I’ve recently come across two items I’d like to share with our readers:

1. Patricia Cano, a Latin singer from Sudbury (one of Ori’s ancestral homes). I heard Patricia’s tune “Dança da Solidão” on CBC as I was driving home from work one day, and I liked it so much that I decided to buy her CD, This Is The New World. Patricia switches effortlessly between languages and idioms, as you can hear from the samples on her website, and the overall effect is very pleasant – much more Iberian than Siberian.

2. The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, an online science fiction novel by Roger Williams. I’ll start with a warning that it’s definitely rated “R,” but its occasional graphic nature didn’t get in the way of my enjoyment of this very engaging story about a technological singularity (chapter 2 in particular). For a couple of days, I was captivated by this story, so I thought I’d share it here to increase its exposure.

Anybody ever notice the strong similarity between the belltowers of the Summerhill-North Toronto railway station and Boston’s Custom House?

I recently came across a hilarious article by Patrick Smith, a professional airline pilot who writes a regular column for Salon.com called Ask The Pilot. His columns are generally quite interesting and informative, especially for regular travelers or, perhaps, an aerospace engineer who is interested in how commercial aircraft are used on a daily basis.

The article was called The Exploding Toilet and Other Embarrassments, and it made me laugh until I cried. I could barely read it aloud to Ori, so hard was I laughing. I hope you’ll find it just as funny!

On a related note, I can now announce that I’ve found employment in Toronto with Solar Ship, a company that’s working to develop a new kind of aircraft that derives some of its lift from a wing inflated with helium. It’s not lighter-than-air like a blimp, but rather a tool for delivering cargo to remote areas not well-served by road infrastructure.

Here’s a video showing the products we are developing:



I can’t say much more at the moment, but the work is very challenging, interesting, and a fantastic opportunity to be involved in the development of an entirely new kind of aircraft. I feel like a Wright brother as I go to work each day!

I recently watched the excellent film Hotel Rwanda, and was surprised to hear a familiar melody in the soundtrack. Research led me to determine it was part of a song by Wyclef Jean called “Million Voices”.

Here’s a sample of the melody I’m talking about:

Million Voices - Wyclef Jean
The reason it was familiar was that I’d heard it on Al Di Meola’s album The Infinite Desire. (I love practically all of Al Di Meola’s stuff and I highly recommend this album.)

Here’s a sample of the same (or at least, an uncannily similar) melody, as found in the track “Shaking The Spirits”:

Shaking The Spirits - Al Di Meola
Strangely, it appears that the line in Di Meola’s track is sung by an Oriana Di Meola, who must be his daughter, judging from her Twitter feed.

I feel like I’ve heard this melody somewhere else, too. I love finding little connections between pieces like this!

Hello readers,

Now that we’re finally settled, I’ve had time to go through the Gallery and add captions to all of the old photos from Oxford that had been missing them.

In theory, now every photo in the Gallery should be captioned, except for the photos from our Camino. I’m waiting on those because I may choose to present them in a different way. Specifically, I’m thinking of posting a few interesting photos at a time (here on the blog), accompanied by captions extracted from my Camino journal. Maybe even in real time, over the course of the 69 days it took us to walk the Camino in April/May/June.

If you do manage to find any uncaptioned photos in the Gallery, to let me know. I’m now considering the Oxford gallery “closed,” but of course there are regular updates occurring in the Toronto gallery.