John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot

St. John's sunset

It's snowing (a lot) in St. John's as I type this, with the first blast of winter showing up on our doorstep. Karen Chappell posted this to her terrific photo blog, Bitstop, last week, showing an autumnal sunset. Karen's other recent posts include some Christmas treats and a couple of great shots from the Bill Cosby concert at Mile One on Friday night.

Watch Helen Gregory make a painting

On Friday evening, an exhibition of St. John's artist Helen Gregory's work opens at The Rooms' art gallery. Unrequited Death is in line with themes that Gregory has been exploring for years, about decay, death, natural history and found beauty. I've gotten to know Helen through the years, and am looking forward to the show. (You have lots of time: It runs until May. The curator is writer Lisa Moore; in February, Gregory will give a lecture on the exhibition.)

Here's a fascinating video on Helen's process, using thousands of images taken in stop-motion fashion, and then speeded up considerably. (And keep an eye on the cats!)

A grand day for a walk

[Surf's Up, as published in the St. John's Telegram on Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009. Click here to read more Surf's Up.]

The evenings are dark now, but that hasn’t stopped our family from trying to get out when we can for a healthy walk. The first site on this week’s web tour is all about the St. John’s-area network that has transformed how many of us spend our leisure time. 

Grand Concourse
The Grand Concourse is an ambitious project launched by philanthropist Paul Johnson and his family’s foundation, and now includes a network of trails and guided walks that crisscross the city and into neighbouring municipalities. Many of the trails are old and well-established, but have been upgraded to terrific shape because of the Grand Concourse’s work.
 
The website underwent a recent overhaul, and has plenty to offer, including suggestions on walks of varying skill levels and lengths, with complementing maps and photos. Among other things, it makes good use of mashups with Google Maps, so you can get a good idea of where a given route will take you.
 
While it’s nice to see a more robust web presence, I’d suggest a few things. For instance, it would be terrific to be able print simple, clean sheets on each hike. As well, the organization could develop a greater sense of community by inviting participants to get involved, and using user-generated tools for photo-sharing, hike descriptions, etc. After all, the Grand Concourse, which holds not just one local gem but many, is all about public participation.
 

Elsewhere this week

Scribd
Scribd is fast becoming a popular application all over the web, probably because it’s easy for users. It produces Flash-powered embeddable documents, which means that rather than linking to a PDF, you can put it right in your blog or website, and the reader can see scroll or tab through the whole thing. The document can be as a big as a book or as small as a brochure; that’s up to you. Better yet, it can be shared, which can help let your content move around the web, if you’re cool with that. It’s a handy way to bring something like a PowerPoint presentation to the individual level, as well. Heavy users range from major publishers, like technology gurus like O’Reilly Media, to small businesses. 

Photoshop Disasters
Photoshop Disasters made the news this fall when one of its routine posts – they all involve errors and distortions that somehow made their way to print – royally ticked off fashion company Ralph Lauren. The blog had merely pointed out that a particular model has sci-fi-style proportions, winding up with an impossibly skinny waist. When other sites, including the wonderful Boing Boing, raised hackles, Ralph Lauren went to its corner and had a boo-hoo. Fortunately, Photoshop Disasters is still plugging away, pointing out the sublime and ridiculous.

Swampland
Time magazine may never be able to shake its image as being stuffier than a starched shirt, but that hasn’t stopped it from running a political blog with plenty of bounce. Swampland is a collaborative project by the magazine’s writers, with frequently updated posts on each day’s political news, with an unsurprisingly hefty emphasis on Washington. (It’s not called Swampland for nothing.) I subscribe to the daily email alert, for reminders to check out new content.

Snapbird
Because Twitter’s in-house search system only allows seven days of access, along comes Snapbird, which lets you comb through many weeks of tweets – as long as they were made by friends or those you’ve marked as favourites. A handy tool for locating something you read weeks or months ago.

Little Wheel
Imagine a robot world where the machines have been sleeping, for lack of a better, word, for 10,000 years. A lightning strike reanimates one of them, and in this charming little game, your job is to get everything back on the go, one step at a time. If you’re confounded, you can take a little cheat and click on Walkthrough … but I bet you’ll love figuring out as much as you can on your own.
 

John Gushue is a writer in St. John's, and is currently on leave from his job with CBC News in St. John's. John is on Facebook right here. John is on Twitter right here.

An Olympic video diary from St. John's

A young fellow named Chris Wheeler has been travelling the country as the Oympic torch relay winds its way to Vancouver. You can follow the progress here, on the Travel With The Olympic Torch YouTube channel. Click below to see his video post of Friday's tour through St. John's.

Olympic torch on Quidi Vidi

I took my son downtown late Friday afternoon to see the Olympic torch relay go by; by the time we saw the participants pass the flame on Water Street, it was dusk and the street was full with spectators, many of them office workers pausing before their way home. Karen Chappell posted this picture as part of a set of photos she took on Friday around Quidi Vidi Lake; you can see them all on her great blog, Bitstop.

From St. John's to the other side of the world

When you were growing up, did you ever think that if you started digging a hole, you would come out on the other end of the world ... and in China? You wouldn't be alone; that's why this interesting mashup involving Google Maps was created. The idea is that you identify where you are, and a second map below shows you where the opposite part of the planet actually is.

As you can see, the opposite end of the planet from St. John's is south of Australia.

[Incidentally, if you ever did want to a dig a hole and go straight through to China, you might want to start from Argentina and environs.]

A T-shirt with local appeal

Regular readers will know I have a thing for T-shirts; I'm also fond of Signal, the locally produced blog. (Our titles are kind of fishing from the same [Deadman's] pond.) Signal is now selling some swag: check it out here.

St. John's, circa 1900

This photograph, showing the still-familiar lines of downtown St. John's, was taken around 1900 by an unknown photographer, and is part of the online collection belonging to the McCord Museum of Montreal. (I spent a few days doing photo research there in 1996: an amazing collection of materials.) The McCord Museum hosts a photostream on Flickr; some of the photos appear in the remarkable The Commons project, in which users are invited to tag photos held in major collections.

Rigging

I took this shot during a tour of the tall ship Kruzenshtern last week, during its stop in St. John's. It is indeed a particularly tall ship; so much so, it was hard to capture the vastness and complexity of the rigging in a shot.

Lanterns

Before time slips away more than it already has, a picture from The Scope from this weekend's Lantern Festival in Victoria Park in St. John's. You can see more photos from Scope here.