By Mike, on May 7th, 2012 
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Backgrounder:
BlogTO had a post in late 2011 that asked readers to comment on their favourite intersections. The contributions flowed in and intersections such as Bloor and Bathurst and Queen and Spadina reigned – see link at end of my post.
My Choice – College - University
Trivia 1: My father worked in the Frost building on the northeast corner when he was in government, and I have a certain fondness for areas throughout the downtown that are connected to memories of being a child and going to his office and elsewhere in the city. Weekend trips around the downtown core which included things like parades, festivals and shopping, fostered an enthusiasm for the city in a young lad who otherwise spent his formative years in the suburbs.
My choice might be a little unusual, but bear with me here. College is without doubt one of the greatest cross-town arteries we have in this city (cue music – “Crosstown Traffic” by Jimi Hendrix). My friend Ian once told me he had an idea for a video or short film which would document the amazing journey of the 506 streetcar as it traverses the long east-west passage from the High Park loop to Main St. station. What a fantastic journey that is, cutting through a variety of amazing neighbourhoods, from Roncesavalles and Little Italy to Kensington and downtown Yonge, to Cabbage Town, Regent Park and over the Don Valley to Chinatown East, Riverdale, and Little India. For the streetcar aficionado it is a superlative trip, especially on a spring or fall day when you catch a quiet mid-morning or afternoon car. University itself is Toronto’s attempt at a classic grand avenue. It ain’t no Champs-Élysées but it is a pretty darn good substitute in a city like Toronto which is a young city that boomed through the twentieth century, alongside the auto and the highway. (University may resemble a mini highway, but when the office workers are out on a sunny day, and students cycle up to U of T, you’ve got a lively enough street life to forget for a moment that there are few cafes or anything permanently resembling a vibrant street life).
Most importantly this intersection is a kind of gateway for me – I have always associated this area with heading to the cooler parts of downtown. West of University you get the arts, design, and entertainment districts, and north of College is the marvelous sprawling University of Toronto campus. In the streetview embedded above you are looking west. The university is on your right. On your immediate left, if you rotate the image, is MaRS – originally a high-profile medical research company and now an incubator for science, technology and social innovation. University Avenue is a crossroads where social meets education meets health meets politics. To the right, out of the frame is the grand Legislature of Ontario. To see it you need to click and move a little further forward and then rotate to the right. As some would posit that Yonge and Bloor is a physical “centre” of Toronto, I’d put forth that University and College is full of broader more interesting convergences (Yonge is perhaps the undisputed commercial heart of Toronto). College-University is an under-appreciated but highly unique intersection, both in the literal and figurative senses of the word.
Trivia 2: Behind the subway entrance on the NE corner is a Firefighter’s memorial with names of dozens of firefighters who lost their lives across the province.
Trivia 3: The U of T building a touch east of the intersection has a plaque to commemorate a Canadian innovator: Sir Frederick Banting (Plaque text reads: “Soldier, surgeon, and scientist, Banting in 1920 became convinced of the existence of a substance now known as Insulin. A laboratory provided by Dr. J.J.R. Macleod of the University of Toronto enabled Banting and Charles H. Best, in 1921, to prepare an active anti-diabetic extract of pancreas, purifed by Dr. J.B. Collip. This was first used successfully on January 11, 1922, by Drs. W. R. Campbell and A.A. Fletcher. Banting shared with Macleod the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1923 and was knighted in 1934. Born near Alliston, Ontario, he died in the crash of a military aircraft in Newfoundland, on February 21, 1941.”).
Trivia 4: Last curious fact is that the station has a very unique grey “curved tile” which gives it a kind of futuristic aura. Queen’s Park is a cool subway station and the park to the north is a great spot for a walk or bike ride.
Questions:
What is your favourite intersection? Is your favourite in your neighbourhood or elsewhere? Feel free to share your ideas (and a soundtrack suggestion is welcome too!).
Links
The BlogTO post that inspired me: http://www.blogto.com/city/2011/11/what_are_the_most_loved_intersections_in_toraonto/
By Mike, on April 25th, 2012 I’m back in business and cookin’ up beats! Actually I never really went away. Mikooshka’s just been ultra quiet and layin’ low. But things been simmering… slowly cooking up a musical storm called “Streets are for People.” It’s one of a handful of burners I am planning to release this summer along with a companion video. The song was written with Jeff Simpson and the vocals are from our pal Grey Coyote. Anyway, check out the track… enjoy…
By Mike, on April 23rd, 2012 It’s been a while since I purchased any new Adobe products but I am very excited about the possibilities of getting my hands on the range of amazing tools in the newly announced Adobe Creative Suite 6 – and Creative Cloud.
I am an owner of the CS4 Master Suite. I use all kinds of different software for graphics, websites, and audio-video (plus some motion design and design for print). Recently I installed trial versions of 3 Adobe CS5 products: Photoshop, After Effects, and Dreamweaver. I have been working with PS and AE for about a week and I’m liking them both. For the most part I haven’t really explored much of the new features. Photoshop is the everyday go-to tool that is an essential part of my routine. The entire Creative Suite family is something I have extensive experience with though, from capturing video with On Location or doing DVD menus with Encore, to managing websites with Dreamweaver or doing layouts for print docs in InDesign. Let me outline for you some of the new features and some of the buying options with the Adobe CS6 and the newly announced Creative Cloud subscription model. My discussion is focused on the idea that buying the “Master Collection” – all 16 Adobe software titles – makes the most sense. Designers today should be able to work in every area! That being said there are smaller packages of programs – some geared toward traditional aspects such as print and illustration, others focused on websites, apps and new media (video, sound, motion graphics). Continue reading Adobe Launches Creative Suite 6 and Creative Cloud
By Mike, on March 21st, 2012  Timescapes will be released May 2012 on DVD, Blu-ray and HD Download
For photography and media enthusiasts it seems like 2011 marked the new era of the super time-lapse video — enabled by using high-end DSLR cameras to take the thousands of frames necessary to produce a high-quality time-lapse video.
I have dabbled in this format, and indeed I am employing it in my forthcoming video “City Symphony.” It is remarkably compelling. I found some amazing examples of this via some Internet searches and blogs. (Links at end).
There seem to be two general styles – nature and city time-lapses – and they offer astounding glimpses of the wild and the urban as a kind of living breathing thing – slowly evolving as the light and shadow change the scene. Continue reading “Timescapes” – Time-lapse Treats from Tom Lowe
By Mike, on December 15th, 2011
 Toronto - Visualization of geotagged photos and tweets by Eric Fischer
Recently I have begun to think about the importance of DATA. Our lives are increasingly digital. While we use the web there is a plethora of data coursing through the back-end – from APIs in website services to locative applications in social media. Location-aware services are becoming increasingly common – and people are sharing or posting to websites and social media from anywhere they happen to be, via their smartphones. A few simple cases in point: photos can be geotagged and uploaded to many different services (Flickr, Picasa, Facebook). Recently I came across data visualizations that totally blew me away. An article in BlogTO, “Toward a map of social media in Toronto,” focuses on data visualization work done by Eric Fischer. Continue reading Visualization of Geotagged Photos and Tweets by Eric Fischer
By Mike, on November 30th, 2011 
Prezi is a cloud-based presentation software that opens up a new world between whiteboards and slides. The zoomable canvas makes it fun to explore ideas…
TED is a cutting-edge conference featuring “ideas worth spreading”
It goes without saying that people want to be entertained, and video may be the ultimate entertainment. The use of video in marketing, and education is also becoming more prevalent. In my workshop, a student recently declared that most of her listening exercises were conducted with video. I feel mostly the same way, and maybe that has to do with the fact that we often source our media from the Internet. The Internet, with its steady increase in content and bandwidth is an ideal platform for video.
When I conduct my “CALL workshop” – on Educational Technology – I have found that if I ask for “interesting sites” that I get a few predictable responses. In no means do I mean “predictable” as “dull.” But the two sites that are recurring with some frequency as possible teacher/student tools are TED Talks and Prezi. They are both very worthy of your time. Continue reading The Power of Online Video and Presentations – Chris Anderson from TED Talks creates a Prezi
By Mike, on October 17th, 2011 
When I was growing up, my mother would take notes about what sports we kids played, how tall we were at certain ages, and what we wanted to be “when we grew up.” My entries say things like: Mike wants to be: an astronaut, a fireman, a baseball player. And variations of those would recur. The one that was always there was the idea of playing in the “big leagues” or as the hockey world call it, “the show.”
I never got remotely close, though I captained my team one year in house league, and was always a strong skater. My brothers dabbled in some all-star hockey. Being a stats man I looked it up one time – if you crunch the numbers it is a long shot – something like 1 in 1500 registered minor hockey players will make the NHL. (500,000 kids are registered in Canada in any given year, and about 50% of the NHL, or approximately 300+ players are Canadian).
One classmate from public school who turned into a “phenom” – was Craig Fisher. I watched his career from afar. He grew up not far from me and we played “foot hockey” with a tennis ball in the school yard. I suppose as far back as I can remember he played in elite all-star leagues, and then moved to the next town to play in the “Triple A” league. He ended up playing for an American college and being drafted by the Philadelphia Flyers 56th overall in 1988. Continue reading Childhood Classmate Played Pro Hockey – Craig Fisher Retired after Concussion
By Mike, on September 27th, 2011 Early this year I interviewed Ray Larabie, a Canadian font designer (from Ottawa), who lives and works in Nagoya, Japan. Ray studied animation at Sheridan college and worked initially in the video game industry. He runs a successful company called Typodermic. I knew about Ray back in my early days of design (mid 90s) because I had on occasion searched for free fonts on the web. At that time he operated as Larabie fonts (there are still dozen of his freebies out there!). I rediscovered Ray doing some font browsing at MyFonts.com. Ray is an interesting guy and I’m pleased to announce he’s the first subject in my newly launched interview page (which will archive other interviews I’ve done as well, with a variety of artists, musicians, designers and thinkers). Check out the interview!
By Mike, on September 23rd, 2011 There is a quite a buzz surrounding the arrival of a large exhibition of work by General Idea at the Art Gallery of Ontario. GI were a Toronto-based art collective, founded in 1969 and comprised of: AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal. They were renowned for their irreverance and satirical wit – playful yet antagonistic in their sometimes harsh critiques of beauty, sexuality, the art establishment and the media. Continue reading Do we get the General Idea? Art Exhibit arrives at AGO
By Mike, on August 25th, 2011  Photo by Jackman Chiu
On the morning of my birthday, August 22, we were doing our usual breakfast time things when suddenly the TV announced that Jack Layton had passed. What a shock! It hit me like a ton of bricks. It was amazing to witness the coverage on CBC and other channels – it reminded me of the fanfare and mourning that accompanied the death of Pierre Trudeau. One of the amazing things I remember about that was sitting with my mother and watching the train that transported Trudeau and his sons from Ottawa to Montreal, and how amazing it was when the camera captured people standing at railway crossings waving and the sons leaning out windows to engage with the well-wishers.
It is a sad and profound moment. At 61 Layton was truly just hitting his stride. Could he have been PM? It’s possible. Continue reading Remembering and Celebrating Jack
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Mike Simpson is a teacher, writer, musician and designer from Toronto, Canada. He is a new media enthusiast and has been "strongandfree" since 1996.
Mike is working on a hybrid music and video project called "City Symphony" and teaching at George Brown College.
Check out Strong+Free for his Design and Media work.
Contact him:
mike @ strongandfree.ca
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