Things I really want:

- Macbook Pro 15''
- a 22'' flat panel
- a decent laser printer; the HP 1012 has become unreliable after 3 years (not that that's necessarily HP's fault: the printer had suffered a fall two times and i'm frankly surprised the thing still works)
- an 8MP or higher compact digital camera
- a no-frills cell phone with good bluetooth headset profile

I gave myself an early christmas present a few days ago: a bluetooth GPS receiver -- Holux GPSlim 236 -- to go along with the Nokia770's killer MaemoMapper application.

Here are some photos...

Here's what I've been working on today. Got 2 boards of pine 20''x96'', each cut into two pieces, resulting in these 4 shelves mounted on 20'' brackets and two upright railings.

And voila... utility shelving for my office.

In other news me and Anna went to the AGO to check out some much needed contemporary art: the Andy Warhol exhibition titled "Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962–1964", guest-curated by that famed film director David Cronenberg. I think that means he narrated the audio guide.

Now i've heard about Andy Warhol before and seen some of his work in a few art books. After having seen this particular installation, I have to say that I was expecting a lot better. I left the gallery half-wanting to see more, which is good and bad. Good because I guess I took something away from this. Bad because the installation was quite small: about 19 pieces with audio commentary and perhaps another dozen without any commentary. Anyhow, I've certainly learnt a lot about Andy and his obsession with found-art

One work in particular that I enjoyed -- and indeed it appeared popular with the rest of the art going public -- was titled "The Couch". Basically he had a couch at his "factory" (a studio which in itself is a work of art) with a film camera pointed at it. Various persona would appear at or around this couch and perform random performance art. There were quite a lot of scenes which would not at all qualify for a family audience. Nudity was just the beginning.

So i'm back in Toronto as of August 29. I had been in Boston MA for 2.5 months and then in Paris, France for 10 days.

Anyway, the point of this post is to illustrate my battle with the racoons. Yesterday night they made a mess of my green bin. The driveway was strewn with organics. It was horrible and disgusting to clean up. Difficult too because the driveway is paved with small rocks.

Determined not to go through another such cleanup, I made a bit of research online and found a product called "Raccoon Check" which is a strap that you screw onto the lid of a garbage bin. Here's what it looks like on my 2 green bins. I had to drill 3 holes on each bin. 2 holes on the lid, 1 on the side front.

After tonight we shall see who is winning!

Gmaps Pedometer!
I wish the site was around when i was training for the marathon two years ago. Back then I was using the MapArt Toronto CD, which worked well but of course, the user interface wasn't nearly as good as gmaps. Sigh, how the world has changed...

Free Parisian Pass Thursdays at the MFA: "After headbutting its way through the World Cup on Sunday, France seems to be in the spotlight this summer, especially here in Boston. The Museum of Fine Arts is hosting their new Americans in Paris 1860-1900 exhibit, which features painting by James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, and Mary Cassatt. It seems that American painters all flocked to Paris to attend art school, gain a reputation, and eat lots of crepes during this forty year span. They also happened to produce some great art, which will be on display through September 24th; the most well-known pieces in this exhibit are two portraits of ladies with extremely different styles: Sargent’s portrait of Madame X and Whistler’s portrait of his mother.

Starting this Thursday and running the next two Thursdays as well, you can see the exhibit free courtesy of Bank of America. (Sure, they might charge a $35.00 fee for each overdraft offense, but they are opening their corporate hearts an"