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I spent most of last week on the road doing usability testing for a software project in Toronto and Tampa.

This was my first look at Lake Ontario from the hotel:

To one side I could see Rogers Centre.

We talked about going to see a Blue Jays game (they were in town) but this didn’t exactly materialize.

After checking in, we headed to the test site, and Toronto’s architecture started knocking me out. This building reminded me of playing with Piet Hein’s Soma Cubes.

The stately Toronto Harbor Commission building seemed lost in a sea of parking lots and more modern construction. Also, the CN Tower is growing out of the top of it.
This shot also illustrates something peculiar about the CN Tower. It is one of the very tallest free-standing artificial structures on the planet, and it’s in comfortable walking distance of this shot. But from the ground, it doesn’t look nearly as tall as it really is, compared to other nearby structures.

The CN Tower is also a little problematic for me as an amateur photographer. It certainly commands attention, and it’s awfully photogenic from many vantages. But I’m conscious that thousands of other people have taken basically the exact same pictures, many with superior skill and equipment. I can console myself that not everyone got lighting as dramatic as this:

The Toronto City Centre area reminded me a lot of some of the futuristic paintings of Robert T. McCcall, except for the lack of flying cars. (McCall’s collaboration with Isaac Asimov Our World in Space was a favorite book of my youth.)

At this point my co-workers are in a quit-taking-pictures-so-we-can-get-back-to-the-hotel-before-the-skies-open-up mode

My hotel looked onto not only the lake and the Rogers Centre, but also onto another hotel, seen in here through heavy rain

These folks flew kites through most of the worst of the storm. I presume they were unaware that if Franklin had performed his famous lightning/kite experiment as it is often popularly described, it almost certainly would have killed him.

I like it when the line between sky and water becomes indistinguishable.

As the storm wound down, I saw a few long singular waves like this one on the surface of the lake. The kite flyers are still at it.

(There are bigger versions of these photos on summervillain’s flickr site)

AHHH! Brain ’splodes!

We were literally calculating an initial offer to make on the condo we’ve liked best so far, and late last night it suddenly went inactive on all the real estate web sites. I had a dream that at 3:21 am the property went back on the market. I woke up from the dream and it was .. 3:21. Or pretty danged close anyway; I never know exactly how far off the bedroom clocks are.

Woke up this morning and it still looks like it slipped away from us. Dang.

On the other hand, later this morning I had a dream which wound up with one of my bosses saying, “of course, we only have three days to build this feature.” So dreams-not-predicting-future is not all bad.

So my wonderful girlfriend asked if Manny was still on #498, and I answered, “No, he got 499 in Seattle on Thursday* so he could do it with any swing,” and just at that moment a pitch crossed the plate and Ramirez thwacked it, and *whomp* there it was. . . and there it went.

The Manny Homerun Tracker web applet is actually kinda cool (Flash required). For instance, click on “Fenway Park” or “Jacob’s Field” to see all Manny’s home-game homers plotted in chronological order.

* I meant Wednesday, of course.

Weight Watchers’ slogan, on this flyer posted on all the office fridges, is “DI*T is a four-letter word.”

But we’re an engineering shop, you see, so I read this as “the derivative of i multiplied by t.”

“t” is obviously time. So what is “i”? I ask.

The mot juste response from a co-worker arrives with alacrity:

“Intake”

We’ve been watching One Punk Under God, a documentary series (with reality show-style editing) about Jay Bakker, son of Jim and Tammy Faye of PTL Club fame/infamy. It’s been more interesting than I would have guessed (although, predictably, I think it could use more punk content). The sequence we watched last night, in which Bakker visits his mother, who is dying of cancer, was some of the most wrenching footage I’ve ever seen.

In the ’80’s, when I spent perhaps too much time listening to Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys, the Bakkers (and Falwell) represented for me the nadir of evil — their hypocrisy made them even worse than the man in the White House. In the documentary, you are forced to confront the fact that she’s really a human being. She’s clearly in terrible pain, and she looks worse than ghastly. The combination of her makeup/facial tattoos and the ravages of late-stage cancer is a very disturbing pairing. There’s some on-screen time spent praying for the easement of her pain.

Before that, we watched some of the re-broadcast of Jon Lester’s Monday night no-hitter against the Royals. There were a few brief crowd shots of people who pretty clearly appeared to be praying for Lester to get all 27 outs without allowing a hit. This annoys me more than it should. If I believe there is a God (I will see the uncertainty of all agnostics and raise them additional doubts) I certainly don’t think it should concern itself with the personal glory of a pitcher for one team and the concomitant humiliation of the opposing team. There’s an inherent implication, it seems to me, that Red Sox fans are more worthy of God’s favor than Royals fans. That creeps me out.

In the abstract, I don’t think a universal creative force should concern itself with the easement of one being’s pain. If there’s a point to suffering beyond the random whim of the universe, I have to believe that it’s some combination of “do the best you can with this” and “learn something from this.” I just can’t accept that it’s “figure out how to weasel out of this.”

But all of this breaks down, of course, when it’s the pain of the ones I, specifically love. So many of my friends have lost feline companions in the past few years that it seems almost churlish of me to wish for a happier outcome in our case, even when the medical odds may not be too unfavorable. But I do. Fervently.

Somerville has been freshening up the bike lane markers. First they indicate where they should go:

Then they stencil the marker right on top:

Sometimes this makes it look like the iconic cyclist is wearing a cliché asian peasant hat

The narrow headed Somervillian riders make some of their skullish Cantabridgian counterparts look rather macabre in comparison:

Especially since some of them look much more definitively helmet-like. Or, perhaps the lanes are reserved for bicycle-riding, mushroom-headed mutants!

Meanwhile, toward Arlington, bicycles ride themselves!

In Davis Square