Hey, somebody used a photo I took of the Papineau mural in Papineau metro station in a discussion of the prison Pied-du-Courant. They even gave me proper attribution, per the license under which the photo was published.
As an American I have a shamefully bad understanding of Canadian history. Example: when I first moved to Montreal, I had to get my local land-line phone service set up. When I was asked for my address (in English -- I didn't even try doing this stuff in French back then), I answered: "Avenue Papineau. That's P-A-P-I-N--" the operator cut me off. "I know perfectly well how to spell 'Papineau', sir," he said, icily. Oops.
I'm trying to get caught up. I've been reading a ton of Pierre Berton books, but I still don't have the whole story as integrated into my own mental processes the way I know, say, American history almost instinctively. Like, even though I know the story, I continue to boggle that Louis Riel keeps popping up in various apparently unconnected historical contexts and era. It's like, "Wha? Louis Riel again? Didn't they shoot him four or five chapters ago? Why is he still here?"
I guess it just takes time. Or maybe it's something I'm never going to understand, like why there were two teams called "Roughriders" in the CFL for so long. I dunno.
tags: papineau flickr louis riel bell canada me
Talk about your busy days
Busy, busy day today. Alain Desilets, a researcher at the National Research Council and a really smart person when it comes to wiki, came to Montreal today for Wiki Wednesday. We had lunch with Alain and fellow researcher Julie at nearby Ty Breiz restaurant, a neighborhood landmark that makes fine crepes and cider and good garlicky salads. We talked about improving wiki interfaces to make it easier to translate between multiple language versions of a page (like you see on Wikipedia and Wikitravel), and came up with some interesting solutions.
Then it was off to Wiki Wednesday proper, at which Alain presented his translation projects and also some collaborative fiction ideas for children. Very cool stuff! It was a real celebrity event: Sunir Shah of MeatballWiki, Sebastien Paquet of SocialText, Marc Laporte of Tiki CMS/Groupware, Anne and Antoine, organizing the RoCoCo 2007 event, and lots of other folks too.
Anne and Antoine also presented their brilliant image-only wiki, Wikigraphe. It lets people upload images as a replacement for pages, then build "hotspots" on the images that link to other pages -- which are in themselves images. It's a destruction of the tyranny of text in the wiki world -- and fun to watch. Sylvain Carle compared it to drawball, but I think they're different.
Much followup talk on RoCoCo 2007. It's going to be an exciting event -- so glad to have wiki friends around the world coming here, to my favorite city. Lots to do between now and May, but I think we can get it done and have a fantastic wiki (and wiki-like) event.
Wiki Wednesdays are such excellent events -- kudos to Seb Paquet for organizing them in Montreal, and also to SocialText for such a good idea, and Robin Millette and gang for hosting.
tags: wiki wednesday alain desilets ty breiz sunir shah seb paquet sylvain carle anarcat marc laporte rococo
CC Salon Montreal
On top of that, we had the Creative Commons Salon Montreal tonight at Amère de boire on rue St. Denis. The Salon is developing internationally as a way for CC-related people to interact, chat, and have fun in cities around the world, and Montreal has too many CC folks to be left out. Tina Pipers, co-chair of Creative Commons Canada, is on the faculty at McGill, so we're lucky to have such a heavy hitter in the area to chat with us. (Also, I found out tonight she's Greek! Good for us.)
Tonight was expecially great since Maj and I talked about Wikitravel and our new project, Crossroads, to create Open Content travel opinion, stories, blogs, photos, etc. It's just getting off the ground, but it was great to share our vision with some people who really understand the idea of content sharing and an information commons. The discussion after our talk was great.
I couldn't drag myself to YULblog, though, after 6 hours of talking... I had wanted to go to get people interested in BarCampMontreal, but Sylvain (one of the event organizers) was already going, so I felt justified in sitting it out. But when am I going to get to another Yulblog? I just don't know.
tags: cc cc salon cc salon montreal tina pipers wikitravel crossroads travel barcampmontreal yulblog
Searls
ha ha Searls's 4th Law: No matter what car you want to rent, what you'll get is a Chevy Cavalier. Man, I love the Chevrolet Cavalier. It's a fun car to drive, and it just says "rental car". Which mean, y'know, "vacation" and "distant lands" and "irresponsibility". How can you not love that car?
Not to mention that someone has to straighten out Doc Searls on Elements of Style Rule #1: Form the possessive singular of nouns with 's. This includes singular names that end with s... like "Searls". There are a few exceptions for ancient names ending in -is/-us/-es, but those are few. To paraphrase: I knew Achilles; I served with Achilles; Doc Searls, you are no Achilles.
tags: searls doc searls chevy cavalier elements of style
UFO Beliefs
Hey! I'm back on Technorati. Rockin'! After like 3 months complaining to their customer service Web form and getting 0 (= zero) response, I finally canceled my blog claim and started a new one. The software picked up on my site right away. Problem solved!
It would have been nice to hear, you know, one tiny peep out of Technorati about my 8-10 bug reports, but I guess they're pretty busy.
tags: technorati listing bug reports