Now that I’m feeding my dents into my Asides category, if you’re a feed reader you might not want to see that junk, especially if you already saw it at identica, so if you want you can subscribe to this feed instead, which excludes the Asides category.
Montreal, the city of festivals, puts on a festival for the kids every year at Parc Jean Drapeau. This year we decided to take Aidan.
My first piece of advice for people thinking about going (next year, it’s over for this year) is to arrive early, and leave early. We arrived around 10am and it was fairly quiet, but when we left at 1:30 there were hoards of people in the park with many more arriving.
My second piece of advice, if you have a small child, is to take a stroller; I’m glad we did. The festival is huge, covering most of the park, so there is much walking involved. We started in the area for toddlers, where Aidan took a foot-powered car for a drive around a “mail route” to deliver a piece of “mail” in the appropriate “mailbox”. Being the mailman has been a favourite game of his for a while so he liked that a lot.
Then we found a place where teenage girls were constructing elaborate buildings from cardboard boxes which were then being randomly painted by small children. Aidan, in oversized paint shirt, spent a creative 20 minutes painting a box in red, blue and orange.
After washing the paint off Aidan’s face we headed over to the “Petit Ferme” where we met hungry goats, a sleeping cow, dozing sheep, chickens, bunnies and a slightly pissed off llama. We also sat in a big blue tractor for a few precious seconds before it was the next kid’s turn.
On the way to find lunch we had to stop at the “Ile de sand” so Aidan could dig for a while, even though the organisers had inexplicably failed to provide digging implements. It was the biggest, and probably cleanest sandbox he’d ever been in though.
We were intrigued about lunch because the guide told us it was international fare, including food from Brazil, Mexico, Europe, Africa, Quebec and Haiti. A lot of the food turned out to be variations on hot-dogs, like the “afrodog” and the “eurodog”, although the Haiti tent did have grilled pork and chicken, and the Mexico tent was selling Mangos made to look like flowers. We had eurodogs, washed down with iced tea and followed up with an ice cream.
We had one more stop to make before we took the now slightly cranky boy home. We’d promised him a fire engine, so we went looking for the fire engine, which happened to be right on the other side of the park. Eventually we found it, and Aidan sat in the back seat and both front seats, and got to try on a fireman’s helmet before the fireman noticed and took it away.
After I dented that we were going to the festival, he warned me to watch out for pedophiles, but I was actually very impressed with the number of police and security people in attendance, not to mention the volunteers taking care of lost children and of the general running of the event. The distinctive volunteer t-shirts could be seen everywhere and we never felt unsafe or saw any dodgy looking men. Well, there was that one guy, but he turned out to be one of the official clowns…
Montreal has a vibrant tech community, most notably in the gaming and multimedia arenas, but also in the world of internet startups. There is also a heavy open-source influence, probably fuelled by the desire of many Montrealers for intellectual freedom and freedom of expression. I’d like to showcase a few of the Montreal based projects I’ve come across:
Identica is fairly new on the scene, only released by Evan Prodromou for public consumption a couple of weeks ago, but it has received a lot of attention. It is a micro-blogging platform similar to Twitter, except it is completely open, both from a code perspective and a data perspective. It is built from the open source Laconi.ca software project which allows anyone to have their own server with complete inter-operability between servers. All the public data at Identica are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. As the FAQ states:
The goal here is autonomy — you deserve the right to manage your own on-line presence. If you don’t like how Identi.ca works, you can take your data and the source code and set up your own server (or move your account to another one).
My Identica profile is here.
Librivox has been around for a while, since 2005 in fact. It is the brainchild of Hugh McGuire, a Montreal based writer and web developer. Librivox aims to provide all books in the public domain in audio format. Books are read by volunteers and the resulting audio files are published on the Librivox site. Librivox is non-profit and ad-free, and the recordings are all in the public domain.
I heard about Praized fairly early on in its development because one of the developers used to do the job I’m now doing. Praized is a local search tool with a twist. It allows users to “Praize” or “Raze” businesses as well as comment on them and add them as Favourites. Because it’s a Montreal based project a lot of the top Praized businesses are in Montreal, but the site has listings for all of North America and I expect it to grow and evolve as more people start Praizing. I also hope they add listings for other countries. As well as the main site there is also a Facebook application, plugins for WordPress and Movable Type, and a published API.
My Praized profile is here.
Finally, a handy resource for keeping up to date on the Montreal tech scene is the Montreal Tech Watch blog, which is in the process of re-inventing itself but is basically a central hub for all things tech/startup related in Montreal.
First, a message to Damon Hill: Please stop trying to commentate. Seriously.
Now onto the race. I don’t remember ever feeling as badly for a driver as I did for Felipe Massa; what a devastating way to end what was a superb drive. When he overtook Lewis on lap one I figured he must have 4 or 5 laps less fuel on board to make such an audacious move, but no, he only came into the pits one lap before Hamilton. He kept Hamilton a few seconds behind him until Lewis suffered a puncture and slipped back. After that the race belonged to Felipe, until three laps from the end when his engine gave up. Cruel, cruel bad luck at the worst possible time. It was tragic to see him trudge disconsolately back to the pits.
Massa’s misfortune was Kovy’s fortune though, as he went on to win his first Grand Prix. It’s about time he had a win, but I don’t think he deserved this one. In fact the only person on the podium who truly deserved his position was Timo Glock, who claimed second place on pure merit, a stunning drive in a far from perfect car. Kimi in third place got lucky with Hamilton’s puncture and Massa’s retirement. He was incredibly fast for the last half of the race but appeared to be half asleep for the first half.
The excitement continues in this F1 season, with even Hungary, usually a processional circuit, giving us an enjoyable race. I’m really looking forward to the next race in Valencia on a brand new street circuit.