Ted Avery

Last month I attended two beautiful indie-folk/pop concerts in Toronto. They were Sufjan Stevens at Lee’s Palace on October 1, 2009 and Loney Dear at the Horseshoe Tavern on October 12, 2009. Unlike most of the concerts I attend, I took very few photos and videos. They were both very quiet and intimate concerts, some of the best I’ve ever attended, and I was right at the front for both of them, so it was an experience I just wanted to enjoy instead of worrying about taking pictures all night. But I did take a few to remember them by, so here they are!

Get ready to come for class and stay for a musical, because UOIT just got the OK to buy the Regent Theatre for class space in downtown Oshawa. It’s a logical next step in UOIT’s expansion to downtown Oshawa and will feature classes running during the day and at least 100 music/dance/theatre acts to run each year during the nights.

The theatre has been doing pretty much nothing since it showed up, having had only a few shows over the span of a few years, and there were some legal struggles between the city and theatre owner as well. It’s a fairly new and nice looking building too, so it’s nice to see UOIT take it over.

The back lot is going to be used for a five-storey building, also used by the school for classrooms, offices, and meeting space. The school is also asking for a 99 year lease on a total of 250 parking spaces, which is good news to the many students concerned about the lack of parking in downtown Oshawa.

Making an acquisition like this is a great way to quickly expand the school, and it is not uncommon. I remember when going to Ryerson University that a deal had just been made for the school to even use parts of the newly built AMC Theatre as class space, but I think we’re lucky to have a bit of extra class with the Regent Theatre.

Source: Council OKs transfer of Regent to UOIT (newsdurhamregion.com)

Coldplay came to visit Toronto at the Rogers Centre on July 30, 2009. Although disappointed at how horrible my view was for how much I paid for the tickets, I did manage to get a few good videos, especially when Coldplay was kind enough to perform a few songs on a centre stage.

Use the left and right buttons on the edges of the video to switch between my 3 videos. I have Green Eyes, a cover of Billie Jean by Michael Jackson, and a beautiful display of butterfly cut-outs falling on the crowd during Lovers in Japan.

Behold! The final shoot for the viral video “Dancing in the Streets” is completed. Directed by Wes Side Studios to promote Oshawa on oshawaisawesome.com.

I’ll be the first to admit I look pretty ridiculous. In fact, we all kind of do. Only one guy could actually dance (the one with the crazy dance solo on the sidewalk). But this really was one of those opportunities to try something new, and I don’t regret it for a minute. I made a lot of new friends who I’m going to hang out with more now, and I’m in a semi-popular online video! Ever seen the movie “Yes Man”? Although a comedy, there is an important lesson to be learned in squeezing every last drop out of life and saying yes to new opportunities.

It’s also great to see a lot of people appreciating this positive light on Oshawa. Oshawa is usually under a lot of criticism, even by it’s own residents (even me, I can’t lie!) so it’s great to see a finished product like this with so much pride for the city.

With background notifications, voice and video APIs, bluetooth iPhone to iPhone connectivity, and many more features open to developers, the iPhone 3.0 update is going to be a fairly significant game changer to the applications we use on the iPhone. As the 3.0 OS will most likely be released tomorrow or shortly afterwards, I thought it would be a good time to showcase the applications I have regularly used up to this point.

I’ve set up a set on Flickr with screenshots of each page of my apps. If you roll your mouse over any of the app icons on the page, a description of the app and link to its official website (if available) will appear.

Click here to view the set!

By: Ted Avery

This Saturday, Palm will release its new, much-hyped smartphone, the Palm Pre, into the wild on America’s Sprint Network. Many tech writers have already been given devices to review, and the results are in: The Palm Pre is an amazing, responsive, feature-packed device that has been deemed as the Apple iPhone’s biggest contender. From the beginning, this device has been built to accommodate to many of the aspects of the iPhone that people always complained about, such as a lack of multiple applications running at once, lack of copy and paste, lack of MMS, poor camera, lack of video recording, and more. In true Apple fashion, Apple has remained mostly quiet about how it plans to evolve the iPhone to remain competitive, but don’t let that make you think Apple is standing idly by. Walt Mossberg, the principal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, just completed his review of the Pre, and in his review states “Whether the Pre is better than the iPhone depends on your personal preferences, though I’d note that the new iPhone to be unveiled next week will have lots of added features that could alter those calculations.” (source)

Yes, it has been long rumoured, and pretty much guaranteed, that Apple will be announcing a new iPhone this Monday during its keynote speech at its WWDC conference. Rumours began almost immediately after the iPhone 3G was released, and after absorbing all this news for the past year, here is my take on what I think the new iPhone is going to look like.

What we already know

A lot of improved functionality for the iPhone has already been announced and will already be arriving in the form of a software update, which will luckily be compatible with the iPhone 3G and the original iPhone as well. Features like stereo Bluetooth, MMS support, Copy and Paste, “Spotlight” search across your phone, e-mailing of multiple photos, tethering with your computer, improvements to the calendar, voice memos, turn by turn GPS directions, voice communication in apps, and more. Most of this is covered in the excellent Gizmodo article “iPhone 3.0 OS Guide: Everything You Need to Know”.

One key feature of this update will be the long-awaited Push Notification service, Apple’s answer to a lack of background applications. And honestly, it makes a lot of sense. Say you are using an app to chat with your friends on MSN Messenger, but want to go make a phone call without having to close the messaging app. Other smart phones would require you to leave the entire application running to remain signed in, but there really is no purpose in wasting your battery life like that. Instead, you can close the application while you remain signed in on the application’s server, and when someone actually wants to message you, an alert will pop up on your iPhone. This is a far more effective solution that gives all the hard work to the server, accomplishing the same things a background application would but using a fraction of the battery power.

What is pretty much guaranteed

• Increased storage capacity, Better battery life, more RAM, and a faster processor: Simple hardware upgrades are always a pretty much guarantee when new hardware is released. Even when the 2^nd generation iPod Touch was released after the iPhone 3G, it was already sporting a more powerful processor than the iPhone 3G had. Expect all the hardware to improve, with storage capacity of up to 32GB.
• A better camera: Whether it be industry analysts, picking apart Apple’s patents, or just the fact that Apple really needs to come up to speed with the other smart phones out there, all signs point to a better camera in the new iPhone. This will almost definitely mean an increase to 3.2 megapixels, but there have also been rumours
• Video recording: The new feature-packed iPhone OS 3.0 (more on that later) has already had beta versions seeded to developers to prepare their apps for compatibility with the new iPhone OS. The beta OS has been picked to pieces, and a full video recording interface was discovered within it. This is definitely coming. (source)
• The ability to download movies and TV shows from iTunes to your phone: Not only were screenshots leaked of an iPhone interface to do this, but it was actually possible to browse this interface on Apple’s web server for a short time before Apple pulled it down. This is coming, but will most likely be when connected to a wi-fi network only.

The rumours I think are likely to happen

• A front facing camera with video calling: There have been a few articles digging up patents filed by Apple showing a camera on the front of the iPhone. Combined with some (possibly fake) leaked images from Fido’s roadmap of 2009 that indicate video calling capabilities, I think this is a real possibility. It would make sense for Apple to extend the iChat brand on their Mac to the iPhone., but even if Apple doesn’t do this themselves, I think it will definitely come in the form of a third party application. Every aspect of the iPhone’s hardware has been available to all app developers so far, like the camera, GPS, and accelerometer. Since video recording is almost a guarantee, Apple would naturally make this aspect of the phone available to applications as well, opening the door to many possibilities of video chat applications.
• A cheaper lower-end iPhone model: The current rumoured model is a 4GB iPhone for $99. This is simply a rumour that has appeared so many times for so many reasons that I think it is quite likely to happen. Not to mention the fact that it would be a great way to gain an even greater market share than Apple already has with its mobile smart phone operating system.
• Turn by turn GPS with Google Street View: Here’s a rumour you won’t see anywhere else (as far as I know) and is more my own theory, but a theory I think makes very much sense. The iPhone 3G has GPS capabilities, but in a very basic form of a blinking dot on a map. It has been lacking turn-by-turn directions that you would see on dedicated GPS devices that mount to your car windshield. Additionally, Apple has placed a strange, unexplained restriction on applications making use of the GPS for turn-by-turn directions, but has already announced to lift this restriction for the new iPhone OS. So why the change of heart, and why restrict it in the first place? I believe Apple wanted to implement this feature themselves before any third-party apps would, and will deploy it in the new iPhone OS 3.0. If this does become a standard feature of the iPhone, it only makes sense to me that it would be incorporated into the maps app. The maps app is entirely powered by Google Maps and Google Street view, so what better way to incorporate 3D turn by turn directions than by overlaying the roads on actual 3D images of your surroundings? And with Google rushing to get Street View supported in Canada this year, I think this is a more than likely solution.

The leftovers

There are a few more rumours that have come up a few times, but nothing else I personally feel is likely enough to be worth mentioning. Regardless of all the rumours, Apple always seems to be able to keep some key features under wraps that always surprise everyone. So let the speculation continue this weekend, but be sure to check the news come Monday afternoon after Apple’s keynote speech for all the official details.

So Ontario has something called The Public Sector Salary Disclosure act. Here is a brief description from the Ontario Ministry of Finance website.

The Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act, 1996 (PSSDA) and the Public Sector Salary Disclosure Amendment Act, 2004 were passed to make Ontario’s public sector more open and accountable to taxpayers. The Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act requires organizations that receive public funding from the Province of Ontario to disclose annually the names, positions, salaries and total taxable benefits of employees paid $100,000 or more in a calendar year.

Interestingly enough, this allows you to view the exact salaries of individual professors at colleges and universities across Ontario. You can even see how much your dean or even school president makes! Every professor doesn’t seem to be on the list, but there were more than a few that I knew by name. Turns out the president of UOIT, Ron Bordessa, made $289,499.96 in 2008. Not bad at all!

Click here to view the salaries for the profs at your school, but be warned, the document is huge and might slow down your computer a bit.

Click here to go directly to the photos and videos!

Last night (May 23, 2009) I had the pleasure of seeing Keane perform at The Sound Academy in Toronto, with opening acts Mat Kearney and The Helio Sequence. The energy at the concert was incredible, both from the crowd and the band. Although frontman Tom Chaplin expressed his love for Toronto as he probably does for every city the band visits, you could tell that the band was genuinely taken aback by how loud and appreciative the crowd was. Tom barely had a chance to fit in any words between songs because the audience simply could not stop cheering, and wild chants of the band’s name began several times.

Keane’s performance was as flashy and high-energy as ever, with Tom dancing around the stage, Tim Rice-Oxley throwing all of his weight into the keys that lay before him, Richard Hughes relentlessly beating the drums. This time round, newcomer bassist Jesse Quin joined the perfomance, a musician that recorded with Keane on their latest album Perfect Symmetry. The audience was even treated to a few acoustic sessions, the highlight of which is undoubtedly Tom’s soaring, majestic sounding voice that effortlessly reached higher and higher.

Seeing Keane is an experience that won’t disappoint. Being in a room full of fans at a concert is always a great feeling, but the high energy that already pulses through Keane’s music multiplies tenfold in a room full of fans who are highly passionate about the music.

I’m not a very good photographer and didn’t really have the best view, but I have embedded my collection of photos and videos below. The photos are often blurry but the videos are pretty decent I’d say! To see an overview of all my photos and videos, go directly to the photo set on Flickr. I also have two longer videos uploaded to YouTube of Keane performing “We Might As Well Be Strangers” and “Bedshaped” that you can watch.

Just a quick note that the final shoot for Oshawa’s biggest viral video Dancin’ in the Streets is today! The last date got cancelled due to rain. Be sure to check out the sneak preview to see what all the fuss is about. Having a lot of people is essential for this last scene to work, so come on out, have fun, and do something different and meet new friends today. Here’s the message from director Wes Evans.

Hey everyone!!!! I sent out a message alittle while ago but I dont thinkl it went out so I’ll try this again.

This is your last chance to get in on the video that will soon be taking YOUTUBE by storm!

Hopefully your all gearing up to get your dance on tomorrow, on the streets of Oshawa.

If you could all be at the studio by 11am that would be great, last i heard it’s supposed to be a beautiful day so hopefully that stays true!

Can’t dance? Thats ok, niether can Alex! And she’s our lead character!!!OH NO!!! All you need is a willingness to have fun! So bring your friends and family out and help us make a splash on the streets of downtown!

For all those who came out to the shoot last time, please wear the same clothes so that we can keep continuity.

The address to the studio is

14 1/2 King St E.
Second floor, Studio 201
Downtown Oshawa

The shoot will be going no later then 4pm, so theres still time after to get your saturday night PARTY ON!!!

Thanks again and I hope to see you all out tomorrow!

Wes