Author: smartpeopleiknow

Zoho Gets better and Better

Over at the blog Compiler from Wired.com is a good review of the latest AND greatest features in Zoho Writer. Key quote:

While it isn’t feature complete just yet, Zoho Writer is getting very close to the ideal in online editing with word processing software that works equally well in offline and online modes. With big names like Google Docs, Microsoft Live and even Adobe all vying for your online office loyalty, there’s no doubt that if offline functionality matters to you, Zoho has the lead.

Boots and other luxuries (or how New York Manhole covers are made in India)

The Nytimes.com has a fascinating article: New York Manhole Covers, Forged Barefoot in India

Some sample quotes:

Manhole covers manufactured in India can be anywhere from 20 to 60 percent cheaper than those made in the United States

And why is that. Could it be due partially to this:

“We can’t maintain the luxury of Europe and the United States, with all the boots and all that,” said Sunil Modi, director of Shakti Industries.

It reminds me of photographs of Europe in the 19th century.

Blade Runner: Final Cut now playing in Toronto at the Regent Theatre.


Blade Runner: Final Cut is playing at the Regent Theatre in Toronto.

Blade Runner was released 25 years ago and while Ridley Scott made strong improvements to the film when he released The Director’s Cut of the film, the Final Cut is even better. Scott has the time and the luxury of telling the story without feeling the need to tighten it up and quicken the pace. That’s just one reason why you should see it again.

Not only that, but as they say at blogto.com, you should go to the Regent and take advantage of

the opportunity to see one of the great visual masterpieces of the cinema on an actual cinema screen, digitally projected no less, is too tantalizing to ignore. Scott’s restoration project has included digital fixes and cleanups

Plus, it is just fun to go the Regent Theatre! It’s a great old theatre on Mt. Pleasant just south of Eglinton. Go before the end of November!

The great Aroma espresso bar in the Annex, Toronto


Here’s a few reasons why you want to go to the Aroma Espresso bar located in the Annex of downtown Toronto (on Bloor around Bathurst):

– it’s in a great location. The Annex is great, and if you are going to a film at the Bloor, Aroma is a great spot to drop in before or after
– it has great ambience (see the link below for more photos)
– it has friendly service
– it has great coffee, plus they give you a chocolate with your coffee! (See photo above)
– when you order one of their delicious muffins that have a very light crust on the outside and fluffy on the inside, they warm it for you.

Those are just a few things I discovered on my visit. Try it yourself…

blogTO | Aroma Espresso Bar

Random fun with Microsoft Word and Russian Literature

I was sending someone an email tonight, and I was discussing one of my favourite books, The Brothers Karamazov. I noticed that Microsoft Word underlined “Karamozov”. Oh oh, I thought, better fix that.

Now if you type in “Karamozov” instead of “Karamazov” in ScribeFire, and then right click on it, it will tell you to replace it with “Karamazov”. But if you do this in Microsoft Word, you get “Kalamazoo”.

Now the first thought I had was: what, Word has been around since at least the early Dostoevsky novels, and it certainly ain’t small, so you think it would be smart enough to at least know leaders of major world literature? My Cyrillic is non-existent, but I am willing to bet money that the Cyrillic spelling of Karamazov NEVER translates into Kalamazoo.

My second thought was: maybe it’s me. So I right clicked on “Karamozov” and “Karamazov” and changed the language to “Russian” and the spell check error went away! Hmmm, I thought, Word IS smart! You just have to tell it the word is Russian! And it is smart enough to know that there are two ways to spell Karamazov!

But then I thought: I wonder if that is true. So I quickly typed in the another “Russian” word:

“Wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww” and did the same test, and lo and behold, “Wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww” is also the name of someone is Russia! (Perhaps this was a minor character the Dostoevsky later dropped to get the book under a 1000 pages.)

So, if you are a developer, and you are providing multilanguage support for your product, and you are asked to specify what standard you will be supporting, I recommend you say: the same one used by Microsoft Word! 🙂

 

Edward Burtynsky’s Quarries on exhibit in Toronto


At the NICHOLAS METIVIER GALLERY is Edward Burtyhsky’s Quarries. As he says:

“The concept of the landscape as architecture has become, for me, an act of imagination. I remember looking at buildings made of stone, and thinking, there has to be an interesting landscape somewhere out there because these stones had to have been taken out of the quarry one block at a time. I had never seen a dimensional quarry, but I envisioned an inverted cubed architecture on the side of a hill. I went in search of it, and when I had it on my ground glass I knew that I had arrived.”

It is on for a few more days: check it out if you can.

What scanning techniques are revealing about vegetative patients in the New Yorker

There is a fascinating article Silent Minds: The New Yorker on how brain scans on vegetative patients are showing more activities than was expected. Here’s the lede into the article, but I recommend you read the whole thing:

Ten years ago, Adrian Owen, a young British neuroscientist, was working at a brain-imaging center at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, at the University of Cambridge. He had recently returned from the Montreal Neurological Institute, where he used advanced scanning technology to map areas of the brain, including those involved in recognizing human faces, and he was eager to continue his research. The imaging center was next to the hospital’s neurological intensive-care unit, and Owen heard about a patient there named Kate Bainbridge, a twenty-six-year-old schoolteacher who had become comatose after a flulike illness, and was eventually diagnosed as being in what neurologists call a vegetative state. Owen decided to scan Bainbridge’s brain. “We were looking for interesting patients to study,” he told me. “She was the first vegetative patient I came across.”For four months, Bainbridge had not spoken or responded to her family or her doctors, although her eyes were often open and roving. (A person in a coma appears to be asleep and is unaware of even painful stimulation; a person in a vegetative state has periods of wakefulness but shows no awareness of her environment and does not make purposeful movements.) Owen placed Bainbridge in a PET scanner, a machine that records changes in metabolism and blood flow in the brain, and, on a screen in front of her, projected photographs of faces belonging to members of her family, as well as digitally distorted images, in which the faces were unrecognizable. Whenever pictures of Bainbridge’s family flashed on the screen, an area of her brain called the fusiform gyrus, which neuroscientists had identified as playing a central role in face recognition, lit up on the scan. “We were stunned,” Owen told me. “The fusiform-gyrus activation in her brain was not simply similar to normal; it was exactly the same as normal volunteers’.”

The nyimes.com No Knead Bread: so simple, even a four year old can make! So you can too

Over at the excellent food blog, Jaden’s Steamy Kitchen, is a review of the No Knead Bread recipe that was featured in the nytimes.com a while ago. Better still, Jaden provides instructions so simple to follow, even a 4 year old can do it (and she has photos to prove it). If nothing else, have a good read of the recipe:

No Knead Bread, Revisited

P.S. This article: How to Turn Cheap “Choice” Steaks into Gucci “Prime” Steaks is also highly recommended. Heck, just sample the entire blog. 🙂

The history of getting heroin, cocaine and opium from the corner store

The Addiction Research Unit from the University of Buffalo has a fascinating page on how

The prohibition of psychoactive substances has evolved gradually in the United States and in Europe. The opium-containing preparation laudanum had been widely available since the 18th century. Morphine, cocaine, and even heroin were seen as miracle cures when they were first discovered. During the mid to late 19th century, many manufacturers proudly proclaimed that their products contained cocaine or opium. A few, like Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup for infants which contained morphine, were more guarded in divulging their principal ingredients. By the beginning of the 20th century, problems with habitual use of cocaine and opiates was becoming increasingly apparent. This led to the removal of these substances from some products (e.g., Coca Cola) and to the introduction of the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) in the United States which required the listing of ingredients on product labels. Nonetheless, standard narcotic remedies like paregoric remained readily available into the early 20th century, and Benzedrine inhalers were marketed without prescription until the early 1950s. Codeine wasn’t removed from most over-the-counter cough suppressants until the early 1980s.

Before Prohibition: Images from the preprohibition era

Thanks to Jean-Francois for this one!

How to clean your home in 19 minutes (roughly)

CNN has cribbed some material from Real Simple and the FlyLady to help you get your home cleaned in a flash. I don’t know if you can do it in 19 minutes, but it can be close. 🙂

How to clean your home in 19 minutes – CNN.com

Also, if you have kids (or a sloppy spouse/roommate who won’t clean up), get some baskets and keep them nearby. Then go around the house, scoop up some stuff and put it in their room. Time = 1-2 minutes.

Hey, smart people don’t spend all day cleaning…they have better things to do! 🙂

Image: James Worrell at realsimple.com

Delud Luxury Blog: where the rich go for shopping ideas

If you are looking for the very best (or at least the most expensive), then you must visit Delud Luxury Blog. For example, the truffle you see in the photo is the Knipschildt’s “La Madeline au Truffe” with a price of $250 for a dark chocolate.

Me, I’ll be happy to eat the wonderful truffles at Simone Marie Belgian Chocolate here in Toronto. 🙂

The shattered Still Life of Martin Klimas

Over at The Morning News – Still Life

is a feature on an amazing artist, Martin Klimas, who as the artlcle says,

destroys a lot of clay to make his art. Combining the silence of Eadweard Muybridge’s horse pictures with the association-rich composition of a still life, Klimas breaks recognizable objects so they become something else, and stops us just at the moment of transformation.

(Thanks to andrewsullivan.com for this one)

MAKE magazine, IKEA hackers, or the rise of craft in North America


There seems to be a common idea going around, at least in North America. People who may have once been interested in hacking computers are looking past them to other areas. MAKE magazine is just one example of this need being addressed. Then there is this article in nytimes.com about people hacking IKEA. As the article puts it:

Ms. Lam, Mr. Csiky and Ms. Domanic have never met but they are nonetheless related, connected by a global (and totally unofficial) collective known as the Ikea Hackers. Do-it-yourselfers and technogeeks, tinkerers, artists, crafters and product and furniture designers, the hackers are united only by their perspective, which looks upon an Ikea Billy bookcase or Lack table and sees not a finished object but raw material: a clean palette yearning to be embellished or repurposed. They make a subset of an expanding global D.I.Y. movement, itself a huge tent of philosophies and manifestoes including but not confined to anticonsumerism, antiglobalism, environmentalism and all-purpose iconoclasm.

For the article, surf over to Romancing the Flat Pack: Ikea, Repurposed – New York Times

Cook’s: for serious cooks and people who are serious about cooking

If you are serious about cooking, or want to know the definitive way to cook something, I highly recommend Cook’s Illustrated.
It’s a great magazine about cooking as opposed to a collection of recipes. You will get recipes, too, but you will discover a whole lot more about the process of transforming food.

Plus they have reviews of cooking tools, premade sauces, menus, and much more.

www.ihackcharities.org

When I first saw that URL, I thought: what?! I am happy to say the site is not about hacking in charities. Instead, it is:

about proving that hackers have amazing skills that can transform charitable organizations.

So if you know of some budding hackers who want to save the world and come up with some worthwhile hacks, send them
here.

Edward Hopper and Winslow Homer at the Art Institute of Chicago

In 2008, The Art Institute of Chicago will be putting on an exhibit of Edward Hopper (with a bonus exhibit of Winslow Homer going on as well). Here’s an idea of what you will see regarding Hopper:

The exhibition will be arranged chronologically and thematically, focusing on the work he executed in Gloucester and Truro, Massachusetts, Maine, and New York. Approximately 50 oils and 30 watercolors, together with literature and history of the artist’s own time, will show Hopper’s place in the tradition of American realism and modernism. Edward Hopper and its companion exhibition, Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light, will provide a survey of the American realist tradition and chart the growth of modern subject matter—from Homer, America’s first modernist, to Hopper, the nation’s best known 20th-century realist.

More on good, cheap wine under $10 from the LCBO and other places

The globeandmail.com has been good enough to set up a searchable database of wine recommendations based on Beppi Crossariol’s wine columns found regularly in their paper. You can search the database in a number of ways, including wines under $10 (you will find around 20 bottles). Some of them are wines I mentioned earlier (like Corten from Moldova) but others are new to me (including some tetra pak ones, no less).

The other nice thing about this is that you can find the wine, and then go to the article. Beppi’s a good writer with good and varied taste: the articles are worth a read, too.

Check outThe Wine Butler