Wayne D's Blog

When will I learn? I spent a couple of hours on and off writing this blog post yesterday and when I clicked on the publish button it disappeared. Save and save often has got to become my blog writing mantra.

I promised some Summerfolk pictures and here they are. Friday night was very windy As can be seen in this picture of James Hill the ukulele virtuoso and Anne Davision who accompanied him on the cello. Note how Anne's hair is blowing across her face. Clicking on the picture will take you to my Flickr photostream where you can see more of my Summerfolk pictures.

This year's concert was better than last year, there wasn't one act that I saw that disappointed me. This next picture was taken on Saturday and shows Muna Mingole and John Simosi performing at a workshop.

Shortly after this picture was taken Muna came down into the assembled crowd and cajoled me into dancing with her. My wife was blissfully unaware of this because she was lying on her back trying to relieve the discomfort that she says was a result of sleeping on the motel bed but I suspect is more from her advancing years. Again this year we rose at 6 a.m. to be in line by 6:15 to ensure that we got a prime spot for our chairs in the amphitheatre when the gates opened at 10:30. Next year we may follow the example of the two people who slept in line, they went straight from the beer tent to the line, this allowed them to sleep a couple of hours longer since they didn't have to get up to join the line.

Yesterday I went to Yorkdale for the first time in many years. When we first got married, and didn't have kids, and live only about five kilometres away we would go a couple of times a week to escape our small basement apartment and eat or watch a movie. Many, many of the stores have changed and the mall was packed with people. I made the trip because I wanted to go to the Apple Store. I am jonesing for some new tech. My last major purchase was my video iPod. The Apple store was zoo, but a nice zoo. There were plenty of easily identifiable Apple employees to help people and I got a chance to play with all of the Apple products. After catching my breath from the sticker shock my impression of the various Mac's I saw was that OS X is really, really cool. It only took me a few seconds to figure it out and other than the goofy one button mouse everything worked very well. Someone had said that a Mac mini might be too underpowered for me but I was playing two videos simultaneously without any visible problems or degradation in system response. Now the question is Mackbook for my wife to help her when she goes back to school or Mac Mini to replace the old Dell. Of course one of the new iMac's would look pretty good in our family room.

After leaving the Apple Store I went to the Bose store. I have seen the ads for the Wave radio for years and when I saw the Bose store I went in to finally hear one. The sales guy demoed the system with the integrated CD player probably because he knew that radio would not provide listening experience that would sell the system. It sounded very good, but $700 dollars? The there is the $170 for the pod connection kit. I need a tech fix but I don't know if I need it that bad.

Before going to Yorkdale I dropped by Newmarket to visit my older brother. He took me to the Crow's Nest pub in Newmarket. A very nice place with a good selection of beers and naughty British postcards in the bathroom which fit in well with the English pub theme.