My last couple of weeks here in Hartford are winding down quickly, mainly because I've got quite a lot to do. Makes a nice change from being bored.

On Monday I organized a small group of people to drive down to the coast, about an hour away. Just east of New Haven is a town called East Branford, where we found Lenny's Indian Head Inn, an authentic lobster shack that looks like it hasn't been changed in 30 years. We feasted on remarkably cheap oysters, clams, lobsters and beer.

Yesterday my next-cublicle neighbour Brian convinced me to start watching the series "24", now starting its second season. Yesterday's show was a bit slow, but the premise is good so I'll give it a chance. It's a "real time" (1 hour per hour of TV, except for the commercials, of course) show chronicling a single (really, really bad) day in the life of a U.S. counter-terrorism expert. The show was apparently a critical hit last year.

Last but not least, I checked Google, and found that I now show up first when you enter "Tom Leslie" in the search field! All the other Tom Leslie's out there, in your face! Boo rah! ;-)
posted by Tom at 6:03 PM | link | (0) comments

I've posted the photos from last weekend's trip to Dirk & Christine's cottage near Haliburton. Check out the leaves! Check out the wolves munching on beaver carcasses! The two mug shots here are their sons Sean and Kevin. I've also posted a couple of pictures of Hartford. Looks like I've only got a couple more weeks there!
posted by Tom at 12:30 AM | link | (0) comments

I'm looking forward to seeing Michael Moore's new movie, Bowling for Columbine. He has a highly entertaining rant on his web site today about the sniper, the guns, and the guy in charge. Lots of fun.

In other news, it looks like my last week in Hartford will be the week after next. I've got a lot of things to finish up by then, so life's going to get much more interesting. Which is a good thing...


posted by Tom at 11:07 AM | link | (0) comments

By your search engine requests will ye be known. From the Dreamhost web server logs for my site, here are the search requests from this week that led people to tomleslie.ca:

#reqs: search term
-----: -----------
3: tom leslie
2: kelly baxter golding
1: book reviews no one lives forever
1: romantika party estonia girls
1: ski trip photos
1: kandynski
1: finland goretex jacket
1: mani greece hiking path map
1: kardamyli
1: hymn or bootleggers or notarize or hitting or pneumatic
posted by Tom at 1:14 PM | link | (0) comments

Another great weekend! On Friday I manned the door at the Exultate concert "In the Beginning", which presented a wonderful collection of American choral music, featuring the Copeland work of the same name. It was a beautiful concert. Despite the fact that half of the bass and tenor sections were new to the choir this year, the blend in the mens' sections seems better than ever. Great to hear.

On Saturday, Anne and I rented a car and drove up to Dirk & Christine's cottage in Haliburton. The weather was a bit weird all weekend -- sunny, cloudy, and raining in rapid alternation -- but the leaves were turning and it was spectacular up there. Dirk and Christine are wonderful hosts, and we had a great time. Yesterday we went the Haliburton Forest Wolf Centre, and were able to see them up and active for their feeding time (beaver carcasses, yum) and went for a three hour hike through the Forest grounds.
posted by Tom at 11:01 AM | link | (0) comments

Another important organizations from the standpoint of liberating content:

Project Gutenburg is digitizing open source books so they can be downloaded off the web, anywhere, for free.

And an interesting tidbit I dug up on copyright law in Canada: I could be reading it wrong, but doesn't this mean I can copy a CD without breaking the law? Must find a lawyer to tell me why I'm wrong about this.
posted by Tom at 4:58 PM | link | (0) comments

More from Lawrence Lessig: slides and voiceover commentary from a speech at an open source conference in July.
posted by Tom at 12:33 PM | link | (0) comments

There's a wonderful battle going on at the moment in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, over the future of the dread bill, the DCMA. At stake are a number of important issues, but basically it comes down to how long a creation can stay in private hands. With DCMA, the U.S. Government is trying to make private ownership of artistic creations perpetual. While that sounds good for artists who own their creations, it is in fact death: most rights are quickly transferred to the immortal corporate entities that control publication, and artists are left with substantial, permanent constraints on their ability to be derivative of prior works. As Spider Robinson points out in a great short story Melancholy Elephants, this could eventually lead to the end of art.

So the court case is important. On the front lines, the U.S. lawyer Lawrence Lessig is arguing the case against the DCMA. And he's got a blog, which has a very interesting running commentary on the issues and the state of the battle. Read on...

posted by Tom at 11:23 AM | link | (0) comments

What a fabulous weekend we just had! In my Thanksgiving list for this year, I'm giving thanks for a lot of things, but near the top are giving thanks to those who made the weekend for me, Anne, and my parents.

The Thanksgiving dinner at Anne's was a triumph of organization, preparation and presentation. I helped out as best I could, but she did all the hard stuff. I haven't been at a sit-down dinner party for 16 in a long, long time, but not only was the food sufficient for the horde, it was excellent. (Special thanks also to Molly, Susan, Meredith and especially Eric, for contributing to the dinner menu: Eric's mushroom pies and pumpkin cheesecake were top notch.)

Sunday Anne and I completed the clean up, and supervised the pickup of the table, chairs and linen by the fine people of Chairman Mills. We then went back to my place and met my parents, who'd come in to Toronto to take us out to celebrate my birthday. We went to Lai Wah Heen at the Metropolitan Hotel, walking distance from my place, where after an initial concern over whether our reservation could be honoured (the front desk hadn't bothered to check that the restaurant had any spare room, and they were very busy) we were shown to a back room. We had a magnificent feast, the Premium Dinner for Four, and rolled home very, very full and very, very happy.

Monday morning, Anne gave me my birthday present, or presents: a beautiful reproduction map of Scotland, which I'm planning to hang in the study, and a copy of No One Lives Forever 2, sequel to the brilliant 2000 game No One Lives Forever. I promptly (but with her permission) got deeply addicted, sneaking through the Japanese before-the-credits level. (Sample conversation overheard: one female ninja telling a friend about and argument with her mother attacking her: they'd been arguing about whether her ninja costume was too revealing, she'd said "Mom, this is the 60's, get with it" and "Old people are always complaining", and then had to subdue her mom who attacked her with a sword). When I had to give up and return to the present, I was in the process of breaking into a secret base in Siberia to uncover a Soviet plot. Great fun.

As punishment for ignoring her for most of the day, Anne then beat me at Scrabble again.
posted by Tom at 6:53 PM | link | (0) comments

There's an interesting Slashdot article this afternoon about the Canadian government moving online -- creating digital certificates for all citizens to access their government files. One of the comments has a reference to a pgp keyserver at pgp.mit.edu that I should check out some time. I've always wanted a digital certificate. ;-)
posted by Tom at 5:08 PM | link | (0) comments

Saturday afternoon at Anne's, in a kitchen full of great cooking smells. We're preparing Anne's annual turkey feast for a horde: 16 and a half (Maddy, not quite 1 year old). The bird has been named "Jean-Claude" and is roasting happily in the oven. A wonderful squash soup has been prepared with much toil, sausages are bubbling in pans on the stove, the cranberry sauce is ready, and we're about to move on to the garlic mashed potatoes. MAN, I love Thanksgiving!

The Queen of Spades was great!! Go see it!! The production was wonderful, with very dramatic style. The best scene was the one with Herman tossing in bed with a nightmare: the whole room was rotated 90 degrees, so the audience was looking down on the bed. Then an eight-foot skeleton emerged from the sheets next to him...
posted by Tom at 4:38 PM | link | (0) comments

Another Thursday, another week in Hartford winding to a close. A VERY busy weekend ahead, though since Monday's a holiday I should have a chance to recover.

Tomorrow morning the appraiser from TD is coming around to do an appraisal of the apartment. I have to be awake and functional at 7:45 am. Ugh.

Tomorrow night Anne and I are off to see the opera, The Queen of Spades. I don't really know what to expect: it had a great review in the Globe, but Anne's parents panned it. Still looking forward to it.

Saturday is the big Thanksgiving feast! Anne's cooking up the turkey(s) and I'm acting sous-chef for the day. With 15.5 guests (Maddy being present but not a big fan of turkey... yet) there's going to be a huge amount of food to cook, dishes to clean, etc.. It's going to be a lot of fun! I hope.

Sunday evening my parents are coming in to town. My birthday is next Wednesday, so they're taking Anne and me out to dinner.

Finally, on Monday there's Nothing Scheduled. Hallelujah!

The only other news is that I've made great strides on redesigning my website. No major changes to the appearance -- yet -- but the style sheets are up and running, all the pages have been converted over, and the archive pages have been merged into the main page design. Navigation through the history of the site should now be MUCH easier.

Let me know what you think! Send me your feedback...
posted by Tom at 4:18 PM | link | (0) comments

Happy Autumn! The leaves are starting to turn, and it was... 28 degrees yesterday. Nice weather for JUNE. Bizarre. Reminds me of the Simpsons' newscaster Kent Brockman's line about an unseasonable warm snap in the middle of winter (in the Mr. Plow episode): "Could this record-breaking heat wave be the result of the dreaded 'Greenhouse Effect'? Well, if 70-degree days in the middle of winter are the 'price' of car pollution, you'll forgive me if I keep my old Pontiac."

It seems that I have been premature in writing off Hartford's arts community. I spent my lunch hour yesterday continuing my tour through the Wadsworth Athenium art gallery, not huge, but possessed of a truly amazing collection for its size. Besides an excellent selection of American art, the Wadsworth boasts a fine collection of Italian and Spanish baroque, and twentieth century surrealist and modernist works. It also has a great lunch cafe. Admission is free for those with Travelers ID badges, like me.

Also yesterday, I went to the Hartford Stage Company's production of Much Ado About Nothing with a few of my colleagues. The play is quite familiar to me, as I just saw the 1993 Kenneth Branagh version last year. It was a fine production, though it really needed to be for the $48 (U.S.) ticket price... Still, Shakespeare's text was delivered almost flawlessly, and the many jokes came through easily. It's a great play, and an impressive company. Unbelievable that in a small city like Hartford they can stage a play for a whole month, and sell out many of the shows. Last night there were no empty seats.

So I take it all back! There are some things to do in Hartford, and it does have a rich community, despite the mostly empty streets after sunset.

'Course I'm still looking forward to finishing the project and coming home...
posted by Tom at 11:41 AM | link | (0) comments