Spent the morning at City Hall, where mayor and council – all but one, namely Councillor Geoff Young – voted in favor of replacing the Johnson Street Bridge. Thank-you, Geoff Young, for throwing some well-placed questions out there, not that it made any difference to your colleagues. Anyway, a few notes: Less than 30 minutes […]
Opinion Polls: Getting the results you want is the title of a Yes Minister sketch (click here to view). From Wikipedia: Set principally in the private office of a British government cabinet minister in the (fictional) Department for Administrative Affairs in Whitehall (the sequel was set in the Prime Minister’s offices at 10 Downing Street), […]
For those who missed the first two PechaKucha Night Victoria events, here’s your chance to catch volume 3 this Thursday, August 12, 7:30pm at the Victoria Event Ctr., 1415 Broad St (doors open at 7pm). Eliza Yon (who, together with Aleya Samji of Anonymous Advertising and Amanda Smith of the Victoria Events Centre, has been […]
A couple of days ago I came across a link for Bing Travel‘s Walking Tours in Great Cities, which features 15 great world cities. The series starts with Chicago, and for some reason I didn’t (still don’t) see a list of all the cities (nor can I find a starter page). So it wasn’t until […]
David Harvey’s Urban Manifesto: Down With Suburbia; Down With Bloomberg’s New York | Fast Company David Harvey derides the NYC for being suburbanized: QUOTE “New York? The whole damn place has been turned into a suburb,” sneered David Harvey, startling a roomful of New Yorkers who prided themselves on the same things he derided: the […]
Since I’m fuming in a conversation over on Facebook about the City of Victoria’s Department of Engineering (which seems to me benighted), I was reminded of my 2007 article, Biophilic Design: Taking Love to the Street (the link goes to the Scribd version). Not to sound too much like I’m tooting my own horn, but […]
Everybody is talking /writing) about pot, including pot in Canada, it seems. Nothing new, really: every Canadian (especially every British Columbian) knows it’s a resource and a big economic contributor. Now a recent Guardian article by Douglas Haddow, Marijuana may cause Canada’s economic comedown, prompted even our local press conglomerate to publish a pretty good […]
It’s a mystery. Something that wasn’t, started working again. Sometime in the early months of 2006, my iBook finally completely and utterly fritzed on me: the hard drive died. It wouldn’t, nay: it couldn’t boot up. Nothing but odd click-click-click sounds emanated from the machine. I had already had lots and lots of problems with […]
A while back, I read A. Alfred Taubman’s Threshold Resistance: The Extraordinary Career of a Luxury Retailing Pioneer. As I noted on my LinkedIn Reading List Update, An unusual book by an unusual individual: A. Alfred Taubman is a real estate developer (who has been accused of “malling” America); an art collector; former part-owner of […]