Hyperbio » Play

Snow = built in excitement!

Leila Boujnane — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 13:43:52 +0000

We got snow. We got snow. We got snow. In Toronto! Yay. Enjoy our last snowfall of the year.

Tokyo

Leila Boujnane — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:21:00 +0000

: Tokyo Subway

I am in Tokyo for a week. Yes, I know who takes a one week vacation to go to Tokyo? Am I insane? Yes, a bit. I figured since Tokyo does not sleep neither would I and I would get to see all of it and head home at the end of the week.

One thing is for sure: I will be returning to Japan. Tokyo is but a little piece of Japan – albeit a pretty big piece – and the little bit I have seen is fascinating. Photos to come very shortly. I am now in perpetual jetlag: I wake up at 4 AM, head out to explore the city by 6 AM and walk all day to come back to the hotel to simply collapse. After 100s of kilometers in walking I now know that Tokyo is not a walking city: it is immense. Thankfully their subway system is amazing. I would send the entire Toronto TTC management team to Tokyo for a week for a crash course on how to develop and run a transit system that works. You can plan your trips to the second and get where you need to go without ever missing a beat. It is a thing of beauty!

I am not dead…

Leila Boujnane — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 11:31:45 +0000

But it pretty much feels like it in my blog. Can’t seem to find the time to do my running, my blogging or my reading. This business of a 24 hour day only is not working too well for me. I keep thinking that if I had more hours I could do more but I know that’s not how it works. I need discipline. Discipline to set aside time to do my running, discipline to carve out a few hours here and there for reading and discipline to sit down and write. Discipline is the hardest thing to develop. But I ain’t no quitter boys and girls so we are going to try this again: my spring/summer/fall race schedule is shaping up and I will post it tomorrow; I have dozens and dozens of books piled practically sky high in the living room – in full view so that there is no way to forget that I have some reading to do – and my blogging? well I am going to try and get back to it. I can already hear my mother in the background: “there is no try dear, there is just do”. Yes, I will just do then!

On that note: Nice to see a human president for a change.

Creativity is everywhere: prisoners inventions to entertain you.

Viral images that spread: I am interested to see how many variations I find in TinEye. This will be for the next post but some interesting photographs I had forgotten over the years.

Cory Doctorow: How to survive the Web without embracing it!

Mapping the cultural buzz: a great article in the New York Times

The VC walking dead from Venture Beat and what’s even more fun are the TinEye results for the Zombie image used to illustrate the blog post.

Canada’s minister of science being a disgrace to Canada.MR. Gary Goodyear: please do us all a favour and hand in your resignation.

Hacker camp in a missile silo? It is happening! Toorcamp is coming in July.

Multicolr Fun

Leila Boujnane — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 17:24:27 +0000

Every once in a while we get an email from someone who has played with our lab technologies and built something fun and exciting. Last month I received an email from my good friend Patrick and since then it has been sitting in my inbox begging for attention! I am such a delinquent when it comes to emails! But that said: Patrick has an awesome career: he spends his time building exciting project, exploring how technology can enhance people’s lives and experiences. You may have seen some of his projects around Toronto. Just recently he built the TXTris wall version 2 which was showcased during HoHoTo on Monday. It was awesome, and I know a few of us spent time sending Tweets just to see them scroll down the screens (some the tweets were not fit to print so we won’t be repeating those here!).

Patrick was inspired by our Multicolr search to build a little prototype: this prototype basically takes a stream from a webcam and picks out the dominant colours and passes them through our Multicolr Search to find photographs that match those colours. Very, very neat and you can view it here:

Colrfindr from Patrick Dinnen on Vimeo.

People in your broccoli

Leila Boujnane — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:54:52 +0000

Via Mathew: another reason to look very suspiciously at any broccoli you are planning to eat! There are people in your broccoli…

Hedge fund good byes. Unlike any other good byes!

Leila Boujnane — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:32:59 +0000

Andrew Lahde, manager of a small California hedge fund, Lahde Capital, burst into the spotlight last year after his one-year-old fund returned 866 percent betting against the subprime collapse. And this is his “goodbye and f— you letter“. Read it and …

Pop vs soda

Leila Boujnane — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:51:35 +0000

This is for all my Canadian friends who have moved to Seattle, San Francisco and other hot software beds in the US (you know we don’t have any software in Canada!).

The Wire

Leila Boujnane — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:21:03 +0000

The Wire is truly the greatest television drama ever produced. I am a big fan and if like me you enjoyed The Wire, then you will enjoy the "Making of the Wire" panel. To mark the release of the final season on DVD, the Museum of the Moving Image presented a panel, "Making the Wire" with David Simon, who wrote several episodes and is the co-producer; novelist and screenwriter Richard Price, who also wrote several episodes; and four of the show’s stars: Seth Gilliam (who played Ellis Carver), Clark Johnson (city editor Gus Haynes), Clarke Peters (Lester Freemon), and Wendell Pierce ("Bunk"), moderated by David Schwartz, Chief Curator.

Charlie Rose Interview

Leila Boujnane — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:33:16 +0000

For the Charlie Rose fans out there: Charlie Rose Interviews Charlie Rose.

Whitehorse Travel

Leila Boujnane — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 01:13:22 +0000

This time around – I mean for this travel – I am incredibly organized: I just scored a coat in less than 3 minutes of shopping… I have a hotel room in Whitehorse, car booked and plane tickets. No gloves, no hat, no long johns; but who cares since right now the weather in Whitehorse is warmer than Toronto! I also have a giant pile of magazines from work, 2 books, 1200 emails to catch up on and most importantly 16,000 photographs to trim to a manageable number so that I can move all my catalogs to a new machine. It will be a relaxing weekend and I am going to have fun with the delete button. I know what you are all thinking: since hardware storage is so cheap why bother deleting anything, well… this is really just to force me to organize my photos so that I can post the interesting ones, delete the lousy ones (lots of those) and forward everyone I owe photographs to the photos I have been promising for months. So it is coming your way!