Favourite Songs" CD...
and man... it's actually pretty good! Alanis' version of Seal's Crazy
is really good, and Joss Stone's version of God Only Knows should
bring a smile to anyone's face. Wow... now while I initially thought
the whole CD-giveaway was a pretty kitschy promo.... but I've changed
my mind... Well done. Now if only Ambient could find some great
musicians ... maybe Mike will do a Chrismukkah (sp?) rendition for
our CD?
grumble... Posting via email w/ accents doesn't seem to work... I meant MontrEal... :)
So I took my first mini vacation in ages this weekend... More about it later (other posts... Crazy week)... But first: Montr�al, please build a tech cluster, and please build your CS/Eng program as strong as UToronto and Waterloo... because, if that were there, I'm sure I (and many others) would move in a heartbeat. What a fantastic city... (its amazing what a perspective you get when you visit for the sake of visiting, and not just on business). Wow... J'aime *vraiment* Montr�al...
Okay, so someone in the film/entertainment biz told me that the Treo 650 is the phone that all the stars have... But man, with the Film Festival here in Toronto, I don't think I've ever seen so many at once. Cool. :)
