He noticed me!

It is with slightly embarrassed fanboy glee that I find myself mentioned on Cory Doctorow's personal blog, for basically being a fanboy.

A worthwhile note on de-cluttering

I try not to be a simple re-posting blog. But sometimes a link comes along that is worthy of being shared:

The Happiness Project: Eleven Myths of De-Cluttering

I have definitely fallen victim to most of the eleven things, but overall stay pretty clear of them.

Minimalism redux

Soundtrack: Built to Spill. Amazing indie rock like the gods intended it to be.

There has been quite a bit of talk on this blog about minimalism. So much so that I made it a tag on my Flickr page, as for some perverse reason I take pictures of my stuff in order to prove how little stuff I have. The futility and absurdity of this practice does not escape me.

In keeping with tradition, I have more pictures of my stuff to show you.






In these two photos, you are quite literally seeing the entirety of my personal possessions (one of the bikes and a decent chunk of the clothes belong to my girlfriend). And my gut reaction to this sight is simple: I have way more stuff than I need.

The most obvious issue is that I own two bikes. This weighs on me more and more, as I am sure I could get by with just one. However, I am an enormous bike geek, and am hard pressed to actually give up one of my bikes. My primary rider, a Surly Cross Check, is versatile, durable, and well loved. My second frame is a Steelwool Limited, and has significant personal attachment. I have a fair bit of extra bike bits and pieces, and I will shortly be donating much of this to a local bike charity. How many sets of drop bars to I really need?

I have too many books, but I am quickly overcoming this dilemma. I have purged a significant number, and every time I look in my bin o' books, I find more to eliminate. The longer I own dozens of books that I promise I will re-read, the more I realise that I never will. There are simply too many great books coming out every year to revisit old books. I still cling to a few, but the number dwindles all the time. And as Cory Doctorow pointed out in a great blog post (which I can no longer find), if there is a book you get rid of and need again, you can easily find it at a local library, or from a variety of online sources for free. Worst comes to worst, you can pick up a copy from a used book store for a couple dollars.

My last major irk is my kitchen stuff. By most people's accounts, I don't have that much. But for the life of me, I cannot figure out why I have 2 frying pans, 3 baking sheets, and more water bottles than I could ever use. Why on earth do I have more dinner plates than kitchen chairs? How could I ever justify that?

Sooner or later, it's all gonna go. One day, me and a backpack, and that's it. And that's a promise to myself, to you, and to all the junk I'm gonna get rid of to get there.

The BBC Booklist

This post is in honour of my second last shift in the book sales industry! Hooray!

The 'essential' booklist internet meme from BBC is getting a lot of media coverage. It's a pretty bizarre list, and certainly very anglo-centric, but it's a fun game to play none the less.

I searched around for the original source, but couldn't find it. The BBC ran an open ballot for the UK's top 100 most-loved books back in 2003. It has many common titles with the below list, but is not quite the same. A quick Google search reveals there is some confusion online as to the origin of the meme, but it doesn't seem to actually have originated with the BBC in this form. Does anyone out there know any different?

So anyways, here it is...

Instructions:
Copy this into your NOTES/BLOG/DIARY. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen -
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien -
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling -
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - X
6 The Bible -
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens -

Total: 2

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy -
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien -
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -

Total: 1

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald -
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - X
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll -
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - X

Total: 2

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy -
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - X (More than 50% read)
34 Emma - Jane Austen -
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini-
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - X

Total: 4

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving -
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery -
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan -

Total: 3

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel -
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen -
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth -
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens -
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon -
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -

Total: 2

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov -
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas -
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie -
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - X

Total: 1

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens -
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker -
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce -
76 The Inferno – Dante - X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray -

Total: 1

80 Possession - AS Byatt -
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker-
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom -
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Total: 1

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad -
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole -
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas -
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -

Total: 4

Grand total: 21

-----------

Post your score somewhere (in the comments for instance).

This was my initial reaction to the list, posted on my friend's Facebook note.

"That list is rather bizarre, and seemingly random. I wonder what their selection criteria was. I think I hit about 15 - 20 or so.

"Why is the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe a separate entry from The Chronicles of Narnia?

"There's a very strange mix of adult and youth writing. The adults now who read some of the older children's/youth writing are fairly unlikely to have read the modern youth books (except for Harry Potter and the Twilight series (not on the list)). His Dark Materials? Really?"

What do you guys think?

Vélo Vogue Fashion, part II

As some of you out there may be aware, early in the new year, I MC'd a cycling fashion show at Tall Tree Cycles, in Ottawa. In addition to being an incredible host, I also tended bar all night, as per the photo evidence below:



You can see more pictures here and here.

Thanks to (or despite) my skills, the event was an amazing success. So much so that the city of Ottawa, via City Councillor Clive Doucet and the Dutch Embassy, decided to host another show to celebrate environment week. And I get to MC, again.

Here are the details. Be there, or be square.

While I will not be serving alcohol this time, you will get to hear me embarrass myself in Canada's two official languages!

-------------------------------------------

Free Event!

Come celebrate Clean Air Day by joining us for Vélo Vogue: A Fashion Show for the Urban Cyclist. Brought to you by Ottawa City Councillor Clive Doucet and the Netherlands Embassy.

Vélo Vogue will feature fun and fashionable clothes that work great on a bike!

Wednesday, June 3, 2009 12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.

Ottawa City Hall, Jane Piggott Hall
110 Laurier Avenue West

More more information:
Nancy Kukurudz, Event organizer at (613) 218-4611, nkukurudz@rogers.com

Catherine Henry, Office of Councillor Clive Doucet, (613) 580-2487, catherine.henry@ottawa.ca
Netherlands Embassy, gobike@netherlandsembassy.ca